Dirt Merchant Read online

  My hand throbbed with an intensity I couldn’t describe if it were required by law. I felt along the edge of my stumpy hand with the fingers of my good paw, the latter of which was now covered in bandages. Blood had soaked through, and they probably needed to be changed, but that didn’t bother me.

  It was the phantom feeling of the discarded digits that vexed me. I could feel my fingers, the missing ones. They twitched and spasmed as if crushed by some unseen force. A vise grip, maybe, pressing from either side, crushing my nonexistent knuckles into nonexistent dust.

  And though I knew they wouldn’t be there, I looked down, expecting to see my ring and pinky fingers. I lingered on the sight of their absence for a while, until footsteps approached.

  When the person belonging to those footsteps handed me a glass, I sipped, realized it was water, and replaced the cup on the bedside table.

  “Real. Drink.”

  The next thing to touch my lips was a tumbler half full of cheap whiskey.

  “More like it,” I replied, and drank deep.

  My body warmed, and the flicker of something otherworldly tingled just below the surface of my mind. I wasn’t up for long. I passed in and out of consciousness with unintentional frequency, dreaming of dead people and people I hoped were dead.

  When I came to again, the ache in my shoulder and fingers was so intense that clenching my teeth was the only thing to give me respite. Fever had worked its way into the nubs of my missing fingers, and my shoulder burned like someone had set fire to it.

  At some point, I saw him.

  A man standing over me, an unnatural flicker leaning over his shoulder and staring down at me. The thing was black dark, a silhouette with eyes and teeth. I could only look at it once without being infected with the heebie-jeebies.

  “I treated the wounds best I could,” said the voice. Older, gravelly voice. Guy who had lived lives beyond lives. Old as dirt and twice as gritty, an acquaintance had once told me.

  “Thanks,” I replied, pulling the covers to my chin. I sipped whiskey from a supine position, and the heat in my brain intensified. I felt the closeness of the spirit lingering over the old man’s shoulder.

  “Oh, don’t mind him,” he said. “He waitin’ for me to kick whatever bucket I’m closest to. Maybe cancer. Maybe brain aneurysm. Maybe a car crash. He been riding on my heels for a good spell now.”

  I attempted to sit up, screamed from the white-hot knife in my arm, and collapsed again.

  The pain I felt couldn’t hide my shock. Had this man really alluded to the fact that he could see the unnatural beast leaning over his shoulder? Through my months and months of being held hostage by the dead, I had never felt so alone. Now — now — there was someone else, someone who could relate to my experiences without labeling me as a kook or an alcoholic.

  I said, “I’ve—it’s just that I haven’t met anyone else like me.”

  “That you know of.”

  I thought on that. “That I know of,” I corrected.

  “They around,” he responded, emitting a hacking, coughing laugh. His coppery skin glinted in the pale light of the lamp by my cot. “Most of ’em’s afraid of getting strung up by the neck as…well, not ‘hypocrites.’ What’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Heretics.”

  His nearly-toothless smile broadened. “Ah, that’s it. Old thought cooker isn’t frying the way it used to. Either way, this one’s not harmful, and the rest, I think, can be controlled with a little work.”

  I tried to sit up again, and for a second time I was felled by my own stupidity.

  “Second time, it’s shame on you,” the old man said, laughing. “You go on and stay just like you are. Pain’s going to be your biggest fight for a little while.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Fingers gon’ get infected, you don’t get some medical help,” the old guy said. He smiled, and those yellowed teeth appeared in his maw.

  “My friend?” I asked. “Did you find my friend?”

  The old man’s lips pressed together, and he eyed the ground. Nodded his head slowly. “Found him. He’s in the living room, on the couch. Took me and my girls hours to get him here. He’s a big one.”

  “But he’s—”

  “Alive. He’s got bullet holes gone clean through him.” He waffled his hand in front of him. “He might make it, or he might not. He’s in bad shape.”

  “Cops?” I asked.

