by Keith Rosson
Robby drank and fumed beside him. His glass looked tiny inside his gigantic furry hand. Vale couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he had hair on every knuckle on his finger, right down to the fingernail. Like a werewolf redneck in a plaid shirt. On the jukebox some cowgirl drawled in a voice heavy as syrup, “He’s my truckdrivin, fly-fishin, straight-shootin maaaaaaan. Uh-huh! And he knows just how I like it.”
“You’re buying yourself a world of hurt,” Robby said. “One shit storm bought and paid for. Not even on layaway.” Vale turned to him and smiled. The Moment would not be making an appearance tonight. But yes, something would be happening, he was sure of it. He felt loose-boned and impervious to harm. Robby could throw him against the wall and he would bounce off, not hurt until tomorrow. He would either sleep tonight in the glorious hammock of Maura’s breasts or be beaten to a pulp in a gravel parking lot by her monstrous, furry, estranged husband. Either one would work because either one was beyond where he was now. His head wobbled on his shoulders.
“This one cheated on me,” Maura said. “With that fat-assed Becky Tomlinson down at the Stihl outlet. ‘I gotta go get oil for the chainsaw, honey,’” she said in a shockingly good imitation of Robby’s baritone. “Coming home ten o’clock at night, reeking of poontang and motor oil, good God.”
“A man has needs,” Robby said petulantly, and Vale laughed.
Maura leaned over onto the bar again—a breathtaking spill of cleavage in his peripheral, and Vale’s eyes rabbited up to the television again—and said, “Yeah, well, you ain’t the only one. I know you’re hearing me over there.”
Jimmy came back and reluctantly pushed Maura’s drink across the bar. It was some cloudy pink thing that looked like he had poured some evil combination of liquor over a can of fruit cocktail. It emboldened her, and she put her arm around Vale’s neck, pushed her breasts against him. Jimmy Two did not give him any change.
“I might just take this buck right here,” Maura said.
Robby shook his head, wounded and shocked. “This dirty, scabbed-up motherfucker? You wouldn’t.”
Maura sucked some of her drink through a swirly red straw that lay shipwrecked in the fruity island of her glass. “You keep telling me what I will and won’t do, Robby. See what happens.”
“Maura—”
“How’s Becky these days? How’s your chainsaw, stud?”
“I told you I was sorry about it.”
“You told me one time you were sorry about it, and then you went and did it again!”
“What do you want me to do? Get down on my fuckin’ knees?”
“I want you to get the hell out of here. I’m on a date.” Maura cinched her arm tighter around Vale’s neck; he couldn’t help but think of Casper in a headlock a few hours before. She smelled like gin and hairspray and a perfume that reminded him of magazine samples. Her fingernails were painted turquoise, and he saw a line where her pale scalp met her orange spray-on tan and even in his embattled state felt the stirrings of an erection.
Vale grinned and placed his hand on the small of Maura’s back. “You blew it, Robby.”
Robby pushed himself off the bar and pulled Maura’s arm off of him. Then he put his own hand on the back of Vale’s neck. His fingers almost met at Vale’s throat, he was that big. “I don’t know what weird-ass, liberal Portland hobo camp you came out of, but it’s time for you to go back there, asshole.”
“Hell,” Maura said, leaning over and licking Vale’s ear. “Me and him might even put that shit up on YouTube, you never know.”
Robby, still with one hand around Vale’s neck, drew his other hand into a fist, held it out in front of Vale. He couldn’t help it, it was so silly: he laughed, and so did Maura.
And then someone behind them said, “Excuse me,” and Robby turned, bringing Vale along with him. And there was Marvin, whose head came roughly to Robby’s midsection. “I was wondering,” Marvin said absently, as if to begin some long-winded question about directions, and he struck his fingertips to the inside of Robby’s free arm, a little jab. It didn’t seem like much.
Robby promptly sank to his knees, his face opening up in a soundless scream.
Marvin looked up and said, “I got us a couple rooms, Mike.”
