Smoke City

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Smoke City Page 8

by Keith Rosson


  Marvin took another stab at it. “So, uh, what do you do, Mike? What brings you on the road?”

  Vale sighed, irritated. Picking this guy up had been a mistake. Spur of the moment. “Well, I used to feed obese children deep-fried burritos, Marvin, but then I got fired for punching a customer.” He looked over, expecting the man to be taken aback, maybe a little scared. Something. But the guy just nodded sagely, as if this was a perfectly reasonable answer. This actually endeared him to Vale, at least a little. “What about you?” he asked.

  Marvin took out his wallet and handed Vale a business card. Vale squinted to read it. “Sounds Good? What is that?”

  “That’s the name of my record store.”

  Vale flipped the card onto the dashboard. “That’s kind of a sucky name, Marvin. No offense.”

  Marvin laughed, nodded. “None at all,” he said.

  There was Mount Hood, blue in the distance. The day was still hot, shot through with clouds, the heat pressing down. An hour and a half later, Vale pulled into the lot of a convenience store. The store was called the Pumpin’ Pig; its sign was thirty feet tall and showed a bright pink pig holding a gas nozzle, tears of near-orgasmic joy leaping from its eyes.

  Vale stepped inside the store while Marvin stayed in the van. His head ached so badly by now it made his eyes flutter. He stepped up to the counter with two six-packs of microbrews—living large!—and realized he had just left a taped-up shoebox with nearly eighteen thousand dollars in the van with a complete stranger. He paid and asked the teenaged clerk for a bathroom key.

  “There’s no key,” she said, putting his beers in a sack. “It’s just around back. Listen, do you need an ambulance or something?”

  Vale stared at her. “A what? No. Why?”

  She waved her hand in front of her own face, frowning. “You’re kind of messed up a little bit. Bleeding.”

  Vale stepped outside, saw Marvin standing at the side of the van, his hands in the back pockets of his chinos, his face held up to the sun. He looked like a low-level office manager gone to seed, and Vale sighed with relief. He nodded at Marvin, making some inscrutable gesture as he walked around to the back of the building with his paper sack. Air horns from semis drifted low from the highway.

  The bathroom was a concrete box with a drain in the middle of the floor, a little room that smelled of bleach-vapor and piss. Vale’s face was a pocked and dented ruin in the warped metal mirror above the sink, and he drained his first beer in one tilt of the bottle and then stared at his splayed hand in front of him, willing the tremors out of it. The teeth of his hangover loosened almost immediately. He set the bottle on the toilet tank and tilted a second bottle up to the sputtering florescent light. With that, relief flooded through him like someone had flipped a switch. He left the two bottles in there and walked back to the van, his nerves suddenly as evened out as a surgeon’s. Marvin was already in the van, his seatbelt back on.

  “Ready to hit the road, boss?” Vale cried cheerily. “You one-eyed bastard.” He winked at Marvin and set the bag of beers on the floorboard at his feet. He checked the shoebox—brazen about it, too—then shoved it back under the seat. He cranked the radio. John Mellencamp, loud enough to vibrate the dashboard. He gazed in the rearview; you really couldn’t see shit, all those boxes stacked and tiered in the back.

  Marvin looked at him a moment and then nodded, smiling. He tucked his hands over his belly and said, almost to himself, “Ready is one thing I am, yeah.”

  Vale whooped, tore ass out of the parking lot.

  9

  The Bride was famous.

  A bottled water sales rep, getting in nine holes at a course in La Jolla, California, caught the Bride on film. And nothing was the same after that.

  In two minutes and three seconds, the Bride changed the world.

  Her fame was two-fold: she was the first smoke to be caught on tape, and her story was classic. The whole tale was right there, digestible and frame-ready and still resonant with a certain mystery. An anguished bride? What happened to her? It was her footage they used when rounding out a news update about the smokes, even though she’d appeared all the way back in June and there were now hundreds of filmed and verified sightings throughout Southern California and Northern Mexico.

