“I guess we’re going to do this then.”
“Stay safe, man,” Simoneaux said. He gave me a little wave as I went back up the hall to join Ben.
“Ready?” he said, bouncing on his toes a few times.
“I guess. Ain’t shot a gun in a while.”
“No, no. My old man keeps the gun. In case anybody comes through the door?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to process everything. “That makes sense.”
“Hopefully you ain’t going to have to shoot anybody any way. But if it makes you feel better, you can have this.” He held his pistol out to me.
“No, man.” I waved it off.
“Eyes on your six at all times.” Ben stepped past the splintered back door. “Stay on my tail, okay?”
I nodded as he dropped down the steps and went left, hugging the building, crouching until he got to the trash-cans and barrels of used peanut oil on the corner. Lightning flashed bright enough to cause the dusk-to-dawn lights to reset. As their glow brightened, thunder cracked. I followed.
He waved his hand. “Four,” he said, pointing to the alley around the corner.
“Boggs?”
“Look at the shadows.”
I heard the rustling of their leather jackets against brick a yard or two away. Just before I saw the shadows myself. A light rain fell.
Ben held a finger to his lip and took two steps forward.
I lingered, afraid to do something stupid. “Subtle” and “quiet” were two things I hadn’t mastered yet.
Ben held a fist up and I stopped.
A cold gust of wind blew loose papers up the alley. I shivered as my shirt grew wetter in the rain.
“Now,” Ben said.
I hesitated, waiting a moment to give him space to work. As soon as I took that first step the woman with the tattoos from the storeroom screamed “Zeb!” from the back door. She stomped down the stairs and stumbled into the alley. I lunged for her as she ran past.
Ben bolted ahead. “Stay with me!”
He fired a shot as Boggs closed in. The man Ben shot twisted and fell to the gravel. Boggs swung a metal rod at Ben.
The woman took cover up the alley as Ashby came at me. I swung the mic boom and he ducked, lowering his head and driving me into the dirt.
Unable to get any leverage on him, I swung my elbow at his ear as hard as I could. Ashby lifted his head and I caught him on the shoulder with a short swing that didn’t do any real damage.
He pushed off me and hit me in the face—right between my nose and my eye. Cold pain shot through my head as warm blood fell past my lips, over my chin. Twisting and flailing were worthless. I tried to bite his ear but couldn’t get close.
“Get off him,” Jamie shouted from the back porch. He fired a round into the grass off to my right. Ashby hesitated, then hit me again in the same spot.
Jamie shot again, aiming to miss. “Get up. Now,” he said, edging toward us.
Ashby stood and backed toward the alley, taking slow steps to where his companion lay, holding his belly. Blood came through his fingers.
Ashby said, “Get up, Ferlin.”
Jamie helped me to my feet, and quickly went up the alley to where Ben had Boggs wrapped up in a chokehold. “Ben—”
“Shoot them!” Ben couldn’t get an angle on the retreating bikers himself.
“They’re leaving,” I said, choking a little on the blood in my throat.
“God damn it, Preston!” he said, furiously. “Do something!”
Boggs gasped for breath, his struggle weakening.
“I can’t kill them all,” Ben said. A loud crack of thunder split the sky right above us.
“You don’t have to kill them, man,” I pleaded.
“There’s a difference between vigilance and a vigilante. It’s time to come home, son. Killing these guys won’t bring Kenny and X back.” Jamie handed me the revolver and took a knee at Ben’s side.
“They’re just going to keep coming back. Preston, I told you to get eyes on those fucking Hajjis, and what did you do? They fucking flanked us.”
“Son,” Jamie said, grabbing Ben’s wrist. “Let justice work. He’ll serve time for what he’s done.”
“Ben, we need you, man. Chloey needs you. Andre is on his way. You don’t have to kill Boggs. Being locked up for manslaughter ain’t worth it. If you go to jail, Chloey and Katy and your mom and dad lose too.”
