It’s past midnight. Nothing but grassland and the odd thicket shape of juniper bushes jumping in the glow of the headlights. The blue gloom of buttes in the distance. Faded neon signs. We pass the ruins of Hyde Park (‘Park Your Hide Tonight at Hyde Park!!’) and I wonder if that’s what Carl has in mind.
I try not to think about that, just feel the road underneath me, the scream of the engine. I am almost relaxed. I can feel my body unspooling the way the road does.
It’s a mistake.
Carl senses it, his body goes rigid and he grins a mad dog grin. He’s been baking in the sun for too long.
“Enough,” he says. “Pull over.”
“Hey, man,” I try but my lips have gone dry. My throat is raw. “Hey.”
“Don’t shit with me, Smiley. Just pull over the fucking car.”
“I can explain,” I start. The line sounds funny in my own head.
“Sure,” he says. “Sure.” But he’s got that grin and I don’t think he gives two shits about what I’m going to say. He wants this. I’m used to reading people. You can’t sell a man what he don’t want in his heart, whether it’s God, a Cadillac, or pills for the perfect boner. A man wants what he wants.
I’m releasing the gas and the car starts to shake as we pull off the asphalt. There’s nothing out here but sage and sky and the road and us – him with the Colt and me with one shot at selling him something it’s clear he don’t want to buy.
Otherwise...
Otherwise...
I’ll be ground chuck when that damned Arizona sun turns the road into the world’s hottest grill.
“I’m the lady of Good Times,” she told me. “I am the lady of Turn Up the Heat, Boys.”
Here goes.
I DIDN’T MEAN to cheat.
I know that’s what every cheater since Eve met the snake claims, but it’s no less true. I didn’t mean to cheat on Juney. The only defence I got is I’m human, I’m human, and what executioner ever gave a damn for that old song and dance?
Let me try again.
I only saw a ghost once before this all got started. That was the night Pappy died. Don’t even know if it was real. When you’ve seen a man’s grey matter splashed over the concrete you’re bound to dream any number of things in the small hours.
I was lucky. What I saw was kinder that I had any right to expect. Which is to say I woke up to find Pappy standing at the foot of my bed. Some younger version, it must have been. He still had the head of hair my mammy fell in love with. Whatever bad news come to him later in life – pulling the skin around his eyes with the fish hooks of too much worry – it still hadn’t found him yet.
There he was. Some shadow of him slivered by the wedge of light from the hall come sliding into the room.
“G’night, Smiley,” he said. Just that. He grinned a sweet old grin at me like he had, I imagine, when I was a babe rolling around in the crib.
“G’night, Smiley,” he said, and then he was gone.
I’M THINKING THIS, but somewhere else I am stumbling through sand and cholla. The night smell of creosote is heavy. I don’t know where Carl is leading me.
Carl is everything that I have ever been afraid of in the world. Ugly and brutal. A man who comes into the world with his fists balled and plans on going out the same way.
Maybe it’s the same for him, though. Maybe I am everything he is afraid of. A man who smiles. A man who had the shit kicked out of him but still knows how to whistle a tune. A man who could make his sister happy – Looney Juney, he called her. God.
A man who could make her cry too. I admit it; I broke her heart more than once. Poor Juney. The only person in the world who had found a way to care for him, and a sumbitch like me has the thread of her love cat’s-cradling between my fingers. God, he must have had that hardon of hate for a long time.
And right now I am thinking that maybe I deserve this. That’s the thing. Right now I am thinking maybe he has a right to put a bullet in me.
I NEVER SAW another ghost but Pappy until three months ago.
It started off with a sound like crying. Wailing, really. I thought maybe it was a bobcat in heat – some critter, maybe, with tire treads crushing half himself. Nothing left to do but cry his grief to the night.
Juney and I had never had kids. We talked about it, well, years ago, but it had never got much past talk. One of the ways I broke her heart, I guess, though I still think maybe I did her a favour. My parents had got unlucky with me – they couldn’t afford a kid, but Mammy had grown up in the light of Jesus so once I had taken hold in her belly there wasn’t much for it. But one was enough. Whatever they got wrong that night they never got wrong again.
