Dirt Merchant Read online

  “Wow,” I said. There were no other words. “I thought—”

  “Ugliest little sumbitch I’ve ever seen, but he’s a good dog. You know he can fetch?”

  I was overcome with the bond that can only exist between man and canine. “I think he can do just about anything.”

  “Brought me all kinds of shit while I was laid up in my bed. Shoes. Pack of cigarettes. You name it. I just had to point to it, and he brought it to me without so much as a command.”

  The old, scraggly mutt licked my face and then took up residence on the couch, where he watched us with a sidelong fascination. So long as I wasn’t bleeding to death and he wasn’t hungry, Willie tended to leave me be.

  The sisters had further changed. Their eyes. Their clothes. Their hair. Their faces. They were no longer the succubi tempting me in my sleep. It seemed like time was slipping away on them, but I had to admit: there was also something equally alluring in the way they peered at me. Even my brain, which was telling me to turn tail and run, mellowed to the idea of sticking around for just a little bit longer. Go! a voice deep inside my head cried out. Get Deuce and hoof it the fuck out of there.

  The voice went on and on, but the moonshine from under Buford’s sink helped me stay the course. Just to see what would happen. When I was under the power of their drink, I saw the way these women used to be, not the things they were becoming.

  Deuce, when I turned to look at him, was similarly mesmerized by the show. He didn’t quite look like himself. Not that I was in fighting shape, but there was something in his eyes that wasn’t quite…Deuce.

  He limped, picking up the beat and doing this kind of macho two-step that was his signature move, if he could be convinced to dance at all. It was a sight as rare as an honest politician.

  Fuck it, I thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  I stepped inside and was greeted with a drink that was not moonshine. It was sweet and delicious but also completely dense with alcohol. You could practically stand a spoon up in it.

  Flannery’s makeup was lined where she had been crying, but that wasn’t unusual-looking. It was the flat, humorless grin spread across her face that gave me a sinking feeling. Nothing about it looked human. I was reminded of a Soundgarden video from the ’90s.

  “You made the right decision,” she said, pressing in close, grinding her hips against me. The air between us tasted like strawberries and vodka, and I was transported to an earlier time, an easier time, when all that existed was a bar and a pretty girl and the sweet-sour smell of booze in the air. With that boost of nostalgia, I allowed myself to be sucked into the moment. The idea of a woman’s embrace didn’t hurt, either.

  I thought about Allison, but like my scruples, my allegiances felt far away, like someone yelling into a canyon. I felt only an echo of my sobriety keeping me in check, and it was fading with each passing moment. It did no good to listen to my conscience, and so I didn’t.

  “One drink,” I warned, half-smiling, and Flannery nodded.

  “Right,” she said, bringing that cigarette up to her lips and inhaling.

  We danced, passing her concoction back and forth as her hands ran the length of my torso, up and down my arms, down the front of my pants. I didn’t stop her, not that I could have. You reach a certain point in drunkenness where inhibitions go sailing out the fucking window. I’d been working on a pretty sustainable, mellow buzz for the past few days, but now I felt myself pass into a different plane of existence.

  And yet, it didn’t feel entirely like being drunk, either. It was eerier and more cerebral, as if my brain were being taken over. The sisters, they blinked and fluttered like images from an old projector. Old. Young. Hideous. Beautiful. I wished I could give myself some perspective, to take a step back and listen to the voice inside me screaming What the fuck, but it was no good. I was being propelled now by the force, by the booze, by my own body, which was engaging in its own slow rebellion.

  Deuce, too, seemed to revel in the feeling of…whatever this was. Despite his original reservations, he was now cheek-to-cheek with the elder McKibben sister, hands moving desperately over her body.

  It wasn’t like him.

  It wasn’t like me, either.

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  Flannery and I ended up on the couch, a dusty old thing reeking of sweat and alcohol, like the spirit of the old man himself. Her mouth was a revelation. What she did with her hips gave me a newfound faith in God. We were still clothed, but I didn’t imagine we would be much longer.

