Dirt Merchant Read online

  “Looks like a couple of scoundrels double-checking their stories,” Coralee said.

  Deuce smiled a politician’s smile. “Just trying to find the words to thank you all for picking us up. We would’ve died out in that swamp, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Coralee said. “I’m damn sure you would have.”

  As she moved closer, I saw that she, too, looked quite a bit older than the day before. It was her hair. Her normally corn-silk locks had been replaced by a bleached-too-often mop and her face’s imperfections had been covered over with heaps of makeup. They seemed to be aging before my eyes.

  She must have noticed me taking a long drink from the well of her looks, because she said, “Takes a lot of work to keep the ravages of time at bay, at my age.”

  “How old are you?”

  Deuce smacked my arm. “Rol.”

  “What? I just wanted to know.”

  Coralee had moved into the kitchen, and was busying herself with a cup of instant coffee.

  “Forgive my friend for his lack of manners,” Deuce called. “He’s not accustomed to keeping polite company.”

  “Maybe it’s because I’m sober,” I told Deuce.

  “You don’t smell sober.”

  “It’s been a few hours,” I replied defensively.

  Coralee impatiently retrieved a bottle from under the countertop and slammed it on the main island.

  “Here you go,” she said, returning to her own work.

  Deuce gave me a knowing look, only he was smiling for the first time since waking up. I mouthed the words I know.

  Women were always understandably unwilling to endure my bullshit, so I spent most of my time on the outs with them. Riding out of town in a hail of drunken gunfire could have that effect on relationships, and I didn’t even want to consider what made Vanessa run out on me.

  I dipped into the bottle of ’shine, wondering if the rest of the stock was piled underneath the counter.

  My brain swam into uncharted territory. It felt nice, and I instantly wanted to drain as much of the bottle as I could, but I had to stay focused on the task at hand. I needed to get us the hell out of here, before this bizarre situation culminated in human sacrifice or something.

  Coralee must have felt me lingering behind her, because she said, “You done insulting me, sir?” Her voice was gravelly, full of salt.

  “I wasn’t trying to pry,” I replied, sipping the ’shine. I turned and held the bottle aloft at Deuce, who waved it away. His eyes, though, told me he was probably going to indulge eventually. “I just thought I was making conversation.”

  “Not your strong suit,” she muttered, but then, to my great relief, she changed the subject. “Daddy’s in there, hacking half a lung into his bedspread.”

  “Well, we’ll be out of your hair today,” I replied. “On the road and a distant memory, so’s you can get back to tending to your dad.”

  She turned to me, eyes wide. “No!” she said, a little too quickly. “No, I mean, you and your friend ain’t better. And we— we’ve liked having y’all around. Daddy’s fine, he’s just old. And he’s— he’s getting real sick.”

  Her eyes glistened with fresh tears — not crocodile tears, by the looks of them — and I reached out to touch her, but pulled back realizing I had only done so in dreams. She noticed and smiled.

  “No, it’s all right,” she said. Her lips opened, as if trying out some new words, but then she closed her mouth and hurried from the room, slamming the door.

  “You sure do have a way with women,” Deuce said.

  “All my life,” I said, and returned to my former seat, moonshine in hand. I drank straight from the bottle.

  Deuce eyed the clear liquid.

  “I know,” I said, slurring a little. “I know.”

  I liked the feeling. The world was warm around the edges, blanketing me like covers on a childhood bed. Being a little woozy made me feel like being hugged by someone who loved me, and suddenly I thought of Aunt Birdie. Great hugger. The best. I vowed to replace the flowers around her grave if I ever made it back to middle Georgia. She wasn’t buried in Lumber Junction, but her grave was close enough.

  “You all right, old man?” Deuce asked. “I sort of lost you for a minute. Where’d you go?”

  “All over,” I said. “My mind is sometimes a vast landscape.”

  “And you’re trampling all over it,” he said. “I thought you were giving up the booze.”

  “I told you. In the car, on the way out of Savannah. Said I…needed it for the time being.”

  “Oh, you mean when I was shot full of holes, barely able to stay upright and conscious?”

  “Exactly then.”

  He grunted. “I can’t say I approve, but I need you, so I reckon I’ll abide it. For now. Lord knows I’m in my own world of hurt right now.”

  “Listen, man—”

  “Don’t start,” he interrupted. “You’re here. That’s enough. I don’t need sympathy. I need help.”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, “before somebody tries to shove us in an oven or pretend to be our grandmothers.”

  I was ready to hear that. Maybe I could score a little hooch for the road.

  Deuce tried to stand. His knees buckled, so I reached out and caught him with my bad hand. I thought I felt a shock, and his eyes met mine.

  “You still got the midnight whispers?”

  “Little bit.” I raised the bottle.

  “Huh.” He waited, reduced his eyes to slits, and then hobbled from the room. As he disappeared into the hallway, I heard him mumbling. “Got to piss for days.”

  When Deuce returned, he was pale and sweaty.

  “I’m all fucked up,” he said. He was shirtless, the bandages covering him soaked through with blood. At the very least, they’d need to be changed before we hit the road.

