The guitar was supposed to be a marker. I’ll be back for it. You can count on that.
At the time, Raven had owned four guitars. She didn’t need another, even though this old National had a full, strange tone when he took it out and strummed it for her. It also had a massive case as carefully constructed as a coffin, and just about heavy enough to require pallbearers. She’d stuck the instrument in a closet, because she had a feeling that somehow, someway, he’d show up to retrieve it. He wasn’t the Devil, but he looked like he could get mean in a hurry. And besides, she couldn’t get the money if she didn’t keep the marker.
Raven touched her cigarette. All she asked was to get home.
There were curves up ahead. Those curves were banked wrong and more dangerous than they appeared, lying flat like a snake, ready to slither off. She saw the sign.
Free Coffee
It was the last rest stop before home. The last little oasis of light and safety, free coffee and road chat. She never stopped there. Never. She turned off her CB. Like those small movements made by Catholics when they pray, her hands moved automatically to touch the cigarette in her hatband, the handle of the knife that rested on the seat beside her. She rolled past the rest stop. His truck wasn’t there, anyway.
She decided to think about the man she’d had the night before, his sweet voice and clean heart. Like riding an angel. That was a hell of a way to break a dry spell. She spent the last seven years antagonizing men into fights, not into bed. But that sweet hitchhiker was too much to resist. As tempting as her first man, her very first. His name was Floyd, and he was a drummer stupid enough to remind her of those old jokes. What do you call a guy who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer. Or maybe, How can you tell when the stage is level? The drool runs out both sides of the drummer’s mouth. Floyd was as dumb as a box of rocks, but his blonde hair had curled around his shoulders, and his arms were as hard as Louisville Sluggers. Drummer guns. He’d looked like Peter Frampton in an FFA jacket. Nineteen years old and divorced, if she remembered right. At the time, she was sixteen pretending to be twelve, chafing in a girlish dress that made her look like she was headed for a square dance, one of her God-awful gospel get-ups, sewn to order by her stage mother, but that was a horrible train of thought, one she’d be confronting in the flesh soon enough, so she took her thoughts back to the drummer. They’d been hiding under the bleachers at a revival show, sharing a furtive smoke. She wasn’t supposed to be polluting her voice. She’d been so damn tired of pretending to be a child. Her heart thudded under her bound breasts. His happy livestock eyes, when she tripped him and beat him to the ground. The first of many men Raven had helped herself to.
She used to take what she wanted. Before.
The rest stop was exactly seven years and eight miles behind her. She was heading west, two lanes then, and she eased the needle a little higher because anyone who patrolled these roads knew her rig and who she was related to. No one would stop her as she drove through the little town of Ochre Water, the whole town asleep under a full moon. Stopping at lights, looking down at the sidewalks around her, the slow speed and narrow confinement of a street after the open road.
She passed the lavender bungalow where Melveena Strange slept. If Raven weren’t so tired, she’d stop, wake Melveena and take her out for a drink, a wild ride. She was too tired, though. She’d stop another time.
Putting it in gear, moving it so carefully, maneuvering onto the highway.
Five miles south, only five miles more, to the south.
NIGHT DEEPENED UNDER a nearly full moon. Dogs barked. Screen doors slammed. Bud cans rolled, lonely and empty, across the gravel. The lawn whirligigs spun, reversed, and spun again. The wind chime collections jangled and belled and donged and rang. One plastic trellis after another slapped against vinyl siding. A black plywood cutout leaned against the side of a trailer. The wind tried hard to knock it down. It couldn’t.
The cutout was nothing special. In these parts, you could see one every half a mile or so, leaning against billboards, sheds, rusted swing sets. It looked like a Marlboro man leaning back, one booted leg kicked over the other casually, his hat tipped down toward cupped hands as he lit his smoke. The smoking cowboy image was meant to be terribly Old West and romantic. The problem was, at anything but high noon it looked like a full-sized redneck robber waiting for a man to leave the house so he could harm the women and smash the gun rack.
