South

by Frank Owen

  Eagle Motel – Your Home on the Road!

  She felt for a match and struck it. It fizzed and died, too damp or too old or both. The next one sparked and held briefly. Come on, little critter.

  It flickered and grew and Vida held it out at arm’s length.

  In the middle were two chairs and their little square table, one dead candle presiding. She muttered, ‘Thank God,’ and went to light the candle. Then she stood and sucked her burnt fingers.

  Behind them sagged an empty chipboard cupboard sporting water damage, swollen with black streaks of rot growing from the ground up. A ragged grass mat lay snug on the floor, but the focus of the room was the colored etching on the wall, the glass fallen out of the frame – a house in an apple orchard with two horses grazing out front in their green heaven, one piebald, the other a dusty pink with a blond mane and tail that made Garrett think of Bethie. His heart shrank into itself. God, he hoped she was somewhere half as decent as the horses!

  They turned back to Dyce where he lay sprawled on the ground, waxy as the candle, throwing a limp shadow as if his spirit self was hovering just above him, making up its mind. Near his mouth was a spatter of stringy bile like a cartoon speech bubble, jagged-edged, untouchable.

  Vida folded her arms. ‘I don’t see no old man.’

  Garrett didn’t answer. He got busy searching behind the cupboard for a door, feeling the walls for a seam, some sign of an exit. Would she never shut up?

  ‘You know, my mama always believed in ghosts. Her religion came and went, but she never wavered when it came to the ghosts. When her ladies came to her, about to drop their babies, she said they were in so much pain that they could see clear to The Other Side. Your mind does strange things when it’s under stress. I can see now that you’re worried about your brother.’

  Garrett grimaced and kept up his moody pacing around the table. ‘I’m not given to hallucinations.’ You fucking idiot, he nearly added. Great. A psychic. Just what I need.

  Vida pressed on. ‘That candle’s going to give us a half hour’s light, friend. Then we better be ready for hibernation. Spend it looking if you want. I’m going to see what can be done about him on the floor over there.’

  Vida took both her bag and Dyce’s, and began unpacking them on the table, laying the items out in neat rows like a tarot reading. Garrett itched to stop her. It was a trespass. Rifling through someone else’s pack was unforgivable, even though he knew Dyce so well he could list in his head everything that was in that bag. Garrett pressed his lips together but said nothing. There they were:

  The smooth stone

  The Opinel

  Birchwood sticks

  Two carved mermaids

  A flint and striker

  A ball of fat nestled in leaves, salted but rancid

  Shards of dried turkey meat

  One honeycomb – sucked clean

  A battered tin of herbs

  Salt tablets

  An army surplus canteen

  Vida opened her bag next. Garrett edged closer to see what might come out.

  A recipe book, stained and bulging

  Five dried locusts, minus a couple of legs

  A flint and striker, the same kind everyone carried

  A bottle of hooch

  A water canteen

  A lumberjack shirt

  Two surgical masks with elasticated ear straps, once white

  Lumps of charcoal

  A knife, its handle bandaged with strips of leather

  With everything laid out, Vida opened her mother’s remedy book. It was an alchemist’s notebook, a weather chart, diagrammed and doodled with plants and rocks and animals that were connected by arrows that also pointed to pots and fires and beakers: the recipes of a lifetime written and then overwritten, self-corrected and no space spared, a map of the human mind.

  She paged through it and nodded to herself. Pressed the pages open and laid a piece of birchwood on top to keep the pages spread for easy reading. She took a pinch of the fat and flattened it on the table, then crushed a nugget of charcoal into the center. Out of her tin she took horehound leaves tied with cotton in a bunch. She powdered some between her palms and added them, along with a heavy dose of dried yarrow, and only a pinch of sagebrush seeds. Then she curled the edges of the fat up and rolled it into a ball.

  ‘Missing a whole stack of ingredients, but get him to take this along with as much water as he’ll drink.’

  Garrett looked at her.

  ‘I know what I’m doing, white bread. My mama was a midwife.’

