"You're a dirty ole dog, Floyd." She punched his arm, and it was the opening Floyd was looking for. Any woman who initiated physical contact was a piece of fair game. He shoved his stool closer, slung his arm around her shoulder and with two fingers fiddled a bit with a partly exposed bra strap. If Melvin had been connected to his own mouth it would have been frothing.
Oh boy! If you're going to shtup her, I'll pop in through Passive Passenger all night until I catch the moment you do it!
"We got trouble, Floyd."
Lynch removed his arm and looked around. The pool game had stopped, and one of its players was leaning on his stick, staring. He was a tall, haggard man in red untucked flannel. His long hair was in a ponytail, and his red, deep-lined face looked like weather-hardened leather. Floyd reached back to pour another drink.
"Is that your boyfriend or your brother?"
"It's my husband." Floyd did not return her grin.
"Now why would you be flirtating me with your husband standing right there?"
"I'm mad at him," she said.
"Why?"
"He's losing the game."
The skinny dude obviously disliked being talked about as if he was not in the same room.
"You'd best move on, fat boy," he said. "Ain't your woman to be groping like that." Floyd turned to face him and put his hands on his knees.
"Now looky here, boy. I'm gonna take your wife and I'm gonna do her. I'm gonna do her right here on this bar. You get to watch." For emphasis, he grabbed at her bra again. This time, he yanked the strap over her shoulder and she slapped at him, the joke now dulled in her eyes.
The song on the jukebox faded to its conclusion. The machine ejected the record, and its motorized shift was a lone cry in a room gone dead quiet. A waitress stood by the entrance to the front seating area with three plates balanced up her arm. A pair of pool players wearing wide-rimmed Stetsons set down their sticks and moved their drinks. One fumbled to snuff out a smoke. A couple at a four-top scrambled for their coats, and the bartender stood by the cash register, phone in hand, ready to dial 911.
The jukebox flipped the next record to the turntable. An amplified scratch turned into the first notes of "The Gambler." The man with the ponytail bared his teeth and snapped his pool cue in two across his knee. Melvin tried to read Floyd's next move, but it was impossible. His mind had gone a cool, predatory blank.
Ponytail spat on the floor and tossed the light end of his pool stick into an ash can that doubled as a chaw bucket. Heavy end up, he two-fisted his weapon and came on. Floyd let him approach, almost counting the steps. Their eyes remained deadlocked. At the last possible moment, Floyd sprang up and danced to the side, dragging his bar stool with him. He swung it back across in an arc, and dead air hissed through the oak legs.
Wood met skull. Ponytail moaned as the pool cue flew behind the bar along with three of his teeth and a chaser of bloody spittle. He hit the floor, and Floyd dropped the busted stool next to him.
Another broken bat homer.
Lynch reached back for his drink, turned, and raised the glass to propose a toast.
It never came out. Someone punched Floyd in the back of the neck (and fucking hard too) before it could be vocalized.
"What the hell," Floyd tried to say. Instead, a hideous gargle escaped. He tried to swallow, but his throat was blocked by something. There was a thick spurting of blood driving up against the roof of his mouth. Melvin shot out of Floyd's body, and hovered unseen by a ceiling fan.
Wait! I haven't been here five minutes. The exit is too early!
He calculated it so to be sure.
Walked in, ordered a drink and chugged it, one minute at most. The flashback was instantaneous, then we talked to Lay-May and fiddled the bra strap, another minute. We smart-mouthed the husband and bashed him, another sixty seconds maybe, if that. That makes three minutes, so where are my other two?
Melvin realized that he was not alone. He was still connected to Floyd Lynch, who for the life of him could not figure out why he was floating up in the air. The trucker looked down then, and Melvin silently shared his disbelief. The body of Floyd Lynch lay in a puddle of his own blood with Lay-May's switchblade stuck out the back of his throat.
"Get up!" Lynch soundlessly shouted down at himself. "I ain't ready to die, please!"
None of the patrons had moved. Floyd and the ponytail man were huddled in a rag-tag pile of arms, clothes, and hair, a strange embrace, but Melvin did not enjoy this dark humor.
