Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  “How do you know that?” She kept her voice down, but a deep fear had sprung up in her, because it had been unreal before, just on her own, but this was different, was so real. “That he was killed by something different from a ghost?”

  With one hand, the one not holding the cigarette, he made a gesture, folded a couple of fingers down. “He was making that sign when he died. It’s a ward, but not against ghosts. Against evil. He wouldn’t have made that for a ghost.” His eyes were turned away from her. “He came to my place in Denver, after.” Voice rough, now. He’d been visited by their father’s ghost, and how weird would that be? “He said that he’d been killed by un diable.” He looked at her, direct, and he was calm again, collected, distant. “It’s dangerous for you guys even being here. Why…” and he looked away, fighting for it, because he wasn’t the sort of guy that liked asking for what he didn’t know. “Why did Baz go down there, to Bailey Yard?”

  Common sense told her to lie, to say that she hadn’t been trying to catch a ghost, but he already knew so much, and he probably couldn’t like her less than he already did. Still. “Baz wanted to. We’d been talking about ghosts and I was saying how hard it was, seeing them all the time around you, and—” She remembered Baz’s words, what he’d wanted out of it. Sol hadn’t asked her why she’d gone down there; he’d asked why Baz had. “He wanted to help you. He thought that maybe I could find out stuff from the ghosts about Aurie’s murder that you couldn’t.”

  He’d been smiling in that sardonic way he had, but he wasn’t smiling any more. Brows crooked, puckering the bandages, and he shook his head, attention to the ground. He went to a beat-up Jeep, worn black paint, missing a few faux wood side panels, and unlocked the back. After a minute, he returned with a bag of road salt. The corner was cut and he poured a line across the doorway to the motel room, more on the windowsills.

  Then he gave her the salt bag, heavy as a baby, and unlocked the room.

  Inside, it was warm, and Baz lay on the bed, watching TV, a mournful expression on his face. He looked up as Lutie came in, then back to the noisy program. Pissed off, but not at her, at Sol. The door was held open for her, and Sol dipped his head beside her ear and she smelled night and smoke and salt. “Make a line at every window, every door. Get him to eat something. Don’t let him out of your sight, don’t let him sing one damn note.”

  And he shut the door behind him as he went out into the night.

  One drink wasn’t enough, but a whole bottle would be far too much. He had another shot, then one more. At the bar, elbows on the counter, on a mission, none of this remotely to do with pleasure. Drinking was work, right now, necessary armor. No, its opposite: a necessary opening. Like a shaman downing peyote to talk to the gods, he thought.

  I have no idea what I’m doing. Not his father’s voice, his own. By the glass-end of Beam number four, Sol thought he’d had enough. Available to things, not so tightly wound, able to see crap, hear things clearly. Hear more than ghosts, probably, because ghosts, merde, he could always see those. Hell, half the time he made it to the bottom of a bottle was an effort to wipe them out.

  This wasn’t about that.

  Papa never talked about les diables, Sol thought. Not to me. But sometimes, his buddies would come through town, usually on tour, musicians most of them—T-Jean, and T-Lou, the Thibodeaux brothers, and all those other guys whose last names ended in x like the marks of illiterates—and the rum would flow and the neighbors would bang on the wall in complaint. Sometimes, they took the party out and Baz and Sol wouldn’t see Aurie for days. These were the times before the manslaughter trial, before the botched exorcism, a time when Aurie had friends.

  They traded ghost stories like cigarettes, like laundry-day gossip, like new lyrics to old songs. Sol had been the young one, and Baz the younger one, Sol handy with ghosts, Baz a prodigy with a fiddle, allowed at the knees of the masters, around to refill glasses and fetch bags of cheap potato chips from the store. These rough guys with ball caps and overalls sometimes needled Aurie about his apparent way with devils and angels and Aurie had smiled, ducked his head, embarrassed, Sol had thought at the time, bashful at such praise.

  He’d been proud of his father, then.

  After prison, the friends had been fewer, the reckonings in the dark with a bottle more intense. The talk had not curled tight circles around double stops and swamp pop anymore, but spoke increasingly of devils, and things that moved freely in the night. Sol had been done with Aurie by then, and hadn’t listened, not to any of it.