The wind blew. The silhouette shook and rocked. It moved as if it were alive. It moved back and forth, back and forth, as if those feet could pull up and walk silently down Sweetly Dreaming Lane, leaving no footsteps behind. Just an old piece of plywood and a high desert wind that keened like something lost in the night.
Wood and wind, that’s all.
RAVEN PULLED INTO the park carefully, guiding her rig between the cement lions, maneuvering down Sweetly Dreaming Lane to the extra long parking space in front of Levi Skinner’s singlewide on Going Crazy Drive. Levi never minded her parking there, because, true to his name, he was doing a little illegal game butchering on the side. He’d passed his taxidermy correspondence course. Officially, that was what he was doing in there, but the tractor-trailer made a nice screen for the various animal corpses brought to him in the night that never came out stuffed or mounted.
Raven parked, fell out more than hopped, stretched. The muscles in her neck and shoulders cracked, complained, and snapped into limber. She headed toward the center of the park, her boot heels tapping the blacktop. She tipped her face up to the moon like all that white light would pour down and give her a drink. The moonlight ran down her scar and made it a vein of silver.
She kicked a little gravel. Touched the cigarette and match in her hatband. What she really wanted was a smoke. What she really needed was a bed. She thought of climbing in next to her little scrap of a daughter, waking her up, smelling her hair. Wrapping her arms around her, singing softly, that song about the hank of hair and the piece of bone.
She thought about Annie Leigh’s grey eyes.
Usually this time on a Saturday night, there were dogs barking, couples tripping back and forth to have a beer with each other. There were men going up to the bar for a game of darts or pool, women coming home from Tupperware parties. No kids, of course, this was an adults park, so the only little piece of trouble running around was Annie Leigh, climbing that satellite dish, sneaking through the broken place in the fence, looking in windows. But not this night, no.
Something was wrong.
She stood there on the moonlit gravel that glowed like luminescent toadstools, and she heard it. Minor keys, a variation on a theme, the upper registers played in dissonant chords of sheer desperation. There were a few pianos in the Park, but only one person who played the piano like that. And he did it in the clubhouse. She went to the door and saw the back of a man bent to the task of playing out his unbearable loneliness on a keyboard. She waited for him to finish.
“Well damn, Pop. Did you write that?”
That long back straightened. Her father, Tender LaCour, turned to meet her eyes. “When did you roll in, Raven?”
“About five minutes ago. You didn’t hear?” She sat down beside him. “Where’s your boots? You weren’t named after your feet, were you?”
Tender lifted his long hands. His fingers spread wide and settled into position on the keys. He broke into a joyfully chorded version of “Kumbaya.” It was an old joke between them, referring to the time when Raven’s mother had decided she wanted to learn to play the guitar. Raven refused to have anything to do with the idea, so the task of instruction had fallen to Tender. Three months later, when Rhondalee abandoned her studies, the only song she’d learned was Kumbaya.
But the truth was, Tender loved this song. He played, his bare feet working the pedals, and she sang as he added a soft harmony.
Someone’s crying, Lord, Kumbaya
Someone’s crying, Lord, Kumbaya
Oh Lord, Kumbaya
They sat s
ide-by-side in the reverential hush that follows a beautiful song. In that stillness, the sound of the Clubhouse door closing was loud as a gunshot.
“Pa? Who was that?”
“Someone quiet.”
He would break her heart. “I’m going up to the bar. You wanna come? I’ll buy you a seltzer and lime. Might be Bone Pilers playing. It’s early yet. Lots of time before Mother comes and hunts you down.”
“I believe I’ll play a little more.” Tender lay a hand on her shoulder. “Be careful tonight, daughter. The ghosts are howling.”
“You change your mind, I’ll be up there.”
She left him with his soul in his hands, playing it out on a keyboard. Raven LaCour walked up Sweetly Dreaming Lane, past her parents’ home, through the glow cast by Asa Strug’s reader board, between the cement lions at the gate, and across the highway to the neon-lit oasis of noise, beer, and music that was the Blue Moon Tap Room.
