“...they ain’t on Main anymore. They down here on Third. I can hear ’em coming.”
Ahead, a man stood on his porch, cordless phone glued to his ear. One hand pointed excitedly and I saw his mouth moving even as his words came through the tinny speakers.
“...right in front of me. Shit, it’s some old lady in a huge SUV. Think it’s an old lady. She can’t hardly see over the damned wheel.”
“Right here on KJPK, Ft.—”
I heard it then. A different voice, captured on reel-to-reel tape, transferred to a record.
“—Stockton’s—”
Deeper, not as excited, but professional.
“—AM Beacon—”
As real as the bullets shredding the town around me, he could almost finish the tagline himself, I’m Joseph Fagan.
“He was here.” I shouted as Cope headed for another intersection. “He worked here.”
“What the fuck, White-Boy? Unless y’all’s dead daddy can save us, I don’t really give a shit he worked here.”
On the corner, a metal spider stood over a small building. Latticework criss-crossed the four legs as it rose about five stories. The transmitter. When I saw it, I knew exactly where we were.
“That’s his station,” I said. “KJPK. He sent me pictures a few times.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I can hear the cars.” The jockey howled. “I’m going outside.”
Through the radio, his audience heard him banging through the studio, tripping over chairs and music and ad disks, getting caught in wires. “Fuck,” and “Who put that there?” and “Where is the front door key?” all shouted to himself and to everyone in town.
Finally, an eternal second later, the jock popped out of the studio, no headphones, a wireless mike in his hand. “Unfucking believable, they are right there. A white SUV is coming around the corner. A woman is behind the wheel and Jimmy Warren’s Dodge Charger is right behind her.”
The engine quit screaming for half a heartbeat and Cope jerked the handlebars to the right. The bike skidded through the intersection, headed directly for the station. Finally the tires bit, caught some asphalt, and yanked us around the corner.
The jock’s gaze never caught us, never really saw the bike. He was fixated on Petunia’s SUV, on the car behind it. Adrenaline had narrowed his vision.
“I’m not sure what’s happening,” the jock said, his voice high and hysterical. “Jimmy is chasing this woman and— Son of a bitch! She’s coming around the corner. She’s going way too fucking fast, sliding all over the damned place. She’s got a gun.”
Somehow, I heard the shot, a last attempt to hit us as we disappeared around the corner from the SUV. The bullet missed, disappeared through a wooden fence as the SUV skidded into the intersection, tires screaming and smoking.
“Fuck,” the jock screamed. “They’re crash—”
The SUV blasted into the building and a heartbeat later, the radio went dead, replaced by static. Glass and brick exploded and a half second later, Jimmy’s Charger followed.
This far away, heading further away, I didn’t hear anything. There was no crash of metal through brick, no screech of tires locking up as they smashed over desks and reception chairs and interior walls, no wail of the horn as Petunia slumped over the wheel, dead or damn near it.
Jimmy’s Charger stopped abruptly half way into the building and I knew it had just kissed the SUV.
The jock bounced around, hopping and waving his hands and screaming into his wireless mike. But nothing came out over the air.
“They didn’t see us,” I said, my heart pounding and my legs and arms shaking. Hell, my whole body shook, one giant quiver of piss-ass scared. “They didn’t see the bike. How the shitting hell did they not see this bike?”
I started to laugh and knew it was hysterical laughter. It was the same laughter that came from that night at Staind Skin, from the tattoos and blood and confetti, from my father’s foot.
And from chasing Fagan’s ghost through small towns without ever realizing why.
“Ain’t stopping, y’all. Might not’a seen us, but we ain’t staying in town.”
Cope kept the bike steady, not overly fast, but fast enough to put some distance between us. In less than a minute, we were on a lonely county road headed away from Ft. Stockton. A haze of red and blue lights bounced off the low clouds and in five or ten minutes, the haze was gone, replaced by the sheer blackness of a west Texas night.