  He wished he had now, because what he knew about les diables currently amounted to this: unlike ghosts, they were not, and never had been, human. They were something else, a flip side of a foreign coin. Good on one side, evil on the other. That was how humans thought of them, Sol supposed. What did words like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ matter to such creatures? When he was a boy, he’d thought of them as something out of folktales—their kind of mischief dragged unwary children off docks, curdled milk, caused girls to sleep through their wedding day. After his incarceration, Aurie had ranted about les diables, and descriptions of them had become more deadly, painted a portent of dread, unravelers of dreams. More than a nuisance, not a full-blown Apocalypse, maybe, but bad enough.

  Sol turned his glass around, refracting bronze light, wishing for more, edges numbed, able to blank out the gibbering anxiety, the nattering of negativity. I can do this, he thought. I have to do this, more to the point. Those shamans probably got stoned for a reason: if their supernatural correspondent ripped them apart, they could at least die happy. Not quite enough Beam for that, unfortunately.

  Rising from his seat, he nodded to the bartender, who had begun with questions, then been wise and experienced enough to back off. Payment was on the bar, under the empty glass. Sol pulled on his warm coat, felt the nearby presence of the railroad tracks like a magnet, siren song. God, I’m too drunk for this. But not really, because once outside, remarkably close to the tracks, a whistle blew and he jumped the fence, windmilled down the graveled incline to the rails, and a train smashed the night, roared by and if Sol had thrown himself under it, he wouldn’t have died happy, not at all.

  He had a half-bottle of rum resting in his inside pocket, just in case he hadn’t gotten the balance right between sober and drunk, awake and dreaming. Everything he’d ever done, everything he’d been taught to do, was anchored in the earth and he didn’t think that devils cared much about the earth. I don’t need a fight, not tonight. This was a fact-finding mission, he had no illusions about trying to rid the world of any evil tonight. He didn’t give a damn, really, about any of it as long as they left his family alone.

  It had talked to Baz, had marked him, somehow. And Sol? Well, Sol was about to mark it in return.

  The moon was a thin scrape of silver, a skater’s incision on a frozen lake, rimed the tracks following the departing westbound, and Sol smiled in spite of the cold and what he was there to do. If he’d been at a bend, the train would have had slowed enough to catch out; he could have been home by midnight, warm in his own bed, tracing the patterns of constellations on Robbie’s freckled back as she dreamed. He thought of his cell phone in the motel room, maybe on the floor. He hadn’t picked it up again. It was pointless. He always came home, and Robbie must know it by now, didn’t need some tag and release program to tell her that.

  The rum flask rubbed a warm groove against his bruised ribs and he thirsted for it. Ignoring that want, he wandered westward, away from the light, away from the agitated rumble of the nearby interstate, only the lonely sound of coyote and the occasional whoop of owl to disturb the night, not even the blast of a train in the distance. He made sure he was nowhere near Claude and Tomson’s shantyville; they didn’t need the kind of trouble he was borrowing tonight. After a while, he slowed, took his bearings, not wanting to become another rail death statistic. He didn’t know how to call these things. Maybe there was no calling them.

  Ghosts came, if you did it righ
t, if you offered incentive. Earth, blood, breath, life, afterlife. It worked, to a point. But ghosts had once been people, had some vestige of human emotion—fear, anger, hate, love. Mais, les diables? Who knew? Probably best not to know, because that meant you’d gotten too close, offered too much.

  The rails scarred the prairie, bound on either side by a bank of rough grass and battered snowfence. The sky above was clear, which was why it was so cold: a massive blush of star, covering from rim to rim, gorgeous and too big for the heart to embrace. Sol withdrew the rum, took a slug, felt it hit his belly and rush to every extremity. The cap didn’t screw on easily, like it wanted to be open in his hand, but Sol argued it back on, slid the flask into his inside pocket, cold against warm, sky huge above him, iron running in two directions at the same time, going home and heading out.

  He crouched down, drew off his glove with trepidation and shoved it into his pocket. He lit a cigarette and considered the night. No ghosts, nothing but wind and snow and the trailing wail of train, now long gone. Inhuman sky above. I don’t want to do this, he thought, knowing that kind of attitude would get him nowhere. I’ve already done my impossible deed for today. He buried his hand into the gravel, finding the hard-packed earth below, firmament of the ages, traces left for those who could see: the grooved crescent imprint of buffalo hoof, tears of exile. Licking his lips, he took a drag of his smoke with his other hand.