  “You’ve just got a few more holes than a normal man,” I said, but the joke landed flat.

  “I don’t feel good, my man,” he managed, before ambling to the couch and collapsing.

  “Take as much time as you need,” I said. Thinking all the while, Hurry up so’s we can get the fuck out of here.

  “No!” he replied, echoing Coralee’s overzealous response. “We got business to attend to. Shit to take care of. I can’t be holed up in this possum kingdom.”

  “Deuce—”

  “We. Are. Leaving. If you have to drag me to Jacksonville, that’s what you’re gonna do, you hear? I’m not dying in this floating coffin.”

  “I’m with you, man, I just—”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. You got a cell phone?”

  “Dead.”

  He stared.

  “Water damage,” I offered. “The junker—”

  “You wrecked it.”

  “Yes. Well, technically, I ran off the road and sank it to the bottom of a pond. So far as I can tell, it’s still down there, if you want to try to jump the battery.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I might be on my deathbed.”

  “Death couch.”

  “Either way, we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got no phone, no car, and I’m sure your face is plastered on every surface and television screen in the south, so hitchhiking is a no-go.”

  “You never know,” I replied. “I’ve started my beard.”

  “Looks like a brushfire somebody only half put out.”

  I made a face of mock offense and rubbed the scruff of my chin. “How are we going to get out of here, Deuce?”

  His defeated posture said it best. He didn’t know, and neither did I. Stranded in the middle of a swamp, beholden to this bizarre family with no means for extricating ourselves.

  I said, “I’m going to ask the paternus major back there.”

  I didn’t like the look in Deuce’s eyes.

  “Dreams have been troubling me, Rol,” he said. “Don’t even ask me; I see the way you’
re looking at me, and I won’t fall for it. My dreams ain’t even half of what you endure.”

  “Maybe later?” I asked.

  “A lot later.”

  I stopped short of the old man’s door. Wouldn’t be the last man I’d owe my life to, but he was the most recent. I needed to give him some reason for why we were leaving. If he was half as afflicted by our shared curse, he’d understand if I told him some troubling dreams had me pushing our cart further down the road.

  The sound of my knuckles on the door echoed through the hallway.

  “Buford…?” I called. I trailed off when I realized I didn’t even know his last name.

  No answer.

  I knocked again, waited. My pulse quickened.

  “’Lo?” I called, leaning against the door.

  I rested my hand on the knob and held my breath.

  An eternity passed between the time I made the decision and pushed the door open.

  I knew what I would encounter as soon as I stepped inside.

  Buford was on the bed. His body was stiff, muscles pulling the body into a near-comical pose of, well, repose. The blanket had been cast aside, perhaps by some unseen force, revealing this husk of a man. Discoloration had given parts of the body a purplish black hue, and the smell from his released bowels and bladder caused my arm to rise instinctively to my mouth and nose.

  The heat, I figured. Drawing his body up like old leaves in somebody’s front yard.

  I walked over, regarded the old man. Death was no longer something I had to shy away from, though the stench was something else entirely. A musky, putrid smell, like an old animal drowned in a stagnant pool.

  And, goddamnit, he looked older, even older than when he’d dropped into the seat next to the bed the first time. His face resembled an old, dried-up riverbed.

  The most unsettling aspect of this was his lips, peeled back in a rictus. A death grin. Small teeth protruded from discolored lips, as if to say, Haha, you silly motherfucker. What did you expect would happen?

  Only took one good yank on the window by his bedside to get some air flowing in. Helped out pretty fair with the smell.

  I stood over the corpse. I had to figure out how to tell his daughters. Man was practically a stranger, and so were the young women. I couldn’t help but think of the dream orgy I had participated in, and I was suddenly bereft of thoughts.

  I was pulled from my thoughts into a somewhat stiff embrace with one of the sisters. In my mind, they had begun to meld into a single figure, and the more I was around them, the more they changed. Flannery, for example, had begun to stoop visibly.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Her body seemed to have changed. It had changed. I’d only been acquainted with her for days, but she already had taken on the face of a stranger. A tree’s roots bursting through soggy ground. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel human; she just didn’t feel like herself.

  “For what?”

  She pulled away from me, looking more or less like a stranger in the dim light of her father’s bedroom. Lines edged new paths around her mouth, underneath her eyes. A decade’s worth of wrinkles had shown themselves since her father’s peculiar demise.

  “I think you know,” she said. Her smile said something about all of this which had remained unspoken until now.

  No doctor had come out here and patched Deuce up. His sudden breakthrough wasn’t a coincidence. Whatever happened during the night had been planned, and him being upright was a direct result of something to do with the Red-Eyed Stranger.

  I backed away, taking a step into the room with the body.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I said.

  Except I did. By lingering here, I had basically offered up my best friend as a human test subject. Buford and his two daughters needed somebody to perform a hellish ceremony on, and Deuce happened to be the unlucky lab rat.

  “I know, honey” she replied in a way that implicated my involvement.

  “What do you think happened?”

  When she didn’t answer, I said, “I mean, he was alive and kicking not even twelve hours ago. Came to talk to me, and he was drinking moonshine and everything.”

