Dirt Merchant Read online

  I lived in a shack with two parents who I guess loved one another but didn’t quite know how to reconcile their lack of education and surfeit of hormones with the fact that they were stuck with me. As a result, my mother stepped out on my father, got pregnant by another man — a black man, which sat none too well with my old man. I was six at the time, so my understanding of the situation started and stopped with the idea that he wasn’t happy with the fact that another baby would be in the house.

  My mother died in childbirth.

  My father killed my mother’s lover.

  My father went to prison for life.

  My father died a lonely, bitter man.

  I have no idea what happened to the baby. For the longest time, I assumed it died, because the being which slid from my mother’s womb did not cry, did not move, did not carry any signs of life. The household doctor who had rushed to save my mother’s life that night hurried away with the thing, before my father was able to realize what had transpired.

  The vacuum left by the doctor’s hasty exit gave rise to my father’s undoing.

  The old man, raging against his sorry lot in life. Destroying the house he had built with my mother. Stomping framed pictures into dust. Kicking over furniture and breaking liquor bottles.

  It is this aspect, this moment, that most often leaks into my dreams.

  In it, he, a figure instead of a man, casts a shadow over me, over the house, over all of creation. He is enormous. Colossal. Gargantuan.

  He is King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. Godzilla pillaging Tokyo. The Kraken, dragging unwitting sailors down to the depths of the ocean.

  And I am miniscule, an ant in the direct path of someone’s foot. Something to be trapped. Something to be crushed.

  Something…insignificant.

  A moment that repeats itself in these dreams confuses me, because I can’t decide if it’s real or an imagined memory: I’m dragged screaming from my spot under my bed. Claws grabbing me by the wrists and yanking me into the light.

  I struggle and fight and resist, but I’m infinitesimal in stature, so I am powerless to stop this.

  I’m hoisted up by my armpits and spun around to face this monster. He is bearded, this goliath, and he is completely insane. Wild-eyed and spitting, a demon in a fugue state.

  This thing is not the man who raised me.

  He has cast off his humanity and tossed it aside. It’s not so different from what happened that night, if my recollection can be trusted.

  He opens his toothy vampire maw and says, “Consider this the inauguration of your cuse.”

  It’s always at this point I snap awake, left to contemplate that last statement’s meaning.

  What remains clear to this day is the vision of my father’s undoing.

  When he was sober, he was a quiet man. Time passed during the period after my mother’s death with grand slowness. He worked in the yards, fixed up junkers for neighbors, often requiring me to hand him ratchet extensions or the occasional wrench, or else he was listening to his old-school console radio, which often spouted religious nonsense regarding Jesus or stock car minutiae, which was more or less incomprehensible slurry to me.

  A few drinks in him, he became notched up to a horrifying degree.

  Even my mother could not keep his rage under control, so being alone in a house with him was unbearable. It started with the babbling, the indecipherable talk concerning whatever idiosyncrasies entered his mind. Could have been religious in nature, though more often than not, it was entirely blasphemous. He’d get hopped up on whiskey and say, “Jesus can go off and fuck his mother Mary, for all I care.” He’d stomp into another room and half-pray to a God I doubted he even believed in.

  Then he moved on to the destruction. Put on an old Waylon record and kick over the furniture, causing everything on the walls to rumble, as if the whole goddamned house would cave in on him.

  Sometimes, I wished it would.

  So long as he kept his violence to the living room, where I didn’t have to be, I at least tolerated it. He could scream and cry, try to split his vocal chords in two, as long as I didn’t have to participate.

  On occasion, I’d be forced to engage with him. He’d throw open the door, leer at me through a haze of alcohol sweats, snatch me up by one hand, and whirl me around the room, the echo of “I’ve Always Been Crazy” echoing from the speakers in the living room. I think he thought it was fun, and were I not totally frightened of the old man, it might have been something approaching entertaining.

