Holding Smoke

by Steph Post

  The minutes crept forward as Ramey anxiously paced back and forth in front of her Cutlass, toeing chunks of broken asphalt and examining the scratches and chipped paint on the car’s hood as a way to keep from staring at the damn green door. When she finally heard it bang open, followed by the indistinct murmur of Judah’s voice and the booming laugh of a correction officer, Ramey whirled around. Judah stepped off the curb, looking in the opposite direction from her, toward the highway, as he sorted out his wallet, phone, and cigarettes and stuffed them into his jeans. Ramey was able to catch his face just as he turned around and, in that instant, with his eyes ablaze, but before they alighted on her, she knew.

  Judah had been running from demons his whole life. The specter of his dead mother, the choleric hands of his father, the collective judgments of a town who saw his last name before his first. Mostly, though, Judah had been running from the long, cruel claws of his own shadow, always with him at his heels, rising and falling, waxing and waning, but never vanishing completely. Sometimes he was able to elude the cinch of the claws, sometimes he could direct them himself, sometimes he bore the gashes they carved into his back when he wasn’t looking. Ramey had felt those claws herself, had gripped them in her own hands to wrestle them back. A demon could be fought, could be banished, but a shadow was with one always, the negative of a second skin.

  Ramey could see in Judah’s face that the demons had been sent back to hell for a time, but the talons and the teeth and the tentacles of his shadow had scored him to razored ribbons while he’d been sitting in jail and an armor of scar tissue had grown over the wounds. His shadow was no longer at his feet, but wrapped tightly around what was left of his heart.

  Judah shaded his eyes against the sun, grinned at her, and winked. Even as Ramey swallowed the shocking, and bitter, realization of who and what Judah had finally become, his crooked smile was infectious and she found herself grinning back. She dropped her shoulders in a sigh as they looked across the asphalt at one another and then she was running, crashing into him. He was laughing, hands on her hips, then in her hair, as she pressed her head to his chest and, for a moment, let herself laugh with him. His voice was filled not with astonishment or relief or even joy, but with conviction.

  “Ramey.”

  She pressed harder against him.

  “Judah.”

  He ran his hands up and down the length of her back and then gripped her gently by the shoulders, as if to push her away, to raise her head and look into her eyes, but Ramey refused to move. She was listening. Despite the wink and the laugh, the familiar, unruly dark hair and graze of stubble along his jaw and the crow’s feet at his eyes, even with the spark behind them, she knew what she had seen. And deep in the cave of Judah’s chest, behind the swelling of his lungs, she could hear it. The tap-tap-tapping of the claws. The call of Judah’s shadow.

  *

  Sister Tulah narrowed her single, colorless eye against the glare ricocheting off the siding of the newly painted Last Steps of Deliverance Church of God and drew her puckered lips down into a frown. She did not like what she was hearing. Milo Hill leaned one twig of an arm out the open window of his teal Ford Fiesta, yapping away in his nasally drone, seemingly oblivious to the wrath that normally followed such a look of displeasure on the face of Tulah Atwell. There was a spotty black tribal tattoo circling his pasty, almost non-existent bicep and Tulah’s eye lingered on it with revulsion. Who did this kid think he was? Some sort of wild, red-faced Indian? Tulah’s lip curled up in a sneer. If so, he needed to spend more time out in the sun and less time holed up in his parents’ dank garage-turned-bedroom, staring like a zombie at a computer screen that was most likely eating away holes in his brain. Of course, spending all of that time in front of a computer was exactly why Sister Tulah needed this upstart of a young man, grandson of one of her most loyal followers, and now business partner in her latest real estate venture.

  Milo drummed the stubs of his chewed nails on the outside of the driver’s side door as he prattled on about quitclaim deeds, cost disclosures, and target markets, as if Sister Tulah hadn’t already bought and sold half of Bradford County before Milo was even out of training pants. She couldn’t quite tell if he was going out of his way to use the most complicated terms to describe the most basic of transactions or if this was just naturally the way he spoke, with all the personality of a telephone pole. She certainly didn’t like Milo—she didn’t like the gel in his spiky black hair or the Give Peace a Chance bumper sticker on his back windshield or the fact that he refused to enter the church to meet with her, the church his grandfather had been attending every Wednesday, Sunday, and Revival Weekend for all his life—but she didn’t need to like him. She needed him to make her money.

