Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  I don’t feel like singing a fucking happy song, anyway.

  There was a time when he’d been allowed to sing; he could remember it. A long, long time ago, under a canopy of cypress and oak, voice carrying across land so water-logged it had the same viscosity as chocolate pudding. His songs hadn’t called anything back then, it had just been singing. He gave me a fiddle, Baz thought, watching the optical blur of wire fencing beside the highway rise and fall like a line of music. He gave me a fiddle to stop me singing. Wonder when he figured it out, what I could do.

  “How about this one?” he asked, pointing to the book, and he sung a snippet of song, the tune memorized earlier in the day. Not really in his range, what he’d heard, so he transposed the key, brought it down. It still sounded off, not right. He might attract howling dogs.

  Beside him, Lutie made a face. “I thought happy songs were what we wanted. You know. Lull ghosts into submission?” A question. They were still unsure how the singing worked. It was not the time to be unsure, and there was no other time. “That doesn’t sound real happy.”

  “Well,” Baz reasoned, “we hook Lewis with the heartbreakers, reel him in, then sing him a happy one. Lull him like a baby.” His gaze cut to her, then back to the fenceline. Reading in the car always made him feel like throwing up. “Do you think the words matter?”

  After a moment, Lutie shook her head. “I think it’s the sentiment that counts. If the melody is happy, then the sentiment is happy. You could be singing about dog food for all the ghosts will care.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll care if I’m singing about Alpo,” he pointed out.

  She grimaced: point made. “See? So it matters to you, and if you don’t believe what you’re singing, then the ghosts won’t either. If you think it’s happy, it’s happy.”

  Right. Baz slouched down in the car seat a little more, pissed off that she seemed so sure about something she knew nothing about. Pissed off that he was listening to her.

  “’Cause I don’t have a fuckin’ clue what this one’s about,” pointing to the words, Aurie’s pencil mark: works like a hot damn. “I put it through one of those online translation programs, but it said that it was about a chicken and a windmill, and they’re all dancing. Which doesn’t really sound, you know. Happy. Sounds demented.”

  “Then don’t sing that one. Find the saddest one in the book, because Lewis isn’t coming for happy, he’s coming for the ones that are sad.”

  They’d grabbed breakfast early; Baz guessed that his sister had been up for hours, was economical in her sleep. Economical in most everything, actually. Over eggs and toast Baz had hesitated, then admitted to his conversation last night with the devil in the parking lot. The devil was cutting no deals, he explained to her. The thing had wanted its ghost back, and expected Lutie to do it. It’s paying attention to us, to me and to her. It couldn’t care less about Sol. Still, it was encouraging, thinking that they could bring back something, that Lutie would be able to accomplish something.

  “Do your best, Baz,” Lutie replied, eyes on the road. “That’s all we can do now.” More to herself than to Baz.

  Lutie dropped down a gear, and Baz thought it was for the slow curve in the road and the conditions were right for black ice, but instead he spotted the collapsed barn as she turned into the dirt road leading to a grade crossing, two crossbucks warning that a train might smash through at any time at all and it would not stop for a stupid little import car with foreign plates.

  The Megeath crossing. Some little village had once existed here, or a homestead, a house. Little trace of it now, except for the barn. The trailer that Lewis had died in had been erased from existence, seized as evidence, Bart had said. That kid was dead, and Baz hoped that his ghost had found its way to where it needed to go. The truth is here, in the ground. And here, in your heart.

  With an indecipherable glance, Lutie eased down the dirt road, cautiously crossed so they were between iron rails and the meandering Platte River. She drove the car down to the bank, the river lacy with ice, lashed with dead rush, further than they’d come yesterday. The engine sighed to a close, the silence enormous, the task ahead larger still.

  Baz nodded to her. “Okay, so this is the game plan, Lutie. I’ll sing a sad song first, get Lewis back in the here and now, then hit him with lullaby. Rock him to sleep, and you see if you can make a deadroad, because he’s gonna be one pissed off ghost. We don’t want him helping that devil anymore. And Sol will…will…” He cracked a grin, all he could do to cover his fear. “Show up.” He would not be doing a very good job of putting a brave face on anything.

