by Poppy Brite
He grabbed a thick jeans-clad ankle and yanked. Charlie went down. The hammer flew out of his hand and thunked into the dust six feet away. Steve smelled shit. It was masked under the smell of cheap beer and redneck sweat, but it was shit all right. He thought of saying Pardon me, but which one of you stepped in shit? and snorted more laughter, crazy laughter, through the pain in his face and his ribs.
Willy was coming for him again. He brought his legs up and pistoned both boot heels into the greasy crotch of Willy’s jeans. Willy doubled up with only a loud grunt; apparently he was more of a man than Charlie. But here came good old Charlie again, and he’d got his silver hammer back, could you say amen and hallelujah, and he was raising it high above his head. Steve wondered briefly whether maybe he should have had his soul saved after all.
And then Ghost shot into the fray, screaming like a mad thing and swinging his own hammer, the one Steve always kept under the front seat of the car. Ghost’s hammer connected with Charlie’s elbow, and Steve heard something crack. He just managed to get out from under Charlie’s hammer as Charlie dropped it, howling and clutching his elbow. Steve grabbed the stray hammer, rolled, and came up on his feet. Now he and Ghost both had hammers. They faced the rednecks, keeping each other covered.
The rednecks didn’t seem like much of a threat now, cringing back against the wall of the building. Willy’s hands were still cupped tenderly around his crotch. Charlie’s right arm dangled uselessly; his face had gone the color of bad cheese. They stared at Steve and Ghost like cornered possums, too stupid to be really scared, but wary.
“We ought to bash your cracker brains in,” Steve told them.
“But we’re not,” Ghost said hurriedly. “We’re just gonna get back in our car and leave. Don’t make any fast moves.” He brandished his hammer at them.
Steve waved his too, but he was beginning to feel he had lost control of the situation. He edged around the front end of the car and pulled his door open. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ghost doing the same. They threw themselves in and both doors slammed at once. Steve thumbed the lock button. Ghost was ranting at him. “Hurry, hurry, let’s get the hell out of here before they stomp both our asses—”
The engine started on the first try. Steve gunned the car across the parking lot and had the satisfaction of seeing Willy and Charlie scrabble out of his way like crabs in boiling water. He thought he might have clipped one of them, hoped so. Then the gas station was dwindling in the red glow of the taillights. He glanced at Ghost, who was sprawled backward in his seat, half-grinning. He thought he could see Ghost’s heart pounding through the thin cloth of his T-shirt. “You just saved my ass,” Steve told him. It was a rare moment of awkwardness between them. “I owe you one.”
“Wait till we get to New Orleans,” Ghost said. “You can buy me a bottle of Night Train.” His hand crept across the seat, found Steve’s hand and held it tight. Steve thought he could feel a message flowing into him through Ghost’s warm fingers: You get yourself killed, Steve, and that’s it. That’s the end of the game for me too. I know you’re bummed out and you think I’m the only person in the world you can trust, but I need you too. So you better keep your ass safe. I need you too.
* * *
Sometime closer to dawn—but not too close, not dangerously so—a battered silver car drove along the same road that Steve and Ghost had left behind an hour ago. A Bel Air. Zillah hadn’t wanted to wait for Christian to gas up his car and give Kinsey Hummingbird his notice, so they had all arranged to meet in the French Quarter the following night.
Christian had forgotten to turn his headlights on. For him the road was lit well enough by moonlight and the faint glitter of the stars. And there were no other cars on the highway, not this late at night.
At least there had been none. But as he rounded a sharp curve, a pickup truck screeched out of a side road onto the highway behind him. Its headlights burned a blinding bar into his rearview mirror. Its horn blared as the driver saw Christian’s car too late, and braked too hard. Then the pickup was skidding off the road, smashing down a short embankment, rolling over and over. At last the truck came to rest against the trunk of a massive pine. The windshield was cracked, blood-smeared.
Christian pulled off the road and left his car. He picked his way carefully down the embankment. The passengers in the pickup were dead, or nearly so; he could smell that. There was no oily tang of gasoline, no smell of heat; the truck would not catch fire. There was only the heavy scent of blood, rich and laced with alcohol.
