I start to turn around and I’m full sure I’ll see Cadaver coming back out of the tavern, or studying me from the inferno. But it isn’t Cadaver.
The fire’s getting a little lower as it runs out of fuel to feed on, the heads of those flames whipping hungrily to the left, toward town, but with no way to get there, I reckon in an hour or two, they’ll be nothing the rain can’t handle. It’s still hotter than hell though, except here near the back, where I’m standing. The cold is coming from the almost perfect circle that has appeared through the smoke and the flames, forcing them to bend around it. Goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen, but sure as I’m standing here with a dead girl at my feet there’s a tunnel, tall enough to step into, drilled into the fire and stretching about ten feet into the tavern, like someone just stuck a great big glass tube right into the blaze.
At the end of that tunnel, brass foot rails reflecting the shunned fire, sits the bar itself. It should be a charred hunk of nothing right now, but there it is, untouched, and as always, unpolished. And behind it, busy fixing a couple of glasses of whiskey, and looking equally untouched and unpolished, is Gracie.
Chapter Eight
For a moment I just stand there, nudging my right foot against Carla’s cold body to make sure I’m really here. The cold air wafting from that tunnel makes me shiver. The combination of temperatures is going to leave me with one raging bitch of a head cold on top of everything else, so I do what I guess I’m supposed to do, and make my way toward the bar.
It’s like stepping into a freezer, or jumping into a lake of ice.
“Jesus Henry,” I moan and rub my arms like a worried housewife. The cold makes me instantly aware of every spot on my body the fire didn’t dry, and my breath turns to mist. I have to question why it needs to be this cold. If Gracie’s dead, then she’s dead. Keeping her on ice can only be someone’s idea of a sick joke. Or maybe it’s freezing because if it wasn’t, I’d be one crispy critter right about now, given that I’m at least four feet past the threshold of fire. It laps at the invisible walls around me, spreading out across the surface like some kind of amber marine creature desperate to suck me out of my shell.
Strange, but I figure it’s better not to analyze too deeply something that’s keeping me from being roasted alive, so I focus on Gracie, who for all I know might at any moment give me a little finger-wave and vanish, along with her little invisible asbestos test tube. I speed up my approach, and the closer I get, the less cold it becomes.
Gracie looks up at me. She doesn’t smile, but nods a greeting and tucks that rogue lock of hair behind her ear. If she’s dead, it’s been kind to her, but the drab unflattering outfit she supposedly burned to death in hasn’t been improved any.
“Sheriff.”
“Gracie.”
I test the reality of the bar by brushing my fingers across its surface. They come away black with soot, but underneath, the bar is there.
“Sit,” Gracie says. It’s not a request.
There’s only one stool, and I’m about to take it when it occurs to me to ask, “This wasn’t Cobb’s, was it?”
“Weren’t anybody’s.”
I sit. Gracie slides one of the glasses in front of me. I look at it, wondering how I’m sitting here in a bar that’s all but burned to the ground, about to enjoy a whiskey that doesn’t exist with a woman who died in the fire. It’s a couple of questions too many, so I figure maybe I can tackle them later. “For Blue Moon.” I sink the drink. It burns, scalds my throat on the way down and sends fumes rolling back up that I vent through my teeth. It’s real all right, and the conclusion forces me to accept that everything else is too, even as the fire dances around us.
Gracie slams her whiskey without effort, without expression, but that’s Gracie for you. Woman could get shot in the ass and wouldn’t blink.
“I’d be lying if I said I expected to see you here, Gracie.”
“Why’s that?”
“You died, didn’t you?”
“I did, but you know as well as I do that the only reason I spent every wakin’ hour behind this goddamn bar is because my daddy—may he burn in Hell—made sure I would. Last thing that sonofabitch said to me was “This is your place, Grace, and it always will be. Nowhere else right for you and you’re not right for anywhere else. Turns out it was more’n just words.”
“You don’t seem too put out by it all.”
“Wouldn’t be much point in that, now would there?”
“Guess not.”
She looks as tired as I feel, and that’s somewhat discouraging. If you don’t get find rest even in death, where can you find it?
“So that’s why you came back?” I ask, holding out my glass. She tips the bottle, holding back a little, but I figure she’s earned that right, being as how she got cooked and I didn’t. “To look after a bar that’s not here any more?” As I say it, I feel the solid wood beneath my elbows and shrug. “Or at least, shouldn’t be.”
Filling her own glass again, she says, “Lotta things none of you barflies knew about my daddy, Tom. He made promises and broke ’em just like every other fool on God’s green earth. Nothin’ special about that. But then there were the kinds of promises he made sure couldn’t be broken. Learned ways to guarantee that there’d be a price if anyone broke their word. Some tried, of course, and ended up ass-up out where you were puttin’ the whore. Others went about tryin’ to find a way to have the promises dissolved, with magic and other nonsense. But my daddy, he had a little ’ol ace up his sleeve in that wife of his.”
“Didn’t know he married again after your Momma died.”
