I looked down at the man who, for the past decade or so, I’d never seen seriously injured or wounded. Sure, we got in scrapes; he took his share of bruises, cuts, and an occasional bullet wound. Nothing like this, though. Nothing life threatening. I admit it was a little frightening. It comes to us all, of course. And it’s not just intellectual knowledge when you’ve seen humans shot, stabbed, beaten and crushed to death, torn apart by animals, and otherwise savaged by life and their fellow life forms.
I knew this. I even knew the odds were always in favor of Rok’s dying before I did. In a Railwalker team, though we’re all martially trained, the Brick’s primary job is to deal with the magickal, the visionary, the numinous. And that often means an altered state of consciousness. At those times, you can lose sight of what’s going on in this world, so your Bear is there to watch your back while you’re altered, and to take point on martial encounters. A Bear is twice as likely as a Brick or a Prof to get killed in the line of duty. I always knew, somewhere in me, that this moment was coming. But somehow, some part of my mind had conspired to ignore that fact.
When he spoke his voice was weak, reminding me of the shade’s voice on the telephone.
“My Brick...”
“My Bear.”
“Morgan says the Beast is dead?”
“His body’s in the morgue, several floors below.”
“Good deal. No regrets, Wolf. We took care of business.”
“We did that.” I nodded.
“Twenty-three blessings, brother. I’d like a moment with Morgan.”
“Sure thing.” I left the two of them alone, stepped out into the corridor.
The walls of the hospital corridor were painted the same puke color as the hall where once, waiting for my Pa, I first saw my mother’s spirit. Or at least it seemed that way to me.
After a moment, I heard Morgan sob, and then her shaky voice began the Chant for the Dead. I raised my voice to join hers, walked back into the room. As we sang, the crows gathered at the window.
39. WOLF
I was too restless to sleep. Morgan’s door was closed, the light out. I left the suite, went down to the street, and started walking. Aimlessly, wandering the streets, paying no particular attention to where I was going. I was somewhere in the area where City Center becomes the North End when I started thinking this was stupid and pointless. There was a bar and casino open on the corner ahead. I should have a couple of drinks, then go back and sack out. I stepped inside.
The place was divided into two fairly large rooms. The front room was the bar, in the back was the gaming room. I ordered a shot and took it with me to stand at the entrance to the game room. It had been a long time. I’d seen plenty of cards and other games of chance go on in bars out in the zones, but it had been years since I had been in an actual game room of this type. There were tables for jackflash, crops, and poker, a wheel of fortune table, and even a couple of slot machines pinging away in the back.
It was a shock when I looked at the men sitting around the poker table and saw my Pa. He’d aged badly. He was gaunt as a corpse, with great caverns carved out under his cheekbones. When I’d last seen him his hair was starting to recede and turn gray at the temples. Though he hadn’t lost any more hair, it had turned snow white. His eyes were still bright, though, peering out at me from beneath shaggy white brows.
He put down his cards.
“Gentlemen, I’m out,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me for a bit.”
I stared in stunned silence as he got up from the table and walked over to where I stood. “Long time no see,” he said. He looked me up and down and added, “Railwalker.”
“Yeah,” I managed.
“Buy you a drink?” he asked, then he gestured and led the way to the bar.
We found stools and sat in silence until the drinks were delivered. He raised his glass to me and nodded, and I did the same, and we both drank. Then we looked at each other for a long time.
“So,” he said at last, “Howyadoin’?”
That phrase, run together as one word, at once was foreign and familiar. He still hadn’t lost the accent of the northeastern cities he grew up in, so reminiscent of the dialogue from DVs of pre-Crash gangster movies. I’d heard him utter that phrase—or that word—“Howyadoin?” a million times when I was young. In exactly that tone. And this was part of my father’s magic. Each time he uttered it, the person he was asking knew deep down in their gut that he really did want to know, that there was nothing more important to him in that moment than how you were doing. Being his son, knowing what I knew about him, I also knew perfectly well that an hour from now, when he was looking across a card table at an opponent he thought was bluffing, the information he was now requesting would be irrelevant and forgotten. But right at this moment, it truly was as important to him as it seemed.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he grunted. “But you always were a good liar. You’re a Railwalker now. Roth called the Railwalkers in to hunt down the Beast. You gotta know the whole city’s talking about that. You found this Beast yet? Got him under lock and key?”
“No,” I allowed. “But the job is done. He’s dead.”
“So?” He sat back. “That’s good. Why do you look like you just lost your best friend?”
“Because I did,” I said. “He was killed by the Beast.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry to hear that. Then I was right. You’re not okay. In fact, you’re very fuckin’ far from okay.”
“Alright,” I said. “In that respect, no, things aren’t okay. I thought you were asking about the bigger picture, y’know, how my life has been, how it is being a Railwalker, that sort of thing.”
He laughed. “I know how the fuck that is. It’s good, or you wouldn’t still be doing it. You’re like me in that respect, anyway. You’re not going to stick with something doesn’t suit you. Oh, I know, you’ll fulfill any obligations you made, but once the debts are paid, you’re done. Am I right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right. But I’m not a liar.”
