by Brian Keene
There is a lot of both on the jukebox.
They drink and listen, Joe Cocker finally finishing Jake’s six plays with “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.”
Then it’s closing time, 2:00 AM …
Ellie is pretty much in the bag, as she leads Jake back to her room at the Hotel Reo.
He doesn’t pay much attention to her tiny, shabby room, even the bright new pictures she’s just hung around. Instead, he turns away from Ellie, and begins to peel off his clothes—a cowboy version of foreplay. Completely naked, he turns to face Ellie, and the child-like expression is gone, replaced with a mean, surly look. She finds it chilling.
“Best peel out of them clothes, girl, unless you want them ripped off.”
Even unsteady on her feet, Ellie put her hands on her hips, and with some attitude says, “Well, I guess it’s ‘bout time for you to go, Cowboy.”
“Hah.” Moving quickly across the room, the big man grabs the front of her shirt in a mitt, and with one clean jerk, tears it completely off. He pushes her back on the bed, and holds her down with one hand around her neck, fumbling with her jeans.
Frightened, she squirms, lashing out at him, and finally gets his attention when she rakes a long gash across his right cheek with her fingernails.
Jake bleeds heavily, but he doesn’t flinch away.
“Ha, you like to play rough, little girl?” He laughs, then punches her solidly right square in the face, making a scrunching sound… but Ellie knows something inside her head, in addition to her nose, is broken.
Entire face and head exploding with pain, everything begins to fade out, as Ellie sinks into a black abyss …
She holds on though, struggling to maintain consciousness, while gasping for breath on her side. She blinks, wiping a stream of blood from her nose. Then she turns her head slightly, and sees the nude cowboy standing on the other side of the bed, an enormous erection in one hand, and his big cowboy belt in the other. He leans across the bed and strikes her with the buckle, the blow raising an instant red welt on her hip. But the cowboy makes a big mistake, pausing a moment, giving Ellie enough time to wiggle off the bed and grab the industrial flashlight near her nightstand.
The drunken giant is roaring with laughter now, as he shuffles around the bed in pursuit. He reaches out to grab Ellie when she whirls about, and strikes out with the heavy flashlight, hitting him squarely above his right ear. He drops face down on the floor … and begins to convulse.
Ellie leans over the stricken cowboy and says: “What part of no didn’t you understand, asshole?”
Jake doesn’t answer. His eyes glaze over, and he finally gasps out a rattle-groan from deep within his throat.
Ellie knows then that Jake is dead, and the perception sobers her up. She glances around the room, blood specks splattered across her bed. She groans, realizing that again she is responsible for a death—
A series of pings sound from inside her damaged head—the sounds tight rubber bands make when snapping apart.
And Ellie knows this is the last straw, that those mental rubber bands were the only things holding her together. She staggers to the mirror above the dresser—
“No,” she moans in protest, because as she suspects, the wrinkles, all the deeply etched wrinkles on her face, slowly widen and pull apart.
She’s a broken lady …
A few seconds later, next door, Taj blinks awake. It’s quiet, but she gets up. A palpable, ominous tingling sensation lingers in the air—
Then, she freezes in place, because she hears a faintly melodious plinking-cracking sound coming from next door in Ellie’s place, like the sound of a plate of glass or perhaps a large mirror shattering apart.
12.
Broken Lady
“… forever now apart,
everything so dark and shady,
time can heal a broken heart,
but nothing can heal a broken lady.”
– song and lyrics by Elinore Nightwind
TALES
THE
ASHES TELL
GARY A. BRAUNBECK
I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light—
“Let me into the darkness again.”
‒ Stephen Crane
Some nights, when the visitors have left and everything within me falls into dismal silence, when even the Librarian grows weary of drifting through these halls, maintaining these chambers, and looking at these glass doors behind which rest the golden books, when the rain spatters against the roof and the flashes of lightning create glinting reflections swimming against my marble floors, when I am at last certain there will be no one and nothing to disturb me, I allow myself, for a little while, to flip through these books as one still among the living would flip through the pages of an old family photo album; only where the living warm themselves in the nostalgic glow of reminiscences, I sustain myself on the memories of those housed within the books arranged on my shelves, behind my glass doors with their golden hinges, here in my corridors with marble floors. I have no memories, being born of wood, iron, and stone as I was. But those who slumber here, within these golden books, their memories remain with them, and many are so lonely that they gladly share them with me on nights such as this. I house them from the elements; they sustain me with their stories. I prefer it this way, on nights such as this, when it is just the ashes, the rain, and I … and the tales the ashes tell.
Tonight it’s old Mrs. Winters who’s the first to start in with her story of her grandson’s death in Vietnam and how it broke her own son’s heart and led to the ruination of his marriage and career, ending when her son took his own life in a squalid motel room somewhere in Indiana. Every time she tells this story, her neighbors listen quietly, politely, patiently, for they—like I—have heard this a thousand times before, but she always changes some small detail so it’s never quite the same; tonight, the scene of his death is not some sleazy roadside hovel but an expensive, five-star hotel in the middle of downtown Manhattan, and this time her son does not decorate the blinds with his brains but instead stands on the roof of the palace, arms spread wide, a joyous smile on his face as he falls forward off the edge and for a moment almost flies until he … doesn’t.
