Whispers in the Night

by Brandon Massey

  When I didn’t answer, he told me, “You know what I mean. There’s nothing to be gained by playing dumb, am I right?”

  I watched Carter from my stool where he stood laughing and chatting up some dude in a leather biker jacket. I noticed Carter wasn’t drinking beer tonight. Hadn’t heard him order nothing but cola all night. I wondered what that was about.

  “Nobody’s playing with you, old man,” I said. Damn Browder had me calling Solomon “old” now.

  “Have it your way,” he said, returning his attention to the cup of coffee set before him. “A word to the wise is sufficient, or so it’s said.”

  “If you’ve got something to say to me, then say it,” I told him. I wasn’t about to be baited.

  “I’m saying that I know what it is to want someone to stop the world so you can get off. But the devil of it is that once the world stops for you, it’s hell to start up again. Can’t be done, most times.”

  “That what happened to you? Is that what happened to all of us here?” I asked him.

  He shrugged, retreating. “I can only speak for myself. We tell our own tales here, Lou. It is ‘Lou,’ isn’t it?” His eyes followed Browder to the far end of the bar.

  I nodded as a terrible dawning burned my mind.

  Old Man Solomon leaned close to me and whispered, “A word to the wise. The coffee here isn’t the best by any means, but there aren’t any demons in the pot.”

  I would have settled for knowledge of where the hell I was and what the story was with the place. I didn’t feel ready to know everything Carter apparently knew. He was getting too damn bold, and I didn’t like it. The way he saw it, he told me, it was all he could do not to lose his last few shreds of sanity. The way I saw it, his last shred of sanity flew over the cuckoo’s nest the minute he killed his first victim. The topic had evolved into one of those things that friends who want to stay friends just don’t talk about.

  I reminded myself he wasn’t a friend anymore as a crash rang out. Carter had emptied his drinking glass and busted it over the head of the biker he was talking to. The bandanna-clad man went down and didn’t move. Blood like burgundy sauce spread over the floorboards to halo his head. No one reacted.

  “Carter, man, what the fuck you think you doing?” I shouted at him, getting to my feet.

  Fixing me in place with a look I ain’t never seen on a man who had more than ten seconds of life left in him, he answered, “I’m learning in death how to live.”

  I replied, “I don’t know about Indian curses or what in hell’s going on round here, but ain’t nobody dead except maybe for that dude lying at your feet.” I don’t know what made me think he’d buy what I was selling. I didn’t even buy it.

  “Sometimes, Lou, dying is the highest, truest form of living. I’ve often wondered whether the dead imitate the living, whether everybody we’ve ever loved and lost are still kicking around somewhere, carrying out the same habits and mannerisms they did when they was alive. I know now that they do, ’cause I’m one of them. And like it or not, so’s you.”

  He’d finally struck me speechless. All I could do was gape at him and wonder whether it hurt to go insane.

  “Let me teach you how to live,” he told me.

  Time slowed down as he remembered the pistol in his belt, swung it up fluidly to align it with my right eye socket, and blasted away the rear portion of my skull.

  An ass-kicking in a glass. That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub. But I’d had enough for tonight. I was headed home.

  Climbing into my car, I recalled a conversation I’d had with the seer. I’d figured on finding someone other than crazy fucking Carter to talk to tonight. I figured on that not long after heading into the men’s room to take a whiz and finding him crouching in the room’s only stall with his dick embedded in the frothing, gore-caked eye socket of some sweaty redhead prone to selling blow jobs in that very same bathroom after she’d had a couple of highballs.

  If you coulda seen the grin on that fucker’s face when he looked up and seen me watching him, you’d know why I left early tonight.

  Drive home seemed to take twice as long as usual. Night driving around these parts always felt like driving through a mausoleum. Desert was so damn sterile and soundless. It sucked to be the poor bastard driving through the Baja at night with a busted car stereo. Music tended to kill some of the monotony of my drive, which varied between forty minutes and an hour, depending on road conditions. Tonight, when I turned the stereo on, I found Nick Cave wailin’ “Your Funeral . . . My Trial” at me like I’d pissed him off. Since my choices seemed to be that or static, I let him yell at me while I drove.

