Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  “They dope you up?” Baz asked, bending his head forward so they could hear each other over the thump of bass.

  She shrugged. “Some. It was better for a while. The ghosts were, anyway. I wasn’t better.”

  The band abruptly stopped: break time, like they were on a clock. Only a lone dancer complained, weaving between the risers and a brass pole that Baz guessed had a more pragmatic use during the ‘buffet lunch for businessmen’.

  Sol leaned back suddenly, voice low. “Worst birthday, though?” Sol eyed Baz darkly and Baz didn’t know which one he’d name, because there were so many to choose from. “Gotta be that one in ’98. I turned seventeen and you were—” He waved his hand vaguely. “I think I ended up in the drunk tank. Something about a car.”

  “A cop car,” Baz nodded, smiled wanly and sideways at Lutie. There had been some social workers in addition to the police. It had been a scary few weeks, mostly due to Aurie’s reaction when he’d found out his eldest son had stolen and demolished a police car. His youngest hadn’t been involved, but only because Baz had been two weeks on the streets, incommunicado. It was the first time Baz had been glad his father was behind bars. It was not the last.

  “When’s your birthday?” Lutie asked, and such a question coming from a family member was indelicate, but so many things about her were.

  Sol smiled, and it disappeared into his beard. “Tintamarre. M’man always said it was lucky.”

  Lutie nodded. “She would. Acadian national day. August 15th?” Baz saw Sol’s smile deepen, a tidbit of knowledge shared like a joint at a party. She’d remembered something of their past. Tintamarre. “I bet that’s when they met. The big Acadian festival at Caraquet, it’s usually around Tintamarre. Aurie must have gone up there to play.” Baz thought of the photo they’d found. “So, what’d you do after you got out of lock-up? When you were seventeen?”

  “He came and hauled my ass off the corner,” Baz interjected. “I’d been hanging out, making money anyway I could.” He laughed, and it wasn’t funny. “See? The Old Roadside is better than that. Almost.”

  They sat in silence after that, Sol’s attention a million miles away. He had that stare, the one that was really easy to misinterpret. Or totally easy to interpret, which was part of the problem. Suddenly he repeated, out of nowhere and with heat: “I hauled your ass off a street corner, stupid shit. That’s when I decided.” Turned the glass around and around. “I’d had it. I caught out.”

  Baz couldn’t say anything to that, thought he’d misheard, or that Sol was just going to start saying things that no one could understand. Lutie, though, she didn’t mishear, or second guess.

  “What do you mean, you caught out?” Not belligerently, but maybe a little annoyed that he’d used jargon she didn’t understand.

  The gaze didn’t come back to them. “Denver’s a good city for it, big yard, railroad hub. Catch east, get to Chicago, west, you’re in San Francisco before you know it.” He downed the bourbon in one gulp, nursing grudges, not alcohol. “North. Time it right, you can ride the rails north.”

  It was bottle talk, because Sol had always been there, as far as Baz could remember, had sometimes been drunk, had sometimes been so surly with fatigue or stressed by exams that he was the single biggest pain in the ass that a teenager could inherit from an incarcerated father, but he had been there. Baz had always counted that as one of his problems, that his brother kept such a close eye.

  “You?” Lutie’s voice was low and thick. “You hopped trains?”

  Unbelievable, maybe, to her as well. Hard ass, feet on the ground, first to judge and to order, Sol wasn’t built for flights of fancy, for midnight runs. For catching out.

  “Where’d you go?” Baz asked, but the moment was gone, Sol had pulled down the shades, had spun his empty glass across the table, was looking for the waitress, a thirst in him that not much was going to quench.

  Lutie looked over to Baz, lifted her hands questioningly.

  “We should get going before the band starts up,” Baz suggested, but he knew that Sol was in no mood for taking hints.

  “Yeah,” Lutie said. “I’m too tired to work out a plan.” She was wary now, Baz guessed, about ordering Sol around. She was giving Sol room to agree with them, giving him room to come with them.

