Dirt Merchant Page 12

  I didn’t see anything, so I decided to head back. In the distance, I saw headlights and reached for my gun. Wasn’t there. In its place was the phone I thought I’d left inside.

  There were a few new numbers on the call log. Apparently, I had taken up calling people while in a blackout. I thought I recognized one of the numbers, but with the headache, there was no way of knowing.

  The headlights in the car blinked off as I got thirty or forty yards away, and a couple, staggering noticeably, converged on the passenger side for an improvised makeout session.

  I sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes, but only because the taste of booze seemed overly toxic at the moment. The gun had disappeared. Wasn’t in the room when I searched for my smokes, but I desperately hoped it was somewhere in the bedroom.

  Funny thing, though. The phone seemed most important right now, as though it were my main source of protection. It intrigued me, how it lit up even though I had definitely powered it down.

  I swiped across the screen to answer, stubbed out my cig, and said, “Hello?”

  “Hello?” said the voice on the other line.

  I sat up, realized it wasn’t Limba Fitz. The voice wasn’t right.

  But…who was it?

  “Hello?” I repeated.

  “Who is this?” A man’s voice. Middle-aged, maybe. Didn’t recognize it, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “I think you have the wrong number,” I said.

  Before I could hang up, I heard my name at the other end. “Rolson, is that you?”

  Tentatively — and probably stupidly — I said, “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “You’re going to have to help me out,” I said. “I’ve been…drinking.”

  Then I did recognize it. It was the voice of not Limba Fitz or Jeffrey Brickmeyer or Bellerose, but Uncle K Laveau, the elderly hoodoo man who had drowned Leland Brickmeyer in his unfinished pool and then disappeared into thin air, leaving me as a suspicious party in the politician’s death.

  “K?” I asked. He sounded…younger, somehow.

  “Heh, you done got that head of yours caught in a vice grip,” he said.

  “I thought you were gone,” I said. “Off the map. Hiding out in some shop in the Big Easy. Convincing other white boys they were crazy.”

  He laughed dryly. The sound of sandpaper on wood. “It don’t take much to make white boys think they out of they minds. Most of them, they got a screw loose already. Sho’ do.”

  “Did you call just to tell me that?”

  “No, no,” he said, and his voice dropped into a much lower register, like somebody tuning a five string bass. “I done bid this world farewell, and I gots to say — the bodies are ripe for the picking.”

  That…wasn’t Uncle K.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, trying to think of something, anything, else to say to the man.

  “You don’t see the dead no more, do you? Got a little bit of the disconnect from our undead brothers and sisters?”

  “Who is this?”

  Another laugh.

  I pressed the end button on the phone, but when I tried to stand up, I realized that I was still sitting and the phone was still pressed to my ear, the low hum of the signal slipping across my brain, going from ear to ear.

  “You are the spawn of Babylon’s one true whore, and your life is a testament to just how fucked this world really is. Turn around, and walk right into the mouth of Hell.”

  “This is not really happening.”

  “So,” the voice said, and I felt it was so close it was vibrating inside my jaw, “you’re telling me you’re not sleeping off a mean drunk in the front yard?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but something reached in and tickled the back of my throat. Once my eyes popped wide, I realized it was a blade of grass. I was lying face-down in the muck of the Gaines’ front yard, grass reaching up into my mouth.

  The phone had disappeared, replaced by the gun. I was holding the gun to my ear. I emptied it of ammunition and tossed it all on the ground.

  That did not stop the spirit of Limba Fitz, whose laugh continued to echo in my ears. The artifice of the phone had melted away, and I was left with the voices. All the voices.

  “Shame you couldn’t have hung onto that gun,” the voice said. “Sure could have used some entertainment. And that wall, that wall could use a splash of wine, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  I tried whispering, but the sound of the voice was amplified, as if by some otherworldly force, so I screamed instead.

  As the voice continued to taunt me, to lure me into suicide by sounding like the old Hoodoo Man, I strove to make it back inside. I was convinced once I was in there I’d be all right.

  “Inside the house,” the voice said. “Inside the house is the worst of it.”

  “Why is that?”

  The voice ignored me. “Might as well replace the empty clip and chamber a round.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Your mother fucked that darkie because she wanted out of the family. She’d rather risk hell than stick it out with the inbreds from Mayberry.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “Or what? You’ll put a bullet through my brain?”

  The laugh — the cackle — could have curled steel. A rusty power drill on the highest setting. The feeling was strange. It was as though my head wasn’t mine anymore.

  I couldn’t stand it; this was the Red-Eyed Stranger at work. He — IT — was an old spirit, long wallowing in the skin of an elderly, incestuous man for the last few decades.

  Now it had new blood, and that blood belonged to my best friend.

  “You’re not wrong,” the spirit said, answering my thoughts as if we were having a conversation. “I was there when Old Tom fucked your mother, and I made sure to combine seed and egg, because that was just the most delicious outcome I could divine.”

