Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (8 page)

She left him with his soul in his hands, playing it out on a keyboard. Raven LaCour walked up Sweetly Dreaming Lane, past her parents’ home, through the glow cast by Asa Strug’s reader board, between the cement lions at the gate, and across the highway to the neon-lit oasis of noise, beer, and music that was the Blue Moon Tap Room.

THE BLUE MOON
Tap Room was actually an arrangement of old mobile homes with the walls removed and floors joined together with pieces of nailed-down tin, giving the interior a crazy quilt effect. A battered walnut bar trucked in from a ghost town stretched for fourteen feet, flanked by the standard issue bar tables and chairs of no particular provenance. Free beer advertising pieces in tin and neon crowded walls lined with pinball machines old enough bring a mint at auction. The pool tables were antique and perfectly balanced, but the stage was the main attraction.

You never knew who you’d find onstage at the Blue Moon. Maybe a group of slick country pros on Social Security getting together on the weekends to stun audiences with their polish and professionalism. Maybe one of the shifting groups of Bone Pile men who could tear up a stage and tear out your heart with how well they played. Tonight, she’d settle for some Park kids hammering out Van Halen covers. She just wanted to hear someone make some noise. Someone who wasn’t her beloved and miserable father.

Neon tubes lit the gravel in the parking lot and lent Raven’s hat a pinkish glow. A man stepped out the door just as she stepped up to it. He stood back to hold it open, his rings glittering in the road house light. “A blessed evening to you, Sister.” His words were Christian, but the look he gave her was far from brotherly. “Well, I’ll be. You’re Rowena Gail LaCour. I’d recognize that scar anywhere. I guess the Littlest Angel for Christ is all grown up.”

She drew up straight as a radio antennae and just as likely to whip. “My name’s Raven.” She remembered Hank Heaven, the manager of a group called the Cowboys for Christ, his creased suit and absurdly large hat. He was always staring at her scar. He’d actually tried to touch it. “You’re Hank Heaven.”

“I go by the Right Reverend Henry Heaven, now.”

“Reverend? So you’re a preacher, now? I thought you were a Jack Mormon.”

He smiled a bit. “Yes, I was raised Mormon, but I got the Call. I’ve got a ministry here in the Park. Your mother didn’t tell you?” Raven blinked. As far as her mother went, Raven blanked out most of what was said in her direction. Clearly, she should have been listening more. He smiled that fishy smile of his. “You ought to come to services.”

As a child, she’d stomped on his feet when he got too close. As an adult, she decided if he got too close, she’d just knife him. “I don’t really care who you are or what you’re preaching, I just want you out of my way.” She pushed past him into the bar, shaking with agitation. She didn’t understand it. Hank Heaven was a sleaze bucket, but not exactly a threat. Her entire body felt danger in the air. What in Jesus Christ’s name is going on with me tonight, she wondered. Beau came down the bar with a shot of Maker’s Mark and a Bud chaser. “Hey Raven.”

“Evening, Beau.” She tossed back a shot, calmed herself. “That skinny fella with all the pimp jewelry. Hank Heaven. I heard he was trying to start a church?”

“He already has. He preaches Sunday services in the Clubhouse. He’s brought the Bone Pilers in with music.”

Well, if anything would bring the Bone Pilers to God, it would be music. Bone Pile, slightly south of Ochre Water, wasn’t even a town, really, just a place. It was as if there had been a great broom that swept the country of its hillbilly population, and the sweepings settled like dust in the hills of Bone Pile. The hills were cooler than the desert, and there were a few secret springs. Families settled in clan-like groups of barefoot women and music-loving men. “And you said they were meeting over to the Clubhouse? My mother must be in on that, then.”

Beau smiled. “I couldn’t say, Raven. I don’t see much of Rhondalee.” He moved off to help another customer. Raven looked around the bar. The usual beer-fueled foolishness was going on. Pool in one corner, politics in another. Quentin Romaine sat at the end of the bar, bending his elbow and talking to Jeeter Tyson about religion, how Jesus wanted the white man to have dominion. The Park’s stupidest man nodded along in agreement.

A group of Bone Pilers hunched over a table in the corner, guarding their stacked instrument cases with the toes of their impeccable boots. She saw a couple of McGillicuttys, a McIver, a Dunnery. She was never sure of first names, since the men traded identities and drivers licenses around to evade warrants from unpaid tickets. They all had thick black hair, ravaged smiles, and skin so pale they glowed in the dark. Aside from their unsavory good looks, Bone Pile men were notorious for their musical abilities. If it had strings, a Bone Pile man could play it, and play it heartbreakingly well. And now Hank Heaven was leading them all to Jesus? Only music, she thought, only music could have let him near those men.

Raven had never messed with a one of them, but she still enjoyed looking at the Bone Pile men. She especially admired that Dunnery, was that Angus or Enoch? Whichever one it was, his poisonously handsome features were marred with anger. He was arguing with a man whose face she couldn’t see. The stranger wasn’t a Bone Piler, because he had back fat and there was no fat anywhere on a Bone Pile man. His hair was light and thin, and much too clean.

