Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  “You gotta take care of your brother.”

  “Look who’s talking.” That was too fast, wasn’t what he’d wanted to say, and it happened every time with this man. There was a reason Sol didn’t pick up the phone.

  Aurie wasn’t moving, and Sol took a step toward the shelves, only to feel cold that seeped right into his bones. He pulled up, understanding. Not understanding.

  “He’s special, him.” Flat, a statement of known fact.

  “I know that,” Sol murmured, rote.

  “I don’t think you do,” Aurie refuted, edge of anger. “You don’t see it. Eyes too full of numbers and cities. Too full of medicine.” Like it was a dirty word and maybe to Aurie it was.

  The shadow did not move again, and Sol could barely make out his father’s outline against the dark, the whiff of cold so deep it froze the hairs inside his nostrils. His father took a breath, coughed against his hand, and as the hand came up, it caught lamplight maybe, or dissolved in it, and Sol couldn’t breathe.

  The hand was swollen past recognition. Fingers were missing, and Sol struggled to say something, but that would make it real and he wasn’t quite ready for that.

  “You be sure they don’t make no monkey business with Baz, ’cause they’ll try.” Aurie became very still, as though he was waiting, as though he sensed Sol was catching up. Treating Sol like a man. Giving him his due. Sol already had his father’s job, after all.

  “Who? What happened? Where have you been?” Sol asked, ignoring his father’s request, suddenly numb, wondering where the words were coming from. “Where—”

  Aurie’s form shook, shimmered, and Sol didn’t want to see any more clearly than he already did. “You know where I am, Beausoleil.” It was bright outside, but it didn’t penetrate the workshop, not much, just enough to dazzle Sol’s eyes in a soft gray light, make forms and outlines blur. That’s what he told himself. “It’s hard, bein’ all the way here.” A chuckle again. “And you shouldn’t be talkin’ to me anyways. No good comes from talkin’ to ghosts.”

  It was too dark to see him properly and Sol didn’t want to anyway. He remembered what the body had looked like at Bailey Yard, and that was enough. Though it was probably hard, Aurie held still, gave Sol some time. Only the sound of Sol’s uneven breath interrupted the workshop’s quiet. Both men were good at waiting, at silence. More than a year, Sol thought, closer to two.

  “Who did this?” he finally asked, because that’s what he had been trying to figure out since he’d heard about the suspicious deaths at Bailey Yard, and it must have been the same with Aurie when he’d heard, too. They looked at a newspaper with the same eyes: ‘Weird deaths’ was all either of them needed to read. He’s been to the rail yard; he was there and something was expecting him. The strange deaths were enough to warrant suspicion from guys like Aurie Sarrazin. From guys like me.

  “It wasn’t no ghost,” Aurie coughed, soft and wet. “Not for me, anyway. Those other stiffs, yeah, you know that. You passed by, cher. Mais, for me? One of the dirty p’tit guys. You know.” And Sol, in theory, did. A devil, a small dirty thing, evil, different from a ghost. “It wanted me dead. I don’t do any favor for it. Pisses those guys off, not gettin’ what they want. They’re so easy to piss off. Remember that. Puis, you don’t do any negotiating. D’accord?”

  After a moment, Sol nodded. He wiped his eyes, which were full. “I know.” He knew what the job was, too, of course; he hadn’t really wanted it, what his father did, what his father had done, but it was his. “Papa?” he whispered, but his father’s ghost was gone.

  TWO

  THREE TAPS

  Baz hoped whoever was trying to get hold of him would give up soon, because it occurred to him—Marianne moving on him like a circus seal—that his phone had a really stupid ring tone. The bayou tune made him feel like he was thirteen years old, sneaking into his first gig with his fiddle tucked under his arm, and that wasn’t the impression he was going for when it came to the ladies. And, c’mon, whoever you are, he wasn’t going to pick it up anytime soon, because Marianne was sliding around now, nails raking his abdomen in a way that was going to make him, make him go—make him—and there it was again. He couldn’t even remember which joker had programmed it, some Zydeco riff that wasn’t his style, but that everybody thought was. The Ragin’ Cajun, screw you very much. A joke, that’s what they’d called it, the other guys in the band.

