The Devil's Bag Man

by Adam Mansbach

  For a while they’d tried not talking—taken all their succor from each other’s bodies. And in truth, that was really what Sherry yearned for. To hold him close, to find release and relief and silence. But it wasn’t enough. You had to talk eventually.

  Sherry needed new beginnings.

  If those actually existed.

  A week ago, she’d started to think maybe they did.

  Maybe they strolled right into your stupid ice cream parlor, flashed you a boyish grin, and asked if by any chance you had a flavor called vanilla.

  Don’t get your hopes up, Sherry told herself sternly, for the millionth time. He doesn’t know anything about you.

  The thought of unburdening herself was terrifying, a burden in itself. And the thought of not, of letting him go on believing she was a normal girl, unmarked by tragedy and worse, felt dishonest. Like she was peddling shoddy merchandise, selling him a bucket with an invisible hole in it or something.

  For now, though, Sherry was having fun. When she was with Alex, she thought of nothing else—not Marshall Buchanan’s breath in her face as he tried to pry her legs apart, not how fucking good it had felt to push the knife into his gut and watch his eyes go wide and glassy, not why her father had gone through hell to save her only to abandon her again, not the worms slithering through her mother’s cold dead flesh.

  With Alex, she got to live in the present. That was all she could ask for, and probably more than she deserved.

  Certainly, she thought with a pang of guilt, it was more than she ever had when her mother was alive. Melinda’s piety was like a chain around Sherry’s neck, forever tightening with stricter rules about what she could do and say and wear. The only thing worse was the lapses, those dreaded days when Sherry would come home from school and find Melinda taking a vacation from the Lord with a pint of whiskey for a traveling companion.

  She twisted the stopper, and the one-hitter jumped into her hand, bringing the waft of singed weed with it. She used the light on her phone to check the long, narrow stash chamber, make sure she had what she needed. Rolled the hitter between two fingers, wished she could blaze right now and feel that sweet gauzy sense of vagueness descend on her like a transparent cloak, mellowing everything out, giving her the strength to accept the world as it was. To find the beauty in the pain.

  And man shall have dominion over all the plants of the earth . . .

  Thank God for that.

  “Sherry! It’s quarter of, honey! Don’t you have work?”

  Ruth, calling from the kitchen, chipper to the point of near mania after two espressos.

  Her own time-honored morning head rush.

  Sherry sighed, pretending it was a plume of smoke instead of a cloud of exasperation.

  “I’m on my way,” she replied, voice conversational, a little passive-aggressive reminder to Ruth that the house didn’t require so much volume.

  As they both well knew.

  The relationship was weird—not unpleasant but unsettled, under construction.

  Guardian and ward?

  Big sister and little?

  Roomies?

  Whichever it was, they’d definitely heard each other have sex more than a few times.

  Sherry jammed the one-hitter deep into her purse, checked to make sure she had a lighter, and set off down the hall.

  “Good morning,” Ruth greeted her, turning from the counter. “How about some eggs?”

  “Morning,” Sherry said. “No thanks. Hey, Nichols.”

  She headed for the fridge, the orange juice.

  “Howdy.” He was scrutinizing the newspaper, legs outstretched, mug steaming in his hand. They were a two-coffeemaker couple: one stainless steel Italia, one plastic piece of crap, the white yellowed with age. Ruth had tried to sell him on Americanos, as a compromise, but no dice. Nichols stood by his sludge.

  Sherry respected that.

  “What are you doing after work?” Ruth asked, her tone a tad too cavalier, and Sherry felt her throat tighten.

  Here we go.

  “I don’t know.” Long swallow of juice, eyes furtive behind the mask of the glass. “Nothing, really.”

  She hadn’t told them about Alex. There was no reason to. They’d only raise their eyebrows at the fact that he was a few years older, or question whether she should be spending so much time with him so soon. Besides, Ruth and Nichols had barely tried to mask their disappointment when she’d broken up with Eric. As if the move called their own relationship, forged in the fires of that same horrible day, into doubt.