“Jesus fudge mothershit that hurts so bad oh my God—”
“We should get going,” Marvin said, as Robby gasped and pawed weakly at their knees with his good arm. “Lot of driving to do tomorrow.” Vale let himself be led away.
20
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
The English ordered the body burned three times. After they raked through the remains, a rumor wove through the stunned crowd: Joan’s heart lay uncharred among the ruins. Much of the crowd had vanished by then, but not all of them. Those that remained looked reproachful, dazed. Sick at what we’d done.
I heard a man cry out that there, there was her heart! Her heart! Though it was simply a bulb of red coal that glowed when revealed to the open air. Inside me whirled a funnel cloud of fear, the blooming certainty of damnation.
The ashes were burned again, men adding fresh tinder and hunks of wood to the ashes and char. We stood tending it throughout the rest of the day and then in the growing gloom.
It was dusk, and I could smell only woodsmoke by the time I was bid to rake the ash and gather it up in a wagon for transport to the Seine. I had already burned my gloves, the torchwood itself, all the things that were considered soiled and unusable. Night blued the building tops around us.
We dissipated without word, Cauchon’s appointed men and the English soldiers told to keep watch over us. I wandered the streets of Rouen in a daze as a dense rain began to fall, persistent but warm as whirling ash. All eyes, I was convinced, were upon me. I felt as if Death himself rode at my side. A boy passed by carrying a tankard of wine for delivery. I took it from him and flung some coins at his feet.
“Give it back!” he crowed, reaching for me.
I touched the halberd at my side and said, “Take your coins and run. Persist and it’s the gallows for you, boy.” He saw my coat, the maelstrom in my eyes, and fled. The stars wheeled above and the walls of the city pulsed with torchlight. I drank the wine. Few people were out that night.
The tavern quieted when I entered. I’d finished the tankard.
“Why the gloom,” I cried, toppling into the barman’s counter. “Why the silence when Death’s messenger enters?” Men shrank from me. I staggered to the hearth—my life seemed dedicated to flame this day—and pulled my blade from its scabbard. I waved it around, like a fool. “A pox upon us all!” I bellowed, wine-drunk and mad, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It shocked me. I could not remember the last time I’d been touched.
“Monsieur Thérage.”
Father Lavendu stood there with red-rimmed eyes. I knew him those few times we’d passed in the constabulary; he was more than once called in for sacraments and last rites among my prisoners.
I grinned. “I have damned myself, father. Make no mistake. It was me, lit the pyre of Joan of Orléans today.”
Lavendu’s smile was sad. Still his hand rested on my shoulder. “If you weren’t the flame-bearer today, someone else would have been.”
“I saw her soul leave her body,” I said, my voice wavering. I sank to a chair and wept, laying my cheek against the rough-hewn wood of the table.
My history of torture, my livelihood of ruination and murder, had culminated in this moment: broken down, drunk, weeping in front of a priest amid a roomful of men who loathed and feared me.
The barkeep came around the counter and stepped close, nervously eyeing the blade still in my hand. “Father, beg pardon, but he needs to leave. Paying folks should be close to the fire, not the likes of him. Men here are just as like to kill him right now anyway.”
“I understand,” Lavendu said.
I gripped the table with those killer’s hands and watched the barman flinch as I raised my head and howled in that dim room. Drunks cowered at the s
ound, pulled their shoulders to their ears.
Six hundred years later I cringe at the unabashed melodrama of it, but at the time? I meant it. I was anguished. I howled for myself, and for Joan, for what had been taken from us both. I’d hoped it would rend something inside me, change somehow the immutable fact of her death.
• • •
Vale stomped along beside me, slack-jawed, his footsteps heavy on the gravel. The air was heavy with night sounds, moths battering the lights along the motel eaves.
“How did you do that?” Vale slurred.
“Do what?”
“The thing with that guy’s arm. He was crying like a baby.” Vale belched, squinting his eyes shut and then opening them wide. “Like a gigantic, hairy, stupid baby that was full of shit.”
“You’re very drunk,” I said.
