13
Nothing fingered the colored glass bubbles in the partition between diner booths of torn maroon vinyl. The Greyhound had taken him down through Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs, down along anonymous highways flanked by chemical processing plants, cigarette mills, housing developments and the dull blue and green aluminum walls meant to protect them from the noise and smell of the highway.
The scenery was boring and oppressive at first. It made Nothing wonder whether he might be travelling deeper and deeper into the dead world populated by his parents and teachers and the sad, desperate friends he had left behind. Surely these couldn’t be the roads that led to home.
But now, deep in Virginia, the roadsides were lush and green, even in the middle of September. He was sitting in a truck-stop diner somewhere south of nowhere, watching the afternoon light fade, staring at the ripped vinyl and the greasy tables and the flashy jukebox that didn’t have the decency to play green and mournful country music, but played the pop top twenty over and over by the hour. Nothing held his backpack close to him. The place reeked of hamburger grease and cardboard-flavored coffee. But the colored glass bubbles in the divider were as beautiful as anything back home in his room. He wished he could somehow steal just one of them. By this time he wished he could have put his whole room in his backpack and carried it away with him. He glanced through the window at the bus station across the parking lot, lit a Lucky, tapped it, and rubbed ash absently into the thin torn cloth of his jeans. The jeans were soft and comforting, decorated with black ballpoint swirls, a chain of safety pins, artistic rips. His hightop sneakers chafed each other, tapped together impatiently, wanting to get back out on the road. There was a hole in one sneaker, over his little toe.
He found the Lost Souls? cassette in the pocket of his raincoat, opened the plastic case, and took out the paper liner. The liner was a grainy photocopy, a picture of an old gravestone dappled with shadow and sunlight, surrounded by pine needles and twining kudzu vines. Across the gravestone the words LOST SOULS? were printed in rainbow crayon. All five hundred copies were supposed to have been lettered by the band. He pictured the guitarist, hunched tall and awkward on the floor, pressing down too hard with the crayons and breaking them,- cussing and turning the whole project over to the singer. The singer was surely in charge of the color yellow and with his fingers would have touched this paper, would have swirled in the question mark that kept the name from being stupid.
Nothing looked at the other side of the paper liner, at the photo of the two musicians. Steve Finn, sitting with his guitar between his knees, grinning with a certain easy cynicism, his messy dark hair shoved behind his ears and a can of Budweiser not quite concealed behind the pointy toe of his left boot. And the other one, the one who slid his eyes away from the camera, whose knobby wrists lay crossed in his lap. Whose patchwork clothes were too big and whose hair fell from under his straw hat as pale as tangled rain, half-hiding his face, obscuring him.
All Nothing knew about the duo came from this picture and the cryptic liner notes (“I like to drink my watercolor water”), those things and the long trainwhistle music and the spooky, wistful words of the songs. But he imagined personalities for them, felt as if he knew them. Lost Souls? belonged to the crowd of spirits inside his head, the ones he used to wish he was squeezed against on Saturday nights when Jack’s car went too fast around a curve and the others screamed for another hardcore tape. Those, his old friends—with their leather jackets and their skull bongs, their Marlboro hard packs and their thwarted dreams—those were teenagers. Nothing knew he was either a child or an ancient soul; he had never been sure which.
He tugged at the drop of onyx and the tiny silver razor blade that dangled from his earlobe. He fingered a ballpoint pen in his pocket. Then he unzipped his backpack, dug for his notebook, and pulled a postcard from between the scribbled, singed, softly ragged pages. It was the postcard he had written while drinking his parents’ whiskey, but he had not yet mailed it. The gold leaf caught the light as he laid the card on the table.
GHOST, he had addressed it, c/o LOST SOULS? 14 BURNT CHURCH ROAD, MISSING MILE, NORTH CAROLINA. He wrote no zip code—they hadn’t included one on the tape case. Maybe Missing Mile was too small to have a zip code. But, thank whatever gods watched over him, he had remembered to put a stamp on it. He could hardly afford to buy one now.