  Or maybe they just worried about her. It wasn’t like Sherry had any other friends, after all.

  “I was thinking we could go shopping,” Ruth said, deliberately casual, wiping her hands on a dishrag and then smoothing down her skirt. “Pick up a few things for—”

  “I’m not going to school. Please, do we have to have this conversation again?”

  Ruth looked at Nichols before plunging in.

  Oh, great. They’d discussed this. Sherry braced for battle, acutely aware even as she did so of how bad she felt for them—bad, and guilty, and ashamed. Who wanted to be saddled with a shell-shocked teenage refugee when you were trying to start a relationship? God, could there be a worse handicap, a bigger albatross than her?

  “Listen, Sherry, I understand—”

  “We both do,” Nichols chimed in, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

  “—that you’re not ready. That’s fine. But there’s got to be a plan, honey. A timetable. Something. I mean, you’re not just going to scoop ice cream all your life.”

  No, maybe I’ll run away with Alex. Get as far away from Texas as the road will take me.

  He drove a ’66 GTO convertible, burgundy over tan. Sherry didn’t know a thing about cars, but she knew Alex’s front seat was her favorite place in the world: that when she slid in, she felt like anything was possible, like the world hadn’t collapsed on itself.

  The car was no sixteenth birthday present from Dad, either. Alex was a man. Nineteen, and out on his own. Seeing the world, paying his own way by flipping vintage finds on eBay, records and books and clothing for which hipsters in Japan coughed up top dollar. He was beholden to nothing and nobody—his past firmly behind him and his future an open vista, a picture still being painted.

  Maybe there was room in the frame for Sherry.

  She imagined walking out of hers and into his, then tore herself free of the fantasy, snapped back to the present. The promise of a different life, a reset button, filled her with new recklessness.

  “Look, if it’s a problem, I can always move in with my dad.”

  It was meant to bring silence crashing down around their shoulders, and it did. The specter of Jess Galvan haunted them all. He wasn’t quite Melinda’s precious Christ on a cross, hadn’t died for their sins exactly, but he’d saved them and he’d paid a price.

  Given up a piece of his soul, maybe. Sometimes Sherry thought of it like that.

  Not that she hadn’t lost something, too.

  The father she’d always waited for, snatched away the second he’d come back.

  Maybe she had no right to be furious—and for sure, the last thing Sherry needed in her life was anger. Anger had better take a number, if it wanted a seat in the psych ward that was her mind, and she was trying very hard not to feel that way. She knew her father loved her, would do anything for her. Already had. If he was staying away, he had his reasons.

  Guess what, bitch? Everything isn’t always about you.

  If only she could help him. She wasn’t a kid anymore—whatever she was, she wasn’t that. It was time she manned up, or whatever you wanted to call it, though woman up definitely sounded stupid. Maybe the way to get some stable ground under her feet was to be useful. To give back, instead of running away.

  After all, who else did her father have?

  Ruth and Nichols were still staring at her, as if maybe they could wait out the mention of Jess.

  Nice try.
/>   “I’m serious. Tell me where to find him.”

  Nichols folded his paper, dropped it on the table. “For the last time, Sherry. He and I agree, it’s better for now if—”

  “I’m his daughter.”

  Nichols picked up the paper again. “It’s not a good idea.” And pretended to read.

  Sherry looked at Ruth, saw that she was about to cry, and felt her own tear ducts fill. She willed the water to stay where it was and swung her bag onto her shoulder.

  “Yeah, well, neither is school.”

  She stalked out the door, left them frozen in their weary little tableau, and made it to the corner before the first tear fell.

  Her hands shook as she lifted the one-hitter to her lips, the orange flame to the tip. She felt her chest expand as she inhaled, the smoke filling her lungs. Another greedy pull, the one-hitter really a two-and-a-half-hitter, Sherry turning the good local greens her coworker Meghan’s older brother had sold her into fine gray ash.

