by T. Braddy
The whole production was reminiscent of what Emmitt Laveau had managed for me back at the Boogie House, but Emmitt was, indeed, no blind bluesman. I took the music to portend something very grave happening in my future. I was going to experience unspoken personal horrors, and I had to keep my soul intact through it all.
“Death is on your trail, and he packs a wallop,” said this bluesman. “Savannah ain’t the place you want to be, and it’d be best you get the hell out as soon as possible.”
I started in with my next line of questioning, but my communion with this apparition was interrupted. The blind bluesman smiled, his guitar and his skin disappearing from view, leaving behind something a whole hell of a lot more unsettling.
A hand slipped over my shoulder. I whirled, ready to swing my wood plank.
The world shifted again, disappeared, melting into another reality entirely. Real reality, I supposed. I was leaning against the fence, blinking away the netherrealm which had claimed me for who knew how long.
I gasped.
“Allison.” Her face looked peculiar, but I tried to blink that away, too. “Sorry.”
“Rolson, Jesus Christ. What are you doing out here?”
I couldn’t tell the truth. Chasing ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. The crack across my head had made it difficult to speak in anything but shallow mumbles. Or maybe the pain at the base of my skull was illusory, and I was continuing a previous hallucination.
“The guy,” I said. “Didn’t you–”
I stopped myself. That did sound crazy. There was no man. Of course, there was no man. There never was, when I needed one.
“What guy?” she asked, trying to match my gaze. “I don’t see any guy.”
“Just–” I started, then stopped. I couldn’t seem to find the words.
Then she reached up and touched the back of my scalp, just above the neck.
“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. Were you attacked?”
“Yeah,” I said, squinting into the distant darkness. How to explain it, I didn’t know. I thought I’d lost consciousness for a minute, so maybe I did get hit. Maybe it was the tattooed monster.
“Rolson, Rolson,” Allison said. “Give it a rest. We’re all inside having a good time. Will chasing shadows up and down Bull Street make you happy?”
“Might keep me alive.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re right.”
She pressed against me, kissed the crook of my neck. “I like you, partly because you’re broken, and that’s one of my things, but for me to leave with you, you have got to put this aside and come on back in.”
“I’ll be inside in a minute,” I said. “I promise.”
“Rolson.”
“I need to come down. I’m racing along in the red, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to bottle it up and go pretend to care about the blues right now.”
“All right,” she said, and I turned to watch her go. It sent my insides shivering, but I held back. I had to check the area out. None of them understood the lengths to which this monster would go to kill me, and I felt responsible for their lives. Just an old habit, I guess.
The next few minutes pushed me around the block a few times, looking in places I had no business to, and I ended up by my old junker, checking under it for some kind of improvised device. No luck, not that I had any idea how to tell what something like that might look like.
I got in, slid the key into the ignition, thought about going on a blind chase through the streets of Savannah, but something kept me in check.
On the passenger seat lay an old sheet of paper, folded into the shape of a gun.
I opened it, unfolding the edges, and read with increasing heartache.
Hey, Rolson. How’s first period? I guess I’m in first period, too, so you can’t judge it, can you, haha. I’m sneaking Jolly Ranchers in Mrs. Davenport’s class. Can you believe it? She’s such a b-word about candy. I mean, who cares, right? It’s just a little sugar. It’s not like I’m smoking the Mary Jane! (That’s a drug reference, by the way, you innocent little lamb, you.)
Here’s the thing: I love you. Okay. We’ve been going together for six whole months, and the one thing we haven’t shared is big and throbbing. It’s my heart, silly! I miss you and I love you. (Twice in one letter, jeez. You’d think I said it all of the time.)
I wanted to tell you in person, but I don’t think I’m cool enough for that. But I do. I. Love. You. I want this to last forever, and with you around, I don’t need no Mary Jane. I don’t need no Mello Yello, and I don’t need no diamond ring (right now). Survive today, and tonight we can sneak off to watch a movie, or should I say, “watch a movie,” haha. Bye, for now. Peace
Sincerely, your sincerest,
Vanessa
* * *
Boozy Jon was cleaning the neck of his semi-hollow body when I returned to the joint, his bandmates already shuffling toward the bar for post-set beers. On the speakers, some Eric Clapton mostly suppressed the drunken chatter of the clientele.
I tried, with some luck, to ignore the blade sliding in and out of my heart, causing me to panic over how safe my friends were not.
They stared at me like they knew my dog were dying, which, to be honest, wasn’t a perfect metaphor to use here, either.
“You all right?” one of them would ask intermittently, forking heaps of mac and cheese into their mouths. Only Allison didn’t, and she kept quiet through much of the rest of the night.
Yaelis polished off her meal and her dad’s, too, but soon she was nodding off on Winston’s shoulder, so we paid up and headed out in an awkward silence I was beginning to grow accustomed to.
Allison and I peeled away from Winston and Y at the door, each pair heading in an opposite direction, and she stopped outside the passenger side door to chat. It was obvious she had something to say.
“Why don’t you come and stay with me tonight?” she said. “The crazy has a hold on you, and I’m convinced you’ll go and do something stupid if you go home and try to relax.”