Boggs faded like the light after a hard day. Like the music at the end of a show.
“Hey,” I said. “Tomorrow is something different, okay? Tomorrow is breakfast and a bed. Tomorrow is your dad and your cousins and your Aunt Rachael and me and Pauly. Tomorrow is redemption, man. Tomorrow is a clean slate, okay?”
He didn’t seem to agree with me. Boggs stopped moving.
I held my breath.
Ben handed his pistol up to his dad. Nodding, he released Boggs. “Okay. We’ll get him inside and tie him up.”
I pushed Boggs off Ben and held him, even though he offered no struggle.
Pauly came to the back door. “Andre’s coming but he can’t get through. We got to get these fuckers out of here.”
“All right,” I said, letting the rain wash the blood off my face. “I’ll take care of it.”
Brushing the dirt from his back, Ben said, “How we going to clear all those people out of the front if you ain’t going to let me shoot any?”
“Just get ready to carry Chloey up to the street.”
“Seriously, Preston. Tell me. This is going to happen tomorrow and the next night, you know. They ain’t going to stop coming for us.”
“I know how to make it stop.” I handed him back his gun. “It’s time to negotiate, I guess.”
I knew the more I thought about it, the harder it’d get to actually do it. “I’m on it.”
“Pres,” Jamie said. “Why don’t you hold up a second?” But I ran up the steps. When I passed the storeroom they had Chloey in a chair ready to be moved. I gave Katy a weak smile and blew her a little kiss.
“Preston,” she said. “Preston, wait…”
But I couldn’t hear her. Not now.
I grabbed a handful of napkins from the service window and held it against my nose for a moment. When I saw that didn’t do a thing to stop the bleeding I used my sleeve.
From below the bar I took a pint glass and filled it with water. I swished it around my mouth to get the taste of blood out then spit in the sink. I drank more as I walked toward the chanting.
When I got to the window, I heard distant trumpets blaring from the hilltops. Not like the clamor from last night’s funeral procession. It sounded disjointed and abrasive. Noise for the sake of noise.
“What the fuck is this, man?” Pauly said. “If it’s me they want you should just let me go out there.”
“Pauly, that’s enough. I told you I’d take care of this, and I’m going to take care of this. Don’t know why everybody has such a hard fucking time believing that.” I stood with Simoneaux and watched through the window. Men and women bitten and bloodied by days of handling serpents looked up to the sky, praying.
“Do you believe me, Pauly? That I’m going to take care of this?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Stringing together a year’s worth of success ain’t enough to clear last year’s slate?”
“It ain’t that, man. You had help—”
“So this last year was all because of Katy?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. But you’ve definitely changed since you met her.”
“Well, I took care of Danicka Prochazka back then and I can do it again.”
“Pres, if you’d have taken care of her she wouldn’t be here now.”
The rain hitting the old corrugated metal roof grew louder as the storm intensified, banging like the crack of a rimshot each time. Just like a hickory drumstick against steel. Rain dripped into buckets and coffee cans. I walked over to the door and flipped the latch. Dani’s silver Merc
edes pulled to a stop amidst all the pickup trucks and motorcycles. The people turned and prayed to her.
A wave of hail bounced off the hoods of the vehicles. A stiff wind blew leaves and paper through the empty streets, past empty houses with dark windows. Homes that once meant something to people. Probably just needles and used condoms in there now.
“Y’all lock that door and come on back in,” Simoneaux said.
But I couldn’t. Not while the sky deepened, like there were thousands of miles between the fog that hung over the roofs and the yellow light pouring in from the cloud tops. A heavy light that pushed all the blue away while it sank. Like wringing water out of a towel. On the wind I tasted anise and mint.
The hail intensified, forcing the people on the street to cover their heads with their coats and jackets. A little kid pushed himself against his mother’s hip. She covered his head with one of her arms while still shielding herself with the other. When the hailstones got larger, some of the people cried out in pain. All the while, the yellow faded, leaving a trace of green.
