by T. Braddy
In the end, though, Savannah made a nice place to land after personal tragedy. Nice change of pace. Friendly people. Just big enough. A healthy sense of danger, and one that was expected. When something bad happens, the people expect it, or at least they don’t seem surprised by it, and there is something to be said for that. It’s a marshy, swampy, watery town, kind of the opposite of most places I’ve been in my life. It’s elastic, in a way, as opposed to the brittle, dry environments of my previous existence. Savannah wasn’t the sort of place where a single, unexpected spark might send the whole place up in flames, but I bet people said the same thing about LA in the ‘90s and Baltimore just a while back.
Back at my shoebox of a home, I cleaned up a little more and then sat on my front porch with my dog and a can of generic soda. I gulped it and thought about the things it was not, all the while convincing myself of what it was. Willie, meanwhile, alternated between pawing through the grass by the road and lying next to me, eyeing the quietly passing cars.
Once I finished my first Misty Mountain, I grabbed another and drank that one, too. I thought about the ring, mostly, how it might have come to be on the shelf in the living room. My contemplation started with somewhat plausible explanations but inevitably veered toward the inexplicable. Of course my mind happened upon the name Emmitt Laveau, and the Bullen brothers, and D.L., and the rest of what happened back home, but it didn’t seem like that kind of situation. The ghosts of my past hovered in the periphery of my thoughts, and most people wouldn’t believe me if I tried to explain. What I kept from Winston or Allison involved my dreams, with things beyond the realm of the natural laws of humanity. Why I hadn’t was obvious, but there was another element to it, as well. Since I’d moved away, there had only been minor occurrences, like slight breezes on a still day. A flash here. A slight folding of the corners of reality, but nothing – nothing – like before.
That’s what I wanted to believe about the ring. Such a silly moment, something I shouldn’t have even told anyone about, but something I couldn’t keep to myself, either. Why would Vanessa – or anything from someone on the wrong side of the dirt – be attempting a message? That’s not what it seemed like to me. But, then again, why would a dead man wear a suit and haunt an old juke joint? Logic is not the principal driving force in the way the universe plays out. It’s merely the intended course. Things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.
What it most seemed like was that somebody fucking with me. That didn’t make any sense, either, because I hadn’t quite made any new enemies in Savannah, so far as I knew, especially none who might have known about my ex-wife. That was some old school shit they’d be bringing up. So I was left without an reasonable explanation. That didn’t keep me from trying, however.
Finding the ring mostly just unearthed the past in a way I wasn’t quite ready to deal with. Vanessa was gone, had taken leave of this world via her own hand, and part of me thought it would be best to avoid lugging around that torch.
Six months before, she stumbled back into my life, strung out and looking for a handout. She had slithered into some trouble with a cadre of snakes. If I had to guess, it had to do with drugs, or money, or both, but either way, she deigned to return to the Junction. This was under the auspices that she’d clean her shit up and get on with her life.
Looked like she might, too, if she hadn’t started to drift back into my gravitational pull. We hinted at starting to throw kindling on the single, remaining spark in our relationship, but a poorly-timed exchange of words smothered it, and she ended up overdosing before I could tell her everything would be all right.
Still, Vanessa was my only love, the only person I’d thought to cast my lot with, and so keeping her in my memory, hoping maybe she’d pin herself to me after death, was a way of clinging to the last moments of her life. If I held fast, maybe she would stick around a while longer. A part of me thought Savannah had been my destination because it was where Vanessa had engaged in her own personal Rumspringa, from which she had never really returned. If I could walk the same streets and haunt the same bars, maybe I could get that feeling again.
Part of me expected to be visited by Vanessa in the weeks and months following her death. I mean, a man I had never really met pushed me to solve his murder. Why wouldn’t my ex-wife help to give me some semblance of peace?
Guess I ask too much of the dead sometimes.
