The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (8 page)

Ten minutes later another eastbound
train came and I wondered if I’d been following the wrong set of tracks and
took a moment to get my head together. All around me, the city gave way to an
old industrial park. The rotting steel buildings reminded me of home, which I
took as a positive sign. With the red dog and coal ash crunching beneath my
feet and my eyes closed, it felt just like walking along the tracks after
school, hoping somebody would save me before I actually had to set foot in the
front door. Jeff for a guitar lesson. Therese for a quick walk around the
baseball fields, which meant making out and a hand job usually. Stu with a J
and an idea for a new song.

The old steel skeletons rattled in the
wind, loose metal banged against unseen support railings, bird cries echoed
through their wasted frames. And as soon as I got used to seeing them, they
were gone, devoured by suburban neighborhoods and middle schools. Not exactly
the kind of place to begin an adventure. Even the pre-fab plastic churches
lacked the magical feelings the big brick churches back home radiated.

Another eastbound train cleared me off
the tracks, activating a new wave of doubt. I started accepting the idea that
I’d based this whole plan on the assumption that I wasn’t kidding myself. That
I had been operating under the influence of total sanity for the last few days.
As far as I could tell, nobody ever considered me totally sane after everything
that happened last year. The sky grew darker and I started to think maybe I
wasn’t even fit to be with a woman like her.

I knew my mood would make it easier
for me to make dangerous decisions. I wasn’t John Lennon or Joe Strummer. I was
Preston-fucking-Black and sometimes I thought dumb thoughts. There were a
hundred million people out there who could tell you that I could’ve done a lot
better than ask Robert Johnson for help getting my girl back.

I wasn’t one of them.

With the city a few miles behind me
the houses all started to look the same. Like the same cookie cutter had been
used row after row. The rails split from two to four, to eight lines and behind
me the steady chug of a locomotive grew. I stepped over the tracks, trying to
anticipate which ones this train would take. Red lights mounted on a scaffold
high above cast a hellish glow onto me. Puffs of steam from air brakes always
came from the wrong direction and I reminded myself that the hotel only sat a
few miles away. I kept telling myself that I was wrong, and that I just made
the wrong decision because I wasn’t quite ready to lead yet. Being a follower
was my best bet. And if I just called Ben I could sleep back at the hotel and
let them work on getting Katy back. I’d crossed through the gates of
misunderstanding a long time ago—before the Currence farm, before kicking the
shit out of my old man in front of the Evansdale Towers, before the record.

And nobody believed any of that
either.

As I kicked a hunk of limestone along
the tracks, a westbound train, the first of the night, came into the rail yard.
It slowed and rested on the tracks ahead, breathing heavily like a napping
bulldog. Guys with flashlights inspected the undercarriage, and as soon as they
passed I knew I could board one of the empties. The smell reminded me of the
county fair and the grease they used for the rides. The double Ferris wheel
spinning through the night, glowing like a fortress made of stars. When you’re
little, that’s the pinnacle. Your mom watches you on the carousel but you’re
watching the double Ferris wheel. Then you have a strip of tickets to share
with your brother and you’re talking him out of the bumper cars and into the
Round-Up. Then you get a girlfriend and you’re on the double Ferris wheel
trying to spit on people or harass the flunkies pulling the levers. You start
going to the fair to score weed or girls. To drink in the parking lot. Then
it’s your band on the small stage playing Stone Temple Pilots wondering how you
get back onto the carousel.

And that’s why I hopped on the fucking
train. Not because I thought Ben or Pauly were right. But because I knew I was.
For once, I knew my plan was the plan. She was my girl, the only girl I ever
truly loved and I’d bleed all over Alabama and Mississippi to get her back.

The engine released a sharp whistle
blast and drifted forward. The cars inched ahead until each one caught the next
car’s connection with a bang. Bang after bang until the last one, faintly
banging at the end of the line. I knew we’d be moving.

