Far stare, mind away, back through time maybe. “It knew Dad. It knew Mom.” The word didn’t stick in Sol’s mouth. “I don’t know. There’s more to it than that.” Another pause, picking his way to even more difficult territory. “Same angel, each time you do this?”
It wasn’t like that. Baz didn’t know how to explain it. “I don’t think there’s more than one. Or, it’s a whole lot of angels at the same time. It’s not the kind of thing you can count.” Like water, he wanted to say, like an ocean. Like air or sunlight, as elemental as that.
“There’s more than one devil,” Sol said, voice still strained, as though he was trying to say something else, was speaking in code, hoping that Baz would understand. “I saw one here, but it wasn’t your devil, the one that killed Dad.”
“You saw one?” Convinced that no cars were coming, Baz sat on the road opposite Sol, who didn’t appear to want to move just yet. “What’s been happening, in this place? You seen Lewis?”
Sol nodded, and now the opposite was happening—he wasn’t taking his eyes off Baz, and Baz didn’t know which one made him more uncomfortable, stare or avoidance. “Okay, so I was in the barn, and Lewis was there. And then?” He lifted one hand, unable to explain. “I was here, except it wasn’t now. It was fall, 1998. Everything the same as then, I was the same. Younger. I went through it all again, Baz. I got wasted, caught out, exactly the same.” He shook his head, eyes wide. “You were twelve years old and I left you.” Steady gaze, right on him, inescapable. “Like I didn’t know what that was like, what getting left was like. What you getting left alone in a house was like. After everything you been through, I was gonna do that.” He faltered, collected himself, voice breaking. “I did that.”
Baz kept his eyes on his hands. “Why?” he asked the ground. Then had to look up, to see what Sol made of the question, to figure out what Sol wasn’t going to tell him. “Why did you have to go?”
Sol didn’t look away, didn’t dodge. It was like a penance, maybe, having to answer. “I didn’t have to. I wanted to. I couldn’t handle—” and the voice was too tight, finally, and he had to stop. Baz reached out, put one hand on Sol’s ankle, just to let him know that he was there, soft, as though Sol might shake it off. “I was trying to find M’man. I was trying to—”
Baz just wanted him to shut up, to stop him, but it was like trying to stop a flood, an open wound, the wind. “Shh,” he said, some murmuring sound, but Sol shook his head, vehemently.
“No, just let me finish,” he said, and now Baz couldn’t take his eyes from Sol’s; he was stuck. “I wanted her to come back, take care of things, take care of you, because I’d had enough. That’s what I told myself.”
“You were seventeen, cher. You remember me at that age? Shit, I couldn’t look after a house plant let alone—”
Sol held up his hand. “Ta gueule, Baz. I was trying to find every way to ditch what I’d been saddled with. But,” he stopped again. Baz didn’t interrupt him. “I wasn’t looking for her to look after you. That’s what I thought I was doing, but that wasn’t it.” He took a breath. “I never stopped looking, not really. Not until I found her.”
Still air, no birds, no wind. Silence. First thing Sol had done, when he’d started work at Denver Health, he’d told Baz and Lutie. He’d found her, dead. He hadn’t given up, not like the rest of them had. Sol looked away, across the prairie again, eyes bright.
“It’s not a sin, Sol,” Baz whispered, barely audible, finally deciphering Sol’s coded words. “It’s not a sin to miss her.”
Sol smiled, teeth white against his scruffy beard. “She left. I was so pissed.”
“I think it’s okay, Sol. To miss her, to hate her.” Baz swallowed. “To love her.”
Sol took those words, seemed to hold them close, and Baz couldn’t tell if they cut or burned or soldered. Finally, his brother breathed out, tears tracking like rain on a window. “I’m gonna miss him, too. Papa.”
“You and me both,” Baz said softly.
Sol nodded, and they sat there for a long time, Baz with one hand on Sol’s foot. Finally, Sol rubbed his face, lifted his hand to Baz. “Help me up. You got any ideas about how to get out of here?”
Baz stretched, grabbed his brother’s elbow and hauled him to his feet, but Sol didn’t let go. Wordlessly, he got one shoulder under Sol, who permitted it. One glance told him that Sol was more at ease, now, in this weird half-world, had let go of some poison kept close.
