by T. Braddy
“Fine by me.”
“You want one?”
“I’ll pass, much as I don’t want to. Might join you out there, if you’d like.”
“Whatever. Either way, I’ll be back in a few.”
I stayed inside, idly drinking my rocket fuel. Jess sat on the shop’s front steps, puffing away on a Marlboro Light and thumbing through some app on her phone. By the time she returned, I had finished off most of my coffee and had bought a second round for the both of us. I was wired, both from the caffeine and the weird sense of anticipation.
She exhaled, and I smelled a mixture of Altoid and cigarette. “Might as well begin at the beginning, am I right?”
“Sure.” The latch on Pandora’s box was getting flicked open.
“She was one hundred percent diesel engine,” she said, smiling in a sad way. “I never had a sister – my mom and dad split up when I was three – but I felt like I had something special when I was with her.”
“I know what you mean about that.”
“You dated back in high school?”
“Way back,” I replied.
“I remember her saying something about that.”
“What was she like when she first got here? What was she getting into?”
“Drugs. Parties. Guys.”
Jess said the last word with some hesitation, but she said it nonetheless. Nothing I hadn’t expected. I let some air pass between those words and then nodded.
“Anyway,” she continued, “she was into devil dust real bad, so much so she didn’t realize she was in a barrel, headed over the side of the cliff. But everybody else knew it, myself included, even though we were fucking high as shit, too.”
“At this point, was she dealing with anybody you’d call rough, or unsafe?”
“Like, dealer types? We were all hinked up with our suppliers and whatnot.”
“No, I mean, like, the dangerous breed. Was she in deep with people with some bodies on them?”
She furrowed her brow, waited. “Hmm, I mean, there was a lot of people back then. Some of them were, I’m sure, but we only did drugs with them, so I didn’t know how dangerous they were, outside of that. Guys that were tatted up. Guys in gangs. Guys who sold powder. Vanessa wasn’t interested in that stuff, not at first. She just wanted to, you know, stay out all night and get high. That’s why she and I hung out, in the beginning. We were a lot alike.”
I could see that. She had a Vanessa-by-proxy look about her. They even seemed to share some of the same physical mannerisms, but that could have been time talking.
“What changed?”
She looked away, looked back at me. “It stopped being fun. We were all kinds of self-destructive, I reckon, but Van took being self-destructive to a whole other level. It was like she was looking for bottom, like she needed to see what the ocean floor was all about before she could be happy. I guess she ended up finding it somehow.”
Jess’s head sank forward, and she waited until the right moment to wipe away tears before continuing. Her eyes no longer had the look of someone peering through a foggy window.
“What did she do to make it seem like she was throwing everything away?”
She coughed, wiped her eyes again. “We stopped hanging out. At a certain point, it’s just not productive. Somebody wants to eat shit, you can only hand them the spoon so many times before you realize how bad it stinks for the both of you. She just wouldn’t stop.”
I slid my half-empty second cup out of the way, leaned forward.
“I don’t want to strike you as the kind of guy who gets off on hearing about his ex’s turn at dumpster diving, but I’ve got this–”
“Deathwish?”
“A death craving, maybe. Death longing.”
“You start poking around in the high grass, you’re bound to come out with a rattlesnake attached somewhere unpleasant.”
“Call it personal curiosity.”
“I call it crazy.”
“That works, too.”
“Huh.” She was running her fingers through her hair, readying it to be tied back in a bun or ponytail of some kind. She had found clarity, and she was clinging to it with such force her hands were shaking. Maybe we’d make it through the whole of this meeting before she skated off to cop a hit, and maybe we wouldn’t, but it was my intention to keep her hooked.
“Listen,” I said, eyeing her as she fingered the latch on her replica designer handbag. “I know it’s not normal. I’m not looking for normal. Hell, I’m not normal. But when my wife–”
“Ex-wife.”
“When she died, she left some questions I’ve got to get answered.”
“Keep you up at night?”
“Every night.”
“Don’t you just wish she could show up and tell you what you need to know?”
If she only knew. “You have no idea.”
“At what cost?” she asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Me and Van, we got involved with some pretty unsavory individuals there at the end. You get fucked up, and then you get desperate. We got real desperate. Van went off the deep end, though, for real. She– I mean, do you really want to hear about it? All of it?”
“Yeah.”
“Just don't seem right to be involved with all of her demons like this.” She paused. “I never got married, but even then, I wouldn’t want to hear about all the corrupt shit my boyfriends ever got into.”
“It’s about–”
“Closure?”
“Something like that.”
The suitcase became a fixture in my mind. Would be for the rest of the conversation.
She paused again, got up. She straightened her clothes and grabbed her purse.
“Can we get out of here? I’m starting to get antsy. Must be all the caffeine. It’s giving me the jitters, and I keep thinking somebody’s watching me.”
I’d chosen the corner booth for a reason.
We took the conversation outside, heading down a side road whose name I didn’t know.
“The next part’s hard to talk about,” she said. “I didn’t want to be going through all my business and personal dealings with all them people around.”
