Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“Wish I had a goddamn twenty-dollar bill for every cockroach in this place,” Soda said and set the bottle on the floor beside the bed. “Man, I’d be a millionaire. I’d be Bill fucking Gates by now.”
The knife dividing the air like pure and holy fire, the burning sword of Heaven to cleave the sky from horizon to horizon, sky above the sea, sky above all Creation, to slice skin and muscle and bone. Red hands busy at their work, hands as sure as a surgeon’s and as careless as a butcher’s. Deacon grits his teeth and opens his eyes, but it’s all still there. Red hands and the sea, grinning Soda swigging from a half-empty bottle of Thunderbird, and the storm turning wild about them all, rolling like a hurricane, a Ferris wheel, the indifferent wheel of fate and fortune.
“Has any mortal name, Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?”
Soda’s brown eyes so wide, so wide and drunk and scared, and the blood flowed from his lips, spilled thick and dark down his chin. The silver blade falling across his face again and again and again, and soon it was not even his face anymore, only raw meat, only a tattered mask for a dead man to wear.
The red hands traced a perfect circle on the wall above the bed and the body.
“I have no friends,” the Lamia said, “no, not one.”
And Deacon slipped off the spinning wheel, sank to his knees on the sticky carpet before the detective could catch him.
There’s a mirror on the other side of the room, and the naked thing squatting above Soda’s body turns its shaggy head and stares at Deacon with eyes like scalding amber stars.
“Shut, shut those juggling eyes….”
“Christ, man, what’s happening to you? Snap out of it,” Detective Downs said, sounding very frightened, breaking the spell, the eggshell moment, and suddenly the storm folded itself closed again, collapsing to leave Deacon Silvey alone at the still, blind center of its soulless soul.
“What the sam hell was that?” the cop asked, and his words, his breath, were so loud, so hard, a hammer to pound the first migraine spike deep between Deacon’s eyes. “What’d you see?”
Deacon looked at the footboard, his hand still wrapped tight about the wood, his fingers numb, white knuckled, and “Nothing,” he lied. “I didn’t see anything at all.”
Deacon leaves the coffee shop five or ten minutes after the detective and stands on the sidewalk outside for a while, smoking a cigarette and gazing vacantly at the marquee of the Alabama Theater directly across the street. Grand old movie palace saved from the wrecking ball, and
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
in ruby-red plastic letters,
LON CHANEY OCTOBER
27; he exhales a gray cloud of smoke, and the breeze along Third Avenue picks it apart. Only five blocks home, but what then? Chance away in Atlanta today on business and their big, empty loft waiting there for him, full of nothing at all but television and his aching head, time alone he doesn’t need and the desert in his throat. He reaches into his coat pocket, and there’s the cop’s white calling card, and another card, too, the one with the phone number printed on the back, the number he never goes anywhere without, the number to call if the thirst ever gets the upper hand again.
Today it just might do that,
he thinks and allows himself the hazardous indulgence of imagining endless liquor-store aisles, pint bottles filled with gin and rum and Jack Daniel’s whiskey, alcohol fire to soothe the pain behind his eyes, to burn away the memories of Soda’s mutilated body and the thing he saw looking back at him from the mirror.
That hundred would buy a good, long drunk, wouldn’t it, Deke?
The shaggy thing he hadn’t told Detective Downs about, and
Not yet,
he tells himself again. Maybe later on, maybe, and maybe not. Some questions you never answer, no matter who’s doing the asking, no matter how many badges he has or how much money he’s offering.
“Just start your ass walking,” he says out loud, no one around to hear him so no one to give two shits if he talks to himself. Better than the booze, talking to himself, walking in the cold, and so he turns left, following the sidewalk east to the corner of Twentieth Street. There’s an old man, the old bum standing there in a brown corduroy jacket and filthy jeans, work boots a size or two too big for his feet, and he glares at Deacon with his cloudy blue eyes.
“Gotta dollar fifty?” he asks. “Only need a dollar fifty to get my medicines. Help a feller out, mister.”