  And on the music blasted.

  Once, as I gulped for air after kissing her, I opened my eyes — drooping from all the booze — and saw the silhouette of The Red-Eyed Stranger. No face. No mouth. Just a thick, black darkness offset by two glowing orbs.

  I looked at Deuce and Coralee, and when they glanced at me, their faces had been replaced with blackness, red eyes, and crooked yellow teeth. The visage of my newfound tormentor.

  I wanted to scream, but didn’t.

  I waited for the horror to pass, trying to shake off the hallucination, and then I continued my selfish, entirely sexual pursuit of Flannery. I pressed her against me, kissed her deeply, let my hands search her body for the right places.

  At some point, I felt sick, and at first I thought it was the alcohol. I had basically survived on booze and toast over the last few days, so it wouldn’t have come as a surprise.

  The sickness, however, turned heavy, and the room tilted to one side and began to spin like a skipping .45 record. I leaned in the opposite direction, hoping to offset the feeling, but it didn’t work. I only tumbled headlong into the rug at my feet.

  Flannery’s head appeared next to me, and the sound of her laughter echoed deep in my ears. It was a sharp hiss, like standing next to a concert’s PA system. It was noise and static, a sound like interstellar communication, and it threatened to split my eardrums.

  I laughed it off, but it wasn’t easy. The way the room was moving, every attempt to get to my feet was countered by the impossible tilt of the ground. It wasn’t funny, and I wasn’t amused, but laughter was all that would come out of me.

  Am I that drunk? I wondered. I didn’t think so. The feeling was reminiscent of being drugged by a redneck enforcer named Bodean Driscoll.

  Deuce was nowhere in sight, and neither was Coralee. Flannery and I were alone.

  Well, not alone.

  Something was in the room with us.

  An inky, black form undulated in the space near the hallway door.

  I closed my eyes. That helped things. The spinning slowed to a low, watery sway, and I focused on keeping myself centered.

  When I opened my eyes, the black shape had disappeared, and all that remained was the smoky wisp. The music thumped and thudded, shaking the walls and the floors as if taking part in some minor earthquake.

  Flannery’s lips on mine dragged me from my investigation of the room’s supernatural tilt. Her eyes were closed, but I felt a lingering paranoia. The air glowed bright red in places, and I feared that at any moment, I would realize that two of the seemingly random spots were menacing eyes in the face of The Red-Eyed Stranger, but the monster was nowhere to be found. And yet, the remnants were everywhere.

  “What’s the matter?” Flannery mouthed under the floor-quaking hum of the music. The baseline walked like a giant through the house.

  “Nothing,” I mouthed back, and then I said, “Where’s Deuce?”

  She grinned and slid her fingers into a thatch of my thinning hair, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she brought the bottle to my lips and bade me drink.

  The night continued on, marching ahead at a blistering pace, picking up speed as the decibels on the speakers climbed. Shadows moved. Lights flickered to blackness. A red glow slowly peeked into the living room and hovered directly over the both of us.

  My mind struggled to keep up.

  The next few hours passed in a weird amalgamation of images: reality and fantasy and history all me
lded together into a single movie — quick cuts, slow motion, visual effects, and virtually no narrative. The frame rate slowed to the point that the grainy film of this experience barely crept along, and eventually it stopped altogether.

  When I next became aware of myself, I was waist deep in water, slogging through the woods. Something heavy was leaning on me, and I heard what, at first, sounded like the intensity of rushing water.

  I tripped, fell, dipped under water, the weight toppling over on top of me. It was a body, too big and too heavy to be one of the girls. Deuce. Also, the sound of the rushing water muted dramatically while I was under, and when I finally managed to get back on my feet, I leaned Deuce against a nearby tree and looked behind me.

  In the distance, a bright, orange light reached for the sky, sending fingers of fire in all directions and igniting nearby trees.

  “Where’s my dog?” I said, slurring my words. “Willie, come here!”