  The footage of the Bride lasts for one hundred and twenty three seconds and what remained so striking about it, beyond the obvious, was the fact that the film was rolling before she appeared; the sales rep was using his smartphone to film his partner sink an eagle. His camerawork was steady enough and the man himself, the rep, who would be interviewed incessantly over the coming months, gained a certain ironic fame for his first words to the apparition.

  The shot was of his buddy from the waist down, sunlight flaring off the putter and the buddy’s watch, and then both men backpedaled and one of them—the rep insisted it was his pal—gave out a little high-pitched scream, because there she was. The Bride. Like they all did, she just winked into existence: suddenly there, no fading in slowly, none of that. Just bam. Her back to them, her train trailing behind her on the green.

  “Can I help you with anything?” the sales rep said, his voice surprisingly calm, and that line alone would inspire untold amounts of merchandising—t-shirts, pillow covers, phone cases, temporary tattoos—over the next three months. The Bride ignored him—par for the course was a joke that would eventually be run into the ground by any number of late night talk show hosts—and continued to walk a slow and seemingly aimless perimeter around the spot from which she had originally appeared.

  Historians assessing the footage, when she snapped from haze to sharpness, said the fabric of the Bride’s dress was a kind of silver tissue and lace common with dresses of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Her eyes were dark with tears and she managed, somehow, to spend the entire one hundred twenty-three seconds without seeming to lock on to any common landmark: not the two men who backpedaled to stay out of her way, nor the bag of clubs that she drifted right through, and beyond that the clubhouse and phalanx of trees bracing the edge of the course. She seemed to see none of it.

  And after two minutes and three seconds, she vanished.

  10

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  When we stepped out from the constabulary, the air was cool on my reddened cheeks. All was as we had left it: the shops still thronged with people, the bleat of animals, the calls and laughter, the streets churned to mud. But the world had changed irrevocably for me. How could it not?

  It is right that they turn their faces from us, I remember thinking. It is right that they shun us, mark us. My father in short order had reduced Simon of Provins to the keening sounds a child would make, an animal stuck in a trap. A bloody thumbprint had served as signature on a confession of heresy the bishops had drawn up. My father would oversee Simon’s execution the following week.

  “Any problems?” the man upstairs had asked. His eyes had taken on a slow, glassy look; a tankard of wine stood on his desk.

  “None,” my father said. My father removed his gloves and threw them in the hearth. Heavy things, they lay there and smoked for a time before catching.

  “There’s a fire for burning that shit out back,” the man yelled as he dropped his feet from his desk. “Don’t burn those unholy goddamned things in here, fool.”

  My father’s face darkened, but he nodded. The two of them looked at each other, gauging each other in ways I could not understand. Finally, the man drew another pull from his wine and the moment passed. He and my father sat about drawing up a bill the constable would present to the lord overseeing Simon’s estate. You paid for your own execution, I would come to learn.

  My father had always been unknowable to me. Always full of strange pockets of silence, a propensity for impatience and drink. I had always loved him and feared him both. But now, after I had seen him and Luc walk down that dark hallway and up the stairs, their jobs done? My father’s gloves dark with Simon’s blood? His willingness to do tha
t to another man, who howled and screamed and tried to pull away? Love, it could be said, had taken a backseat. The fear, though. That bloomed.

  We got back on our cart and started on our way. “Now to the Black farm,” my father said. “You remember that place? We went there once; we bought a sheep there. Do you remember?”

  I turned my face away, my vision trembling as tears threatened.

  My father clicked his tongue, pulled the reins. The mules stopped. I saw thousands of tiny droplets of dew studding their manes. I seemed to see everything with this terrible clarity.

  He pulled the woolen cap from his head, gripped it in his hands. He looked down at his boots on the buckboard of our cart. “You’ll need to get used to it, Geoffroy.”

  “He said he didn’t do it,” I said. “His neighbor—”

  My father shook his head. “He might as well have been on the wheel as soon as the bishop sent word to elicit a confession. There’s no escape from a charge of heresy, Geoffroy. Not in these times.”