  Sometimes, though, it wasn’t good to give Sol room, because that meant that Sol was going to take room, would stay, would find the waitress and tell her to line ’em up same as a firing squad. “You coming?” Baz asked for the sake of doing so. Someone had to walk with Lutie. He didn’t have the luxury of babysitting Sol tonight. Not my job, he told himself, but it was his job and he knew it.

  Sol sighed, stretched cautiously, his head tilted back against the padded bench. “Maybe one more,” like it was code. “You go ahead.”

  “No,” Lutie said. “We go together. I don’t want anyone running into that thing tonight.”

  Sol’s eyebrows came up and he laughed. “Vraiment, chère? That thing?” Sounds of language mixing, no sharp edges, just blur.

  “Really,” and she already had on her coat, handed him his. “You’re going to feel like shit in the morning, no matter what.”

  “I’m gonna feel like shit?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t just repeat everything I say.”

  She’d been raised an eldest child and it showed. To Baz’s amazement, Sol slowly got up, took his abused and stained parka. “You are just like her,” Baz thought he said but Lutie didn’t react to it.

  Out into the cold and Sol missed the first step. Baz caught his elbow before he went down. “Easy,” he said, feeling suddenly like his brother was a badly put together marionette, that he would fall apart at the least provocation. Sol straightened, withdrew his elbow, righting himself. Trying to right himself.

  Lutie was on his other side, and Baz was glad of that, just in case Sol needed some help. After her first question, though, he was less happy about it.

  “You say Aurie’s ghost came to you in Denver, and that’s how you knew he was dead. Did M’man do the same thing? Did she come to you?”

  Sol, patting his pockets for cigarettes, snorted like their mother’s ghost was a television show he’d heard of but never watched. “If she had, then I’d have known she was dead, right from the start, no?” He found his pack, then started looking for his lighter. “I don’t know, chère, she didn’t show up to me. She never looked back.”

  They walked and Sol found his lighter, lit his cigarette, and they walked some more. The night air was cold like the inside of a meat locker, and Baz tucked his chin down. “When?” he asked when neither of them said anything else. It was unfair, that they knew and he didn’t. “When did she die?”

  Lutie didn’t answer, just looked straight ahead. Sol turned to her, and then he took a long drag and he said to Baz. “November.”

  “Things would have been a lot different if she hadn’t done it,” Lutie said softly from the other side. “If you had found us before that.”

  Sol let out a bark, not quite laughter. “If she hadn’t left in the first place.” He flicked the butt away and it sailed across the parking lot, trail of sparks like a miniature comet. “I don’t know where she is now. Heaven, Hell, some other place. You get fucked up, you die with a ghost tied to you. Tied to a ghost.” Sol’s voice dropped to match the wind whistling over the broken asphalt. “She can stay between worlds for all I care.”

  They didn’t say anything else because the motel was right there, or at least Baz thought that was the reason. Lutie said goodnight in that northern voice, and Baz responded with his flat Midwestern one, and Sol just hummed under his breath as he tried the key in the lock, sounding like a southern washboard, spare and lean and hard.

  First light, Lutie bought muffins and coffee. Balancing a cardboard tray in mittened hands, she crossed the parking lot from the retro diner, eyes on her brothers’ room. The curtains were still drawn; she was up before them. Coffee was a peace offering. Muffi
ns, an opening salvo.

  Maybe she knocked louder than was necessary, but if they were both asleep, she had to, right? Coffees balanced on the tray, temperature still chinook mild, and Lutie knew she needed to leave today. The whole situation was ridiculous by daylight. She was in the middle of her second year, getting great grades, had a room in a student house, a job waiting for her. And here she was in the worst motel in Nebraska, about to nurse one of her long-lost brothers through a hangover, work out why the other could charm angels. Not even taking into account hunting the devil that had killed the father she could barely remember, or the violent ghost working in tandem with it.

  Her hand came up to knock again, but Sol pulled open the door and he looked pretty much as Lutie expected he would, given the last twenty-four hours. He glanced at her, then at the coffee, leaned against the doorframe and smiled.

  “llo, ma chouette,” he murmured, plucking a coffee from the tray as she brushed past him into the room.

