by Taylor Brown
While crossing the endless plains of West Texas, he read newspaper stories of Red Byron, the champion of stock car racing who had been standing on the catwalk of a high-altitude bomber, twenty thousand feet over the Japanese homeland, when a burst of flak ripped through the belly of the machine. His leg erupted beneath him, as if the very bone had exploded. He rode the six-hundred-mile flight back to their airbase in the Aleutians, losing blood every second, and the surgeons extracted a swarm of shrapnel from the bloody hive of flesh, pinning the fragmented limb back together in a giant steel cage. He spent twenty-seven months in recovery. Two years later, he would enter a stock car race at Seminole Speedway, his leg scarred and twisted like a blackthorn shillelagh. A metal brace still encased the limb, which he bolted to the clutch pedal. He would win at the Daytona Beach and Road Course, sliding from the rough asphalt of highway A1A onto the thrashed sand of the beach again and again, carving a name for himself in black rubber and blue smoke. He would win at Martinsville and Charlotte. He would win and win and win.
Maybelline was waiting at a garage in Raleigh, stored before Rory shipped out. At first he bucked and squalled all over the city, stalling at lights and rear-ending Buicks, scrawling the streets with inadvertent rubber. He stayed in a motorway inn and raced from one side of town to the other, resting only for coffee and cigarettes, sitting in the yellow glow of late-night diners. He hardly slept, hardly ate. He drove in silence, only the raw throat of the machine, his skin coated in the stink of desperation. He drove and drove. The days dying into nights, the nights burning into days. Slowly he became smoother at the controls, surer. The car no longer barked or bucked or stalled. Behind the wheel of such a machine, he was not lame.
* * *
Pleasure Island, they called it. His last delivery of the night. It was located in a Quonset hut, a war-surplus hangar of ribbed metal, shaped like a giant roly-poly. Inside, cubicles had been installed, each about the size of single bed, the mattresses laid out on wooden pallets. Sometimes the patrons worked up a thirst.
Rory parked in front of the rear door. Madam Erma had heard him coming. She was waiting on the back stoop beneath a single forty-watt bulb, her eyes raccooned in mascara, her breasts bound in a tight bodice. Her dark-dyed hair a complex nest of pins and bobs. She was lighting a cigarette, her hands bright-knuckled with rings and stones.
“Hey, sugar,” she said. “You made it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She pulled the money from the cloven gloom between her breasts. Rory took the bills, moist, and opened the trunk.
“Say, sugar,” she said. “My back is acting up tonight. Think you could carry it in for me?”
Her back was always acting up.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. The words were hard in his mouth, like something pickaxed from his throat. He took the crate and followed her up the stoop, into the perfumed cavern of the place. Everything was red-lit, shadow-draped. A hidden Victrola played tinny jazz, a strange accompaniment to the sounds coming from the stalls. A sort of hushed hysteria, like people dying at the bottom of a well. Only the sharpest cries reached him, but he could feel the rest of them, the bass notes, beating at his chest.
The bar was all the way at the front. He limped behind her down the long aisle, the glass jars tinkling in the crate. The girl working the bar smiled at him. She was eighteen or nineteen, with a bloodred mouth, a necklace of flowers hanging from her neck. She seemed to have too many teeth, crowded to fit. Bruises the size of thumbprints dotted her arms. Rory wondered what had made them, those marks, and he could not but think of his mother, the faceless riders that still lurked in the night. The one-eyed man.
Madam Erma touched his shoulder, making him jump.
“You look like you need a drink.” She looked at the girl. “Don’t he, girl?”
The girl nodded, showing her crowd of teeth.
“Make him one, honey.”
Rory set the crate of whiskey on the bar.
“No, I’m good.”
Madam Erma’s fingers crawled up the back of his neck, talon-sharp, scratching at the roots of his hair.
“Come on now, darling. Sit a spell. Have a drink with us. You’re done for the night, ain’t you? Time to loosen up.”
