Phantom Nights (25 page)

"By the way," Mally said, admiring her evening's finery, a sleeveless dark blue shantung dress and a gold bangle-bracelet on her right wrist, "thanks for the dress and the jewelry. But I didn't really need
this
." She held up her left arm. She was wearing a gold strap watch that looked like Bernice Clauson's. "Never could afford anything this choice, that's for sure."

Alex glanced at Mally's bare feet.

"Oh-oh."

"Never mind. I'm not likely to pick up splinters."

"Uh, how about a pair of riding boots like Francie—"

"Not with this outfit, thank you very much."

"I still don't get what, I mean how I—"

"You dress me up in your mind before I—come. Otherwise, who knows what I'd look like?"

"You mean dead?"

Alex bit his sore underlip, looking away from Mally because he didn't like to see that she wasn't breathing. Made it difficult for him to draw breath himself.

"Reckon so, Alex. Dead and getting deader all the time."

He could see Mally perfectly, as if she created her own serene light, shining through her skin and not on it, a paper-lantern sort of light; otherwise there was a depth of blackness at the Crossing like nothing he'd known before. It was like being at the absolute silent, faceless edge of the universe.

There was an apparitional stir within the depot that he felt rather than saw. He looked in there through thick mesh wire covering one of the jagged windows, looked quickly away. He could dress up Mally, but not the other souls crowded inside, wanting to get a look at him.

"Train's on the way," Mally said.

"Another of those spook trains," Alex said with an unnerved grin.

Mally gave him a dire look. "There are white folks waitin' to board too, Alex."

"I know, I"—his lip was bleeding, never would heal if he didn't leave it alone—"see them. Long as you're with me, I don't have anything to worry about, do I?"

"Oh, Alex. Maybe it's not such a good thing, you being so close to a Crossing?" She looked east and up the track.

"Don't care for the looks of this one. Step back, Alex, against the depot wall. You don't want to get sucked in."

He did as he was told, heart seizing up, although he saw nothing, east- or westbound, on the track. But he could feel, again, pressure against his body. Suddenly there it was, like a silent explosion, sparks flying from the grinding of huge driver wheels on steel rails. A headlamp cold as a reptile's eye. Then he heard low wailing, but not from human throats.

Mally was in front of him, shielding him with her mildly luminous body, although he had no sense of that body, her skin on his. He only felt
protected
.

"Close your eyes and stop your ears. Do it now!"

There was an outpouring of souls from inside the depot. He felt as if the mild temperature on the platform had dropped to zero. The wailing, although he held his ears tightly, had the pitch of cataclysm. He felt such bottomless despair that he burst into tears and dropped slowly to his knees. When they touched the rough planks of the platform, all sound and phantom motion ceased.

Mally had stepped away from him. He looked up to see the last coaches of a train that was part black steel and, oh God!, part armored serpent slipping round the bend at Half Mile and into a red wound of the sky as terrible as a torn heart. It lasted for two blinks of his dazzled eyes.

"Are they going to hell?" he sobbed.

"There's no heaven or hell, which is what I always suspected 'spite of Sunday School and the Old Testament and those preachers who use hellfire for a fundraiser. There's only other worlds to go to, some a lot nicer than . . . the one I just left, and others that are—well, I can't say for sure. It's like on your side some folks get Palm Beach and others get Pittsburgh. But in the grand scheme of things, Alex, no matter how bad you mess up in one try at life, you get to do it again, like if you failed fourth grade. Difference is, next time around your fourth-grade teacher is going to be a lot stricter, and the new school won't have that nice playground, and there's no free lunch. Fail twice, it only gets tougher each time to make up your work."

Mally looked west, where the sky was no longer fulminating. All black again.

