But whiskey had prickled my nerves. I started sprouting tremors, and that got me beady eyes from the counter clerks. And twice, serious-looking gentlemen followed me out. Both times I slipped them, but high-tone stores had lost their potential.
I aimed lower, started browsing hardware stores and bead shops. That was slow work, usually needing a whole day to boost enough to trade for a lone pint, and green goods at that.
The last day of July was inhospitable, sixty degrees and pouring gray rain. I was huddling under the eave of the train station to catch my breath after tapping the costume jewelry store across the street for a pocketful of junk. The owner had been on to me right off, but a half-dozen teenie girls had followed me in. Chattering and giggling, they swarmed the counters like bees, giving me enough cover for a quick sweep and a fast vamoose. Still, I’d been stupid, risking a grab when I knew the owner was watching, and the episode had left me shaking.
That year, black raincoats was the fashion. And in the downpour, the folks scuttling into the station looked like morticians racing to a train wreck. Except for one woman, hugging at the collar of a white coat that stood out bright against all the black ones. Dark hair, lush red mouth, she set my spine to tingling like I was leaning against needles. Brushing past, she whispered, “Greedy now, banjer man?”
It wasn’t just her mouth talking. It was the red of her lips and the white of her coat. It had been a long time since I’d remembered anything for sure, but that rainy afternoon, one memory came back sharp as the Devil’s own pitchfork.
Tadesville, 1954.
“I believe I almost am,” I thought to yell at the back of her, as she disappeared into the terminal. “I believe I almost am,” I said again, this time to myself.
People was looking at me. I hustled down to the viaduct to get away from the crowd and think.
A hallucination, I told myself. From the mash.
A vision, my other self said.
It’s been ten years, my first self said.
She could have been only twenty then, or thirty, my other self said. She’s still there, living in the woods, in a cottage full of diamonds.
That ring was the only one, my first self said. For sure, she didn’t know it was valuable, else she wouldn’t have tossed it to me for playing a few tunes. It was a fluke.
I shut down the voices. When you’re dead broke, stealing for half-pints to quell tremors, flukes take on new importance. They become likelihoods.
I came out of the viaduct into bright sunshine. The darkness and the rain were gone. I took that to be an omen, a portent, of a better day coming.
Tadesville.
THE drugstore map for Michigan showed no Tadesville, not west of Detroit or anywhere else. That made sense, being as there’d been no people there, save the woman. I pocketed the map for future use and went outside to ponder.
Problem was, I’d never known the route, because I’d been cradling my head in the backseat, caring only about the bumps Arnie wasn’t dodging.
Arnie. Arnie Norris, of Randall’s Corners, Illinois.
Approached like he was being called just for old times’ sake, he might remember the route to Tadesville.
There was a phone booth at the corner. The operator said there was a Norris listed in Randall’s Corners. I pulled my hand off the phone, having a better thought. Nudging his mind in person might be better, especially if he’d enjoyed enough good fortune since our jug band days to spot his old banjo man a twenty—money I could use for traveling. I went back to the drugstore to consult an Illinois map. Randall’s Corners was in the middle of the state, right on the way to Michigan. I made a show of putting the map back and left.
I hocked what I could, excepting the banjo, sold the spinner hubcaps at a junkyard, and headed north with the top down, serenading the telephone poles, cars, and trucks with songs of whiskey, rivers, and diving ducks.
And cottages full of diamonds.
RANDALL’S Corners looked to be suffering no prosperity. Two live souls stood jawing in front of a gas station.
“I’m looking for Arnie Norris,” I said to the one who shuffled over to the pump.
He gave me a careful look-over. “You a friend of his?”
“Korea.”
“Arnie never came back here.”
The warmth of the gin in my gullet faded away. “How about the Norris in the phone book?”
“His brother’s son.”
I bought eighty cents worth of gas and followed his directions to Arnie’s nephew’s house. The nephew didn’t warm much to the idea that I’d served in the army with his uncle.