Again, for the second time tonight, she leaned in and pressed her face against mine, so that we were cheek-to-cheek. I experienced the same feeling as a time before, when the old man in suspenders trundled past me. It was a superhuman feeling, but I didn’t let on that she was electric against me.
“I’m a dangerous man,” I said, half-serious.
“Guilt by association,” she said into my ear. “I’ll have to sleep with a baseball bat beside the bed, I guess.”
I pulled back, kissed her. The buzzing inside my head detonated into a whole-scale explosion of sounds, voices and requests and long dormant songs of mourning. The sort of existential state I had grown eerily accustomed to back in Lumber Junction. Only, kissing her more feverishly did not diminish, but actually increased, my heightened senses; though, I’d readily accept even that over the silence of my solitude.
“I’ll help you forget your ghosts,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat. “At least for tonight.”
It was the closest to drunk I’d been since moving to Savannah.
thirteenth chapter
The text from Mickey was urgent. I knew this because the guy had never sent me so much as an emoji before, so this had to be important.
It was simple:Call me ASAP.
“Cops’re looking for you,” he said as soon as he picked up. “Fuckers’ve got a body they’re looking to connect to you, and it looks like they want you in, at least for questioning.”
“Doesn’t scare me,” I said. “I didn’t actually kill anybody.”
Which, even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. At least the not being scared part. Something told me I should be plenty terrified.
“They kept asking to see our knives, what they looked like.”
“Knives?”
I thought about the guy I’d plugged in my house. No knives there. What in the shit could they be talking about?
“That’s
what they mentioned. They didn’t want to say anything, but I was a complete bastard until they let slip something I could tell you. They was pissed as shit.”
“Okay.” That didn’t make any sense, but I had to go with it.
“Somebody’s got a frame job in the works,” he said, “and the two cops came by had an especially hard one out for you. They thought they’d get rough, but I put those two pencil dicks in their places. If I were you, I’d lay the fuck low for now.”
I told him to meet me at the Bonaventure Cemetery in half an hour.
* * *
Walking along the Spanish moss and ancient, leaning tombstones, I started to get that old feeling again. I caught sideways glimpses of the fates of the people who resided in this silent community. In the months following the debacle at Lumber Junction, I had come to the conclusion that there was something to my drinking that provided me with a glimpse into the supernatural. These peeks into the afterlife faded after I gave up the stuff, but I still occasionally caught a spark of something, like a bulb with enough juice to flash and flicker every once in awhile.
How did Allison play into it?
Mostly, above the plaintive whine of my own thoughts, I heard whispered requests of those recumbent in death. Please tell my mama it don’t hurt anymore. I made the pain go away. Or questions about people also long since dead. Is my baby all right? I realize I– but did she make it through? Or songs sung by long-dead piano players and bar-hardened guitarists, melodies of the kinds of struggles that landed them precisely in their current residences. The notes of those grief-stricken lamentations drifted away from me as I walked to a shaded corner of the place, where moss dangling from oaks sent spires of light over the headstones.
Real heartbreaking stuff, all of it, but nothing I couldn’t become accustomed to. I didn’t spy any walking undead, or get propositioned to embroil myself in the solving of their deaths, though the distant wails evidenced that there were plenty of those, too. Husbands poisoned by their wives, and wives beaten to death by their husbands. It was a place of sorrow and beauty, and it caused me to reflect on my remaining time here on this mass of rock and water.
At first, when I contemplated staying in Savannah for more than a long weekend, I considered going to a professional about...the condition. My condition, I guess. It occurred to me I should try to understand what exactly might be happening to me. Of course, the conclusion I came to was that I had a brain tumor, the hallucinations the result of some kind of naturally-occurring condition. Weirder things had happened.
Then I thought better of it. This was as real as anything else, I supposed, even if it had befallen me while I was locked in a fever dream of alcoholism.
Besides, the south was full of ghosts. Spirits dripped from the stories people told at dinner parties. You could go on christing tours down here, try to conjure up some tormented spirit to have something to post to Instagram and FaceBook.
That wasn’t for me. Understanding wasn’t for me. It was for people who needed answers. I didn’t. I merely needed to know it was out there, that I could reach out and touch it if I really wanted to.
And who could tell me what exactly what that was, anyway? A doctor with a wall full of degrees? A psychiatrist? A priest? One was likely to commit me, one was likely to medicate me, and the last would probably want to burn me at the stake.
Not knowing was fine enough for me. I didn’t need to know the exact details of how it worked to understand drinking brought it out in me. For now, I didn’t want to drink. I wanted to have some semblance of control over that aspect of the past. Didn’t mean that some facets of it couldn’t come ripping through the space-time continuum or the reality fabric or what the hell ever it was. It happened. Sometimes, I awoke with the sounds of weeping children in my ears, begging for the kind of spiritual mercy I couldn’t give them. Other times, I leaped out of bed, sweating, thinking someone had lain down with me for a quick peek down my ear and into my brain.
But the drinking brought it on full-force. The sober moments, they were mere glimpses. The other nine tenths lay beneath the surface, where the other leviathans dwelled.