  ‘Yeah, and I once knew a guy who knew a guy whose uncle was a doctor.’

  Vida glared. Garrett shrugged it off. Other things to think about. He went over to Dyce and propped his brother up in a corner.

  ‘Allerdyce! Hey, little brother! Come on, come on. Open those creepy eyes. Prodigal lady made you some medicine.’

  Dyce moaned. When his mouth opened again, Garrett worked the tablet past his teeth and onto his tongue. He held the canteen up to Dyce’s mouth. He drank and coughed and then slumped back against the wall.

  With the candle fast puddling on the table, Vida packed the bags right and set herself up in a corner. Garrett did the same, taking the opposite, like a boxer. The candle sizzled and went out. In the gloom Garrett could hear Vida crunching down on something – a dried locust? He’d hardly eaten all day but he wasn’t hungry. Hadn’t been since Beth passed over. The Death Diet. He took a plug of bear fat from his own pack and let it melt in his mouth, then washed it down with water.

  After a long silence Vida spoke up. ‘Wind’s a blessing for a change.’

  Garrett adjusted his pack under his head. ‘You and me got a different understanding of that word, then.’

  ‘Callahans were going to catch up with you, Dyce being so sick. Bought you some time.’

  ‘Hallelujah.’

  There was another stretch of silence between them. Vida was restless.

  ‘What’s across the sea?’

  Garrett groaned, as though he was being disturbed from a deep sleep.

  ‘You know, I don’t know. Maybe nothing, maybe something. Could be worse there, could be better.’

  ‘But what picture is in your mind when you think about it?’

  ‘You wanna know?’

  ‘I asked, didn’t I?’

  ‘Okay.’ Vida could hear him sit up. ‘It’s me and Dyce. We’re in a nightclub, like a kind of whorehouse, dark with tobacco smoke in the air . . .’

  ‘Oh, God. Forget it.’

  ‘. . . and there’s a woman standing in front of me, buck naked . . .’

  ‘Jeez. Spare me.’

  ‘. . . and her skin is perfect – no scars or welts or rashes or redness or blisters. Just the skin the good Lord gave her on her birthday. And I’m just looking.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No joining of your giblets?’

  Garrett laughed. ‘That’s a different dream.’

  She turned away from him, into the corner, and they drowsed to the tinkling outside. It was coming faster now, a tiny hand somewhere nearby shaking the nuts from the trees, maybe, like those silver balls her mama’s pregnant ladies oftentimes wore over their unborns, a songline for the little hand to hold when it crept through the flesh.

  Vida had thought she would sleep no matter what, but the little bell was annoying, jangling at the edge of her mind like an alarm, some niggling reminder of a chore she had yet to do. Outside it was afternoon, but they had to sleep whenever they could. There was a tiredness that settled on you when you were moving around: it never seemed to disappear entirely.

  Vida sat up now in the low hum of her sleep deprivation, and the muscles in her calves cramped in protest. She had tried to sleep curled up, gripping her legs for something solid and familiar. That wasn’t smart: they had gone numb right away, and now they felt as if they belonged to someone else. She kept thinking of the Lazar
us babies, how their legs probably felt the same, like that game she had played long ago: Dead Man’s Finger.

  When Vida tried to close her eyes she was surrounded by the children in their sooty mounds. She felt the tendrils of Stringbeard’s beard, tickling her face in the dark, like a goodnight kiss from a drunken daddy.

  How had she ever slept, before? She had forgotten how.

  At last she did.

  She was back in the bar. The bear was there this time, slumped in the doorway, blocking her exit. The animal snores rose unbroken as Vida stepped over the fur, blackly matted with oil. The creature smelt of the death it brought with it; the rancid marrow and broken bones of the food chain.

  The snorting stopped. In the silence the bear’s eyes flicked open and tracked her.

  She backed away slowly. It’s still sleepy time, Bruin. Nothing to see here. She turned. Behind her, of course, on his barstool, was Stringbeard. He had fused with it, some hybrid of man and fitting. He watched her with his wet, red eyes and sipped, sipped. Vida expected him to lick his lips.