Christian knew the accident had been his fault. After all, he had left his lights off. But he had not meant to. And the truck had been going much too fast.
And he was hungry.
The truck’s passenger must have died instantly. His features were smeared across his face in a blur of blood and bone studded with broken glass. The driver was still alive. His body lay twisted across the seat, his scrawny legs pinned somewhere beneath the dashboard, but he was conscious. Blood soaked from under his mesh cap, beaded his colorless hair. The driver moaned when he saw Christian, and when Christian bent to the passenger’s torn throat, he tried to scream. But he could not open his mouth. His chin had struck the steering wheel with crushing force, and his jawbones ground together, pulverized.
As Christian lapped the dying-blood off Charlie’s lips and chin and throat, Willy could only watch.
25
Everybody else had a car to drive, or a bunch of loud companions, or at least, like Christian, a radio to play all night, brave rock and roll occasionally exploding into bursts of static, whispering in voices that almost formed words.
Ann’s decrepit Datsun would never make it all the way to New Orleans; she had no car, no companion, and she had sold her Walkman to another girl at work so she could see R.E.M. play at Duke University last month. She couldn’t even listen to her Cocteau Twins tapes on her way to meet her love.
By the time she got home that night, she knew she was going to New Orleans. It had been easy enough to stand there in the trailer yard talking to the tall bartender, telling him she would follow Zillah anywhere. But when it came right down to going—well, that had to be thought out for a while.
At work, waiting tables in the Spanish restaurant whose gold flocked wallpaper and red pile carpet passed for elegance in the North Carolina sticks, she thought it out. By the time she left, she was able to phrase a note to the kitchen manager explaining that there was a sudden illness in her family and could the balance of her pay please be forwarded to Ann Bransby-Smith, General Delivery, New Orleans, Louisiana. She didn’t really expect to see that money. Maybe when Zillah saw how she truly loved him, he would provide for her; the purple silk lining of his coat spoke of wealth.
She had thought it out carefully, but she was still scared by her decision. Leave Missing Mile? She had never done that, not even to go to college. After high school graduation she hadn’t applied to any schools, telling herself she was taking a year off to concentrate on painting. Steve and Ghost were going to State. If they thought college was worth anything, then she might go. But the year turned into two. Steve and Ghost got disillusioned and came back home, fell back into their dream of being rock stars.
She couldn’t talk to Steve now, didn’t think she ever would again. But there was still Eliot, only ten miles down the highway, who knew nothing about her night with Zillah outside the Sacred Yew. She could see him any day after work. She admitted to herself that she hadn’t wanted to see him much lately. He wouldn’t smoke pot and was a little shocked that she did. He even wanted her to quit smoking her unfiltered Camels: “Can’t you at least switch to one of the low-tar brands?” he’d asked, and hadn’t understood why Ann burst out laughing. Eliot couldn’t even outdrink her. What kind of man got sleepy after drinking three Lite beers? The only thing Eliot really liked to drink was his loathsome gin-and-Cokes.
She couldn’t pretend that Eliot mattered anymore. He had tried to make Ann jealous last weekend, telling he
r his ex-wife was coming to town. “She’s got no place to stay,” Eliot had said innocently, “Do you think I should offer to put her up here?” Ann didn’t give a shit. She had not stayed in Missing Mile for Eliot. She had not stayed for Steve. She had stayed because of her father. Simon’s strangeness had kept her here, kept her worried enough to postpone her life. Now it was the final thing that drove her away. If Simon found out she was pregnant … well, he would think she was stupid. And Simon did not suffer fools gladly.
But none of those men mattered now. Steve, Eliot, Simon—they were just names receding into her past, names with none of the susurrant magic of Zillah. She whispered his name to herself constantly. It was like the smooth taste of whipped cream, like a deep tongue kiss.
She drove out to Violin Road, but the trailer was dark. The black van and the silver Bel Air were gone, and there was an air of emptiness about the trailer: already it looked as if no one had lived there for a long time. They were on their way to New Orleans, then. Soon she would be too.
