Dirt Merchant Read online

  Deuce got his legs under him. This time, he was able to hold himself up. He ambled over to the women, entwined in a sisterly embrace.

  “I see your point,” Deuce said. “That, too, is true, but most of the Tarantino movie you probably heard of on the news is due to my erstwhile companion here. He tends to bring gunfire with him, wherever he goes. Me, I’m just trying to keep him on the warm side of the dirt.”

  “Full-time job,” I said.

  “If we don’t make it down to my family soon, there’s a chance all hope of finding my little brother’s killer will be lost. I don’t mean to make y’all contend with my grief, in addition to your own. But I got more sadness waiting on me, and I’d like to get to it, if I could.”

  The sisters exhaled simultaneously, and I thought I felt a chill in the air. But their heavily-painted countenances softened, and for a moment, they looked like the young women I had encountered in my fevered dreams.

  Deuce lifted his eyebrows in anticipation.

  “Oh, all right,” Coralee said, turning to face her sister. She raised one hand and pushed a strand of hair out of her sister’s face. “You help us with Papa, and we’ll get you on your way.”

  I felt my temper rising, and strained to resist it. I could see where this was going. We were getting more deeply ensnared in this hellish family drama, and the longer we stayed, the less likely it was we’d walk out with our lives or our freedom.

  “Consider it our payment for dragging you both to safety,” the elder sister said. Her eyes became daggers, and she smiled. She knew she had us.

  “I ain’t much for lifting right now,” Deuce contended. “I think I might have to leave it up to Mr. Charlie Bronson here, if it’s all the same to you.”

  The sisters smiled and, without a word, turned and strode into the hallway.

  5

  They came out a while later, and by then, the range-of-motion in Deuce’s injured shoulder had improved. Looked like maybe he’d help out, after all.

  “’Bout ready?” Flannery asked. She had changed, and it was not typical funeral wear. Her dress was bright and low-cut, as if she was going to hop off of their dock, directly into the pick-up, and ride into town for some carousing.

  “As we’ll ever be,” Deuce said.

  Coralee produced a bottle of clear liquid from under the counter — How much of that stuff could there be? — and slammed it on the countertop, sending dust in all directions in the late afternoon light.

  “One last toast for Buford McKibben,” she said.

  “McKibben,” I said. “I’ll drink to that.”

  And I did. I drank, and then after the rest of them dispersed, I uncapped the bottle and continued to dip into the clear stuff. The way that drinking used to deaden my senses had been replaced by a new feeling. Out here, there were no ghosts, really — save for the Red-Eyed Stranger — so I only experienced the elegant hum of the landscape that exists between worlds.

  I wandered out to the dock and bellied up to a small table there. The deck chair I sat in threatened to collapse at any moment.

  I stared out across the water, soaking in the area’s composition. Old, cracked trees disappeared into the water like skeletal fingers, and plants blossomed at their outer edges. There was a chill in the air, but even the cold couldn’t diminish the robust funk of the place. It was a deathly smell, a rotting body smell, and it sent my stomach to doing flips. I imagined gators bellying around in the water, dredging up all the silt and the decaying organic matter from the north Florida swamps.

  It was a strange coincidence which had brought us out here to the swamp, and though I feared we might somehow not escape unscathed, I did think it fortuitous to find someone else in the world who shared my affliction…even if he was dead now.

  Day after Barack Obama was elected president, the Illinois lottery pulled three sixes in a row: 6-6-6. Strange coincidence. September 11, 2002, one year to the day after religious fanatics slammed planes into the Twin Towers, the New York State Lottery’s three numbers were 9-1-1. The first and last man to die in the building of the Hoover Dam were father and son, respectively, and they died on the same day thirteen years apart.

  World works in some fucked up ways.

  I was contemplating this bewildering aspect of life — how things emerge in seemingly random patterns, when I saw something.

  A pair of red eyes, floating just out beyond the dock. I had what drunks call “a moment of clarity.” I saw this for what it was, I supposed, and dug in my heels to see what it wanted.