“You have no idea where he might be?” I asked through the screen door, clutching my hands together behind my back so as to not betray any agitation.
“He never came back here after Korea.”
I drove back to the pay phone at the gas station, trying not to panic. I’d been counting on that tap for a twenty.
I couldn’t recall where Whiffer was from, but Billy Dabbert hailed from Cedar Rapids. The operator had a number.
“Billy?” I almost shouted, much relieved, when someone answered.
“Is that you, Billy?” an ancient voice croaked back.
“I’m looking for Billy.”
“Where the hell you been all these years, Billy?” the confused voice asked.
The old gentleman was out of gray cells. I was out of dimes. I hung up. I’d have to detect the route myself.
I continued north, straining to remember what I could. We’d played a four-tuner outside of Detroit, then headed west. Low on gas, spooked by not encountering any towns, we’d stopped at sunset, drank, slept in the car. Next day, suffering the effects of the mash, I’d kept my head shrouded the whole way to Tadesville. Afterward, I’d hitched a ride from a guy driving a truck to Kalamazoo. Tadesville had to be in a line between Detroit and Kalamazoo.
It took four days to get to Ann Arbor, west of Detroit, being as I had to find gas stations crowded enough to allow a fast-exiting, nonpaying patron. Ann Arbor’s courthouse had no record of a Tadesville, but they did have a big map showing county roads. I studied it for the route we’d likely taken, then set off westbound on skinny blacktop that wandered through towns named Bridgewater, Norvell, and Napoleon. I spent the night in the car outside Joppa. And then I came to Rasden. It had two church spires visible from the town square.
It could damned well have been that last four-tuner we’d played.
The sun climbed higher as I continued west through spindly, second-growth woods and long-abandoned farms. Then the trees got taller and thicker, until at last they twined together so thick I lost sight of the sun and the fields beyond the road.
I drove on, mindful of the drooping gas gauge and the growing thought that I could have made up the whole business about Tadesville and the lady in the woods. I’d been stupored that day, and in that condition, my mind had never been a stranger to inventing things. Maybe Tadesville was one such episode; maybe I’d browsed the ring someplace else, and my shredded brain had invented the woman so as to not remember the actual thieving.
I began to shiver. It had been hours since I’d swallowed the last of my provisions. I put the top up and turned up the heater full blast. Still I shook. Best to get out of this forsaken country, quit chasing a remembrance that never happened. I sped up, squinting ahead for a road I could take south to the interstate and, if fortune smiled, potentially a poorly tended package liquor store.
Suddenly, the cracked blacktop fell away, and I was driving on dirt, kicking back brown dust like I was fogging crops. There was a curve. The thick trees ended. And it was there, fifty yards up, baking under a full sun.
Tadesville.
And more.
I straight-armed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes, crunching the tires deep into the dirt.
Arnie’s ’37 Plymouth was still parked at the side of the road.
The chalky blue paint was almost all weathered off, exposing huge blotches of gray primer
and brown rust, and the tires had shriveled to thin black circles, but there was no doubt. It was Arnie’s car. And behind, still hitched to the bumper, was our stage trailer, piled with the tattered, rotted remains of our army-drab duffel bags.
Long needles prickle-danced up my back. I shut my eyes and squeezed the steering wheel hard. Crazy; I’d gone crazy from the mash, crazy from the gin. I wanted to giggle, but I didn’t have the courage. I begged God, to whom I had not spoken in decades: let it be a hallucination.
I opened my eyes, slow.
Arnie’s car. The trailer. Both the same.
I killed the motor.
Nothing moved in the hot, sudden silence. No cars, no people, no damned, droning flies. The air was dead, like when we’d first pulled into Tadesville.
I got out, shutting the car door easy, but still the sound boomed off the storefronts like three beats from a marching drum: the grocery, the General Feed, the long building with no name. More paint was gone from each of them, weathered away like skin flaked from a corpse too long in the desert. Above the grocery, yellow strings—remains of curtains—hung limp in the window, like entrails dangling from something dead.