He finished his cigarette, lit another, tried to make out the time through the layer of grease on the wall clock, glanced over at the bus station again. But it was no good. He couldn’t get back on a bus even if he wanted to. The money from his mother’s jewelry box had run out two towns ago. His stomach hurt, and he had thought of spending his one remaining dollar on a burger or some pancakes. But what if it was the last dollar he ever got? He had to save it for something he really wanted: a new notebook, a cup of expensive coffee, a black slouch hat in a thrift shop somewhere. He could always steal cigarettes. You had to spend your last dollar on something important.
He was going to have to start hitching. He’d never done it before—he’d tried to catch rides to Skittle’s or the record store back home, but the young townie matrons only eyed his long raincoat, his lank black hair, and stepped on the gas. And hitching out on the highway, with the wide flat sky stretching away overhead and the great trucks like dragons screaming by—well, that was a different affair. Anyone might stop. Anything might happen.
He kissed the postcard and dropped it into a mailbox near the bus station, then crossed the parking lot and climbed a grassy embankment to the highway. Among the mosaic of dirty gravel and shattered glass on the shoulder of the road, he found a single long bone as dry and clean as a fossil. A chicken bone, probably, that somebody had tossed out a car window. But it might be raccoon or cat or even—Nothing shuddered pleasurably—a human bone. Maybe someone had been thrown from a wreck, or some hitchhiker like himself had been hit and killed here, and the policemen who cleaned up the mess had overlooked a finger or two. Nothing put the bone in his raincoat pocket and closed his hand around it. It nestled there, making a place for itself next to Lost Souls?
An hour’s worth of cars went by, sleek and faceless, windows rolled up against the coming night. Colors melted across the sky; the sun died its bloody evening death. Out here, away from the lights of the diner and the bus station, the sky was a deep violet pricked with stars like glittering chips of ice. A night wind was freshening, and Nothing began to shiver. He had almost decided to go back and try to sleep in the bus station when the Lincoln Continental screeched to a stop beside him.
The car was unwieldy and enormous, salmon-pink splotched with great woundlike patches of rust. A rope trailed from the rear bumper, unravelling, its end stained dark. The car’s interior, once white maybe, reeked of something rancid.
As he got in, Nothing saw the green plastic Jesus on the dashboard, but before he could reconsider the driver leaned across him and pulled the passenger door shut. Nothing realized suddenly what the rancid smell was: sour milk. It made him think of the Dumpsters behind the school cafeteria when they hadn’t been dumped for a while.
“Where you headed?” After a moment’s hesitation, the driver added, “Son?”
The green Jesus glowed faintly in the dimming light. Nothing dragged his gaze away from it and looked into the driver’s face, but not before he had realized that the eyes of the Jesus were painted red. “Missing Mile,” he said. It was the only place he could think of on a second’s notice. “North Carolina.”
The man nodded and turned back to the road. “Heard about the place. Maggot’s nest of sin, nightclubs and bars, fast women.” He scowled at the highway.
Nothing looked more closely at the driver. He seemed very white. His face was unlined and pale, with a kind of crazy exalted beauty to it, but the hair that hung in it was the color of flat, hard-packed ice. The man’s hands were as spindly as two white spiders on the steering wheel, and the pale wrists disappeared into folds of cloth as white as milk. Was he wea
ring robes?
The white hands skittered on the wheel. “Have you been saved?”
“Shit,” said Nothing softly.
“What was that?”
Nothing looked out the window at a graying landscape. Born-agains made him into a smartass. “Yeah. I was saved once, at a party. I was almost sober, and my friend gave me another drink.”
One of the hands shot off the wheel. Nothing flinched, thinking he was about to get smacked, but the hand only crawled through the clutter on the front seat and came up with a smeary purple-inked tract clutched in its fingers. Saved by the Blood of the Lamb.
The man dropped the tract in Nothing’s lap. A long white finger touched Nothing’s leg through a rip in his jeans. “You read that,” he said.
“Yeah, sure. I will.” Nothing started to stuff the tract into his backpack.
“Now.” The voice was ice-edged. Nothing thought of frozen milk, of shattering crystal. “You read me them words now. Sing it loud and clear.”
“No way. Fuck that.” Nothing pushed himself back against the door. “Let me out.”
