Dirt Merchant Read online

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Something pained him, and he waited for that to settle. “I have an ear for these things,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve seen my…companion.”

  I wasn’t going to deny it. “I have.”

  “Harbinger of death, that one is,” he said. “Don’t remember when I came to realize I had a—,” he paused. “A gift,” he continued hesitantly, “but when I did, I got the hell out of Jacksonville. Reckon it’s kept me busy all these years, trying to rip something wispy as death off my shoulder.”

  “I don’t see it now,” I said.

  He only nodded. There was something working around in his mind. I could see it by the way he chewed on his lip. “You understand it any better’n I do?”

  “Only if you don’t understand it at all.”

  “I only know it come on like a switch some years back, and I ain’t been able to shake it ever since.”

  I sighed. “Mine comes and goes with drinking. I went a few months on the wagon, and everything sort of started to fade into the background.”

  “Shit, you tell me you want it around? If I figured out my trigger, you can bet dollars to doughnuts I’d be sober as a judge on sentencing day.”

  I said, “I hit a rough patch—”

  “I’d say so.”

  “And it made sense for me to dive back into the drink. I’m still at that point, I reckon. Speaking of…”

  “Oh, sure. Sure.” Buford plucked a bottle from beneath the bed and filled my glass to the brim. “Only man besides me to go in for a return trip on this stuff.”

  “It tastes like gasoline.”

  “Probably isn’t too far from it, I figure. It’ll get your motor runnin’. Do you see…anything…now?”

  I closed my eyes, tried to visualize somebody on the other side of the dividing line. I got nothing, and shook my head to confirm it.

  The old man cackled. “Ha-ha! There you go. I got some kind of mojo working in my favor, I guess. Maybe I just scared all them haints off my property.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, sipping at the white-hot rocket fuel.

  “You hear anything, you let me know,” he said. “To be honest, I’m afraid of what might happen if this old place gets surrounded. We ain’t more than a few miles from where my great-great grandad met his end. Plenty of them men probably felt as though they got a raw deal. Luckily, their spirits haven’t found their way to me yet.”

  “And you don’t know how you kept them away?”

  He cocked one thumb over his shoulder. “Has to do with Old Red Eyes, I’m sure. With him stomping around on the property, ain’t no way sumbitchin’ haints want to fool with me.”

  “Huh,” I said. “And you never, like, did experiments to figure out how you maintained a perimeter around your house? I mean, the, er, undead followed me everywhere.”

  Buford leaned back, rubbed one hand through his beard. It made the sound of steel wool crinkling together. “Dare say I did,” he said. “Spent years with different endeavors. Used to try and trick that dark-faced sumbitch into getting off my back for the longest time, but nothing I ever did worked.”

  “What all did you do?”

  This sent him into a laughing fit. “Goddamndest things,” he said. “Burned sage and sorta waved it around in my room. That only fixed the smell of my dirty socks for a while. You should’ve seen me, walking around with that stuff, smearing the doorways and whatnot. I swear: the things people do to cure what ails them.”

  “What else?”

  If I could decipher what worked best, I could divine my own cure.

  “I went and picked the brain of an old medium lives down the road a ways. Florida’s nothing if not full of the bizarre. She told me to get myself some obsidian. ‘Tell me what in the hell it is, and I’m bound and determined to,’ I told her. She put me in touch with an old root worker, who gave me some black rocks. Paid more’n I care to say for them. Went and lined them up the way I was told to — put them all over the house and even wore one around my neck — and the only thing it did was make me look a little light in my loafers, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” I said. I was starting to feel a bit weak.

  “That ain’t all,” he said. “I slept upside down in my bed. I played a satanic record backwards. I covered all the doorways in salt. Prayed on my knees for days on end, to a God I only scarcely believed in. Took in a preacher friend I trusted and had him douse the whole damn house in holy water.”