  “Lewis isn’t a ‘him’,” Lutie murmured, and Baz remembered the lesson, his father impressing it on Sol, Baz overhearing as you did when you lived on top of each other. “A ghost is an ‘it’. They aren’t like us, there’s no predicting what they might do.”

  “Sol’s a ‘him’,” Baz returned with a bit of heat, male object pronoun a declaration of rebellious hope, a talisman, lucky charm.

  She laughed, bitter. “Do you think Sol’s going to be placated? That he’s going to be happy you’re singing for ghosts? That he’s going to be pleased?” Lutie’s face screwed up as though she was thinking of more unlikely emotional states Sol might eventually manifest.

  No. Sol would be pissed. But thinking of a pissed Sol was better than thinking of a dead Sol. The door handle was cold beneath his hand, easy to open, outside would be freezing, sun making no dent in the temperature today. Clear meant cold; cloud cover was just that, a blanket. Nothing comforting about the weather today; the chinook had passed.

  “Can you handle this?” he asked like he was wondering about her ability to get a pizza order right. “I mean…are you gonna…?” Too much to say, too much said, not enough, choose one. “We don’t have a choice.” Ready or not ready, enough knowledge, pitifully little, none of it mattered. There was just now, and trying something desperate, the two of them, because they had nothing else and Sol was gone.

  “No,” she said after a minute, pulling open the door, wind creasing a line across the car, thin air crystalline. “No, we don’t.” Which meant she didn’t think high-tailing it back to Canada and forgetting about the Sarrazin boys was a viable option.

  The area between the grade crossing and the river was mostly flat, a stand of cottonwoods describing the line of river as the land dropped down to meet it, ubiquitous snowfence leaning precariously, silvered by cold and sun and wind. They could see anything coming for miles, which was a potential problem: they didn’t want anyone stopping—you got a flat tire, need some help? It must have occurred to Lutie as well, because she had parked near the river where the land dipped, just below the sightline of anyone driving along the cracked highway, nestled by the rushes.

  Flames from Lewis’s trailer would have lit the night, would have been a beacon for miles around. Baz tried not to think about what it would be like to be burned alive in your own tin can. No one deserved that, not even an asshole railway cop. And here they were, about to ask his ghost to come back to this place, where soul had been ripped from flesh, unfinished business like the smell of ash in the air. We all have unfinished business, why should this méchant trou d’cul get another chance?

  He didn’t want anything to do with ghosts. Never had. All he’d ever wanted to do was make music; it lay in him like an aquifer. The desire hadn’t dried up, it still came out, it had to. The only time he ever felt whole was when he was on stage. As Baz unbent from the car, he ran a hand across the roof of it, remembering Sol’s hand doing the same thing to the Wagoneer only the day before yesterday, knuckles bloody, keeping hold of some kind of reality. They were tenuous, the Sarrazins, Baz concluded, not well-stitched to this world, could come unraveled with the wrong snip, a strong tug.

  It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought, that one, so Baz retrieved a smile from his arsenal, put it on and followed Lutie to the edge of the frozen river. A tree had fallen into it some time ago, its roots exposed and gray, a
dark scorch running up it. Maybe hit by lightning. Maybe burned by something else: A murder had happened here, long ago now, and things like trees didn’t forget.

  “Not much of a river,” she said. Looking up, the harsh sunlight caught her eyes and they reflected green. “Bart said that the trailer was close enough that Lewis would have been looking at water as he burned.”

  Nice touch, Baz remembered, no wonder his damn ghost’s pissed off. He didn’t say anything, because he knew Lutie was thinking it too. He wanted to ask again if she could manage this, but that was dumb and pathetic, so he sighed a little, held up the songbook to declare his intent, and opened it to the marked page.

  He’d never sung this song before, and très dangereuse surely meant it brought something nasty. In this case, nasty was exactly what they were going for. Closing his eyes, he pinched his nose once, found his key, and began to sing.

  Head up, and he kept his eyes on Lutie, because he might not know what he was calling up, but she would be able to see it when it came. The other times with Lewis’s ghost, he’d smelled ash, and he could always feel ghostcold. But the day was frigid enough that ghostcold might not make much of a dent. His voice caught a little and he faltered, but then cleared his throat and settled into it.