* * *
The next morning, I picked myself up off my double mattress and made better use of my running time. I jogged along River Street, trying not to break my ankles on the cobblestones, and I stopped once to stare down at the river as it drifted by. Where it passes through the city, it’s not a beautiful thing to behold, not like you’d imagine. Savannah is an old place, looks like it was forged when time was created, so you’d expect everything to be moss-covered and majestic – antebellum in the purest sense of the word – and I guess that’s somewhat true.
But the river’s damaged in some noticeable ways. People fling their gum wrappers and cigarette butts into the water, so the river looks like a bar puked in it. Not always, and not in an overwhelming way, but it’s visibly unsettling, like spitting on a caged animal. The locals see the town as a commodity and the river as background noise for their lives. Same for the architecture and the simple beauty of the landscape. Just another town to live in, a place where the bills get paid. As an outsider and a transplant, it was odd to behold.
Standing by the railing and watching the water flow by was meant to be a small break in the middle of the run, but it usually turned into something else. I had to tear myself away from the river, and it was no different this morning. Wasn’t quite four in the morning, the bare minimum of people staggering by on the street, so I could derive some sense of (I hated to say) meaning from staring into the depths of that dirty water.
When I finally managed to pull back onto my trail, I shuffled down to Broad and ran past Beasley Park before circling back home. My legs held up, and my back held up, and generally I felt pretty good for a man knocking on forty. The soft, fleshy parts of me had begun to recede, slowly, and I hoped to see the improvement continue. I was climbing incrementally out of the grave I’d shoveled for myself, and the future looked marginally less dirt-filled by the day.
It was never my intention to become anything more than a man who lived in his hometown his whole life, but I was becoming slightly used to the feeling of this adventure. I’d reconciled myself with the fact that I was running from something, even if that thing was something I carried with me. “Can’t run from the devils, ‘cause the devil’s always inside you,” somebody told me once. Hell, I might’ve said it into my whiskey, but it felt true.
Anyway, I was enjoying moving forward, putting all the misery from Lumber Junction behind me. And yet, I thought, you’re looking for any reason at all to reconvene with the memory of your dead-and-buried ex-spouse. Might as well build a monument to her in the corner of the house. Thinking like that made me contemplate the suddenly appearing ring. Getting lost in my thoughts about where it had come from and what it might mean sent me hurtling into a street overrun with cars and cyclists, the jogger’s mortal enemies. One of the spandex-clad aliens in the yellow helmet called me a jackass under his breath as he passed, and I waved, because I’d earned it.
Could blame the ring and my own rabbit hole of a mind, but there was something else, too. I thought I’d seen someone peering at me from just down the way, leaning against the gnarled trunk of a resplendent old tree. Could have been a woman. Maybe a too-skinny thirtysomething with dark eyes and no pulse. Looking ahead, using my thousand-yard-stare, I’d seen something, but then the whole disturbance with the cyclists had tripped me up, and when I’d looked up, nothing. Just an old couple flinging stale bread at disinterested and spoiled birds. Pigeons, maybe. But no girl. No guy, either. Guess my hackles were up, and I couldn’t keep the old feelings at bay twenty-four hours a day. Peeking over my shoulder kept me sane.
; I finished the run without further paranormal incident. The house was in working order when I got back, and Willie barked twice to signal he was ready for breakfast.
“Me, too, old man,” I said, as I poured him dry food. He whimpered once, and I shrugged, as if that made any difference to the dog. Usually, I scraped my leftovers into his bowl and left him eggs or bacon to start his day, but there’d be none of that today. For once, my appetite seemed to match my expectations.
I cooked grits and eggs on the stove and ate them on the front porch, sitting down on the steps and peering off into the distance. For a second, I imagined myself seeing something that wasn’t there, an old juke joint lighting up all on its own, but it was just a flash. A trick of the brain, maybe. The old juju working in my bloodstream, firing off in my brain. I didn’t linger on the thought, even though my body pulsed with a singular physiological warning. I just smiled, tried not to conjure up an image of men on fire, but my nostrils burned with the smell.