The sky turned green with the
eastbound storm. Lightning flashed at the extreme edge of flat cotton fields.
The sky never looked blue or black—it was always green with scattered bits of
slate floating down like broken butterfly wings. The color of an old bruise.
When lightning flashed, black clouds jumped out of the sky and returned just as
fast. Thunder followed, rattling the cars, shaking the very rails themselves.
The sky didn’t look like the kind of sky that forgave.

It looked like the kind of sky that
pushed rivers into basements. The kind of sky that carried away cars and
mothers coming home from work. The kind of sky that gave newscasters something
to talk about the next day when they rolled through your neighborhood in their
news vans, talking about how this used to be the school and that was the
church. My ears popped as the pressure dropped. All across the flat countryside
dogs barked at the sky. The cars bucked and jumped along the tracks.

I didn’t see any lights from houses or
cars or grocery stores or hotels. Just the light from the sky, the green light
that let me see a thousand miles before fading back into the clouds. And I
couldn’t compose songs or apologies or even think of what I’d say if I ever saw
Katy again because the lightning stole my words from my throat. I knew this was
one of those times to sit and watch and stay out of the way.

When the rain came it didn’t come from
the sky. It came from across the fields in horizontal bands that got me wet
from the bottom up. I shivered in the green light and decided I’d made a
mistake. That I wanted off the train and I’d call Pauly to come pick me up as
soon as I figured out the name of the town I ended up in. That I’d gotten in
over my head again. That all my words about being sad and mopey were just words
that I couldn’t control as much as I controlled breathing or my heartbeat.

And I supposed that was why I was
doing this. Knowing she was gone left me with few options. I had to go to
Mississippi. I knew Johnny Cash wouldn’t steer me wrong.

Under flashes of white and green light
the landscape opened up into vast muddy cotton fields waiting to be planted.
Shotgun shacks shook in the violent wind. The flooded lowlands reflected the
white and green lightshow like an old black and white TV shut off before going
to bed. That was how I knew I was in Mississippi, a landscape described by Led
Zeppelin and Johnny Cash and Elvis. Like, my bones knew even if my head didn’t.
I couldn’t think of a better place, or better night, to seek the help from
another plane. The way I felt on that train, alone, like no part of me touched
any other living thing was a feeling I carried until I met Katy—the one voice
out of thousands that connected with me. And when I responded, she acknowledged.

Last summer, while her shoulder healed
after that shit with the Lewises, she led me into the mountains above her pap’s
house with a blanket and a packed lunch.

We took our time strolling through
ferns that smelled like peaches and fields where butterflies were too fat and
lazy to even fly away when we passed by. Clumps of trees broke up the wide
meadows. The wind blew warm air from the valleys on the other side. I spent a
lot of time worrying we’d get lost, but never said anything because I trusted Katy.
Tree trunks got thicker and farther apart. The little plants that grew between
them slowly disappeared into deep beds of pine needles and dry leaves. The
limbs were so dense I thought we’d need a flashlight to get back. And just when
I felt like I needed to say something the sunlight streamed in on golden
ribbons, and we were standing on a ledge of white rocks looking over hundreds
of square miles.

When the sun set I said we needed to
get home before it got dark and she said we weren’t going back. That the show
hadn’t started. And when the first stars appeared I got scared. Venus cut
through the darkness. I kept hearing animal noises from the trees behind us.
But her reassuring demeanor calmed me. And I knew I could never be scared or
lonely with her. I knew she’d do everything in her power to get me through.

Tonight I was scared. I had to get
myself through to get her back.

The train slowed and I got off the
first time I saw streetlights. I sloshed across the muddy fields toward a truck
stop. My Docs were covered in heavy clay but the rain fell so hard it barely
mattered. I took shelter beneath the awning that covered the gas pumps and let
the water drip off me. An old man filled up his tank and I asked if Lula was
nearby. He took off his Mississippi State Bulldogs cap, and in a slow voice,
said it took about an hour to get there. I asked if he had plans to head out
that way and he shook his head.