THE BLUE MOON Tap Room was actually an arrangement of old mobile homes with the walls removed and floors joined together with pieces of nailed-down tin, giving the interior a crazy quilt effect. A battered walnut bar trucked in from a ghost town stretched for fourteen feet, flanked by the standard issue bar tables and chairs of no particular provenance. Free beer advertising pieces in tin and neon crowded walls lined with pinball machines old enough bring a mint at auction. The pool tables were antique and perfectly balanced, but the stage was the main attraction.
You never knew who you’d find onstage at the Blue Moon. Maybe a group of slick country pros on Social Security getting together on the weekends to stun audiences with their polish and professionalism. Maybe one of the shifting groups of Bone Pile men who could tear up a stage and tear out your heart with how well they played. Tonight, she’d settle for some Park kids hammering out Van Halen covers. She just wanted to hear someone make some noise. Someone who wasn’t her beloved and miserable father.
Neon tubes lit the gravel in the parking lot and lent Raven’s hat a pinkish glow. A man stepped out the door just as she stepped up to it. He stood back to hold it open, his rings glittering in the road house light. “A blessed evening to you, Sister.” His words were Christian, but the look he gave her was far from brotherly. “Well, I’ll be. You’re Rowena Gail LaCour. I’d recognize that scar anywhere. I guess the Littlest Angel for Christ is all grown up.”
She drew up straight as a radio antennae and just as likely to whip. “My name’s Raven.” She remembered Hank Heaven, the manager of a group called the Cowboys for Christ, his creased suit and absurdly large hat. He was always staring at her scar. He’d actually tried to touch it. “You’re Hank Heaven.”
“I go by the Right Reverend Henry Heaven, now.”
“Reverend? So you’re a preacher, now? I thought you were a Jack Mormon.”
He smiled a bit. “Yes, I was raised Mormon, but I got the Call. I’ve got a ministry here in the Park. Your mother didn’t tell you?” Raven blinked. As far as her mother went, Raven blanked out most of what was said in her direction. Clearly, she should have been listening more. He smiled that fishy smile of his. “You ought to come to services.”
As a child, she’d stomped on his feet when he got too close. As an adult, she decided if he got too close, she’d just knife him. “I don’t really care who you are or what you’re preaching, I just want you out of my way.” She pushed past him into the bar, shaking with agitation. She didn’t understand it. Hank Heaven was a sleaze bucket, but not exactly a threat. Her entire body felt danger in the air. What in Jesus Christ’s name is going on with me tonight, she wondered. Beau came down the bar with a shot of Maker’s Mark and a Bud chaser. “Hey Raven.”
“Evening, Beau.” She tossed back a shot, calmed herself. “That skinny fella with all the pimp jewelry. Hank Heaven. I heard he was trying to start a church?”
“He already has. He preaches Sunday services in the Clubhouse. He’s brought the Bone Pilers in with music.”
Well, if anything would bring the Bone Pilers to God, it would be music. Bone Pile, slightly south of Ochre Water, wasn’t even a town, really, just a place. It was as if there had been a great broom that swept the country of its hillbilly population, and the sweepings settled like dust in the hills of Bone Pile. The hills were cooler than the desert, and there were a few secret springs. Families settled in clan-like groups of barefoot women and music-loving men. “And you said they were meeting over to the Clubhouse? My mother must be in on that, then.”
Beau smiled. “I couldn’t say, Raven. I don’t see much of Rhondalee.” He moved off to help another customer. Raven looked around the bar. The usual beer-fueled foolishness was going on. Pool in one corner, politics in another. Quentin Romaine sat at the end of the bar, bending his elbow and talking to Jeeter Tyson about religion, how Jesus wanted the white man to have dominion. The Park’s stupidest man nodded along in agreement.