  From somewhere nearby, a small, throaty bark met my request, and I was momentarily centered. Deuce and the dog and some semblance of freedom. What else could I ask for?

  “Keep up with us, old man,” I whisper-yelled, and he responded in kind with a raspy yelp.

  When I made a move to turn back, Deuce stopped me. “No, they’re gone,” he said, struggling with the words.

  I held him, feeling us sink into the mud, staring at the house going up in flames, before finally giving in to Deuce’s appraisal of the situation and moving on.

  At some point, there was the sound of a grand collapse, and what I had first thought to be the sound of rushing water was, in fact, the house folding in on itself. I didn’t turn back to watch, thinking it was better if momentum carried us forward.

  I basked in the silence, intermittently broken by the ragged, harsh breaths we produced in trying to evade the situation. I wondered what really happened, but now was not the time to ask, and Deuce was not in shape to answer. He wasn’t bleeding, so far as I could tell, but then again, I wasn’t looking.

  When at last the sound of fire had completely vanished, I thought it all right to talk.

  “I owe you my life, Deuce.”

  “No, man. Now we’re even.”

  We didn’t exactly read one another’s minds, but I could tell he knew what had happened. The thing with the Boogie House. The old man. His daughters. Somehow, a blood covenant had been created, and the only way to pay it back was with more blood. And somehow I didn’t think the beast would allow us to walk away without paying up.

  More blood than one man could give, I was sure.

  But I had stared death in the face and accepted it.

  I had unwittingly signed a contract and was on the hook for everyone involved, including the sisters and my best friend. More to add to the list, like etchings on a stone wall.

  At least I had my friend back.

  For the time being.

  On we trudged through the woods.

  “What you hear, Rol?” Deuce said, his voice like rice paper in a whispering breeze.

  Still healing. Still getting his shit together. Same as me, only more fragile, and heading into a lion’s den of familial anguish.

  On the drive down, mere hours before I drifted off the side of the road and into a thicket of trees, Deuce had mentioned his brother, killed because of some half-assed drug- or gang-affiliations. Taj had floundered, where his brother had found success. Deuce had topped out in the NFL, playing a few seasons in a Saints uniform before returning home to drag bail jumpers into the arms of a vicious and punitive court system down in South Georgia.

  In the world at large, he was a mid-level star of a formerly high-profile team, but coming back to Lumber Junction, he was nothing more than Deuce. Most people didn’t even call him by his legal first name. He was just Deuce, just the guy downing brews in Virgil’s Bar or snatching a knot in some redneck’s ass, just to get him to court.

  “Nothing, Deuce,” I said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You ain’t lying to me,” he said, halfway between a question and a declaration.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Not some supernatural shit? You don’t see the other side right now?”

  I was beginning to sober up, to feel the two halves of my personality converge again, so no, I didn’t really experience anything that wasn’t purely a hunch. I didn’t want to tell Deuce that I thought there was something on our heels, a real life hellhound like Robert Johnson sang about so many years ago, because I didn’t think it would do any good.

  “Just the cool breeze, my friend,’ I said. “It’s going to blow us right into Jacksonville, and then we’ll be able to deal with somebody else’s problems, for once.”

  At this, Deuce managed a weak chuckle, which sounded like a gold record right now.

  We shambled through the swamp until we came to a house on the edge of a nearly abandoned road. No one was home, but there was a junker of a car parked in the front yard.

  We got in. We checked everywhere. Deuce found the keys.

  I shrugged. “Guess if you live this far out, you trust that nobody will steal your car.”

  As we pulled away, I thought of what we had just survived. Perhaps the most bewildering situation of this whole affair, and that was even considering the two fingers I had lost.

  In any other situation, we might have shrieked with a kind of desperate glee, but instead, all we did was stare forward, speeding off toward whatever fate awaited us in Jacksonville. Willie barked once to mark the occasion; then, he settled into himself in the back of the cab.