Instead of holding fast to those weird feelings, I turned my attention to the dog, rolling around in the grass in something that’d probably make him smell cowpie-ish. He snorted and sneezed as he rolled around, taking in the good fortune of outside time. It was weird, having taken in that dog. I was possessed of a crazy hypothesis about how he’d come to be in my possession, and part of it had something to do with an old voodoo man who had more or less disappeared into thin air after killing a minor politician in my hometown, but that theory had faded, even if the memories of the old man hadn’t. Sometimes I looked at the dog and saw an intelligent, almost human face. Then Willie’d go to licking his balls and break the illusion.
A rattling sound pulled me from my daydreams. I picked up my phone and saw my old friend’s name and number flash on-screen. My thumb hovered over the green answer button for a few seconds, but eventually, I left it be. The call ran its course, and a few moments later the phone buzzed in my hand, indicating I had a voicemail, which would be like all the other voicemails. Hey, Rol, it’s Deuce. I’m not giving up. Give me a call. I need to know you’re all right, brother.
He’d called me once a week, every week, for six months, and even though I hadn’t picked up, that had not deterred him from continuing to call. I owed him that much. I owed him a conversation. Probably owed him every single conversation, since he’d saved my life before I’d ducked out of the Junction, but I hadn’t answered.
Another week gone, another missed call.
I polished off the grits and rinsed the dish before placing it the crude dishwasher. I showered and went to work a shift at my job.
In a bar.
* * *
Most people – rightly – believe me to be entirely detached from good sense for trying to get sober while working in a place that serves alcohol. Not only that, but to work in a place that almost exclusively serves alcohol. The looks I got from the people in the program bordered on contempt. “You really think you’re serious about your sobriety, you working in a bar with all them lost people?” they’d say, their eyes looking at me like I’d said I wipe my ass with broken glass.
“If I ain’t serious, I’m bound to slip off and tumble into the dirt either way,” was my usual response. Which I thought was true. Didn’t matter if I was around the stuff or not. In a town full of bars, I’d end up with a drink if the inkling dawned on me.
Back in Lumber Junction, I’d been oddly cursed with the ability to...see certain things. Experience visions of uncanny apparitions. Talk with the dead. Wake up far away from my bedroom. It was like advanced sleepwalking, and I used it to gain the upper hand in hunting down a young man’s killer. A lingering effect seemed to be a supreme willpower that helped me ignore my cravings for booze. Could’ve just been my time to quit. I try my hardest not to read too much into my circumstances, but I was born with a wonderer’s sense of self. I reckon I’m a seeker, but spiritual peace is not what I’m out to find.
Even in sobriety, sometimes I experienced flashes of insight into the world I might have missed. It had something to do with working in the bar. I caught glimpses of otherworldly things, but only glimpses, nothing major. A flash here, a flash there. I might see a man in tails and a top-hat saunter up to the bar. I have to resist the urge to speak with him when his deformed, rotten mouth opens, and he tells me the story of how his brother had him dumped in the river so he’d be cut out of their grandfather’s will. And then the vision disappears. No top-hat, no tails. Just a smattering of sweat standing up on my skin.
I’ve seen other things, too, but they tend to be partial visions of the afterlife, like reminders of its existence. We’re still here, they seem to say. I try my best to ignore them, but sometimes they veer too close to my day-to-day, and I have to contend with them.
Sometimes it manifested itself in the form of heightened perception, and these flashes only really occurred when I happened upon someone drunker than was dignified. Drunker than Cooter Brown, Deuce might have said. A bar-hopping couple might stumble in off the street for a quick cocktail, and I’ll see a flash of something - the argument they had out by the river, or the one that nearly ended in an ambulance ride for her the night before. Nothing elaborate. Just a small peek at something, and then nothing at all. Just the blank feeling of loss.