  The old man guffawed. “Shee-it. Cops ain’t got jurisdiction out this way, far as I’m concerned. I’ve got a still out back and my own brand of greenery in the shed, if you catch my drift.”

  “I do,” I responded. “But—”

  “I’ll keep you in the know, but you can’t worry yourself. I’ve got both my girls working on patching him up. Cleaning the wounds. Wrapping him up. Won’t know anything until morning.”

  “What happens in the morning?”

  “We handle our own out here in the swamp. My buddy’s a burnout, but he’s practiced medicine before, so he’ll be able to patch up your friend, best as can be expected. He’s just got to make it until then.”

  I’m not a praying man, but I said some words in hopes of changing Deuce’s fate for the positive. If I could get drunk and see the other side, in my mind there was no reason why I couldn’t also have some minor effect on the way my friend’s cards got dealt.

  I opened my eyes eventually, and the old man was gone. The darkness remained. Two glowing eyes in a pit of black shadow. Outline of a figure not entirely human. I gulped the last of the whiskey and experienced a shock of recognition. Familiarity washed over me. I had slipped through one of those rips in reality and landed on the other side.

  The smell of the thing was gruesome. Stagnant water spilling out of a long-dead corpse. It was leaning over me, eyes staring into me, and I couldn’t be for certain, but I thought it was smiling. Were I a betting man, I’d have said it had some designs on when I’d be joining the afterlife.

  “You’re not waiting on me,” I said, staring into those lifeless red orbs.

  In due course, darkness blended with darkness, and the red eyes drifted toward the wall, where they became two lights on a smoke detector.

  Not long after, I was engulfed by the absence of light, and I slept fitfully amidst the demons that plagued my nighttime hours.

  At some point, I found myself standing over Deuce, still and practically lifeless on the couch in the living room. Don’t know how I got there, but I was there nonetheless. My friend’s shirt was soaked through, his breath a strained, hitchy sound in the night air.

  I laid my hands on him, hoping I could somehow drain the pain and sickness from him, but all I got out of trying was bloody hands. Deuce grunted once, a gurgle deep in his throat, and then he slipped back toward unconsciousness.

  Later, when I fell asleep again, I stood alone in a familiar place. The Boogie House had returned to its former dilapidation, but it wasn’t, as I had last seen it, a pile of burning embers.

  Only, that was wrong. I wasn’t alone. I turned to see that dark silhouette, the one with the red eyes, peering down at me. The thing loomed above me with that horrible dark chamber of a face.

  “I’ve got boundary issues,” I said, but the thing didn’t budge. I stared into the cavernous absence, expecting something. Anything. A backlit grin, maybe. Rather, I sensed it pushing me away, to where I had made the discovery which had sparked this whole adventure.

  I swayed drunkenly toward the center of the old haunt. Same old waterlogged boards. Same lack of sound. Like being underwater, with static from an old record player. It was the sound of the in-between world, the place where life wasn’t life and death wasn’t quite death. Maybe it was purgatory. Maybe it was just my insane burden to bear.

  The smell was different, though. It did smell like fire here. As I walked, the crumbling place flickered, and I caught glances of a building overcome by flame. In the wake of those moments, I heard sounds. Spikes of audio am
idst an otherwise blank ocean of static Strained screams, oddly reminiscent of a man who had murdered his lover. It was suffering writ large, and I caught other voices in those moments, too, though I couldn’t quite place them. The owners. Could be. Could be all the people who had died under my watch. Or just people whose deaths were my fault. A kind of gallery of Hell, perpetrated by my conscience.

  From behind me, the silhouette loomed ever larger.

  The darkness in there chilled me to my bone marrow. I refused to give him my face again. Seemed like it drained a little part of me every time I gave in and peered up at it. Maybe that’s why the old man had refused to interact with it.

  The center of the Boogie House was no drier and no brighter than the entrance.

  I expected a meet-up with my old friend, Emmitt Laveau, but what I got instead was…nothing. Darkness. Sagging boards. The hint of an agonized scream buried in the hiss that filled my ears.

