Holding Smoke

by Steph Post

  Back inside, she found Benji, struggling to stand without his cane, tears coursing in dirty rivulets down his face. Judah was on his knees in the middle of the barn, his neck stiff and shoulders hunched as he stared at the body before him. Levi had collapsed in front of Judah, felled like a tree, with what was left of his chest rising slower and slower with every breath. Ramey’s mouth hardened as she took in one brother, and the next, and the next. Dinah was nowhere to be found.

  *

  Judah couldn’t touch him. He kept reaching for Levi’s chest—flayed, slick with blood, the flesh and torn cotton of his T-shirt indistinguishable—but then pulling his hands back, waving them aimlessly in the air like a shaman, grasping at the trails of an elusive soul. Levi’s eyelids were still and his mouth slack, though his chest continued to heave beneath his body’s wreckage. Judah stretched his fingers out again, but only plucked at the whirlwinds of dust settling in the bars of sunlight creeping across the floor. The kerosene lamp in the corner had guttered out, its oily smoke wafting up to the rafters. Judah turned to look over his shoulder at Ramey, standing behind him, her fingers at her lips, a smear of blood in the hollow of her throat. His own.

  “Can you? Is there anything?”

  From across the barn, Benji let loose the gulping, heaving sob Judah couldn’t. Ramey slowly drew her hand down and Judah could see the cast to her mouth. She started to tilt her head and he quickly turned around. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to hear the word.

  Ramey eased herself to the ground beside him, but didn’t touch Levi, either. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and suddenly his eyes snapped opened. They were glassy, drifting around the barn, but when they focused on Judah, they widened slightly. Levi tried to lift his head, gurgled, and dropped it back into the dirt. Judah leaned forward, but Levi’s eyes had shut again. He was moving his lips and Judah leaned in as close as he dared.

  “Hey, man. I’m here. Benji’s here.”

  Levi swallowed, his Adam’s apple dragging in his thick, bull neck. His voice was serrated, a hacksaw carving up every word, but Judah understood.

  “It’s all yours now, brother.”

  Judah waited, but there was no more. Finally, Ramey reached for Levi’s wrist. She fell back beside Judah, but didn’t shake her head. She didn’t have to.

  Benji must have seen Ramey check Levi’s pulse, though, because his wail broke over them as he hobbled to Judah’s side. He flung himself down and threw his arms around Judah’s neck, crushing his wet face into Judah’s neck. He couldn’t move. Benji burrowed against him, sniffling and gagging on his tears, until Judah lifted his arm and cupped it around his brother’s bowed back. Judah couldn’t stop staring at Levi’s face, at the alien flatness it was already assuming, as if it had sunken into itself somehow, but he gripped Benji’s shoulder and pulled him closer. On his other side, Judah felt a hand slip into his. Ramey. The mascara he had hardly ever seen her wear was weeping down her cheeks. When Benji finally let go of him, spilling back onto the straw and hugging his good leg tightly to his chest, Judah edged toward Ramey. He curled into himself, dropping his head into her lap and he felt her fingers brush his forehead. Judah let himself rest there, but only for a moment.

  *

  Dinah crashed through the saw palmettos, stumbling but not stopping as the snarls of underbrush tore at her ankles. She ran until she couldn’t breathe and then she slid to the ground on a slick bed of pine needles. She watched and waited, scouring the trees behind her for any sign of movement. Aside from the swarms of gnats and mosquitos clogging her nose and vying for any patch of bare flesh, the thick woods were silent and still. Dinah waited until she was absolutely certain she hadn’t been followed before hauling herself to her feet. She braced herself against the craggy trunk of a turkey oak and patted her pockets for her cellphone. Thankfully, she hadn’t lost it when the shooting started and she’d broken away. Luis and his crew had been punctual, but she hadn’t trusted them to be the best shots, and seeing as the planned massacre had quickly turned into an evenly matched shootout, Dinah hadn’t thought twice about hightailing it. She’d scrambled on her hands and knees into the tack room, searching for a window. There hadn’t been one, but she’d managed to pry apart a few slats of rotted wood in the corner and squirm her way out.