So I wasn’t much used to the sound of babies crying, which is why I’d been thinking about some dying thing.
Juney didn’t hear it. She worked the night shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, and I didn’t ever see much of her til the sun started in.
I didn’t think much on it, but then it happened again. This time it weren’t crying. It was singing. A drunk’s tune. A little of this, a little of that. But sad.
I went into the kitchen. I had the Colt in my hand because wasn’t that what my little Junebug made me keep it for? In these parts a man who wanders into another man’s house is liable to end up six feet under. Half the folk think they were born from a misplaced squirt from Billy the Kid’s cock.
Not me. Sins I have in plenty, but I never thought it in me to kill a man. Not without asking his name first.
Still, I kept my finger on the trigger. I ain’t stupid neither.
But the man. Well. When I saw him standing like nobody’s business in my kitchen with that sad song on his lips, I knew I recognised him. Not enough to wave, but enough to know I’d seen him before. It took me a moment, but I’m good with faces. I’d given him a dollar or two when I had one to spare. Bought him a Coke outside the drugstore once. Sure enough, I looked down and there were the two bald knuckles of his left hand rapping lightly against my kitchen table. His sign had said he was a vet. He had that half-vacant look in his eyes. True or not, I believed it.
He catches me looking and his lips twitch. He flips me a slow, three-fingered salute, and I swear, just like Pappy, the moonlight takes him. It seemed clear enough whatever I meant to do with the Colt, worse had happened.
He wasn’t back the next night, but three nights later he was. I woke with that itch between my shoulder blades that someone was in the house. I didn’t say nothing to him, but he looked so sad. And something else too. A sharpish, black-eyed look. I sat with him a while. And the next night too. And the next.
Until he didn’t come back no more.
THIS IS HOW I discovered girls.
If you know this, maybe the rest will be clearer. Maybe.
I was sitting with Pappy at the bus station getting ready for my first real haircut. Maybe six years old? Haircuts were a big deal in my family. We were dead broke, but it was my birthday and Pappy was clear. The cut makes a man. I was nervous. I knew this was a grown-up thing and Mammy and Pappy had fought about it. A big ole screaming match. I knew this was Big Boy stuff.
Pappy knew I was nervous. He starts horsing around, trying to let me know that it’s no big deal. But I’m this sullen cinderblock. I don’t move a muscle. I don’t smile.
So he gets down on his knees in front of me, dusting up his best pair of trousers in the dirt. He’s pulling faces. At first I won’t crack a grin, but the faces get bigger and bigger. And there’s Pappy down on that dirty floor with all the other folk starin’ and he’s yanking at his lips and tugging at his nostrils. Now some of them are laughing, and now I’m laughing too, these giant yuk yuk laughs that are half hiccups. My chest is sore from laughing. Now I’m on my knees, half running, half-crawling through the rows of chipped orange chairs because this big ole monster of a Pappy is grunting and chasing after me.
I duck and juke, then I skid to the end of the last row.
I hardly notice someone’s there.
> A woman.
Ten seconds ago I was twisting on skinned knees but suddenly I am transfixed. I am staring straight up the skirt of this young college girl with legs smooth as stripped timber and black stockings running up her perfect thighs.
I have never seen such an elaborate set of machinery as the garter belts that kept those stockings in place. Erector sets had nothing on whatever those were. Nothing.
I’m telling you this because there is still nothing sweeter than those fancy snaps and laces that make a lady a lady. To this day I swear it was seeing the buckle of Juney’s garter slipping out from under the hem of her church dress that stopped my breath. That sly sweet smile when she caught me looking.
I was in love. Same feeling at six as it was at twenty-six.
I never meant to hurt Juney. I swear. But women have always been my weakness.
The second woman I loved was Kelsi Koehler. She was a regular feature at the Glendale 9 Drive-In. A scream queen of the highest caliber. The leading lady of every wet dream I had between the ages twelve and sixteen.
