Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  They almost died crossing the Atlantic.

  He’d been about to ask the stewardess for a menu when the plane suddenly dipped—lurched really—the overhead lights dimming, and a sickening angle of blue-green sea pivoting toward them outside the windows. The engines actually seemed to sputter and catch, a strange and coughing sound that made his balls crawl and his asshole tighten up in animal terror. The oxygen masks dropped and unspooled from their housings, bobbing playful things with their yellow mouthpieces. Screams popped like party favors up and down the aisles. The whole thing lasted maybe twenty seconds and then the plane righted itself, the engines returning.

  They did an emergency landing at JFK, the landing strip lined with ambulances and fire engines even though the captain had spent much of the rest of the flight reassuring everyone that things were fine.

  Still, Vale had seen the faces of the stewardesses, and the immutable blankness of the sea rising to meet them.

  It was punishment, he knew. Or at the very least, his guilt made physical. His transgressions courting disaster.

  So yeah, Vale doesn’t fly.

  12

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  Years passed.

  I was my father’s son.

  We ate supper with rain falling in strings outside our hut. The poultice my mother had wrapped around my hand stank of sulfur, garlic.

  My father coughed, awful wet rattles that vibrated in his chest. He’d been ill for months. We had sought out three healers before one agreed to visit our home. Her fee for such a visit was astronomical. She refused to actually touch my father, called his illness a sickness of the spirit and prescribed prayer and a satchel of herbs to be buried in the ground for a week and then laid on his chest. To no avail, of course; his cough worsened. No one was surprised. Thunder boomed outside.

  “How was it?” father asked, wincing against the grit that inevitably settled like silt in his mouth after a drink of wine. He motioned for my mother to fill his cup again.

  I held up my hand in its bandage as way of explanation.

  “He cut you?”

  “A bite,” I said.

  My father nodded, scooped more potatoes into his mouth. “The toothless man can’t bite, Geoffroy. Remember that.” He had long since ceased his rounds; I had replaced him. And yet in his retellings of tales, his constant unsolicited advice, he would recast himself in a nobler or more vicious light, depending on the situation. He’d grown fat on such proclamations. We all listened in silence.

  I remember thinking I would never get old like my father.

  I said, “He was afraid. That’s all.” My father snorted, lifted his cup.

  The year was 1400. I was—what? Twenty years old? I had replaced my father at the gallows, the dungeon. Luc had become my superior. In Rouen, I answered to him; elsewhere my rounds took me days away from home. My father, with time on his hands, had tried his hand at growing a small crop or two, but they seemed inured to his past and were meager things, or blighted. He mostly spent his afternoons and evenings drinking wine and browbeating my mother about her own chores. This dwindling down of a man.

  Esme, as the daughter of an executioner and disfigured on top of it, remained unmarried. The four of us lived together still, with Riva and Jehanne having gained husbands by moving to cities on the coast. We had heard nothing of them in months. There was always the gnawing worry they had passed on from famine, war, pestilence. I slept nearest the hearth now, my one increase in stature as provider for the family.

  Here is what I had learned since watching my father pry his confession from Simon of Provins those years ago: The prisoners themselves became interchangeable. Bodies were interchangeable. There was little to differentiate one man from the next; such was the raw honesty of the flesh.

  They were all the same: Fragile sacks of gristle and shit and yellow bone. Blood and howls. The faces blurred together into one indistinct face. A non-face, almost.

  I would sometimes find myself walking down the avenue or a country road and in passing someone think of the latticework of their ribs, the spongy pale fat couched beneath the skin, what their gibbering pleas would sound like. It became natural, the course of how my mind worked. This is what had happened to me: everyone had been distilled to simple flesh. There was little I hadn’t done to a person.

  Esme, once my guide into sleep, my ship in the darkness, looked at me now as if I was some kind of animal. I spent days away on my travels and was sullen and silent when home.

  I wore my father’s coat now, the sword stitched on my back.