  Milo’s voice trailed off like the air being let out of a balloon. He pushed his wire frame glasses up on the bridge of his nose and glanced in the rearview mirror, then twisted in his seat awkwardly to look around the church parking lot, glistening with recently poured black tar. Tulah followed his gaze. Her gleaming Lincoln Navigator was the only other vehicle in the lot, parked up front in the best spot, with a new sign staked out in front of it proclaiming Preacher Parking Only. It was another one of the little perks Sister Tulah had tucked into the recently rebuilt and almost completed church. The asphalt, the parking sign, the air-conditioned and expanded back office, complete with a microwave and stainless steel mini fridge, and the intimidating bronze plaque hanging above the mahogany and frosted glass front doors, entreating all who walked beneath it to Remember, and Forget Not, How Thou Provokedst the Lord thy God to Wrath in the Wilderness – Deuteronomy 9:7. Milo seemed distracted and Sister Tulah snapped him back to attention with a sharp clearing of her throat.

  “Before you began trying to impress me with your superfluous vocabulary, you said we had a problem.”

  Milo swiveled back around in his seat. The look on his face told Tulah that her manner of speaking still unsettled him. Good. It wouldn’t do to have him growing too comfortable around her. He liked to act as if he hadn’t heard the stories, the whispers, about what happened to folks when they found themselves on the wrong side of Sister Tulah. He needed to be reminded that, while useful, he was hardly untouchable.

  Milo scratched at a pitted acne scar on his cheek and replied to Tulah with just a hint of insolence.

  “We do. I told you it wouldn’t be smooth sailing all the way through. These things always hit a snag. There’s always someone just waiting to rock the boat.”

  Sister Tulah picked a thread off the starched cuff of her long-sleeved dress. It, too, was new and she had opted for a black-and-white Damask print instead of her usual pastel floral. The dress was stiff, caught high at the neck in a buttoned lace collar, and rustled like chainmail when she moved, a quality Tulah appreciated. She flicked the thread away and skimmed her hands down the gathered sides of the dress, stretching tight over the bulk of her hips. Tulah had already decided that she would go back to the catalog and order two more in the same style.

  “And is this someone in the boat, or swimming toward us from the shore?”

  Milo appeared confused, and his slack-jawed response pricked the side of Tulah’s thin mouth with a barbed smile.

  “Uh?”

  “The person causing the problem. Is it someone directly involved with us? Or is it someone on the outside?”

  Milo still didn’t seem to understand, and Tulah huffed in exasperation. In so many ways, Milo was hopeless. But he could create the email accounts, web pages, and eBay profiles that were crucial to Sister Tulah’s brilliant plan to turn a loss into a profit, to transform misfortune into a goldmine, and that was all that mattered.

  When Sister Tulah had returned from The Recompense in August—broke from the tithes to the True God and its ceremony, shunned by fellow members of The Order of the Luminous Sevenfold Light and therefore without prospects or proffered assistance, facing a mounting pile of bills, a half-finished church, and a duplicitou
s nephew—she had found herself with nowhere to turn. Yes, there had still been her secret pact with George Kingfisher that, if she were successful in her task, would guarantee her a coveted place on the Inner Council, but the rewards of the future weren’t going to pay the debts of the present, as Sister Tulah well knew. In going through her depleted assets and casting around for quick-cash ideas, Tulah had alighted upon a contrivance that was simple, elegant, and tied up many of her loose ends dangling across the county. Once the idea hit her, Sister Tulah had stayed up all night with a yellow legal pad in hand, drinking glass after glass of Nesquik and devouring an entire family-sized tray of macaroni and cheese as she worked out the details of her plan. By the time the sun had crept through the cracks in her heavy, closely pulled drapes, Tulah’s dining room table had been littered with stacks of torn pages and Deer Park Reserve had been born.

