Currency of Souls (21 page)

I can't look at him. Won't.

Then I do.

Help him down, goddamn it. He's still alive
.

I'm back on my feet in an instant, hugging my boy's legs, my arms tight, lifting, lifting. Trying to unbreak his neck; trying to unchoke him. He rises, but doesn't make a sound. Christ...he doesn't make a sound.

No words, no breath. No life.

He's dead and gone.

Slowly, so slowly, and gently, I let him go until the rope is tight once again and his body twists in a breeze that isn't here.

Another man, another
father
, might persist, try to free him, try to save him, wailing and moaning all the while, crying out to God, promising retribution for this heinous injustice.

But I'm not another father.

And God isn't listening.

I find myself looking at my son's shoes, note that they are cleaner than mine, though we've walked the same paths tonight. Guess that probably means something. All I take from it is the fact that they're cleaner, and that the laces are untied, same way they always were when he got done with a day's work. He never could tie laces right, but he sure did a hell of a job with that noose.

His belt buckle is silver, a rearing horse locked inside an oval, and it glints in the sunlight, until the body swings around to the shadows again, then that silver mare turns black.

The floor hurts my knees as I let it draw me down again. Bare wood. I want to claw it to splinters, but I'll wait. I have to wait to see if I choke to death like my boy because the feeling in my chest makes me believe that's what's going to happen. Someone has their hands around my throat, but there's nobody here but us.

Just me.

Just me, and my boy, who's wearing a brown noose pulled so tight it's sawed almost clear through the skin.

Just me and my boy, who's sticking his tongue out at me like he did when I teased him about the girl he used to walk home when they were in second grade. How many years ago was that? What was her name? Nancy something. Ellis, maybe. Damn it. Pretty girl too, but she moved on. She didn't want to, and I guess Kyle didn't want her to either. But wish in one hand...

"Shit in the other," I say aloud, wondering if my voice is enough to make Kyle swing some more, because aside from that creaking rope, the room is deathly quiet, deathly still, which I suppose is only appropriate.

On the floor, there's a chair, lying on its back, one its runners broken. I wonder if Kyle changed his mind as he stood atop that chair until the chair decided for him.
Sorry, son. Too late now. Your old man hasn't spent your time wisely.

I won't look at his face, though it begs me to.

I won't.

I've taken the blame for my wife's death though I wasn't even in the car. I got out, she drove away, and two hours later we pulled my Lexus out of the Milestone River. I never told Kyle that. Never told him that we found Alfie Tomlin, the banker, in the passenger seat either. No, I kept that stuff to myself because once she was gone, I was all he had left. I was what he needed. A target. Someone to blame, to hate, and I let him.

I let him.

You're the victim
, Cadaver said. Not Kyle.

He lied, of course. For all his sympathy and confessions, he lied to me. I'm not the victim. I'm not the one swinging from the rafters or burned to death.

I'm alive, and though I'm about to make myself a promise that I'll rectify that before the sun goes down, I'm going to forget about Hell and devils and men with no voices and miraculous resurrections and ghostly spouses, and the cosmic or celestial balance that has made us all its slaves. I'm going to put out of my mind all thoughts of betrayal and lies and sin and hate and love.

Fuck all that.

Right now I'm going to restore the only balance that matters a goddamn right at this very second in my life.

And I'm going to enjoy every minute of it.

* * *

I expect to find him gone, fled like the yellow son of a bitch I know him to be, and when I storm into the parlor, he's nowhere in sight. Rage is making me shake harder than a man in an electric chair, but when I turn, there he is, the front door open, poised, waiting, as if for me to accompany him. Like we're about to take a nice pleasant walk of the grounds. The daylight doesn't reach far into the hall. Maybe he's holding it back. Maybe it doesn't know how to penetrate the sickness, death and misery he wears for a coat.

"You killed him."

He clucks his tongue, and I've just decided that's the first thing I'm going to rip from him.

"You know that ain't true." It's hard to hear him over the sound of my own blood roaring through me. "Maybe not in your head where the fury's flowin' from, but deep down you—"

Fists clenched tight and held by my sides, I start toward him. "I'm through listening to you telling me how I am, what I am, and what I'm supposed to do. And you're all done messing with folk's lives. You're going in the ground today, Cadaver, right next to Eddie and the whore and the only choice I'm giving you is whether or not you want to be dead or alive when I do it."

I need him to be unsettled, to look shaken. I need him to be afraid, but he isn't. Nothing about him has changed much, except maybe for his shoulders, which have drawn in a little as if he's waiting for the first blow. But there's no fear in him. Nothing. He just looks sad, like none of this is a surprise, as if he saw the whole damn thing in some fucking crystal ball.

"You know somethin'?" he asks, when I reach him. "I would very much like if you could do that. But you can't, and you ain't the first to offer. Not by a long shot. And every time I hear it, I feel somethin' I'm not allowed to feel, somethin' I've all but forgotten how to feel. The very thing you and everyone else in this town squanders with every breath you take: Hope. So by all means, Tom, do your worst. Make your last stand in a town that has nothin' left in it for you to protect even if you continue to pretend it does. Put me in the ground for a spell to teach me a lesson you still, despite all you've lived through, haven't learned yourself."

Words. That's all they are. More words.