  Swamp music called up heat and mosquitoes and catching wind with an outboard motor, all sorts of things he barely remembered. Here it was, damn near winter, just off the plane from Cancun and the Christmas decorations were up all over Colorado Springs. He and Marianne had been gone that long. Lost track of time, nothing weird about that.

  The bedroom was bigger than most bars he played and she made some noise, her, but he didn’t mind that so much. The best thing about ladies Marianne’s age, Baz had found, was not so much that they knew tricks he didn’t, it was more that they weren’t afraid of using them.

  The sun disappeared fast in this part of the country, dropped behind the Front Range like a lost sock behind a sofa, but the soft orange light lasted. After quite a stretch of sheer physical pleasure, Baz finally felt like he might need something to eat, and so he rolled out of bed in the last golden light of the day, body lit like he was on stage. Always. Open suitcases on the floor, and he thought that maybe most of his clothes were dirty, and a shower wouldn’t be out of the question either. He eyed the surf shorts and flowered shirts as he passed. Too Mexican, all of them, foreign somehow. Relics of a vacation past.

  He wondered where he’d left his jeans and plaid shirts and camo jacket, seemed to recall that Marianne had sent them to be cleaned before they’d left. Weird to think that they were somewhere in this airplane hangar-sized house, encased in thin plastic like the contents of body bags.

  He felt her eyes on him from the bed, and so he turned to give her a good look. Smiled, because this was all okay, really, and he could give her that, it cost him not a thing. This wasn’t permanent and they both knew it, which was part of the dance. Baz leaned one elbow against the huge opening to the ensuite—he thought that’s what they called it, one of this house’s seven bathrooms—and stretched, giving her the tableau she wanted, the one she’d remember later, the one she’d tell her friends about.

  “Mmmmn,” Marianne breathed from the bed, inching onto her elbows and not bothering to pull up the sheet. “Damn, I knew you shouldn’t have worn those shorts.”

  He looked down and saw that the Mexican sun had striped him straight across the middle. She’d advocated for him to tan naked on the private beach. She had a point; he was brown as walnut wood, mostly, where he wasn’t white as a graveyard angel. He scratched his head, hair in need of a cut, fingers brushing over a three-day growth of beard, not really caring.

  His phone rang again and he met her eyes, a little chagrined. All he needed was an accordion and a ‘gator, for God’s sake.

  “A month down south, no calls and now this?” Marianne asked. “You should pick up. Sounds like someone needs you.”

  Baz shrugged, sauntered back to the huge bed, bigger than some rooms he’d had as a kid. “Doubt it, ma cocotte.” He leaned across the expanse of Egyptian cotton, stretched Marianne’s arms above her head where her fingers clutched the wrought iron headboard. “No one needs me,” he teased, slow with smile. He ran his tanned hands down a body that hours of yoga classes and daily runs had made sharp and sinewy. Bending his head down, his tongue drew a line from her breasts to her belly button and beyond. “It can wait,” he murmured into the only soft bit of her.

  “Talk French to me,” she said on a taken breath, and Baz sighed, shook his head.

  “Don’t remember enough,” he said indistinctly.

  “You remember enough,” she replied and that was true.

  Later, when evening had fallen over Colorado Springs, the city lit up like a parade, Baz lounged in the sitting room next to the kitchen, still wet from the shower,
wearing Marianne’s husband’s bathrobe. He couldn’t figure out how to turn on the TV, let alone the stereo. He put his feet up on what she called an ottoman, and ate a bowl of Cheerios with table cream. The cleaning staff had made sure that groceries were waiting for their return. It was like Disneyland or something.

  Marianne was still in the shower and he remembered that her husband was back in town tomorrow afternoon because remembering such schedules was really in his own best interest. He knew that he’d been an excitement, a brush with danger for Marianne, a tale to spin, grounds for divorce, payback, who knew, and that was okay, was fine. No illusions one way or another, but now he needed to get his things, figure out where he was going next. He was between bands at the moment, his fiddle was somewhere around here, been a while since he’d touched it. It wouldn’t be hard, picking up where he’d left off, it never was. Make a few phone calls, see what—damn.