Like her neighbors I am pleased by this new trick of the tale. Each time she changes a bit of the minutiae the story resembles itself less and less, and one night it will be a completely new story that she will begin revising almost immediately. We like this about her. She was never married, our Mrs. Winters. She had no children. She died alone, on a bus-stop bench, a forgotten bag lady whose mortal remains were cremated and placed here by a sympathetic police officer who still comes by once a month to bring flowers and pay his respects; it seems Mrs. Winters reminded him of his own grandmother; beyond that, no one here has any further idea of his reasons, and if Mrs. Winters knows of them, her memory is too fragmented to know for certain if those reasons are true or not. We do not press the matter. Even here, certain privacies are respected.
I find it curious how many of her neighbors were interred here by strangers, or family members they were never particularly close to. Many of them come here from cities and towns that are hundreds—sometimes thousands—of miles away. I know that I am a glorious edifice, and am honored that so many of the living wish to bring their loved ones here to rest. I am a tranquil place, a quiet place, a place of serenity and sanctuary. I know all of the stories of nearly everyone who slumbers here, but not all.
Tonight, we have new neighbors on my shelves, behind my glass doors. I heard only a part of the explanation given by the slightly hunched, spirit-broken man who brought them here. Something about his brother and his niece and a boy his niece once knew. I wonder whom it is he has left with us. I exchange pleasantries with all my friends between the golden covers of their books, and as I do each of them asks, What do you know about the new arrival? I have no a
nswer for them, not yet, but being the curious sorts they are—and always so lonely, even when all of them are chattering away—they want me to find out but are too polite to ask. They know they don’t need to; I will discover it in time.
I see that the glass doors have been freshly washed and dried so that our new arrival is welcomed into a clean space. She is whispering to herself, our new neighbor, and I become very still, empyrean, allowing the rain and lighting and the slow turning of the Earth to cast shapes of angels in the primum mobile of night.
She speaks not of herself, but of we, of the uncle who brought us here.
Could it be? There are so few books here that contain more than a single person’s remains; the last was five years ago, when an elderly husband and wife who died within hours of each other left specific instructions that they were to be burned and interred together, their ashes, like their souls (or so they believed), intermingled for eternity. I find that sort of sentimentality pitiful, but I never speak my judgment to those who need to believe in such antiquated notions. Do not misunderstand—the souls of that elderly couple are intermingled here, but not in the way they were raised to believe; there are no fields of green they run through, hand in hand, laughing as the afternoon sun sets their faces aglow and the scent of autumn leaves fills the air. They are simply here, and so shall remain. But it is enough for them, this fate, and that pleases me.
The girl still speaks of we and us, very seldom does the word I make an appearance. At least not at first.
I’m here, I tell her or them. As are we all, and we are all listening.
She continues to whisper, but whether she is telling the story to me or to those who live inside my walls, I do not yet know. But she tells her story as if she has told it a thousand times before and expects to tell it a thousand times again; and, perhaps, like old Mrs. Winters, she will begin altering details as the years and decades and centuries go by, until it is a new story, one she finds can spend eternity with and not be crippled with regret.
Mute, voiceless, abandoned and all but forgotten, she begins, my father’s house does not so much sit on this street as it does crouch; an abused, frightened animal fearing the strike of its keeper’s belt, the sting of a slapping hand, the rough kick of a steel-toed boot. No lights shine in any of the windows, which are broken or covered with boards or black paint or large sections of cardboard that now stink of dampness and rot. The paint on the front door long ago gave up fighting the good fight and now falls away, peeled by unseen hands, becoming scabs dropping from the body of a leper in the moments before death, but with no Blessed Damien of Molokai to offer up a final prayer for a serene passage from this cheerless existence into the welcoming forgiveness and saving grace of Heaven. This was once a house like any other house, on this street like any other street, in this town that most people would immediately recognize and then just as quickly forget as they drive through it on their way to some place more vibrant, more exciting, or even a little more interesting.
But we can’t blame them, you and I; we can’t impugn these people who pass through without giving this place so much as a second glance. If things had worked out differently, we would have burned rubber on our way out, making damn sure the tires threw up enough smoke to hide any sight of the place should one of us cave and glance in the rear-view for a final look, a last nostalgic image of this insufficient and unremarkable white-bread Midwestern town, but that’s not the way it works around here; never was, never will be. You’re born here, you’ll die here; you’re a lifer, dig it or not.
We sometimes wonder if people still use that phrase, dig it, or if it’s also passed into the ether of the emptiness people still insist on calling history, memory, eternity, whatever, passed into that void along with groovy, outta sight, “That’s not my bag,” “Stifle it, Edith,” Watergate, Space-Food Sticks, platform shoes, Harry Chapin flying in his taxi, and the guy who played Re-Run on What’s Happening?