An odd byproduct of the Curse: muscle memory lived a surprising half-life. I’d sometimes find myself the recipient of blips and bursts of centuries-old information. Brushing my teeth above the record store, I’d suddenly remember the protocol for dissecting a cadaver in the seventeenth century or, I don’t know, how to operate a steam-powered printing press. I had a rudimentary, working remembrance of eight or ten languages.
When I stepped into the bar, one of those whispers had slipped in, some ghostly framework of jujitsu coming back to me. It wasn’t something I could control, and I probably couldn’t even do it again. It was like getting a melody stuck in your head for a bit.
Vale walked behind me, his chin dipped into breastbone, shoebox like a pillow tucked under his arm, weaving in the gravel.
I handed him the key to his room. He stabbed it toward the doorknob a few times. I took it back from him, let him in. His room was the same as mine: burnt-orange carpeting, faux wood paneling that would buckle against a toddler’s tantrum. I opened the drawer next to the bed and the corpse of a mosquito sat on top of a Bible, its wingspan almost as large as my hand.
Vale fell onto the bed face-first. “Forgot my backpack in the van,” he croaked, his face mashed into the pillow, his shoebox beside him.
“I’m not undressing you,” I said. “You’re on your own.”
“G’night, Marvin,” Vale slurred. “Thank you for saving me from the Hairy Shit Baby.” When I touched the doorknob, he said with an aching clarity and sounding entirely sober, “I really do miss my wife.”
I said, “Your wife?” but he was already out.
I turned out the lights and left. Then I went back in and put the wastebasket next to his head. In my own room, it took me a long time to get to sleep. I listened to the rattle of the pipes in the walls, the bursts of laughter and yelling and country music from the bar across the road. I thought of Joan and how she might have moved through a world like this, what she would have done here.
WEDNESDAY
1
They made their way down to the garage, Vale’s guts still twisted from his morning heave. The fields shone golden beyond the road, each blade of grass spotted with dew, the deep blue sky above flecked with a few ragged tatters of cloud.
It was gorgeous, and nausea clutched Vale like a jealous lover. Through the window of the Tip-Top they could see a few countermen drinking coffee, leafing through the morning paper, trading lies. Marvin walked with his face cast up toward the sun, the black lens of his glasses kicking back sparks from its reflection. The stride of the smug and sober, Vale thought, thumbing sweat from his eye. His hands were brick-like with cold, thrumming with tremors. His guts felt watery and loose, and some minor demon had clearly taken a shit inside his eye sockets in the middle of the night. The hangovers seemed to be getting worse.
“You want to get something to eat before we go? Might be a good idea.”
“Food? Christ, Marvin, you’re going to make me puke again.”
Gary greeted them in the dim cavern of the garage, the bay doors open to the day. He cast a shrewd eye at Vale, who stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, shivering; his ever-present shoebox tucked under one arm.
“God dang, somebody had some beers, looks like,” Gary said, clapping him on the shoulder. Vale grunted. The van sat there in the gloom, silent and grimy with dust. It was impossible to tell what had or had not been done to it.
“Well,” Gary said, packing a plug of chew into his bottom lip, “she’s ready to rip.”
Vale lifted his head. “It’s ready to go?”
“I fixed the ever-loving shit out of it, man.”
“We’re not going to get fifty miles down the road,” Vale said, “and some other piece of the engine seizes up or something.”
“I don’t believe so, bud, no. I fixed it, is what I’m saying.”
“Awesome. What do I owe you?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Gary said, looking thoughtfully at the dust-wracked van. “Don’t worry about it.”
Marvin frowned. “What do you mean, don’t worry about it?”
Gary walked out into the sunlight and spat on the gravel, his hands in his back pockets. “Listen, you guys seem nice enough.” He lifted his chin toward Vale. “You got a lot of stuff going on.” Vale couldn’t tell if Gary specifically meant his injury or just the general, overall mess that he was. “How about you just get down there to LA and we’ll call it good. Follow your dreams and all that shit.”