“Yeah,” Baz said, “I got an idea. But you’re not gonna like it.”
Baz told Sol that he was going to sing, call back the angel, see if his ticket here included return passage. Sol’s mouth tensed, but he didn’t say anything, which meant he didn’t have a better idea. Sol had already admitted that he was scared for Baz, that he was worried. The next step was why that would matter, but Baz already knew why his brother worried. Some things Sol didn’t have to say for Baz to know.
Baz slipped the blue book out of his pocket, picked out the one song that their father had said worked like a hot damn, the song that Sol had forbidden in the motley park, back when Sol had been in control. They were a bit beyond that now. They had passed the invisible point where Sol called the shots. They were into new territory, where Baz could take up the slack a little, carry his share of the load and Sol would let him.
With much of Sol’s weight—figurative and literal—resting on his shoulders, Baz smiled at his brother, the bright sunny smile that always had caused their father to grin in return, unable to deny him. Sol stared back, close enough that Baz felt his shallow breathing, caught every flicker of eyelid. Not able to deny him, no, but neither able to smile about it. Different than their father, and Baz should remember it.
Baz’s smile faded, and he took a deep breath. Then, he started to sing.
The ghost cocked its awful head, but Lutie didn’t scare easy, didn’t scare hardly at all. Screw this deadroads crap, and instead, she did something almost the reverse. She didn’t know how to make a deadroad, that was obvious. Who knew what would happen if she tried that again? She had to keep Lewis close, not send him away. Luetta—ce n’est pas une rue, ma poussinette, c’est une porte. Not a path, but a door. Mireille’s ghost had resided within her mother, wasn’t bound by a string, it was tucked inside, like a letter in an envelope. Lutie didn’t need to make a road leading away from her; she needed to open a door within. You need someplace to stay, Lewis?
First though? First, she had to do what Sol had claimed to have done, what her father had royally screwed up: she had to cut a binding, because she sure as hell didn’t want a ghost inside her that was also bound to a damn devil.
So. Feet apart, heartbeat of earth on the soles of her feet, reaching out, understanding the grip on Lewis, the wear of binding against its anger, raw wound from the shackles. This thing was bound and it was in pain—you look after them, Luetta, that’s all they want. Someone to look after them. Lutie could do something about that, because the devil wasn’t looking after Lewis, it was torturing the ghost. M’boy, like Lewis was its slave and maybe the ghost was, for all Lutie knew.
Lewis’s ghost stared at her, unmoving, maybe not knowing what she was going to do. Not coming after her with that bat, anyway.
Lutie suddenly grinned. She wasn’t the sort that Lewis in life had hated. Those had been men like Bart, or those other dead guys along the tracks from here to North Platte: they had been leaving, had been getting ready to catch out, and that had driven the ghost crazy. Easy to kill them. The ghost had gone for her brother Sol, who could not keep his eyes from following the trains, even now. Sol seemed steady, and was anything but. No wonder this ghost hated him, hardly even needed the devil to tell it as much.
“Hey, Lewis,” she said to it, “I’m going to do you a favor.” And the ghost looked surprised for a second, less charred, suddenly more whole.
Wound round him, felt with the same sense that connected her with the earth, Lutie found not a knot, but a growth, tendrils wrapped
around the ghost’s very bones, a living, sinuous binding of hate and pain. No wonder it does the devil’s bidding, bound like this. Her anger was sharp and hot, and both things were needed to sever this bond.
It wouldn’t take long, she didn’t think, for the devil to notice.
One strike, her mind a laser, both burning and cutting, cauterizing, one slice, then—
Lewis turned, roared, in pain, in anger, hard to tell, and Lutie screamed as the club came down on her, missing her head, catching her shoulder. The ghost writhed like it burned, and maybe it did, but Lutie didn’t stop. The bones of her left shoulder felt undone, in a state of not speaking to each other, simply screaming. But the binding between ghost and devil was frayed, and she had no time to consider what condition her shoulder was in. She had to do two things at the same time now: cut the last of it, and open a door, because a loose ghost wasn’t going to bring back Sol, or Baz, but a bound ghost might. She didn’t want the ghost, she didn’t want this ghost, but Lewis had been to wherever Sol had gone, and it had come back. Maybe Baz had called it, maybe not, but if it knew where her brothers were, Lutie wasn’t letting it go anywhere.