Wouldn’t it be nice if that drunken Welshman’s poems had been true, that death has no dominion, or that we could rage against the dying of the light? Odd. It occurs to me that if we were still alive, we’d be looking right into face of our fifties about now, feeling its breath on our cheeks, its features in detail so sharp it would be depressing.
But this never does us any good, does it, thinking about such things? Especially tonight of all nights. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? Yes, that’s right. This night marks the anniversary of the night my father buried us under the floorboards in my bedroom after he came home early from work and caught us in my bed. It was my first time, and when he saw you there, with his little girl, it was too much for him to take; not this, not this dirty, filthy thing going on under his roof, it was too much; his wife was gone, three years in her grave after twice as long fighting the cancer that should have taken her after nine months; his job was gone, the factory doors closed forever, and he was reduced to working as a janitor at the high school just to keep our heads above water because the severance pay from the plant was running out.
“At least the house is paid for,” he’d say on those nights when there was enough money to buy a twelve-pack of Blatz, sit at the kitchen table, and hope with every tip of every can that some of his shame and grief and unhappiness would be pulled out in the backwash.
You never saw it, you never had the chance, you didn’t know him as I did. I couldn’t look at his eyes and all the broken things behind them any longer; I couldn’t listen to his once booming voice that was now a disgraced whisper, the death-rattle of a life that was a life no longer, merely an existence with no purpose at its center … except for his little girl, except for me and all the unrealized dreams he hoped I’d bring to fruition because he no longer had the faith or the strength to fight for anything. A hollow, used-up, brittle-spirited echo of the man he’d hoped to be. Even then, even before that night, he’d ceased to be my father; he became instead what was left of him. I tried to fill in the gaps with my memories of what was, what had been, but I was a teen-aged girl, one who hadn’t paid any attention to him during the six years my mother was dying, and so I made up things to fill in those holes. I pretended that he was a Great War Hero who was too modest to boast about his accomplishments on the battlefield; I dreamt that he was a spy, like Napoleon Solo on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., hiding undercover, using his factory job to establish his secret identity, his mission one so secret that he couldn’t even reveal the truth to his family; I imagined that he was writing the Great American Novel in hidden notebooks late at night, while I slept in my room with the Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy posters on the walls, their too-bright smiles hinting that someday soon my father’s novel would make him so rich and famous that the two of them would be arguing over who would take me to Homecoming, and who would take me to the prom.
But he was no war hero, no spy, no secret great notebook novelist; only a factory worker with no factory who’d exchanged a lathe machine for a mop and a bucket and pitying looks from faculty members. To the students, he was either invisible or an object to mock.
No, I don’t remember your name. I don’t remember my name, but what does it matter now? Our names, like our flesh, were only a façade, an illusion to be embraced, a falsehood to be cherished and mistaken for purpose, for meaning. We have—had—what remained of our bodies to remind us of that, beneath the floor, flesh long decayed and eaten away, two sets of bones with skulls frozen forever into a rictus grin as if laughing at the absurdity of the world we’re no longer part of.
Let’s not stay here for now, let’s move outside, round and round this house, watching as the living ghosts of everyone who once passed through the door come and go in reverse; watch as the seasons go backwards, sunshine and autumn leaves and snow-clogged streets and sidewalks coming and going in a blink and … and let’s stop here. I want to stop here, in the backyard, just for a few moments, just to see his face as it was on that night.
Watch; see how pretty it all is. Murky light from a glowing street l
amp snakes across the darkness to press against the glass. The light bleeds in, across a kitchen table, and glints off the beer can held by a man whose once-powerful body has lost its commanding posture under the weight of compiling years; he’s overweight from too many beers, over-tense from too many worries, and overworked far too long without a reprieve. Whenever this man speaks, especially when he’s at work, especially when he’s holding the mop and bucket, his eyes never have you, and even if they do you cannot return his gaze; his eyes are every lonely journey you have ever taken, every unloved place you’ve ever visited, every sting of guilt you’ve ever felt. This man’s eyes never have you, they only brush by once, softly, like a cattail or a ghost, then fall shyly toward the ground in some inner contemplation too sad to be touched by a tender thought or the delicate brush of another’s care. To look at him closely, it’s easy to think that God has forgotten his name.
He lifts the can of beer to his mouth. It feels good going down, washing away the bad taste in his mouth that always follows him home from work. He drains the can, sighs, goes to the sink and pours himself a glass of water. He is thinking about his days as a child, about the afternoons now forgotten by everyone but him, afternoons when he’d go to the movies for a nickel and popcorn was only a penny. He thinks about how he used to take his daughter to the movies all the time when she was still a little girl and her mother, his wife, was still alive. He remembers how much fun they used to have, and he longs for the chance to do something like that again, something that will put a bright smile on his daughter’s face and make himself feel less of a failure.
He stands at the sink listening to the sounds of the house, its soft creaks and groans, still settling after all these years. He thinks about his dead wife and doesn’t know how he’ll be able to face the rest of his life without her by his side. She was a marvel to him. After all the mistakes he’s made—and, God, he’s made a lot, no arguing that—her respect and love for him never lessened.