“Not constitutionally, maybe,” he said. “But you’re good at it when you need to be, just the same. Remember how you used to become different characters from the DVs you saw?”
I only vaguely remembered having played at being some of my heroes as a kid.
“You were totally convincing, completely in character. You’d be Batman or Captain Arclight, or Brick, for days on end sometimes. Quite the little method actor, ya were.”
I remembered using towels as capes, and recalled a particular hotel we’d stayed at in Fresh Springs that had dark-colored towels that worked better than the white or cream-colored towels we found in most places.
“Thought sure you’d become an actor. That worried me some. That’s not a real secure job. Hard to make a living.”
“Oh, yeah, and gambling is real secure. You got yourself a pension fund squirreled away somewhere, Pa?”
He snorted. “That’s just the point. Never wanted you to grow up to be a bum like me. I was real happy when you went into construction. Solid future in that business.”
“It wasn’t for me.”
“Yeah. I shoulda figured that. I saw Bobby a year or so after you left. He told me you’d joined the order.”
“Railwalker Academy isn’t exactly hard to find, Pa. In the five years I was there, you never had a game near New Frisco?”
“You know I don’t do good with that ooky-spooky shit.”
“Not even to visit your own son?”
“Bad enough you’re all into that shit now. Sitting down with you today ain’t the easiest thing for me, just on that basis, never mind our history. I wasn’t going to walk into a whole campus full of that.”
I heard the anger in his voice and realized it was as much anger at himself, at his fears and frailties, as it was at me for having embraced the “ooky-spooky shit.” Suddenly I was looking at the man before me not as my Pa, but just as a man—an old, burnt-out gam
bler, probably an alcoholic, who lived with a lot of regret and struggled with his own fears and anxieties. A man who felt himself a failure.
I thought back to my youth and remembered how he’d always avoided Railwalkers, witches, and psychics, except for Patty Morris. And even his friendship with her had been an uneasy one; he’d been much closer to Bill than to Patty. It was a common enough thing amongst gamblers, as I ought to know. Most of them were intensely superstitious. They’d carry their rabbit’s foot or St. Bernardine medal, maybe mount a plastic Elvis on their dashboard. The bravest among them might visit a desert witch to get a custom luck charm. But they all avoided any active involvement with anything that smacked of the occult or the spiritual. I pulled my attention back to Pa, who was speaking again.
“Blood will tell, they say. Guess you’d pretty much have to turn out to be either a gambler or a Railwalker. Probably Patty was right, I shoulda left you with her and Bill. You’d have had something like a normal life in Alturo. ’Cept Patty woulda probably started you down that road all the sooner.” He shook his head. “I dunno. Hell, I guess it’s better this way. At least you’re doing something helps people, contributing something to the world. Better that than turning into a drunken old gambler.”
I could see he was perched on the precipice of self-pity, and I wasn’t going to go there with him. Besides, something he’d said had stuck in my head like a burr on a coattail.
“What did you mean, ‘blood will tell’?”
He looked at me for a long minute before replying. “Patty used to say you had the Sight. Guess she was right. You got that from your mother. She trained to be a Railwalker, you know.”
I hadn’t known. He chuckled at my expression.
“Close your mouth, kid. You’ll be catching flies. Yeah, Irena trained at the Academy for a couple of years, but she never took the Oath or got the tattoo. She dropped out, or whatever you call it.”
I was baffled. I couldn’t imagine my father in a romance with a Railwalker trainee. Talk about “ooky-spooky shit.”
“How did you...?”
“Get together?” he supplied. “I started dating your Ma before she went in. Her visions and dreams and stuff were like her dirty little secret in those days. She didn’t talk about them. I didn’t know anything about it until it was too late. She already had me, hook, line, and sinker.
“I think she wanted to forget it, leave that shit behind, but it wouldn’t let her go. Went from dreams and occasional flashes of vision to full-blown fits that would have her out of it, lost in some other world, right out in broad daylight. Things eventually got so bad she couldn’t hide it, had to talk to me about it. ’Course, I was spooked. It scared the shit out of me. But I wasn’t gonna walk on her at that point, leave her to deal with it by herself. Eventually we agreed she had to get help, had to get some kind of training to deal with it, and that’s when she decided to go to the Academy. We both thought that meant we were all done, our life together was over. I drove her to the Academy, dropped her off. Thought that was the last I’d ever see of her.”
“And where was I during all this?”
“You? You weren’t even a gleam in either of our eyes at that point. You were an egg that hadn’t dropped, a sperm that hadn’t swum upstream. Couple of years later, I was playing in a casino in Freno, and she comes walking up to the table. ‘Hi, Doc,’ she says. ‘You up for a different kind of game?’”
“She’d left the Academy?”
“Yeah, she’d left. Learned enough to get control of the shit, or so she thought. Wanted to have a life, raise a family. We were both still young enough in those days. We thought we could pull that off. I even tried getting a regular job for a while. Not that that worked out any good.”
“So what happened?”