“No, really,” Vale said, beginning to pull back the taped flap of the shoebox. Any act of goodwill was one housed in treachery and deceit; Brophy had taught him that. No, he’d taught himself that. Life had taught him that. Nothing was free. This would inevitably bite him in the ass somewhere down the road. “I’m happy to pay you.”
“Seriously, keep your money,” Gary said.
“What’s the catch, man?”
Gary held out his hands, shrugged. “No catch. That pump was doing jack shit around here anyway. Like I said, if it isn’t built Ford tough, we don’t have much use for it around here.” Vale and Marvin traded glances. Marvin shrugged.
Back on the highway the day opened up blue and wide in front of them. Vale gripped his hands tight to the wheel to stop their shaking. He felt chilled beads of sweat on his forehead, the small of his back. The bottles beneath his seat sang out to him like sirens, cruel little brown-glassed mermaids calling out to this shipwreck of his body, his heart.
Marvin said, “You want me to drive?”
“I’m good,” he said. The bottles clinked against each other.
Let’s just shut up about it and get there, he thought. Let’s just do this one thing well.
2
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
After Joan came the winding down of my life.
While I still performed executions, still pulled corpses from the prisons and dispatched diseased animals at surrounding farms, I hired no apprentice to take my place. Word got around regarding my behavior at Rouen and in the tavern following. If it was possible, I became even more of a pariah.
I honestly, truly believed I was damned, heedless of what I did with my remaining days.
This alone made me a fearsome man for the first time in my life.
What had been cruelty measured with theater before now became staunch heartlessness. I lacked compunction. Joan’s death—and seeing her soul take flight through the smoke—had carved that from me. There would be no pardon from God.
In Rouen, in the hallways and stinking chambers beneath the constabulary, I would speak at length of my own damnation to the prisoners, my fear of it, my assuredness, as I performed any number of atrocities upon them. I’ve wondered since if this is where the seedling of my need to confess was planted. Christ, I hope not.
It horrified them, of course—my confession stacked upon what I did to their bodies, their minds.
I became wraithlike in my terror, my disregard.
Those last five years of my life, word spread throughout France: Fear the executioner, the old man Geoffroy Thérage, who believed himself the murderer of a saint. He’s crazy, and there’s nothing—absolutely no
thing—he won’t do to a man.
I sought out Father Lavendu once, but he had moved to another parish farther south, hoping assumedly to cast the pall of Joan’s killing from his eyes. The English stayed on and the war continued with victories for each swaying like the tide, the only constants being the ceaseless and unnecessary death of men and the dying of the crops. I, for my part, crossed the road whenever a holy man came near. I wanted no truck with it: Lavendu was the only religious man I’d have spoken to.
I dreamt of Joan, Cauchon, and damnation, all in equal measure.
My death came in 1436. Esme had died the year before of pneumonia, and as such, the home had fallen into great misuse. I paid a priest an astonishing sum to deliver last rites over her body. The desire to mourn was inside me, the idea of it, some small flower of grief that wanted to bloom, but it would not take root. I dug a grave and buried her next to our mother.
I slept solitary on a bed of damp straw and, alone now, felt the rats skitter over my legs in the night. Sections of the roof fell in. I spent my nights at home wrapped in rags, staring into the hissing hearth, my unwashed hands frequently darkened in the gore of recalcitrant men. I hardly ate. I looked for sigils of my future in the wavering coals.
My death, when it arrived, came from my horse. Of all things! Laughable. This was something I was to learn about death—how many ways besides war there are in which to die, the majority of them graceless and terrible, and so many of them full of a kind of dark mirth.
The mules, of course, had decades ago been butchered, and I had no use for a wagon anymore, as I needed little more than a simple blade and a gaze to extract confession or perform executions.
I had purchased a mare, old when I bought her; she had seemed a steady and diffident animal. I did not mistreat or abuse her: I could take the fingers off a man as if sawing through a rind of dry bread and I would feel nothing save my own impending doom, but the idea of ever hurting an animal simply did not cross my mind. The mare slept tethered in the house, her own sets of rags bundled over her for warmth.