  The premise was simple. When she had been doing everything possible to bring a phosphate mine to Bradford County, Sister Tulah had amassed a tremendous amount of mostly worthless land west of Lake Sampson. Low-lying areas choked with pond pines, water locusts and snaring devil’s walking-stick that disappeared under at least a foot of water during the summer months, and acres and acres of fallow, sandy pasture, suffocated by hip-high brambles and scrub. Some of the land had phosphate beneath the surface, but much of it was unusable and undesirable, simply passed down from one generation to the next and included in the sprawling parcels Sister Tulah had bought for pennies from her congregation and their friends and their families and anyone else in the county who knew better than to cross her. When the phosphate mine fell through, Sister Tulah hadn’t even considered using the valueless land for anything else. Once she put her plan together, however, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it sooner. A good old-fashioned swampland scheme was exactly what Bradford County had needed.

  She’d recruited Milo and with his help created the subdivision of Deer Park Reserve, an up-and-coming neighborhood nestled in the quiet and serene woodlands on the western edge of the county. According to the website Milo put together, Deer Park was a gated community lined with cleared three-acre lots just perfect for building a custom home or estate. Sister Tulah had ordered a crew from the Last Steps congregation to bush hog an area roughly a quarter the size of an advertised lot and then Milo had worked his magic with camera angels and creative cropping. Tulah, meanwhile, had provided the rhetoric to make the land irresistible to snowbirds, investors, and retirees, whose dreams of a sun-dappled end to their days could be realized for only twenty thousand dollars an acre. Never mind that the land was actually worth only a tenth of its asking price, was inaccessible by road, and not connected to water, sewage, or power. The photographs were convincing and the inviting website even more so.

  Once the paper subdivision had an internet presence, Milo had created several real estate companies and realtor personas, all vaguely, but not legally, franchised from Hill Family Realty, his parents’ legitimate business. After that, and with a few blindly signed documents from the Bradford County Clerk of Court, it was show time. Depending on the target audience, Deer Park Reserve was marketed variously as “Pristine,” “Charming,” and “Close to Disney World!” Milo sold some lots through their realty websites, but eBay was their bread and butter. Folks from all over the country were shelling out thousands for covetable land they were sure was being snapped up quickly. Prospective buyers didn’t want to miss out on the chance of a lifetime, and Milo was careful only to accept bids from folks in places like Michigan and California, who wouldn’t be familiar with the landscape of North Florida or likely to make a trip to check out their investment anytime soon. When they did, they would be surprised, they would be heartbroken, they would be irate, but there would be nothing they could do about it. And, most importantly, they would never, ever, be able to connect the scam back to Tulah. She wasn’t cutting Milo Hill thirty percent of the profits for nothing.

  But now, apparently, they’d hit a snag. Sister Tulah arched the sparse eyebrow above her black eyepatch, waiting for Milo’s response. He shrugged and ran his hands up and down his shaggy purple steering wheel cover like a kid pretending to drive a racecar.

  “I don’t know who’s causing the problem.”

  And this was why Milo, despite doing the bulk of the work, would never make more than thirty percent. Sister Tulah leveled her gaze at him.

  “You don’t know?”

  She dragged out every word, relishing the way it made Milo squirm. It was about time his impudence was checked.

  “I’ve been getting these emails in one of our company’s inboxes. From some guy who says he knows our land is worthless. Says he’s going to do something about us selling it as Deer Park.”

  Sister Tulah had known this would happen eventually. Sooner or later, someone would discover the truth and threaten to do something about it. Of course, legally, nothing could be done, as the land had been bought and sold fairly. You couldn’t sue someone because you were stupid enough to buy land over the internet. Sister Tulah was more concerned about her Deer Park scheme being publicly exposed before she could sell off all the plots. The money she’d been making over the past month was astronomical and Tulah intended to squeeze out every last dime she could.