  And drove.

  I knowed something was wrong after missing the exit that I usually take to get home. When I say I missed it, I don’t mean I’d passed it. I knowed I hadn’t. What I mean is that it wasn’t where I knowed it was supposed to be. I’d half convinced myself that I must have fell asleep at the wheel and passed right by the son of a bitch until I caught sight of a little glimmer on the horizon. Figuring it might be a gas station or a sheriff’s depot where I could catch my bearings and figure out where I’d made my mistake, I made up my mind to pull over when I reached it.

  And the nearer I got to it, the more convinced I grew that ol’ Nick was ridin’ with me, and that I’d indeed made my way onto his shit list for reasons as yet unknown to me.

  I was coming up on the Paradise Pub.

  “You can’t tell me you ain’t curious,” Carter told me, seating himself beside me once I’d come back inside. On the TV, photographs of people who’d died in some drunk driving accident flickered. Their vacant eyes set me trembling. A nice-looking black couple, a mildly overweight but gorgeous Latina, and her brother. None of them had survived.

  “I can’t tell you nothing if you done already made up your mind that you ain’t listening,” came my reply.

  “It won’t let you leave, Lou. Remember those stories about a curse on the land that we always thought was bullshit? Well, I think it’s time we wrap our brains around the fact that they ain’t.”

  I ordered up a cup of black coffee, prompting Browder to eye me for a curiosity before going to get it. The coffee machine sat at the other end of the bar near Zadora’s stool. Overhead, coverage of the car accident continued to unfold.

  “Looks like the place will be seeing some new faces soon enough,” she told Browder, tipping her chin at the screen in a gesture that I didn’t understand, but would soon come to. He said something in reply that I couldn’t hear because Carter spoke to me at the same moment.

  “I’ll let you kill me if you want, Lou. I’ll sit still for it one time. You gotta experience it.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I spat, succeeding only in making him laugh till his eyes watered.

  “I wish I could, man. Goddamn if I don’t,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you’re fucking serious,” Carter told me the next night, climbing into the passenger seat with me. I couldn’t believe he was actually coming along. Don’t know what had made me invite him anyway. He seemed all too content here.

  “Oh, I’m heart-attack serious,” I told him, firing up my car’s engine. “We are shaking this fucking mob scene tonight.”

  I turned the car onto 7734, heading opposite the direction I’d traveled in some nights ago. If I couldn’t find my way home, then I’d get us back to Route 2 and consider my options once we got there.

  “You think we can just motor out of hell like a couple of bored tourists? Don’t you understand that we’re home? We’re home, Lou.”

  Not five minutes on the road and he was getting on my nerves already. “If you buy that, then what the fuck did you say yes for when I invited you?”

  “I came along so I could prove to your ignorant ass that the reason we can’t leave is that we’re right where we belong,” he told me. “Now stop the car.”

  The muzzle of his Diamondback kissed the side of my throat.<
br />
  “I ain’t gon’ ask you but one time,” he said, leaning on the gun, making its presence painful against my neck.

  I was sick of a lot of things in that moment, but mostly of him. “Fuck you and that gun. You claim you’ve already shot me in the face and killed me a few nights ago. What more you think you gon’ do to me?”

  “Pull the fuck over or we’ll kick off every night for the rest of fucking eternity with me putting a bullet up your ass. They won’t ‘kill’ you, but they’ll hurt like a bastard. Every. Fucking. Night.”

  Our bluffs waltzed with each other for another second before mine got sumo heaved off the table. I pulled to the side of the road. “Satisfied?” I asked him, making a mental note to bust his ass later and pray the old memory would hang on to it.

  “Almost,” he said, grinning like a death’s-head with only the dashboard lights to illuminate his features. “Get out.”