“I could tell you were a sinner from the minute you climbed in. Christ shows them to me, and it’s my duty to save them. I got to do it. I got to do it.” The driver’s voice sounded almost frightened now. “You got to read, it’s my duty to make you.”
The needle of the speedometer was jittering, climbing. Sixty. Eighty. The Lincoln slipped on the shoulder, sprayed gravel, righted itself.
Nothing unfolded the tract. The last fiery sliver of sun was just slipping down behind the pines. The tiny violet letters squirmed and blurred before his eyes. “I can’t read it,” he said. “Too dark.”
The driver touched a button. Dull light flooded the car. The man glanced sideways at him, and Nothing saw that the irises of his eyes were red. No, not red. Pink. Bright jewel-pink. Nothing was so intrigued that he forgot to be afraid. “Can you see?” he asked.
A kind of radiance suffused the man’s face, lighting up that crazy horrible beauty, making it glow. “My affliction,” he said. “They call me albino. I call it the hand of Jesus upon me. I am stricken, and I walk with Him.”
“They’re pretty,” said Nothing. “I wouldn’t mind having pink eyes.”
The radiance disappeared. The speedometer trembled up to ninety-five. “God-given affliction ain’t pretty. You go on. You got to read.”
Nothing picked up the tract again. As he shifted in his seat, his foot crushed something on the floor. Now he could see where the sour smell came from: dozens of empty milk cartons littered the floorboards, some fresh, some faded with age. Missing children smiled sunnily up at him, refusing to acknowledge that now they were probably just scattered bones in a culvert somewhere.
Nothing took a deep breath and opened the tract. The paper felt slick and cheap between his fingers. “ ‘What is eternal life?’ ” he began.
“Go on,” the driver told him. His breathing had begun to quicken.
An hour later it was full dark outside the dusty windows. The Lincoln was cruising at eighty. The albino had made him read four more tracts, and between that and the sour-milk odor, Nothing’s throat felt as if someone had poured hot sand down it.
“ ‘Don’t let Satan deceive you, for he lies. BEING SAVED IS THE ONLY WAY INTO HEAVEN….’ ” Nothing faltered. His voice was as hoarse as if he had just smoked a whole pack of Luckies. If the albino was going to kill him and dump him in a ditch somewhere, they might as well get it over with. If he stopped now, maybe he’d still be able to scream.
“I can’t go any more,” he said, afraid to look at the albino. Instead he stared out the window. The countryside was dark. Rain had begun to speckle the windshield, streaking down through a patina of dust and highway grit. There was no light anywhere, not by the side of the road, not on the horizon. Heavy clouds blotted out the moon.
The Lincoln’s one working headlight picked out a line of bright orange cones by the side of the road. Highway work. The cones (lashed by slower… slower. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels. The car came to a full stop.
The albino cut the ignition and turned to Nothing. The only light came from the glowing green Jesus on the dash, a ghostly light, faint and phosphorescent. The painted eyes stood out like holes in the tiny mournful face. The albino stared at Nothing, his face shadowed, his own eyes glittering flatly. When the craziness in his face was not showing, he looked like a sick child. One of the white spiders touched Nothing’s leg.
Nothing glanced at the door. The button was pushed down. Locked. Would he be able to open it and jump out before the driver could grab him? The man was bigger, though his body looked sickly and loose-jointed under the white robe. Rain dashed against the window. Nothing peered out through streaks of dirt and swashes of clean black night. What was out there? If he made a dash for it, would anybody help him, or would the albino run him down? He stared at the milk cartons, saw again the eyes of the missing children. Little dark smudges in a sea of red and white, utterly helpless.
The white spider was crawling up his thigh, squeezing.
“Now we’re gonna go over what you learned,” the man said again. Suddenly Nothing wasn’t scared anymore. This situation was familiar.
“Why didn’t you just tell me what you wanted, instead of making me read all that crap?”
“It’s my duty,” the man said, but his voice shook, and his hand tightened on Nothing’s leg.
