Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  “You’re in Ontario now,” Sol stated, ordering a beer from the hovering waitress while giving the menu more consideration than he was giving Lutie. Baz hoped she saw through this, but there was no way to know. “So why did Baz find you in Manitoba?”

  Across the table from Sol, next to Baz, Lutie’s eyes flicked up, down, and Baz’s stomach flipped uncertainly.

  “My folks are there. I live in Toronto.” Curious, but not asking how he knew. Easy enough, though. Sol must have seen her plates. She snapped the menu shut; Sol still studied his as though someone had written a novel in the margins. “I’m at U of T.”

  Sol made some sound, but didn’t look up until their waitress brought their drinks, pen and pad ready for their food order.

  “What’s your major?” Sol asked, ignoring the larger bait—mention of her ‘folks’. He must be wondering, but he wasn’t asking.

  Lutie’s mouth turned around her straw. “Second-year psych.”

  “Useful,” Sol murmured, and Baz remembered that Sol had started at the state university, done a year, then transferred to the community college. It had been a difficult year, that one, in a lot of ways. Money had been one part of it; time looking after Baz had been another. Sol didn’t show his bitterness often, and it startled Baz now. The waitress was waiting for Baz and he smiled up at her, ordered a burger and fries.

  “She grew up in foster care,” Baz said after the waitress left, broaching the topic, since Sol was dancing around it and Lutie seemed to be willing herself into the next county. He elbowed her, raised his eyebrows. Sol needed to know about what had happened to their mother. “Like us.”

  Sol’s eyes were as opaque as a shark’s. Alert, roaming. “Not like us, Baz.”

  “Our mother’s dead,” Lutie fired across his bow, or maybe she was going for the direct hit, and Baz knew what she was doing, because he’d been on the receiving end of it in the McGregors’ kitchen. “When I was nine. She committed suicide and left…”

  Baz had no idea what this news would do to Sol, who never talked about Maman. Baz couldn’t remember a single time when his brother had mentioned her name. At least their father had given Baz the one photograph, had cursed her when he’d been drinking, had acknowledged her existence with his misery. Had every once in a while, and only when very drunk, played lullabies on the fiddle and told Baz they were hers.

  Beside Baz, Lutie stiffened, seeing the look Sol gave her. Refraining from touching her, comforting her, Baz cleared his throat. She didn’t need his protection, he reminded himself. “Sol. I’m sorry, but—”

  Lutie interrupted. “Don’t, Baz.”

  Baz’s attention bounced between them. He opened his mouth, and then shut it. Sol hadn’t moved, was watching Lutie with interest, finally.

  “Do you know what I did this morning?” One hand turned his bottle around, and his voice was terse, controlled. Baz didn’t want to know, couldn’t predict anything that Sol might have done that morning.

  Lutie’s hand came up. Go on, it gestured.

  But Sol always made you ask. “What?” Baz said, going through the formality, wanting things to be different, for Sol to be different. I want her to like him, he thought, fleetingly. With despair. I want her to stick around. I want her to want to stick around, Sol.

  With one thumb, Sol scratched his eyebrow, where the butterfly bandages must be itching. “I got rid of a fortuneteller’s ghost,” he said, kept his voice low. “She’d trapped it against its will and it was making her crazy. You know about that part, right? The part where a bound ghost turns you insane?” He looked directly at Lutie and Baz might as well not have been there.

  Baz heard the pride, the warning. There had been the whole Katrina business, when Aurie had specifically broken the frosty impasse with his eldest and told Sol not to go, and Sol had ignored him, and had come back broken. Something overcome, this morning, some notch carved wherever Sol kept track of how well or poorly he was doing.

  Again, still, Lutie did not move, held herself rigid as a dressmaker’s form. “M’man did okay with it.” Words as weapons, childhood name a bullet to the heart.

  And Sol smiled, dimples disappearing into what was now formally a beard, not an afterthought, everything deliberate. “Right up till the bathtub, hé, chère?” Another swig of beer, and Baz saw that his brother wasn’t indifferent, wasn’t cold. He was so far from that, and all the words flying across the table were sharp because of it. “You don’t need to cover up the truth for her, she’s long gone. That ghost she had was company enough, I guess. Better company than her husband. Than her kids. She left us all, Luetta. Just you last.”