  “Seems like it worked,” I said. “I mean, you’re pretty much alone out here.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe this albatross around my neck scared them away. Like a pack leader snarling and gnashing its teeth at all the things around.”

  “You ever consider moving away?”

  “Going to Savannah change anything for you?”

  I shook my head.

  He nodded. “Figures,” he said. “I think wherever there’s dead folks, there’s a chance they’ll be able to sit down and chat with me.”

  “You ever see any of them anymore?”

  “Oh, hell yes,” he replied. “From a distance, you see. I can hear them doing their best impression of an old school spook. Making noise and reaching out for me. Telling me things I don’t want to hear. Taunting me. Thinking maybe I’d be compelled to help them out of fear for my own life, or my daughters’. I held fast, due to my constant companion back there.”

  He thumbed the air over his shoulder, and I followed his eye, expecting to see the shadowy thing somewhere off in the distance, but all I saw was a row of framed pictures nailed to the wall. Black and whites of dilapidated buildings, with people standing in front of them.

  Two sets of eyes appeared in the doorway. They were attached to faces, but shadows obscured the features.

  There was a slight squeak of the floorboards in the hallway.

  “Come on in, girls. He ain’t going to give you brucellosis.”

  He laughed, a wet thunderstorm in his chest, and the girls stepped inside the smallish, dusty bedroom.

  They were beautiful. Both of them in flower print dresses, they looked nothing like Buford. They were young and lithe and pretty. Buford was old, and these had to be his girls, but they couldn’t have been older than twenty. Their features were beset by smooth, velvety skin, and they were practically bursting from the tops of their antiquated dresses.

  They stepped into the room and stared right back at me.

  I noticed immediately there was something…different regarding the sisters, and not just the way they looked. It was an unnatural allure lingering around them like their perfume. I tried without much success to avoid looking at them.

  They knew it, too, if their smiles were any indication.

  “These are my girls, Coralee and Flannery. Girls, y’all go on and say hi to—”

  “Rolson,” the one on the left said. “We heard.”

  The one on the right, slightly taller than her sister but otherwise identical, said, “I’m Coralee. Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir. I sure do you hope you and your friend out there get better soon.”

  “Pleased to meet the both of you,” I said.

  They kind of curtsied, spread the hems of their flower-print dresses. I got an off-kilter vibe from them, like they had stepped off the set of an old episode of Tales from the Crypt.

  They held the curtsy a little too long. Buford watched me watching them, and he cleared his throat when my gaze overstayed its welcome.

  “You got mighty beat up in that car wreck of yours,” Flannery said.

  “Sure did,” I said. “Y’all ever treated anybody like this, given them the red carpet while they convalesced?”

  They peered at one another and shook their heads simultaneously.

  After a pause, Coralee smiled. “’Fraid you’re the first one. Daddy don’t like having fellas in the house. Says they get a mind to do something, and they don’t calculate the consequences.”

  “I figure I can agree with that,” I said
. “I don’t have a little girl of my own—”

  “Oh, we ain’t little girls,” prompted Flannery. “We real grown.”

  I let that settle into dust for a minute.

  “Still,” I said, coughing, “I am not blessed with children, but I understand the urge to protect them. See, I knew this teenager, had a mind of her own—”

  “She die in that shootout?” Coralee asked. “The one happened up in Savannah?”

  I didn’t answer the question. Instead, I found myself looking for Buford to return and step in.

  “Sorry,” Coralee harrumphed, when she became aware of her own misstep in the conversation. “It’s just, we don’t get much of the news out this way. I mean, people are looking for you! Government people. Cops and whatnot. I s’pect the folks that tore up River Street probably’d like to get another pair of eyeballs on you.”

  The last statement came out of Coralee’s mouth with more vigor than I wanted. I might have been concerned, if I thought she had any means of divulging my whereabouts. From what I could gather from peering through the dusty windows of my bedroom, we were as far from civilized America as one could get, without venturing into the wilds of Alaska. Might as well have been on our own island.