  “But you said—”

  My father put his hand over mine, and put his other hand over the back of my neck. He leaned in close to me. He smelled ripe and awful, a rich, long-seated dankness we all carried and hardly noticed until someone else got close. His hands were rough and warm. It was the gentlest he had ever touched me in my life.

  “Geoffroy, listen to me. There is no Almighty. There isn’t. Were there, I’d have been struck a hundred times dead for what I have wrought on the world. What God is it, Geoffroy, that lets a plague pass over the executioner while the priests rot and die as young men? What God is that? No, Geoffroy, we are alone. Men cast judgment on our deeds, and those doing the judging are blood-mad themselves.”

  I took my hand from his and tucked my chin to my chest. “I’ll never,” I said. “Never.”

  My father’s smile was small and sad. There was a delicate stippling of blood next to his eye. He snapped the reins and the mules took foot.

  • • •

  Driving with Vale, it seemed doubtful we’d make it to the California border, much less to Los Angeles. At one point he very nearly kissed the mud flaps of a semi during an abrupt lane switch. The horns of terrified motorists dopplered past us. The speedometer jittered around eighty, the chassis of the van groaning beneath the radio. The wind roared through Vale’s open window.

  Things had gotten complicated. With the notion of Lyla, I was suddenly invested in the business of living. I cared all of a sudden, and in doing so put myself at risk.

  Vale turned to me and cried, “I just bought this car.” It was clear he’d drunk a few beers at the gas station. Now that he was buzzed, he was talkative, cheerful. With his matted beard, bloody bandages and gigantic old-lady sunglasses, the man looked absolutely insane. “There’s no backseats,” he bellowed, “but what the shit, right? The guy who sold it to me was a tweaker. Bought it right off the street, man.”

  “Well, again,” I said drily, my fingernails practically embedded in the dashboard, “thanks for picking me up.”

  Vale shrugged. “Not a big deal.” He turned the dial on the radio station and we started drifting toward the shoulder. Vale settled on the Kinks—“Lola”—and finally, thankfully, put his hands back on the wheel.

  One of my Five Rules: Look for portents and signs. Lola, I thought—close enough to Lyla? I was reaching.

  Vale, meanwhile, was oblivious. Trying to light his cigarette going eighty with the window rolled down. “What brings you out on the road, Marvin?” His cigarette wagged as he spoke.

  “I’m, uh, heading down south to visit a friend.”

  “Yeah? Heading down for a funeral, unfortunately.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “How far south do you think you’ll be going?”

  “The funeral’s in LA. I’m just doing a straight shot down there.”

  My heart did a clumsy stutter. Portents and signs. “So you’re going straight to Los Angeles?”

  Beyond the ceaseless repetition of my death and rebirths, I’d quit searching for any meaning a while back. How does one find meaning in a maelstrom? Order in a cyclone? The parameters of the Curse had made themselves clear long ago. It was like a palindrome, the repetition of it. But I believed in coincidence no more than I believed in benevolence. This was the problem with searching for portents and signs: once you found them, once they revealed themselves, what did you do with the goddamned things? How did you read them?

  What were the odds that the man who picked me up in Portland would be taking a straight shot to Los Angeles, where Lyla was?

  Vale finally got part of his cigarette lit, an inch-long section of ash running down one side of it. “Indeedy I am, Marvin. Straight there. I am heading to Los Angeles like a fucking bullet train, buddy.”

  “Wow,” I said, my voice heavy and strange in my own ears. “That’s crazy. That’s where I’m going too.”

  Vale turned and looked at me—much longer than he should have, we started veering again—and said, “You should ride with me, Marvin. I could use the company.” He sounded joyous, happy. A dark coin of blood had seeped through the gauze wrapped around his head. “To be honest, it’s been a rough day.”

  11

  Even if there wasn’t a flight ban, Vale wouldn’t be flying to LA.

  Because after Paris, Vale didn’t fly anymore. Not a chance.

