Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  Slowly, Lutie shook her head. “Not that I ever heard.”

  “Aurie,” and it felt so strange to call him that in this room while he still held the man’s wallet curved to fit the body, the weight of his clothes in a box beside him, “Aurie said she was evil.”

  Lutie was staring at the photo again. “Is that the look of someone who thinks his wife is evil?” she asked, holding the photo closer to her brother, and it was true.

  Midnight found Sol standing over a body outside Kitty’s on East Colfax, pondering the effectiveness of ‘We Never Close!’ as an advertising come-on. The dead guy at his feet was certainly taking a break from Kitty’s twenty-four-hour party. Lividity had set in, someone’s New Year’s Eve gone horrifically wrong, ghost long gone, stoked to the max with barbiturates mixed with alcohol, if Sol didn’t miss his guess. Nothing for them to do here.

  Tonight he was partnered with Dan, a mild-mannered kind of guy who always pressed his white shirts and never got flustered, no matter how cooked the call got. Sol had once seen Dan—middle aged, with two kids in college—recite turkey-basting instructions to his youngest daughter over the phone while administering anti-seizure meds to a freaking out junkie in the middle of a housing project’s public commons.

  While Dan finished the paperwork, Sol loitered to the side of Kitty’s bar, sizing up the Fillmore Auditorium across the street, wondering when the show was going to let out and how to deal with the crowd of people that were sure to be interested in the dead body on the pavement. That would be a police problem, Sol assured himself, still going through the mental exercise to keep boredom at bay.

  “Happy New Years,” Dan surprised him, passing Sol a cup of coffee hastily obtained from inside Kitty’s. Sol saluted him with the white paper cup. “You got a resolution?”

  Sol shrugged. “Don’t mix business with pleasure,” he muttered. “You?”

  It was astonishingly cold tonight, too cold for snow, and windy, a bad combination. They’d been collecting frostbitten drunks up and down the Colfax strip all night. The appearance of an overdose was a bit of a reprieve. Dreary and constant, Sol would call tonight’s work.

  “I’m gonna drop ten pounds, Darlene tells me.”

  Sol grinned into his coffee. He’d barely made it in time for tonight’s shift, had slept away the day after working a double the day before. Since returning from Brule, he and Robbie had missed each other completely: the salon was busy during the day, and he was pulling night shifts. Nothing was coming together properly.

  Though he’d looked, he hadn’t found anything online—nothing fitting Brule, Lewis, fire. Hell, he’d even tried to find out if someone named Old Leaky had died in a Mexican hospital over the last few months. He’d tried phoning Bart at the Coffee Caboose Museum, but hadn’t gotten through. The kid hadn’t been lying about the lack of an answering machine. Not enough hours in the day to go back. Not enough time, not enough sleep.

  The phone had wakened him from a dead sleep at two that afternoon. Robbie, phoning from work, inviting him to come with her to a party, not pleading, but close to it. There was no way he could have found a replacement, not on New Year’s Eve and not at that late hour. He hadn’t been at his courteous best with her, groggy and already running late. He’d parked the truck in the employee garage along Bannock, grabbed a uniform from his locker, received his assignment and met Dan at the rig, ready to do his check. That had been eight hours ago, and it had been non-stop, pick-up-drop-off since.

  Sol sighed, looked with irritation at the police milling over the body, waiting for the ME to show up. “You ready to give these guys your report, Dan? Let’s get out of here.”

  “Boy, Sarrazin, what’s your hurry? You should work on that resolution of yours.”

  Sol zipped his jacket all the way to the top, harder to coordinate because of his gloves. “Mais, I’d rather be in the rig than freezing my ass off out here.”

  Dan shook his head and walked over to the police sergeant, handed him the top copy of his paperwork, and they were back in the orange and white unit, ready to go. Sol called in their availability to dispatch and was told that nothing was hot yet. They drank their coffee while Dan outlined his diet plans, which seemed to involve a whole lot of bran, as far as Sol could determine.

  Four messages had been waiting for him when he’d arrived at work—one from Baz and three from Wayne, trying to get him to come to his party so that he could monitor people for alcohol poisoning. The calls from Wayne he’d ignored, wondering when the guy was going to get his ass fired, and the call from Baz he’d returned right away, only to get an out of area message.