  The turn of the century had brought with it any amount of doomsaying. Even steady, faithful people had fallen prey to it. The end of the world was drawing near, they said. Some rejoiced. Others lamented. Roving bands of flagellants traveled from town to town, loudly praying and whipping themselves bloody. Punishing themselves for the earthly sins of man. Still, such people were afforded room, board and gifts by benevolent citizens of the towns they passed through, all three a scarcity in a nation wracked with plague and occupation.

  A band of them had been passing through the village of L’Houmeau and a man, a serf known only as Jean, had thrown a stone at them, called them opportunists. That’d been enough; he’d been beaten, jailed and brought to the constabulary at Rouen. There were rumors at this time that King Charles had gone mad; somehow he had heard of Jean of L’Houmeau’s charges and the order had traveled down from the King’s advisors to the bailiff of Rouen: the man, this Jean, was to be publicly quartered for his heresy. The bailiff passed word to Luc, who’d chortled like a fool and assigned the job to me.

  The market had been opened to all and citizens were ordered to bear witness. A dais was built in the center of the square. Jean of L’Houmeau was placed flat on his back, the bonds at his arms and legs knotted with heavy leather straps that led to the traces on the horses’ backs. Like most of what we did, it had the terrible showmanship of theater.

  The priest had performed his meager ministrations over the man as another monk waved incense around the platform. Luc and I stood at the rear, I with my hands crossed before me and a short sword in a scabbard at my side. The man had wept and pulled at his bonds. Between Luc and I, while searching for an admission of guilt, he had lost fingernails, teeth. I had shattered the bones of his feet with a mallet. Luc had removed long peels of flesh from his ribs with a curved knife. The layers beneath shone scabrous now, red and pink, dense with writhing maggots.

  Throughout it all, Jean of L’Houmeau had refused to claim guilt. I had found myself more than once angry at his recalcitrance, his lack of fealty.

  The priest looked at me and nodded with his watery eyes. I had stepped forward and went to lash Jean’s neck with the last remaining bond and he’d bitten me, his remaining teeth yellow and bright among the grime and blood caked on his face.

  “Damn you,” I’d said, and struck him. Behind me, Luc laughed. Someone threw a rotten lettuce and it exploded like a bomb on the wooden platform. Boos and murmurings began from the crowd, and the ragged line of men-at-arms below exchanged glances, tightened the grips on their pikes and mallets.

  “All these trappings of men,” Jean hissed through his broken mouth as I lashed the strap around his neck, “do obfuscate the word of God.”

  “Oh, prattle on, heretic,” I said, and gave the signal.

  The men stationed at the five points whipped the flanks of their horses, urging them forward, and soon enough Jean of L’Houmeau was done talking.

  My father looked at me over the smoking candle in our little hut. His eyes glittered in his great shaggy head. “He was just afraid,” I said again. “It’s all a bad business.”

  My father stopped chewing. Sick as he was, pale as he was, the fire quickened in his eyes at that.

  “I know what it is, boy. I know what kind of business. Don’t ever doubt it.”

  Esme, always sensitive and attuned to the workings of the house in ways the rest of us were not, struggled wi
th tears. My mother told her to hush.

  “You weren’t built for this,” my father said.

  I shrugged. Why fight it? “It’s true,” I said. “I grew angry with him at times.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he made me hurt him. Because he cared more about being right then being alive.”

  My father shook his head. “You don’t have the backbone for it.”

  “Perhaps not.” I looked down at my plate. The thought hung precarious there, unspoken. Finally I said, “To be truthful, I fear for my soul at times.”

  And with that my father leaned his head back and roared laughter, the rain hissing in the fields outside.

  • • •

  Blue sky, patchy green fields beyond the windows, fields scattered with huge circular mounds of lashed hay. Traffic had thinned significantly. Vale sounded darkly cheerful when he peered at the temperature gauge and said, “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That knocking? That knocking sound?”

  Said sound had been coming from the engine for the past forty miles or more. I’d just assumed that Vale knew about it. “Well, well, well,” he muttered. “That didn’t take long. Goddamnit.” He pulled a beer from the sack on the floorboard.