I close the space between us with one lunge, and insane animal sounds fill the hall, like there's a pack of crazed starving jackals pouring down the stairs. Takes me a moment, but as soon as my hands find Cadaver's coat, and then his neck, I realize that sound is coming from me. Spit flies from my lips into the old man's face, flecks of foam stippling his sallow cheeks, and still,
still
he doesn't look threatened, and that refusal to be afraid, to at least pretend I have a hope of ending all of this by ending him, is going to drain the fight from me if I don't do what I need to do and fast.

"Bring him back," I snarl, grunting with the effort of trying to strangle a man whose throat is mostly metal. He shakes when I throttle him, but his eyes, one living, one dead, stare at me with aggravating calm, his hands by his sides.

"Bring him
back
."

"And what will you do for me?" he whispers.

"Just bring back my son."

He mouths the words, "I can't," and then the bastard smiles, adds a silent, "I won't" to it and my hands fly from his throat to his face, to those eyes. He jerks back, and somewhere inside me I'm celebrating the first reaction I've gotten from him, but I'm too focused, to driven to rejoice for long. His skin is cold—but not cold enough to indicate he's already dead and therefore can't be killed—and my hands brace his face, thumbs finding his eyes.

"If you won't fix it," I growl at him. "You won't ever again see what you've done to people." And as if I'm pressing them into fruit to test for ripeness, I let my thumbs sink into his wrinkled sockets, into the too dry but soft orbs of his eyes.

He doesn't make a sound, but he's beginning to sag. The feeling of victory increases, filling me with cold fire, igniting some part of me that's been buried for far too long, the part of me that knew once upon a time how to make others pay for their sins.

And goddamn it, I'm not stopping until
someone
has paid.

Cadaver's legs buckle beneath him. He's kneeling, arms still by his sides, face still cradled in my hands, a queer hissing noise coming from the box in his throat. That little microphone clatters to the floor.

"Fight me," I command him, because I want him to. I want him to fight for his life like everyone in Milestone has had to do because they were too blind to see it when it deserted them.

He gasps as his eyes give way beneath my thumbs. I increase my grip, letting them sink farther, drilling toward his brain, or whatever ugliness fills his rotten skull. Even without his eyes, he could be dangerous.

Sweat trickles down between my shoulder blades.

Cadaver mouths something as watery blood streams down his face, but I can only feel his lips move against the heel of my palm now. Dry and dusty, like the wings of a moth. I lean close. "
Fix it
." It can't be this easy. But it seems it is. Three years being governed by an old man and a lunatic priest and they were both made of flesh and blood at the back of it all. What utter fools we've been.

Cadaver, who hasn't struggled from the beginning of this, gasps one more time and I feel his weight pulling away from me, his body headed for a resting place in the corner by the door.

Milky fluid squirts and reflexively, my grip loosens. There's a gruesome squelch as my thumbs slide free of the man's eye sockets. He falls back, legs folded beneath him, his skull thudding against the hall wall.

He's still smiling.

I wipe my hands on my pants, and stand over him. The fresh air drifting through the open door cools the sweat on my brow but I'm shaking so hard I'm afraid it will shake me to pieces. My guts seem about to escape through my throat. They're headed off by desperation. "How do I make this stop? How do I get him back?"

He gives the smallest little shake of his head.

"Goddamn it,
tell
me or I'll carry you out of here in a basket."

He does, but I have to bend low to hear the words. "It wouldn't interest you," he says.

"What wouldn't?"

The fist he brings up is trembling, and for a moment he looks like an old man about to waggle it at some pesky kids who've left a flaming bag full of dog turds on his stoop. But then a twig-like finger springs free and bends toward him, indicating he wants me to come closer.

I hesitate, and in that hallway where the light is hesitating too, time passes unmeasured by the fall of the old bastard's coins. I hunker down, knees crackling, my gut straining against my belt.

"Tell me what to do."

With that maddening smile still mangling his lips, he brings his head close and whispers in my ear. "You have to give me what
I
want."

* * *

Wintry's been near-death since the fire, but in Milestone, even if you don't have an old man's pennies in your pocket, you can draw the time out just enough to get your business done. I've been doing it for too many years to count, and Wintry's doing it now.

With his last reserves of strength, he leans against the doorjamb, awaiting my word. He says nothing, offers no condolences, asks no questions, just stands there, eyes narrowed against the gnawing pain, watching as I return from the kitchen, a bread knife clutched in one hand. When I ask for his help in cutting Kyle down, he dutifully steps over the threshold where Cadaver is playing possum, and accompanies me upstairs.

My boy is as I found him, though he's stopped swinging, his shadow like a painted thing on the polished floor. The wounds mask the emotion on Wintry's face as he supports Kyle's legs while I drag the bed away from the wall and far enough into the middle of the room to allow me to mount it and reach the noose. There is little give in the mattress, though I can feel the hard springs pressing through. The rope has been looped three times around one of the rafters. It won't be hard to cut and the blade is sure.

"Lift him," I instruct. Wintry does. The sound of his breathing is like a steam train leaving the station.

Kyle is turned away from me, and I'm thankful for that. All I can see is the back of his head, the dark unruly hair. I can't remember the last time I touched it, but I won't touch it now. Later, maybe, when Wintry's gone.

I begin to saw at the rope, tears or sweat running down my face, I can't tell which.

The first loop snaps with a labored groan.

Then the second. When the third gives way the boy is free, and falling, but this time it is not a noose that catches him, but Wintry, whose eyes now seem to contain an emotion I have never seen in them before. It's the same look he once drew from me whenever Flo lavished attention on him.

Envy.

And it's directed at the boy cradled in his arms.

Chapter Seventeen