“He worked there,” I said. “At KJPK. The AM Beacon. I’d forgotten until I heard the jock. He used the same exact tag line. ‘AM Beacon.’ He worked there.”
“Ain’t working there no more, not with two cars sitting in the middle of the building,” Cope said.
“That and the fact that he’s dead.”
“Well, yeah, that too.”
Two Days Ago
Pecos River
Two and a half hours later, the Pecos River ate us.
We sat on the banks and the water moved gently at our feet, though the sound seemed to come from some vast distance away over the flat horizon. The moonlight, as dim as the water’s rush, gave just enough light to see a writhing plate of obsidian. Or of nothing, as though the World simply ended at the bank and started again on the far side. One step too many and you’re caught between Worlds, caught in that tar-black nothing.
I laid back in the dirt. For a while, I’d thought the gentle lap of the water would calm me, allow me to see things straight. Actually, that was heavy grade, extra-stink, prime-ass bullshit.
There was a lot of crap going on right now, but everything came down to murder. I was a murderer, yet leaving a man alive hurt me worse. Leaving my step-father on the front porch while I drove off in Fagan’s Continental had come to hurt me more deeply than killing.
Because I don’t remember the killing. I do remember the driving away.
We’d never gotten along particularly well, me and my step-father. Years upon years and the best we ever did was a sort of grudging tolerance. Mama’s second husband was too disciplined, too authoritarian, built around too many of the things Fagan was not. Too many of the things I thought I hated. And I was too many of the things Daddy #2 hated.
I didn’t remember the killing, or the blood and the screaming. I didn’t remember the sounds of a knife or saw or something cutting through flesh and snapping bones. Maybe not bones. Maybe just the one bone. Maybe just the one that allowed me to shove the man’s foot into my back pocket.
“Sounds like y’all’s head’s going about ninety different ways at once.” Cope tossed a pebble at the water, but it only thumped on the mud.
“Don’t you think it should be?”
“Was for me, after I did my killing.”
“That’s not it.” I grabbed idly at a mesquite bush near us. “I’m just like him...Fagan.”
“Except he’s dead.”
“Damnit, Cope, I’m not screwing around. He didn’t feel a fucking thing when he walked out on us and—”
“How y’all know that?”
“Mama told me.”
Cope nodded. “How she know? I mean, if he was gone, how she know what his insides was doing?”
“That’s not the point. If he felt anything, why didn’t he ever come back?”
The night air had finally begun to cool. In Barefield, the summer air, day or night, was always blast furnace hot. But in the desert, away from town, it cooled quickly once the sun disappeared. And the tiny breeze blowing across the river cooled it even more. “So y’all think you and him are the same person.”
“I didn’t feel anything when I killed him. Woke up, found his foot, freaked out for a few minutes, and then left. That easy.”
Cope chuckled sound as stark as a scream in the quiet night. “Wasn’t no way it was that easy. If it was that easy, why you spend so much time in the Church?”
“Hiding. I thought I saw Kurston in Valentine, I ducked into the church to hide from him.”
“Except that wasn’t ho
w it happened. Y’all was crying on your ass in the street. And tell me this, White-Boy Darcy, how Kurston such a great cop? He was in Valentine. He was at the banks. He was in that state trooper car and in all those other towns. Shit, how much you think any one cop can do?”
“No more than any one whore. Monea is pretty much everywhere, isn’t she?”
“Mebbe so, but that’s different.”
“How?”
“Well, she pretty much supernatural. Whore and a witch.” He cackled and spread out on the soft ground, wadded his jacket up beneath his head. “Y’all ain’t much like Fagan.”
“How do you figure?”
“He didn’t feel anything when he left.”
“Right.”
“You did.”
Somewhere, a coyote answered, almost a sigh of agreement, a howl of affirmation. Maybe this crazy old man who loved sex and had killed someone back in the day was right. Maybe I wasn’t anything like Fagan.
***
Later, after failing to sleep, I whipped. Not hard, not bloody. It was whip against skin, but not into skin.