  She gave me a simpering look, as if I were this plan’s mastermind. “Oh, come on now,” she said. “You don’t mean to tell me you think it was all a big coincidence.”

  “I do, actually,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”

  Or had I? The old man and I shared this curse, so maybe I was the catalyst for the old man’s death. The question that remained in the wake of all this was, Why not me?

  She laughed. “I didn’t say you killed him, silly. Or your friend. But don’t look at me like that. I didn’t kill him, either. Neither did Sister. How could you think such a thing of us?”

  I regarded her carefully. This was a delicate moment. “You don’t seem all that broken up. I mean, you’re putting on makeup and dancing around the house like it’s no big deal— like your dad just took a vacation, or something. Christ, you may as well throw a fucking party.”

  She slapped me.

  I suppose I deserved it. With women, I routinely did.

  “I am not glad he is dead. If you knew anything about him, you’d be ecstatic that his pain and his suffering were over, as both me and my sister are. He was a sick man, and he had been carrying something heavy around with him for years. And he is now clear of that pain and horror, and so are we. Neither I nor my sister could be free while he still lived with his demons, but now that he’s gone, we are as untethered as a bird taking to flight. So how dare you throw his death in my face.”

  “I think that’s fair,” I said. “I apologize.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry yourself,” she responded. “We have plans for you.”

  She backed away, eyes never leaving me. “And how to get rid of that pesky…condition of yours. There’s really only one solution, and if you hang around” — she winked — “you just might get exactly what you want.”

  With that, she disappeared into the back of the house, closing a bedroom door behind her. I was left standing there, stunned and shaking, determined to leave this place, even if I had to lose all the rest of my fingers in the process.

  “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” I whispered to Deuce a few minutes later, looking around nervously from my seat on the recliner in the living room.

  “Look at this shit,” Deuce whispered back in his low drawl. He peeled the bandage from one of his wounds and had me take a gander. Though it wasn’t magically healed, it was much further along than it should have been.

  “It’s nearly closed up,” I said, astonished.

  “You ain’t whistling ‘Dixie,’ old buddy,” he replied. “Something weird’s going on here, and I think you’re the central ingredient.”

  I checked my own sore spots and found they weren’t any closer to healing. The gunshots still felt like puddles of blood, pus, and human flesh, and they hurt more or less constantly.

  Of all my injuries, my fingers fared the best. They ached like a motherfucker, but the wounds themselves were drying out and beginning to lose some of the fiery tenderness which had plagued them.

  At my lowest moments, I imagined some hapless new homicide detective coming across two amputated fingers, carrying them around Bellerose’s compound, trying to tie their existence to the rest of the mayhem.

  At least it made me smile.

  Truth be told, though, I had purged most of the details of that night from my memory. I remembered the moment after losing the first finger, but much of the rest was a blur. Whenever I concentrated, I caught mental glimpses: Deuce getting shot, chasing down Limba Fitz, waking up to my dog licking my face. Occasionally, I woke suddenly from nightmares of the shootout at Bellerose’s, the sounds of gunfire still echoing in my ears. For the most part, however, my memories were like old pictures tossed into the air.

  Just then, the girls swarmed into the room, each picking at the other’s face. They had caked on makeu
p and slipped into dresses that clung to them like wet rags. The makeup concealed — but did not quite erase — how time was catching up to them.

  I tried to convince myself it was the grief, maybe, that was aging them, but the changes were too stark, too sudden, to be the result of sadness. Beyond that, I didn’t dare ask any questions, even of myself. It was better I focus on finding my way out of this situation.

  I stood up.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m thinking maybe this situation is getting a little personal for us, so maybe we take off and leave you to deal with your business.”

  “Our condolences,” Deuce added, “for your grief and your sudden loss.”

  The look on their faces was one hundred percent Stepford Wives.

  “You can’t leave yet,” Coralee said. “He is still. Back. There.”

  “You don’t expect that we take his body,” Flannery added. “He is our father.”

  “See,” I said, scratching the back of my neck, “I figured we’d leave you to deal with it in your own way, maybe call the proper authorities. You have, like, grief counseling and all that to be concerned with. Picking out a coffin and shit. I don’t—”

  A bark of laughter interrupted me.

  “We’re not going to bury him,” Coralee said. Her face sagged. She pointed out the nearby window. “He was born in this swamp, grew up and grew old in this swamp, and he’ll go to rest in this swamp, too.”

  I cleared my throat, checked Deuce’s take on this.

  “We don’t, um…” Deuce said. “We don’t want to.”

  “Don’t want to what?” Coralee asked.

  “Be here,” Deuce said. He tried standing, shook, sweated, then sat back down. “It’s nothing against the two of you. I’m sure this is as low as you can feel and still be alive. I should know. I’m practically on the path directly behind your old man.”

  They gave him a quizzical stare.

  “But the point is,” he said, wiping his brow, “we’ve got our own issues to deal with, too. I don’t know if Rol here told you, but I’m on the way to a funeral myself. That’s why I’m headed through Florida.”

  “I thought it was because you turned Savannah into a god-blessing ghost town,” Flannery said. Her mouth was screwed up in a gleeful approximation of disdain.