  “I figure they’ll have to catch me first,” I said, “and I don’t plan on them catching me.”

  “You stay laid up, and somebody’s likely to stumble out here. Sheriff, maybe.”

  “Or a federal agent,” Flannery added. Their eyes sparkled with the prospect of being involved in a major criminal investigation.

  A troubled silence beset the conversation, and I let it linger. The pain was beginning to return, and I yearned for my twice-daily shot of moonshine. When I said as much, Buford’s two daughters practically fell over themselves to make me comfortable.

  As soon as their old man was out of sight, they volleyed questions at me without pausing for response.

  “Is that what you really want?”

  “Can we getcha anything else?

  “You need to prop up your injured hand?”

  “Get you a blanket, maybe?”

  I held my busted hand aloft. “This ain’t going to feel better until I get real medical attention. Your daddy’s backyard swill is the only thing that dulls the pain, and only for a little while. It’s currently a little while, and I need a drink, so would you mind grabbing me one?”

  They stared.

  “Please?”

  The pain crescendoed. A broken leg hurts, but you can set the bone. A gash in the forehead bleeds, but the wound can be wrapped in gauze. What can be done for missing fingers that ache?

  The two continued to stare. In my disoriented state, I believed their faces flickered, seeming to become older, less nubile versions of what I had seen.

  Could be a hallucination. Could be I was seeing something I didn’t want to see.

  Or shouldn’t have seen.

  If I was surprised — and I guess I was — I hid it the best I could.

  I smiled. “Or whiskey?” I asked. “Your daddy had some bourbon, and if I can’t at least be a little mellowed out with drink, I start to get a little…weird.”

  Fact was, the world on the other side of sober was the bizarre one, but it was preferable to complete sobriety. I’d given that a shot. Just didn’t take. I needed something to keep me upright and functioning. Staying off the sauce cleared up some of my existential cobwebs, but it wasn’t a complete cure, and that’s what I needed to find. Not yet, because I was pretty sure Deuce wanted my ability to help with the investigation into his brother’s death. After that, I’d want to be shut of it completely.

  What I hadn’t realized was that the two daughters had slowly been slipping closer to the bed. They were so close to me, I felt a heat coming off them. Not necessarily an energy, but something out of the ordinary. They crowded in beside the bed, ignoring how uncomfortable it seemed to make me feel.

  Flannery leaned in, her lips parted. “You want me to show you my titties, don’t you?”

  I blinked. Couldn’t even muster an exclamation of disbelief.

  “Flannery,” Coralee said. “Don’t.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I figured as much. I saw you lookin’ at me when I came in.”

  I couldn’t think of a civil way to respond. Where did she get off, thinking—

  “I can show ’em to you real quick,” she said, and before I could protest, her hands plucked the straps from her dress, revealing two—

  Writhing, desiccated human faces.

  The mouths, situated where the nipples should have been, yawned open in clear torment, and I picked myself up, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. I gaped in disbelief at the humanoid shapes dangling from her chest.

  Flannery grasped the back of my head with both hands and pressed my head between her breasts. The tormented faces wriggled on either cheek, the gray tongues sucking and licking at my face. When she pulled away, I blinked, realizing both sisters were fully clothed and standing on the other side of the room. The wetness from the tongues, I realized, was just the cold compress of a cloth against my forehead.

  “Did we meet already?” I asked, in complete bewilderment.

  Flannery giggled. “We sure did,” pronouncing sure like the place where the ocean and the sand meet. “But you went to shaking and convulsing and just passed right out. Daddy’s off doing his own thing, so we decided to wipe you down. Figured it might help the fever. You want us to get you something to drink? We don’t have much in the way of medicine, but Daddy does keep aspirin around for his heart. Thins the blood. You want that?”

  “Sounds great,” I managed, trying not to sound freaked out.