  He and Candice had been married for three years. He was in his mid-twenties, at the apex of his trajectory. He’d already grown accustomed to the life, the pressure and benefits both. So, Paris. He’d been invited to participate in a Brut art exhibition at the Museum d’Orsay; something Brophy had talked him into.

  “Sounds like a fucking pain,” Vale had said when they talked about it over the phone. “Paris drivers, all that. I mean, I’ve never even heard of this museum, man.” Trying to sound so worldly. When he thought about it now, it made him want to puke.

  Brophy had laughed at him. He was used to indulging Vale, smoothing the rough edges over with some ego-stroking. “It guarantees a spike in overseas sales, Mike. Get on the plane and go. You’re the star of the show. We both know it.”

  Vale had been more amused than anything when no less than four of Brophy’s assistants came to his studio the next day and cherry-picked half a dozen canvasses from a folder full of photographs they’d brought with them.

  He’d just convinced Candice to move to Portland with him; after a few years of living there, Los Angeles had just grown too filthy and fake for him, and just felt too goddamned big. He liked Portland’s compactness, its earnestness. And cheap? Christ, it’d been cheap then.

  Vale had stood in his massive studio—he rented a warehouse down in the industrial section by the river—drinking vodka cran from a water bottle and laughing as the assistants moved through the space with the efficiency and coordination of a hit squad. They hardly said a word to him, just conferred with the photos and then packed them out to a truck.

  The day he left for Paris, Vale leaned out the kitchen window of their apartment, smoking and looking for Brophy’s limo that would take him to the airport. Candice washed the dishes, everything telegraphed by the sound of plates and glasses clinking against each other in the suds.

  “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t be like this.”

  “You could’ve gotten me tickets,” she said.

  Vale laughed. “You’re working on your book. You need time to write, remember? Well,” he said, twirling his cigarette in the air, little curlicues of smoke, “here’s time to write.” This old argument of theirs.

  The clatter of silverware. The faucet.

  Vale said, “First you ask for something, Candice, then you complain about it when you get it.”

  She dropped the sponge in the sink. “That is so shitty,” she said. “That is such a shitty thing to say, Mike. Aren’t we in this together? I mean, Jesus.”

  “Candy,” he said. “Babe.” Just like that, he was gracious and consoling as he saw the limo pull t
o a stop downstairs, “I’m sorry.” He went over to her and kissed her forehead, her eyes, her lips. “I’m not even going to be doing anything. I’m just going to be hanging around the museum, nodding at a bunch of French bankers. I’ll be back in three days.”

  She sighed and leaned against him. She’d graduated from UCLA a few months before and was editing yet another draft of her novel, The Weeping Trees. Her professor there, a cadaverous man prone to wearing bow ties, a man who had won a National Book Award around the time Johnny-fucking-Appleseed was gallivanting around the countryside and who Vale knew wanted to bang her, had raved about it, urged her to seek a publisher. But she was frozen, insisted it wasn’t done. She hadn’t even let Vale read it yet.

  They stood in the kitchen and she laced her hands around his neck and steadied him. She looked him in the eye and said, “Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t drink all the wine.”

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. “Come on. I have to go.”

  She yanked on his hair, that incendiary mixture of the plaintive and sultry. “I’m serious.”

  “I know,” he said. “I won’t drink all the wine. I’ll be good.” And that was the thing: he’d meant it.

  He’d meant it, hadn’t he?

  But what happens when you paint every ugly thing inside yourself and they laud you for it? What happens when a sketch you give a taxi driver as a tip for a ride to the bar fetches sixty grand at a Christie’s auction a year later? What happens when you’re twenty-four and surrounded by yes-men, shitwads with dollar-sign eyeballs, at every turn? When your agent says, “Fuck it, you’re going to Paris, Mike. Live a little.” What happens then?

  The world eats you for breakfast, that’s what. You think you own the world but the world owns you. You’re a sucker.

  You’re a sucker because you’re young and you don’t know any better. You’re a sucker because the painting comes easy, because the painting’s a salve, because the painting lights you up. But the big reason, the main reason you’re a sucker?

 

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