  But then there was the turn. Once the raucous nature of this one-man show slipped into a different gear, the way he swung me around the room transformed into a horror show of precarious near-misses on shelf corners and appliances. It was as though he became possessed, and as the possession dragged him toward oblivion, he’d whisper things to me, things to disparage her, that to this day I can’t disabuse myself of.

  “She was a cunt who fucked around, and she’s roasting in Hell right now,” was one particular gem of his, and he relished the way it brought tears to my six-year-old eyes.

  And it was that look, when he’d eyeball me in the wake of revealing his true feelings of my mother, that sticks with me today. Since he couldn’t heap his pain on her, I was the closest substitute, and a proxy was better than nothing.

  “She’s roasting in Hell, that bitch.”

  Sometime in the night, I awoke to the sound of the bedroom door creaking open. I expected to see red eyes in the doorway, but instead I heard two sets of feet. They moved through the darkness, presumably attached to legs and the rest of a human body, and I peered through half-open lids, trying to get a bead on them. They whispered, but all I caught were random vowels or consonants, syllables floating around in the night air.

  Then, the lightest touch. Fingernails of two separate hands gliding along the topmost quilt, moving up my legs, the sensation disappearing near the growing bulge of my crotch.

  The whisper of a voice in my ear. “Daddy don’t have to know,” it said. Though my eyes were closed, I recognized Flannery’s breathy drawl.

  Again, the hands on me, moving all over, freezing me into place. One hand resumed its work below my midsection, slipping under the quilt and into my jeans.

  I clenched my teeth.

  This was a ruse. A dogged attempt to get me under a black sky with their father. I was a pawn in a long-standing familial struggle, and the longer I stayed here, the less likely it would be that I could wriggle free of becoming involved. I held no illusions that it had anything to do with me, specifically. I was a vessel for whatever was to come after the sisters had drawn me into their little chess match.

  But I couldn’t stop them, either. They were pretty. Their hands were possessed of a kind of sensual knowledge I couldn’t have suspected.

  As Coralee gripped me and pulled, I envisioned a flash of something horrific. It was the sisters, unencumbered by clothes and writhing together in bed, but they were joined by a third party, and that third party was not me.

  It was their father.

  A sudden burst of air threw the door open, the knob banging against the wall, and suddenly the room was empty again.

  I sat up, sending glass shards of agony down my injured arm, but I couldn’t lie there anymore. I looked around, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and slipped my feet from under the quilt. I tucked myself back into my jeans and buttoned them. The door was closed. I turned the knob and slipped through the opening, moving into the house proper.

  The air was still and cold, but I was shivering for another reason. There was something unnatural about this place, and I was getting dragged into a situation I might not be able to free myself from.

  Was it real? Was it a dream? My mind was racing. The abruptness with which the whole affair had ended told me it was just a fantasy, a fantasy gone wild.

  But there was the physical evidence, and that, too, was compelling. The unbuttoned jeans. That particular empty feeling that accompanies rel
ease.

  I got up, staggered drunkenly into the living room, where Deuce lay sleeping, chest heaving unevenly. He was sleeping better than the first time I had seen him, but he was nowhere near the surface.

  Reaching out, I held my left palm over his forehead. Warm. Feverish. A jolt went through me, and I tried to ignore it.

  Now, though, the pain rose from a well deep inside the nerves and pushed outward from the stumps. It was electric: harsh but cathartic.

  Deuce groaned once, the sound of air whistling through his lips, and he was silent again.

  “We’ll get you fixed up, old friend,” I said. “We’ll get you upright and on the road. Your brother will not go in the ground without you there.”

  He sighed and settled back into sleep. There was no lightning strike, no sudden magical change. His skin was feverish to the touch, and the was sweating through, but I had neither the strength nor the wherewithal to help him in that regard.

  But he was alive. That was all I needed to know for now.

  I removed my hand.

  And then I felt the presence.