  The food came and maybe the waitress sensed what was going on, because she dropped the plates and ran.

  No one touched anything. And then Lutie said, “I didn’t say she did it in a bathtub. So you tell me. Who’s covering up the truth?”

  Slow, slow smile, recognition of a hit, of kinship, who knew, and then Sol said, “I thought we were gonna eat like normal people.” He pulled his plate toward him, but his words knocked on Baz’s heart like a door-to-door solicitor making the rounds and Baz understood what hadn’t been said so much as revealed.

  “You knew?” Baz said, unbelieving, and for the first time, Sol’s impassive front faltered.

  Reaching for the pepper, Sol rolled a shoulder like he was taking a punch, looked briefly at Baz, but his words were for Lutie. “Happy?”

  “No,” she shook her head. She hadn’t made a single move yet. Not for food, not for anything. “I’m not.” She turned, maybe to make sure Baz understood, because Baz knew how he came across, knew what people tended to think of him. “He’s known all along, that she was dead. Knew it and didn’t tell you.”

  Baz wondered if the fever was back, because the diner was orange and too hot for him, and he felt a chill come over him. He wanted her to like Sol. Hell, Baz wanted to like Sol. He wasn’t making it easy, not by a long shot.

  Across the table, Sol took a forkful of slaw into his mouth, followed it with the tail end of his drink. His eyes cut sideways, uncomfortable. Finally, his attention rested on Baz and Baz had no idea how to make sense of that look. He swallowed, adjusted his voice. “No. I didn’t tell you.”

  “How…” Baz couldn’t even finish it, couldn’t ask. He didn’t know how to ask Sol this, and it was unfair for Sol to demand it with his silence. So he waited. Lutie did too and Baz wondered that he’d just learned this, that he didn’t have to fill all of Sol’s silences.

  After a moment, Sol put the fork down, met Baz’s stare. “When I started work for Denver Health. I was able to access records. It was the first thing I did.”

  Baz made a quick calculation. “Four years?” It was incredible. “You’ve known for four years?”

  “Ouais, gars.” He sighed. “Mo chagren. Mais,” and his brows came up a little and he picked at the pale tomato in his clubhouse, teased a piece out the side. Choosing words, setting them up like a screen. “What good would it have done? Eh? She was,” and he lifted a hand in Lutie’s direction as though she was an abstraction, and then caught himself. “You were with a family, and you had been for years, the court records said, and the social worker I spoke to said you were doing good there. What? I was gonna phone you up? ‘Hé, T-Lu, laissez les bon temps roulez?’” His best and most effective Cajun accent and Baz felt more than his heart in his mouth, because he heard it, everything that Sol hated about where they came from, who they were. Sol turned to Baz, clear-eyed. “She finally had it good. Let it lie, eh? It was done.”

  “You called my social worker?” Lutie demanded, the first real reaction Baz had heard from her. Outrage, because that was easier than anything else.

  Sol ignored it, stared at his plate.

  “Did Dad know?” Baz asked, and he shouldn’t have, because he wasn’t sure he could cope with the answer.

  Slowly, Sol shook his head. “Nah.” His smile was a fiddle string; his words the peg, turning. “I don’t think so, anyway. We we
ren’t really talking to each other by then, were we?”

  “Why?” Lutie asked. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  Sol licked his lips and looked away. Without looking back, he lifted his shoulders. Up. Down. Baz knew this gesture: he wasn’t going to say. Maybe he didn’t know himself, or didn’t want to share, but they’d never hear about it. Instead, Sol picked up one of his sandwich triangles, gestured to the waitress and asked for more water.

  And that was as much as Baz could take.

  Lutie watched Baz leave; he was out the door in seconds and Sol let him go. Lutie made to stand and Sol lifted his chin, looked her in the eye. “Leave it alone.”

  He seemed on the verge of telling her she’d done enough, and that was true, was more than true, but Baz had been the one to seek her out, hadn’t he? He’d been the one to turn the key, get all this in motion. So what if he was unprepared for consequences, that wasn’t her fault. Whatever lay between these two, that wasn’t her fault either. She stayed seated while Sol slowly picked apart his sandwich.

