Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (43 page)

 
          
“Wait
till we get to New Orleans,” Ghost said. “You can buy me a bottle of Night
Train.”

 
          
His
hand crept across the seat, found Steve’s hand and held it tight. Steve thought
he could feel a message flowing into him through Ghost’s warm fingers: You get
yourself killed, Steve, and that’s it. That’s the end of the game for me too. I
know you’re bummed out and you think I’m the only person in the world yon can
trust, but I need you too. So you better keep your ass safe. I need you too.

 
          
Sometime
closer to dawn—but not too close, not dangerously so—a battered silver car
drove along the same road that Steve and Ghost had left behind an hour ago. A
Bel Air. Zillah hadn’t wanted to wait for Christian to gas up his car and give
Kinsey Hummingbird his notice, so they had all arranged to meet in the French
Quarter the following night.

 
          
Christian
had forgotten to turn his headlights on. For him the road was lit well enough
by moonlight and the faint glitter of the stars. And there were no other cars
on the highway, not this late at night.

 
          
At
least there had been none. But as he rounded a sharp curve, a pickup truck
screeched out of a side road onto the highway behind him. Its headlights burned
a blinding bar into his rearview mirror. Its horn blared as the driver saw
Christian’s car too late, and braked too hard.

 
          
Then
the pickup was skidding off the road, smashing down a short embankment, rolling
over and over. At last the truck came to rest against the trunk of a massive
pine. The windshield was cracked, blood-smeared.

 
          
Christian
pulled off the road and left his car. He picked his way carefully down the
embankment. The passengers in the pickup were dead, or nearly so; he could
smell that. There was no oily tang of gasoline, no smell of heat; the truck
would not catch fire. There was only the heavy scent of blood, rich and laced
with alcohol.

 
          
Christian
knew the accident had been his fault. After all, he had left his lights off.
But he had not meant to. And the truck had been going much too fast.

 
          
And
he was hungry.

 
          
The
truck’s passenger must have died instantly. His features were smeared across
his face in a blur of bleed and bone studded with broken glass. The driver was
still alive. His body lay twisted across the seat, his scrawny legs pinned
somewhere beneath the dashboard, but he was conscious. Blood soaked from under
his mesh cap, beaded his colorless hair. The driver moaned when he saw
Christian, and when Christian bent to the passenger’s torn throat, he tried to
scream.

 
          
But
he could not open his mouth. His chin had struck the steering wheel with
crushing force, and his jawbones ground together, pulverized.

 
          
As
Christian lapped the dying-blood off Charlie’s lips and chin and throat, Willy
could only watch.

 
          
Everybody
else had a car to drive, or a bunch of loud companions, or at least, like
Christian, a radio to play all night, brave rock and roll occasionally
exploding into bursts of static, whispering in voices that almost formed words.

 
          
Ann’s
decrepit
Datsun
would never make it all the way to
New Orleans; she had no car, no companion, and she had sold her Walkman to
another girl at work so she could see R.E.M. play at Duke University last
month. She couldn’t even listen to her Cocteau Twins tapes on her way to meet
her love.

 
          
By
the time she got home that night, she knew she was going to New Orleans. It had
been easy enough to stand there in the trailer yard talking to the tall
bartender, telling him she would follow Zillah anywhere. But when it came right
down to going—well, that had to be thought out for a while.

 
          
At
work, waiting tables in the Spanish restaurant whose gold flocked wallpaper and
red pile carpet passed for elegance in the North Carolina slicks, she thought
it out.

 
          
By
the time she left, she was able to phrase a note to the kitchen manager
explaining that there was a sudden illness in her family and could the balance
of her pay please be forwarded to Ann
Bransby
-Smith,
General Delivery, New Orleans, Louisiana: She didn’t really expect to see that
money. Maybe when Zillah saw how she truly loved him, he would provide for her;
the purple silk lining of his coat spoke of wealth.

 
          
She
had thought it out carefully, but she was still scared by her decision. Leave
Missing Mile? She had never done that, not even to go to college. After high
school graduation she hadn’t applied to any schools, telling herself she was
taking a year off to concentrate on painting. Steve and Ghost were going to
State. If they thought college was worth anything, then she might go.

 
          
But
the year turned into two. Steve and Ghost got disillusioned and came back home,
fell back into their dream of being rock stars.

 
          
She
couldn’t talk to Steve now, didn’t think she ever would again. But there was
still Eliot, only ten miles down the highway, who knew nothing about her night
with Zillah outside the Sacred Yew. She could see him any day after work. She
admitted to herself that she hadn’t wanted to see him much lately. He wouldn’t
smoke pot and was a little shocked that she did. He even wanted her to quit
smoking her unfiltered Camels:

 
          
“Can’t
you at least switch to one of the low-tar brands?” he’d asked, and hadn’t
understood why Ann burst out laughing. Eliot couldn’t even out drink her. What
kind of man got sleepy after drinking three
Lite
beers? The only thing Eliot really liked to drink was his loathsome
gin-and-Cokes.