  An indication of how long he’d been gone and how little he’d thought about it, that it took him a good five minutes to find his phone. It was in the suitcase, underneath a pair of cheap flip flops. Baz scanned the call log, could barely remember how to negotiate the interface. Four missed calls today, all from his brother’s number. That can’t be good, he thought, pressing the call return button. He tried to remember when he’d last talked to Sol and came up empty.

  It rang twice.

  “Hey, Robbie,” he tried, staring out the bedroom’s huge plate glass window, recessed halogen lights reflecting from the hardware he wore in his ears, nose, through his eyebrow, distracting from the snow outside, big Santa flakes, city twinkling beyond.

  She sounded a bit pissed off, that wide flat voice of hers. He could almost see her brows drawn together over her freckled nose. “Baz, is that you?”

  “You don’t have to make it sound like a disease, Robbie.”

  “He’s been trying to reach you all evening. Are you still in Chicago? I’m sorry, I should let you, but he’s…” She regrouped and Baz didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “He’s gone to work?” Baz guessed. Sol was always working, it seemed to Baz.

  “No.” Emphatic, and the dog was barking and Baz could tell she was walking through their house, something about the quality of the call, her sudden breathlessness. “No, he’s here, he’s just gone, hang on, let me put on my boots.” A pause, and Baz sat down on a chair, not wanting to look at his sun-browned face floating above a winter landscape.

  He heard muffled voices, Robbie’s matter-of-fact mumbles and his brother’s more fluid cadences, swearing in two different languages. Baz rubbed his temple. This wasn’t good, Sol swearing. In the next room, the shower shut off, an abrupt cessation of white noise, and Baz dropped his voice. This was a life apart, this wasn’t Mexico and fucking on an acreage mattress.

  “Sol?” he asked uncertainly, hearing slow breathing on the other line. “Ça va?”

  “Hey, man.” Low and boozy, from a frozen place like someone had opened a door to the outside. “Hé, cher.” In the background, Baz could still hear Robbie. She was telling Sol he should come inside. Sol didn’t seem inclined to come inside, and Robbie’s voice receded like Sol was pushing her back through the door. The dog’s barks subsided and Sol was back. “Where you been?”

  “Around, you know,” Baz said. “I was out of the country. Down south, near Cancun.”

  Sol laughed. “Down south.” Like it was a joke between them. “Where you now?”

  Shit. Baz held his breath, quietly closed the door to the bathroom, wondered how long it would take him to get his things together, because this was pointing in only one direction. “Not far, Colorado Springs.”

  A pause. He could hear Sol smoking, maybe taking a swig of something. “That’s good.” A dry, humorless chuckle. “C’est bon, ça.”

  Oh, man, he didn’t want to ask, but you always had to with Sol. He made you. “What’s up? What’s going on?”

  Another break, and please, Sol wasn’t going to make him ask again, was he?

  “When’s last time you seen Dad?”

  What? He had to think. “Did you guys have a fight? You know you shouldn’t get into it with him. I thought you weren’t talking to him anyway.”

  “When you seen him last?” Insistent, tongue sliding on—rum. That would be it, that was the poison on the menu tonight, Sol’s weapon of choice when he needed to get lost.

  “I dunno. Last month, maybe? Before I went to Cancun, around my birthday. I was hanging with him in—” Where had that been? Some place with good clubs, big city. “Minneapolis. Up there.”

  Another swallow. “Up there, hey.”

  “Sol?” This was just great. Baz had returned a drunk call. “Sol?”

  “He’s gone, Baz. He’s dead.”

  “You don’t know that.” It came out automatically, a repudiation. “Christ, you don’t even talk to him. How can he be dead?”

  The line was snowfall silent, and once again Baz heard Robbie’s voice, coaxing and cajoling Sol, softer than he’d ever heard her before. That was the thing that made it real, otherwise it was just his brother, drunk and making shit up. The void of the non-shower loomed big, and then Marianne opened the door and Baz found himself staring at her and not able to do much else. He must have looked helpless, or struck or something else that made people look after him, a bird dropped by a sudden stop of window, because the older woman took the phone from his loose grip and talked to Robbie for a few minutes, making arrangements, making plans, as Baz slowly circled the room, hand drifting over his solar plexus like it hurt. Like something hurt.