  “You didn’t talk to your father for four years?” He didn’t volunteer anything, this one, and she wanted to keep him off-guard, not ask the obvious. It seemed safer.

  Sol looked at her before answering. “We didn’t agree on a lot of things.” Like that was an explanation.

  “Why was he in jail?” Her eyes narrowed. “Was that why you cut him off?”

  His eyelids flickered, and a smile crossed his face briefly. “What makes you think the not-talking was my idea?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  A full smile, a real one, bitter as the bottom of a staff room coffeepot. But no response. She waited, finally chose a fry from her plate. They were stone cold. After a while, he called the waitress over and asked for the check. The waitress wondered if everything was all right, when any idiot could see it wasn’t, and then she asked if she should package Baz’s meal to go and Sol smiled in a way that Lutie was coming to realize meant its opposite. The answer was no, but he said yes to both things.

  “It’s a long story, and Baz shouldn’t be alone.” He stared at her, empty-eyed, unreadable. “He doesn’t know what he can do, he doesn’t believe it.” He paused, was very still. “At least, not before today. You put him in a lot of danger.”

  “And you know what he can do?” she asked, pointedly. “You’ve worked that out and decided not to let him know? You let him loose, and he calls up what he calls up—”

  Sol let out a huff, maybe of shock, maybe anger. She could take whatever he dished out, though. “Calls up? Like, lining up a bunch of cooperative ghosts to be your own special lapdog? You used him.”

  It stung, sure, but it was beside the point. “He sings, and more than ghosts come. You know that.” She shook her head slowly, like a disappointed school teacher. “I’m not the one putting him in danger.”

  He considered her, and she didn’t know what was going on behind the calm eyes and the beard, and the pressed-together lips, all his masks. He paid and she let him, then grabbed the white plastic bag that contained a Styrofoam box filled with food that no one in their right mind was going to eat, and stood. Lutie followed him down the aisle, past the stupid records and the goofy prints of old cars, pulling on her coat and finding her tuque in the side pocket.

  Outside, the wind came in from the west, swept down the street, swinging traffic lights on their clamps. Lutie looked across to the parking lot, but she couldn’t see Baz anywhere. He’d probably gone to the room; it was too cold for just wandering around.

  Sol wasn’t crossing the street. His hands were searching his pockets and he eventually found and lit a cigarette, and they stood there while he smoked, Lutie cold but not freezing, not wanting to be there, particularly, but angry enough to stay.

  “What do you mean, ‘more than ghosts’?” he finally asked, picking a fleck of tobacco from his lip. The streetlight illuminated half his face and it wasn’t enough to read him properly, even if Lutie knew how to do that. He was waiting for an answer, though, was apparently good at doing that.

  The pompom on her tuque rolled to the side as she bent her head. Not a shrug, really, because whatever Sol could do with ghosts was way beyond her experience, so why was he evading now, with this? “I can see ghosts, right?” He nodded in agreement, and it felt strange, to say that straight, without fearing a medical assessment.

  “Yeah, I know that.” Hurried, impatient, old ground.

  “And that other stuff, I can see it too.” The pavement was cracked, long lines leading nowhere, no sense to them.

  Sol, so apparently practiced at waiting for it, looked hard at her, and she could see that his calm had worn thin. “What other stuff?”

  Lutie didn’t like to be questioned. Especially, she didn’t like that he was asking her to explain what she didn’t know about, when he knew perfectly well what it was. “Screw you,” she said, hands up. “I don’t owe you anything.”

  His teeth gleamed white in the night as he laughed, turned from her, streaming smoke as he circled away. One hand up to touch his temple, then another drag before facing her again. “Hey, this wasn’t my idea.”

  “You’ve made that really clear, thanks.” And she heard what lay underneath her words, hoped he didn’t.

  He flinched, though, and she knew he had. Another long moment as he looked into the night, but she didn’t see anything in the shadows. His voice, though, was softer when he looked back to her. “What else are you seeing, Luetta?” Then shifted, eyes narrowing, almost like he was remembering something. “You seeing something—dark?” He’d been considering another word, and Lutie wondered if it was French, if he only knew how to describe this stuff in his first language, in their parents’ language.

