Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  Daddy hefted the bottle and chugged bourbon straight from it, A moment later he let out a long, wet, rippling belch. Trevor got up from the corner where he’d been sitting, keeping an eye out for Momma’s headlights, and started to leave the room. He didn’t want to see Daddy get sick. He’d seen it before and it had nearly made him sick too, not even so much the sight of the thin, stringy whiskey vomit as that of his father’s helplessness and shame.

  His foot struck a loose piece of wood and sent it skittering across the floor. Daddy had been doing repairs around the house a few days earlier, nailing down a board that had begun to curl away from the wall. Long silver nails and a hammer were still scattered around the hall doorway. Trevor began to gather up the nails, thinking Didi might step on one, then stopped. Didi was smart enough not to go around the house barefoot, with all the splinters in the floorboards. Maybe Daddy would need the nails. Maybe he would still finish the repairs.

  At the sound of the nails chinking together, Daddy looked up from his bottle. His eyes focused on Trevor, pinned him to the spot where he stood. “Trev. What’re you doin’?”

  “Going to bed.”

  “Thass good. I’ll fixyer juice.” Momma usually gave the boys fruit juice to take to bed with them, when there was any in the house. Daddy got up and stumbled past Trevor into the kitchen, slapping one hand against the door frame to support himself. Trevor heard the refrigerator opening, bottles rattling. Daddy came back in and handed him a glass of grapefruit juice. A few drops sloshed over the side, trickled over Trevor’s fingers. He put his hand to his mouth and licked them away. Grapefruit was his favorite, because of the interestingly sour, almost salty taste. But there was an extra bitterness to this juice, as if it had begun to spoil in the bottle.

  He must have made a face, because Daddy kept staring at him. “Something wrong?”

  Trevor shook his head.

  “You gonna drink that or not?”

  He raised the glass to his lips and drank half of it, took a deep breath, and finished it off. The bitter taste shivered over his tongue, lingered in the back of his throat.

  “There you go.” Daddy reached out, pulled Trevor into his embrace. Daddy smelled of stinging liquor and old sweat and dirty clothes. Trevor hugged back anyway. As the side of his head pressed against Daddy’s, a panicky terror flooded through him, though he didn’t know why. He clutched at Daddy’s shoulders, tried to wrap his arms around Daddy’s neck.

  But after a moment, Daddy pried him off and gently pushed him away.

  Trevor went down the hall, glancing into Didi’s dark bedroom. Sometimes Didi got scared at night, but now he was fast asleep despite the punishing volume of the music, his face burrowed into his pillow, the faint light from the hallway casting a halo on his pale hair. Back in Austin the brothers had shared a room; this was the first time they had slept apart. Trevor missed waking up to the soft sound of Didi’s breathing, to the scent of talcum powder and candy when Didi crawled in bed with him. For a moment he thought he might sleep with Didi tonight, might wrap his arms around his brother and not have to fall asleep alone.

  But he didn’t want to wake Didi. Daddy was being too scary. Instead Trevor walked down the hall to his own bedroom, trailing his hand along the wall. The old boards were damp, faintly sticky. He wiped his fingers on the front of his T-shirt.

  His own room was nearly as bare as Didi’s. They had been able to bring none of their furniture from Austin, and hardly any of their toys. Trevor’s mattress lay flat on the floor, a rumpled blanket thrown over it. He had pinned up some of his drawings on the walls, though he hadn’t put up Skeletal Sammy and he hadn’t tried to draw any of Daddy’s other characters. More drawings lay scattered on the floor, along with the comics he had scrounged from Daddy. He picked up a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book, thinking he might read it in bed. The antics of those friendly fools might make him forget Daddy sprawled in the chair, pouring straight whiskey on top of his pain.

  But he was too tired; his eyes were already closing. Trevor turned off his bedside lamp and crawled under the blanket. The familiar contours of his mattress cradled him like a welcoming hand. From the living room he heard Charlie Parker run down a shimmering scale. Birdland, he thought again. That was the place where you could work magic, the place where no one else could touch you. It might be an actual spot in the world; it might be a place deep down inside you. Daddy could only reach his Birdland by drinking now. Travor had begun to believe his own Birdland might be the pen moving over the paper, the weight of the sketchbook in his hands, the creation of worlds out of ink and sweat and love.

  He slept, and the music wove uneasily in and out of his dreams. He heard Janis Joplin singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” and remembered suddenly that she had died last year. From drugs, Momma had told him, taking care to explain that the drugs Janis had been using were much worse than the pot she and Daddy sometimes smoked. An image came to him of Daddy walking hand in hand with a girl shorter and more rounded than Momma, a girl who wore bright feathers in her hair. She turned to Daddy, and Trevor saw that her face was a swollen purple mass of flesh, the holes of her eyes black and depthless behind the big round glasses, her ruined features split in the semblance of a smile as she leaned in to give his father a deep soul kiss.