Rory could hear the sounds coming through the flimsy walls of the place, louder now, yelps and grunts and shrieks. Violent sounds, like love or slaughter. They seemed to pass through his skin, touching his bones. Shame flushed his face, and he spun away from the bar, the outheld drink. He headed back up the aisle, the stall curtains drifting toward him as he passed. They were shower curtains, he realized, covered in palm trees and seashells and dolphins. He did not want to be touched. Ahead, the door stood ajar, a flurry of moths swimming beneath the naked bulb. He was on the stoop when he froze, flat-footed as a beast in headlights. He tried to back up, but the door slammed closed behind him, the bolt sliding home in the lock. The door was metal, cold as a slab against his back.
There were three of them, thin men, leaning against his car. Boys, really. The one on the hood had a shotgun leveled across his knee, a long-barreled double for wingshooting. The other two, flanking him, had their hands in their trouser pockets, each pinning open his coat to show the crosshatched crook of a pistol grip in his waistband. Rory could see they were old pieces, antiques taken from oily rags in Grandpa’s bureau drawer. Guns that killed pigs or snakes or stray dogs.
“Those Muldoons put you up to this?”
The boy on the hood smiled. He tapped a cigarette on the butt of his shotgun, then stuck it in his mouth and lit it with the same hand, grinning through the swirl of smoke.
“People say you a war hero.”
Rory shifted the weight off his wooden leg.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” he said.
The boy on the hood nodded and drew on his cigarette, his cheeks going dark in the light of the single bulb. He pointed the cigarette at Rory.
“Well, you done found it, that there’s a given. Only question is how much.”
“What is it you want?”
The boy shrugged. “Money. Whiskey. Either’s the same.”
“I’m out of whiskey.”
“Then you know what it is I want.”
Rory thought he heard jarflies then. Their throbbing, choral scream. As if in alarm. It was loud to him a moment, and then it wasn’t. He felt a warmth in his chest, like the first slug of whiskey.
“It’s in my leg,” he said. “I hide it there.”
The boy laughed, his companions, too. All chuckling. They were standing back on their heels, pushing their bellies against the guns in their belts. Proud.
“In your wooden leg? You got to be shitting me,” said the boy. “Ain’t that a hoot.”
“Yeah,” said Rory.
“Well, let’s see it then.”
Rory came down off the stoop. The low-wattage bulb, screwed into a fixture above the doorframe, made of him a large shadow that swept toward the others. Each of them shifted, uneasy, as if something were spilling toward their feet. Something they shouldn’t touch, cold and dark as the mountain hollows, untouched by sun. A dark shape now before them, backlit against the naked light. It bent down and began to roll up its pantleg. One inch, two, revealing the polished black throat of a jungle boot.
The boy stood from the hood, looking at the wooden foot.
“How’d it feel when that thing come off?”
“Bad,” said Rory.
“What the girls think about it?”
“I ain’t asked them.”
The boy was looking down at him now, his head slightly cocked. He was moving the barrel this way, that way, his finger playing across the double triggers.
“Guess that’s why God made whores.”
Rory had the pantleg just high enough, above the boot, the polished maple gleaming where his flesh should be. There was an old boy in Yelson’s Holler Granny used to run with, did woodwork. Mainly duck decoys, he sold them to the rich waterfowlers o
f the coast. He’d never done much with rock maple until he met Rory. It was a .32 Colt automatic, a Pocket Hammerless, inlaid in the inner calf of the limb. A blued pistol with checkered grips, no hammer to slow the draw. Rory’s hand slid beneath the pantleg, unclasping it. In a single motion he stood upright and shot the boy in the shin.
The shotgun leapt from the boy’s hands, lifted by his scream, and he fell back against the car. He reached to clutch the dark canker in his trousers but his hands stopped short, the fingers caged over the wound. A ragged red mouth, white-toothed with splintered bone. He stared down at it, his eyes wide and trembling, as if he’d never seen the insides of a man. His friends had bolted, like Rory knew they would. He limped closer. The boy looked up at him, slack-jawed, like some new believer.