  Her head lightened deliciously, and her heart went along for the ride. She ground the hitter in its compartment, refilled it, suddenly proud of herself for not breaking stride, playing it so cool, just a girl smoking a cigarette, nothing to see here.

  I’m a survivor, she thought suddenly. It was Ruth’s phrase, therapy-speak, everybody a survivor of something in the doctor’s book, the syntax tortured and awkward—like, if your mother got murdered, that made you a murder survivor, which sounded about as retarded as woman up.

  Supposed to be empowering, probably.

  It had never done shit for Sherry—but now, in the exultant blush of her high, she felt the word swelling with new meaning. Felt it pulling her spine straight, squaring her shoulders. Goddamn right, she had survived. And then some. She flashed on the knife in her hand, sliding into Marshall Buchanan’s gut. She’d do it again. Do it every day of her life, if she had to, and never lose a moment’s sleep.

  I am my father’s daughter.

  Before she knew it, Dreamery Ice Creamery loomed before her, the universe settling into perfect harmony with Sherry’s immediate needs: to consume tiny pink-plastic sample spoons’ worth of at least twelve flavors of premium hand-packed small-batch ice cream and sit in an air-conditioned room with Meghan, who had opened today and was sure to be baked as well, trading occasional stony remarks but mostly just listening to random crappy inoffensive pop music on Meghan’s iPod, plugged into the Dreamery house system, and not causing each other any drama.

  In an hour Sherry would be bored stupid, but right now everything felt right.

  And at four, she’d walk out the door and into Alex’s car, with the whole night stretched out in front of them like an endless red carpet.

  Maybe I’ll never come back.

  CHAPTER 8

  Galvan broke wood until he broke dawn. He broke six eggs into a dirty glass and let them slide into his stomach, then broke three more and chased the first batch. He could feel the fatigue weighing down his muscles, knew he was about to round the corner into the asleep-on-your-feet exhaustion he craved—and also that, weirdness among weirdnesses, he’d be good as new after three hours of sleep, like a cell phone in need of charging.

  But there was nothing easy about sleep. Nothing restful.

  Galvan never knew whose dreams he’d have.

  He’d seen glimpses of a life he assumed was Cucuy’s, been enfolded into a consciousness he knew was not his own. He’d occupied a distant past, filled with grandeur and brutality: eaten roasted meats from golden platters while men fought to the death for his amusement; walked through a stone palace bathed in remarkable quantities of sunlight as a retinue of servants trailed behind; prostrated himself before a mammoth altar in a darkened room and brought fire to a fragrant herb of some kind, sending the smoke billowing toward the heavens. And he’d dreamed of darker times: strode across battlefields strewn with the dead and the dying, a bloody spear in each hand. He’d sat in grim judgment, hearing pleas of fealty from his ruined enemies and demanding their lands, their gold, their daughters in tribute.

  He’d received those daughters. Ripped their hearts from their chests with his bare hands, and taken them into his own body, fresh and warm—the vessel of the gods, the sustenance of the accursed.

  The hell of it was, such dreams were the least of Galvan’s problems; the past was the past, at least until further notice. He didn’t know whether he saw the things he did because Cucuy wished him to, the monster orchestrating the show, or because Cucuy was helpless to prevent Galvan’s incursion into his own psyche here in this altered, passive state.

  Whichever it was, Galvan’s dreams of the future were far worse.

  Or perhaps they were Cucuy’s dreams.

  Or perhaps they weren’t the future; perhaps they were a sales pitch.

  Galvan, all-powerful.

  Striding through the world like a god.

  His will supreme, his strength boundless, his dominion unopposed. All of creation reduced to subservience, worship.

  The dream never evolved, never whittled itself down into specificity, never revealed itself in scenes. It was an abstraction. A feeling.

  Intoxicating, though that word did it no justice. Endless fucking orgasm was more like it. Only crueler, sharper, the ecstasy without the release, the high without the comedown.

