Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  Sol did look at her then, and he sighed. There was no explaining any of it without explaining all of it, and that seemed too big, too strange and dangerous. You think she’s upset now, he thought, drawing her closer. There was only showing her how he felt, and he knew it wasn’t good enough.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into the top of her head, and he was always saying that. “You deserve better,” because it wasn’t her fault, none of it was. She’d just set her sights on the wrong guy.

  “No,” she said, and Sol was surprised her voice was steady, almost resolved. “No, I deserve exactly what I’ve got.”

  Sleep deprivation didn’t help him figure that one out. The phone rang into the silence that followed. Robbie disengaged, slipped out of the bed to answer it. She came back into the bedroom, naked, hair tumbled, lovely in the light, cute as something dangling from a keychain. She had her hand over the receiver. Their eyes met.

  “It’s Baz,” she said.

  TEN

  VITAL SIGNS

  The trouble, as far as Lutie could tell, was that ghosts seemed to be following them. The small bags that they had retrieved from their father’s rooming house seemed to work well enough; she saw some ghosts while she was out at the grocery store, hanging around the motel, but they fled when she came near. Shy, almost. Not wanting to be seen, but unable to keep away.

  Lutie couldn’t tell what they were attracted to—Baz wasn’t singing, was he—but they seemed to know he could and that was enough. Like groupies at the backstage door, Lutie thought uncharitably. I should have just gone back to Toronto. She remembered that day in the cemetery, so long ago, remembered the heat of it, and remembered that her brother would protect her, no matter what. Would help her, could help her.

  She’d taken advantage of that, and it sat in her stomach like a rich meal, badly digested.

  For the next couple of hours, she watched Baz’s condition worsen. Over-the-counter drugs had limited impact on his fever and she knew that the next stop would be the ER. She wondered if Ogallala was big enough to have a hospital. Probably. She retrieved her laptop from the car, but the motel didn’t have WIFI and she didn’t want to venture out again.

  The windows rattled, but it was the wind, crossing the plains like a nomad, relentless, changing, path unknown. Baz jumped at the sound, though, and his eyes drifted open, met hers. “Hé,” he whispered, voice of stone.

  She gave him some Gatorade to drink, and he tried to sit up, but she told him to stay put. She wasn’t a very good nurse, she knew that, but this time it covered a slow-boil of panic. She had no idea what to do. If she called her parents, they’d come, but it would take time and more explaining than Lutie was willing to offer. Besides, she hadn’t called them with an emergency in years, and she didn’t want to break her record now.

  “You see them?” Baz asked her, the skin on his face tight and flushed, eyes at half-mast, hair dark with sweat.

  “See what?” Lutie asked. “Should I turn on the TV for you?”

  He shook his head. “No ghosts, right? It’s too hot in here for ghosts.”

  Lutie sighed. “No, no ghosts.” It was only a small lie; he didn’t have to know about all the ones outside. That would be her worry. “Maybe I should call my parents,” she suggested, almost to herself. “The Major will know what to do.”

  Baz smiled, but he wasn’t looking at her. “Nah, it’ll be okay. Don’t worry.” His eyes closed again, and Lutie thought his breathing sounded off, staggered.

  Don’t worry. A fine strategy. She needed to define what her final straw would be. What would be her signal to call 911, not CFB Shilo?

  A pounding at the door startled her, but Baz didn’t move. Damn it, they had the room till tomorrow morning, must be the desk manager, who had been suspicious of her Ontario plates right from the beginning. A ghost could make that noise, too, though. She knew that, knew how much more than mere apparitions they were, how solid they could get, how physical they could become when given opportunity.

  She came to the door, and the loud knock—gloved hand against wood—made her startle again.

  “Baz?” a voice came. “Baz, you in there?” and the sound of swearing, muffled. As she watched, the doorknob moved, and a metallic jingling in the lock caused her to back away. A ghost probably couldn’t pick a lock, she thought belatedly. Probably wouldn’t know Baz’s name. Probably wouldn’t sound so aggrieved.