  Unnerved, though persevering in my personal covenant ignore IT, I peered around the room.

  I caught sight of something twitching in the distance. At first, I thought it was a furry little creature. A rat or a squirrel or maybe a stray mutt. A glint of light flickered off the shape. It just so happened this was coming from the corner of the Boogie House where a big man with a hand cannon had first tried to blow my head off.

  The walls flickered. Bright orange light, literal walls of flame, illuminated my path.

  It was Deuce, and he looked terrible. A funhouse version of himself. He was bloodied, stretched out to an impossible height. Concentration camp thin. Propped against the wall, shaking his head, uttering a single syllable: no.

  Deuce was dying. He was dying right now, and it wasn’t just in this in-between world. I didn’t know how I knew, but somehow I did, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

  I turned to face the red-eyed demon, and though it spoke no words, a sentence as concrete as one inked in a book appeared in my mind.

  For the benefit of one, another must be sacrificed.

  Deuce gulped, but what he gulped was blood. It poured from his eyes, nose, mouth. He transformed into a sinewy collection of flesh, and for a second I saw what a man looks like in the grave, long after people have forgotten he’s in the ground.

  It was not a pretty sight. I reached for him, and I noticed my missing fingers had reappeared. They glowed with a kind of supernatural light. A healing light, maybe.

  “Stop it,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”

  A life for a life, the red-eyed stranger replied.

  “Take it,” I said, and in that moment, I meant it. Deuce’s only crime was being stupid enough to risk his life for a meager son-of-a-bitch like me.

  The red glow vanished as the eyes dissipated into the thick, blank sheet of night that surrounded me. Even Deuce dematerialized, leaving me standing amidst the wreckage of this old building by myself.

  2

  The next time I realized who and where I was, it was daybreak. The old man was sitting in a chair in the corner, hat in his lap. He looked more haggard than the previous night. It wasn’t just the years hanging off his bones. He was hurting. He sat gingerly on the chair next to the bed, winced once, and groaned long and hard before talking to me.

  I was sober — or at least sober-ish — and the Red-Eyed Stranger was no longer clinging to the old man’s shoulder. Yet I felt his presence, as close and stomach-churning as morning breath.

  “Your friend is patched up,” he said. His voice was shaking, and he didn’t attempt eye contact.

  He nodded toward the table, and I saw the whiskey glass topped off with clear liquid.

  “Water?” I said.

  “Oh, that’s not water,” he said. “Made it m’self.”

  I gulped and gulped again and ended up spraying half the second across my lap. It tasted like liquid fire and burned twice as bad.

  “Probably’d do more good poured on your wounds than in your mouth, but it’ll pass, I reckon. Put you out. Help you sleep. Maybe keep you…mollified.”

  “Where is my dog?” I asked.

  “Dog? You mean the fella laid out on my couch?”

  “No, I mean a dog. Like a fucking dog. A mutt. He was — he was with me.”

  “Oh,” he replied. “Huh. No dog. Might’ve heard some howling off in the distance. Wasn’t a hound, was it?”

  “No, just a mutt.”

  “Well, he wasn’t with you, I’m afraid.”

  “Sounds right,” I said. “He’s got a tendency to wander off when there’s a chance I’ll be taken to safety.”

  “Maybe he’ll turn up before you’re all patched up and ready to go.”

  “However long that’ll be,” I said, adding, “Not that I plan on—”

  “Don’t even mention it,” he said. “Really. If there’s a chance you get on your feet before the end of the week, I’ll kick you out the door m’self.”

  I let that thought linger for a while. The old man seemed content with a lack of talking.

  “How is D— my friend?”

  “Alive. Not drastically better, but breathing. Truth be told, he’d probably be better off dead than he is now. Them bullets did a number on him. My friend, the doctor, thinks he needs real attention. Couple surgeries. My girls, too. He’s on the steep decline.”

  I had a decision to make.

  “Give it time,” I said, finally. “If he’s not working up toward getting better this afternoon—”

  “Or if he’s not dead by then,” replied the old man.