  A state no mortal could maintain.

  Godhood.

  Galvan awoke from those dreams in a lather of sweat and terror and arousal. The sense of omnipotence lingered for minutes, and most frightening of all was that Cucuy stayed silent and let Galvan ride it out—as if he knew the feeling was more seductive than anything he could say. And yet, in these frantic silent interludes Galvan had to triple-check each thought, each impulse, before he could be sure it was his own.

  How the feeling faded, how the violence flooding his brain drained, Galvan couldn’t say. But it did—that was the important part. He met the challenge. Chopped his wood. Ran down his prey. Kept the prison cell inside him locked down.

  Galvan’s reward was the other dream.

  The other other dream.

  If he was lucky, he thought, collapsing on the thin, sweat-redolent cot, she’d come to him tonight—or rather today; the sun had climbed high enough to fill the trailer’s windows with light, and Galvan covered his eyes with a pillow, rolled onto his side, and tried to conjure her without Cucuy knowing. It was a new trick he’d been working on, a way of thinking one thought for cover while another ran underneath, undetected. The way a TV news story took up almost the whole screen, but that little crawl of words kept scrolling across the bottom, nice and quiet.

  Who knew if it worked. Who knew if it was necessary. Who knew anything.

  Fuck it.

  Galvan let the woman in yellow fill his mind. Maybe if he fell asleep that way, the dream would come.

  It was the closest thing he had to intimacy these days, and she hadn’t laid a finger on him. The seduction was agonizingly slow, governed by a rhythm Galvan didn’t understand but couldn’t question. It was as if she were probing the dark contours of his soul, stretching him out flat and smooth so she could see and know and feel every inch. She moved like a cat, circling him, engulfing, her emerald eyes flashing and bottomless at once. He didn’t move a muscle, but every fiber of his being sang out for her. The sun pounded down on them, and on the featureless, glassine desert in which the encounter always took place.

  There was a resonance there, some echo of the familiar. Galvan had been trying to put his finger on it ever since the dream began, and all of a sudden, as he teetered on the brink of sleep, it hit him and he almost threw up.

  Of course.

  The woman in yellow looked at him exactly like the Virgin Army did, back when he was a Righteous Messenger and those first young blameless undead girls had sensed the heart he carried and emerged to take his measure, the bylaws of their charter, or whatever the fuck, rendering Galvan upstanding enough to be untouchable.

  For a while, anyway.

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nbsp; It was the same energy. The same paralyzing, probing feminine lust.

  I don’t know what to do with that, Galvan thought. And then, at long last, he passed out.

  It was a sleep without dreams, pure and black, restorative, heaven sent.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Galvan floated up from that dark, silent place, like a diver breaching the surface of a lake, and found himself staring down at the twinkling lights of a town he didn’t recognize. The sky was blue black, mottled with stars, like a mirror doubling the windows below. The air was warm, pleasant, spiced with sage.

  And Galvan was Galvan. He contained no multitudes, possessed no powers.

  It was glorious.

  The scene was coming into focus now. He was on a bluff, a scenic overlook, the kind that drew sunset enthusiasts and teenage couples. And sure enough, a handful of cars were scattered across the broad hilltop, pointed at the early-evening view.

  Galvan’s attention lasered in on a convertible muscle car, parked at a rakish angle to the bluff. Two moonlit heads inside, parked at rakish angles to each other.

  One of them was Sherry. He knew, somehow, and started toward her.

  Or tried to.

  It wasn’t that kind of dream. Galvan couldn’t move. He was incorporeal—an observer, a ghost. As Cucuy was to Galvan, Galvan was to the world of the dream.

  An orange glow lit the blackness like a firefly, inches from his baby girl’s mouth. A cigarette. No—a joint. Galvan could smell the rich, fruity smoke. He clenched his fists, felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of his arm.

  She took another draw, then offered it to her companion, fingers bunched around the base as if the joint were a tiny torch.