  Her first instinct had been to bolt, but she’d needed to know how much of the job had been botched. The shooting had stopped almost as abruptly as it’d started, and from her hiding place behind a cluster of fifty-five-gallon barrels, she’d been able to pick out the three figures struggling across the field toward an SUV parked underneath a tree. Dinah’s stomach had caved. If the Cannons were dead, Luis would’ve stayed to find her; if anything, so he could still get the horse. Dinah had tried to listen for sounds of movement, but it’d been difficult to make anything out. Then she’d heard Benji. Dinah had crept along the back wall of the barn until she’d found a crack between the rain-warped boards. She hadn’t been able to see much, but she’d had a clear line of sight to Judah, crouched in the straw. By standing on an overturned bucket, Dinah had been able to angle herself to see what Judah was kneeling in front of. Levi. Unmoving. His chest a blaze of red.

  Dinah scanned the trees behind her one last time and turned to cut through the woods to the highway. As she walked, she dialed on her cellphone and brought it to her ear. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Is he dead?”

  Dinah grimaced as she stooped underneath a veil of low-hanging Spanish moss. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel anything for Levi, but hearing those words, so abrasive in her aunt’s mouth, gave her a little stab.

  “He’s dead.”

  No response. Even though she hadn’t personally been in Sister Tulah’s presence for over ten years, Dinah knew the face she was making. Her lips were creased and her brow was plunging in dissatisfaction. Dinah had heard that Tulah lost an eye back at the beginning of the summer. Her achromic shark’s eyes had always been her most terrifying feature and Dinah wondered if Tulah’s disfigurement instilled more or less fear in her followers.

  “Did you hear what I said? Levi’s dead.”

  Sister Tulah cleared her throat.

  “And the others?”

  Dinah brushed a spider web back from her forehead. She could hear road traffic in the distance.

  “They survived. Levi’s dead, I made sure, but the job didn’t go as planned. My guys weren’t as good as I thought. Or maybe the Cannons were just better.”

  Tulah said nothing and Dinah nervously repeated herself.

  “But Levi Cannon is dead. Like I said.”

  “Like you said.”

  More silence. Dinah stopped walking; she hated the pathetic note in her voice, but she was so close, so close, and couldn’t give up now.

  “The job was to take out Levi. The others if I could, but Levi was the most important, right?”

  Dinah could imagine Tulah slowly shaking her head, maybe licking her dry, thin lips, considering. Dinah hadn’t been lying to Ramey. She truly didn’t know why Sister Tulah wanted the Cannons, and specifically Levi, killed. She didn’t know what their value, alive or dead, was to her aunt.

  “And the horse? The ransom?”

  Dinah had forgotten about Calypso, still back at the barn with the Cannons. She wasn’t sure what they’d do with him.

  “For the moment, out of reach.”

  “I see. So all you have for me is Levi.”

  “Yes.”

  Dinah resumed her trek as she awaited her fate.

  “And Levi’s death cannot be traced back to me? No one can figure out it was on my order? The rest of those vermin Cannons know nothing, correct?”

  She didn’t hesitate.

  “They don’t know a thing.”

  Dinah waited for the words she desperately wanted to hear. There was a pause so long that Dinah checked her phone to see if she’d been disconnected but, at last, Sister Tulah relented.
/>   “Very well. You shall have your reward.”

  13

  Ramey pushed open the screen door and quietly slipped out to the front porch. The afternoon had been cloistered by the doldrums, the air stagnant, desiccated, nettling the back of her throat. She crossed the sun-warmed boards on bare feet and sat down beside Judah on the top porch step. His hands hung limp between his spread knees, but he was staring intently down their curving driveway and Ramey had to lean forward to catch the expression on his face. Judah’s mouth was set in its familiar grim line and the wells beneath his eyes matched her own. The shallow gash skipping across his forehead—caused by a splinter of ricocheting wood most likely—was already starting to scab.