Simon’s car wasn’t there either, when she drove home. She wanted to see him one more time, but she was afraid to. This was how it had to be. She began to pack. What should she put in the one small bag she would be able to carry? She wished she could take the new series of paintings she had begun. All of them were unfinished; all were of faces with sly pink smiles and iridescent green eyes. But those would have to stay. She wouldn’t need them in New Orleans. Instead she packed her black lace underwear and two pairs of old pink cotton panties. Her toothbrush, her cigarettes, her little wooden pipe and her film can, which contained three pinches of marijuana she’d cadged off Terry. She might need to sneak a toke in some bus station bathroom between here and New Orleans. Somewhere in the swamps.
There were a few crumbly leaves left in the bottom of her bowl, so she sneaked a toke now. It put her at loose ends. She stood staring around at her possessions, suddenly feeling unable to leave anything behind. Her mourning hat with the little black veil, her record collection. The R.E.M. poster on the wall stared down at her. Stipe’s eyes were like loss. Peter Buck’s were like dark fire. How could she leave her posters, her clothes, her canvases and paint box?
Frenziedly she snatched at a black lace scarf and tied it around her throat. That, at least, would go with her. She put on a string of ebony beads, a gray sweatshirt, a skirt with a torn silk lining. She was caught in the mirror, adding lipstick and silver eyeshadow (in just eighteen hours or so she might see her true love again; she must look beautiful), when she heard Simon at the front door. She snatched off her beret and with the side of her foot shoved the suitcase under the bed.
Ann heard him stepping carefully through the mess in the living room. Picking his way through the piles of books and newspapers, emphasizing how untidy the room was. He dragged the books off the shelves, he read the newspapers, but she was supposed to keep the house picked up. That was one of her duties. Simon was very big on duties. Sometimes she wondered whether he didn’t strew his things around just to make the absence of liquor bottles more obvious. He said he had not taken a drink for five years, six months, and twenty days, and Simon was never wrong.
Here he was at the doorway, small and spare. His hair, uncombed for days, flared wildly about his head. It was thick and snow-white; his skin was almost phosphorescent in the gloom of the hallway. In the summer Ann worried about her father’s health. He had come over from Dorchester twenty years ago, but the hot, humid summers here still made him droop. He was like some glacial plant whose fragile structure was supported by ice crystals; his hair went limp, he perspired from the dark bags beneath his eyes. But in the winter he exuded a kind of mad vitality.
Suddenly she was sure he would be able to read her mind, or look through the mattress and see the suitcase beneath it. He would begin to argue with her, calmly, reasonably. But his argument would be slippery. There would be no tail end she could grab onto so that she might argue back. In ten minutes she would feel as if she were trying to wind up earthworms on a spoon. In half an hour she would feel as if she were trying to drive a nail through a blob of mercury. In an hour or two or three, he would have her talked out of the whole stupid notion. She would not go to the Greyhound station, would not catch the all-night express to New Orleans. She would never see Zillah again.
Simon had talked her out of so many things.
But all he said now was “Good evening, daughter.”
As always, the form of address half-annoyed her and half-warmed her. “Hi, Simon,” she said.
“Your day was …?”
“Rawther shitty.”
He nodded and allowed himself the slant of a smile. Ann’s voice had as much of a Carolina twang as her mother’s had had, but she knew it amused him when she imitated his accent. “As was mine. I dissected three toads today. There was no change in any of them.”
Simon had taught once, so the story went, at one of the Great Universities of the World. Ann wasn’t sure where. He hinted at Germany, France, the United Kingdom. Now retired, he spent the days in his study trying to change the chemical composition of various types of blood. Until recently he had used his own, and sometimes hers; once Steve, drunk off his ass, had offered a sample.
But lately Simon had been getting into animals. Ann had pitched a crying fit the day she found him cutting up the lusterless carcass of Sarah Jane, a black-and-white kitten she’d been feeding on the back steps. Since then, as far as she knew, he had stuck to using mice from the Woolworth’s in Corinth and toads he caught in the vacant lot next door. He injected the toads with varying amounts of his own blood and sometimes with liquid LSD. Mostly they jumped around a lot.