  “I have something for you to eat, too.” She shook the bag at him, grease blossoming translucent stains on the paper.

  Sol made a face, opened the lid of the coffee and inhaled. “Thanks.” He didn’t look twice at the bag.

  She heard the shower in the bathroom, and Sol tapped the door, told Baz that Lutie had brought coffee and if he didn’t hurry, he’d drink it all.

  They sat opposite each other and in the morning light, Sol looked like he’d been left at the curb on trash day, ripped and stuffingless. “Bon Dieu,” he said to the floor. “I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night.” If it was an apology, it was a poor one. His head came up. “We got a lot to do today.”

  Not an apology. Self-castigation. “Like what?” Lutie asked. Trust Sol to have come up with an agenda on little sleep and much alcohol.

  He wouldn’t look at her. With his splattered pants and battered unshaven face, he looked like he lived by the tracks. He looked just like she imagined her father had looked, how she remembered him. She saw the swallow he took. “I’m gonna show you what I do. See if I can teach you.”

  “God, why should I learn that?” Before she even thought it through, thought about what she wanted or didn’t want, the words were out.

  That seemed to amuse him, which only served to piss her off. He leaned elbows onto both knees, kneaded his shoulder with one bruised hand. “I’m not saying you go look for them. Just…you should know how to do it.” Then he did look at her and he didn’t look like anyone who lived by the tracks or under a bridge, someone who pushed around a beat-up shopping cart. Lutie straightened up, seeing it. He continued, “You’re gonna go back today and I don’t want to send you away without knowing how to get rid of them. If you’re not gonna take meds, you should know.”

  Before she could say anything, Baz came out from the shower, hair flopping wet into his eyes, t-shirt announcing his unlikely affiliation with an ironworker’s union, smile widening his face, pleased to see her, always that and it lit her inside, being greeted with such affection.

  “Good morning, birthday plus one.” He tossed a towel to the bed where it wilted among the turbulence of the disarrayed sheets. “Sol’s got a surprise for you.”

  “She’s not surprised.” Sol provided the update, passing Baz a coffee. “She says she don’t want to know.”

  Baz popped the lid, opened the bag, looking for creamers, maybe. He took out a muffin, eyed it before cramming half into his mouth. Around it, he said, “She seemed curious enough before. Spied on you through the curtains.” He smiled through the crumbs, turned to her. “You are so full of shit.”

  Lutie turned up a hand, a sort of shrug, a capitulation. “Okay, so show me.”

  Baz sat on the desk, long legs tangled. “So, how are you gonna do this without calling up that devil? Unless you want it to come around?” He paused and Sol shook his head, possibly in disbelief. “And Lewis? You call that one out, you got a fight on your hands. Look how good that worked for you yesterday. You want nice friendly ghosts for her to practice on, cher.”

  Sol had finished his coffee, and now he put both hands on his knees, levered himself to a stand. “No such thing as friendly ghosts. First lesson,” and he turned to her, catching both of them in his glance. “If they’re hanging around, they’re confused. And if they been around for a while? They’re pissed off and that’s not good.”

  Hopefulness warred with apprehension in Baz’s face, and Lutie saw it perhaps a moment before Sol. “So, you want me to…you know. Sing some up for you?” Baz asked.

  “Not a chance,” Sol said. “Lutie, can he use your laptop? I want him to find out more about those songs in the book, see if he can find the music to go along with them.” That non-smile again, attention to his brother. “You know about Google, right?”

  Sol drove, but not far, only to a diner immediately adjacent to an Ogallala park on the other side of an old folks home, a five-minute drive. Hell, everything was a five-minute drive, either that or it was out of town. The diner had WIFI, another sign that Sol had scouted things out in advance. Baz ordered a big Saturday breakfast before Lutie and Sol went out into the cold, had Lutie’s earbuds to plug into the computer, the blue book beside him.