Hail hit the roof so hard now I had to cover my ears. Trees were stripped of their remaining leaves. The ice rolled spring back into winter. Pounded the grass into the mud. All this as a milky jade grew in the sky above. An unearthly shade, one definitely not found in a Crayola box of sixty-four. A strange heat penetrated the blasts of frigid air from the cold front.
Out on the street it looked worse.
Hundreds of birds took shelter beneath the juke joint’s eaves. Those that didn’t fell out of the trees, dead before they hit the ground. In the dark far off, dogs howled painful cries. Begging to be let off chains. Men and women fell to their knees and crawled under the pickup trucks and into their vans. The water that ran into the storm drain looked like blood in the strange mixture of light from the streetlights and sky. As far as I could tell, no green remained anywhere on earth’s surface. It’d all been pulled into the dividing sky. Like the clouds had been split by a streak of clarity. My eyes were drawn up to it. A never-ending thunderclap rattled what remained of the windows. The noise grew like a squadron of jet fighters with freight train engines coming from somewhere beyond the mountains. Beyond the sea. Beyond the heavens themselves.
In the clearing above, a pinpoint of light grew in the darkness where space should’ve been. Without stars to remind me of my location, the glow looked more like it was rising from a hole than falling into one. Ascending out of an abyss. And earlier, if I thought I should’ve been scared, it was because I didn’t truly know fear until I saw that drop of light double in size every few seconds. Like I’d fallen into it.
“Pauly, come see this.” I waved my hand without checking over my shoulder to see if he was even looking at me. “Pauly?”
Simoneaux joined Pauly behind the bar and said, “They call that star Wormwood. A third of all the waters became poison when it fell. Thousands of people died from that bitter water.”
“You thought you could take care of this?” Pauly said, “I had a hard time believing that dude from The Goonies could carry Frodo up that volcano. But this…”
“I know.” My phone buzzed to life in my pocket. “It’s time to go.”
I walked into the rain. Mint and the tingle of alcohol washed over me. My lips burned with a long-forgotten taste. I turned and saw Katy come through the swinging door from the kitchen. She looked at me for a long time. And when she cried, Pauly held her.
I held up the pint glass to the dim street light and saw my water turn milky. Each droplet left a trail of cloudiness. I tilted my head back and watched the star continue to fall.
“From the emptiness where heaven used to sit.”
I drank.
And when I’d emptied the glass I let it fill again. Rain mixed with wormwood, mint, and star anise. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I wiped water and alcohol and tears out of my eyes. I licked the saltiness and the burn of the absinthe off my lips. Tasted a lot like those nights in Dani’s apartment.
I scrolled through my texts. Hundreds of them. From Kurt Cobain. From Berry Oakley. John Bonham. Jim Morrison.
From Willie Dixon.
MCA sent one that said,
I flipped through a hundred more from Layne Staley and Ronnie Van Zant and Andrew Wood.
From Brian Jones. Elmore James. From Cliff Burton. George Harrison.
Duane Allman sent me a text that said,
Strummer’s said,
I downed another glass, this one much stronger than the first. I held my eyes shut, and in that instant, experienced every doubt I’d ever known.
I’m insane, and I imagined all this.
I dropped the pint glass into the grass.
I died on the bridge that night after the show, and this is purgatory.
I looked up at the falling star one last time. It had taken up almost all of my field of view. The dim light fell into my eyes like dust and I tried to blink it away.
I looked at Dani—Danicka—out in the street in her little silver car. A ride I once believed would take me to the end of my dying days, embraced in a passionate love that didn’t know work or hunger. When I saw her sitting out there, my heart ached for the way I’d hurt her. The way I lied to her. My stomach knotted, my face burned with the regret of not seeing things through with her.
With Dani.
For all I knew, she was the woman I was supposed to die with.
My phone beeped again. I expected a hundred more texts.
But it was a call. Before I even held it up to my ear John pleaded with me. “Brother, go back in and lock the door.”