My feet kicked up dirty puffs, dry as brown talcum, as I crossed the street.
The Plymouth’s windows were down. I leaned in. Arnie’s keys and dog tags hung on a chain from the ignition. The cloth upholstery was shredded off the driver’s seat, the tops of the exposed seat springs shiny. Someone had been sitting on them recent, keeping away the rust.
My old suit jacket lay crumpled on the mildewed mohair in back, still balled up from when I’d used it as a pillow. I reached in, pulled it out. The rotted fabric came apart in my hands.
I let it fall as I went back to the trailer. My duffel was on the bottom of the pile, the stenciled “Olton” faded against the bleached army green. I undid the brass hook and pulled the putrid canvas open. My white shirts with their long, pointy collars rested on top, green-yellow now. I felt down, pulled out a pair of black gabardine slacks, a tie with a garden full of flowers, and my other suit. Everything was thick with black mold. At the bottom was a pint of Jack with two swallows left. Jesus.
I pushed it all back in the duffel, tried to wipe the black from my hands.
Run to the car. Turn the key. Get away from this place.
Once, I had the strength. Not now. Now I needed.
It was a perfect day for browsing.
I went back across the street, each step muffled by the dust, inevitable. I opened the Pontiac’s trunk, took out the banjo case, dimly heard as the falling lid sent more drumbeats off the storefronts. At the intersection, I turned the corner. Like before, it was cooler under the thick, dark canopy of leaves. Almost cold.
I walked down the half mile.
THERE’S no meat on Arnie, Billy, and Whiffer. Their skin hangs loose and yellow, like rotting shrouds. They look like the people that came out of Auschwitz—haunted, like they’ve seen hell. My skin’s a little tighter. I haven’t had to browse as long.
We come every day about four thirty, drag what’s left of the duffels to the ground, and pull ourselves up on the trailer. We start tuning. Arnie’s only got two rusty strings left on his guitar, but it doesn’t matter. Always, we counted on Billy and Whiffer. Most folks have never seen jug and washboard.
We lead with “Divin’ Duck.” Surefire stuff, used to be. But nobody comes. Across the street, my Pontiac, white on black with red vinyl interior, sits low on rusted wheels. The tires went flat years ago, and the top is tattered from sun rot. I sleep there. I don’t know where the others sleep.
Arnie starts a banjo joke. I shuffle forward, make like I’m drooling. Nobody laughs. There’s nobody there.
We try singing down the gospel: “Swing Low,” “Go Tell It,” “Amazing Grace.” Used to draw them out, but that was in Christian towns. There’s no God in Tadesville.
Arnie sets down his guitar, makes like he’s squinting at the buildings. “We’ll have to browse.”
I start picking “Will the Circle?” but it’s for show, like before. We have to browse.
Arnie eases off the trailer, slow because there’s nothing left in his hip sockets. Clutching at the door handles, he pulls himself to the driver’s door, drops onto the seat coils. He sighs through what’s left of his teeth. He’ll wait for us behind the wheel.
Billy levers himself down with his good leg. His right leg broke years ago and healed crooked. He keeps it strapped with his belt. He hobbles for the grocery.
Whiffer goes toward the General Feed, though what he’s expecting there I don’t begin to wonder.
I latch my case, walk to the intersection, and turn down the side road. It’s always cooler there, under the leaves.
I walk down the half mile. The trees, thick and twisted, caress each other like vipers.
I know the spot. I set down the banjo.
“Are you greedy, banjer man?” The soft Southern voice brushes my skin like cold silk. It smells of mold. I cannot see her. Only the wind, moving the leaves.
I squeeze between trunks grown so thick they’ll soon touch. One hundred, two hundred yards in, I look everywhere. There is no cottage, no ruins of a foundation. Still, I move through the trees. It is my need.