Nothing didn’t care what he had to do. Whatever it was, it would be worth it to get away from this sour-smelling car, those lonely cardboard smiles. The albino’s jewel-pink eyes slipped shut as Nothing bent over his lap and pulled his robes aside. This was clumsy magic, but it was so easy; he had learned it in a hundred drunken backseats, in Laine’s bedroom on lazy afternoons laying out from school. Sometimes older men in fancy cars would cruise past the schoolyard and park near the curb, out behind the cafeteria Dumpsters. Some of the boys, if they were saving up for a guitar or hurting for a bag of pot, would go out there and blow them for twenty dollars a throw. That was what the sour-milk odor reminded him of. Nothing had done it a couple of times back then, and he guessed he could manage now.
The albino had a huge erection that pulsed vivid red against all the whiteness. Even his pubic hair was like coarse cotton. Nothing had to stretch his mouth open until he thought his jaws would crack. The white spiders twined in Nothing’s hair and stroked Nothing’s throat and shoulders with a careful, psychotic tenderness. “I got to do it,” he said as he came. “I got to do it.”
His sperm was thin and milky, and burned Nothing’s raw throat as it went down. But Nothing had never minded swallowing come. Something about it settled his stomach and made his whole body feel good.
The albino gave Nothing five dollars—five lousy dollars, Nothing amended silently. But the night air refreshed him as he pushed open the heavy door, and he got out fast, before the man could decide that he wasn’t quite saved yet, that another round of tract-reading and blowjobbing might do the trick. The salmon-pink Continental rolled slowly away, the stained rope trailing from its rear bumper, leaving Nothing alone on the roadside. The albino had forgotten to turn his single headlight back on, but as the car crested a hill and disappeared, Nothing glimpsed a tiny green phosphorescence through the back window. The red-eyed plastic Jesus, lighting the way through the night.
Nothing licked his lips. The taste of the man’s sperm, still fresh and raw, reminded him of something Laine had once told him. Did you know, Laine had asked with innocent lasciviousness, that come has almost exactly the same chemical makeup as human blood?
The countryside was hilly, sodden, absolutely black. Nothing tore the back of his hand on a barbed-wire fence. Tears of pain made his eyes glisten as he sucked at the blood. I’m alone now, all right, he thought. Nobody in the whole world knows where I am. His sneakers were soaked with cold rain, and his toes ached to the bone. Long slick grass squeaked under his feet. At last he staggered into an abandoned barn. Great pronged s
hapes loomed around him—abandoned farm machinery, heavy and rusted. It might fall on him in the night, pin him to the musty floor, leave him to struggle and die alone. He didn’t care.
The rain raised dust and cobwebby chaff in the barn. Nothing sneezed once, twice, three times—hard, choking spasms that bent him double. The third sneeze turned into a loud sob. He curled up beneath the loft and sucked at the blood on his hand. His tears soaked into the dirty wooden floor.
During the night, while Nothing dreamed uneasy dreams, a small spider climbed delicately through his wet black hair. It let itself down along the smooth line of his jawbone, lingered briefly on his lips, and ran away over the damp red-streaked fingers that Nothing pressed to his mouth, his tongue darting out to lick the blood away as he slept.
14
It was still hot when Christian drove into Missing Mile.
He did not know he was in Missing Mile, not yet, for the road he came in on had no town limits sign. The sign, a splintered pine plank with its painted letters aged to translucence, had been knocked down twenty years ago by a man who decided to take two lovers that night; his head lay against Vodka’s breast and his hand was on Whiskey’s thigh when he lost control of his car. The sign lay several feet from the road, swathed in kudzu, stained brown with blood long dry.
So Christian did not know he was in the town, not yet. He knew only that he was almost out of money somewhere in North Carolina, that his fuel gauge was hovering on empty, and that all day the sun had threatened to emerge from low-hanging clouds. This, then, was where he would stop for a while.
He came in on Highway 42 and took a left, which brought him into town by way of Violin Road. He looked at the trailers and broken-backed shacks, the weed-choked family graveyards, the heaps of rusted scrap metal, as he drove slowly past. Christian felt no dread, no excitement; it did not really matter where he lived. I might have gone all the way to San Francisco, he thought, and when I saw the Golden Gate Bridge and the glitter of Chinatown, I would feel this way still. He could not go back to New Orleans, so any other place in the world would do for now.
Lost Souls Page 12