Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (20 page)

 
          
“I
could tell you were a sinner from the minute you climbed in. Christ shows them
to me, and it’s my duty to save them. I got to do it. I got to do it.” The
driver’s voice sounded almost frightened now. “You got to read, it’s my duty to
make you.”

 
          
The
needle of the speedometer was jittering, climbing. Sixty. Eighty. The Lincoln
slipped on the shoulder, sprayed gravel, righted itself.

 
          
Nothing
unfolded the tract. The last fiery sliver of sun was just slipping down behind
the pines. The tiny violet letters squirmed and blurred before his eyes. “I
can’t read it,” he said. “Too dark.”

 
          
The
driver touched a button. Dull light flooded the car. The man glanced sideways
at him, and Nothing saw that the irises of his eyes were red. No, not red.
Pink. Bright jewel-pink.

 
          
Nothing
was so intrigued that he forgot to be afraid. “Can you see?” he asked.

 
          
A
kind of radiance suffused the man’s face, lighting up that crazy horrible
beauty, making it glow. “My affliction,” he said. ‘They call me albino. I call
it the hand of Jesus upon me. I am stricken, and I walk with Him.”

 
          
“They’re,
pretty,” said Nothing. “I wouldn’t mind having pink eyes.

 
          
The
radiance disappeared. The speedometer trembled up to ninety-five. “God-given
affliction ain’t pretty. You go on. You got to read.”

 
          
Nothing
picked up the tract again. As he shifted in his seat, his foot crushed
something on the floor. Now he could see where the sour smell came from: dozens
of empty milk cartons littered the floorboards, some fresh, some faded with
age. Missing children smiled
sunnily
up at him,
refusing to acknowledge that now they were probably just scattered bones in a
culvert somewhere.

 
          
Nothing
took a deep breath and opened the tract. The paper felt slick and cheap between
his fingers. “What is eternal life?” he began.

 
          
“Go
on,” the driver told him. His breathing had begun to quicken.

 
          
An
hour later it was full dark outside the dusty windows. The Lincoln was cruising
at eighty. The albino had made him read four more tracts, and between that and
the sour-milk odor, Nothing’s throat felt as if someone had poured hot sand
down it.

 
          
“‘Don’t
let Satan deceive you, for he lies. BEING SAVED IS THE ONLY WAY INTO HEAVEN…’”
Nothing faltered. His voice was as hoarse as if he had just smoked a whole pack
of
Luckies
. If the albino was going to kill him and
dump him in a ditch somewhere, they might as well get it over with. If he
stopped now, maybe he’d still be able to scream. “I can’t go any more,” he
said, afraid to look at the albino. Instead he stared out the window. The
countryside was dark. Rain had begun to speckle the windshield, streaking down
through a patina of dust and highway grit. There was no light anywhere, not by
the side of the road, not on the horizon. Heavy clouds blotted out the moon.

 
          
The
Lincoln’s one working headlight picked out a line of bright orange cones by the
side of the road. Highway work. The cones flashed by slower … slower. Gravel
crunched beneath the wheels. The car came to a full stop.

 
          
The
albino cut the ignition and turned to Nothing. The only light came from the
glowing green Jesus on the dash, a ghostly light, faint and phosphorescent. The
painted eyes stood out like holes in the tiny mournful face. The albino stared
at Nothing, his face shadowed, his own eyes glittering flatly. When the
craziness in his face was not showing, he looked like a sick child.

 
          
One
of the white spiders touched Nothing’s leg.

 
          
Nothing
glanced at the door. The button was pushed down. Locked. Would he be able to
open it and jump out before the driver could grab him? The man was bigger,
though his body looked sickly and loose-jointed under the white robe. Rain
dashed against the window. Nothing peered out through streaks of dirt and
swashes of clean black night. What was out there? If he made a dash for it,
would anybody help him, or would the albino run him down? He stared at the milk
cartons, saw again the eyes of the missing children.

 
          
Little
dark smudges in a sea of red and white, utterly helpless.

 
          
The
white spider was crawling up his thigh, squeezing.

 
          
“Now
we’re
gonna
go over what you learned,” the man said
again. Suddenly Nothing wasn’t scared anymore. This situation was familiar.

 
          
‘Why
didn’t you just tell me what you wanted, instead of making me read all that
crap?”

 
          
“It’s
my duty,” the man said, but his voice shook, and his hand tightened on
Nothing’s leg.

 
          
Nothing
didn’t care what he had to do. Whatever it was, it would be worth it to get
away from this sour-smelling car, those lonely cardboard smiles. The albino’s
jewel-pink eyes slipped shut as Nothing bent over his lap and pulled his robes
aside.

 
          
This
was clumsy magic, but it was so easy; he had learned it in a hundred drunken
backseats, in Laine’s bedroom on lazy afternoons laying out from school.
Sometimes older men in fancy cars would cruise past the schoolyard and park
near the curb, out behind the cafeteria dumpsters. Some of the boys, if they
were saving up for a guitar or hurting for a bag of pot, would go out there and
blow them for twenty dollars a throw. That was what the sour-milk odor reminded
him of. Nothing had done it a couple of times back then, and he guessed he
could manage now.

 
          
The
albino had a huge erection that pulsed vivid red against all the whiteness.