  “Did this man say what he was going to do? Exactly?”

  Milo shrugged again.

  “Go to the papers, go to Channel 6 Action News. Post on message boards, Rip-off Central, Scam-Bust. That sort of thing.”

  Sister Tulah nodded again, running the possible outcomes through her mind as she spoke.

  “Which one of our companies was he contacting with these threats? We can fold Venture if we need to. Even if he does try to go all the way to the evening news, no one will believe him because the company won’t exist.”

  Milo scratched at the blackheads dotting his nose and pushed his glasses up again.

  “Well, that’s just it. He sent it to Sky-High, but it was addressed to you personally.”

  Sister Tulah’s hands flew to her hips, though she tried to keep the outrage from showing on her face.

  “What?”

  Milo nodded hesitantly.

  “Yeah, the email was all over the place, but it said that he knew it was you behind Deer Park and he knew it was a scam because some of the lots were on land that had been in his family for a hundred years. He said his son sold you the land for ten cents an acre last year. Is that true?”

  Milo’s voice lilted upward with incredulity. He’d never asked Sister Tulah how she acquired all of the land they were selling. Once, he had alluded to the fact that it must have been in Tulah’s own family for generations, and she hadn’t bothered to correct him. Tulah ignored Milo’s question, but lurched forward in agitation, coming right up to the Fiesta’s window.

  “Did this email say anything else? How much he wanted to keep quiet?”

  Again, Milo seemed confused as he fidgeted in his seat. Clearly, his idea of criminal activity differed from Sister Tulah’s.

  “He didn’t say anything about money. Just that he wanted you to stop. To not dupe anymore hardworking folks. I think he said something like he was giving you a chance to walk away before he walked his story over to the press. Something lame like that.”

  Tulah ran her dry tongue over her lips and spoke slowly.

  “Giving me a chance?”

  Her voice boomed.

  “Giving me a chance?”

  Milo leaned away from the open window, the seatbelt stretching tight across his scrawny chest.

  “Whoa, lady.”

  “Lady?”

  Sister Tulah had to restrain herself from reaching out and jerking Milo toward her by the peaks of his meringue-stiff hair. What did it matter that he worked for her and she needed him to push the stupid buttons on his computer at her direction. Milo flung up his arm, as if to defend himself, as if he saw the wrath of God coming for him, which wasn’t such a far-fetched fear. He cringed as he c
ontinued to shrink away from her.

  “I don’t know if it helps or not, but the last email was signed.”

  Tulah caught herself, and while she didn’t step back from Milo’s car, she brought her voice back under control. She would not be provoked by a sniveling little man hardly more than a teenager.

  “Yes, it helps.”

  Milo dropped his outstretched arm and nervously plucked at his chapped top lip.

  “It was weird, though. It wasn’t signed with a name, but with a month. August. Does that mean something to you?”

  Tulah’s brows came down, mimicking the frown cut into her face. She cupped the edge of Milo’s window and then stretched out her palms, as if banishing him from her presence.

  “Oh yes.”

  Tulah slowly turned away as she swung her hands behind her back and clasped them, heading for the church.

  “Oh yes, indeed.”

  *

  Judah spread his hands wide on the table in front of him and lifted his head to survey the kitchen. They were all present. Ramey, of course, sitting directly across from him, biting her bottom lip, arms crossed, one shoulder cocked higher than the other as an affront to Levi, sprawled out in a chair to her right. Judah knew it bothered Ramey to have his older brother in her house, let alone taking up space at her kitchen table, but it couldn’t be helped. Levi shot him a smug grin that he couldn’t quite read, but Judah kept his expression blank as he let his eyes drift back across the table to his younger brother, Benji, elbows up, just a little too eager to finally be part of a Cannon family meeting. Benji was walking fine now with the use of a cane, and able to drive, so Judah had been surprised when he’d unfolded himself out of Shelia’s cramped Rabbit in the driveway. Judah hadn’t been surprised, though, that they were bickering with one another before they’d even reached the porch steps.