  And Daddy kissed back …

  Sunlight woke him, streaming through the dirty panes of his window, trickling into the corners of his eyes. His head ached slightly, felt somehow too heavy on his neck. Trevor rolled over, stretched, and looked around the room, silently greeting his drawings. There was one of the house, one of Momma holding Didi, a whole series of ones that he was pretty sure were going to turn into a comic. He knew he could never draw the slick, tawdry world of Birdland the way Daddy had, but he could make his own world. He needed to practice writing smaller so he could do the letters.

  His head slightly logy but full of ideas, Trevor rolled off the mattress, pushed open the door of his room, and walked down the hall toward the kitchen.

  He saw the blood on the walls before he saw Momma.

  It would come out in the autopsy report—which Trevor did not read until years later—that Daddy had attacked her near the front door, that they must have argued, that there had been a struggle and he had driven her back toward the hall before he killed her. That was where he would have picked up the hammer.

  Momma was crumpled in the doorway that led from the living room into the hall. Her back rested against the frame. Her head lolled on the fragile stem of her neck. Her eyes were open, and as Trevor edged around her body, they seemed to fix on him. For a heart-stopping second he thought she was alive. Then he saw that the eyes were cloudy and filmed with blood.

  Her arms were a mass of blood and bruises, silver rings sparkling amid the ruin of her hands. (Seven fingers broken, the autopsy report would say, along with most of the small bones in her palms, as she raised her hands to ward off the blows of the hammer.) There was a deep gouge in her left temple, another in the center of her forehead. Her hair was loose, fanned around her shoulders, stiff with blood. A clear fluid had seeped from her head wounds and dried on her face, making silvery tracks through the mask of red.

  And on the wall above her, a confusion of bloody handprints trailing down, down …

  Trevor spun and ran back down the hall, toward his brother’s room. He did not know that his bladder had let go, did not feel the hot urine spilling down his legs. He did not hear the sound he was making, a long, high moan.

  The door of Didi’s room was closed. Trevor had not closed it when he looked in on Didi last night. High up on the door was a tiny smudge of blood, barely noticeable. It told Trevor everything he needed to know. He went in anyway.

  The room was thick with the smell of blood and shit. The two odors together were cloying, almost sweet. Trevor went to the bed. Didi lay in the same position Trevor had left him in last night, his head burrowed into the pillow, one small hand curled into a fist near his mouth. The back of Didi’s head was li
ke a swamp, a dark mush of splintered bone and thick clotted blood. Sometime during the night—because of the heat, or in the spasms of death—Didi had kicked off his covers. Trevor saw the dark brown stain between his legs. That was where the smell came from.

  Trevor lifted the blanket and pulled it over Didi, covering the stain, the ruined head, the unbearable curled hand. The blanket settled over the small still form. Where it covered the head, a blotch of red appeared.

  He had to find Daddy. His mind clung to some tiny, glittering hope that maybe Daddy hadn’t done this at all, that maybe some crazy person had broken into their house and killed Momma and Didi and left him alive for some reason, that Daddy might still be alive too.

  He stumbled out of Didi’s room, felt his way along the hall, sprawled headlong into the bathroom.

  That was where Momma’s friends found him hours later, when they drove out to see why Momma hadn’t shown up to model that day; she was so reliable that they became worried immediately. The front door was unlocked. They saw Momma’s body first, and had nearly worked themselves into hysterics when someone heard the high toneless keening.

  They found Trevor squeezed into a tiny space between the toilet and the old porcelain sink, curled as compact as a fetus, his eyes fixed on the body of his father. Bobby McGee hung from the shower curtain rod. It was the old-fashioned kind bolted into the wall, and had held his weight all night and all day. He was naked. His penis hung limp and dry as a dead leaf; there had been no last orgasm in death for him. His body was thin nearly to the point of emaciation, luminously pale, his hands and feet gravid with blood, his face was so swollen as to be featureless except for the eyes bulging halfway out of their sockets. The rough strand of hemp cut a deep slash in his neck. His hands and his torso were still stained with the blood of his family.

  As someone lifted him and carried him out, still curled into the smallest possible ball, Trevor had his first coherent thought in hours, and the last he would have for several days.

  He needn’t have worried about accidentally coming upon the Devil’s Tramping Ground, he realized.

  The Devil’s Tramping Ground had come to him.