“’Course you didn’t. No one did, and that’s how he liked it. His little secret. I was only eighteen at the time, and she—Lian Su—wasn’t much older. Said he won the little bitch in a poker game on one of his trips to the Orient, but figured out after too long that he’d been the one who’d come away a loser, on account of how she wasn’t…right. Saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see, made things happen, could hex people and the like. Could make people forget themselves, cause accidents, summon quarrels from calm. All manner of voodoo shit.”
“I’m not sure the Chinese have voodoo, Gracie.”
“Well whatever it was, it wasn’t natural, and it was dangerous. My daddy was afraid of her at first, tried to lock her away in the guest room upstairs, but given the kind of man he was, it was only a matter of time before he started figurin’ ways to benefit from her “gift”. Next thing, he’s winnin’ poker games all over the place and those few unfortunates brave enough to challenge him end up missin’, or worse.” She shrugs as if the recollection doesn’t bother her, but it’s plain to see it does.
“If he was winning poker games, what’d he do with the money? No offense but this place was never what you’d call fancy.”
“He was a gambler, Tom. Anything he made got lost just as quick.”
“Right.”
“So a year later, Lian Su gets a letter tellin’ her her Momma’s sick, and she begs my daddy to let her go home. Not quite sure why she felt the need to get his permission. Never could figure out what his hold on her was, considering she could probably abracadabra him into a possum if she had a mind to. Whatever it was, he agreed, but on the condition that he be allowed to go with her, I suppose to make sure she wasn’t scheming to leave him. I know he was secretly wonderin’ if maybe her momma was rich and left Lian a fortune that he could then add to his own pocket. Lian had no choice but to grant his wish. So they went. Before they did though, she did somethin’ to me at my father’s request. Made sure I stayed right here tendin’ to his shithole till he got back.”
She steps back from the bar, her gaze hard, and slips the strap of her dress off one shoulder, letting it slip down almost to the nipple of her right breast. If she’d done this earlier, I might have been grateful for the glimpse, and eager to see more, but there are two reasons why there isn’t anything even remotely sexual about this moment. First, there’s the obvious fac
t that she’s dead, and as much as I was attracted to her in life, that’s a line even I won’t cross. Secondly, there’s some kind of symbol branded into the flesh of that breast, a large ugly pink thing that looks like a couple of wigwams behind a crooked fence trapped inside a square. Hovering above the whole mess is a couple of rough Japanese or Chinese symbols.
“What’s it mean?”
She shakes her head, tugs the strap back onto her slim shoulder, and I’m somewhat disturbed to note how hard her nipples are beneath the material, and how harder still it is for me to ignore the fact. “I don’t know, but it’s how he kept me here,” she says. “S’why I’m still here. Night before he took off, he tied me down, took off my shirt and had the bitch spout gibberish over me before she drew that symbol on my tit with the business end of a red hot Bowie knife.”
“Jesus. You ever try to leave?”
“First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin’ in my belly at the time.”
“You were—”
“No great loss. It was my daddy’s child anyway, so he did me a favor.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin’ from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin’ if I tried a third time, it might be the last.”
“Might’ve been a mercy too.”
“This look like mercy to you?”
“Guess not.”
“So my daddy comes back. Lian Su isn’t with him, and he’s loonier than a goddamn fox-gnawed hen.”
“What happened?”
“Beats me, but it don’t take a genius to figure out what might have happened to a Western man in an Eastern house of witches, does it?”
I shudder at the thought, or maybe it’s the cold, but despite how unnatural my circumstances might have become, the whiskey is once again doing its job and blunting the edges.
“He locks himself in his room for a week, and I leave him there, happy to have him starve to death, till I remember he’s the only hope I have of ever steppin’ foot outside this place. So I go up there and I find him curled up on the bed like a child, naked and whimperin’, and I grab him by the throat.” She extends her hand and throttles the air between us. “And I tell him I’m glad he’s gonna die, that it should have happened years ago. And I tell him I’ll help put him out of his misery if he just tells me how to get out from under the bitch’s hex. And you know what he does?”
I wait for her to continue.
“He laughs. That cocksucker laughs in this hysterical girly laugh and tells me this is my place, nowhere else right for me, and then gets right back to laughin’.”
“So he could have done something about it if he’d wanted to?”
“Don’t know. Maybe he knew how to lift the curse, maybe not, but I didn’t give him a second chance to tell me.”
I drain my glass, and damn that whiskey’s hitting the spot now. I’m even wondering if Gracie will object to letting me take another bottle off her hands for old time’s sake. But her eyes are all glassy. She’s back in that room with her daddy for the moment so I guess it’s best to hear out the end of her account.
“You kill him?”
“You bet I did,” she says, the fire in her eyes hotter than the one at my back. “Fucker had it comin’. Should’ve done it years ago, first time he came into my room reekin’ of bourbon with his pants around his ankles. Should have stashed a knife and cut off his prick, but I never dreamed he’d do it. Could’ve done it any night after that but I guess I was too afraid, too stuck on the Bible and what it tells you about vengeance and righteousness and all that bullshit. He unlearned me of those lessons, I can tell you. My only regret now is that I left him off easy. Smotherin’ him with a pillow was a hell of a lot better than he deserved. I should have tied him down and…” She waves away the thought. “S’all the same now.”