The bum smells like soured wine and body odor, and Deacon reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. “Yeah, I got a dollar fifty,” he says. “You better start thinking about finding a warm place to sleep tonight. You know they won’t let you in Jimmy Hale if you’re drunk.”
“I don’t go to that damned old mission no more,” the bum replies. “I go over to the Firehouse. The preacher over there, he ain’t such an ass.”
“Well, they still won’t let you in if they know you’re drunk.”
“I ain’t gonna be drunk tonight. Just gotta get me my medicines, that’s all. Doctor says it’s my goddamn liver. Says I prob’ly ain’t even gonna live till Thanksgivin’. Now, ain’t
that
some fine shit, mister? Somebody sayin’ you ain’t even living till Thanksgivin’?”
“I’m sorry,” Deacon says, and there’s nothing in his wallet but the hundred the detective slipped him, the bribe so he’d get in the car and take the ride across town to Soda’s apartment.
“Maybe he was wrong,” Deacon says, and the old man blinks and looks confused.
“Who?”
“Your doctor. Maybe he was wrong.”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”
Deacon looks at the hundred a moment, remembering when that would have been a small fortune to him, not that long ago, and then he hands it to the bum.
“Don’t you lose this, you hear me? Whatever you don’t spend today, you put it away someplace safe.”
“My god,” the man mumbles, licking his chapped lips and staring at the bill in his hand. “No way, mister. No, no, no. You can’t just give me a hundred-dollar bill.”
“Why not? You need it more than me.”
“
Why not?
Jesus. ’Cause someone’s gonna think I stole it, that’s why not. Or someone’ll hear I got it and bash my brains out to steal it. You can’t just go givin’ a bum who ain’t even gonna live to see Thanksgivin’ a goddamn hundred dollars.”
“I already did. It’s yours now. I don’t want it,” and Deacon glances anxiously southeast, at the tall brick buildings standing between him and home.
“But somebody’ll kill me, mister. I’ll wind up dead or in jail. Maybe both. Ain’t you got nothin’ a little smaller?”
“No,” Deacon says. “I don’t. Just take it,” and he leaves the bum staring dumbfounded at the detective’s blood money; he turns north up Twentieth, walking quickly away from home.
“I only needed a buck fifty!” the bum shouts after him.
Deacon ignores him and keeps walking, past vacant storefronts and alleyways, four banks at one intersection and an Episcopal church cringing in their shadows. Keeps his eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk, the litter and pigeon shit smears; if he doesn’t have to stop, he’ll be at the park soon, the park and the library, and he can spend what’s left of the day reading. Hiding in books and magazines until Chance gets home, and he feels a little better already, the money gone and with it at least some small part of the temptation. The thirst is still there, still burning, but not so easy to quench now, and at least that’s something.
He looks both ways, then crosses Seventh Avenue to Linn Park and the two bronze soldiers standing guard on their tall granite pedestals. The one on the left a remembrance of the first World War, a doughboy frozen forever in his last, desperate dash across no-man’s-land, bronze barbed wire twined about his ankles, his rifle and bayonet clutched in verdigris hands. And the soldier on the right to honor the men who died in earlier, half-forgotten conflicts—the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippines Insurrection—and he stands at attention, his rifle held across his chest, proud soldier who’s never even dreamed the nightmares of trench warfare and machine guns, mustard gas and tanks. And in between these mute and immobile sentries stands a fifty-foot limestone obelisk dedicated to the Confederate dead. Deacon pauses on the steps near the base of the obelisk, last opportunity for a smoke before the library, and he fishes a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. He’s smoking way too much these days, but he supposes that’s like talking to himself, better than the drinking, at least as far as Chance is concerned.