Is time ticked off the same in the hereafter? What if one second of human time equals a thousand years of spiritual time? I had two minutes left.
A deep brilliance of color with a hue indescribable by the blunt tool of human vocabulary closed in from the corners of Floyd's perception, a flood from beneath, behind, and within. It quickly became everything, save one point of dazzling light in its center.
"Looks like a headlight on Route 9," Floyd thought. "What's next, drag racing?"
Floyd shot toward the bright sphere.
"So you do actually shoot toward a bright light," Melvin thought.
It was some kind of doorway. Floyd could not see it, yet he perceived it, like eyesight, but fuller. Like touch, yet more intimate, as if all the senses were combined in a new kind of vision. It was a circular cascade of fragrance, of warmth and absolute beauty. It was the thunder of a thousand voices in harmony. It was a shimmering storm of waterfall colors that formed rivers and rainbows.
Floyd burst into the sphere and joined its powerful warmth. It was a sweet flotation, the loving embrace of the beginning and end of all things. He had felt it before, once in his mother's womb. He had entered his world kicking and howling. Now was his exit of silence and wonder. He passed through the sphere.
Floyd was at the far end of a long corridor, and he had been given back his sight. It was not a gift. Erected through a thick fog of bluish mist were two white pedestals, and atop each sat an entity, not alive in the earthly sense of the word, but present in forms Floyd understood on a fundamental level. The beings began to take form as wavering outlines, the inverse of images in the visual sense, existing on the periphery of what Melvin would consider "perception," and filling in the grounded center of focus with suggestion. For a moment, Melvin tried to describe this phenomenon in scientific terms, but the best he could come up with was, "It is what it is, and Floyd manufactures his version of what it is to fill in the stuff between the lines for the purpose of base recognition." It was a crude rendition of the experience, but here the human was a crude slave in the palace of his betters.
The entity on the left pedestal spun itself into a tornado of red flame that turned and twisted at the edge of Floyd's version of a nightmare. It tossed sparks, spit lightning, and slowly opened its eyes, terrible orbs that were slanted with rage. They were bottomless caverns of agony that held reflections of torment, ageless and unforgiving. Floyd looked away and was made to look back.
The flames hardened into a body that formed around the slanted eyes. It was a huge jackal with fangs as long as the pedestal was high. Its tail was a whip with razor quills and its tongue was a serpent.
Floyd was suddenly allowed to break the glance and he silently thanked it as if it was God.
"No, not God," Melvin thought. "That thing cannot be the Almighty because it does not know that I am here."
Floyd was allowed to look at the pedestal on the right. It was bliss. It was a warm, white cloud that seemed to ebb and flow with the very fabric of tranquility. It opened a pair of eyes that sang to Floyd in a chorus of voices that defined its outline as the shape of a dove. It reached out its huge wings to Floyd in a glorious gesture of hope.
Floyd was not comforted. The dove and the jackal merged colors and combined for a moment in a tone that by the power of its own design was capable of cracking Floyd's very being.
"
Bladnestannabellshannah
," they said, in a reference to what must have been Floyd's name before a human mother reconfigured the title into that generic, shared form that began the long, inherited process of reshaping the individual into the stagnant patterns of "culture." Man's decorated prison, his savior, and his tragic flaw.
"
You are in the corridor of deeds
," they said.
Then began the construction. Every single thing Floyd had done in his twenty-seven years of service on the land surrounded by the seas, one at a time and with deafening speed, shot toward the pedestals. It was not difficult to figure out the purpose of the activity. What was viewed as "good" went to the dove, and the "evil" actions were consumed by the jackal. The deeds were filling in the wavering lines, and Melvin had pretty much come to the conclusion that the dove and the jackal were finally to fight for Floyd's soul.