  After one verse, Lutie’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t stop singing; their agreed-upon signal for that was her raising her hand. His breath plumed white in the air, verses gathered like soldiers. He paused before the last chorus and Lutie shook her head in frustration.

  “Five of them, keeping their distance, but no Lewis. Be careful.” She knelt, one hand out, ready for whatever might come too close. Waiting in the shark cage for Jaws, surrounded by smaller but no-less-deadly predators. Waiting for a bite, waiting to be bitten. Sharks made Baz think of alligators, the swirl of their unseen tails as they moved through murky waters, eyes above water, so much danger down below.

  Heat of bayou, Great Plains cold, polar opposites, and yet together, here. The withered grass bent, movement by the dead tree that had fallen in the river. Among the exposed rootball, gnarled as old hands, something moved. Baz’s voice faltered. He couldn’t see ghosts, he knew that. The only thing he’d ever been able to almost-perceive was un diable.

  A coarse chuckle confirmed it. Lutie’s hand came up, the one that wasn’t on the ground.

  “That’s it, girlie,” the thing said, cat-tongue rough. “You bring m’boy back for me. Useful, that one.”

  His boy. That damn ferocious ghost. The devil wasn’t going to let them bring Sol back, Baz knew it then and he couldn’t speak, couldn’t do a damn thing, because this meant that Sol was gone, was dead to them, and whether or not a body was there for them to bury or burn, it didn’t matter.

  Unfettered access to me, a direct line to an angel, that’s what the fucking thing wants.

  Baz had run up a tab with this devil and it would collect. Maybe today. Maybe later, and Baz knew this was just what his father had fought all his life to avoid, his son being in debt to a devil with the talent he had.

  Papa loved me. He knew that in the deepest part of him.

  “Oh, I’ll bring him back, all right,” he heard Lutie say, and she deployed the beloved pronoun, edged like a weapon. Like knowledge of love, the word spun and settled. For the first time in a long time, hope unfolded, hands held out in adoration. Baz believed her, had to. “Keep singing,” Lutie continued, not sparing Baz a look.

  Try to stop me, chère, Baz thought, already opening his mouth, moving to the third verse, slow sad song, full of longing, a song of the Grand Dérangement, families ripped apart, sent from Nova Scotia to different parts of the globe, mothers and fathers and children on separate ships, the French Acadian deportation, names like Breaux and Arceneaux and LeBlanc and Richard arriving in Louisiana and Boston and the Caribbean. A song of farewell and loss. He might not truly understand having a particular connectedness to place, he who’d been birthed in a drowned land to a family as restless as Cheyenne nomads. But he knew about knots picked apart, about becoming unstitched from those you loved. He knew about that.

  These were not things he thought about often, and weren’t easy thoughts to begin with, so he meshed the multiple Sarrazin-Cyr losses into the song, closed his eyes, wove the disappearing throb of his mother’s Pontiac as a bass note, heavy, tolling same as a church bell. C’mon. At the end of this chorus the song would be over, and he didn’t know what he’d sing next, because this one was the best he could find, the saddest, the one that ached for the way things had been. If it didn’t call ghosts, he didn’t know what would. C’mon, Sol. The words, all Acadian French, staggered off his tongue clumsy as closing-time drunks and he hoped pronunciation didn’t count for much.

  Another chuckle, and Baz opened his eyes only to see the shadowy devil hunker down among the roots, eyes gleaming green, a smoky-gray blur among the parched tangle of dead roots. He was glad he could only see it obliquely, because the thing was horrific. Lutie still crouched on the ground, fingers out as though the earth itself was radiating heat. Her hand was small and white, delicate, and Baz remembered his father’s hands, large, capable, hard. How was she to do what she had to with hands like hers?

  Then the sky buzzed, washed clear white, a dazzle of brightness beyond mere sunlight, and Baz knew what this meant, but there was no way to warn an angel that a devil lay in wait. Besides, the angel can look after its own damn self. It’s Lewis I want. But that wasn’t true. That wasn’t what he wanted at all, the ghost was merely a means to an end. C’mon, Sol, you gotta come back.