So: ignore the pain, cut the binding, unravel the last of the sticky threads. And then it was gone.
Howling, an inhuman, awful noise, lamb-gutting, rabbit-strangling, deer-dying sound—the devil’s cry came from far-away, beyond usual senses, too distant to do anything, severed from its boy. The pain in her shoulder was just this side of bearable, and her job was unfinished still, but Lutie did it anyway: she smiled. She hated that thing, its black legs and its green poisonous gaze. The way it knew them, the way it had bargained with Baz, who didn’t know any better, using his love against him. It had been instrumental in her father’s death. It had hated him, and Lutie returned the favor on her father’s behalf now.
The devil wasn’t here, it had left the ghost to do its killing for it. The devil had strayed too far, and they were standing on the spot where Lewis had burned to death: it was a place of power. She hadn’t killed the devil, but by severing its hold, she’d hurt it, anyone could tell, the sound it was making.
Lutie held very still, offering a way out, a path away from the pain the ghost had endured when it wore flesh, the burning hold that had been the devil’s. The ghost didn’t hesitate. Instead, it shook, a tremble of light and fog, and its form became more what it had been: a tall, tall man, full of anger and longing, a bat, an insatiable desire to crush masking a need for shelter. The ghost took the open door, passed through it and into her, banging around like a rat in an empty barrel. Breathless, Lutie shut the door behind it, locking it in, keeping it tight, safe.
She shuddered, once, as the ghost filled inside, buzzed along her nerves, swift as any intravenous drug given in a psych ward. Gasping, Lutie fell forward onto her hands and knees, retching, invasive foreign poison in her now. Get a grip, she told herself. Get a grip, steady, it’s yours, you don’t belong to it. She couldn’t let Lewis take over, because she needed the ghost. She needed what it knew.
I am stronger than Lewis. In every way.
And she was. She was stronger. She had been raised with love, and with madness, and she needed both now. Deep breath, then she came to a queasy stand, arms wrapped around her middle. “Lewis,” she whispered. “Lewis.” She wasn’t ready to give the ghost any free rein. She kept it close, and she could feel it turning within her. “Lewis, you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll get my brother to sing for you. The good stuff, none of that lame sad shit.”
It was enough, that promise. She felt Lewis still, go quiet, thoughtful. She didn’t hear what it said, she felt it.
Wait, Lewis told her. Wait.
* * *
If I did what I’m supposed to, what Papa told me to do, I’d never let him. But Sol was too gone, too wrung out, barely keeping it together in this between place. There was a certain appeal in letting go, in surrender. In letting Baz and Lutie handle things, for once. Baz was consulting the book in his hand, and Sol tilted his head so he could read the words, because he sure as hell didn’t understand them the way Baz was butchering them.
A song about a bird, and a mill. Dancing. Anything with dancing, and the only thing that Sol knew his brother liked almost as well as singing was dancing. A fool for it, and good at it, of course, rhythm like he had. Sol remembered, so clearly he could almost smell warm cornbread cooling in the kitchen, their mother with arms around Baz, heads bent, eyes to their feet like they’d dropped something between them, Mireille teaching Baz steps.
A line to their past, to his past, to her. Here.
One verse, French murdered, but Sol didn’t think it would matter. Their father had sung this song in his worn voice, and it had done something for him, called ghosts maybe. He didn’t call no angels with a voice like that. The devil had to up the ante, needed Baz, not Aurie, to get an angel in the ring.
Which was his first clue about what would happen next, and what would happen after that: angel, then devil.
Baz swallowed, paused, started on the second verse. I should stop him. This is too dangerous. Visceral, his instinct to protect Baz, to get him out of harm’s way, because that’s exactly what the terrain between an angel and a devil would become, a killing ground.
It was too late, though, because the sky lightened to a washed-out yellow, pale as baby hair, and under his battered shoulder, Sol felt Baz shiver as though he’d caught a sudden chill.