The specks of yellow sun on the leaves turn orange, then gray, embers snuffing in a dying fire. I push through the bramble as fast as the arthritis and my tea bag lungs allow, screaming as the thorns rip at my scabs to get at the soft, unhealed pink underneath. There is no cottage. There never was, except as a shadow the germ beginnings of my greed needed to see.
“Greedy, banjer man?” she whispers, through the wind, through the leaves.
“You know I am, you bitch,” I yell, hell’s own supplicant. I push on.
When the last of the gray between the trees goes black, when the wind kicks up and chills the wet of my sweat and the new blood oozing out of my skin, when the shakes come so bad I can’t go on, I start to feel through the darkness for a way out. It’s almost over for another day.
Sometimes I see her then, in that last thin light. Faint, a mist, back in the woods. Laughing and swaying in the trees, mocking the weakness she has claimed at last.
I stand on the road, waiting for my raggedy breathing to regulate. I check my watch. It doesn’t work, but I know it’s been more than an hour. Arnie, Billy, and Whiffer will have gone to wherever they go. Arnie is real firm about not waiting more than forty-five minutes. I bend down, find the rope tied to the banjo case. For dragging. After the woods, I have no strength left for carrying.
I start back to town. There’s no going the other way, no finding a road to Kalamazoo. That part’s over. I’m greedy now, welcomed in Tadesville.
I always stop at the big oak where the shiny box hangs. I put it in plain view, back when I had hope that someone would come along. Back before it hit that this place was for us alone—Arnie and Whiffer and Billy and me.
And her. Especially, her.
I feel inside for the paper—this paper—and know again the little death as my fingers close around it. Nobody will come.
I give the twine a tug to make sure the string is still taut and then head back to the Pontiac, dragging my banjo, taking what comfort I can summon from the spongy, dark places on my skin and the lump the size of a walnut that’s growing on my forehead.
I tell myself it will end soon, when the spongy places and the walnut ripen. That nothing will come after, except peace.
It can’t last forever, I say to the dark.
Sure as hell.
Limbo
By STEVE BREWER
I snapped awake on a cold autopsy table.
A white-haired man with rimless eyeglasses stood over me, a scalpel in his hand, poised to slice my bare chest. I grabbed his wrist before he could break the skin.
The surprise was too much for the old man. The color drained from his face until he was as white as the smock he wore. His wide blue eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, his arm tea
ring free from my grasp as he crumpled to the floor.
I sat up and looked around. The room was chilly and close, lit only by one bright lamp that dangled above my aching head. The shiny steel table had a drain built into it. Shudder.
I was naked and, except for the headache, seemed uninjured. The usual chunky, hairy body. “Semper Fi” tattoo on my forearm. Football scar on my knee.
I dropped my legs off the side of the table and my feet reached the cold concrete floor. I bent and checked the old guy’s neck for a pulse, but I could tell at a glance that he was gone. Served him right, the son of bitch. Trying to cut me open—
As I straightened up, a glimmer of light caught my eye, off to the left. I looked over my shoulder, but found nothing. Feeling unsteady, I turned all the way around, searching for the source of the light, but it stayed just past my field of vision.
A washing-up sink stood in the corner. Above it hung a round mirror, and I stepped over the dead guy to reach it. My face looked the same, flat-nosed and square-jawed and dinged from a lifetime of fist-fights. I needed a shave.
A shaft of yellow light beamed from my head, just above my left ear. What the hell? I reached up and let the light play on the palm of my hand. Where was it coming from? Gingerly, I pressed my hand against my scalp, covering the beam, feeling for its source.
That’s when I found the bullet hole.
I nearly joined the dead man on the floor. What the fuck was happening here? No blood, not much pain, but there was no doubt about the hole in my skull. I dipped a fingertip into it. A neat round hole, felt like a .38. When I pulled my finger away, yellow light poured out.
I didn’t like that. Made me feel dizzy, weak. I covered the hole with my hand. Looked in the mirror. Lifted my hand away. Light beamed from the gunshot wound. I covered it again.
“I’m light-headed,” I said to my reflection in the mirror. Neither of us laughed.
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