“Where’s Momma?”
“In the clouds, the ground... whatever makes you feel better about the accident you caused.” He smiled impishly, golden teeth shining through.
“Me!” Brady said, a small red circle forming on his forehead. “I saw it with my own two eyes. It was you pushed her off the porch. Why? For what!”
The Whiskey King removed his hat and handed it to the pale woman. She filled a glass for him and set it on the table, twirling her parasol as she walked back into the crowd.
“Tell him why,” she echoed back.
“You see what I want you to see,” the Whiskey King said. “The only thing you’ve ever done without my help is open those doorways. Cute, by the way. They look just like the doorway back home. The sisters, my coyote runners, hell, even the crows I gave to you. The weirdoo that got you here comes from Momma’s broken neck. How else do you think it gets passed down?” He took a gulp and licked his lips, rolled his sleeves up.
“I didn’t ask for this,” Brady said. “Take it back, take it all back and put Momma on the porch.” White smoke began to rise from Brady’s forehead. Either the Whiskey King didn’t see it or didn’t care. He was getting too much pleasure from the truth of things.
“A favor for a favor,” the Whiskey King said, “that’s always been the weirdoo way. I gave you a little of what I got when I was a boy. In return, your momma had to go. Don’t tell me you don’t like what I gave you, Brady my boy. I dreamed up the hardest mash in history and bottled it. And when that distillery went up in flame, I opened my own doorway—built Jubilee from ash and bone. I can do anything here. Just ask and it’s yours, if I feel like it.”
“Whiskey King,” the pale woman said. She looked worried.
“I see it,” the Whiskey King said dismissively. “He’s blocked, don’t worry. My mash’ll clog up just about anything.”
Now, I’d never seen more than two eyes on Brady’s face, and I had no idea what the Whiskey King was referring to when he told that pale woman not to worry, but whatever wicked mash he’d shoved down Brady’s throat to keep him from fighting back wasn’t working. Like a cactus crab playing possum, Brady had bought enough time talking truth or dare to finally use the gift his momma’d left behind for him.
“The runners,” Brady said. “The doorway opened when I killed the runners.”
“Now you’re catching on. Someone loosen-up that chicken wire. I want him comfortable when he makes his request. A building of your own, a bullfrog’s paradise. You want the sisters back? There’s room enough in Jubilee to build anything you want. But you can’t have my throne. Sound good to you? It’s the least I can do after pitching your momma off the porch.”
“A favor for a favor...”
The wranglers made their way through the crowd to loosen the chicken wire. They moved slower than before. Everything moved slower, like the floors had been covered in molasses. The dealer tossed cards in slow motion; the pale woman’s parasol stopped spinning.
“I want...”
The Whiskey King sat up straight, thumping the end of his cane down.
The floors above, an infinite expanse reaching the starlit sky, began to fade, wash away, leaving only the first floor. The Whiskey King stared intently.
“...Jubilee to...”
“Yes, tell me!” urged the Whiskey King, leaning into the table, which began to melt like sand when the tide was high.
I took a deep breath, all that fire in my belly now ready to reach out and grab the devil’s hand. Night faded away. The sun rose outside, its rays turning the citizens of Jubilee back to skeletons with puppet strings. The wranglers were skeletons now, too, reaching with boney fingers for Brady’s throne. The pale woman fought to reach the table between them in time, her parasol dissolving.
“...to burn.”
Brady’s third eye opened on his forehead, its light covering the room, unveiling the Whiskey King’s paper castle. All was bone inside. Brady tore loose from the wire, sunbaked strips of twine that had before seemed inescapable.
He didn’t have to say it. I knew what he wanted me to do. I leaped off the table and unleashed every bit of flame I could muster, turning the crowd to ash and dust, laying them to rest where the Whiskey King had kept them awake for his own pleasure. His fiefdom now purified, freed by fire.
The walls dissolved, and the Whiskey King shrunk back to the man I remembered. Only more pitiful, emptier than before. He looked like a starving waif covered in a funeral shroud, his arms sinew, his face gaunt and gray and horrified as Brady stood and approached him, kicking through the pile of dust that had been the green felt table, all bets at a halt.
“You could have had all of this,” the Whiskey King muttered, butt-scooting away.
“I see everything now,” Brady said. His third eye stared mercilessly ahead. But below that, his true eyes welled. “I’m not going to put you in that pine box, Daddy. I can’t.” His boots thudded across the floor. With each step, Daddy shuddered.
“I’m not sorry,” Daddy said, “if that’s what you want to hear. I’d do it all over again. Only I’d have the runners strangle you in your sleep.”
“I know you would. You’ll die with Jubilee, with the sisters. You’ll die, and I’ll never open another doorway again. Jeremiah,” he called to me.
I made my way over to him. He picked me up and placed me in his pocket. I watched Daddy shrink like a dying tree in the desert. All the hooch in the world wouldn’t fill him up again. His shriveled face was filled with rage. Only his head remained, a white-haired raisin staring up at us through a pile of tattered clothes.
Brady lifted his boot and squashed the Whiskey King. He ground his foot until a golden knob appeared, then a whitewashed frame with a solid oak door the color of silt on the bed of some forgotten stream.
The doorway’s where it ended.
The home was untouched.
Fallen Cain sat pretty, a portrait petrified in time. Brady stood on the porch for a while, taking in the vastness of the shrouded plains. They stretched for what seemed an eternity. Green paint chips swirled in the arms of dust devils sweeping across the floorboards. They creaked as he approached the edge. Trudie’s tail swatted at flies on her back. She was tied to the porch railing, her nose dug deep in a bucket of grain and hay, munching away in the sunlight.
Brady smiled.
“Are you scared, Jeremiah?”
“Croak, croak.”
“You think I’m scared?”
I knew he wasn’t. All his wrath and fury had ended with the Whiskey King. The sisters were lost forever, swallowed up when we walked through that last doorway. They were better off that way. Let someone else find them—someone who twitched in their sleep, flailing to push away at their own ghosts.
“Croak, Croak,” is all I could say.
He crouched on the porch edge, looking down to where Momma had fallen.
“You can go now, bubba. I’ve taken up enough of your time. Go find those tadpoles. It’s tough not knowing where your daddy is.”
He patted his pocket, and I leapt down from the porch.
The sky began to darken, filling up with storm clouds that rolled in like quicksilver light. Those first drops of rain felt like heaven.
I watched him as he jumped down to greet Trudie, tossed his empty gun belt to the ground, and rested his head against her ribcage. “Come and visit some time. I’m sure Trudie would appreciate you eating up all these flies for her. Sun tea and idle time, sound good to you?”
I burped a ring of smoke and made my way back home.
I’m not sure what kind of life the Whiskey Chile led after that day on the porch. I suspected he’d always struggle with how his momma had died to give him the terrible gift of that third eye. How the Whiskey King had forced it upon him. How he never had a choice in the matter. The hooch running through his veins would always be there, itching to flip the world upside down again.
From time to time, I’d hop on over to a cliffside overlooking the
plains, where that first doorway had opened, to watch him slowly rebuild the old distillery. I can’t be certain what he was brewing-up there, or why he’d want to breathe life back into the place that had taken everything he’d ever loved.
One thing I do know, though.
That small blue flame, the one about the size of a chile’s angry fist, was gone.
© Copyright 2019 S.H. Mansouri
S H Mansouri - [BCS273 S01] - Through the Doorways, Whiskey Chile (html) Page 3