“Whatdye think? Ooky-spooky shit happened. A couple of years after you were born, the visions got out of control again. She never did explain it all to me, but something she’d seen convinced her that if she stayed around, you were going to be drawn into that world, and it was gonna be bad for you. Said you’d be swallowed by the dragon, or some shit like that. She thought if she left, and I did my best to keep you away from that kind of stuff, you could have a normal life.” He shook his head. “Guess we both should have known better.
“I never talked about this because, you know, trouble between men and women is always that he-said, she-said shit. I have my feelings and opinions, and I coulda told you what they were, but I wasn’t the person to present her point of view, and I didn’t want to poison your mind against her. She was your ma, after all.”
“Poison my mind?”
“I wouldn’t have done it intentionally, but when you’re a kid, you listen to what your parents say. It weighs more with you than it ought to. If I’d have told you the whole story, even if I’d tried to be fair, you’d have heard my side, but not hers.”
I was stunned. He’d never told me anything about my mother because he was afraid he’d unfairly prejudice me against her? “Look, Pop,” I said, “I’ve learned a bit about how reality looks different to different people. I think I’m a bit old to take my father’s word as absolute canon verity.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and he sighed. Looked at the bottles behind the bar, at the door to the games room, the front door of the place, everywhere else he could before finally looking at me. “Your mother,” he said at last, “was a hard woman to love.
“Not hard to fall in love with, y’know. That’s different. Gorgeous she was, with that soft smile and those big, luminous eyes. You’ve seen her picture. She was like some elegant DV star. You know, some women that beautiful, they develop this attitude, like they’re somehow privileged and better than everybody, because all their life people have given them everything they wanted, just because they were beautiful.”
I nodded. I’d known a few women like that.
“Your mother was never like that. Modest, self-effacing, when I met her. Easy to fall for. But falling in love, that’s nothing. Loving, once you’re in a day-to-day relationship, that’s another thing entirely. When you’re playing partners, and things get rough, the world don’t exactly deal you all the best cards. Tension builds up. You get anxious and edgy, and you start blaming each other.
“I knew how that went, of course, but when Irena and I started at each other, well, she could say things. Things that weren’t true, that she didn’t even believe were true. Just to hurt you, to score a point. Especially when she was drinking.”
My mother had a drinking problem? This was new to me. I mentally laughed at myself. Everything and anything about my mother was going to be new to me, since all I actually knew already was her image from that one photograph.
“I’d been around the block a time or two even then. You’d think an old dog like me would have run into that before. But dumb as it seems, the truth was, I hadn’t. I’d known guys would lie to get the upper hand in an argument, say shit that was total lies, but never a woman who’d do that to hurt her man. I think it was that more than anything had me ready to agree, and to let go, when she decided to hit the road.”
I wondered again about the spirit I’d seen that I’d always accepted as the spirit of my mother. This didn’t sound at all like her. But what did I know? That spirit appeared now and then to pull my irons out of the fire, and then vanished again. I didn’t deal with her on a day-to-day basis, like I did with the Wolf Spirit or the Crows.
“So why did she leave?”
He sipped from his drink and looked me up and down. “You want to know my honest opinion, she left to chase her own ambition. Washing out at the Railwalker Academy did something to her. She’d seen something there that she wanted: power, influence, authority. Oh, she gave other reasons for leaving at the time. All that stuff about a vision, a prophecy about you. Supposedly she was worried about that, trying to avoid it. You were better off without her. But you ask me, the reality was, she thought it was her was better off without you and me.
“Whe
n the weird stuff started up again, after you were born, I could see that instead of resisting it, this time she was accepting it. She was determined to turn it to her advantage, gain herself some power. On a path like that, a gambler husband and a baby were just encumbrances. Toward the end, you could see her getting harder, nastier. Like she was trying to rid herself of compassion, empathy, softer feelings like that. Back then I thought it was the booze, but now I think the drinking was a symptom, and a tool. I think she’d come to see those kinder feelings as weakness. Drinking gave her some distance, some insulation.”
I thought about that. I’d known more than a few people like that in my time.
“So the whole prophecy about me was a made-up excuse?”
“Hell, no. That was a legitimate vision. I was with her when it happened. Unless she was a much better actress than I thought...” He paused. “Which I guess is a possibility.” He shook his head, denying it to himself. “No, I think that vision was real. I just don’t think it was the reason she left.”
“So what exactly was this vision? I’d be swallowed by a dragon?”
“Something like that. Couldn’t tell you the details.” His eyes widened at my expression, and then narrowed again as he leaned toward me. “Look, okay, I know, you and your cohorts, you pay attention to visions and prophecy and all that shit. You can’t imagine how somebody could actually forget something like that. But you gotta remember, at the time I was scared shitless of that crap, and I did my best to avoid and forget anything associated with it.”
I noticed he’d used the past tense. “So you’re easier in your mind with ‘that crap’ today?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “I am, actually. The older you get, the more you realize Old Man Death is sitting in on every hand. You tip to the fact he can collect up the pot any time he feels like it, the other weird stuff don’t seem all that scary anymore.
“I’m sorry I forgot that prophecy. If it was today, I’d mark it down and remember it. But back then, last thing I wanted was to remember. And I’m sorry I never told you anything about Irena. That wasn’t fair. Though, truth to tell, you never actually asked.”
Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman Page 27