  It pulled me from my seat, brought me to my feet, and turned me toward the hallway where Buford, Coralee, and Flannery slept, hopefully in separate beds.

  You could just go, just take an axe — there is one in the corner back there — and slide into each room. One swipe, and the suspicion would end. The pain, too, because don’t you think that old fucker is drugging you to keep you here? Why else would you not have hit the road by now?

  My mind recoiled from the prospect of violence. I reeled, trying to turn around, but the force kept tugging at the paranormal part of my brain.

  Traipse from room to room. Get it over with. They’re the evil ones, right? No one will miss these people, and then there’s no chance the two of you will be caught. What if they’ve called the authorities? What if they’re just fattening you up in order to make a name for themselves with the crime-obsessed public? Bet TV shows would pay top dollar for an interview with those who caught the Butchers of Savannah?

  I took two steps into the hallway.

  I felt it — something evil was unfurling, spreading possessively within me. My missing knuckles burned, and as I moved down the hall, the pain became a dull ache.

  I came to the first doorway. Instinct told me it was one of the daughters’ rooms, maybe both of them. Blurred flashes revealed scenes of unknowable horror. The air outside the door stank of a fetid odor I feared to investigate. I shouldn’t have, but I turned the doorknob, looked in.

  My eyes were treated to a scene of such remarkable sickness I could barely look. Coralee lay on the mattress, blood spreading around her, soaking into the sheets. Her legs were spread, a ghostly figure pounding vigorously at her most intimate spot. The figure, clad in a black, flowing garment, wrenched his head sideways, and the face was not the Red-Eyed Stranger’s, as I had expected, but my father’s. Or maybe Emmitt Laveau’s. Or Leland Brickmeyer’s.

  When I looked back at Coralee’s face, I saw instead my ex-wife, Vanessa, looking exactly as she had the night she left me, when she wandered off and got herself killed by a monster named Limba Fitz. A monster I had shot and drowned in the ocean on the outskirts of Savannah.

  Vanessa, beautiful though crippled by addiction as she was, smiled and nodded at what was happening. Blood continued to spread, and she opened her mouth in a vacuous, overwrought display of ecstasy. The room smelled of sex and death, and as I backed away, I thought I heard the sound of a distant, girlish voice call my name. Maybe it was Coralee. Maybe not. Either way, I was out of there. But before I could run, another chilling suggestion rolled through my mind. I paused, sweating and shaking, hand poised on the doorknob.

  The axe. The axe in the corner. Even if a second or third swipe was necessary to separate head from neck and neck from torso, it would be worth it. No screams to get in the way of your mission. Maybe some gurgling. Maybe a little yawning honk, the sound of a person’s soul leaving the body. What do you say, eh?

  Gathering every remnant of my faltering will, I whirled around. I saw a figure in the darkness. The Red-Eyed Stranger taunting me again.

  Only, the figure in the darkness wasn’t IT. Deuce stood in the hallway, head listing forward.

  “Holy shit, man,” I whisper-yelled, still trembling. “What in the hell got you off the couch? I thought you were out like a—”

  One hand clamped around my throat, and as I slipped toward unconsciousness, I thought, This can’t be the way I go.

  There was nothing for a long time after that.

  A voice startled me awake the next morning.

  “He’s on the mend,” Flannery said.

  She was sitting in the chair next to the bed, her hands clasped between her knees. There was no acknowledgement of last night’s…revelation in her eyes. It sent down the road of wondering if I had hallucinated it all.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and said, “Whatever papa’s medicine man did, it’s working.”

  I didn’t think it was the backwoods doctor at all. First of all, why wouldn’t have also treated me? No, I suspected it had more to do with what was going on behind the scenes with this family than what they were telling me.

  I suddenly wanted to get the hell out of there.

  She waited in the doorway, and though I tried to give her the silent treatment, she was a swamp girl, so I guess she was more patient than most.

  “Where’s your dad?” I asked, finally. “Also, whiskey?”