  Baz chose the music, and Sol let him because that filled all the hours of not talking. Baz sang along, as he always did, gorgeous, tuneful voice that Sol only allowed in the moving car, because that was the rule.

  North Platte was only marginally improved by the layer of snow blurring the gray and yellow brick buildings, but the glare was blinding and Sol’s sunglasses could only mask so much of it. It didn’t help at all, either, that Baz had lost his license last year, which meant Sol had spent close to four hours behind the wheel this morning. With a hangover. He couldn’t lie to himself, though: a robust hangover was nothing compared to what churned underneath. The thudding headache, his queasy roiling stomach, all of it was just a convenient excuse to say not much of anything during the drive.

  Sol sent Baz alone into the County Coroner’s Office, mute retaliation for his failure to drive, said that if he went in with Baz, he’d get recognized. By who? Baz asked, but Sol had already spotted a coffee shop across the street from the office and was out the door. Deep down, Sol knew if he started talking he wouldn’t be able to stop, so it was better to just shut up, even if Baz had a million questions.

  Don’t ask to see the body, he felt like saying, wanting to keep Baz from the worst of it, but how else was there going to be an identification? Hell, Sol hadn’t recognized his father’s body when he’d been lying dead at his feet. First thing that morning, they’d put together a list of Aurie Sarrazin’s scars, the prison tattoo on his right forearm. Things that even a violent death would have a hard time erasing.

  An hour and two trips to the coffee shop passed before Baz slid back into the Wagoneer, way too pale for someone who’d just come back from Mexico. Sol bit back a comment about Baz’s ridiculous new haircut. Robbie had done it last night, or early this morning, sometime after Sol had passed out in any case, because Sol would not have allowed it.

  That morning, just as the sun came up, Sol had staggered into the living room to discover Baz asleep on the couch with a half-hearted and disheveled mohawk, the kind you immediately tried to grow out. Baz’s eye had cracked open, and he’d been instantly awake and hungry, eating anything that wasn’t nailed down even as Sol rejected anything solid, Baz’s eyes wild and blue and glittering. Grin sharp enough to make Lucifer wary, lightly joking at Sol’s wretched expense, setting Robbie at ease. Baz was good at that, Sol knew.

  Sol couldn’t remember if he’d been
awake when Baz had arrived.

  The coffee was hot, and he eyed his brother through the steam. Baz’s ears were painfully red. He’d have to invest in a hat, but knowing Baz, it would probably be one of those stupid ones with earflaps and rabbit fur. It was like hanging out with a traveling freak show. “So?” Sol asked after a long minute.

  Baz scowled, expression serious, and Sol was immediately sorry for his one syllable conversation. “Yeah,” Baz said too quickly, pinching his nose, head down. Sol stared at the bright street, and despite the glare, took off his sunglasses and tossed them on the dash. Baz’s head came up, following the sound. “Yeah, so it’s him all right,” Baz told him, voice even. “They found his truck. ID in the glove.”

  “Hey,” Sol started. Please, he thought, not knowing what he was hoping for. “So you didn’t—they didn’t actually make you look at—” He recalled the smashed body, and how crows had picked at it, their father’s blood frozen in the gravel. Sol was used to such sights; Baz was not.

  Baz stared at him, eyes glowing. “Did he…did he come to you? Is he stuck?”

  Sol grimaced. “Ouais,” he admitted slowly into his coffee, not knowing how to say more.

  “So,” Baz said with a flick of his fingers outwards. A supplication of sorts. “You’re gonna fix that, yeah?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” he said, knowing that Baz needed to hear that almost as much as he needed to say it. “He made it all the way to damn Aurora but he died here, Baz. That’s some trip for a ghost. No way he found his way to…” He waved his hand vaguely. To wherever ghosts go when they’re at rest, he didn’t say. The coffee was cooling rapidly and Sol took in a good mouthful, swished it around his mouth like Listerine.

  “Why was he in North Platte? Why were you here?” Baz had been asking variations of these questions since this morning, since they’d pulled out of Robbie’s earshot. Part of the reason for the soundtrack, all the way, so Sol wouldn’t have to answer. “What did he say to you?”