  I got up and staggered toward the house. The bedroom, I thought, would save me from whatever horrors I was experiencing outside.

  “I put the bottle in your old man’s hand. He wanted to quit. He wanted to save his marriage, and he wanted to give the bottle up and live happily ever after with the two of you, but I made sure that didn’t happen.”

  “Fuck you,” I muttered. My head was pulsing with with that same ear-splitting drill sound, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t go away.

  “That bother you? You thinking about those nights under the Christmas tree you missed? Singing carols and sipping egg nog with the folks? You think maybe there could have been a few more of you inbred, toothless fucks walking this earth? If only, if only. That’s what your whole life has been, right? If only the world were a different place, and your father weren’t a hooded demon and your mother a two dollar whore? Am I right? Am I getting close?”

  “I’m not suicidal,” I said.

  “Says the man with the gun to his head.”

  I realized I wasn’t standing on the porch, staring into darkness as I had thought. I was upright in bed, holding a 9mm Beretta to my temple.

  “Isn’t that just a big how-do-you-do?” the voice said.

  I tried to lower the gun, but my hand wouldn’t listen. The force holding it in place was stronger than my powers had ever been, and I thought maybe this was it. The end. Kaputz.

  I used every mental trick I had learned. I didn’t know many, but focusing and trying to sway the objects and people around me had worked well enough.

  In the middle of my wishes, though, which had become bleak with thoughts of my own end, I found a dim light emanating from somewhere. I saw me and Deuce standing side-by-side in the dirt parking lot of a beer-soaked locals bar off in the woods of Nowhere, GA. I saw us leaning against Beau Stevenson’s pickup and talking girls and cars and future plans, trying on our adult personas as we navigated that strange environment.

  I thought about us wandering into the bar pr
oper, the air smelling thickly of whiskey and cigarettes, and the honky-tonkers swaying to oldies belted out by remaining members of the Swinging Medallions.

  It was impossible not to let my mind wander, to remember those teenage years when I thought time would stretch out forever in front of us, that we had the rest of our lives to be young, that getting old meant nothing, if it happened at all. I thought about how Deuce talked to girls without self-consciousness, and how I abandoned him halfway through the night when I found a girl who was five or six years my senior to take me back to her car for what turned out to be nothing at all. She’d passed out halfway there, and so I’d locked her in her car with the keys on the console and headed back to find my friend when—

  The hold over me weakened. It was just a moment, but it was long enough for me to react.

  I released the clip as gently as I could and placed them on the floor beside the bed. Once I stopped hyperventilating, I took the gun out to the car. I stowed it under the front seat and walked on shaking legs back to the bedroom.

  But I didn’t sleep.

  When the phone rang later that morning — it was actually powered up this time — I was hesitant to answer. Eventually, I slid my thumb across the screen to receive the call. I had to see what the bottom felt like.

  After I’d gathered my bearings, I said, “Yes?”

  “Rolson? That you? Doesn’t sound like you.”

  It took me consciously opening my mouth and forcing the words out for me to speak.

  “Allison?” I asked, starting to feel the desperation in my voice. “Allison, you okay?”

  “Yeah, but I think me asking you that is more important right now. What’s wrong with your voice? Sounds like you been gargling with glass shards.”

  “I’m surprised to hear from you.”

  “I am now aware of what a version of you twenty years into the future would sound like on the phone. How are you?”

  I looked down at the bum hand. “Little banged up, maybe, but I think I’ll live.”

  She sighed. “Don’t be so sure of that. The word around Savannah is getting pretty hot surrounding you.”

  “If you’re able to track me down on a phone number I didn’t give you, then I have to say it’s probably not going to be that difficult for the men who bought and paid for Bellerose’s services to find me.”

  “Ah-ah. Don’t be so sure about that, either. I got this number from one Deuce Gaines. Nothing but pure, old-fashioned detective work.”

  “And how’d you get his number?”

  “Magic, I guess,” she said. “You want to give me the third degree this whole time, or do you want to update me on how your life is going? I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “The heat is a little hot, but I think we’re holed up in a nice place down here in — you’re not on an official line, are you? Like, your cell phone?”

  “I decided to call you from the main branch of the police station, so what do you think about that, Rolson McKane?”

  “Ha ha. Forgive me.”

  “I’ve picked up your habit of buying drug dealer phones. I grew up in a chaotic house, so your particular brand of borderline disorder does it for me.”

  “And the investigation? Are all of the families—”

  “There’s a lot of grief, Rolson. People are in shock. It’s one of the worst events in the city’s history, and it happened to coincide almost to the day with Halloween, so you can only imagine with that holy rollers are saying. God’s divine judgment on the heathern blah blah blah and all of that.”

  I said, “I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did.”

  “I don’t think anybody could have predicted it if they each and every one had a crystal ball jammed up their asses. You can’t predict the actions of psychopaths.”