"Those folks ridin' westbound now are just some of your stubborn diehard failures, those who loafed and la-di-da'd through life or did real harm to others. Where they wind up, fourth grade is gonna be a lot like gladiator school." She looked at Alex from that characteristic side slant of her head, those calm, smart, brown eyes, her expression wry and piquant. That wise crease of a smile. "Maybe you ought not come here anymore. I'm real concerned that you may have too much—what's the word?—
affinity
for the Crossing and what goes on here. Like you said, something has been drawing you here nearly all of your young life, and there are . . . forces that will try to take advantage. No, don't ask me to explain. I'm just beginning to have a sense of things on this side. You could have been killed here twice already that I know about. Now, Alex. Whatever time it's got to be, that cute girl of yours must be waitin' and maybe worried that you haven't showed up."

"Telling me you won't be here anymore if I do come?" Alex said, getting to his feet.

"No. I'm not saying that. Because it's probably not up to me. The arrangement, or attraction we seem to have for each other, the power of it is strongest on your part."

"I
need
to see you, Mally. Because there's nobody else I can talk to!"

"Baby, language isn't just words. Which you may have latched onto already today, and you know what I'm saying."

"She'll change," Alex said dourly. "Sooner or later Francie will dump on me like everybody else does."

"Whoa now. Don't be bringin' that attitude around here, or maybe I'll just hop aboard the next train out, wherever it's bound."

Alex's eyes were streaming again. "You can't, Mally! You have to help me put Leland Howard in jail, because Bobby doesn't have the guts to do it!"

"Told you before—"

"But that must be it, Mally! Why I'm here and
you're
still here, because, like it or not, you can't rest until that yellabelly gets what he has coming!"

Mally folded her arms pensively. She had begun to appear insubstantial to him, yellow caution light from the signal bridge by the trestle shining where her heart ought to be. His power to attract and hold Mally was subject to a dynamism he understood no better than his own emotional peaks and falls.

"If you're right," she said, "I could be in for a long stay here. 'Cause that man may never get all he deserves—over there on your side."

"Can't you help me?"

"Show up in a courtroom like Banquo's ghost at a feast? Point an accusing finger at the man who raped me? You already know I can't . . ." Mally fell silent even as she slipped a little further away from his perception. "Huh. I'm forgettin' something. Alex, on his deathbed Priest Howard raised up to call Mr. Leland 'thief'."

"What about it?"

"Mr. Leland worked in town at the bank for a good many years 'til he quit to politic. Was in charge of the Trust Department."

"What's that?"

"Managed accounts for bank customers, those who had a good bit of money put by. Evening Shade is a poor county, but there's always those farmers and business people who save and save and don't spend much and invest in stocks and bonds or let a Trust Officer at the bank do it for them. A clever man like Mr. Leland could have done something tricky with a few of those accounts that would put money in his own pocket, and if he was patient and not greedy, his thieving might not be found out for a long time."

"But Old Man Howard could've got on to him."

"Well, it was his bank."

"Mally, I'm not seeing you so good anymore! Don't leave yet!"

"Not up to me. Just keep studyin' how I was, as if you were looking at an old snapshot. While I think on this. Mr. Howard gave me something a few days before he passed. Now what—?"

"Which train did he catch?"

"Not the prettiest, but far from the worst. Alex, you got to keep heart and mind focused on me now, I'm trying to—"

"He gave you something. A letter or—"

"No. It was a key. One that Mr. Howard said would unlock secrets that it was time to tell."

"So where—what did you do with—"

"I don't know."

"He gave you a key he said was important, and you don't know what you
did
with it?"

"We don't carry a lot of memories beyond the Crossing. Because our reckoning is done the second we all die, and there's no need to think anymore about how we acted or what we were like in our past life. That's only like a long dream we had. How much do you recollect from your dreams, not when you first wake up but a day or two later?"

"I don't know. You've got to tell me where that key is!"

"Was maybe two inches long. Steel, not brass. Umhmm. And it's buried now—or did I bury it?" He slammed a fist against the depot wall in exasperation. "Alex, I'm trying."

"I can hardly see you!"