  “You got me,” I said, “Now, what are you going to do with me?”

  However, there was no grand gesture, no smoke rising out of the swamp. Just a set of eyes, and pretty soon they flickered and died. Maybe just to taunt me. Maybe to give me the feeling I wasn’t in charge of my life.

  But, oh, they weren’t gone. That much I was assured was true. It was just getting started with me. Whatever was behind them had a purpose and a mission, and if they hadn’t drawn me out here, I’d eat my fucking wallet.

  Hyper aware of approaching footsteps and yet incapable of turning around, I closed my eyes and felt the light and the heat springing out in all directions. In my heightened state, even footsteps had their own character.

  A pair of lips stopped just shy of my ear.

  “It’s time,” Flannery said.

  I watched a Great Egret spread its wings and disappear into a thicket of moss-laden slash pines and black mangroves. The splish-splash of some smaller creature was accented by rodent-like yips in the distance.

  I followed Flannery inside, trying not to observe the way her dress clung to her backside. It wasn’t that I was attracted to her. It was that I couldn’t help myself. The simmering lust in the pit of my stomach wasn’t natural, and it wasn’t a choice. I knew it, recognized it, and yet I was completely helpless to it. The fact that she surely murdered her old man affected me not at all.

  After that, Deuce and I found ourselves in a terrible struggle with Buford’s remains. The body had grown a little mushy on the underside — undoubtedly where the blood had pooled — but the top half of him was desiccated, a mummy in a National Geographic special.

  The girls lingered in the doorway as Deuce and I struggled with him. One misstep, one mistake, and we’d be scraping him up off the floor with a hand trowel.

  “Smells like a dead pig left to rot,” Deuce said.

  He kept his voice low, so as not to upset the heirs to this estate. The way their mouths sort of curled up at the edges told me they weren’t too concerned with what we thought of the body.

  “You never smelled a dead body before, Deuce?” I asked. “I figured, in your line of work, you’d be around them all the time.”

  He made a face. “Shee-it,” he said. “I’ve been around all kinds of dead people, and I ain’t never smelled a body reeked like this one.”

  We covered the old man with a blanket and used the fitted sheet from his bed to carry him down to the dock. We left a trail of blood along the path, but neither of the sisters commented on it.

  With the body next to the water, the dock bobbing up and down gently with the waves, we stood in silence for a long time before Deuce turned to the women and said, “Have any last words?”

  The way their eyes changed, I thought they might turn and spit on the dead man.

  “He was as cursed a man as ever lived,” said Coralee.

  Flannery eyed me, a slight glint in her gaze. “Yeah, but that’s all over now,” she said. “Thanks to these two…gentlemen.”

  “His suffering is over,” continued Coralee, giving her sister a look. “That’s what matters now. He will no longer tarry with the evil spirits that plagued him. You remember a time when he wasn’t looking over his shoulder, so to speak?”

  Flannery shrugged petulantly. “He was always talking about the— well, the world beyond this one, and I don’t know that he ever really paid any true attention to us.”

  This time, Coralee did elbow her.r />
  “Listen,” I said. “I’m not blind to what he was going through. We discussed it, so you don’t have to go pretending that what he believed was some kind of crazy nonsense. He wasn’t an End Times preacher. He and I share a view to a world most don’t see, and if he was overly focused on it, that was probably because he was fighting to keep you safe.”

  That seemed to cut some of the tension from the proceedings. The sisters both smiled defenselessly — it was the first time since the old man’s death they looked as though they weren’t trying to put on some show — and the rest of the discussion of their father went without any major hitches.

  Once they had said their peace, Deuce and I waited for them to command us to relinquish his body to the depths.

  “You want to say something, Rolson?” asked Coralee.

  I demurred, but they insisted. As a compromise, they produced the bottle of their father’s ’shine and we drank to his memory before I cleared my throat and began.