Miss Koehler had this thick glossy hair. The most adorable way of shrugging her shoulders and quirking her eyebrows so they almost kissed at the centre of her forehead. The best part was you could find her every other night for the cost of admission. It was Boomtown for the Weissman family during those years – no more fights over haircuts, not then!
It wasn’t the hair toss or that perfect little moue that got me though. It was her voice. The super sultry huskiness of it.
“I’m the lady of Good Times,” I remember her saying. “I’m the lady of Good Things Coming.” When she said that it was like she was speaking directly to me. Her voice low and sexy, cutting the cuteness the way whisky cuts coke.
After that I dedicated every pencil erection my teenage self got to her. She was my queen. My goddess. My lady of Good Things Coming. I worshipped her with paper route money and discount ticket stubs every Friday night.
And three days after the dead vet flashed me his final three-fingered salute, there she was.
The glorious track of red hair. The girlish set to her shoulders. The B-Movie smoulder.
My lady of Good Times. My lady of Love At First Sight.
And then she winked.
HERE’S THE THING you got to know about my Pappy. Billy Weissman was a Bible salesman. It always struck him as funny that a Heeb like him could get work slinging the gospel. He had a big Jew nose just as I’ve got, but people took him for a cheech. Or a wop. An Apache, even.
He was gone most of the time when I was growing up, but when he was in town, it was always a party. Mammy and I’d get in the car and we’d drive out to God knows where and Pappy would take out a bottle of whatever was rolling around in the back. We’d watch the stars. Sing old Hank Williams songs. Pappy would drink the road dust out of his throat and get a bit friendly until Mammy gave him that look all men know.
I loved those nights. All three of us together.
What I didn’t know was that wasn’t his first bottle. It might not even have been his second. Maybe Mammy was happy. I don’t know, but you gotta wonder what a mother’s to think about being so broke in those early lean years her son has to stitch his shoes together with safety pins while his Pappy’s got the cash for whisky.
Well. You know how that ended.
And when it did I got a gun, a briefcase full of the Good Book, and a taste for the bottle.
It hadn’t been good between Juney and me for some time.
There were times when I was glad she worked the night shift so she didn’t have to see me crawling in at three or four in the morning. But, God, I still remember that girl I saw in church. Her garters slipping out from under the hem. Her stockings drooping.
I didn’t know how bad it was though.
I didn’t know that she musta been over at Carl’s place crying some mornings after her shift, in that trailer of his with its jars full of choking flies. What it musta been like for her to go to her big brother for help.
Even though he was mean.
Even though he could be vicious as a mad dog.
Maybe we all have blind spots.
WHEN I FIRST see Kelsi Koehler I think maybe I’m looking through the thick, glass bottom of the bottle. It isn’t real. It could be any woman with her hip up on the kitchen table, her thigh leaving the lightest trace of sweat there.
“Hiya, honey,” she says. That voice.
“Hi yourself,” I say.
“Pour a woman a drink?”
I nod. Maybe I nod. I find a bottle, anyway, and pour out whatever is in it. Something cheap, I imagine. It’s whisky I was drinking that night. I get two ice cubes from the freezer and her eyes are following me as I do that. Plop they go. They chime as they hit the glass. I’ve always loved the sound of ice cracking in whisky.
She takes the drink without saying a word. Makes a face when she tries it.
“This is the best you’ve got?”
I shrug. She cocks her head and now her eyebrows are doing that kissing thing I remember so well from the big screen.
“Am I dead?” I wonder. It could be. Maybe I’ve flipped my car on that tricky bend coming out of the canyon. It could be. I guess I’m wondering out loud, because she laughs in that low and husky way of hers.
“No, honey,” she says. “I am. Ovarian cancer. It’s bin eating away at me for years now. Guess it must have won out.” She pauses. Takes a sip of the whisky. “And Nurse said I bin having a good day.”
I look again. She must be, what, in her sixties? Not that she looks it. Her skin is flawless, breasts small and perky as apricots. Her thigh is one long, smooth curve. There’s a sweet little divot in her dress at the delta where her right leg crosses her left.