  The door opened with a scatter of loose snow, and a man stood there, his eyes adjusting to the relative light. He half-turned to look at something and Lutie saw it too: a ghost, materializing close by, mindful perhaps of an open door. The stranger stepped in, closed the door behind him quickly, one hand laid flat upon it, then fast, fingers to his chest, then back to the door again. “Shit,” he muttered.

  After a second he turned, saw her, dark eyes quickly sliding from her to Baz on the bed, and she knew who this was, who this had to be, mostly because he looked so much like the man in the photo. Beausoleil, she tried it in her mind, on her tongue, hadn’t really thought about him much over the years because he’d been the most indistinct: Maman, she remembered clearly, Baz had been her friend and playmate, Papa she remembered as wise and present.

  But this one?

  He ignored her, attention fully on Baz. With one hand, he took off his knit cap and tossed it onto the table by the window, and Lutie thought he looked like he’d been in a fight—his cheek was raw and small bandages held together one eyebrow. He crossed to the bedside, ran a hand over Baz’s face, and she realized he’d brought what looked like a tackle box with him. He opened it on the bed, fanned out like a kid’s pop-up book, and from it he extracted a stethoscope, a digital thermometer, took Baz’s temperature, listened to his chest, flipped open one eyelid and shone a penlight in there.

  Lutie came closer, intrigued. Surprised.

  “What happened?” her brother said, not looking at her, voice flat and uninflected. From the practiced cadence, he’d asked questions like this before.

  She said they’d been down at the tracks in North Platte, and that seemed to surprise him, and he looked up quickly. “North Platte?” he repeated. “Did he…sing?” Like she’d think he was crazy. She nodded.

  He held her stare, dark eyes blinking. After a moment, he turned back to Baz. “How long’s he been like this?”

  “This being, what?”

  He sighed. “Non-responsive.” Worried, but not angry.

  He doesn’t know who I am.

  Lutie’s hand came up, fingers splayed, a hand-shrug. “He was talking a few minutes ago. We were by the tracks at dawn. He threw up a bunch on the way from North Platte to here. He’s had a fever since then.”

  For a few silent minutes, Beausoleil—Sol, like the sun—selected items from his box, started an IV with surprising efficiency, put some fluids into Baz, some medications, kept one hand on his brother’s chest, checking vital signs continuously.

  “Hé, gars,” he finally said, but it was to Baz, who had opened glazed eyes. “You’re back.”

  Baz tried to smile, lazy as anything. “You missed the party.”

  Sol used the stethoscope and cuff to check Baz’s heartrate and blood pressure. Lutie hadn’t asked anything about this other brother, all she knew was that he knew more about ghosts than Baz, which wasn’t saying a whole lot.

  “I was working,” he murmured, slinging the stethoscope over his neck. “Listen, I gotta take care of something outside. These fluids will help you feel better, quick, but don’t mess with the IV, okay?”

  Baz nodded. “Hé, mo chagren, Sol.”

  Another sigh. “I know.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m really sorry.”

  With one hand, Sol reached over and ruffled Baz’s hair, but he didn’t stop his rise, his purposeful action. He paused at the hex bag closest to him, perched on the table by the window. Cautiously, he picked it up and examined it, then tossed it back on the table. His hand was on the knob. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,”
he said, and Lutie thought he might be, finally, talking to her. “Keep an eye on him. You can get going when I get back. I’ll take care of this.” And he opened the door, slid sideways through it and if she hadn’t known there were ghosts outside wanting to get in, she’d have called that strange behavior.

  After he was gone, Lutie cast a sidelong look at Baz, who was staring at her. “You called him,” she said, and tried not to make it sound like an accusation, but that’s just what it was. She might not have done a great job at looking after Baz, but she didn’t need a babysitter, either. And she’d already said she wasn’t ready to meet this other brother.

  “I didn’t tell him,” Baz whispered. “About you.”

  Hard laughter burbled from her lips, a choked response, bitter. “Only because you don’t want him to chew you out,” and she knew that was the truth. Lutie went to the window, parted the curtain to watch. “What’s he doing out there?” She heard a sound behind her, Baz clearing his throat.

  “He don’t like to be watched, Lutie.” Baz paused. “You come away from the window, chère, leave him be.”

