Currency of Souls

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  The impact was so severe, I expected to see it had ejected the doctor from his car, but though the windshield was obliterated, he’s still in the driver seat, though what’s sitting there isn’t recognizable as anything human.

  Can I call this an accident or assume it’s the result of another of Cadaver’s little bargains? Guess it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does is lying three feet away from me, spread-eagled, head cocked at an unnatural angle.

  I have to leave here, but my truck isn’t going to move. There’s steam gushing out from beneath the crumpled hood and oil pissing from beneath it. It’s done, as is Hendricks’ Buick, so I guess I’m walking, unless someone comes along who doesn’t feel compelled to use their car as a weapon. And in Milestone, at least over the past few hours, such people are rare.

  I stand up, check on Kyle to make sure he’s as comfortable as he needs to be, that he’s not just lying there like a buck waiting to be skinned, then I look at the road, at the twisted metal, the blood, the chaos.

  Wintry’s gone, and though I know I should mourn him, I reckon he’s exactly where he wanted to be. At least his suffering’s over.

  I step out onto the asphalt.

  Though my truck’s a wreck, the front end doesn’t look all that bad.

  There’s a slim chance the stereo still works.

  * * *

  Blue smoke, sad eyes. The smell of fresh blood and motor oil.

  “Did you know?” I ask her.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I tried. You wouldn’t listen.”

  Silence but for a faint dripping from somewhere behind me. Then, somewhere in the trees behind Kyle, a catbird does its impression of a hungry infant. I look toward the sound and see a flicker of dark gray, then nothing but green trapping the sunlight.

  “What I’m going to do…will it be enough?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Can’t or won’t.”

  “Can’t. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Knowin’ what lies ahead can’t change you, or make anythin’ better no more than dwellin’ on the past will. You’ve always done what your gut’s told you to. You’ve never been a great listener to the voice of your heart, not because you’re a bad man, but because you’re not wired that way. It doesn’t speak to you in words you understand, and that’s just how it is.”

  I respond with a soft, bitter laugh. “So I can blame this voice for driving my son to kill himself? Jesus, that’s a relief.”

  “Would Kyle have been happy if he’d sold you out, and got out of Milestone? Would you, in his shoes? Neither of us can see what would have become of him. He wanted out; he got it. He listened to the voice of his heart and it showed him the way.”

  “And what is my voice telling me to do now? Can you hear it?”

  “No. But it doesn’t matter if I tell you it’s the wrong or right way, you won’t listen. All that’s left is to see this through.”

  “Hey,” I say, clearing my throat and scratching at my scalp—my way of letting her know I can’t discuss this anymore.

  “I know.”

  I wave away her mindreading and scowl. “Well for Chrissakes just let me say it anyway.”

  “You don’t know how.”

  “Then can I say I love you?”

  The smoke curls into a smile. “Yes.”

  “Will you buy it if I do?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I love you.”

  “What about Iris?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Get goin’ Tom. Do what needs to be done.”

  “Wait.” I haven’t turned off the radio, haven’t told her to leave me alone, but when I search for her face, she’s gone, curlicues of blue smoke drifting on the breeze from the open car door. I watch it fade until only the memory of her is left, and the sad fact that when I told her I loved her, she didn’t respond in kind.

  * * *

  The sun’s high in the sky and glaring like the eye of a dragon by the time someone comes. We haven’t moved, Kyle and me. We’re still just sitting, and catching up on old times, though of course I’m doing all the talking, and I figure I must have been staring right back at that big old sun because there are white orbs wherever I look, even when I shut my eyes.

  This car is a familiar one. It’s going too slow to present much of a threat, but in this town, who knows? There are no miracles in Milestone. Plenty of murderers, though.

  The car stops a few feet away, and it’s a woman that gets out.

  “Tom?”

  “Iris.” I’m glad to see her, but I’m guessing she won’t know that by the look on my face, so maybe I’d better tell her. “Guess your magical power of screwing up electricity doesn’t extend to car batteries, huh?”

  “Or telephones, or hairdryers. What happened?” She’s blocking the light now, her shadow cool and welcome across my sunburned face. It gives her a red halo.

  I fill her in on the details, laughing my way through some of it, blubbering my way through more, and listening to the rest as if it isn’t coming from my mouth at all.

  In the end it comes down to a litany of who’s dead, an out-loud reading of tomorrow’s obituaries. Iris is quiet through it all, and if she’s upset as I reckon she should be seeing Kyle lying here lifeless at the side of the road, I can’t hear it in her voice.

  “C’mon,” she says. “We gotta get you home.”

  “I’m not going home.”

  “Where then?”

  “Your place. Just for a little while. I need to rest.”

  I expect her to ask questions, and there are certainly plenty of them, but we both know my son’s body’s got to be loaded into her car, so we say nothing more until the job is done and we’re on our way back to town.

  “What are you goin’ to do?” she asks me, her voice laced with concern.