  I stepped out of the car.

  He leveled the gun on my groin and shot me.

  “You’ll thank me for this, brother,” he told me before driving away smiling and leaving me writhing around on the roadside. If the scent of my blood released into the air didn’t set the creatures he’d talked about on me, then the piece of hollering I was putting on surely would.

  And did.

  The nightmare creatures from Carter’s tale came out of the darkness of the night as if woven from it. Black hulking things with leather for skin and hellfire in their throats.

  The creatures filled my ears with sound as they exposed my entrails to moonlight and fed on them. Bones cracking like glass rods. Bear traps snapping shut. Screams of the dead.

  An ass-kicking the following night behind a pub in a moonlit desert. That’s what Carter got ’cause that’s what he deserved.

  When I came to myself, I was standing over Carter with blood on my fists and in my hair that didn’t belong to me. I dropped to my knees, bringing my two-hundred-thirty-odd pounds down hard in the pit of his stomach. My hands found his throat. My thumbs dug into his larynx as I squeezed. I did this without knowing the reason for it, but something in his smirk refused to let me feel bad about it. Every breath I drew convinced me further that the bastard had it coming and that if I ever remembered what he’d done to deserve this, then he’d really be in some trouble.

  “I’m proud of you, brother man,” he gurgled, smiling before going limp in my arms.

  It should have bothered me that I’d just murdered the murderer who I’d chastised for being what I had become. Instead, I felt great.

  God help me, I felt fucking great.

  “All right, you convinced me,” I told him the next night when he sauntered into the pub smiling “I told you so’s” at me. “I want to give it a try. I want to kill somebody tonight.”

  “Hot damn, now you’re talking, Lou,” he laughed, clapping me on the back as Browder set a couple of lagers in front of us. I thanked Browder, but I didn’t drink the bitch. I wasn’t drinking nothing else in this fucking place until I tested out a theory. I hoped Carter would polish his off, though, since the round was on me. If my plan worked like I hoped it would, it was the last round I’d be buying for quite some time.

  “Yeah. I mean, there ain’t shit else to do up in this motherfucker, so I’ll play it your way for a while,” I said, hoping he was buying my line of bull and wouldn’t smell the shit on my breath until it was too late.

  “It grabs hold of you, don’t it?” Carter said. “Told you I knew what I was talkin’ about.”

  I lifted my glass in salute.

  “Let me hold your pistol a minute,” I murmured, locking my eyes on a patron across the room who I knew Carter would take for my mark. He practically leered at me as he handed it over, eager to see me walk the walk.

  Sucker.

  I stood up, turned to face the bar and its bottled demons, and made a wish.

  I trained the gun on the bottles behind the bar. I opened up on the top shelf stuff first. The blue label. The gold label. The imported spirits. Colored flasks burst into sparkle dust, slopped expensive vodkas and brandies all over the counter, the floor, the ice bins. Fractured bottle fragments leapt into the air. The sickening sweetness of rums and tequilas and liqueurs wafted around me as each pull of the trigger blew apart the bottles that housed them, raining glass shards over every inch of floor and countertop.

  I’d succeeded in getting Browder’s attention. He rushed toward me with graveyards for eyes.

  “Are you looking to die, old man?” he asked me, frothing with rage at my impact on his inventory.

  “You have no idea,” I told him.

  “Tough,” he said.

  My mama used to tell me that if wishes were horses, beggars could ride. Her words came screaming back to me as I watched a wave of Browder’s skillet-sized palm prompt every glass shard and every drop of spilled liquor to leap back into place.

  If I’d blinked I would have missed it; the flash reverse motion of exploded glass vessels reconstituting like jigsaw puzzles assembled by phantom hands. I cussed at the sight of the full, intact bottles sitting unbroken as you please upon the tiers of the bar behind him.

  “Do you honestly think you’re the first of the insects I collect ever to attempt what you just did?” he said. His mouth had a way of smiling without letting the rest of his face in on the act.