  She nodded once. “It came when Baz was singing. It wasn’t a ghost. It…” She had his attention now, all right. Her brother ground out the cigarette on the pavement, came closer, hands in pockets, Baz’s cold dinner swinging from a loop on his wrist. She took a breath and said it all at once. “I think it knew Baz. It didn’t act like the ghosts, they were all grabbing him, wanting a piece of him. This was black, like a crab or a huge spider, and it was talking to Baz.”

  The upside to Sol’s reticence, to his bull headed calm, was that she could talk about this and he wasn’t telling her she was crazy, he wasn’t freaking out. There was something to be said for that. “You hear any of that conversation, Lutie?” She shook her head. “You think Baz did? You think Baz could see it?”

  She shrugged, but Sol didn’t look pissed off any more. He looked worried.

  “It disappeared, not like a ghost does. You know?” And Sol nodded. It was weird, being able to talk about this, weird and so good. “I have a lot of questions,” she admitted quietly.

  Sol nodded, but his expression had changed again, this time to resignation. “I’m sorry. He should have just left you alone. You should go back to school, take your medication, forget all about this.”

  “I’m here now, though.” It was the truth, and he couldn’t wish her away. “So talk to me.”

  He blinked, face held stiffly, maybe a response to emotion. “What can I say to you?”

  “Well, first off, what was that black thing? Why’s it after Baz?” It was cold, and she wished they’d go inside, either to the diner or to the motel, but she knew Sol wasn’t going to talk about this in front of Baz.

  “I think it’s the same thing that killed our father,” he said, point blank, and Lutie suddenly knew what it was like, getting hit this way. He wasn’t even trying to use it as a weapon, either. “I don’t know what to call it. Like a demon, a devil, un p’tit mauvais. A small bad thing.”

  “It wasn’t cute, you know.”

  Wordlessly, he handed her the restaurant bag, then lit another cigarette. “I know.” He turned, started walking across the street. “I don’t know much about them.” A door had shut within him, and Lutie didn’t quite know what to say. He’d been Aurie’s boy, she remembered Maman saying.
He’d been taught, sort of, but not enough, had cut their father off, cut off the teaching, rejected it. Guessing now, just like her. A little better at hiding it, maybe.

  “Don’t you want to kill it?” she shouted after him.

  He turned in the middle of the street, empty of traffic, held out his arms, a question. “What do you want me to do?” He kept walking, heading toward the motel, and Lutie caught up with him. Before she could ask again, he said, “You don’t kill those things. You try to avoid them. Better that they don’t know you’re there.”

  “Well, Baz has this one’s attention, and if it killed Aurie, too? I don’t know about you, but I think we’re past trying to get out this thing’s way.”

  He stopped outside the door, and strobing television-light spilled from between the curtains, a sign that Baz was inside. Sol scrutinized her, weighed her worth, and Lutie felt uncomfortable under this gaze, shifted from foot to foot, cold among other things.

  “I’m looking into it.” He hesitated, hands on his hips, breath pluming into the night as he sighed. “There’s a ghost working this part of the track. It has a thing against people who are about to catch out. You know,” and he smiled slightly, bemused maybe, “railroad slang. Catching out, getting on the road, leaving the past behind you. Those lucky assholes who’ve thrown in the towel, kissing boring goodbye, looking to follow their bliss.” He stared knowingly at her, quoting Joseph Campbell, trusting her to get the reference. Not some bayou hick, make no mistake. “I’m pretty sure it’s the ghost of a railroad cop that was murdered near here about thirty years ago, according to the drifters along the tracks. I talked to someone at the historical society in Brule, which is where the murder happened, but they wouldn’t give me any more than that. At first, I thought this ghost killed our dad, but I don’t think so anymore. Maybe the devil you saw is controlling the ghost, maybe le diable just likes all the confusion a big méchant ghost causes, I don’t know. The murders first showed up on my radar a few weeks ago. Dad came here, looking into it, same as me, and it got him killed.”