  “Shh.” Sol had just bent down in the parking lot, a pair of misty apparitions hanging by an old pick-up truck not twenty feet from him, and he turned his head, touched the ground, put his hand inside his coat, out again, to his mouth. And she saw what happened next: a line, a shining line opened between Sol and the ghosts, widened like a path seen at night under moonlight. She understood it was there, and that it wasn’t. It simply existed for a moment, and had no beginning, no end. Sol looked to the ghosts, and she saw his lips move, and the ghosts unfolded, changed, didn’t so much as take a step, but the path came to them and they disappeared along it.

  Across the street at the gas station by a thicket of highway signs, where Sol didn’t notice, another ghost watched, and faded away, perhaps not wanting to be caught up in such an operation, but who knew what ghosts thought?

  “Lutie!” Baz hissed behind her. She turned, and Baz, eyes bright, still flushed, tried to sit up, agitated.

  She came back to his side, and handed him the wet washcloth. “Sorry. I’ve never seen something like that before.”

  “You’re not gonna learn anything by spying on him.” He put the cloth on his forehead, something cool to wick away the heat.

  Lutie raised an eyebrow. “Well, he doesn’t really seem the type to just tell me.”

  Baz laughed. “No, you got that right.”

  “I could just leave,” she said quietly. “Maybe that would be better.” They exchanged a long look: there was a certain benefit in that plan, a certain ease. Just get in the car, drive away, pretend none of this had happened.

  Sometimes, you could rewind the clock.

  A stupid amount of ghosts. Whatever Baz had done—going down to the tracks and purposefully singing—it was because Sol hadn’t warned him. Sol stopped outside the door for a minute, composing himself. Maybe Baz only suspected that his voice called ghosts to him, or maybe it was just too abstract. Ghost-sick like this, though? Well, that must make it a little more real.

  Sol didn’t know who the girl was, but he scarcely cared, some New Year’s Eve pick-up that had gotten more than she’d bargained for with Basile Sarrazin, who had never had any problem finding company, not in any arena. Baz could pick up in a mortuary. And Sol grimaced at that, because it wasn’t funny.

  The hex bags, though, they meant that Baz had cleared out their dad’s things in Minneapolis, just like he’d said he would. Sol was still waiting for any evidence that hex bags actually did anything, fetishes of their father’s swampland upbringing. Sol would have chucked them in the nearest dumpster.

  Still, if they gave Baz some sense of safety, that was something. The patient’s mental state was half the battle. Belief, faith, never underestimate it.

  His brother and the girl were staring at each other when Sol came back in, and he felt that he was interrupting something, but couldn’t have said what. Maybe Baz had just told her to get the hell out.

  Baz looked better, as Sol had expected. The ghosts were mostly gone now, if Baz didn’t open his mouth again—what had he been thinking? And Sol knew at least part of it was on him. Dad asks me to look out for him, and watch me screw it up.

  “So,” he said to the girl, who was pretty enough, young for Baz’s usual tastes, fair-haired and doe-eyed. First things first. He couldn’t ask Baz what the hell he’d been trying to prove down at the tracks when there was a stranger in the room. “Do you need a drive?”

  From her expression, she understood that he wasn’t offering her a ride.

  “What are you? Some kind of doctor?” she asked.

  Questions with questions. Great. “Paramedic,” he answered. “I could call you a cab,” he clarified.

  One of her shoulders hitched, and she looked around the room, eyes landing on a cardboard box sitting on the floor between the beds, on Baz’s duffle bag. The windows. Finally, her eyes rested on Baz, and again Sol thought there was more going on than he could easily make sense of, words being exchanged in some language he didn’t understand. “I call my own cabs. Besides,” she said slowly. “My car’s outside.”

  She sat on the bed next to Baz, and took his hand in hers. The box was in the way, so Sol picked it up from the floor, placed it on the decrepit desk loaded with television guides weeks out of date. On top was a fiddle case, below a few stacks of shirts. The smell was familiar, drew a sharp tug of loneliness, of unwanted memory. His dad’s things, here, possibly all that Baz had saved.

