Crystal Queen

by T. Blake Braddy

  About the time we got to the bottom floor, the giant figure from the apartment, along with the gun-wielding woman, appeared along the railing and emptied their weapons into the ground at our feet as we scuttled away.

  The guns popped like fireworks as we turned the corner and fled.

  7.

  We holed up at a house for people desperate for a place to hide out. Mostly, it was for low-level drug dealers needing to get away from the next man on the totem pole, but it was also a drug den for people looking to get high somewhere safe. They could shoot up and nod off without fear of being rousted by the cops or stabbed under the ribs.

  An old hippie named Marcus Delacroix ran it. He was a former member of the Black Liberation Army who had seen the err of his ways and decided the best way to undermine the government of the United States of America was to give asylum to those living on the edges.

  It wasn’t a totally clean place he ran, but it was a big house full of people, and he made them keep it relatively okay for the stragglers who stepped onto the premises.

  We settled into a back room on the second floor and stretched out on a couple of the cots lining the walls. It was like a scene from a war movie, where the nurses hurry around to care for battle-wounded soldiers. People were lying on temporary beds, coughing and shaking and moaning uncontrollably. It smelled vaguely like body odor in here, and the rest of the house didn’t smell much better.

  I was using a stray hairpin to unlock the case doing a terrible job of it.

  Meanwhile, Jerry had taken off his pants and was tending to his “wounds.”

  “Did it even graze you?” I asked, taking a glance at his mostly intact leg.

  “Yes, it did,” he said, pointing sulkily at a mere scratch. “Another inch, and I’d have bled out from a burst femoral artery.”

  I rolled my eyes but didn’t let him see it.

  “You know,” I said, “my folks used to say love is the things you take with you. It’s not an emotion.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nodded. “My dad told me that. He has this idea that love is the act of carrying your memories with you. And he believes you can’t feel the love that’s inside you if you’re not in a place where you’re loved.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I looked around me, felt the walls closing in. Even though the lights were on, the shadows lingered in the corners of the room and seemed to push in on me. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Nothing.”

  “Aw, man,” Jerry said. “My phone is back at the apartment.”

  I tapped the top of the case. “This is the most important thing. This is all you needed to grab from that stinking shithole of an apartment.”

  An ornery looking junkie happened by, peering at our shiny case, and I gave him the stinkeye “Walk on by,” I said.

  I pushed the case aside and stretched my neck. I had no idea how in the world we would get it open, but it was absolutely necessary that we did.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, and left Jerry to his own devices.

  I went to the bathroom and waited in line until it was my turn. Then, I turned on the sink and wept into my hands until someone beat so fiercely on the door I thought it would cave in.

  I was having what some people in the program called a moment of clarity. Everything I had left from my previous life was stuck back at that apartment. The few pictures and clothes were probably destroyed, and all the rest had been sold. The locket my grandmother had given, which had first been a present to her from my grandmother after World War II was at a pawn shop in Savannah somewhere. That’s where the trouble had begun, and it had only gone downhill from there.

  “Save some hot fucking water,” said the person on the other side of the door.

  ***

  I snuck downstairs and used the phone in the kitchen — this place still had a landline — to call the one person I thought would understand my current situation.

  It was after midnight.

  He didn’t answer the first time, and I thought about giving up.

  Instead, I tried once again, and this time he picked up on the next-to-last ring.

  “‘Lo?”

  His voice was charred sandpaper, slurred by the heat of several too many whiskeys.

  “How’s the bottom of a High Life treating you?”

  “Van? ‘Sat really you?”

  Slurring his words. Running them together like there was a broken spacebar in his brain.

  He’s not going to remember this tomorrow, I thought. I could tell him anything, and he’d forget it as soon as it was done, or else he’d think it was some crazy dream. Or nightmare.

  “It’s really me, Rol,” I said. “It’s really me.”

  I’d thought this through all the way up to the moment he picked up the phone. I thought maybe he would fix something, that talking to him would give me some semblance of closure, but it only seemed to complicate things.

  “You, uh, you doin’ all right?” he asked. “You still in Savannah?”

  “Uh, no. I’m in Atlanta these days.”

  “Hotlanta!” he said, in that mocking tone of his. “What’re you doing all the way up there?”

  I honestly had no answer for him.

  “Getting myself together, I think,” I said. “It’s been...an experience.”

  “You don’t sound good,” he said. “You sound, I don’t know, tired or—”

  “High?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Not high enough, I thought.

  “You know,” he said, his voice dropping to a lower register, “I never said you had to be sober before you could come back. I still got some...clothes here. Some you never picked up.”

  My arms broke out in chills. “Well, um, those old things! Just throw them away. Donate ‘em to the Goodwill. I won’t miss them, not one bit.”

  A silence swelled between us, and my heart fluttered in a kind of sad approximation of nostalgia. I pictured him holding me, spooning me in that old, comforting way he had, his five o’clock shadow tickling the back of my neck.

  “I will keep ‘em by the front door,” he said. “I don’t intend on ridding myself of anything, until we figure out what...all this actually is.”

