Currency of Souls (18 page)

Vess's grin falters. He wonders if she includes him in her estimation of the townsfolk, but then reminds himself that he is an outsider, a mere visitor, and a woman as pretty and smart as the barmaid would surely know this.

"Can I see the bones?" she asks then, slamming her glass down on the counter hard enough to make Vess jump.

"Oh yes. She might even talk to you," Vess enthuses, and scoops the bones from his pocket, scattering them on the bar like a voodoo woman about to tell a fortune.

Gracie studies the bones for what seems to Vess to be a considerable amount of time, her expression unreadable until she smiles and looks up at him. The feel of her studying him is not an unpleasant one, and he is abruptly cast into those green eyes as helplessly as a man bound to an anchor tossed into the sea.

His drink no longer seems important.

He is a traveler, and in her eyes, he is seeing a place he has his whole life been forbidden from visiting. He will not, cannot blink.

"That's hers all right," Gracie says, and though she moves back a step, she does not look away, and for that Vess is grateful. "Not that I can really tell from the bones." She chuckles and the sound is magical, like pipe music to wounded ears. "I know because I put her there." His smile grows. He is not really paying attention to the words, only the lush red lips that form them and the piercing eyes that hold him in place.

"
Not here, no not here
!" the finger seems to wail from the surface of the bar, which is now oddly slick beneath his fingers. He ignores the cry, watches his world jar, once, twice, and believes it is his heart, which feels like it may explode.

Somehow, it starts to rain inside the bar. The shadows thicken and reach for him, attempting to steal away this delightful interlude. He resists, struggling to hold on.

"Can't always ssssay it right," he admits. "Werrdener..."

The barmaid's scent intoxicates him. He does not want this to end, and is saddened a great deal to realize, as crimson tears flow copiously down his face, his skull deflating under the weight of the long metal pipe Gracie is bringing down upon his head like a woodsman cleaving a rotten stump, that it already has.

Chapter Fourteen

Static shrieks from the radio.

Hands follow.

"What the fuck?" The knife is gone from my throat, tearing off a strip of my flesh as Brody propels himself away from the pale tendrils of mist that are snaking their way free of the CD slot in the car stereo. "What the
fuck
, man?"

I'm no less scared. While Brody's going to get hung up on the whole unnatural or supernatural angle here (maybe it reminds him of something from a horror flick he caught at the Drive-In with his high school sweetheart), this is a repeat of a moment I have been trying to avoid since the night Jessica died.

Brody claws at the door. "Unlock it for God's sake!"

It isn't locked. At least it wasn't, but maybe she locked it.

The hands spread out, push further into the car, the tips brushing against my chin, making me flinch, bringing me dangerously close to soiling myself. It's cold in here now. I can see my breath. I can see Brody's breath too, pluming over my shoulder.

"Open this goddamn door!"

The mist separates, the CD slot gapes obscenely, lit from within by white smoky light. The black plastic cradle keeping it in place begins to crack. And all the while Patsy Cline keeps singing "Crazy" at the top of her lungs, loud enough to make my eardrums vibrate with pain. I feel a hand on my shoulder and bat at it in terror, but it's Brody, trying to pull me through the seat. "What is it? What did you do?"

"It's our song," I tell him.

He starts kicking at the door.

She won't let it open.

Her face emerges sideways, slipping impossibly from the too-narrow gap, her features distorting, forming and reforming, coming apart like windblown cigarette smoke only to be whole again before the eye can track the movement. There is nothing but a rope of smoke connected to her head as it rises like a tethered balloon from the CD slot. Her face settles. The face I loved. A face I am terrified to see looming over me now.

Brody screams at the sight of it, renews his assault on the door.

"Oh shut your trap," Jessica commands and the door Brody is so desperately trying to break open is suddenly blown from its hinges with a tortured shriek of metal, clear into the trees on the other side of the road where it smacks against the trunk of a pine, falls, and is still. Brody doesn't wait to see whether she intends him to be the next object thrown at high velocity from the car. He hurries out into the road, and straight into the bruised, burned and bloody knuckles of Wintry's fist.

The kid drops and hits the ground hard.

"Can I turn this down?" I ask, desperately trying to avoid looking at that blue mask hovering three inches from my face.

"Why are you shakin'?"

"It was a close call with the kid, that's all. I guess I'm not as tough as I used to be."

"Right." Even though the expression is made up mostly of dust, smoke, and air, and, for all I know, my own memories of her, the doubt sweeping across it is all too clear. I let out a long low sigh. The kid's down for a while, thank God, and Wintry's holding on hard as he can. But in my frightened mind I can still hear a clock ticking, still feel those cold pennies in my pocket. I don't have time to hang around talking to my wife's ethereal head, no matter how sentimental that song makes me feel.

"Looks like quite a mess you've made for yourself," my wife says.

"Looks like it, yeah."

"It didn't have to be this way you know."

I smile, but it's a cold one. "Yeah, I do, but please spare me the list of reasons why. I don't have time to hear 'em."

The smoke coils in my vision. I'm tempted to close my eyes but that only leads to the dreadful thought of what she might do to open them, so I stare at the dashboard, at the undulating tendril that's keeping her tied to the mangled stereo. Somehow, it's still playing that song.

"You're still actin' the fool, Tom. Still pretendin' life will eventually work out just fine if you keep walkin' through it with blinkers on. What you can't see can't affect you, right?"

I say nothing. Have nothing to say.