  If you wanted more, you should have gone yourself.

  “You gonna go now?” Sol heard his brother say, and it was laced with something hard and fragile, both.

  “It’s for the best. You have my number.”

  Right, Sol thought, making a show of flipping through the shirts, his back to the bed. The list of Baz’s one-night stands was like roll call in a cathouse and if she thought she was getting more of him, she’d be waiting a while.

  “Yeah. I’ll call. Have a good trip back,” and there was a pause and Sol couldn’t see what was being exchanged without turning around and disturbing it. “Stay safe.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said with a laugh. “And you know, Baz. You have a great voice. You do.”

  Wonderful, that’s just what you should say to him, Sol thought, hand encountering a shoebox underneath the shirts. He brought it out and put it on the table, because she was leaving and they really didn’t have a whole lot of time for the past and for goodbyes and for one-night stands. Baz was an exposed wound, was in need of protection and Sol didn’t know quite how to give it to him, but last night he’d wrestled with the most difficult kind of ghost that there was, and so he thought he’d probably figure out a way to handle whatever came next.

  She left without further word, and Sol parted the curtain to watch her reverse out the parking spot and drive away. Dammit, there was one more ghost malingering by the vacancy sign, and she slowed as she approached it, took a wide berth. Sol dropped the curtain with a sigh.

  “Man, you sure know how to pick ’em,” he said, and turned to find Baz wiping his eyes. Fine, he was an insensitive jerk after all. “Sorry,” he muttered, shrugging out of his coat.

  It didn’t take long for Baz to bounce back; it never did. Besides, he had ample ammunition. “You get in a fight for New Years?” Supposing, probably, something that was a likely scenario.

  Sol didn’t answer. Telling him exactly how he’d received his cuts and bruises was one way to start, maybe, impress upon his brother the seriousness of messing with ghosts, especially when you couldn’t even see them. Still, he’d driven three hours straight to get here on the same amount of sleep prior, and he needed coffee in the worst way. Or sleep. He wasn’t going to get sleep, he decided.

  The motel was located across the street from a retro-style diner and Sol had the intention of scouting for more ghosts when he ducked out for caffeine, but the ghost that had been hanging around the vacancy sign w
as gone. Sol didn’t know where, and the fact that so many ghosts had been outside when he’d arrived wasn’t right to start with; Baz had sung hours ago and sixty miles away. Ghosts usually didn’t follow you around if you hadn’t bound them to you.

  If this was some kind of binding, it was one that Sol had never heard of before, and a burr of suspicion wore at him in a place he couldn’t quite reach.

  He came back with a coffee for himself, two bottles of orange juice for Baz.

  The IV had done its job and so Sol removed it, much to Baz’s evident relief, and he then proceeded to slug down both juices. Then he declared that he had to go to the bathroom. While it could be true, Sol knew that Baz was avoiding conversation like it was an ex at a party. Something wasn’t right about all of this, and Sol knew that he was too tired to figure it out, but he’d chosen Caffeine Road, and was committed, so he prepared himself for the specific unpleasantness of forcing the issue.

  “Sit,” he said as Baz came out and before he had a chance to open his mouth.

  Baz took the bed. “Listen, I know what you’re gonna say—” and Baz lifted both hands, resting his back on pillows propped against the headboard. He didn’t finish the sentence; it just hung there, lost.

  It was funny, in a way. “Ouais?” Sol asked him. “You know what I got to say on this.”

  Baz blinked those big eyes that had always reminded Sol of Parisienne orphans on black velvet. “Well, no,” Baz admitted. “You should see what we found in Dad’s room.”

  Diversionary tactics. In a way, going along with Baz was always easier. More pleasant and fun. Didn’t always take you anywhere, though. This was deliberate bait, but Sol couldn’t quite resist it. “Let me guess. A whole pile of old shirts?” Gestured to the box.

  “You could use some.” The brows crept up. He was going to laugh and this was serious.

  “We?” Sol repeated instead, wiping the smile off his brother’s face.

  Baz deflated like a kid’s balloon post-party. He licked his lips, almost nervous. “Jean-Guy, right?”