Up ahead, some high school students were sneaking sips from a double-deuce of High Life stored in their patchwork backpacks. They glared suspiciously at us, gauging just how likely we were to call the cops, before continuing to pass around what looked like a lukewarm beer.
We got past them, and Jess let out a long, slow breath. “So, I was saying – oh yeah. Before she moved off, Van went off into a dark place, like she wanted to die. She was staying up days – I mean, it was an impossible thing for most people, but she’d go three, four days without a wink of sleep. Come to somebody’s house looking like, I shit you not, a zombie. Dirty, ripped clothes. Stumbling, eyes wide. It was like she’d taken a look over the edge and was showing us what she’d seen at the bottom of the ravine.”
“Was this when she started hanging out with dangerous types, maybe the guys above the dealers? The dealers’ dealers. That sort of thing?”
“Maybe. She was almost always alone, but if she went anywhere, she’d be on the phone, having these clipped screaming matches with somebody.”
“Any names you remember?”
She shook her head. Some hesitation. I suspected she knew more than she let on, but I didn’t push, for now. It’d be a topic I’d come back to.
“What do you remember about who she talked to?”
“All’s I remember is the screaming. Her voice used to get real hoarse, from staying up, screaming, partying. You’d have to lean in real close to hear her. And the smell. Christ, the smell. I tell you what, she was a hot-ass chick when she first showed up, but when she left, she looked like a completely different person. Couldn’t have picked her out of a line-up, if you had known her before. Know what I mean?”
“I do.” I thought about what she’d looked like when she came back to the Junction. Wide
eyes. Scabs. Bulging veins. Sweats. Bad teeth. A poster child for an anti-meth campaign.
“Before she left, even, she had this look straight out of Pet Sematary, like she’d died and been dug up right out of the graveyard or something.”
That sent my heart rip-roaring against my chest. Did Jess know more about the connection between the dead and undead than I’d first suspected?
I said, “I experienced that, too.”
“Hallucinations, the full nine. She would come and tell me about these...dreams she had. Dreams about dying. Dreams about meeting her dead relatives. Shit like that. She called them – holy shit, I forgot this – but she called them her wampum dreams. Do you know what the fuck that means?”
I shook my head.
“She even said she dreamed about you. She tell you any of this?”
“No. Did she talk about me a lot?”
She raised one hand and waffled it in front of her face. “Sometimes. She’d go through phases, you know. Like, when she’d sober up for a few days, she’d rattle off all these compliments, tell us how she thought you were the love of her life.”
Jess paused for a split second, as if she knew the next line would be awkward. “She said you were real good in bed.”
She paused and giggled. “Sorry,” she said, almost blushing.
“It’s all right. Continue.”
“The other times – when she was real bad – she’d say you were the fucking devil. Made you out to be the monster that drove her to drugs. It was always difficult to see the straight line, to know what you were like. It’s why I held back on talking to you when you showed up at Richie’s house. I just couldn’t believe it was you standing there, in the flesh.”
“What do you think?”
She took her time answering. “Everybody’s got a good first impression in them,” she said. “It’s easy to be what you want people to see. You don’t even know me. How come you don’t think I’m a monster?”
I ran one hand through my hair. “I dunno. You seem nice. You’re taking the time to tell me all of this. You didn’t have to do that.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Deuce. I denied the call and went back to walking with Jess, who was fishing a cigarette out of her purse.
“Toward the end, right before she left, it gets kind of hazy for me, too. Now you say it, I do remember her hanging out with some fiendish-looking individuals. Guys flashing guns, roughing up people for money. That sort of thing. And then–”
She paused.
“And then what?”
“She – I don’t know how this is relevant. Jesus Christ, don’t–”
“Just tell me.”
“We used to go to these parties, but you couldn’t really say they were parties. More like a drug den with music. The inverse of Richie’s pad. Pipes on the floor. Busted lights. Cigarette butts everywhere. Just a trashy-ass place. I went one night with some friends. More casual drug users than I was, at that point, and I was on a binge.”
She puffed long and hard on her cigarette, blew the smoke in a long funnel out to one side.
“I went to this place, and the music was real loud. This dark, metal shit. Like Slayer or something. And this was a place – people usually hung out on the couches. Got stoned, shot up, what have you. But this time, nobody was in the living room. Instead, there was a crowd pressed against the door to the back bedroom.”
I swallowed. The back of my throat tasted like coffee and vomit.
“She was double-teaming these two guys. Men standing around the bed, just waiting their turn. Van didn’t – I swear – she didn’t even look like she knew what she was doing. Eyes rolled back in her head, barely able to move. She’d take the guy out of her mouth and say, ‘Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go.’ As if it were automatic, not even her at all. It was hard to watch.”
I wanted to say something, say anything, but I couldn’t muster the words.
Jess stubbed out the cigarette on the bottom of a shoe and flicked it into the grass. She went back to her purse, as if looking for another cig, and then made a hand motion as if she were forcing herself to stop.
It was so weird having this conversation on such a peaceful, calm evening. I watched a young couple nuzzle up against the breeze. The guy pressed his girl against him and kissed her on the crown of her head. They moved past us without knowing we were there. Like we were ghosts.