  So far, the two of us — three, counting the dog — had committed a series of felonies leading up to this moment. I wasn’t sure we were completely responsible for the fire back at Buford’s, but I figured we might as well take the blame. Add grand theft auto to that, and we were looking at some major time.

  And yet, I could sense that there was something far more sinister, far more unsettling awaiting us in The River City. Deuce didn’t acknowledge it, or bring it up, but I was plenty aware that we were gearing up for something terrible.

  We couldn’t stop. There were bodies awaiting us, the souls of men and women requiring our attention. If he was willing to give up the entirety of his life for it, then so was I. Wasn’t like I had anything else going on.

  So we drove on, the shadowed figure at our heels, and I wondered as we rode how long we’d be able to stay ahead of it. Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks. It seemed whatever carnage we had unleashed on Savannah would come back and clip us before we had a chance to further disgrace ourselves.

  Part II

  Jacksonville Nights

  1

  Deuce and I limped into Jacksonville in our “borrowed” vehicle. As soon as we parked the son-of-a-bitching truck, Deuce unscrewed the license plate and tossed it on the passenger side seat.

  “This isn’t the city proper,” I said, stretching and yawning as we made our way down a narrow street filled with houses. The dog scuttled along beside us, occasionally stopping to lick and chew himself before popping back up and running to catch us.

  “Never said it was,” Deuce said. He was moving like he was made of raw nerves.

  “All right,” I responded.

  “Family lives outside the city,” he replied. “We’ll spend most our time there. But first, we’ve got to get down to business. Got to see what’s what.”

  After a fair bit of walking, we came to a convenience store promising “the best wings in Florida.” Somehow I doubted it, but I tended to a dozen of them while Deuce made several phone calls in a back room. Seems he knew the owner at least well enough to ask for a favor. Or else, the guy appreciated my friend’s gargantuan size and didn’t have the balls to say no.

  I fed half the wings to my furry companion as I stared out the window next to my table. I was sitting in a diner area thick with cigarette smoke. Some old-timers perched on battered bar stools in the corner, pressing the buttons on stand-up gambling machines.

  Deuc
e returned ten minutes later and poured himself a cup of the thick, black sludge this place passed off as coffee.

  “My cousin Reginald’s on his way,” he said.

  I exhaled. I had bummed a cigarette off one of the geriatrics and was busy smoking it down to the filter.

  “I thought you cut that shit out, too,” Deuce said.

  “Bad habits are easy to get into and hard to get out of,” I said.

  Deuce rolled his eyes and got up. “I need to walk,” he said.

  He got up and ambled out into the parking lot, making wide loops as he stared at his feet.

  Something bothered him. He wasn’t exactly an absent son, but I had never heard of him going home, either. Dude was the Golden Child who stayed golden because his family didn’t know what he was into.

  The question of what got his brother popped lingered with me. I wasn’t so blind I couldn’t see Deuce felt responsible. I didn’t have to ask him; I just knew. Something had happened involving Deuce that ended with his brother facedown in a ditch.

  Gambling was a possibility. Deuce was always either flush or floundering, depending on how well his teams were doing. He played the odds, but he was also fiercely committed to his teams. There was the Saints, of course, but when he got knocked down to second string and then washed out, he tried out for the Falcons, too. If he bet on them piss-poor Dirty Birds, I guess there was a reason he was always struggling with his gambling debts.

  I didn’t imagine the shady debts and IOUs started once he got back home, so maybe he racked up some while still in the pros. Maybe — and this was a big maybe — but maybe that was what distracted him from the mission, what knocked him off the starting eleven. Couldn’t hack it anymore, because he was more worried about the money going out to the debt collectors than the money coming in from living the dream.

  A late model Caddy first passed by, and then circled back around to the gas station, before stopping directly in front of Deuce. A dude, maybe six-four or six-five, stepped out and nodded a few times at Deuce’s monologue before grabbing his hand and pulling him in for a hug. Reginald, I assumed, clapped Deuce on the back and then stepped back, rubbing Deuce’s stubbly-but-mostly-shaved head.