  She kept backing away. She didn’t want to go through the curtain again: she knew what would be there, didn’t she?

  The dream was merciless. Vida pulled aside the blackened hessian sacks, her heart bitter with the hard knowledge of sorrow.

  But the tiny beds were empty. The big bed, too.

  The Lazarus woman was standing at the window, looking out, surrounded by her children – pink and healthy, one and all. They had put their shoes on, sockless. One by one, they smiled at Vida and she saw their teeth, pink-rimmed at the gums, sharp and white at the tips. Coyote kids.

  The woman beckoned. Why don’t they ever talk in dreams? Vida wondered, but she came closer so that she could also look out of the window. She had to wade through the children, and they stroked her legs as she moved among them.

  Vida looked out. On a distant hill she could see the wind blowing, moving toward them at speed, agitating the leaves as it came. The children began to hold out their hands to it, as if they could take the air in their arms. This wind had substance. It swirled in coils of transparent fibers, the sinews of ghostly bodies the angry yellow-gray of tornadoes. Vida heard the wisps whistling and sighing as they approached, an army of the diseased dead. The hungry ghosts would envelop all of them – the Lazarus family and Vida herself, screaming as they smothered the living.

  Vida turned to run, but the woman grabbed her wrist and pointed again at the scene outside.

  Stringbeard and the black bear were striding out across the grass to meet the wind’s battalions.

  The two stood side by side, crouching low against the solid body of the earth. When the phantoms were upon them, they sprang, man and beast, trailing mucus and mangled fur. They kicked and clawed and bit the air as it shrouded them, and they disappeared under its onslaught.

  Vida woke in the false darkness and felt for the clammy hand of the Lazarus lady. It wasn’t there.

  Of course it wasn’t.

  She exhaled in relief. Where was her water? She reached into her pack for her canteen and sat all the way up, hot and bothered.

  There was something about that dream. When her stepdaddy had died, she and Ruth had taken to recounting their dreams as they ate their scanty breakfast: you could do that when there were only the two of you. Vida still missed Evert terribly – him and his horses. The last of the black cowboys, he always said: the great-grandson of old Nat Love, the famous Bronze Buckaroo. Whether it was true or not, he had loved her and her mama pure and strong, and everyone had known it. Most of the time Vida thought it was over, the mourning, but then there were days that brought back the lightning bolt of misery and loss. Grief made you sharper, didn’t it? Made you appreciate what you had left – the things you still had to lose. With Evert gone the two women were left to make sense of the events of their days and nights, and so they talked first thing. The rest of the day would be about the ladies who came to see Mama, crying and clawing their abdomens, moaning that their time had surely come. Vida had long learnt that when a woman in labor was brought to their house, Ruth was a midwife before she was her mother.

  Mama thought dreams were like trances: the meaning was always hidden in plain sight. Your mind was trying to tell you something you already knew, and you had to shut up and listen. The dream had something to do with what Stringbeard had told her. What was it? Vida shut her eyes tightly, as if that would make her remember. She pictured Evert with his lasso, the rope whirling over his head as a new horse bolted.

  Two wrongs sometimes make a right.

  Vida sat up, trying to clear the sleep from her mind without shaking the dream out altogether.

  That was it. Two wrongs; two viruses.

  The bear and the leaking man.

  Why was she so sure they belonged together? Each one left alone in that barn would have massacred the children, and chewed through the wife. As a unit, though, they had done something else entirely – faced an outward attack instead of turning on the obvious victims.

  They had offered protection.

  Vida clunked herself on the knee with her canteen. That was it!

  Stringbeard’s double infection had been random. But what if she could find two viruses that would negate each other’s symptoms? Pair them up so that they turned harmless? Or transformed themselves into something else?

  Could there be a virus out there that would fix Ma?

  Vida sipped at her canteen in cautious celebration.