  “I didn’t know Buford too well,” I said, “but we had something in common. He shouldered a burden no one should be forced to endure, and yet he did so for most of his adult life. He did so for the sake of his daughters, so they wouldn’t have to. For that, he deserves whatever praise we heap upon his remains.”

  “Here, here,” Deuce said, slipping the bottle from my hands and swigging.

  “He may rest in peace,” I said, “but he’s not entirely gone. We’re always here, even after we leave the husks of our bodies behind. There’s always a wisp of someone’s soul floating around this godforsaken dump we call home, so don’t you ever think he’s gone from here!”

  “Rolson,” Deuce said, a warning in his tone.

  I snatched the bottle from Deuce’s hand.

  “He’ll always be watching you,” I said, turning to Flannery and Coralee. “His eyes will ever be sliding up and down on you, no matter where you go. You can’t go anywhere to escape, no matter how hard you try. And you may not see him, but he’s there.”

  I glugged from the bottle until Deuce slapped it away from my mouth. It clanked on the raft at my feet.

  “I think that’s enough,” Deuce said. “You got your point across.”

  “You think you’ve rid yourself of the old bastard because his heart stopped, but he’ll always be here. He’s not gone; he’s just changed.”

  “Rolson, stop,” Deuce said.

  His anger outweighed the response from Flannery and Coralee. They scowled and stared but said nothing. They knew I was right. They knew it was true. Just because the old man had passed along his albatross didn’t mean he wasn’t still around.

  I wanted them to know. I wanted them to be afraid, but they appeared to have ignored my entire diatribe.

  The younger sister moved in close to me. Her eyes twinkled, but they weren’t what stood out regarding her appearance. I tried to pull away, but the allure she generated was impossible to ignore.

  “Oh, come on, Rolson,” said Flannery. “Stay one more day. What’s it going to hurt?”

  She nestled into my neck, and I felt something lurking in my guts. The stink of the dead lingered on my clothes, and yet here she was, trying to cuddle up to me.

  “We had a deal,” I said, but that didn’t stop her. She pulled in closer and slipped her arms around my waist.

  I tried to appeal to my best friend, hoping he’d be able to knock me free of her spell, but I saw he, too, was caught up. Coralee clung to him like vines on a busted tree. He was nearly comatose, but somehow upright. The walking wounded, half-awake and barely breathing.

  I whisper-yelled at him, but he either couldn’t hear me or didn’t care to. Repeating his name did no good, and I saw it had to do with the fact that Coralee had her hand pressed to the swell of his trousers.

  The fuck are we doing? I asked myself, trying to fight an unwelcome surge of arousal.

  I was trying to fight her sensual pull, because somewhere in the blurry, drunken depths of my mind, my thoughts were freaking the fuck out. But the harder I tried to fight, the more feverishly, irrationally lustful I became.

  “Let’s get rid of the old man,” Flannery said, whispering in my ear the way Vanessa used to.

  I did as she said. I was starting to feel lopsided from the booze, so what happened to me — to any of us, really — mattered less and less.

  “Deuce?”

  He blinked away his daze, and we knelt next to Buford’s body, one at each end of him. He smelled worse than I felt, but then again, he was gator food.

  “May the swamp wash away what troubled you,” I said, and then the body was committed to the water.

  We had wrapped twine around the sheet that covered his body to protect it from the elements. I also suspected the sisters didn’t actually want to see their father sink to the bottom of the swamp.

  Then, something happened.

  No one else saw it, but something definitely happened as the sheet soaked through with water. I glanced around at Deuce and the sisters, but they had set upon one another, hands and legs intertwined, too busy to be concerned with the hapless man sinking to the swamp’s murky bottom.

  He moved. He was dead — no doubt there — and yet he twitched. First, I saw it in his face. The sheet revealed the outline and details of his features. His mouth gibbered syllables he could no longer pronounce, and I tried to discern them as he slipped under the surface.