“I got the dudes I was with to stop it, to put a stop to the whole thing, but Van started screaming. She was fucking pissed, even though I don’t think she was completely aware. She had to have been going for a few days – on meth, Molly, whatever – at this point, maybe more. Just high as shit, hallucinating and whatnot. So I tried to attribute it to that.”
Silence punctuated by a cool, thick breeze was all that lay between us. I couldn’t think of a way to respond to that, so I merely waited for her to continue.
“She looked like one of those Haitian witch doctors, like this was something she was meant to do. Her eyes never returned to normal. During the whole fight, getting those assholes to vacate the premises, she held this half-zen countenance, and it still – I mean, it’s still something that haunts me. The way she seemed like she was somewhere else. Jesus Christ, I just – she was my friend.”
We had wandered over by the Savannah College of Art & Design campus, and the SCAD students, in their mohawks and piercings, stared disinterestedly at us as we passed. I placed one arm on Jess’s shoulder as she cried, in part because it felt bizarre not to. I thought she might pull away, but instead she leaned into it and sobbed until the feeling passed. Then, she clasped my hand and whispered, “Thank you,” before letting go.
“And then what happened?”
She kicked a stray Natty Light can into the grass. “Same thing for a while. Then, she disappeared. Met a guy and moved up to Atlanta, where I heard it got real weird. But all of that started down here. She was running away from something but headed right for something else. Head-on, with no brakes. Was she always taking risks?”
“No,” I said immediately, without pause. I was still underwater from Jess’s previous revelation. “In high school, we’d sneak around. Back then, that felt right, because it was illicit, but it was safe, you know? She liked me, would make all these drawings in class. And she bought me things. We were both poor as sin but gave each other gifts constantly. She had a good heart. She wasn’t who she became.”
“When did she change?”
I sighed, thought about it. “It was little things over time. Nothing happened all at once. It almost never does. Nobody really just changes in one swipe of the blade. It started out small. Lies. Little indiscretions. She kept things from me.”
“Were you jealous?”
“Of course. She was the first woman I’d been with. I thought – wrongly – that we were kind of tied together, that if I let go a little bit, she’d go away. I guess I was partly right.”
“What did your parents think of you getting married, playing house so young?”
“Dead. They were both dead, or dead to me. My mom died when I was a kid, and my old man – he rotted in prison. Never really got to know them, but I imagine at least one of them would have approved of it.”
“Trying to find happiness.”
I nodded. “Right.”
Jess gave into her unholy urge. She lit up another cigarette and offered me a puff. I shook my head, but it wasn’t that easy. Internally, I was struggling. A woman pretty as Jess offering me a smoke was not something to be taken lightly. It was the connective tissue of mutual addiction. Made me crazy. Made me want her. On a fundamental level, it did. And it was tangled up in the circumstances of my Van’s dance with the devil. Still, I refused.
I looked Jess over, wondered how much of the truth she should be privy to. She was as complete a stranger as could be imagined, but she had been honest with me about Van. Least I could do was be honest right back. At worst, she had my secrets, and at best, she could help me over the hump of my insecurities
. It wasn’t like she was some member of the sewing circle back in Lumber Junction. If my business got spread all over Savannah, who gave a shit? My partners in crime these days consisted of alcoholics and addicts of all stripes. If we didn’t have dirt, we didn’t have anything at all.
I let her get a good grasp on her cigarette and kept talking. “It progressed from the lies, which became more elaborate and obviously false. We never had money, but I’d come home and find things. I’m perceptive, I guess you could say, and I could suss out what new things had come into the house while I was away. They had this...energy.”
I tried to find a way to explain how I could see little things. How it wasn’t merely my perception, but something on top of that. Something ineffable and weird. I couldn’t explain it, so I steered myself in another direction.
“Anyway,” I said. “I was driving a truck back then, so I was gone most weeks. You think your girl is going loose on you, and you start to spend all your time inventing scenarios. I’m not a jealous man, by nature, so far as I know. This, though, had me on the outer edges of my sanity.”
“I bet that was hard.”
“Being gone. Being on the road. Seeing what people are capable of – that made it hard. We didn’t have cell phones back then, so if I didn’t call her from my hotel room or a pay phone somewhere, we didn’t speak. Once the fabric started tearing away, what slipped between the gaps grew into horrible, monstrous things. My mind got away from me, and I went from having conversations with Van to asking questions, little passive-aggressive things. Button pushers, you know. Talking like I knew but didn’t know, badgering the witness to get her to admit to whatever was going on. Which, at that point, I had no idea.”
“Was she using?”
“Behind my back, maybe. Yeah, probably. I don’t like thinking about it.”
“I know. It’s tough. You don’t have to talk about it.”
“She – I know – but she started to lose weight. Started to...change. You spend every day with someone, you don’t realize how different she looks until you see pictures from years past. Well, I’d be gone for a week at a time, so the changes were more obvious. Her face – I mean, it would just look different, like she’d found a mask that almost looked like her, or a body snatcher had gotten her. Something like that. And the house, it would be either too clean or too dirty. Dishes to the ceiling and clothes and food everywhere, or, on the other end of the spectrum, not a speck of dust to be seen. Then, I–”