“Hey there, stranger,” someone says, familiar girl voice grown unfamiliar because he hasn’t heard it in so many months now—a whole year, almost—and when he looks up from his lighter and the burning tip of his cigarette, there’s Sadie Jasper walking towards him from the library, Sadie’s quick, determined stride, as if she always has someplace to be and she’s always five minutes late. Her cultivated pallor and hair like a fire engine, black lips and her blue eyes paler than the October sky and ringed by so much mascara and eyeliner they look bruised. Seeing her again, not just Sadie but the old life she represents, Deacon feels something in his throat, his belly, an almost-pain that’s part nostalgia and part dread. Sadie’s carrying a bundle of books in her arms, and she sets them down on the sidewalk at his feet.
“No one ever sees you around anymore,” she says and frowns. “But I guess you’re respectable now, right? Can’t risk being seen hanging out with a bunch of freaks and barflies.”
“Is that how it is?” and Deacon fidgets self-consciously with the simple white-gold band on his left hand. It glints dull in the afternoon sunlight, and he takes a deep drag off his Camel. His headache is getting worse, and he can’t think, isn’t sure what to say next.
“I don’t know which is harder to believe, that Deke Silvey’s sober or that he’s married.”
“There’s a difference?”
“You tell me,” and then she bums a cigarette, and he lights it for her, and they stand smoking beneath the obelisk.
“You hear about Soda?” Sadie asks, and Deacon can feel the goose bumps on his arms and the short hairs prickling at the nape of his neck, the shiver inside that his mother always said meant a possum was walking on his grave.
“Yeah,” he says. “I heard.”
“He was a weasel, but damn, I never pegged him for a suicide.”
“Is that what you heard, that Soda killed himself?”
“Yep,” and Sadie makes a pistol of her right thumb and index finger and sets the barrel against her temple. “Sheryl’s big brother’s a cop, and he told her that Soda blew his head completely off. Said he used a shotgun.”
“Yeah, well, word sure gets around fast,” Deacon mutters and shakes his head, glancing down at the stack of books that Sadie’s deposited on the steps, a copy of the
Mabinogion
on top and Bruno Bettelheim’s
The Uses of Enchantment
underneath that. “You still working on the novel?” he asks her.
“On and off,” she replies, sighs and kicks gently at the stack of books with the pointy toe of her boot. “I think it’s just about decided it doesn’t want to
be
a novel. Maybe I’ll write something else, instead. Maybe it wants to be short stories. But thanks for asking. I’m surprised you even remember that.”
“Of course I remember. I liked that one chapter you let me read last year. I liked your style. You know, your voice.”
“My
voice?
” Sadie laughs and takes a long drag off her cigarette. “My last rejection slip called my style ‘obtuse’ and ‘contrived.’”
“That’s bullshit. I’d call it Faulknerian, à la
The Sound and the Fury
.”
“Oh, you mean the way I liked to run words together to make new adjectives? Well, I don’t do that anymore. It just kept pissing people off.”
“Yeah, well, I still liked that one chapter you let me read.”
“It sucked ass.”
“Hey, what the hell do I know.”
“That’s not what I meant, moron,” and she looks up at him with those cold blue eyes, and for a moment it might still be the world before, the long days and nights of boozing and the careless ease of a life filled with slackers and layabouts, dead-end hipsters, people without ambition or all their ambitions out of reach and they know it so what’s the use trying. The life he walked away from for Chance, the bars and punker shows replaced with AA meetings and his monthly counseling sessions. And it would be so simple to go back, as simple as twisting the cap off a bottle of Popov or Mad Dog. As easy as following Sadie home or to the nearest watering hole.
“I gotta run,” she says. “There’s gonna be a thing for Soda at The Plaza tonight, and I told Sheryl I’d help tend bar. You should drop by. You could bring the little wifey thing. Tell her we won’t bite.”
“You know I can’t do that, Sadie.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I know. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all.” And she stands on tiptoes and hugs him around the neck, hugs him hard, and Sadie Jasper smells like vanilla and roses and the spicy smoke of clove cigarettes. He hugs her back with one arm, a surprised and noncommittal hug. “I miss you,” she says, almost whispering. “We
all
miss you, Deke.”