  The water, too, appeared to glow around him. This wasn’t his Jesus-behind-a-rock routine. I didn’t think he’d magically appear back up at the house, , but death had not released him into the atmosphere. He wasn’t heaven-bound, nor would he be picking at a harp from a cloud in the distance.

  He had just changed shapes. My previous experiences with the undead told me they didn’t just pass away into some other plane of existence but remained in this world, usually with some request or another. I didn’t see Buford’s as being much different, in that respect. He’d stick around, maybe haunt the surrounding area, but that was his curse. Ours was dealing with whatever he had unleashed onto the world after expiring.

  It was then I came to really, truly fear The Red-Eyed Stranger. Whatever had happened, whatever Buford had gone through, it had now transferred elsewhere. That explained his messy, sludgy corpse. It explained how readily the sisters celebrated their newfound independence. It explained, most importantly, Deuce’s miraculous recovery.

  He had been on death’s door leaving Savannah, plugged through like a sieve, and now he was up and walking around as if nothing had happened.

  Watching the old man’s body descend into the water clarified plenty of this situation for me. Buford wanted to be free of his affliction, even if that meant certain death.

  The sisters, well, why they would want to melt like wax dolls wasn’t apparent just yet, but they did seem to enjoy their freedom.

  For me, their need for ust to stick around had something to do with the evil spirit floating around the swamp, just waiting for a body to inhabit.

  Or maybe it had already found its next victim.

  I didn’t feel any different. When I looked at Deuce, I tried to discern some kind of change in him. He had always been quiet, always respectful and kind, but had he always worn that particular scowl now draped across his face?

  I wanted to scream but couldn’t.

  Instead, I watched Buford’s body disappear into the water.

  “Weird means of disposing of a body,” I said. I hid my frustration behind a veneer of civility. I somehow always found my way out of these situations, so I took cold comfort in the possibility that it would happen again.

  “He always said this is the way he wanted to be put to rest,” Coralee said.

  “Not sure why.”

  Coralee smiled wickedly. “Gators’ll have him by the turn of the hour, I bet.”

  Flannery detached from my hip, and I found my senses returning.

  I began to see her for what she was, a quickly-disintegrating approximation of a human being, but when sh
e kissed me, I fell knowingly back under her sway. The fact that I knew I was being duped didn’t make it any less extreme.

  She looked at me, and the image of her flickered. She was at once a beautiful young woman and the thing she was becoming.

  My head ached. The booze did not help. I knew we needed to drop everything and head for the exit, but the idea seemed far away. Right now, I needed to see where this whole situation with the sisters would take us. My brain screamed for me to cut and run, but my body just followed along.

  She turned and started back for the house. “I don’t care to see that, even if he did keep us under lock and key for the majority of our lives.”

  The two sisters went back to the house, leaving us alone on the dock.

  “We could make a run for it,” I said.

  “Something tells me,” he said, “we wouldn’t make it.”

  6

  One drink.

  We had promised them one simple, little, easy, brief, conciliatory drink before we hit the road. It was getting dark, and we were getting desperate. Even if we had to walk our asses out of the swamp, that’s what we were going to do, son.

  However, like the old saying went: the best laid plans of mice and men, and all that. We got back up to the house and opened the door to a scene unfit for two men looking to make a hasty escape.

  Music blared on a set of ancient speakers, the music itself buzzy and indecipherable. Might have been old disco. Might’ve been early hip-hop. Either way, it was unintelligible. And so loud, to boot.

  Flannery and Coralee gyrated at the room’s center, hips and arms moving in equal and opposite directions as they pulsed to the music. They were smoking long, thin cigarettes and sucking down drinks from red plastic cups.

  A loud yelp issued from just beyond the couch. It was Willie, shaggy and a little scrawny-looking, but mostly unharmed.

  “Where in the hell did you come from, little buddy?” I asked, as he bounded over to me.

  “We was keeping him in my bedroom,” Flannery said. “You two weren’t in any shape to deal with your own selves, much less an animal.”