It was lighter because I was discovering other ways of dealing with the bullshit, but also because this shit hurt. Some of the monks really tore themselves up. Sliced their backs open to a depth that left me speechless. Some of them, like me, were less enamored of pain and so didn’t hit as hard. Yeah, I wanted the blood out and I bled, but not from every hit or stroke of the whip.
—Whap!—
It was two, maybe three hours since we’d stopped. Cope was sleeping somewhere in the desert and I was bleeding a little. The water floated past, dark enough that it could be blood and maybe that was the sign I needed. Maybe it was telling me to chuck everything and suicide my ass on outta town.
—Whap!—
Well, that sure as shit wasn’t going to happen. I was a pussy, yeah, didn’t care for pain and couldn’t stand the thought of dying. But more than that, I still needed to apologize.
“Mmmm”
Again with this? Was I in the theater all over again, getting ready to discover Roy Guy again?
—Whap!—
“Mmmmmm”
I looked over. “Cope?”
Soft crying.
Coming from an old man, hunched over, his feet in the river, his head in his hands, his shirt off, and what looked like angry worms crawling all over his back. I realized, startled, those were the scars of his own blooding. “Cope?”
Nothing.
“Hey, Cope.” I went to him, my back and legs stinging.
“Y’all blooding it out?”
“Just a little bit, yeah,” I said.
“Y’all ain’t in church anymore.”
“Church of the Bloody Stools?”
“Bloody Stumps?”
“Bloody Rumps?”
“Bloody Dumps.” Cope chuckled around his tears. “Yeah, that was most of us, wasn’t it?”
“Hey, old man, you okay?”
“Not no way, White-Boy Darcy, not no way at all.” With joints creaking and popping, Cope stood. His face was streaked with tears. “Ain’t been all right for a lotta years.”
“About fifty, I’d guess.”
“Not a bad guess for a dumbass.”
“It isn’t really much of a guess, Cope.”
“Yeah, y’all probably right there.”
He’d been at his grandfather’s house, the old man said. Sixteen years old, his parents a year dead, and he couldn’t keep his head quiet. It talked to him all day; sometimes it yelled and sometimes it screamed, but it never shut up.
“Like a tent preacher. Come on, Darcy, they knew, ain’t no way they didn’t.” Cope stared along the river as though it were railroad tracks and he could see his parents. “Mom and Pop knew that train was coming. They just couldn’t...didn’t...move.”
“Bullshit. They wouldn’t have left you like that.”
Cope grinned an empty grin, as though Esther had painted it on with theater make-up. “Y’all don’t know nothing. Moms wanted to be a dancer. And Pop wanted to fly to the moon.”
I laughed. “So you were digging the Sinatra back there.”
Cope looked confused. “What?”
“‘Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars,’” I sang.
“Too right,” Cope said. “He wanted to fly in the Air Corps and get himself a rocketship. Hell, they hadn’t hardly been invented yet, but that’s what he wanted. Buck Rogers and all that shit.
“Bad dreams to have with a boy in tow. Bad dreams when you got something weighing you down like that. Mom worked as a secretary to a man couldn’t keep his hands off her tits and Pop worked as a clerk in a grocery store. But they had some dreams, didn’t they?”
He turned his face to the sky. The moonlight was dim and I only saw his eyes. “Maybe he could’a heard her singing from his spaceship.”
“But you were sixteen, Cope. Why would they have—”
“Dunno. Maybe it took them that long to realize their baby boy fucked up all them dreams.”
Silence, broken only by the water, stumbled over us. We sat in it for a few minutes, like drunks stewing in our own piss.
“He had a friend, my Pop did. Guy he’d worked with at the store for years and years. About a year after they died, this guy tracks me down, tells me Pop had left something for me.”
Cope pulled a ragged, battered letter from his wallet. “Said Pop gave it to him to give to me someday. The guy was moving outta town. Cleaning out his house, I guess, found it, brought it to me.”