Some of the deeds were recognizable, and some Floyd had no memory of. Most of his early childhood actions filled in portions of the dove, yet the insignificance of the given action was measured proportionally in reference to the amount of fortification it provided to its host. At six months, Floyd was in the dirty powder blue car seat stuck in the dark corner of the living room inside Mama's mobile home on Burnt Lick Road. He usually behaved himself in the car seat, yet now he cried out in a passion of hunger, small arms jerking and flailing at the cold, silent darkness. At three and a half, he hid in the broom closet underneath a low shelf that supported a few weathered pairs of work boots, a large Sears security flashlight, and a red toolbox with its top tray littered with screwdrivers, hammers, dented steel tape measurers, and an array of homeless fasteners. He hid in the dark closet because his uncle Jimbo was watching him today, and Uncle Jimbo thought it was funny to chase little Floyd around the yard with a steel-tined rake. At five, Floyd sat on a sloping, uneven stone wall and tossed pebbles into the creek that ran below him. His head itched and he had no socks, because Mama had to work a double at the mill, and she didn't have the time to throw in a wash. At seven, Floyd got a game-winning inside-the-park homerun in little league that was called back to a single because it nicked the pitching machine. At eight, he read aloud to his class a poem about the shapes clouds make, and at nine he crashed his bike into a willow tree because Freddie Smithers dared him to ride blindfolded.
The dove grew and fattened with each instance. Still, the balance of Floyd's years seemed to hold more weight, and most of those actions went to the other pedestal.
When Floyd was twelve, he stole a fishing rod out of the back room in Gorton's general store, and at fifteen, he robbed the same place blind as its cashier, hitting "No sale," writing up dummy receipts on a spare pad he kept under the drawer, and pocketing the cash after the customer exited the premises. At sixteen, he and Bubba Nichols regularly bullied Harvey Wallson, finally making him lick toilet water in the handicapped stall in the second-floor bathroom, and at seventeen, he hit Ma the first time. The contributions to the jackal seemed endless. The drinking, the fighting, the reckless driving, the cursing, the side-comments to co-workers, the endless stares at women even in church, all culminating with the argument he had with his common-law wife Jessie last year, right before she threw him out for good.
Two final images danced before the dove and the jackal, then shot forth. Though the circumstances leading up to Floyd's murder belonged to the jackal, the act of the murder itself greatly enhanced the intensity of the dove. Still, the conclusion of Floyd's all-night shouter with Jessie was devastating. It was 3:09 in the morning, and Floyd had her by the hair. He had her bent over the kitchen sink with her nose scraping into the dried remains of some baked beans on the plate on top of the pile. He was leaning over her, and yelling into her face, and grabbing a spoon, and threatening to dig her eye out with it.
The jackal took this last image in one swallow and then devoured the fragile white head of the dove. The spiritual victim beat its wings and the jackal snapped the white body from side to side. It smashed its prey against the right pedestal, leaving dark blue spatters of blood and feathers. The sound was deafening.
The jackal dropped the lifeless body of the dove and gnashed at the hot blue mist that poured from its wounds. The coarse hairs of this beast stood straight and lathered, like wet knives. It turned to Floyd with blood dripping off its teeth.
"Come with me, Bladnestannabellshannah. For now, you are mine. Your deeds have given me the right to escort you to the hall of thoughts. It is the second of many . . ."
Melvin began to exit Floyd's consciousness. The retreat was achingly slow. The jackal tensed on its haunches and looked. Its ears whipped back close to the head. It bared its teeth, showing spotted gums.
"It sees me!" Melvin thought. "Oh hurry, please!"
The jackal howled. It snapped at the air and clawed at its own nose. Melvin was almost to the archway. The jackal screamed and elongated its face. The jaws stretched and chased Melvin the length of the hallway by themselves. Melvin felt its scalding breath. Then it was gone. The whole corridor was gone.
Melvin was back in his bedroom, floating behind the version of himself that was about to press the button to initially activate Passive Passenger. The clock ticked right up to 9:10 A.M., but just before the rejoining he heard something. A voice, faint like an echo on damp cobblestone.
I'll be waiting for you . . . Melvin.
The joining was complete. Melvin shrieked, shoved his chair out of the way, and crawled under his desk. He curled to a ball and jammed his knuckles into his mouth. His eyes stayed wide open.
He did not come out for a long, long time.
1:40 P.M.