Over the rims of his glasses Simon looked at her oddly. “Were you thinking of going out tonight, Ann?”
Involuntarily she glanced at the space beneath her bed. The bed skirt hid the suitcase, but again she felt sure that her father could see through mere cloth, that he knew her intentions. “I might go down to the Yew,” she said.
“You aren’t going to see Steve, are you? After the way he dishonored you?” She had told her father only that Steve had slapped her. For once, with rare sensitivity, he had not pressed the issue.
“No, Simon,” she said. “I’m not going to see Steve.”
“Or his peculiar friend?”
“Simon, Ghost isn’t—” She stopped. There was no point saying Ghost wasn’t peculiar; that wasn’t what she meant anyway. “Ghost never did anything to me,” she finished.
“I wish you wouldn’t go out tonight, daughter.”
She looked at him. “Are you requesting or ordering?”
“I have your best interests in mind,” he said frostily.
Ann rubbed her wrists. At sixteen she had come home roaring drunk one night. Simon was still drinking then too, but that didn’t make him any more compassionate. He trussed her to her own bedposts with rope and kept her tied there for seven hours, until she pissed herself and begged him to forgive her stupidity. The memory of the chafing had never quite gone away.
“So I’m not supposed to go out tonight,” she said. “I’m supposed to stay home and wait on you.” Defeat welled in her. Why did Simon have to get his way every damn time?
Maybe he didn’t.
She looked up at him again, this time trying to make her eyes submissive, to wipe away the frigid hurt from his face. “I’m sorry, Daddy.” That would get him for sure. “Had a long day at work. Why don’t you go read the paper? Or your library books? I’ll fix us a pot of coffee.”
Simon was touched. He came across the room to kiss her forehead. She had to stop herself from flinching back, sure he would know what was up when he tasted the sweat at her hairline. But he straightened and gave her another slanted smile. “You may rest,” he said. “I will make the coffee.”
No, dammit! That wouldn’t work. She put on her sweetest smile. The taste of vomit rose in her throat. “Let me do it,” she said. “I know you want to see the paper. There’s another article about the
disappearances.”
That got him. Simon had followed the disappearances with a weird avidity, considering it was only a Violin Road rug-rat and a couple of bums that had been killed. Maybe he had been dissecting them, too.
As soon as Simon left the room, Ann dug through the top drawer of her dresser until she found a little plastic bottle. She opened it and shook the contents into her cupped hand. Several tiny pills, wafer-thin, each with a V-shaped cutout in the center. The Valium dated back to her mother’s last nervous illness. Ann had stolen it out of the medicine cabinet a year ago. She had taken almost all the pills on various sleepless nights; only these were left. She hoped there was still some decaf in the freezer.
“There you go,” she said a few minutes later, setting a yellow ceramic mug on the arm of Simon’s chair. “It came out a little strong, so I put in a lot of sugar. I hope it’s not too sweet.”
“I’m sure it will be lovely,” he said.
She held her breath as he took the first sip, but through the steam his face registered only tired contentment. He might have been any father letting his daughter bring him a cup of coffee after a hard day’s work. She still felt a little sad.
An hour later she kissed his lips lightly and locked the front door behind her. His breathing was a little irregular, and she tasted the sourness of coffee and tranquilizers on his mouth, but she would save a prayer and a curse for him when she got on the bus. No one could stop her from going to meet her true love now.
The Greyhound took her south, frosting her to the bone with its air-conditioning adjusted for the middle of August, not for this November night. As the bus lumbered away from the dark depot, Ann half-rose out of her seat, one hand on her suitcase, the other raised to stop the driver. Wait, she almost said. Wait, I went a little crazy, let me out and I’ll trade in my ticket and go back home, maybe Steve will take me back, maybe my father will welcome me home.
But the bus lurched and toppled her back into her seat. Then they were bumping across the railroad tracks that led out of Missing Mile, and she saw an omen: far down the line, at some other junction, a pair of signal lights gleaming in the night.