The words hiccupped unexpectedly from Rory’s mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
CHAPTER 6
The boys were gone, their leader piled wailing into the back of a rust-eaten sedan. Rory had called the others out of the dark, told them how to bandage the boy’s leg, directed them to the alcoholic veterinarian who treated the nightly victims of End-of-the-Road. He even peeled off the twenty-dollar bill needed for the man to unbar his door. The boys’ faces were so pale. They kept thanking him, thanking him. Finally they tore away, their gutted muffler gunning through the trees.
Only after they were gone did Rory realize they had slashed his tires—or someone had—the rubber puddled flat under the moonlike rims. He toed one, gently, like it might rise at the prodding of his boot.
“Hell.”
He went and tried the door of the whorehouse. Locked. Hammering brought no one. He wondered what was in the drink they tried to give him. He looked across the street: an old Sinclair filling station, closed for years. The windows were papered over, the Sunday pages making the glass opaque. Green Sinclair dinosaurs bled from the signs. A small place, usually dark, but tonight the windows pulsed, shadows writhing against the illuminated newsprint. The air thumped with sound.
He started walking toward the place. A pair of gas pumps stood out front, gravity-fed, each topped with a glass globe. One was busted, just a jagged bowl. The other was full of something brown. Rainwater, maybe. Not whiskey. Someone would have drunk it.
He crossed the road, the grit crunching beneath his boots. The service doors were down, the papered windows glowing. Shadows leapt against these bars of light, rising and falling, reeling and surging like tongues of flame. The air drummed and cracked. There was something wild in the sound, unhinged. Electric. Throttled tambourines stung the air, a whining steel guitar. A mania of twanging metal and screaming chords, of yelps and shrieks, such as the end of the world might make, yet alive and heel-quickening, too. He could almost see the music erupting from the place as he neared, in bolts of rampant light, white and gold, and there were words, too, howled and shrieked and sung. There were some he knew and some he didn’t, some sung in an unknown tongue. But he knew what all of them meant. What charged them.
Praise.
* * *
“This thing is real!” The preacher’s hair was slicked back in a ducktail, jet-black though his face was old, and he wore a shoestring necktie, a button shirt with short sleeves ironed sharp. He held the Book high above his head. The pages were tattered, the cover stained. “It is the Word, and there need be no other.”
Amen.
“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Amen.
“But we live in a world too silent, do we not? A world of infatuate babble, yet silent, saying nothing. Nothing of his Name. This, friends, this is the very silence of death.”
Yes, it is.
“Spiritual death!”
Yes.
He waved the Book high above his head.
“When the saving Word is here, friends! Right here!”
Hallelujah.
“In the ultimate hour, he will separate the wheat from the chaff. The bellies of nations will yawn wide, the unrepentant will be swallowed in seas of fire.”
Yes, they will.
“And soon, friends. Soon! It has been nearly two thousand years. His time is coming. The End. Let the world die in ash, sprouting atomic mushrooms that cloud out the sun. In that darkness we will be saved.”
Yes, we will.
“For we have the Word. And we call it out, don’t we, friends?”
Yes, we do.
“We call out to him! Here in the blackest spot below these mountains. Here in the sinners’ very den. We call out his name!”
Yes, brother.
“Not just for ourselves, but for all to be saved in him.”
Amen.
The preacher clapped his hand on the shoulder of a man with a guitar.
“Let us sing!”
The guitar had been plugged into a wooden box with a woven-looking face, and the chords crackled through the electric light of the small garage, tinny and strange, buzzing with power. Rory watched with one eye, peeping through a crack in the door. The people were shrieking now and dancing. Rattling tambourines, hammering them against the heels of their hands. They were awash in sweat, their mouths slack like the revenants’ of old tales, filled only with crude moans and gasps.
They whirled and stomped, their arms antlered upright like candelabra, their palms cupped as if they held within them holy water or fire. But it was the girl he could not quit watching. She had white skin, milk-smooth, and dark hair that crashed all upon her shoulders, uncut, an avalanche of darkness save for bangs slashed straight above her eyes. That face twisted with pain, or what seemed it, as if she were enduring a great agony, a blade digging into her softest places. Searching them. She swayed at the front of the group, her eyes pinched closed in concentration, her hands held quivering before her as if she cradled a great stone in the crook of her arms.