"Just hold on. Think about me. Was I pretty to you, Alex? Did you maybe have a little crush on me like you do on Francie?
Remember
. Bring me back."

"Mal-LY!"

"Oh. It was canning day, with Verona. So hot. I was melting."

"Melting what?"

"The paraffin, of course."

"What was it you were putting up?"

"Tomatoes," Mally said.

Or had she said "potatoes"? He wasn't sure, and like that she had escaped his last tenuous hold on her, starlight where Mally had been, a bleak angle of the old depot's roof. The night at Cole's Crossing had resumed in full tranquility, the sky calm as the surface of a mirror reflecting a portion of the universe's blaze of wonders and benign night, quiet except for peeper frogs along the steeping banks of the moon-chased Yella Dog River.

"Oh shit," he said, tried to get it out. But with Mally's disappearance, his fluency was gone, voice box corroded like an old tin lock. Alex felt something brush his cheek, a light touch, whisk of gossamer, a remembrance kiss. Nothing more, although he stayed on the rotting platform by the shut depot used now only by ghosts spirited and dispirited, until the next train showed up, this one a rumbling earthbound freight with cattle, hopper, and flat cars that carried new harvesting machinery west, ammonium nitrate tanks sliding silver in the moonlight. A bindle stiff smoked in the partly open doorway of a Rock Island boxcar, nothing supernatural about him. All of it rolling by at a sedate forty-five miles an hour.

Alex retrieved his bike and pedaled down the road past Little Grove Holiness Church, past a parked stake-sided pickup truck with a whiff of pigs about it that he hadn't seen an hour earlier when he arrived for his nightly visit to Cole's Crossing, a truck with an accordion fender and empty cab; paid little attention as he side-slipped past. Maybe a young couple, blanket on the ground somewhere in leafy shadows having at it, no time for spying them out to lay low and enjoy a bare-ass show, and if he ever got the chance with Francie Swift, oh boy, slipping her panties down knees ankles burying his nose in them smelling
it
Jesus wonderful but that was a midnight fancy with the moonlight through his bedroom windows falling on his naked groin, one hand twisting the fat Schwinn handgrip and pedaling faster, flinging gravel, not seeing the red tip of a cigarette across the road in the shelter and shadow of a modest two-story lancet portico framing church doors. And faster, because he was excited and not only about his nascent sex life—young Alex.

Paraffin. Tomatoes
.

He knew what Mally must have done with the key entrusted to her.

Cocktails

Runaways

False Sanctuary

"W
ill he be back here tonight?" Bernice Clauson said. "There is so much talk in town already, you would not believe the gossip."

"I wonder who started it?" Cecily said, sitting in the kitchen with her blouse unbuttoned and Brendan drowsy at one breast but still suckling.

"Things just become
known
in a small town like Evening Shade, especially unsavory things. I was aware at the market today of a certain—well, hostility, to give it a name. The Gambiers have a nigra living at their house—"

"A Negro doctor who was educated at the Sorbonne."

"—as an invited guest." Bernie peered down through half glasses at the game of solitaire she was amusing herself with until Brendan went off to bed and she and Cecily could play hearts. But the boy would not part with her nipple just yet. "Even Rhoda thinks Bobby has taken leave of his senses."

"This is not like you, Mom. Come on, Brendy, you've had enough; let go, you little tiger, time for beddy-byes."

"Hem. I am from Wisconsin, a vastly more civilized state than this one, but as fate and an unfortunate marriage would have it, I've spent the better part of my last fifteen years in Evening Shade. I consider myself superior to bigoted attitudes, but really, dear, one must be sensitive to the mores of one's adopted place. What I am saying is, it was not seemly to have invited that man here in spite of his tragic circumstances, and of course I had
no warning
. At least couldn't Bobby have had the good judgment to offer Dr. Valjean your perfectly adequate accommodations in the basement instead of plopping him down in the room next to mine? It almost seemed to me like malice aforethought."