  “Marvin,” he said, pointing the beer bottle at me as he talked. “What I’m going to do is I’m going to pull over at the next exit. This van is about to shit the bed.” He handed me the bottle. “Meanwhile, I would greatly appreciate it if you could open this fellow for me.”

  I looked down at the bottle. “I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea, Mike.”

  Vale nodded as if he understood. “I’ve known you for about an hour and a half, Marvin. Please don’t be upset when I tell you I don’t give much of a shit if you think it’s a good idea or not.”

  “And what happens if we get pulled over?”

  Vale shook his head, took his beer back. A flap of bandage had come loose at the back of his head and hung there like a filthy, blood-spotted ponytail. “Marvin, I just said I’m pulling over, man. Look,” and he pointed the beer at a passing sign, “says there’s a gas station coming up in a mile and a half. Just open this fucking beer in the meanwhile.”

  “I can’t do that, Mike.”

  “Goddamnit.” He dropped it back into the bag.

  The van began giving odd bucks and lurches, other drivers giving us commiserating I’m sorry looks as they flew past us. We made it to the off-ramp and pulled into the parking lot of yet another gas station. Vale slammed the door and stormed inside the convenience store. On all sides of us lay rolling hills burned brown by summer. I got out, wondering what Lyla was doing right then.

  Vale came back out a minute later and poured a jug of water into the open hood of the van. Somewhere in its guts, things gurgled and hissed.

  “Mike,” I said.

  Vale held up a hand. He’d retied his bandage in the back with a knot and now looked like some kind of dirty, half-crazed Rambo cosplayer. “Fuck you, Marvin. You weird one-eyed motherfucker.”

  “What? Jesus. What’s the matter with you?”

  “The matter with me?” He slammed the hood down, shot a seething glare my way. “Where do you get the nerve, man? I just met you.”

  Anger flared, quick as a match. “Yeah, I know. I understand that.”

  “This is my van. I’m the driver.”

  Grown men, talking to each other like this. I held up my hands. “Have you ever seen a human body that’s been in a sixty-mile-an-hour collision?”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “Yeah? What’s it about then?”

  He peered into the mouth of the water jug and then banged it against his leg. The van gurgled and croaked. “If I need any kind of imposed morality, I’ll go fall on my knees in some church. I’ll go call my ex-wife, okay? I don’t need your one-eyed moon face casting judgment on me.”

  “I wasn’t judging you.”

  Vale laughed, pushed his big sunglasses up on his nose.

  No one spoke. We spent a few moments looking out at the hills. Customers again gave Vale the once-over, kept on their way.

  “Okay,” I said, “I was judging you. Fine. But listen. The shittiness of being even remotely drunk and driving aside”—Vale opened his mouth to speak, and I held up a hand—“the danger you’re putting other drivers and their families in, all that aside, open containers are a death-kiss. You really want to go to jail on a DUI charge in some piss-ass town on 101? It’s just a bad move.”

  Even before I was done talking, Vale was nodding in agreement. Acquiescence. Even with the bandage and the sunglasses on, the beard, I recognized the look he gave me. I recognized shrewdness when I saw it. This man so desperate for companionship, camaraderie. And I, so desperate to believe I was being guided somewhere that I would stick with him in spite of this idiocy. Portents and signs.

  A hell of a pairing, the two of us.

  13

  The gauge continued to tremble, the temperature continued to climb. The van sputtered and moaned, its shuddering visible to other cars. “Thank you,” Vale said, smiling and waving his hand in mock cheer as another driver made frantic motions beside them. “I had no idea what was going on. You drive a hybrid. A real steward of the earth, thank you.”

  Marvin looked out his mirror. “Well, we’re leaking water. We’re leaving a big stripe of water behind us.”

  Vale took the next exit and they pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart. Stop and start and stop again. “My entire fucking life is going to be gas stations and parking lots,” he said. The town was named Roseburg and seemed to be populated mostly by sullen, overweight rednecks and tanned retirees in bright pastel.