  Even the lunatic side effects didn’t seem so bad from here. It was a crazy idea, but with it came the treasure-box glimmer of hope. And what other choice did they really have? Her search for medicines, for salts and oils and herbs, was just delaying the inevitable – giving Ma’s body time to fight the infection, buy an extra day, a week, a month. What was the sense of drawing it out if all there was was this suffering? You and your spectral children, the descendants of misery and malady, staring through some eternal window.

  It could work. It MUST work. It must.

  Vida lay awake, her plans swirling, nagging and ghostly. Finally, she slept again.

  This time she dreamt of Ruth and Evert and Dyce and Garrett and a girl she didn’t know, vital and healthy, playing ball out behind the wooden house.

  13

  Garrett woke to a scratching noise coming from near the table. Rats going through Dyce’s bag, I’ll bet. Gorging themselves sick on bear fat. He sat up slowly. Eat up, little Hansels, little Gretels. I’ll take rat stew over bear fat eight days a week.

  Now Garrett stood up quietly, straining his eyes in the blackness.

  Below the table he saw a dull slit of light. A trap door?

  And more: a pair of eyes.

  Quietly, quietly, the two humans regarded each other.

  There had been a trapdoor spider that lived under the old cottonwood back at their house, where the earth was always damp and compacted between the serpentine roots. His home was a perfect little circle in the dirt: if you weren’t looking you wouldn’t know it was there. Dad, being away most days, working all week and training for the reserves on the weekend, wasn’t there to say, Don’t you dare shoot your catapult at those pigeons, or, What do you plan on doing with the squirrel once you catch it? Or, Leave that little spider be.

  But there were still rules. Garrett’s code of honor.

  ‘If the pin breaks, it’s game over, okay? He wins. And we only fight him once a day. After that he’s tired and it’s not fair.’

  For weeks, the spider had its daily battle, Dyce always asking when it’d be his turn, Garrett never willing to share.

  He’d choose a pin from their gran’s old sewing kit. He’d drag the tip of it along the ground, like the footsteps of a wounded beetle. He’d come walking from a yard away, for the full effect, and his pin-insect would scuttle closer, and then closer, Garrett mouthing shark music all the while, Dyce watching, still as bones. Then, if he’d played his part well, the circle door would spring open and the spider would lunge
at the pin and there’d be a moment when the spider realized its mistake.

  And here was the real skill in the game: to get the pin wedged in the hole before the spider closed it. Only then would the real battle begin. The spider would tug and tug. And if the pin held, which it seldom did, the lid would open slowly, slowly, and the boys would see the desperate black legs gripping the lid.

  Once it was up, and victory unthinkable, the spider would let go and retreat into his burrow, and Garrett would flip the lid down to cover the hole.

  After a fight he and Dyce would go out collecting bugs for the spider. The boys would stun them with a flick to the head and then leave the offerings at his doorway. Respect. Sacrifice. Later, Dyce would call it what it was: conditioning.

  The day it all ended was also the day it began. He’d nagged his way into a turn, and Garrett, bored of the contest, had finally conceded. Dyce copied his brother’s long amble closer and closer to the door, stopping occasionally to inspect a leaf. Then the moving away again, the scuttling.

  He managed to lure the spider out first time, but in the race for the door he misjudged the distance and spiked it through its abdomen. The creature didn’t try to secure the lid: it limped down to the bottom of its hole, bleeding ichor. The insects they left outside were untouched.

  The boys came back the next day with a cross made of lolly sticks, and whacked it into the dirt with a stone.

  Now, peeking out from his secret bunker, was no spider.

  The old man.

  Garrett stepped closer, rolling his heel on the floor to dampen the sound. The old guy didn’t move. One more step.

  Garrett tumbled forward and jammed his fingers under the lid.

  He heaved the trapdoor open. The old man fell back in fright from his perch. He sprawled, naked and groaning, at the bottom of the wooden steps. There were shards of glass around him on the dirt floor; he held his hand against the leaking gash on his head and cursed.

  When the old guy fell quiet there came again the sound Garrett had heard since they’d first taken shelter in the shack, a constant and distant ringing. Tinker-fucking-bell. Worse when the wind picked up. Wind chimes? In another time it would have driven him nuts.