A group of Bone Pilers hunched over a table in the corner, guarding their stacked instrument cases with the toes of their impeccable boots. She saw a couple of McGillicuttys, a McIver, a Dunnery. She was never sure of first names, since the men traded identities and drivers licenses around to evade warrants from unpaid tickets. They all had thick black hair, ravaged smiles, and skin so pale they glowed in the dark. Aside from their unsavory good looks, Bone Pile men were notorious for their musical abilities. If it had strings, a Bone Pile man could play it, and play it heartbreakingly well. And now Hank Heaven was leading them all to Jesus? Only music, she thought, only music could have let him near those men.
Raven had never messed with a one of them, but she still enjoyed looking at the Bone Pile men. She especially admired that Dunnery, was that Angus or Enoch? Whichever one it was, his poisonously handsome features were marred with anger. He was arguing with a man whose face she couldn’t see. The stranger wasn’t a Bone Piler, because he had back fat and there was no fat anywhere on a Bone Pile man. His hair was light and thin, and much too clean.
His voice rose hard and sharp over the jukebox. “I’m offering you a SWEET DEAL!”
All over her body, fine hairs rose in waves. Her world narrowed to three things; the sound of her own heart, the feel of her knife in her hand, and glacial passage of one moment of her life.
The tock of a cue ball making impact with another ball broke the spell. The bar sounds came back one at a time. The clack, smack and ding of the solitary pinball machine that had managed to attract a player. Glasses set down sharp on tables. The strike of a match in the hand of a man near her. The chuckle of a young girl, leaning over the bar to flirt. The song on the jukebox that had been playing all the while. And of course, the hard whine of the blonde man’s arguing.
She looked down at her hand, forced it to release its grip on the shot glass. Beau set down another shot. “You’re awful pale for an Indian. You see a ghost? Your dad says the air’s full of ’em tonight.”
She had, indeed, seen a ghost. How many years had she been pulling into stops, seeing his rig, moving on. Turning off the radio whenever his voice came over, rolling past wherever he was. How many times had she counted the miles to that rest stop, and away from it. Counting the miles, the months, the years between herself and that rest stop. And there he was.
“Beau, what the hell is Gator Rollins doing here?”
“Gator? Not drinking, for one thing. Being as how he’s a Mormon. He’s part of this stingy crew of teetotalers I have up here now. He’s planning on entering the talent show under the management of the Right Reverend Heaven. Staying up at his trailer, too. I guess they know each other from way back. They came here tonight to talk to me about the talent show. They plan to win it, collect that prize money and roll off to Nashville with a big development contract. Gator’s the front man, the Reverend is the brains behind him, and they want all those Bone Pilers for back up. They just need a name for the band, that’s all. I suggested Gator Rollins and the Inbreds.” Seeing her face, Beau swallowed his laughter and wisely went to mop up the bar somewhere else
.
The two of them together. Well, that figured, now, didn’t it?
“What do you know, Babygirl?”
The nape of her neck swarmed with spiders, there were ants on her arms, cockroaches making their way up her legs, a giant, swarming mass of filthy scuttling things let loose by the sound of his smooth, hard voice. Raven breathed in deep through her nose and swung herself around. He showed no surprise at the knife in her right hand.
“Afraid of something, are you?”
He held up both hands, palms out, and backed away so smoothly that it looked as if he were gliding, not stepping into the darkness.
She left the bar with his eyes on her back.
CROSSING THE HIGHWAY, she fought the urge to run. Her head swam, and her stomach cramped enough to kill her, and she made it a hundred feet up Sweetly Dreaming Lane before losing her liquor all over the custom pin striping of Harley Ridgeway’s F150. She staggered over and sat down on one of the railroad ties that Quentin Romaine used to edge his yard.
What to do, what to do. Up the lane, her family slept, clueless, believing themselves safe in bed. Hello, Pop. You dreaming away about ghosts? Hello, Mother. You dreaming about being the next Naomi Judd? Hello, Annie Leigh. I bet you aren’t even asleep.
Annie Leigh.
Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 5