  Coralee departed, and her sister followed. They came back a few minutes later with a glass sloshing with clear liquid. Flannery leaned over when she handed me the aspirin, providing me with a clear view down her shirt.

  It wasn’t that they weren’t attractive. It was that I suspected I might be stepping into something I couldn’t step out of. Buford might be watching. Or maybe the girls themselves wanted some payback against their father. Or maybe they just wanted to have a little fun with the new man in the bunk. It was all so confusing.

  I drank deep, feeling the warmth spread through my veins like tributaries emptying into the sea. Shadows slowly edged into existence, edging toward the bed.

  At some point, I attempted a visit to the living room, but I was too drunk and too pained to accomplish it. Plus, for every hour I spent in that bed, especially after the moonshine, I wanted to remain there, forgetting my mission’s overall purpose.

  While I napped and healed, the world twisted into something else entirely. I awoke to a briskly approaching darkness. The shadows had turned into oceans of black.

  At some point, a light flickered on.

  The old man had returned, and he wasn’t alone. He leaned against the doorway. His children stood in the hallway, faces glowing like cherubic spirits.

  Could be that Old Red Eyes was fucking with me.

  “Hey there, stranger,” Buford said.

  I muttered a vague response. My brain was cloudy. I was coming out of a stupor and experienced a newfound resolve to get my ass out of this place as soon as possible. The longer we lingered, the less likely it was we’d actually solve Deuce’s brother’s murder.

  I suddenly thought of Allison.

  “You didn’t happen to find a cell phone with my near-corpse, did you?” I asked.

  The three of them shook their heads.

  “No sign of any electrical device,” Flannery said. “Soaked as you was, I don’t figure anything like that would function. You was practically pickled.”

  Buford and his girls cackled, and it was a rough sound, like bacon popping in overused grease.

  “Drink?” Buford asked, holding a bottle of moonshine aloft.

  It looked amazing.

  I shook my head. My body yearned for it, but I felt like I needed to resist it.

  “Aw, hell, it’s on
ly going to dull the pain while you convalesce, Rolson,” the old man said.

  Eventually, after Buford’s persistent persuasion, my alcoholic tendencies outweighed my resistance, and I wore down. The old man poured, and I drank. Everything returned to normal. We had a pleasant conversation regarding the prospect of a new Braves season — “Hope springs eternal for Braves fans,” Buford said — and chatted on a whole host of topics. All the while, Flannery and Coralee stood in wait, leering at the both of us. I saw desire in their eyes, but I tried not to mistake it for anything sinister. They were country girls, spent too much time with the old man, and perhaps new company made the days slide by quicker.

  Eventually, the old man and his progeny packed up and left me. I lay in the darkness, pressing into myself to avoid touching the shadows that divided the moonlight and reached for me.

  Later, in the hallway, I heard the sisters talking.

  “You done knitting that tie you was working on?” the one said.

  The other replied, “Shhh, it’s supposed to be a secret.”

  “Whatever, I’m going to start supper. I hate when it starts getting dark this early. Gives me the heebs.”

  “Me, too. You hear that one wolf wailing the other night? Sounded like a grown man with an ass full of buckshot.”

  They descended into a fit of giggles.

  “He scared me so I thought I was going to piss my bed, I swear before God.”

  “And that was even before it got black dark.”

  “They’re creeping in closer,” said one of the girls. “Sooner or later, they’ll be on the back porch.”

  “Not if things keep going the way they’re going.”

  With that, they vanished into some other corner of the house, talking in low tones of vaguely unsettling ideas, wolves and satanic woodsmen and the like. I reclined in the bed and squeezed my good hand to ease the crushing sensation in my phantom knuckles.

  3

  My drunken, sleepy travails took me northward, back to my childhood home. This was before the old man got picked up for murder. This was before my Aunt Birdie yanked me out of Hell and brought me into her quaint little life, where she taught me how to love reading and language.