  Dispatch blurted on the line: the next call was to a townhouse complex in Westminster East and Sol was glad Dan was originally from New Mexico, because chances were this was going to be an emergency conducted in Spanish. They went in lights and siren, Sol speeding just enough, response time under ten minutes, which was how the policy wonks at admin liked it.

  The middle-aged woman was in cardiac arrest, first few minutes counted, and Sol looked for the Fire Department’s first response team’s truck pulled up to the brick townhouses, let Dan take the ALS bag, run the call. Sol took the second bag with the defibrillator, and followed Dan into a wind tunnel between two decrepit brick buildings, bits of tinsel and broken lights all that remained of Christmas hanging tattered around the entranceway.

  He almost missed the sign as they went in, but had to double check the address against what dispatch had sent, because stuff like this got messed up all the time, especially in housing developments with all the pedestrian access routes. Right address, and underneath the number, hand-drawn in shaky black marker on Corplast: Madama Lopez, Maestra en Ciencias Occultas! Lectura de las cartas y Palma de la Mano. A crude drawing of a hand appeared underneath.

  Down the semi-enclosed corridor, Sol could hear Dan calling to the firefighter-EMTs, then talking to someone else in Spanish, and the lights from their two rigs were flashing red and blue against the brick. It was desperately cold and Sol couldn’t move.

  Another sign—Madame LeBlanc, La meilleure sorcière de la Nouvelle-Orléans! Crazy old bitch doesn’t speak a word of English. No one in the immediate vicinity speaks French, no one but the kid from the Denver unit, and the water is rising, pouring up through the sewer system; they wade in green-brown floodwaters up to their chests to get to the apartment building. They enter from the third floor. Everything smells of death, he’s almost used to it. The temperature is soaring in the high nineties. He’s been up for more than thirty-six hours straight, has a fever of 103, and couldn’t say when he’s last eaten, or had a drink of water.

  Shit.

  Sol took a deep breath, swallowed down the sudden swim of spit in his mouth. The wind whistled in from the mountains, cut through the corridor linking the street to the courtyard, and he could hear Dan calling him, voice clear and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world, which he did not.

  Without pausing to properly collect himself, Sol plunged into the dark passage, toward a light-filled doorway at a T-junction, several tall firefighters towering against a frame of light. Further in, down the hallway, Dan was on the ground with an older heavy-set woman. Her face was gray, and Sol crouched on the opposite side, unzipped his bag, let Dan do the talking.

  Dan ran a strip and there was reason to hurry, because there was hope. Sol leaned back, told Dan he’d go get the stretcher and Dan nodded tersely. As Sol stood, he took bearing of where he was: a small room hung with embroidered curtains and lit with candles, though many of those were extinguished now, the EMTs with bags of equipment stacked against walls thoroughly papered with symbols and old woodcuts depicting Cinco de Mayo-type death heads in various stages of festivities.

  He turned and noticed a black-clad woman, mid-forties maybe, standing aloof in the corner, a shawl draped over her shoulders, dark gray-streaked hair pulled back into a severe braid. She hovered for a moment, then shivered, and was overlaid, like she’d stood in front of a mov
ie projection in a theater. Sol saw a ghost, a tall man, taller than her—a head above the fortuneteller, must be the fortuneteller—and the ghost was screaming.

  Sol backed up two paces, and bumped into a firefighter behind him. The ghost disappeared and Sol saw the fortuneteller—Madama Lopez, evidently—make a gesture with her fingers, in what he thought must be a sealing ward, to lock an uppity ghost in place. Her dark eyes flashed in the recesses of deep-set sockets, and her gaze swept up to meet Sol’s. It was more than enough to share a fractured, fraught moment of recognition. He’d seen her captive ghost; she knew that he was the sort who could see such things. She recognized the danger he represented.

  He took another step back, apprehending a specific and sudden potential for harm, then ducked his head, darted back into the cold corridor, heading for the rig to get the stretcher. On top of everything else, a patient was busy fighting for her life in there, and he had to do something about that, first and foremost. The heart attack had been Madama Lopez’s client, perhaps, there to get her fortune read, ghost silently at the ready to help extract useful information not privy to most souls.