His voice rose hard and sharp over the jukebox. “I’m offering you a SWEET DEAL!”

All over her body, fine hairs rose in waves. Her world narrowed to three things; the sound of her own heart, the feel of her knife in her hand, and glacial passage of one moment of her life.

The tock of a cue ball making impact with another ball broke the spell. The bar sounds came back one at a time. The clack, smack and ding of the solitary pinball machine that had managed to attract a player. Glasses set down sharp on tables. The strike of a match in the hand of a man near her. The chuckle of a young girl, leaning over the bar to flirt. The song on the jukebox that had been playing all the while. And of course, the hard whine of the blonde man’s arguing.

She looked down at her hand, forced it to release its grip on the shot glass. Beau set down another shot. “You’re awful pale for an Indian. You see a ghost? Your dad says the air’s full of ’em tonight.”

She had, indeed, seen a ghost. How many years had she been pulling into stops, seeing his rig, moving on. Turning off the radio whenever his voice came over, rolling past wherever he was. How many times had she counted the miles to that rest stop, and away from it. Counting the miles, the months, the years between herself and that rest stop. And there he was.

“Beau, what the hell is Gator Rollins doing here?”

“Gator? Not drinking, for one thing. Being as how he’s a Mormon. He’s part of this stingy crew of teetotalers I have up here now. He’s planning on entering the talent show under the management of the Right Reverend Heaven. Staying up at his trailer, too. I guess they know each other from way back. They came here tonight to talk to me about the talent show. They plan to win it, collect that prize money and roll off to Nashville with a big development contract. Gator’s the front man, the Reverend is the brains behind him, and they want all those Bone Pilers for back up. They just need a name for the band, that’s all. I suggested Gator Rollins and the Inbreds.” Seeing her face, Beau swallowed his laughter and wisely went to mop up the bar somewhere else.

The two of them together. Well, that figured, now, didn’t it?

“What do you know, Babygirl?”

The nape of her neck swarmed with spiders, there were ants on her arms, cockroaches making their way up her legs, a giant, swarming mass of filthy scuttling things let loose by the sound of his smooth, hard voice. Raven breathed in deep through her nose and swung herself around. He showed no surprise at the knife in her right hand.

“Afraid of something, are you?”

He held up both hands, palms out, and backed away so smoothly that it looked as if he were gliding, not stepping into the darkness.

She left the bar with his eyes on her back.

CROSSING THE HIGHWAY,
she fought the urge to run. Her head swam, and her stomach cramped enough to kill her, and she made it a hundred feet up Sweetly Dreaming Lane before losing her liquor all over the custom pin striping of Harley Ridgeway’s F150. She staggered over and sat down on one of the railroad ties that Quentin Romaine used to edge his yard.

What to do, what to do. Up the lane, her family slept, clueless, believing themselves safe in bed. Hello, Pop. You dreaming away about ghosts? Hello, Mother. You dreaming about being the next Naomi Judd? Hello, Annie Leigh. I bet you aren’t even asleep.

Annie Leigh.

She breathed deep, getting a lungful of creosote for her troubles. And then, into the void of her drawn breath came a noise. A high tone, a musical wail, the spiraling shriek of imminent death made by a jet sucked out of the sky and on its way to oblivion, the engines singing a suicide song while every passenger screamed to God for mercy. Beauty and terror. It swirled round her head in echoing chorus, a call, a cacophony, love and mayhem and hatred and blood. The sounds of hellfire and wrath.

“I don’t believe in Hell,” she said out loud as her vision greyed. “I don’t.”

Anyone who saw her fall would have called it graceful, how she sank to her knees and onto her side, her long fingers curled up gently into her palms. But no one saw it. Raven was out cold.

Around her, the Park was still.

SHE WOKE IN
a panic. A jackhammer headache pounded behind her eyes from that demon-noise or hell-song or whatever it was, but at least that noise was gone, that song from Hell or whatever it had been. She sprang up, boots hitting the blacktop, turning like a top to find her direction. She wanted to get to her rig. That was all she wanted, to get to her rig. Her rig was safe, and if she had to stack her family up in it like firewood to keep them safe with her, she would.

She would do whatever she had to.

The rig was parked by Levi Skinner’s. She made herself remember where that was, where she should go. She’d do that first, that one thing, find her rig. And then she’d do the next damn thing, whatever the hell that might turn out to be. As she approached the ugly lump in the road, she was focused on getting around it, not what it might be. It was a lump. It was an obstacle.

It was the Reverend.

He was preaching to the pavement, facedown, arms spread, the moon shining off the white topstitching of his royal-blue polyester suit. It was only a matter of time until a Park resident rolled down the street and mistook the Reverend for a Dacron-clad speed bump. She didn’t mind the idea of the Reverend checking out, but the impact would send the driver through the windshield and send a perfectly nice truck to the body shop. Might even bend the frame.

She pushed him with her boot and stepped back instinctively, expecting a grab at her ankle. “Hank Heaven! Wake up!” He didn’t move. She gritted her teeth and grabbed his humped shoulders and rolled him over. She expected to see that leering set of false white teeth flash up at her.