  “Part of me is worried who you’re referring to there.”

  “So paranoid. Honey, I know you’re innocent.”

  “Looks suspicious when a man walks into a place and screams another man’s name before taking his assault rifle to the place,” I said.

  “For the time being, for God’s sake, keep a low profile.”

  “I’m keeping up that end of the bargain,” I said. Then, without much forethought, I said, “I miss you.”

  “Aw, I miss you, too,” but thankfully she left it at that. She must have heard the weird lilt in my voice. She’d been the first woman I’d been interested in since my ex-wife’s death, and so the queerness I carried around with me had to be as visible as sleeves on an orangutan.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  She sucked her teeth. “Now, don’t go and ruin a genuine moment by backpedaling. I’m going to just fly right over that last statement of yours.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Plan?”

  “Yes, weirdo. How are you going to move forward? Do you plan on getting in contact with the police?”

  “Christ, no. Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Good boy,” she said. “Just making sure you didn’t think you could just charm your way out of multiple homicides.”

  “Anything else to report? I asked.

  “I’m coming down there,” she said.

  “Don’t,” I said, trying to come up with an argument. The best I could do was repeat the last word. “Don’t.”

  “I’ve got a couple days off coming up, and once things die down up here, it’ll be easy for me to leave the city. Right now it’s a madhouse.”

  “I hope you know I—”

  “Don’t start,” she said. “Right now, I don’t believe you had anything to do with them poor drunks getting killed. But the more you talk, the more guilty you seem, and you don’t have a good poker face.”

  “Is that what drew you to me in the first place?”

  “No, I think it was like you were a pit bull went and mauled a whole family. I’m the sad sack thinks I can rehabilitate you.”

  “Having second thoughts?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you’re getting into down in Jacksonville. I never thought I would say it, but I’m not liking this space between us.”

  “Because you miss me?”

  “You’ll get caught up in a ten or twenty year sentence without me there to protect you.”

  “Have you always dated broken people?”

  “I think of you as a Mama’s Boy with a penchant for sticking his head up his own ass.”

  “Not entirely untrue.”

  “Cops been trailing you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Comforting.”

  “No one’s knocked on my door yet. I’d consider that a personal victory.”

  “I don’t think that’ll last.”

  “Me, either. You been watching the coverage?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Richie’s been all over the TV. He’s got a good narrative, even if he was a shit bird most of the time. Media’s framing it as a ‘man lost in the system.’ But yeah. They seem to be slowly connecting the dots. You won’t be able to stay invisible for long.”

  “I’d say my face is probably pretty well known.”

  “River Street’s a perpetual circus, and not just because of the tourists, anymore. GBI’s involved. Federal boys are getting in on it too. I’m telling you, Rolson: They’re going to tie your ass in a sling before they’re done.“

  “I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”

  “And, what, you think you can fix it?”

  “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Get as far away from here as human possible. That is your only option. That, or disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Completely.”

  “Mountains of North Carolina maybe?”

  “Kind of nearby, but yeah. Maybe. They’ll keep looking for you.”

  “Nothing is forever.”

  “You should write
birthday cards.”

  “I should get off this phone, before they track me down. You’re not wearing a wire or anything, are you?”

  “At least your sense of humor is improving.”

  “Gallows humor.”

  “You sound sad,” she said. “Get Willie and take him for a walk.”

  “I think the mask might tip off the neighbors.”

  “Bye, there, Carrot Top. Try to keep yourself occupied with something other than booze. I can smell you from Savannah.”

  4

  Two nights before graduation. Beers resting on the hood of an old pickup truck, parked down by a pond in the midst of an unused cotton field. The owners have given the lot back to its former glory, and the weeds, trees, and grass have settled unevenly over the land, giving it a slightly tropical look. April rains have rendered this May a sweltering mess, all humidity and mosquitoes. The vegetation appears to be constantly sweating, and the people fare no better.

  The two young men lounging on the truck’s hood are lithe, passively happy, resting cans of cheap brew between their legs and laughing carelessly at the night sky. The echo of their conversations about girls and grades are spiraling out into complete silliness.

  There is, at some point, a faint but distinct pause. The conversation turns slightly serious.

  “And Aunt Birdie? How’s she going to get along without you?”

  The other kid sips his beer, says, “I don’t know. Doctors say she’s a tough lady, that if they caught it soon enough, she’d be able to get away with a heavy dose of chemo. If not…”

  Both young men allow the dark possibility inherent in that last if to linger, even as they snapped their heads to notice a bass leaping out of and then sloshing back into the water.

  “She’ll be all right, man,” Deuce says. “She’s taken care of you since you was, what, seven years old?”

  “Six,” young Rolson says. “She picked me up in the hours after my dad was, you know, arrested, and it’s been the two of us ever since. Now, I only hope I can pay her back.”

  “Sounds ominous,” Darron says.