  “I wish I knew what it was, Rolson.”

  “It’s confusing as hell, is what it is.”

  I sighed into the receiver. “I know it. I don’t pretend to know why I’m doing any of what I’m doing; I just know I’ve got to do it, that’s all.”

  “I want you to come back,” he said. “Whenever this is done, if you don’t go off on your own and live in Atlanta, or wherever, there’s a place for you back at the house.”

  “Thanks for that, Rol.”

  “You remember that time we skipped school and went out to the shoals?”

  Pronouncing it member. Joining his words together drunkenly.

  “Course I do,” I said.

  “We took a twelve pack of beer out there and went skinny dipping with Deuce and Leroy Dansler and their girlfriends? Deuce brought that goddamned banana float that wouldn’t stay inflated.”

  “And Leroy cut his foot from toe to heel on an outcropping of rocks next to a sandbar.”

  “That was a good day,” he said. “Until DL showed up.”

  I could still see the way the cruiser came careening through the woods, lights on and flashing. It had been enough to make me think I was having an adolescent heart attack.

  “I thought he was literally going to put me over his knee and spank me in front of all of y’all,” I said, dredging up the memory.

  “Me, too, hell,” Rolson replied. “Your daddy always liked me, but it took a long time to come back from that one.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He’d always be cleaning his thirty-ought-six whenever I came over. Like, how many times you need to polish that goddamned thing?”

  I took a minute to call up a mental image of one of those situat
ions.

  “It’s good to talk to you,” I said.

  “Good to talk to you. I still love you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t go and make any drastic decisions based on that, but it’s still the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey Van.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not doing too good.”

  “Rol—”

  “It ain’t got to do with you,” he said. “I’m having dreams again. This time they’re strong. Got me sleepwalking, and I wake up in totally different places.”

  “Cut out the Jim Beam.”

  “That’s the one thing I can’t do, in all of this.”

  “You seeing things, too?”

  “Sometimes. When I wake up, there’ll be somebody standing by the bed. A shadow shaped like a man. I’ll stare at him until he goes away. But that feeling never does.”

  “We’ve all got demons, Rol. I guess that’s just the manifestation of yours.”

  “I dream about a world consumed by fire.”

  “You ain’t been going to church, have you? Cause that sounds like some of Preacher Benton’s fire-and-brimstone talk.”

  I heard the tinkle of ice cubes against a glass. “It’s in the woods. In the mountains. In it, I’m being chased. Big monster, got lots of arms and legs, like a spider. And it’s coming after me. I’ve got a gun, but every time I shoot off one of the legs, two more grow in its place.”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “Is horrible. I can’t escape, and no matter how many rounds I pump into this thing, it just keeps coming. And all around me, there’s fire. It’s, like, what’s that thing, when something represents something else?”

  “A metaphor?”

  “That’s it. That’s why I married you.”

  “Because I can remember the word metaphor when I’m sober?”

  “No,” he replied. “You’re smart. And all the other things.”

  “Thanks, Rol. I...I think I need to go.”

  “Okay, well. Come home soon.”

  My words caught in the back of my throat. “See you.”

  “Yeah.”

  I waited for the finality of the click on the other end and then replaced the phone back on its cradle. I stood in the darkness and allowed the entirety of the conversation to wash over me.

  The saddest part of it all was, Rolson’s voice had begun to slip away from me. If I focused hard enough, I could get the tenor of just about right, but it was a weird mental approximation of his tone, and it usually required me to picture him, as well.

  He was a slender six feet, maybe six-one, though before I left, he had gained maybe ten or fifteen pounds, and it was all visible on his face. That was from all the drinking, which had slowly crept its way into his everyday life like ivy. He was slow to smile but possessed a great one; it set his whole face alight and gave him these adorable little dimples. The way he looked when he was in a good place made it obvious he’d be a good-looking older man.

  It was the little things. He was long-limbed and stern and looked mysterious when he was in deep concentration. He was perpetually flecked with stubble and wore beat-up old t-shirts when he was not in his police uniform.

  It was a shame the way things were going.

  With a few years under his belt, he’d have been on the short list for Chief of Police, but his crippling dependence on hard liquor and cold beer had robbed him of anything but a basic position on the force, and he was little more than a ticket jockey for the county. Last I heard, he was fucking that up, too, spending more of his hours on the clock sipping bourbon than not. I know he always feared me ending up on a slab somewhere, but there was no doubt in my mind he’d end up dead within a few years if he didn’t clean up. I wanted him sober even more than myself, and though I would never tell him that — maybe I’m stubborn, too — my hope was that he knew it, somehow.

  There was something beyond his abused puppy personality that drew me to him, and one night he told me one reason he thought he was different from every other redneck in Lumber Junction. He said he could see the wavy, ephemeral line between life and death. Said it showed up in him the night his mama died giving birth to a bastard child.

  “After that, I got these...hunches,” he said. “I never was able to do much with them, but they led me to befriend Deuce—and you.”