  When he finally turned to her, though, there was a lambent cast to his face of the sort she hadn’t seen in months. For an instant, the spark of a man twenty years younger flared. The teenaged boy who still had the world at his feet, his mistakes not yet etched in stone. The boy who understood what it meant to be a man, but had not yet given himself over. Had not yet given up. One corner of Judah’s mouth twitched in a crooked smile. The youth vanished.

  “You avoiding me ’cause you think I’m going to change my mind?”

  Ramey dug her thumbnail into the board between them, digging out a splinter.

  “Just giving you some time.”

  “We agreed, Ramey.”

  Judah tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. Ramey could hear the rumble of a truck’s engine and she sighed, flicked the splinter, and raised her head, squinting up into the drained, fathomless sky. It was so rarely this color, a cyan desert, a wash of briny vacuity. Ramey nodded.

  “I know we did.”

  She brought her gaze down to the road.

  “Do you want me to come with you tonight?”

  Benji’s truck was coming through the trees.

  “No.”

  Judah stood up and ran his hands down the thighs of his jeans, brushing off crumbs of ash from the dozens of cigarettes Ramey had watched him smoke, alone, since they’d laid out their plan. He reached for her and pulled her to her feet.

  “It needs to be just Benji and me.”

  Ramey watched the truck cruise to a stop across the yard. Benji was looking in the opposite direction, giving them a moment, letting the truck idle.

  “I knew Levi all my life.”

  “There was no love lost between you.”

  “No, but still. Knowing someone is more important than liking them.”

  Judah nodded in agreement and ducked his head, turning to leave, but then his eyes were suddenly on her again, fervent, almost fiendish.

  “I know what I’ve done, Ramey. To you, to us. You probably tried to tell me a million times, in a million different ways, but I had to see it. It might have possessed you, but it was my demon. The one you once said kept me in a snare. You remember that?”

  She remembered. On a hot July night, clinging and heavy, they had celebrated signing the lease on their new house—the one they stood in front of now—by splitting a fifth of Jack and screaming at one another under the crushing weight of all those summer stars. They had spat meaningless words. Desire and respect and power, cowardice and shame, honesty and regret, loss and lost, and on and on and on. Much of that night was nothing more than a sick, spinning squall and they’d never spoken of it since, but Ramey remembered those words, those sharpened sticks, whistling through the air. The whiskey in their sweat and the broken glass beneath their feet. She remembered her mouth raw, the streak of the porch light over Judah’s shoulder and, yes, decrying the demon she was just then beginning to see in him, the one she now knew had been there all along, at times dormant, at times raging, but always ever present.

  “Yes. Didn’t think you would, though.”

  Judah ran his hand back through his hair, looking away.

  “Yeah, well, I tried to forget most everything about that night. Everything you said and especially everything I said. But this morning, when I saw you with Dinah, when I saw what you could do, what you were going to do, I finally saw that demon.”

  “In me.”

  “Because I was too blind to see it in myself. But that demon, that…”

  Ramey’s voice was no more than a whisper.

  “Shadow.”

  His eyes were on her again.

  “Shadow. I remember now. And to think, it had its claws in you, too. That’s the hardest part to bear.”

  Ramey thought back to sitting in the truck, the phone call from Shelia, the gun in her hand, steps across the barn, Dinah’s throat straining, her lips split back from the burnished barrel. She thought back to the knocking in her head. Those talons tapping, gouging, deep into her heart. The space they had carved out. The woman she had become. And now, in some ways, would forever be.

  Judah glanced over his shoulder at Benji, his hands resting on the steering wheel, not impatient, just ready to go. Ramey turned to leave them, but Judah grabbed her by the arm, shaking her, his grip was so tight.

  “I mean it. We’ve got to do it this way.”

  She looked up at him, searching for the fissures, but he didn’t waver. All of him was there. All of him was going forward.