  “Yeah, that too. If he’s on a steep hill, headed toward the bottom, I’ll take him to the hospital myself.”

  “Probably wouldn’t hurt to get yourself checked out, while you’re at it. You were out when my friend showed, and he took a cursory look at your hand. Said you were in a hell of a lot better shape than your buddy but that’s not saying much.”

  I winced at some pain in my hand. “Yeah, that checks out.”

  “How is the paw doing?”

  “Hurts. Feels like my fingers are still dangling from the knuckles. When the pain spikes, I try to reach for them, but of course they’re not there.”

  “I got the same thing,” the old man replied, “except mine’s my heart, and it aches for a woman named Amaleen.”

  I might have laughed, if it didn’t hurt so much.

  I squeezed my left hand into a fist, which felt awkward, considering that forty percent was no longer there.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, trying to take my mind off my hand for a while.

  “What’s yours?” he responded pointedly.

  “Rolson,” I said.

  “You the fella they’re looking for? The one from the williwaw in Savannah?”

  I eyed him. Checked his expression. Then answered.

  “I reckon so,” I said, and paused. I thought for a moment, then continued, “Though I’m not wholly to blame for what happened there.”

  “Nobody’s ever totally to blame for anything. Even David had Bathsheba to tempt him.”

  “Well,” I said, grasping for a response. “I think maybe I had more to do with it than not, but there was a hellish demon of a man on my tail.”

  “Oh.”

  “You never told me your name.”

  “Most people know me call me Butch, but my given, Christian name is Buford. Don’t care for m’last name and don’t much need it, since all my business is conducted in cash and the IRS don’t have to know I live out here in the swamp.”

  “Buford,” I said. “Buford’s a good name.”

  The old man’s eyebrows kicked up to his forehead. “I reckon so,” he said. “It was my great-great grandad’s name. Fucker got his fool head blown off in the war on slavery. Battle of Olustee, which the Confederacy managed to snatch from the Union. Sumbitch Seymour landed in Jacksonville, trying to upset the South, and my great or great-great grandfather died by the hand of the 54th Massachusetts. You know what made them special?”

  I pondered it. “That was the Af
rican-American regiment, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure was. Them and the U.S. Colored Troops, which I’d hope you’d be able to pick out was full of black folks. Second bloodiest battle for the Union.”

  “Huh,” I said. “And you bring that up, because…”

  Old Man Buford swiped his hands at the air. “Ah, hell, no reason in particular. Suppose I mull over the dead plenty, and this one man stands above all the others in my family. Rest of my family tree’s comprised of coon-huntin’ nincompoops, m’self included. Swamp people. But people who can tell which way the wind’s blowin’.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He smiled. “In your efforts to dodge the police, you got blown off-course, like what’s-his-face. The fella from the books.”

  “Ulysses.”

  “That’s the one. Jacksonville’s ‘bout fifty miles west of where we sit right now, and I could gather that’s your destination from you and your friend’s fever dreams. He got a brother?”

  “He does,” I said. “Or did.”

  “Uh-huh. That why you fucked Savannah all to Hell?”

  “That’s what we’re headed to Jacksonville for.”

  Buford rolled his eyes. “God bless that town, then. I don't know what in the world you plan on doing, but I can imagine it’s going to get mighty violent.”

  “S’pose it will,” I said. “Deuce’s brother…well, we’ve got some business to attend to. Pretty serious business, and that’s why I figure Deuce isn’t going anywhere until it’s done. He’s not done with this world quite yet.”

  “Might better tell him that, because he’s clinging to life with the tips of his fingernails.”

  “He’ll get better,” I said.

  A dark shadow spread across the old man’s face. His expression turned grim. “My dreams ain’t been so good lately,” he said. “Been keeping me up. You have that?”

  “I do,” I said. “I end up going places I didn’t intend, and I get caught up in problems I had no business attending to. You can sympathize, I think.”

  “I can,” he replied.

  “That how you came to find us?”