“Stop,” Sol said, amazed that his voice was no more than a whisper, considering he’d never meant anything so much in his life. “Please stop, Baz,” but Baz couldn’t hear him, Sol didn’t even know if he’d managed to say it out loud.
All around, the landscape bloomed with light. Sol had the feeling that if he’d looked at his brother, he wouldn’t see anything, couldn’t see anything. He squinted, the light too bright, too much. As he took another scorched breath, ready to tell Baz to shut up, that he didn’t care if they stayed here forever, his brother suddenly let go of Sol, and Sol dropped like a stone.
He came up on his arms almost immediately, white all around him. Shaking his head, he looked frantically around, could see nothing but glare. In the arms of an angel and who knew where they would set down next, or when. “Baz!” he shouted, panicking, trying to find his feet, get them under him, but there was nothing to push with, no strength in him. “Baz!” he called again, voice cracking, reverberating hollowly, the light swallowing his every sound. Gray lines crossed his vision like a hyped-up Etch-a-sketch, describing horizon line, up and up and over, down: tree. Line, and line, moving more quickly now—railway tracks. All strangely two-dimensional, all stripped of color and form, only monotone shape.
Almost home, almost back.
Sol opened his mouth to shout again, then heard it: skitchskitchraasp. Dragging of crustacean limbs over ground, smell of carbon heavy in his nostrils, clogging his lungs so that a denied cough punched his sternum like a physical blow. Sol covered his mouth, shivery breath against what was coming, because he could now feel cold earth beneath his prone body. Hip and shoulder and side were one solid scream of pain.
He’d have to deny that, too, for the moment, because the devil hadn’t noticed him, and by the sound it was making—low groan, drag of body across gravel—it wasn’t in great shape, either. Sol didn’t try to guess why this might be, only that it was coming for the angel, and the angel had Baz, had his brother somewhere in its embrace, and that the only way to protect Baz was to protect the angel, which meant he had to get rid of the damn diable, le p’tit mauvais.
Hand to ground, wanting to find the beat of life, wanting connection. He ached with it. It came immediately, had been waiting, maybe years, for him to want it this badly. Now he dragged himself quietly to a kneel, ignoring everything that movement cost him. Fingers under his shirt, against his bare skin, heart loud against his trembling touch: I open this road for you, devil, wherever it may take you. His hand was shaking and he hoped it wouldn’t matter. Up to his mouth
and he closed his eyes, felt all the life around him, everything that ghosts and devils and angels were not. This was his; it was not for them, or of them. Life rushed through him, he merely a conduit for it as it changed, altered into an arrow, a direction made manifest. It burned and throbbed and he held it for one moment, full, then it came out, across his fingers, into the haze of light, lifting, lifting, shimmer brighter than even what the angel had brought, Baz’s song lingering in the air like perfume, like oxygen.
The devil was suddenly right there, caught in shimmer, and it turned its head to Sol, close enough to touch, each scale and dripping gelatinous external organ lit by what the angel had caused to come. By what Sol had opened for it. It was half-dead already, Sol could tell, and with a twitch of his fingers, he brought the road around to the devil as the thing lunged toward him.
There was no sound, none at all, as the devil disappeared along Sol’s road, its multiple legs folding in, cilia waving to no purpose at all. It was not looking at Sol, it was moved and moving too fast for that. Sol held his road, wanted to make sure the devil wouldn’t fight its way back, claw along the pathway, shredding as it went.
Silence, no slither or rasp or scratch.
Then Sol felt his connection, the one he was holding, pull hard, as though the deadroad wanted him on it, too. He braced himself against the ground, shouting his pain, denying it and falling headfirst into it, white fading to dark gray, the landscape indistinguishable from soft dust, barely a horizon. End it, end it, you moron, and he straightened two fingers of his right hand, touched the ground, where he hoped the ground was, and tapped three times, releasing his hold as he did so—on the road he’d made, on the earth and all its life.
Like the rebound of a bungee jump, recoil of a powerful rifle, Sol was thrown back, slammed against something unforgivably hard, vision going crimson, fading to black. Then someone or something grabbed him by his coat, shook him, only a roaring in his ears, and he struggled against the hold, colder than he’d felt in years.
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