  “We lit the match, Ramey. But we need to do more than just hold it between our fingers and watch it burn.”

  *

  There was no name on the squat gravestone, spotted with moss and patches of lichen, but Dinah knew it was hers. The shallowly engraved epitaph was obscured by rangy weeds and Dinah bent down and yanked out a handful to reveal the stone’s inscription.

  Called Home by Angels

  Dinah ran her fingers over the words before pulling the cuff of her sleeve down over her fist, attempting to scrub away some of the grime. She immediately stopped as bits of concrete began to flake away. The stone wasn’t old like the others in the wrought iron-fenced graveyard, just cheap, and Dinah was afraid to damage it further. She stood up, wishing she’d thought to stop and buy a bouquet of flowers on the way, and looked aimlessly about at the empty plots of scraggly grass as if one might suddenly materialize. The rest of the headstones were clustered together on the other side of the small, rectangular cemetery and Dinah glared at them with envy. They, too, had been neglected, the brambles thick at their bases, their surfaces spattered with bird and lizard droppings, but each bore a name, each a date of birth and a date of death, a litany of children or a favorite line of Scripture, proof that the wormy bones marked out beneath had once been a person, not just a motto.

  Behind her, Dinah heard the rusty gate squeak and rattle as it swung open. Dinah crossed her arms and set her chin, looking upward to the pitched roof of Sister Tulah’s imposing house, looming like an ivory juggernaut over the graveyard. She could hear Tulah puffing, waiting for her to turn around and face her. Dinah dropped her head and let her eyes wander along the top of the fence, the scrolling ironwork swooping up into tall, spiked fleur-de-lis every few feet. The fence more resembled the battlements of a fortress, meant to keep enemies at bay, than a gentle barrier to shelter and protect the dead. Dinah’s thoughts strayed as she dragged out the inevitable confrontation before her. Even though she had come all this way, and done so many terrible things in order to arrive, she still wasn’t ready. Dinah pretended to study the decorative iron and kept her voice as toneless as possible.

  “It doesn’t even have a name. Her grave. At least you could have put her name.”

  Sister Tulah huffed.

  “I could have left her in the gutter, too.”

  Dinah spun around, not sure of what she was going to say, what she even wanted to do. Tulah’s uncovered eye was just as mesmerizing and terrifying as Dinah remembered, her pinched lips crinkled, her smirk bristling with spite.

  “I could have. I probably should have. Rowena liked the gutter. It was where she wanted to be. Where she chose to be.”

  Dinah’s fists were clenched at her sides and her forearms and shoulders were so ta
ut she was trembling. The last time she’d come face-to-face with Sister Tulah she had just turned twenty-one. All her fermenting rage had been loosed that day, sitting in the passenger’s seat of Tulah’s Lincoln Town Car in the back parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts up in Jacksonville Beach where she was working the drive-thru. It’d been a week after Dinah’s birthday and Tulah had needed some papers signed. Dinah hadn’t bothered to read them, to wonder what she was agreeing to or giving up, as she scribbled her signature beside each neon yellow tab and called Tulah every dirty name she could think of. It only occurred to Dinah much later that the papers must’ve been important enough to Sister Tulah for her to put up with the abuse.

  She remembered leaning over in the slippery leather seat—still wearing her coffee-stained work uniform and brown, peaked cap, squashed down over her spikey purple hair—and raising her hand to strike. Sister Tulah had not so much as flinched.

  And, of course, Dinah had not hit Tulah. If she had, she doubted she’d have been around to answer the calls for the many odd jobs her aunt had tossed her way over the years including, now, this one.

  Dinah unclenched her fists and let her shoulders slump forward. Out of all the things she wanted to say about the nameless headstone at her back, only the simplest, and most painful, came forth.

  “She was my mother.”

  “Well, I guess what they say about the apple falling from the tree is true. And yet here you are, standing in my graveyard, behind my church, next to my house, on my property. In my presence.”