 
          
She
couldn’t pretend that Eliot mattered anymore. He had tried to make Ann jealous
last weekend, telling her his ex-wife was coming to town. “She’s got no place
to stay,” Eliot had said innocently, “Do you think I should offer to put her up
here?” Ann didn’t give a shit. She had not stayed in Missing Mile for Eliot.
She had not stayed for Steve. She had stayed because of her father. Simon’s
strangeness had kept her here, kept her worried enough to postpone her life.
Now it was the final thing that drove her away.

 
          
If
Simon found out she was pregnant … well, he would think she was stupid. And
Simon did not suffer fools gladly.

 
          
But
none of those men mattered now. Steve, Eliot, Simon —they were just names
receding into her past, names with none of the
susurrant
magic of Zillah. She whispered his name to herself constantly. It was like the
smooth taste of whipped cream, like a deep tongue kiss.

 
          
She
drove out to Violin Road, but the trailer was dark. The black van and the
silver Bel Air were gone, and there was an air of emptiness about the trailer:
already it looked as if no one had lived there for a long time. They were on
their way to New Orleans, then. Soon she would be too.

 
          
Simon’s
car wasn’t there either, when she drove home. She wanted to see him one more
time, but she was afraid to. This was how it had to be. She began to pack. What
should she put in the one small bag she would be able to carry? She wished she
could take the new series of paintings she had begun. All of them were
unfinished; all were of faces with sly pink smiles and iridescent green eyes.
But those would have to stay. She wouldn’t need them in New Orleans.

 
          
Instead
she packed her black lace underwear and two pairs of old pink cotton panties.
Her toothbrush, her cigarettes, her little wooden pipe and her film can, which
contained three pinches of marijuana she’d cadged off Terry. She might need to
sneak a toke in some bus station bathroom between here and New Orleans.

 
          
Somewhere
in the swamps.

 
          
There
were a few crumbly leaves left in the bottom of her bowl, so she sneaked a toke
now. It put her at loose ends. She stood staring around at her possessions,
suddenly feeling unable to leave anything behind. Her mourning hat with the
little black veil, her record collection. The R.E.M. poster on the wall stared
down at her.
Stipe’s
eyes were like loss. Peter
Buck’s were like dark fire. How could she leave her posters, her clothes, her
canvases and paint box?

 
          
Frenziedly
she snatched at a black lace scarf and tied it around her throat.

 
          
That,
at least, would go with her. She put on a string of ebony beads, a gray
sweatshirt, a skirt with a torn silk lining. She was caught in the mirror,
adding lipstick and silver
eyeshadow
(in just
eighteen hours or so she might see her true love again; she must look
beautiful), when she heard Simon at the front door. She snatched off her beret
and with the side of her foot shoved the suitcase under the bed.

 
          
Ann
heard him stepping carefully through the mess in the living room. Picking his
way through the piles of books and newspapers, emphasizing how untidy the room
was. He dragged the books off the shelves, he read the newspapers, but she was
supposed to keep the house picked up. That was one of her duties. Simon was
very big on duties. Sometimes she wondered whether he didn’t strew his things
around just to make the absence of liquor bottles more obvious. He said he had
not taken a drink for five years, six months, and twenty days, and Simon was
never wrong.

 
          
Here
he was at the doorway, small and spare. His hair, uncombed for days, flared
wildly about his head. It was thick and snow-white; his skin was almost
phosphorescent in the gloom of the hallway. In the summer Ann worried about her
father’s health. He had come over from Dorchester twenty years ago, but the
hot, humid summers here still made him droop. He was like some glacial plant
whose fragile structure was supported by ice crystals; his hair went limp, he
perspired from the dark bags beneath his eyes. But in the winter he exuded a
kind of mad vitality.

 
          
Suddenly
she was sure he would be able to read her mind, or look through the mattress
and see the suitcase beneath it. He would begin to argue with her, calmly,
reasonably. But his argument would be slippery. There would be no tail end she
could grab onto so that she might argue back. In ten minutes she would feel as
if she were trying to wind up earthworms on a spoon. In half an hour she would
feel as if she were trying to drive a nail through a blob of mercury. In an
hour or two or three, he would have her talked out of the whole stupid notion.
She would not go to the Greyhound station, would not catch the all-night
express to New Orleans.

 
          
She
would never see Zillah again.

 
          
Simon
had talked her out of so many things.

 
          
But
all he said now was “Good evening, daughter.”

 
          
As
always, the form of address half-annoyed her and half-warmed her. “Hi, Simon,”
she said.

 
          
“Your
day was…?”

 
          
“
Rawther
shitty.”

 
          
He
nodded and allowed himself the slant of a smile. Ann’s voice had as much of a
Carolina twang as her mother’s had had, but she knew it amused him when she
imitated his accent. “As was mine. I dissected three toads today. There was no
change in any of them.”

 
          
Simon
had taught once, so the story went, at one of the Great Universities of the
World.

 
          
Ann
wasn’t sure where. He hinted at Germany, France, the United Kingdom. Now
retired, he spent the days in his study trying to change the chemical composition
of various types of blood.

 
          
Until
recently he had used his own, and sometimes hers; once Steve, drunk off his
ass, had offered a sample.