  He sucked in the dark night air, knew that he’d hyperventilate if he didn’t calm down. His father had taught him to tell no one about what he could see, that no one outside their scattered community knew anything about this. Furthermore, the only ones that tended to know anything about ghosts only knew about them because they were seeking to exploit them, and their ghosts were some méchant trou d’cul. Stay the hell away from a fortuneteller’s ghost, Beausoleil, because they’re crazy fuckers, they’ll rip you apart, gars.

  Sol had learned that the hard way, and wasn’t inclined to test those floodwaters again.

  Still.

  He unlocked the back of the rig, pulled out the stretcher and slammed the door behind him, trundling wheels across pavement bumpy with frozen runnels of dark ice. His hands were frozen on the metal bars.

  Might come to nothing, going back in there, live and let live. What was he going to do, anyway? Free her ghost in the middle of a call? With a roomful of firefighters watching? There had been what had happened in New Orleans, he still had that to live down, there was no need to add to it.

  Not in public anyway.

  And this woman, this patient with the failing heart who had wanted to know the future on this night that was all about burying the past and ushering in the new, deserved his undivided attention. He made a promise to himself: Just leave it alone, Sarrazin, no need to go borrowing trouble, no need to put every damn ghost you come across to bed. Not your damn job. Let it be.

  It was hard to ignore the ghost’s screams, though. Even though he couldn’t see the ghost, and decided to not even look at Madama Lopez, Sol could still hear it, begging for release, over and over again. Sol spoke enough Spanish to understand: Let me go! Make her let me go! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you all! Over and over, so loud Sol wondered that everyone didn’t hear it.

  Luckily, Dan had everything under control, as usual. The patient was now lucid, and they transferred her from floor to stretcher in one heave, Sol anxious to be out of that room, but not happy about turning his back to the Madama, who had not—as far as he could tell without looking at her—moved.

  Sol was driving and was glad of that, because anyone else behind the wheel couldn’t have gotten him out of there fast enough.

  They spent the early part of New Year’s Eve driving south into Iowa, Baz humming along to some country station he’d found, keeping time with his fingers drumming on his thigh.

  “You know,” he said suddenly, and Lutie jumped a little, already accustomed to his constant car singing, but not to his actual voice in conversation. Hurtling down the highway at sixty miles per hour, they didn’t seem in any danger of attracting ghosts with song. “We should go to Chicago. There’s this great bar there, it’ll be jumping tonight but I know most of the doormen and we could—”

  “Baz,” she said, smiling, because that’s what he made you do. “Baz. We’re nowhere near Chicago. It won’t be jumping at noon tomorrow, which is when we’d get there. It’ll be closed.” Not to mention that he wasn’t heading in that direction, he was heading in the opposite direction.

  He stirred himself from his slouch, unperturbed. “It’s still a great bar.” He reached into her back seat, all legs and arms in the small import car, threatening to dislodge the stickshift, then he was back, the fiddle case on his lap.

  He opened it up, ran his hands up the loosened strings. He took the instrument out, found the bow and rosin, put the case down by his feet. It could have been a rare and exquisite form of torture, but Baz started to tune the thing. In his hands, somehow, the tuning sounded curious, a quest for finding form out of chaos, and he plucked and tightened while some Nashville blonde warbled about Jesus. Finally, he seemed satisfied and Lutie stole a look at him.

  He was beaming at the instrument, fingers running down the strings, over the worn veneer, dark in the highway light. Perhaps sensing her attention, Baz smiled deeply, snapped off the radio, brought the fiddle to his shoulder, scratched out a short run. “Hey, you must remember this one,” and launched into a lilting lullaby.

  Lutie did remember it, like a half-formed dream, a dream of a dream. There had been words to this, but they were lost to her. Maybe to Baz as well. He stopped after a few bars, looked out into the highway lines, dotted and straight.