  He thought powerfully of Baz, not as he appeared now with the markers of fashion piercing his face and ears, not the careful way he handled Sol, same as he’d handled their father. Instead, Sol thought of his brother as he’d been at nine, ten years old, when he could sing as loud as he pleased under bent cypress wooly with moss, sun and heat making him brown like some sort of wild creature more at home on a boat than on land. Sol concentrated on Baz’s voice as it had been, soft and sliding from English to French and back again, not even knowing there was a difference, just whole in his skin, so bright he could break your heart.

  Sol sent that out, from heart to hand to earth.

  Crouched low, cigarette done, hand so cold he couldn’t feel the pain anymore, holding on to this memory, and behind him, gravel moved, shifted in the night. Where the devil could not see him, Sol smiled. Blinked, then ran a tongue over lips chapped and split from dry cold, knowing that he was open enough, that he would be able to see it, and it could see him. He would be at its mercy. So be it.

  Its chuckle sounded more like stone rattling on stone, a wash of floodwater over a beach littered with bodies. Sol smelled swamp rot and engine oil in the air, a thousand miles from the nearest bayou. It stirred fear in him, stirred failure, opened a void vast as an ocean. He felt like that shoe box back at the motel, open to the world, secrets bared.

  Gotta be open enough for this, he counseled himself. Leave yourself open just enough.

  He turned. The rails glowed in the wan moonlight, and some yards away, a dark mark against the frost-burnt grass, was a creature, big as a Harley. Loose-jointed, close to the ground, eyes catching moonlight when its head swayed side-to-side like a slow conductor’s baton. Another chuckle, and every hair on Sol’s body rose in response.

  The devil was twelve feet away from him, maybe less, and it was solid, present, ruinously so. Arms hung from its spider body; Sol couldn’t tell how many, it seemed to change as he watched. It approached raggedly, reorganized itself, became more man-like, as though on a whim.

  “Hey, good-lookin’,” it rasped like it was going to burst into song. It laughed again, coughed, as though the air strangled it. “Whatcha got cookin’?” And it scraped one talon-like finger over its obscured face, striking sparks. Sol smelled sulfur, the inside of a furnace, creosote.

  “We haven’t met,” Sol said, mouth dry, wanting the rum, dead weight in his inside pocket. “But you know me.”

  Its head turned, and Sol knew this because of the moonlight glinting pale green from its eyes. “You guys all look the same. I thought you were gone, thought we were even. So fuckin’ tricky, you people.”

  A minute, Sol looking at it, ungloved hand like a block of ice hanging at his side. Against the soles of his boots, he could feel the thrum of earth. He paid attention to that, because he knew it, trusted earth like nothing else. Waited for this thing to understand the situation. Finally, it chuckled again. “Hey, you ain’t him!” It slithered and scratched closer, every step drawing sparks from the stones. Came close, and circled behind and Sol turned, following it, hands held out, no weapon to go against it. I’m not giving it my back, he thought, and didn’t know if that was wise. It was like bear attack advice: look bigger than you were, play dead, climb a tree, run, back away, whistle.

  “No. I’m not him. He’s dead. You killed him.”

  It had a spider’s silent rush, pic-pic-pic’ed to the side, collected itself. Stroked its flank with one clawed hand, head draped in fine hair, Sol could now see. Maw open, black teeth row upon row, breathing ragged against the poison air. “Yeah, I killed him all right. You’re the other one, I guess, hé, gars?”

  So sly, remembering Aurie’s cadences, or picking up Sol’s fast. It wasn’t human, but it sure as hell sounded like one. A wave of pure adrenalin surged up Sol, toe to head, flashing like fever and he wanted to run so badly he had to concentrate on keeping his feet planted firm. “The other one?” He didn’t sound stupid, he sounded cold, thank God.

  “The other guy. You Sarrazins.” Clicking forward, pause, step again. Closer. Sol didn’t budge. “You need something, Beausoleil?” The more time in its company, the more it seemed to figure out about him, the more it took from him.

  Needing something from things such as this was probably a bad idea, but still. He licked his lips. “I need you to keep the fuck away from us.”