  He kept singing, thought that he could repeat the chorus, but then he would have to end it, because even he couldn’t keep a steady grasp on such a sad song. There were limits. The light brightened, and it hovered near, above, filled the sky, soon filled all of Baz’s senses, enveloped the day like a nuclear blast. Baz could close his eyes, but it made no difference, open or shut.

  The landscape disappeared. The light was all, that and Baz’s voice carrying an ancient tune with truth in his heart. This time, inside the light, it was mild, not warm, not cold, it just was. No body, no being, only voice and loss. No awareness of anything beyond that. One thing, though. One thing tied him to the earth, one thing filled the longing with meaning, otherwise it was just sentiment, which was fleeting.

  The light, the angel, whatever it was, paused, listening, perhaps waiting, but Baz couldn’t guess how angels worked. They were fashioned from light, unlike the devils, which were made of baser things. As are we. Himself, and his sister, and his missing brother, tied together not just by blood, which held its own dark turbulence of moving iron and oxygen, but by something much stronger and more true.

  Finally, not caring about anything but those ties, Baz put all his love, his sense of kinship, into the final line of the song. The light folded him into itself, burned away everything but the bonds that held, that had held for years over histories bleak and unexplained. Love was the gift Baz offered, and one was given in exchange.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE DEADROAD

  After making himself perfectly clear about his expectations concerning homework completion, Sol left Baz to it and escaped their tired apartment by way of the back staircase. Once on his own on East Colfax, he acquired a flask of Beam with a doctored ID card and headed to the park. The sun disappeared behind the tops of broken buildings and Sol dropped the hit of acid he’d sandwiched between his student bus pass and suspended driver’s license.

  A couple of hours later, cold to the bone, epically misjudging the season, he smoked a lot of speed-laced dope with the sketchy older brother of an ex-girlfriend’s best friend, shared the last of the Beam, and then wandered alone down to Denver Yards. This all took the better part of the night and he didn’t really worry too much about whether or not Baz had finished his homework because it was a lost cause whatever way you looked at it.

  He couldn’t have said when, precisely, he’d decided to catch out: near dawn, thirty seconds prior, two months ago
, all were probably true. Now, coasting through prairie, the deed done, he told himself that he’d only caught out because he’d been so high he hadn’t actually thought it through, but that had nothing to do with it, if he was honest.

  At this moment, all that mattered was the strength of the train as it pulled away from Omaha. The train had slowed then stalled its run in Omaha and Sol wasn’t ready to stop, was nowhere near ready to stop, needed a new train like a drug, one that would take him away from home, away from what was left behind, prairie now flashing by like a moving ocean of grassland out the side of the open boxcar, autumn tipping everything gold, harvest time. Sol knew nothing about farming, so he couldn’t tell by looking if these crops represented a good year or a bad one. All he knew, really, was that he was having one of the most fucked-up years of his life, and that his harvest was going to be pitiful, painful even.

  I can’t go on like this, he thought, but even as the thought came to him, he realized he wasn’t going to have to go on like anything; he was already moving, literally in a different direction. To Canada, magnetic north, like he had a string tied to him. Strings behind and strings ahead and him being pulled, maybe apart. It felt that way, like one of those medieval death sentences. Drawn and quartered. Halved, more like it.

  With one hand, he took out a pack of smokes from his jean jacket, shook one out, cupped it against the wind so the match would light. He leaned against the doorframe, one hand tucked under the other elbow in an effort to stay warm, eyes on the horizon. The first drag was heaven, blew away from him as all things were blowing away from him. Maybe I have no ties, he thought. I have no ties. Take out the maybe, reinvent himself.

  The after-effects of the drugs slid messily around, and his head was fuzzy and achy, enveloped in a blanket of haze, acid still floating in his system, making everything more interesting, more tenuous, more apt to develop a life of its own. Better this way, a necessary distance from reality. Geography was an indistinct subject, terre inconnue once beyond Denver, knowledge of place rooted in asphalt, not paper and ink. Had they crossed the border yet? He had no idea. Destinations were beads on a string: Denver, Omaha, who knew what came next?