  I’d always thought it was a little crazy, but I liked that about him. Sometimes, he’d get drunk and have this far-off look about him, like he heard something in the woods just outside our house. I’d ask him about it, and he’d say it was nothing, but he would get up and go out on the porch, smoking cigarettes in silence until midnight. Then he’d come back in with this look about him like he’d stuck his member in a light socket, all wired and haunted.

  “Ain’t nothing,” he’d say. But it was obvious it was something, and he never quite got used to his...power.

  He was a good man, but he was broken, and it would take more strength than I’d accumulated to be able to fix what was wrong with him.

  It was obvious to everybody but him: he’d never been able to get over the loss of his mother. She was like the sun and moon, always lighting his way, even if he didn’t consciously know how she was illuminating his path.

  Not that he’d ever acknowledged her death still bothered him. It came out in consistent but odd ways, his anger and frustrating spilling out of the seams so that he threatened to burst. Every year on her birthday, he got rip-roaring drunk and tore something up. Never mentioned a word about it, never let on that he was still sad about her passing, but if you brought it up, even in passing—Jesus Christ, did he lose his temper. He never took that out on me or anything — because of the way he was raised, he abhorred violence against women — but he fed off of it in unhealthy ways.

  My father, DL, was his boss on the force, and he had sometimes insinuated Rolson should seek professional help, counseling of some kind. But Rolson had laughed it off. He truly believed his problems were his and his alone and that he’d have to work them out somehow.

  Maybe my self-imposed exile from Lumber Junction was my way of working through my personal issues. Thank God Rolson never asked about those. I might have had to tell him, and then he’d really be worried about me.

  Flashes of a man in a cheap suit standing on the beach, one hand extended toward me. The sun blotting out his face, silhouetting him among all of the other people wandering along the coastline.

  I needed a hit of something. Jerry and I needed to score, and quickly.

  ***

  On the way back through the house, listening to the quiet intensity of rampant drug use, I heard someone murmuring at the front door.

  The hallway smelled like weed, and I found myself inhaling it to maybe bring down my pulse a little bit. My heart had been perpetually slamming against my chest ever since that first bullet whizzed by my head back at the apartment, and I hadn’t quite recovered.

  There was also the whole conversation with Rolson. Having his voice rattling around in my head gave me this whole new perspective on things.

  The main stairwell was by the main door, and I was minding my own business, but I noticed the door was cracked. Standing on my side of the doorway was a gaunt figure in a tanktop and jeans. On the other was a gargantuan human being.

  The guy with the gun from the apartment. There was not a woman with him, but suddenly my head tricked me into thinking she was in the house, and I was off. I didn’t run, exactly, but I hurried up the stairs and back to the room where we had been staying.

  Jerry was half-in and half-out of the bed, in just his faded boxer shorts. He was asleep and snoring and looked almost innocent and peaceful in that moment.

  I shook him awake and shushed him. A few of the other junkies in the room turned and looked but then rolled over. By this time, it was very late.

  He seemed to catch my meaning, because he got up and followed me wordlessly to the window at the far end of the room.
r />   The window creaked as it opened, and as I looked down, my head swam.

  It looked like a lot farther of a drop than I had expected, and so I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it. I tried to tell myself I had to, because the only other option was death, and Death Himself was hanging out on the front porch.

  Jerry was tugging on his pants but carried his shirt in one hand. The case was in his other hand, and I thought, Good boy.

  “My leg,” he whispered to me. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “The killer is downstairs,” I told him. “The big guy with the gun.”

  “And the lady?”

  I just shook my head.

  He sighed inwardly, a gesture of defeat. “Okay,” he said.

  I took the case from him and held it over some bushes, and with bated breath I let it go. It dropped with a soft plunk into the shrubbery beside the house.

  “Let’s hope we’re that lucky,” he said.

  “Crossed fingers,” I whispered.

  And though I hadn’t done such a thing in what felt like weeks, I leaned over and kissed him. On the surface, it felt awkward and perfunctory, the kind of kiss you get before leaving for work, but the specter of death lingering above us gave it a newfound electricity.

  Nothing like mortality to get the old juices flowing.

  I positioned myself half-out of the window and looked back one last time.

  He smiled sadly. “Ladies first,” he said.

  I didn’t have time to ponder the fear, because I heard heavy, inhumanly big footsteps approaching down the hallway. It was the sound of boots on hardwood, and I knew instinctively it was him.

  I let go.

  I tried to do that thing people do in movies, the whole tuck-and-roll gesture, but all I did was wrench my knee like a son-of-a-bitch when I landed. I managed to get up and run without too much pain, though, so I considered that a victory. I grabbed the case and sprinted for some nearby magnolia trees. They provided good cover as I watched Jerry make a mockery of this whole process.

  He was still shirtless and had the look of a man who’s just shit himself at a public gathering.

  I waved to him, pushing him to take the leap, but he couldn’t see me. Somehow, it made me feel better, however, and so I kept doing it, feeling the blood rising in my temples.