And I asked every person that came
through. An hour wasted on truck drivers and young married couples trying to
wrangle their kids into car seats. I finally went inside and asked the
attendant if he knew anybody who could help me. But he said he could help
customers only, so I bought some boiled peanuts and he said he didn’t know
anybody heading out that way.

Now angry, I went back outside. He
didn’t realize that Katy could die and that I didn’t have time to fuck around.

An old maroon Ford Taurus driven by a
pair of teenage boys pulled in next. The driver had on a
Master
of Puppets
T-shirt.
The other had on a red flannel and an Atlanta Braves cap. Pantera blasted out
of their car speakers. I went over and said, “You guys think you can give me a
lift?”

The one in the Braves cap spit a brown
stream of snuff spit into a Mountain Dew bottle and said, “No, man. Give yourself
a lift.”

Before his partner could get a word
in, I said, “I’ll fill up your tank and buy you booze.”

They didn’t even have to discuss it.

And that was how I made my way from
that gas station in Oxford to the intersection of Highway 49 and Highway 61
near the Barbee Cemetery, just outside Lula.

Ray
and Vance were more than content to wait in the car once they found out what I
meant to get into. Besides, they had booze now. They backed onto a gravel road
that ended a few yards into a fallow field and shut out their headlights. To
make sure they didn’t split I took the keys and told them to start drinking.
Didn’t make me much of a role model, but they weren’t exactly brain surgeon
candidates and I figured they knew their way around a case of Coors Light. Way
I saw it I was keeping an eye on them. Keeping them out of trouble. Or my
version of trouble. The air had warmed since the rain stopped so I left my
jacket in the car. As soon as I shut the car door and started walking, Ray
yelled, “Stay away from the burial mound.”

I could almost hear the blues floating
across these old fields. Sounded like pain and dying and suffering to me. But I
didn’t know what to do at this point. I had no ritual, no routine and no idea
of what was supposed to happen, so I waited in the center of the crossroads.
The only light came from the traffic signals where Highway 61 met Highway 49,
but there were no cars and trucks coming and going this time of night. The
signals changed from green to yellow to red despite the lack of traffic,
throwing faint shadows through the fields. Painting me in red and green, over
and over again. In a way, each red light felt like a sunset, each green like
another thunderstorm, and each yellow like a new day to suffer through, because
I felt that way without Katy at my side. Every time the light changed it felt
like another twenty-four hours had passed since I’d let her down. Since nothing
seemed to be happening, I walked north a ways, shuffling my feet, venturing
farther into the darkness. Off in the fields the ground moved. I could hear it.
A
shhh
, like a
finger to lips. I continued to pace as the light went from green to yellow to
red.

Fingers of mist rose from the flooded
fields and warm asphalt. Something halfway between steam and fog. The Barbee
Cemetery sat on a small rise, one of the only ones around for as far as I could
see, which made it feel kind of unnatural. Like a burial mound. Like the one
Ray said to stay away from. Tall tombstones stuck out like broken teeth and one
old tree grew behind a wrought iron sign. A small dead tree waited a little
farther up the hill. Faded Confederate flags popped out of the ground here and
there and all around orbs of faint yellow light rose from the swamp. Not
fireflies—this light shone much duller, more like the impression of light than
anything else. The orbs hung in the air like day-old balloons. I’d never seen
foxfire before.

I heard music and turned to look for
the car and the crossroads. Both waited nearly a half-mile back. Too far to be
the source of the guitar I heard. Peepers called from new puddles. Far away
lightning arched across the green sky, turning black clouds white then a
lingering gray. It reflected off the vast pools that formed in the low fields.
Like the lights that flash in your head when you get punched. There was never
any thunder anymore, making the storm seem real far away. But it felt close.
Close enough to keep me away from trees and that wrought iron. Close enough
that I could smell ozone.