  My eyes are closed; exhaustion’s taking me away from all this to a cool dark place where there’s only me, no one else, no angels with red hair or devils with no eyes. Just me. But I have energy enough to satisfy her curiosity as Cadaver satisfied mine, even though the dark wings of sleep have wrapped themselves around me and are already spiriting me away.

  “Kill Gracie.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Brody closes his eyes. His jaw aches something terrible, and he suspects his nose is broken. His breath whistles through the coagulating blood. Still, all things considered he reckons he could be a lot worse off. He’s still free, after all. There aren’t any sirens sundering the air, no thundering cavalcade he could never outrun on foot. The maddening chorus of birdsong drills into his eardrums and he kicks at the high grass, roars at the source of the noise, but that only makes his head hurt more, so he shuts them out, massages his jaw, and keeps walking. He’s heading out of town, tired, and sore, and on foot, but sooner or later a goddamn car has to pass this way and give him a ride.

  He wipes his sleeve across his nose, winces and grunts with pain.

  “Goddamn sonofabitch.” The guy got him good, there’s no denying that. In his haste to be away from the whatever-the-hell-it-was that came crawling out of the Sheriff’s car radio, he hadn’t thought of the big black guy, hadn’t considered that there might still be enough strength left in him to get in his way. But there was, and he did, and the fist Brody ran into was like a brick wall.

  Worse than being knocked out by a burned-up giant he hadn’t had the sense to look out for though, is the fact that they tricked him. The Sheriff should be dead and Brody three states away by now, but the Sheriff knew what he was doing when he turned on that stereo, and all Wintry had to do was step up to the plate. Now they’re gone, and though he knows where to find them, and vengeance demands he do that very thing, he’s letting it go. There isn’t time; he’s wasted enough of that on these hicks.

  He needs a car, and fast, and it’s only when he stops looking over his shoulder at the quiet road a mile
and a half later that he realizes he’s been looking in the wrong place. To his right, through the trees surrounding a narrow overgrown path, is a small quaint little cabin. Smoke drifts from the chimney. There’s some kind of a wooden figure standing on the rickety looking porch, and what might be a totem in the small overgrown yard.

  Parked out front is a beat-up old Dodge.

  Well I’ll be damned.

  Brody smiles and steps off the road onto the path.

  * * *

  The cabin is painted gray with crimson shutters. Dreamcatchers and wind chimes dangle from the eaves, tinkling away like tin-eared men trying to play a tune. A six-foot cigar store Indian either presides over the porch, complete with headdress, war paint, and battle scars. He’s stationed right next to the small bungalow’s warped and scarred front door, sharp-boned face upraised, ocean blue eyes staring reverently upward. There’s a quiver of arrows on his back, a bow slung over one shoulder, and a curved wooden blade strapped to one muscular thigh.

  Brody stoops to pick up a dusty rock, half-expecting to find a door key hidden underneath, but is disappointed. Nothing but a few earwigs and earthworms, and after a second, even those are gone. He sighs, but keeps the rock in his hand, nods at the chief respectfully as he mounts the creaky porch steps. Now there’s a guy who’d have taken no shit from cowboys, he thinks as he raps a knuckle on the door. Immediately there comes a shuffling sound from inside the house. “Who’s that?”

  “Yeah, hi,” Brody says, in as cheerful a tone as he can summon out of his aching head. “My car broke down a ways down the road there. I was wondering if maybe you had some jumper cables or something.”

  “I ain’t got nothin’ like that. Be on your way.”

  “Well, how about a phone so I can call someone?”

  A dry chuckle. “You know where you are, boy?”

  Brody groans silently. This is all he needs. Of course the option to just jump the car is still available to him, but if it turns out there’s a real life Geronimo behind that door, he’d rather not end up with a couple of arrows in his back. Better to just make sure the guy’s incapacitated one way or another.

  “I need a ride is all. Doesn’t seem to be much traffic out here this time of the day. Thought folks would be coming home from work at least.”

  “There’s no work in Milestone, boy, least not the kind you’d understand.”

  “That so? Well, if you could help me out—”

  “I know who you are.”

  Brody stops, sentence unfinished, and straightens. “That so?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well I don’t see how you’d know.”

  “I heard.”

  Brody puts his hands to the sides of his head, massages his temple. Jesus on a cornstalk. This is all he needs. Obviously the guy is watching him through a peephole or something, though Brody doesn’t see one, and has recognized him. Could be his mug shot is showing on the guy’s TV right at this moment, or on the front page of a newspaper spread across the kitchen table. But just as he’s about to concede defeat, the guy mumbles something that gives Brody pause. “What did you say?”

  Clearer: “I said the wind told me about you.”

  “The wind?” Brody rolls his eyes. Another loon. “And what did the wind say?”

  “Said not to trust you. Said you murdered some folks, one of ’em a drifter who looked like Dean Martin, your girl’s favorite singer. Said you tried to kill the Sheriff when he was just tryin’ to get to his son. That sound about right?”

  Brody grits his teeth. “Wow, that’s quite a wind. Better than the main evening news.”

  “You best get out of here now. I have nothin’ you need.”