“And here you are. Still.”
“Here I am.”
“The hell happened in here tonight, Gracie?” I want more than anything for her to be able to give me a straight answer, tie up the whole goddamn mess in one quick sentence, because she died, and surely that gave her the opportunity to see who pulls the strings in this little nightmare.
But all she does is shrug. “Don’t know.
“So what now?”
She looks around at the fire outside our little magic tunnel. “Guess I’m gonna have to start putting this place back together. Not gonna stand around in a pile of ashes for the rest of forever, and a girl’s gotta make a livin’.” This time she does smile, just a little.
“I’d be glad to help.”
“Appreciate the offer, Tom, but it’s not like I don’t have the time.”
“Not a matter of time, Gracie.”
“I’ll figure out what needs doin’, and the way I see it, if I can blow cold bubbles that keep the fire from eatin’ me up again, I can sure as shit make myself some walls and a roof.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Besides,” she says, shoving aside her empty glass and taking a long swallow from the bottle. “You’ve got problems of your own.”
I sigh. “Don’t I know it.”
“Not yet you don’t.”
Setting down my glass, I feel the return of the cold. You can dispute bad news from just about any source, but when it comes from the dead, who I figure are more likely to know the score than anyone living, then you best listen. So I do.
Gracie’s dark eyes hold me in place. “Tonight,” she says. “This tavern, this whole town, has been rotten for a long time, Tom, and so are most of the people in it. Some more than others.”
None of this is news to me, but she’s building up to something, and I find myself getting edgier with every word. She’s trying to be gentle with me, and that’s not in her nature, so it doesn’t work, and that’s the worst thing of all, because if she’s trying to soften a blow that’s coming, it’s going to be a bad one.
“Tell me.”
She puts the bottle in front of me, nods for me to take it. I do, and with it comes the feeling that it’s a parting gift, that she suspects one of us isn’t going to be here when the sun comes up. That lock of hair falls over her eye. I wait for her to tuck it back. She doesn’t.
“It’s your boy,” she says. “You have yourself a Judas.”
Part Two: Sunday Morn’ in Milestone
Chapter Nine
Wintry’s in agony and it’s not the kind of pain he’s accustomed to carrying with him. This isn’t the same as walking around with guilt pinned to your chest like Sheriff Tom’s badge, or keeping it in your eyes like Gracie, or in your heart like Flo, or like Cobb trying to shed it with his clothes as if sins are snake skins. It’s not the same as waking up every morning to find the faces of a few murdered men glaring at you in the mirror. This is a different kind of pain altogether. Oh yes. This is like being dragged for ten miles naked across a gravel highway until you tumble into a mound of salt and fire ants after being skinned alive and havin’ boilin’ water poured over you.
He sits atop a rock on the bank of the river, eyes closed, rocking like a child and whispering for forgiveness that isn’t likely to come any time soon. Most of his body’s burned, and burned bad, but despite the insistent demand inside him for self-pity, he figures maybe he deserves the scalding pain. Figures he should probably be dead so that those waiting for his end would finally get what they’ve been praying for. He knows for a fact that there’s a widow down in Atlanta who’d be overjoyed and more than a little relieved to hear the fire took him, or that he died right here crying like a baby on the bank of a foul-smelling river. Of course, Wintry doesn’t smell anything but the aroma of fresh-cooked flesh.
The problem is, that poor widow down in Georgia hasn’t gotten her wish, at least, not yet. Seems her prayers, just like Wintry’s, aren’t going
to be answered for a while. But sitting here with the rain falling down around him and the black waters of the gurgling river rising up, he wishes to God they had been, that he’d joined Flo wherever she got off to when the fire was done with her and the child.
The child.
Instinct makes him want to rub his wounds, to soothe them, but he can’t. Even the slightest touch makes the raw oozing flesh on his body sing, so he keeps his hands pressed to the sodden grass, wishing the cold would help, but he’s beyond believing it will. He’s already washed himself in the river once, and for one brief moment, when the shock of the icy water hit him, there was relief, but then the fire returned with renewed force, eating him up from the inside out. So here he sits, and suffers, still sending up prayers to the Almighty to make the agony stop, if just for a little while.
And when, after some immeasurable length of time, with the rain coming down even heavier than before, hurting rather than helping every part of him it hits, he almost doesn’t feel someone touching his shoulder. With eyes filled with rain because the flames have burned his tears away, he looks first at the hand, silently hoping it’s the hand of a savior, or his executioner, both of which have come to mean the same thing in this night world of unprecedented suffering, then up into the face of the woman standing over him.
A smile splits his charred face.
“You alive?” says the woman. As brief as the first dip in that freezing river, Wintry feels love wash over him, easing his pain. He thinks of the child, he thinks of getting away, of second chances and God’s grace. He doesn’t consider the memory of that raging blue fire spreading from the hole in Flo’s belly, burning her up as if she was made of straw, or the horrible choking sound she made when finally she dropped to the floor and lay still. He doesn’t consider any of this and it doesn’t matter a lick. She’s here; she’s alive, and he’s not alone.
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