I had quiet days and loud ones, and today was not going to be quiet. People milled about like cattle at a feeding trough, waiting impatiently for a socially acceptable time to start pounding drinks. I used to do the same thing. I never really took vacations, but sometimes Vanessa and I absconded away from our shitty lives for a weekend and went somewhere – like Savannah – to “get away” but ended up just blitzed out of our minds for most of the trip. Drinking all day, napping, then drinking some more. It wasn’t a break from the drinking – and in her case, drug use – but the opposite: a short-term ramping up, as though we were training for something. Get fucked up. Argue or pass out or have clumsy sex, then repeat the process. It happened at all hours of the day and night, without regard for the social rules that should have dictated our behavior, so it always felt tilted to one side: an off-kilter, slightly bizarre inverse of the normal world. Something out of Twin Peaks, maybe. Back home, at least I had a job to stabilize and offset the drinking, which, if I’m being honest, wasn’t always effective – sometimes I snuck away to toss back a few on the clock – but for the most part, my job succeeded in distracting me from my addiction.
I ignored the zombified crowds, feeling (falsely) like a local, and made my way to the back of the bar to clock in. The owner, Mickey, was counting money in the back room. He was a big, ancient slab-o’-beef.
“Them fucking books you gave me kept me up since I closed up shop, so I’m running on, like, a couple hours’ sleep, at this point. It’s going to be a shitty day for the first person gets in my face today. You going to get in my face today, Rolson?”
I ignored the question. “You on Brown’s Requiem or Big Nowhere?”
“One of them. I don’t know. The one where the guy finds out cops is dirty as fuck and ends up getting dirtied himself.”
I smirked. “Oh, that one.”
I grabbed a hand towel, draped it over my shoulder. First gig was wiping down the bar and the tables real quick.
Mickey inserted a stack of singles into a bank bag. “Yeah, well, all’s I know is I picked up where I left off after we closed up, but I’m thinking I had that post-work adrenaline working for me and just couldn’t sleep anyways, so I guess it all goes out in the wash. Them books, though. Christ, man, why didn’t they have us read that kind of shit in high school? I’d have been a goddamn college graduate or English major or some shit if I’d had that to read.”
“I know,” I lied. I’d always been a reader. My mother used to read to me, gave me an appreciation for the act. I guess a small part of me had been trying to find her by continuing to read all these years.
“Instead, they had us reading books about green knights taking their heads off and pigs that could talk and shit. Unbeli
evable stuff, you know? Who reads that?”
I nodded, though I didn’t so much mind the latter.
But he was on a roll and kept going. He said, “And that Red Badge of Courage book. Teacher handed it out, and I read the back, and I’m thinking, ‘A book about war. Might be interesting.’ Shee-it. I ain’t never heard of so much walking in my life, except maybe for that movie about them little people going to throw the ring in that volcano.”
“Never read that one. I mean, Red Badge of Courage, yeah, but I remember liking it all right. It was about how boring war can be. Like how a cop’s job is ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent absolute hell. It’s about what happens in those moments when you’ve got to do what you don’t want to do, just to survive. It’s like, I don’t know, Full Metal Jacket or that one movie with Jake Gyllenhaal.”
Mickey smiled. “Now you’re talking. Them’s my kind of movies. They never pitched it to me like that, though. I’d have liked it better if somebody had told me it was like that. I just thought it was a bunch of assholes walking around, getting shot at sometimes. I hated it. Maybe I should go back and check it out.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t remember liking it that much.”
He glanced at my hand towel. “Well, might as well get to doing some stuff you don’t want to do. The locals got a little bit rowdy last night.”
I nodded and went out to start wiping down tables. Didn’t pay well, but it wasn’t bad work. It was harder, physically, than you’d think, but it was straightforward. It didn’t require much thinking, and I think I liked that most of all. I could go in for a shift and just not talk, if I wanted to be that way. I need not cajole anyone, or force anyone to bend to my will. It reminded me of my twenties, back when I drove a truck for a living. It was a simple, solitary job, and it was physically and emotionally draining. All that sitting and driving was enough to make you a little bit crazy. If it was a particularly long and monotonous haul, then you were mostly alone with your thoughts, which, for me, could be dangerous.