  Clickclickclick, scuttle of stone, scrape against chitinous shell, spark and spark. “Sorry,” it said. “No can do.”

  Sol kept his hands out, fingers frostbite cold. “Why d’you kill him?” Still surprisingly calm. That was the Beam talking, he thought. Steady as she goes, just enough to override the adrenaline.

  The thing swayed back and forth, same movement as a mother lulling a newborn to sleep, now not more than a body-length from him, reeking of a shrimpboat hold in August, of the submerged Ninth Ward, bloated bodies wedged under attic rafters. Sol took a step back, remembering that, and it laughed. “Why not?” it asked, huddling next to a fringe of hoary prairie grass. It gathered itself, became less human again, more like an insect, hard-bodied. “He was tiresome, your papa. We hated him. Oh, how we hated him. Always so damn contrary. But he got old, worn out.” It sighed. “He fucked up.”

  Contrary. That was one word for Aurie. The thing was talking in the plural, though, and that meant there was more than one of them. Sol blinked, filing information for later, not assessing it yet, because that took his attention away from what was right in front of him. “You…knew him for a long time?”

  It waved a claw, a hand, a talon. “Too long.” It hustled to one side, teeth gleaming, maybe a smile, maybe a threat, and Sol’s insides froze. “Too damn long. So I get to move onto the next thing.”

  Oh God, Sol thought. “Leave Baz alone.”

  “That’s what you’re here to tell me? ‘Leave Baz alone?’” Repeated it like he was doing a bad DeNiro impersonation.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m here to tell you.”

  “Make me.” A thrill of laughter. “What a wonder he was hiding, your old man.” It shuffled away, laughing still, like something was funny. “Aurie Sarrazin, always trying to work it out, trying to get the best of us, but he never did. Didn’t in the end, anyway. But,” voice carried away, thin stranglehold on what could only be jealousy. “You shoulda seen him when he was young. What an arrogant asshole. Never knew what she saw in him, but then I never could figure you guys out.” You guys. Humans, maybe.

  Don’t try to work it out. You don’t have time to work it out right now.

  The devil scurried back to Sol, amazingly fast, sle
ek green eyes shining in the moonlight. “Who knew that Aurie woulda come up with a kid like that? Well, not Aurie, really. Maybe in spite of him, hé? Had me hoodwinked. You have no idea.” Closer, and Sol backed up so he was between the thin lines of iron and he hoped it was enough protection. “This little light of mine—” it sang, awful coarse retching, untuned catgut stroked by horsehair.

  Sol’s stomach ached, the ground shook and he felt a rush behind him, like the sudden suck of enormous wings. He was protected, was between iron, and he heard a laugh, but only barely, because of the noise and the grinding and the light from behind.

  And he realized, right then, that he was standing on the tracks of the Union Pacific Railway’s major east-west corridor, making small talk with something that wanted to kill him. This was exactly how his father had died. Without thinking, he leapt to one side, away from the devil, and an eastbound freight train roared past, all lights and oil and sparks and steel, eight thousand tons of steel and freight going seventy miles per hour, Sol rolling ass over shoulder, bones singing, blood pounding hard in head and chest, the flask breaking inside his coat, jagged glass sliding down his side as he bounced and rolled out of the way.

  A train, a goddamn train and he’d been conversing with that thing like an amateur, an idiot. You don’t negotiate. Car after car rushed past, too fast to read tags, ascertain cargo. Sol came to his hands and knees, breathing hard, head down, a few minutes now, le p’tit diable wouldn’t cross, he didn’t think, but who the hell knew, really?

  To his knees, then his feet, staggered to the side, one foot crossing another, down to one knee again, back up, breath coming in gasps, one hand inside his parka to his side, wet with rum certainly and blood probably, he didn’t know. The train kept coming, car and car and car, finally the end, Sol standing straight, ready for it, whatever came next.

  The train passed, last car flashing red into the night, and Sol leveled his attention across the tracks, every instinct brought to bear. Beyond the iron rails, before the snowfence, was only emptiness, a hollow lack. The devil was gone and the train swept to the east, away from places Sol called home, to industrial, populated parts. Sol stepped back, but there was no danger here, not anymore. The danger had moved, and he could not say to where.