  Once in the park, Lutie looked back and could see Baz in the window of the diner, and he lifted a hand to her, Sol still walking resolutely to a park bench in the gray landscape. A screen of leafless shrub protected them from the road, paths leading from the sidewalk to behind the two-story brick seniors facility. Sol could keep an eye on both of them from here, Baz protected inside.

  Was she protected, though? Lutie didn’t feel like she was, and at the same time, didn’t think Sol would deliberately put her into danger. That wasn’t his style, as far as she could tell. But what did she know? Under twenty-four hours, she’d known him, that and a lifetime.

  He never teased me, she remembered, not like Baz did. He kept an eye out; he saw me.

  She turned and followed him, knowing that small-town cops would be interested in the tableau: two strangers, one particularly worse for wear, hanging around in the park waiting for something to happen. She sat down on the bench next to Sol and for one moment wished she had some stale bread to feed the birds, just to look normal.

  Shifting a little, cold enough in spite of the warm mountain wind, Sol scowled beneath his tuque. “Usually, people die in hospitals and old folks homes,” he said. He would know. “This one,” and he gestured to the building behind them, “is as good as any.” His eyes were on Baz in the diner’s window: head bent, for all appearances researching Acadian lyrics.

  “Ghosts haunt where they die,” she offered, stating one of the few things she knew, one of the few things she remembered.

  “Usually,” Sol said, face calm and expectant. She shivered. “You cold?”

  “No, I’m scared,” she said fast, dripping with faux dread.

  Sol looked sideways at her. “You’re some kind of funny, hé?”

  A man with a dog walked the far edge of the park. No kids, no play equipment: which came first? She frowned. “Yeah, I guess I think I am.” It was like teasing a bear, and Lutie couldn’t help herself. He took himself so seriously and there was only room for one of them to do that at a time. A long moment passed before Lutie asked, “Did you mean what you said, last night?”

  She didn’t look, so she couldn’t tell what was in his face, but he moved slightly before sighing. “What did I say?”

  These things were easier said when you weren’t looking at someone. “You drink too much.”

  A dry chuckle. “Too much? Maybe not enough. You?”

  That drew her round and his eyes were hard, glittering. She’d made him mad. Good. “I’m not the one with a drinking problem,” she said.

  He nodded, marking the hit. “So, what’d I say that’s got you so upset?” Taunting her right back in a way that disallowed a flippant remark, the kind she would have served up to any of her other family.

  She looked away. “What you said about M’man. How y
ou don’t care where she is now.” Then, she raised her hand to him. “You don’t have to answer that. I can guess.”

  She couldn’t, not really, but he didn’t have to know that.

  He didn’t laugh this time, and she knew she’d won. It didn’t feel good, though. Her tongue was too quick, had always been too fast, too sharp.

  “So,” she said after a while, when it became clear that Sol wasn’t going to talk anymore, that she’d shut him down. “How does this work?” She looked over at him, and his attention was on the far line of bare cottonwoods marking the edge of the park.

  It took him a moment to answer. “You need to go in with a pure heart,” he said and that sounded so unlikely she almost laughed. Go in with a fifth of bourbon, maybe, or go in with a shotgun, go in with the intent to kill. Sol sounded slightly embarrassed to be saying it. “You concentrate, here,” he tapped his temple, “and here,” and his hand moved to his heart.

  “Like…meditation?”

  He shrugged: How would I know? “You clear your thoughts, concentrate on the one thing, until nothing else matters. You connect, and then you can open a road for them.” He pointed to a bare oak, the lone large tree in the park. “Tell me that you can’t feel that tree, how it reaches down into the ground, how the roots grab the earth, hold onto it. You can feel that, right?”

  And she could, she always had been able to grasp that, so she nodded.

  Sol cleared his throat, came off the bench and walked a few steps on the winter-burned grass. He bent down, took off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket, spread one hand. “I usually use my right hand, but it don’t matter. Dad used his left, said it was closer to his heart.” His dark gaze shifted to her, then back to what he was doing. “You lay your hand down as close as you can get, and you feel…” He stopped, suddenly self-aware that he was on his heels, hand on park lawn beside a bench, like he was looking for a four-leaf clover out of season. “Come here.”