  Brody glances over his shoulder. The Dodge is a rustbucket, but the tires aren’t flat and he can see through the dirty window a set of keys in the ignition. With a smile he turns back to the door. “I need your car.”

  “Take it.”

  Brody stares at the door for a moment. Then: “Take it? Just like that?”

  “Sure. I ain’t got no use for it anymore.”

  “Why’s that? You a cripple or something?”

  “Nope. I just don’t leave the house.”

  Brody smirks, already starting to feel better about things, even if his head still hurts like hell. “Town like this, can’t say I blame you.” Eager to be gone, he slaps a palm on the door. “Much obliged to you for the car. Can’t say as it’s ever likely you’re going to see it again.”

  “Don’t expect to.”

  “Right. You take care now.”

  Grinning, Brody turns, but halts so abruptly on the top step he almost falls. “The fuck?”

  From behind him, the old man’s panicked voice: “What is it? What do you see?”

  Brody opens his mouth, but quickly closes it again, smiles uncertainly. “It’s nothing,” he says.

  But it isn’t.

  No birds are singing, and the breeze has died.

  There’s no sound at all, even from the hundreds of deer that have somehow gathered in the old man’s yard and are now standing motionless, heads lowered slightly, their dark eyes fixed on the house.

  On Brody.

  “It’s nothing,” he says again. “Just a bunch of dumb old deer.”

  “I’m afraid,” the old man whispers. “They’re a little more than that.”

  * * *

  It’s time to go. I’ve only slept a few hours, but it’ll do. Iris’s hand is cool against my bare chest, and though we’re both naked and in her bed, we’ve done nothing except lie together. I didn’t ask for anything more, and she didn’t offer, and that sits just fine with me. It’s not why I came here.

  The breeze through the window has the candles snapping at shadows. In the kitchen a sink is dripping water with the sound of a clock ticking in an empty room.

  I take a moment to breathe in the scent of her, of this woman I hardly know and likely never will, then I carefully remove her hand from my chest and set it down next to her. Despite my efforts to make as little noise as I can getting out of bed, I’m heavy enough to make the springs squeal and when I stand and look back at her, her eyes are open, and clear, as if she hasn’t been sleeping at all.

  “Leavin’?”

  I nod.

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I have to get going. Have to ‘tie up some loose ends’ as they say in the cop shows.” I’m trying to sound casual, like the darkness locked inside me isn’t trying to eat its way out, but she’s not fooled. She props her head up with the palm of her hand, her elbow digging into the mattress.

  “What kinda loose ends?”

  I avoid answering by pretending my clothes are proving tough to locate, even though they’re laid out right here at my feet.

  “Tom?”

  It isn’t until I have my underwear and pants on that I answer her. She’s looking impatient, worried, ready to reach for something to threaten the information out of me.

  “I’m turning over my badge tonight,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the way it’s supposed to go.”

  “That sounds like a crock of shit.”

  I smile at her and sit back down on the bed. “Does, doesn’t it?”

  She scoots close, drapes her arms over my shoulders, rests her head against my back. “If you’re plannin’ some kind of heroic exit, that’s one thing, but if you’re figurin’ to walk out of here without tellin’ me why, you’ll be doin’ it without your balls.”

  “Nice.”

  This is a tough one, and I’m not sure how much I can say, how much I’m allowed to say, so I guess it’s best to just keep it simple and hope she understands. “I’m done with this town, Iris, and it’s more than done with me. I should’ve handed over the reins years ago to someone who might have done something more than stand around watching people die. Can’t do it anymore.”

  “Then don’t, but that don’t mean you have to leave.”

  “I’m afraid it does.”


  Her grip tightens on my shoulders. “Then let me come with you.”

  “I would if I could.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because you wouldn’t much like where I’m going.” I bring my hand up to hers, squeeze it tight.

  “What if I don’t let you leave? What if I keep you prisoner? I could do it you know.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  She pulls her hand free, withdraws her arms and sits up. “What’s going to happen?”

  “Something good,” I tell her. “And something bad.”

  She says nothing else, just watches as I get dressed. She doesn’t cry, won’t cry, but I can tell she wants to.

  When I’m ready to go, I carefully pick my way through the candles until I’m at the door. There’s no mad rush from Iris, no sobbing farewell. She just sits there, knees drawn up, hand on her chin, studying me.

  With my fingers on the door handle, I give one last look at her. “You know just because you can’t leave with me, doesn’t mean you can’t leave.”

  “I know.”

  “Big world out there. Could be a better place for you in it. Never know.”

  “Never know,” she echoes, and scoots down under the sheets.

  “Wish I’d had more time to get to know you.”

  “You had plenty of time, Tom. We’ve lived a stone’s throw from each other for a long time.”

  “True. Guess I was busy.”

  “Guess you were. And blind.”

  I can’t argue with that, so I don’t, but when I start to open the door, she starts talking again.

  “I’ve never loved anyone, Tom, and I’m not goin’ to say I love you, because I don’t. But I know people, and I know you better than you think.”