I waited for ten minutes but Cope never opened the letter. Eventually, the old man put it back in his wallet, stuffed his wallet in his back pocket. The rings on his right forefinger caught in the stitching of the jeans.
“It give you any peace of mind?”
“Took it all away.”
Damn, what I would give for a letter like that. What I’d give for some old friend of Fagan’s to track me down, hand me a letter than answered all the questions and told me why Fagan had left me.
After stretching his ancient muscles, Cope headed for the bike. “We gotta get motatin’.”
“What?”
“They gotta KOA up the road a piece. Check in, camp out long as we need. We gotta figure out what’s next.”
I wanted to say something, but something in Cope’s face, something in the hunch of his back and the heavy tromp of his steps, stopped me. Instead I asked him what happened.
“What’s it matter?”
“Blood it out.”
“Telling ain’t blooding.”
“You’ve been blooding for fifty years and I don’t think it’s worked. Try telling.”
“No.” The old man put his leg over the bike seat.
The cooler sat open, the ice long since melted. The foot was still in it and so I jammed the whip in. Next stop in civilization, I thought, I’ve got to get some ice.
It hit me then, the full import of Cope’s story. A friend of his father’s. A letter. Something from the past to clear up the future.
Fagan had a friend. And I had already talked to him about Fagan. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?”
The bike exploded to life.
“No KOA,” I said. “No more banks.”
“Where, then?”
“Barefield. Time to be finished with this bullshit.”
“Yeah,” Cope said, casting a long, hard look at me. “Pro’ly is.”
Twenty-Three Hours, Thirty-Seven Minutes Ago
Johnny’s Barbeque
Barefield, Texas
“God, I love that stink,” I said.
The stink of dead pig, dead cow; the tang of spicy sauce slathered on ribs and hotlinks, brisket, beans. The clean air was full of the sweetness of apple and peach cobbler and Johnny’s Barbecue was still half a block away. But the odor of the joint had been in my nose since we’d parked the bike in a multilevel garage two blocks back.
“Why we here?” Cope asked.
Here was
the heart of Barefield. Downtown, where the movers and shakers played with money and jobs like Monopoly pieces. This bit of beat-up concrete jungle was where the politicians decided whose road got paved and whose road wore another year’s worth of potholes. The place, too, where school boundaries were drawn based on who was the best football player, that player who’d give Barefield High School the best chance to win the state championship.
But the heart of Barefield was also not that damned far from the Barefield Police Department.
Two squad cars had already passed us. Each time, I’d turned my head and covered my face. Not enough to make the cops wonder why someone might do that and thus stop to talk to us, but enough to smear my features.
“Y’all say the cop shop is...pretty much...right there?” Cope walked slowly, as though his old man’s legs and hips weren’t working too well.
From sleeping on the ground at the river, I knew. Actually, from laying on the ground and not truly sleeping at all.
“Yeah, but don’t sweat it, old man. Most of the uniforms don’t usually eat here.”
“The uniforms don’t dig no barbeque?”
“How the hell do I know what they dig and don’t dig? But I know sure as shit they don’t like brass and detectives. And those guys do eat here. Uniforms go to a Mexican food place near the Flat.”
Cope’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How y’all know that? Fact, how y’all been knowing all kinds’a stuff ’bout cops.”
“I’ve got a little experience.”
“Said that before. Means dick to me.”
I stared into the far distance of Spring Street. A few blocks down, just before it crossed under Interstate 20, was Barefield’s library. How many hours had I spent there, looking for some mention of my father, some mention of his time spent at Barefield’s news station? How long had I spent reading the very same books Mama told me Fagan had checked out? It’d been a fucking stupid way to waste time. There was nothing to be learned by touching what Fagan had touched, by reading what he’d read. Fagan was not in the pages he’d turned.
Besides that, those books had been props. Exactly the way Esther’s fake money and empty liquor bottles had been. Those books were just things Fagan carried to make people believe he was intellectual, trying to be more than he actually was. At least, trying to project an image of more than he actually was.
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