Mostly, however, the dreams had gone away. I wanted that to be the truth. Dreams are boring. Dreams are what boring couples discuss over breakfast. Your dreams only matter to you, unless someone yanks you into theirs, and ever since the mystery of Emmitt Laveau had been solved, I had been the sole proprietor of my nights, thank you very much.
I sat down on a bench and waited.
Mickey showed up carrying two pistols. “Just in case,” he said. “You’ve got some heavies wanting to put you in a pinewood box.”
“I understand,” I said. Both were .38 snubnose revolvers inlaid with tiny little crosses on the grips.
He caught my gaze. “They make me look like an old PI,” he said. “Like Mike Hammer in the old Mickey Spillane books.”
“I think he carried a .45.”
“Doesn’t matter. This one matches my imagination, and that’s what counts. Now, listen–”
“I know. I need to be careful.”
“You need to get the hell out of Dodge,” he said. “I’ve got a stash I can lend to you – temporarily – so you can hide out. It’s–”
“I can’t do that.”
“I insist. The bar’s doing well, and shit, I’ve probably been taking advantage of you, for you being sober and all. You’re entirely too willing to work hard, and that’s a trait I don’t trust in a man.”
“I guarantee that’s the first time a boss has said that about me,” I said.
“Well, don’t forget about it when you’re on the lam with my goddamned money, because I will eventually need it back.”
“Mickey, I–”
He pulled an envelope from his back pants pocket. The guns swayed in their shoulder holsters as he moved. The money got tossed at me, and I placed the stack at my feet.
“I’ve got money,” I said.
“Bullshit. I’ve seen that compartment you call a home.”
“The case I mentioned,” I said. “The one from Lumber Junction. The one Vanessa...left at my house back home – it’s never been opened, but I suspect I know what’s in it.”
His eyes widened with a kind of realization. He came and sat down on the bench next to me. “Christ,” he said. “That’s what this is all about.”
“It is.”
“Somehow it all comes down to money.”
I thought of Vanessa. “Or love.”
“Or lust,” he added tonelessly. “Okay, well, shit. Take this money.”
“Mickey–”
“Shut your goddamned mouth. Take the money. I wouldn’t have wrapped it up in this envelope, were I not confident you’d put it to good use. You’re a crazy son-of-a-bitch, but you need to see if you can outrun this little speed bump of yours.”
“I’d hardly call it a speed bump.”
“McKane, you’ve got this shitty look about you, but do you know what: you’re one of the luckiest assholes on the planet. Most people quit drinking have to struggle with their demons on a daily basis, constantly fight the urge like they were walking around with a portable IV of addiction. Here you are, working in a goddamned bar, just living your life. How the hell did that happen?”
“Guess the shit that almost put me under was worse than a Sunday morning hangover.”
“You’re in denial. It was partly those Sunday morning hangovers – which I’ll bet were Friday and Saturday and Monday morning hangovers, too – that put you in your current situation. If you deny that, then you need to take a good long look at who you were versus who you are now.”
“I can spend plenty of time navel-gazing, if I can figure out to rip free from the demon planted on my crotch.”
“Yeah, well, consider the boys in blue, too, when considering your nether-regions. They’ve got you pegged for killing a filthy young man in a crumpled suit.”
I kept thinking, the knife. Theknifetheknifetheknife.
“The knife,�
�� I said abruptly.
“Yes, they said this asshole was killed with a knife.”
“The other day in the bar,” I said, “the two guys showed up, and after they trundled out with their asses on their shoulders, I was missing a knife.”
“No, you had that one. I thought you were going to use that monstrosity on one of them.”
“The other knife. The paring knife. Could that be used to kill somebody?”
He blew out a long breath. “It’d be painful as hell.”
“I think that’s the point.”
“If it’s one of them sons-of-bitches, I’m glad they’re dead.”
“Mickey.”
“Fuck you, I’m serious. I used to be a preacher man. I know when evil’s afoot, and them two’s practically got goat’s blood running out of their ears.”
“Glad to know somebody else can sense it.”
“I tell you what, I get dreams, sometimes. They play hell with my sense of self, but they endow me with a newfound confidence in the afterlife.”
I leaned back, crossed my feet at the ankles. “Mick, you believe in heaven and hell?”
“Sure as Sunday, I do,” he replied with the vigor of a partisan being asked who he’d vote for in an upcoming election. “Only difference between me and most is that I believe this is hell.”
“Like a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“Not quite,” he replied vaguely. “But, hell, what’s Hell got to do with this?”
“We’ve got to keep me out of it, if we can.”
“Shit, boy-o, you’ll be all right. You’ve got a .38 snubnose for a pecker. Ain’t nobody going to be able to touch you without coming up crimson.”
“Hey, Mick?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
“Be careful, and you can cram your ‘thank you’s. I’ll be taking a cut of whatever’s in that case, you manage to get out of this. Consider me the man who has your pound of flesh.”
“I will.”
It was only then I noticed something peculiar: in the presence of the old man, the voices diminished to the point of being nearly inaudible. I’d need to hang onto that for future reference.