Then her eyes snapped open, green as jewels, and she looked right at him.
Rory leapt backward as if struck. He tripped over an old tire leaning behind the cash register and crashed into a metal folding chair, hopping across the floor on his good foot and out the door onto the apron, expecting a mob of them to come rushing after him. He hobble-skipped between the gas pumps and across the road, his shadow chasing him crazily down the ribbed side of the whorehouse, flaring and jerking like some hounding goblin. He reached the car and leaned blowing against the door, stump throbbing, fists clenched, waiting for them to come outraged from the darkness with clubs and two-by-fours and ax-handles.
No one did.
* * *
Dawn, colorless, crept through the canted trees, the warped dives and cars left derelict in their yards and lots. Rory opened the driver’s door with a click. It was quiet, no one about. He got out and stretched and peed in the grass, leaning his forehead against the roof of the Ford. He’d slept but fitfully in the front seat of the car, waking again and again, surprised not to see a flood of faces mashed against the glass, ugly and irate.
He buttoned his fly and started the long walk into town. Behind him the filling station sat dark now, padlocked. An empty husk. End-of-the-Road was a strange place here in daylight, the night’s sins left bare as if by outgoing tide. All along the road, casualties lay curled in backseats or mounded against car windows, mouth-breathing, making wet little clouds on the glass. They had passed out fumbling for their keys, for the starter switch or gearshift or headlight knob, their eyelids working in slow motion, their bodies heavy, like men at the bottom of the sea. There were empty bottles in the weeds, glittering bursts of broken glass in the street. A lone boot lay like a roadkilled pet. Shreds of calico and gingham from dresses torn in anger or lust. Footprints on car windows, rubbers left like pale and flattened worms in the road. Blood hardened under the sun, the work of fists or razors or knives. Last night a gun.
His irregular cadence rang out on the hardpack of the road in two-one time, the stump aching every step. He had a special sock he was supposed to wear for the prevention of skin-she
ar, folliculitis, but he never did. Before long he could feel his skin burning beneath the buckles and straps, angry and raw, the hair follicles risen up in red little hills that itched. Beyond that a deeper hurt. Distal-end pain. Too much pressure on the remnant bone and tissue, the stump darkening like a bruised fruit, like something tossed out with the grocer’s daily spoil.
Just up the road a truck was pulling out, an old half-ton bloodied with rust. Rory waved and stuck out his thumb for the driver. She was a white woman the color of brick, her flesh clouded with freckles. She stopped at the edge of the road and waved him on. Rory hobbled around the front of the truck and climbed in, pulling home the door three times before it latched.
“Appreciate it,” he said.
She had a round face, her arms thick like a man’s, wormed and welted with pink and white scars. Rory wouldn’t have bet against her in a fistfight with any of the old gunnies he knew. She shoved the truck into gear, a big bulb of muscle rounding out the back of her arm. The transmission scoffed but gave, grating, and the truck lurched onto the road, clattering under the oaks like something that might just fly apart. The wheels bounding off on their own trajectories, the cab grinding to a halt like a dropped buffalo. Rory looked at her. If the truck was smart, it would keep itself together.
“Where you headed?”
“Garage in town. Needing some tires.”
“More than one?”
“Four.”
She whistled. “You pissed somebody off. Lady friend?”
“I wish.”
She grinned, her teeth dark.
“A boy like you, you ought to have them keying your car every night.”
“You run that joint back in there?”
“More like it runs me.”
Rory looked out the windshield, cocked his head. The sun was above the trees now, cool and white, the dead leaves chasing one another across the road in fiery loops and scrolls, as if to write some message he couldn’t quite read.
“Pretty,” she said.
“What?”
“Trees,” she said. “Everybody likes the spring, when they’re all blooming out.” She shrugged. “Not me. Gets like a fucking prison down here, so green, all shadows and pollen so thick you can’t hardly breathe. Me, I like when they all fire up, when you know that clean, cold air is coming.”