  She didn’t want to interrupt his reverie, but it seemed unfair, suddenly, why she’d done this, why she’d agreed to Baz’s scattershot plan and driven him south. It was so easy to like Baz. Angels smile on him, and shuddered as she thought it.

  “Baz, you don’t believe it, what your dad said about M’man.” She made it a statement, like that would make it true.

  Experimentally, Baz plucked a few notes, then drew the bow across the strings like a shiver. “You were the one who said she was a cold-hearted bitch,” he pointed out, but with a burble of laughter.

  “But she wasn’t evil,” she continued, not getting drawn into Baz’s hilarity. “It’s what some people can do, like how Aurie could hunt down ghosts. Maman—she took care of her ghost, kept it close. It helped her, sure, but she protected it, too. It wasn’t all bad.”

  There were no highway lights along this stretch, and Lutie was depending on the moon, which was obscured by cloud. She could hear the intake of breath Baz took. “I don’t know anything about it, poussinette.” The silence was only marked by the whir of the heater’s fan. Baz sniffed. “But I don’t remember Maman being evil.” He paused, and he might have smiled, for all Lutie could tell. “And I don’t remember her being a cold-hearted bitch, either.”

  To which Lutie said nothing. Their father hadn’t known about the ghost when they’d all lived together, Lutie remembered that much. Maman’s little secret. Neither their father nor Sol had seen it. Lutie had. Lutie had known. Hot day, hanging heavy as wet laundry on the line, nothing stirring in the cemetery, not even birdsong. Then singing, Baz singing, and she had known: Je veux un fantôme comme toi, M’man.

  Her mother’s pet ghost had been that of a young woman, hair like cobwebs, dressed in a winter coat. It had been the first winter coat Lutie had ever seen. From the north, then, not a Louisiana ghost, not dressed like that. What’s your ghost called, M’man?

  You don’t name them, T-Lu. They aren’t like us.

  A couple of miles later, and a number of short tunes on the fiddle, and Lutie noticed that they were coming up to the outskirts of Des Moines. It was almost midnight, new year, new life, things on the horizon she hadn’t considered even a week ago. She’d never made a resolution in her life before, thought them silly and a waste of time, but she made one now.

  “I’m like her, Baz,” she said between the chorus and the verse of Baz’s song, interrupting something vaguely celtic. Baz was singing softly above the tune, posing the question ‘When will we be married?’ He let the song still.

  “Quoi?” he asked, soft. “What do you mean?”<
br />
  “I’m like her. I see ghosts. And for as long as I can remember, Baz, I’ve known that I could catch one, same as her. I could.”

  “Mais, what would be the point, chère?”

  That was the hard part. To explain in a way that made any sense, when he did not have to live with what she did, couldn’t even see what she did. “To keep the others away,” she said finally. “So I don’t go crazy.” No more meds. No more strange ghosts in strange places. Just the one and it would be hers.

  Baz leaned back into the seat, plucked out a cheery little maritime melody that Lutie was fairly sure she’d heard before. She gave him a bit of room, because she’d learned at least as much from the Major as she ever had from her mother.

  “So, what do you want me to do?”

  She kept her eyes on the road, heard the softest of feather runs up and down a scale choked close on the neck, could imagine the hard calluses on his fingertips from wrenching music out of nothing but tension, vibration and air. “I want you to help me, Baz. I’ll take you all the way back to Denver if you like, but I can’t catch a ghost without you.” Then, she clarified, because her parents, all of them, had taught her to be honest. “I don’t want to do this alone.”

  Another tune, this one sounding like it came straight from the swamps, filled with heat and dark things, and it was all about loss and loss and loss. Into this song of longing, Baz said, very quietly, “Okay.”

  Don’t fix other people’s problems. That was Sol’s second New Year’s resolution. Then he’d become distracted, the fortune-seeker’s cardiac arrest needing a fast run with no room for error. He made the resolution in good faith but it only took forty-five minutes to break it.

  Because he had seen the fortuneteller’s ghost, had heard the ghost, and that made it his problem. There was no one else. Everyone’s problems—falls on ice, missed medications, overdoses, car crashes—they eventually made it to him. Same with this. Once he knew about it, it was his. Ignorance was the only excuse and he didn’t have it, not now.