"You shouldn't be in the least bit surprised that it's come to this."

"I'm not. Just didn't figure it would happen so soon is all."

"What wouldn't happen so soon? Do you even know what this is?"

I shrug, still can't look at her.

"It's not Hell," she says softly. "It's not damnation other than the one you condemn yourself to. The Hell inside yourself. Shun love and ignore hate, hurt people and dismiss those who truly need you...that's the best way to find yourself stopped at an intersection in Milestone lookin' up at a traffic light that hasn't worked in ten years, without any idea how you got there. When
did
you get here, Tom? Do you even remember?"

I nod slowly. Sure I remember, but I don't want to. Thankfully, it's a question that requires no answer, because she already knows it. What I can remember without fear is the woman who worked in the library in its last year of service, the woman who at first sight encompassed every adolescent fantasy I'd ever had of the quiet bookish brunette, hair tied back, spectacles perched on her nose to downplay the sultry beauty you knew in your heart was there. But Jessica was so much more than that. Within ten minutes of getting up the courage to talk to her, I realized she was way out of my league, not only with her looks, but with her frightening intellect and resolve. She was witty, clever, and iron-willed. The mating ritual was of little interest to her. No let's do dinner, then play phone tag until I trust you enough to fall into your bed. She was stuck in a small town that died a little every day. Her job was in danger. She needed a man to love her and provide for her, but railed at the slightest suggestion that it meant she would stay at home and play the good wife. No. She intended to study, paint and make enough money so she could get out of Milestone, maybe go back to school, and someday teach. A damsel in distress she certainly was not. A homemaker only under duress. Aprons would be worn not to bake cakes or apple pies, but to prevent the spatter from her paint from ruining her clothes. She was a bohemian, and if a prospective mate couldn't understand that, or considered it something that would pass once she discovered the joys of Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart, then they would be sorely disappointed.

She frightened me, she enthralled me, and I knew the day I left her company for the first time and stepped out into noon sunshine that looked a little brighter, a little cleaner than ever before, that I had to have her.

She frightened me then; she frightens me now, for the same reason: She was always right.

"I'm sorry."

The smoke clucks its tongue. "Too late for that, and I'm not the one you should be apologizin' to, unless you're goin' to play the same game with me that you're playin' with Kyle."

"I'm not—"

"Save it." Her face whorls, and reforms right in front of my face, close enough for us to kiss. It's hard to see her as my wife, so I avert my eyes once more. There's no denying where the voice comes from though.

God, I still love her.

"Why didn't you tell him?"

I shrug and it's pitiful. "There was never a good time."

"Bullshit. It would have required too much of you. It would have meant you'd have had to sit your ass down and talk to him like a man. You'd have had to face up to somethin' for the first time in your life, but like everythin' else, you turned your back on it. Just like you turned your back on me."

"I didn't—"

"What else do you need to lose before you see what you've done to yourself and the ones you love? How many more people need to die before the sun breaks through the clouds around that thick head of yours?"

"I have to go."

"No."

"I have to help him."

"Why?"

"Because he's...because I have to."

"It's too late."

I slam a fist on the steering wheel. "It isn't, and don't you say that." Panic courses through me. Like I've said, she's always right, and right now, more than ever, I don't want her to be.

Again her face falls an inch or two, trying to stay level with mine. "Why do you care? Why now is it so important that you race to his rescue?"

"I don't have to explain it."
Because I can't, and I don't want to have to think about it.
"He's my son."

"He doesn't think of himself as your son. I don't think of him as your son, and on any other day you wouldn't either. Do you think this will save you?"

I give a bitter chuckle at that. "Save me? From what? Myself? This town? That old bastard with his coins? There's no salvation here and you know that as well as I do."

"Then why fight it?"

"I don't know. For Chrissakes I don't
know
, all right? Why does there have to be a reason? Would you prefer I just sit here listening to you while whatever happens to our son happens?"

"Why not? It's what you've been doin' your whole life."

"I don't need to listen to this."

"Then why did you turn on the stereo?"

I scowl and reach for the keys. "To get rid of the kid."

"You're lyin'."

"You think so? Take a look around. The kid's out there on the road, not here with a goddamn Rambo knife to my throat.
That's
why I turned you on..."

I feel her smile and the urge to share it is almost overwhelming, but I kill the compulsion by reminding myself that for whatever reason, she's trying to keep me here.

"I'm going, and I'm switching this thing off."

"Why?"

"Because I don't have time to talk anymore, that's why."

A sad sigh. "Nothin' ever changes in your world, does it Tom? The whole town could wake up buried under a hundred feet of ice and you'd still plod along with that badge pinned to your chest, swearin' to protect while watchin' them all freeze. And an hour later, it'd be forgotten, locked away for good in that holdin' pen in your skull."

I start the ignition. The truck rumbles to life. Wintry's shadow eclipses the light through the passenger side window, where he stands, and waits, aware that the business in here is not something he wants, or has any right, to be a part of.

Finally, I look at her face, into her eyes. Death has made her one of her own sketches, a pale imprint on blue paper. Only the eyes look alive, miniature galaxies swirling in pockets of deep space.

"I don't know any other way," I confess, and quickly look away.

"There's always another way, Tom, but you've never been interested or tuned in enough to seek it out. Your way suits you fine, and that's why you're here now, waitin', maybe secretly hopin' it is too late when you reach Kyle so you won't have to shoulder the burden of what follows. You're your own puppet, Tom, even if today, someone else is pullin' your strings."