“Careful,” she says, “you’ll catch flies.” And she laughs again.
I am thinking, “But what have I caught here?” I don’t know. Lord help me, I don’t know.
And then she’s gone. Fast as that, the moonlight’s got her. Fast as the curtains pulling shut. And I am left holding a glass of whisky and water.
Maybe a better man would have told Juney. I wonder that, but I don’t think she would’ve believed me.
I had to know if it was real. If Kelsi Koehler was real. And so I did just about the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. I went cold turkey.
I emptied every bottle down the sink. Every drop of it, gone. And then the mouthwash too. And then the rubbing alcohol, because even though I knew it’d make me go blind I didn’t trust myself not to try it if things got hard.
Juney watches me dump it all, and she don’t say a word. She’s seen this before. But still. I see a little light in her eyes switching on like I haven’t in some time.
All she says is, “Will it stick?”
I shrug. What more is there to say?
It’s Hell. The shakes get real bad on the second night and I’m glad I dumped the rubbing alcohol. I think I might’ve tried anything at that point. I stay in the house. I keep the phone off the hook so none of the boys can call.
Because I want to know. I want to know.
And on the third night, Kelsi’s back, and this time there isn’t a drop of drink in me to cloud my vision.
She has a look to her. Maybe I missed it with the vet because I wasn’t paying attention, but on Kelsi it is pretty damn hard to miss. She’s paler. Gorgeous? Hell, yes, but now it’s a scary kind of beauty. I don’t know how else to say it. Just that I know something is off. Maybe she’d been the lady of Good Times, once, but tonight, she was something else. The lady of Bad Things Coming. Even I could see that.
“I’m dry tonight,” I tell her when she quirks one of those perfect eyebrows.
“Guess that means I’m dry too, honey.”
I stand there staring at her for a while, just making sure it’s real. Eventually she gets bored. She stands up. “Got music, at least?”
I switch on the radio. They’re talking about the fall of Saigon. They’re talking about
our boys coming home. Then I turn the dial, and out of the static comes John Lennon crooning about getting by with a little help from his friends. She’s nodding her head along. When the jockey comes on during the final fade out, she turns back to me. “Gunna stare all night?”
“No, ma’am,” I say.
“Good,” she says. “I can’t abide a gawper. They were always gawping at me. Well. In the beginning, at least.”
“And now?” I say, turning down the radio low so it’s just a murmur.
“Honey, I don’t know what now is. A way station maybe. A pit stop on the Road to Somewhere Else. Who knows how the rules work? I’m just happy to be playin’ the game a bit longer before...” She tosses her hair and the copper-red of it gleams in the buttery light. “I’m cold,” she says.
The sun has been baking the Arizona desert all day, and inside the house, even though I’ve got the air conditioner cranked up and it’s past midnight, it’s still so hot I worry that the windows might crack. It’s been known to happen.
But she’s cold. And I’m a gentleman.
“Warm me up?” she says.
And I love Juney. I’ve loved her since the minute I laid eyes on her. But this is something else.
So I go with her. She tastes the way the desert smells after the rains. Like creosote. The black taste of tar. Her skin freeze-sticks like an ice cube, but she’s my lady of Good Times.
She’s my lady of I’m Only Human.
She is beautiful in the moonlight streaming through the window as I lay her down on the bed. As I kiss the curve of her breast.
She is wearing garters. I know this should mean something to me, but in that moment it don’t.
I slide my fingers up the silky surface of her stockings. I can feel the muscles underneath. I dream I can feel her pulse. My thumb catches on the hook.
She’s just a way station, I think. Just a pit stop.
She is beautiful, but now her eyes are black. Whatever it was that’s underneath her skin, that coldness, that oily sweet smell, it’s getting stronger. I don’t know what she is. It’s starting to scare me. But I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I want to touch her. I want the feel of her stiffening nipple between my fingers, the clench of her legs around my waist...
End of the Road Page 12