“How do I know you aren’t a trick of my mind? Making me weak, when I need to be strong to end this like I said I’d end it?”
“I’ll prove I’m not a figment.” John said, “Ask me anything. Things you know from the books. Ask me about ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and the rope. Or about the day Geoff Emerick quit because of ‘Revolution’ and that bloody amplifier.”
“But these things that you are telling me are things that are already in my head. So if I ask a question, it’s one I already know the answer to.”
“Preston, please go back inside and see Katy and Pauly. Nothing is real, and you know that. I’d like to think I taught you something. Let them help you come down from this.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” I walked toward the street. “But the only thing that’s different about tonight is the clarity I feel. You know, I ended it all once before.”
“That’s the illusion! Somebody is pulling your strings.” Rage filled his voice. “None of this would be happening otherwise.”
“That’s what I keep hearing. But I have to try this, I have to show Katy and her people that I can be the hero. That I’m not a fuck-up juvie. If this is my defining moment or if I’m about to go down I have to go down singing, right?”
I’d meant to say “swinging.”
“I have to have my chest out and my jaw stiff. Isn’t that how you got as far as you did? And you’re about the closest I have to a role model. So that’s what I’m going to do. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
I hung up and walked toward the car.
Back in the bar, the phone rang. I turned. Katy stood in the door, wiping tears away. Her face blanked. I couldn’t see a hint of anger or sadness in those eyes. Her lips, for once, had nothing to say.
“I love you, Katy.”
She turned, and went back inside. Before shutting the door completely she stopped.
I said, “This is all going to end tonight.”
Nodding, she said, “I love you, too,” and clicked the lock.
I shoved my phone into my front pocket.
The passenger side door to Dani’s car popped open. As I got in, little frogs emerged from the storm drains and craw
led up over the curb to the naked trees that lined the streets. Their glossy bodies caught the light, reflecting it like a cat’s eye reflected the moon.
When I saw her face I wanted to love her all over again. I remembered the way it felt with her head on my lap, her hair splayed out across my legs. I remembered the warmth, the way time seemed to last forever. I remembered the way she looked at me and I wondered if I’d confused compassion for insanity. I remembered the way she tasted. I remembered the way her skin felt in the shower and in bed. And all the bad stuff that happened may as well have happened to somebody else.
Feelings of warmth and excitement bubbled up in me. I wanted her to touch me. I wanted to feel the excitement of something new and dangerous. I’d never know if things would’ve worked out because our situation didn’t last very long. The harsh thoughts I’d harbored for her seemed suddenly meaningless, as if her eyes made it okay to forgive her for being what she was. Like, the way they looked at me made me think that she never really meant to hurt me the way she did. It was all an accident. A misunderstanding.
She drove off, slamming the Mercedes into gear with all the passion I remembered from our nights in her apartment. She sped through the little town, past the liquor stores and boarded up gas stations, out of the projects and past the town hall and strip malls and fast food joints. I watched her every move. Not because I was suspicious of her. But because she excited me. It felt like I’d never left her side. My muddy memory formed an unending chain of earnest events that began that day in Isaac’s Records.
Dani and me last winter, staying warm on dark mornings as it snowed outside.
Dani and me last fall, out for a walk in a copper-and-brass-colored canyon,
bundled against the stiff mountain wind.
Dani and me last summer, wandering green fields where blueberries grew in such
abundance you just had to inhale to taste them.
I saw myself in her eyes. Dark rich forests and a fireplace blazing against the blackest of nights. A wide bed in a room that never saw light. A table set for two with never-ending drink and the sweetest sweets. I saw her coming out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, ready to love me again. I saw long conversations about who we’d used to be, and felt the kinship of a girl who knew the trauma of growing up without parents to call her own. I saw the bond that brought us together, the loneliness forged against brothers and sisters who had parents they could hold and kiss. I saw the invisible threads that made us a special pair.
The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) Page 25