  Carter’s gun hadn’t helped me worth a damn, but I kept it between Browder and me anyway. I felt less naked with it there. “What the hell is this place?” I demanded, no longer doubting my knowledge of the answer to the question, but fearing to know what I knew. “Where am I?”

  “It’s like the man said,” he told me, nodding at Carter. “You’re home.”

  “I tried to tell him,” Carter assured the bartender, who seemed to be gaining height by the second.

  “Bullshit,” I declared, unsure which of them I was addressing.

  Browder said, “Listen, old man. I’d say I was sorry for your loss, if I truly were. Truth is, though, that you deserve to be here as much as any of these other losers.”

  I ain’t never been the kind of man to let a face-to-face insult stand. I figured it was time to die with my boots on, so I stepped up to the bar and hoisted myself up on my palms as close to his nose as I could. “The fuck did I do to deserve your ugly fucking mug pouring me that piss-spiked sewage you call beer night after night without end?”

  “What, indeed,” Browder said, snatching up a nearby newspaper kept on hand for drunks who read while they boozed and hurling it into my arms. “Even a befuddled old sot should be able to add two plus two.”

  I took his statement as my cue to turn to page four and found a black-and-white photo of a little girl named Emily at the top of the page. She was black, ’bout six years old. A couple of cottony-looking pigtails framed her little apple of a face. She had a smile on her that I couldn’t help returning even though it was just a photo. It was the last smile that would ever touch my face.

  Emily had my last name.

  The article accompanying the photo cited my name as the driver of the vehicle that had killed us both when it plunged into a ravine on our way to the house where her mother and her new husband lived. According to the article, I’d had three times the legal amount of alcohol in my system.

  I needed to sit down and scream my way through the tears that followed the revelation, so that’s what I did. I’d had a daughter. I’d had a daughter whom I’d killed and a wife, and had apparently fucked up the latter relationship so severely that she’d moved on. And my punishment was to have to choose every night for the rest of eternity. Either sit here and let the memories drive me as mad as Carter, or drink them dead.

  Old Man Solomon came to rest a hand on my shoulder and told me, “My wife, Loretta was her name. Four-car pileup. Could have been avoided if I hadn’t fled after accidentally running down a mother and child. I hung on for three weeks on life support. Everyone else died instantly.”

  The pub door opened. When I looked
up and seen the pretty Latin girl from the accident on the television earlier walk in, I nearly died. Apparently, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Solomon said, “I don’t want to forget my Loretta. Guess I’m not like most folks. Most folks who end up here want to forget their sins. They all want to forget eventually.”

  He hobbled away as Browder returned to offer me a cup of black-labeled anesthesia.

  I watched a stronger man than myself make his way to the restroom, and I ordered up an ass-kicking in a glass.

  Are You My Daddy?

  Lexi Davis

  “Are you my daddy?”

  “Hey-ll no.” I grabbed my pants and jumped away from it—I mean, the kid. Shamir acted like nothing was going on.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a, uh—uh—one of those!” I pointed.

  Shamir got out of bed, naked and indecent, and put on her robe like it wasn’t nothing. “You didn’t ask.”

  “The hell I didn’t.” I swung my legs around to the opposite side of the bed and scooted into my pants, trying to get away from his big spotlight eyes that searched me up and down like he was on the kiddy LAPD squad. “I told you, no kids. I got too much going on. Kids are complications. I can’t even kick it with a woman who has kids, and I for damn sure don’t want none of my own.”

  “But, Chris, that’s Nehemiah. He’s special.”

  “Special?” I stood with my back against the closet, my mouth all twisted up to show my pissivity.

  I looked at the kid. A kid was a kid. This one had the biggest dang eyes I’d ever seen—like that Boondocks cartoon boy. Hair like him, too—a lopsided, oversized Afro. Other than that, Nehemiah—or whatever she claimed his name was—was just another little snotty-nosed brat.