  They stepped into the cavernous building, Vale’s shoes clomping on the cement floor, and went to the customer service desk. He asked to use a phone book.

  The customer service guy wore a red vest and a bow tie and looked like he should have a pet monkey next to him clapping a pair of cymbals together. Vale could see the guy processing what the hell a phone book even was, and then he looked them over—brazenly and pretty haughtily for a man in a bow tie, Vale thought—and asked if they were customers.

  “Our van broke down,” Marvin said.

  The guy’s smile was so fake, it looked like he was passing a kidney stone. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. But I’ll need a sales receipt for you guys to use our phone.”

  Vale put his hands on the counter. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  The smile, a tilt of his head. The leer. “It’s policy, sir.”

  A few minutes later Vale came back to the customer service desk with a twelve pack and a receipt. The guy pulled a Yellow Pages from beneath the counter and pushed it over to him. There were a half dozen pages of listings for Auto Repair.

  Vale looked up. “I probably have to invest in company stock to use your phone, right?”

  “Here.” Marvin handed him his cell phone.

  Vale picked the listing for Gary’s Authentic Automotive and Towing because it sounded backwoods as hell. Why not? Go for the whole experience. How shittier could things get?

  The tow truck driver said he’d be there in fifteen minutes. Easy enough.

  “Thanks so much for your help,” Vale said to the customer service guy. Then he pushed the phone book off the counter with one finger and walked away.

  • • •

  The driver wore oil-stained coveralls and had a band of green barbed wire tattooed around his bicep, a bulb of chew fattening his lip. He lifted up the hood and stared thoughtfully at the engine for a grand total of roughly five seconds. “Tell you right now, guys, your water pump’s gone tits up. Hear that hissing? Shit’s done for.” He honked laughter and seconds later turned grim, eyeing the two of them, catching the vibe they were throwing out. “We’ll get you down to the shop and try to get it fixed up real quick.”

  Vale winced. “We’re in a bit of a rush.”

  The guy worked his chew around to an
other pocket of his mouth and winked at Marvin. He turned to Vale. “No worries. We ain’t exactly got water pumps for a ’98 Town and Country fallin’ out of our ass cracks over there, but I bet we can line something up. Can’t do a thing in the parking lot of the Walmart, though.”

  Vale and Marvin traded looks. “Okay,” Vale finally said. “Whatever.”

  “Okey doke. Let’s hook ’er up.”

  The driver slammed the hood shut and leaned over, releasing a terrific jet of black tobacco juice onto the pavement. The sun was beginning to sink below the lip of the valley. It was coming on dusk and they’d managed less than two hundred miles.

  14

  Jared Brophy was having a drink after his checkup. He was in some shithole in Silver Lake drinking with a bunch of kids thirty years younger than him. The news had been about what he’d expected—bad—so with a sense, this sudden urge, to just do one goddamned thing that didn’t seem preordained or inevitable, he’d driven around until he found a bar and ordered a G&T from a bartender with a straight-up bull ring through her nose. The alcohol supposedly wasn’t good for him but did it really matter at this point? Really?

  The bar was a faux-redneck deal called Lu-Lu’s. Wood paneling, a gigantic stuffed black bear on its hind legs in one corner. Singing bass on the walls. Framed posters of The Dukes of Hazzard and Jeff Foxworthy. They served—Jesus Christ—they served shots of mystery booze in spent shotgun shells, which had to be against some kind of code. And yet cans of PBR were still seven dollars.

  His gin and tonic could’ve fed his parents for two weeks when they were growing up. He marveled at this city, sometimes. At the very least, you had to have a trust fund or be a fucking executive to get drunk anywhere besides your own home. Where did these kids get the money? They all looked like they were skipping social studies to be here.

  Still, the booze helped, buoyed him a little. It’s not good, no, the doctor’d told him today, a gravity to his voice that had thus far been held in check. What he meant was obvious. The doctor might as well have been a singing fish himself, his one tune belted out again and again: You’re dying.