 
          
Even
his pubic hair was like coarse cotton. Nothing had to stretch his mouth open
until he thought his jaws would crack. The white spiders twined in Nothing’s
hair and stroked Nothing’s throat and shoulders with a careful, psychotic
tenderness. “I got to do it,” he said as he came. “I got to do it.”

 
          
His
sperm was thin and milky, and burned Nothing’s raw throat as it went down.

 
          
But
Nothing had never minded swallowing come. Something about it settled his
stomach and made his whole body feel good.

 
          
The
albino gave Nothing five dollars-five lousy dollars, Nothing amended silently.
But the night air refreshed him as he pushed open the heavy door, and he got
out fast, before the man could decide that he wasn’t quite saved yet, that
another round of tract-reading and
blowjobbing
might
do the trick. The salmon-pink Continental rolled slowly away, the stained rope
trailing from its rear bumper, leaving Nothing alone on the roadside. The
albino had forgotten to turn his single headlight back on, but as the ear
crested a hill and disappeared, Nothing glimpsed a tiny green phosphorescence
through the back window. The red-eyed plastic Jesus, lighting the way through
the night.

 
          
Nothing
licked his lips. The taste of the man’s sperm, still fresh and raw, reminded
him of something Laine had once told him. Did you know, Laine had asked with
innocent lasciviousness, that come has almost exactly the same chemical makeup
as human blood?

 
          
The
countryside was hilly, sodden, absolutely black. Nothing tore the back of his
hand on a barbed-wire fence. Tears of pain made his eyes glisten as he sucked
at the blood. I’m alone now, all right, he thought. Nobody in the whole world
knows where I am.

 
          
His
sneakers were soaked with cold rain, and his toes ached to the bone. Long slick
grass squeaked under his feet. At last he staggered into an abandoned barn.
Great pronged shapes loomed around him abandoned farm machinery, heavy and
rusted. It might fall on him in the night, pin him to the musty floor, leave
him to struggle and die alone. He didn’t care.

 
          
The
rain raised dust and cobwebby chaff in the barn. Nothing sneezed once, twice,
three times—hard, choking spasms that bent him double. The third sneeze turned
into a loud sob. He curled up beneath the loft and sucked at the blood on his
hand. His tears soaked into the dirty wooden floor.

 
          
During
the night, while Nothing dreamed uneasy dreams, a small spider climbed
delicately through his wet black hair. It let itself down along the smooth line
of his jawbone, lingered briefly on his lips, and ran away over the damp
red-streaked fingers that Nothing pressed to his mouth, his tongue darting out
to lick the blood away as he slept.

 
          
It
was still hot when Christian drove into Missing Mile.

 
          
He
did not know he was in Missing Mile, not yet, for the road he came in on had no
town limits sign. The sign, a splintered pine plank with its painted letters
aged to translucence, had been knocked down twenty years ago by a man who
decided to take two lovers that night; his head lay against Vodka’s breast and
his hand was on Whiskey’s thigh when he lost control of his car. The sign lay
several feet from the road, swathed in kudzu, stained brown with blood long
dry.

 
          
So
Christian did not know he was in the town, not yet. He knew only that he was
almost out of money somewhere in North Carolina, that his fuel gauge was
hovering on empty, and that all day the sun had threatened to emerge from
low-hanging clouds. This, then, was where he would stop for a while.

 
          
He
came in on Highway 42 and took a left, which brought him into town by way of
Violin Road. He looked at the trailers and broken-backed shacks, the
weed-choked family graveyards, the heaps of rusted scrap metal, as he drove
slowly past. Christian felt no dread, no excitement; it did not really matter
where he lived. I might have gone all the way to San Francisco, he thought, and
when I saw the Golden Gate Bridge and the glitter of Chinatown, I would feel
this way still. He could not go back to New Orleans, so any other place in the
world would do for now.

 
          
A
small child stood by the side of the road, a girl seven or eight years old but
as thin as an old woman, dressed in a blue smock far too large for her. One
sleeve dangled, half torn off. The child was swinging something in her hand.
Christian drew the car up next to her and rolled his window down. The girl
stared up at him. Her eyes were gray, as washed out as the sky.

 
          
“Can
you tell me where I am?” he asked.

 
          
The
girl lifted one knobby shoulder, then let it drop. From her hand the object
still swung—a rat, its fur matted with the dust of the road, its head and
forequarters mangled, dried.

 
          
Christian
made himself look back at the girl’s face. Her pale eyes seemed depthless; he
could hardly tell where the irises faded into the whites. He caught the sour
brown odor of death from the rat, the faint tang of dried blood. “What’s the
name of the town?”

 
          
The
girl regarded him with her bottomless gaze. There was something wrong with the
symmetry of her face. Her eyes were unevenly spaced, her forehead too low, the
line of her brow crooked. Christian realized he was looking into the face of
profound retardation. This was one of the few gazes that could meet his own: it
did not fear, because it did not know.

 
          
He
thought briefly of taking her into the car. The smell of
roadkill
,
dry and fetid as it was, made him edgy with hunger. The nourishment from the
boy at the river’s edge was fading out of him. But he disliked the sight of her
crooked mouth and the various knobs of her body. Christian had often gone
hungry because of his weakness for beauties.

 
          
Wanting
to leave the little girl behind, he touched the toe of his boot to the gas
pedal. But in the rearview mirror he saw her empty eyes staring after him. The
mangled rat swung from her hand.