  She raised the bottle.

  “I’m way ahead of you,” she said, rising from her chair and moving to a seat on the bed.

  She poured three gulps’ worth of the clear stuff. Scary prospect, so far as I was concerned. I sipped and tried to manufacture supernatural elation.

  I got nothing from the other side, but I did feel the heat coming off my companion. Though she perched on the edge of the bed, her proximity to me was as intoxicating as the moonshine.

  I tried to steer the subject away from what my mind was leading me to discuss.

  “And your dad? Where is he?”

  A pause.

  “Hit that bottle a little too hard last night?” I questioned.

  “He’s…not well,” she said. “He’s an old man. Prone to sickness. He takes days sometimes to get himself back together before he can go back to business.”

  Liar, I thought.

  “And what is his business?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  She leaned back on the bed, one elbow propped on the mattress between my knees, and reached for my glass. She took a slug of the liquid, clapped it onto the bedside table, and poured another.

  “Here’s to you,” she said.

  It was then I saw her. Really saw her for what she was.

  She wasn’t the nubile beauty from before, not that a woman’s femininity should be judged entirely on looks. My Aunt Birdie would be fit to be tied over such a thought.

  Still, she looked different. She’d lost her alabaster complexion. Where her skin had before shined with a doll-like quality, I now saw blemishes. A few around the mouth. Crow’s feet marking the corners of her eyes. A vertical line between her eyebrows.

  She must have caught me looking, because she snapped up to a sitting position, ran her fingers behind her neck, and said, “You can come see Daddy if you want. He likes the company, and, well, we’re just his girls. He don’t got much to say to us, other than to bark orders like we was his prisoners.”

  “I’m feeling a touch better, so I just might do that,” I said.

  “And your friend, like I said, he’s starting to open his eyes.”

  That did get me going. “Wait, he’s awake?”

  “Didn’t I damn well tell you that?”

  I shimmied out of bed, slid into the house shoes I had been provided, and began to dress properly. It was a sad affair, since my fingers didn’t want to work the way I wanted them to. My left hand felt useless, all things considered, so it t
ook far too long for me to dress myself. And yet I persisted. It was time I got the hell out of this place.

  4

  In the living room, Deuce sat hunched on the couch. He dwarfed the damned thing, which sagged in the middle from his weight. He was a football player going to seed, but he wasn’t quite a physical mess yet. He was powerful, and awfully big. A man who could drag bikers in front of a judge without breaking a sweat.

  He was rubbing his eyes and grunting like a bear scratching its back against a tree.

  “Goddamn,” he said, when he finally saw me. “I feel like I’ve been traipsing around Wonderland for the last few…days?”

  “You guessed right,” I said, pulling up a chair. “Right upon a week now, if time is passing the way it usually does.”

  He patted the wounds, which were denoted by the red splotches on his loaner FFA T-shirt.

  “I ain’t supposed to feel as good as I do right now,” he said.

  “Bullets went clean through you,” I said. “Plus, the old man owns this place has a buddy who must be dis— what is it, disbarred?”

  “I think you’re thinking of lawyers, old friend.”

  “Anyway, he took a gander at you and pronounced you critical. Still, it’s good to have you on this side of the dirt. I was beginning to worry.”

  He looked gravely at me and said, “I had some bad dreams. Some unsettling— I don’t know …visions. You trust the people here at this house, Rolson?”

  I guess I waited too long to respond.

  “I knew it,” Deuce said. “Knew it soon as I woke up. I don’t have your natural — or is it unnatural — link with the recently deceased, but even I had a hunch surrounding what we stumbled into here.”

  “Don’t be so rash,” I replied, though there was no weight behind it.

  “Rolson, I saw things in my dreams I’m still not prepared to deal with. Things I’ve never seen before.”

  “Like what?”

  “My brother,” he said, half-lidded.

  Just then, a door by the kitchen creaked open.