Currency of Souls

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  No one says anything.

  There is silence except for the clink of Cadaver’s pennies.

  A few moments later, Cobb starts swearing into the phone.

  No one is surprised.

  I raise my glass with a muttered: “To Blue Moon,” in honor of the man who can’t be here, and take the first sip of whiskey. It cauterizes my throat. I hiss air through my teeth. Flo goes back to talking to Wintry, leans in a little closer, one leg crossed over the other, one shoe awful close to brushing against the big black man’s ankle, and there’s that envy again. But I remind myself that she’s probably only cozying up to him because he’s mute, and therefore unlikely to ever ask her about her past. For the second time in a handful of minutes, I’m covetous of Wintry’s condition.

  Cobb slams down the phone, curses and stalks back to the bar, his flaccid tool whacking against his thigh. I close my eyes, pray my gorge can handle another night of the old man’s exhibitionism and concentrate on refilling my glass.

  “She weren’t there,” he mutters before anyone has a chance to ask, and slaps a hand on the counter. “Fill me up, Gracie,” he says. “And make it same as Tom’s. It’ll keep me warm on the walk home.”

  I almost expect Cadaver to remind Cobb of his offer, but Cadaver is ill, not dumb. He says nothing, just keeps on counting those pennies.

  “You make it sound like you can just walk outta here as you please,” Gracie says scornfully. “You take a blow to the head, or is all the drink just makin’ you dumber?”

  “He ain’t the boss of me,” Cobb says, scowling like a sulky teen. There’s no passion in his voice, no truth to his words. Everyone here knows that, just like we know a little brave talk never hurts, as long as you only do it among friends.

  “You reckon he’ll show up tonight, Tom?” Flo asks, twirling a lock of her hair around a fingernail the color of blood.

  “I reckon so.”

  She sighs, and turns her back on me. Flo wants hope, wants me to tell her that maybe tonight will be special, that maybe for the first Saturday night in years, Reverend Hill isn’t going to come strolling in that door at eleven o’ clock, but I can’t. I realized a long time ago that I’m a poor liar, and despite the gold badge on my shirt, no one should look to me for hope, or anything else.

  From the corner comes a sound like a dead branch snapping. It’s Cadaver clucking his tongue. Seems a coin slipped off the top of one of his miniature copper towers.

  Gracie goes back to pretending she’s cleaning the bar.

  Cobb grumbles over his beer.

  Occasionally I catch Wintry looking at my reflection in the mirror. What I see in his dark eyes might be concern, even pity, but if I was him, I wouldn’t be bothering with the mirror, or me, not when Flo’s breathing in his ear. Besides, I’m not looking for sympathy, only solutions, and I don’t reckon there’s any to be had here tonight or any other.

  The heat from the kid’s glare is reliable as any fire on a winter’s night.

  These are my friends.

  Chapter Two

  The clock draws out the seconds, the slow sweep of the narrow black minute hand unable to clear the face of a decade’s worth of dust. When at last it reaches eleven, with no sign among us patrons that any time has passed at all, there comes the sound of shoes crunching gravel.

  Everyone tries real hard not to watch the door, but there’s tension in the air so tight you could hang your washing off it.

  Reverend Hill enters, and with him comes the rain, and not the spatters Cadaver announced, but a full-on tacks-poured-on-a-metal-roof downpour. Bastard couldn’t have timed it better, though if it inspires an impromptu sermon from him, he’ll have trouble getting anyone to believe God is responsible, no more than we’d buy that the silvery threads of rain over his shoulder are strings leading to the hand of a divine puppeteer.

  For him, the door groans as he shuts out the storm.

  He doesn’t pause to regard each of us in turn like any other man would, gauging the company he has to keep, or counting the sinners. Instead, that confident stride carries his lean black-clad self right on up to the bar, where Gracie’s stopped cleaning and watches him much the same way the kid at the next table is watching me. Except, of course, Kyle’s not looking at me right now. All eyes are on the holy man.

  The town of Milestone has rotten luck, much like the people who call it home, though to be fair, over time we may have grown too fond of blaming the things we bring upon ourselves on chance, or fate. It’s more likely that bad people, or folks with more to hide than their own towns can tolerate gravitate here, where no one asks questions and they carry their opinion of you in their eyes, never on their tongues.

  When Reverend Hill came to town, filling a vacancy that had been there for three years, he brought with him the hope that spiritual guidance might chase away the dark clouds that have hung over the people of Milestone since Reverend Lewis used his belt, a rickety old chair, and a low beam in his bedroom to hasten his rendezvous with his maker.

  But in keeping with the town’s history of misfortune—or whatever you want to call it—what Hill brought to Milestone wasn’t hope, but fear.

  “Rum, child,” he tells Gracie, and leans against the counter right next to Cobb. He makes no attempt to conceal his disgust for the naked man. Hill has beady eyes, too focused, self-righteous, and intense, to bother with color of any determinate hue. I’m convinced those eyes can see through walls, which may explain why no one in Milestone goes to confession anymore. He has eyebrows a woman would kill for, plucked and arched like chapel naves, a long thin nose that spreads out at the end to allow him the required amount of air with which to fuel his bluster, and a thin pale-lipped mouth that sits like a scar above a pointed chin. At a guess I’d say he’s about sixty, but his age seems to change with his mood. The dim light shuns his greased back hair, which is artificially black. Everything about the guy is artificial, as we discovered not long after he came to town.

  Some folks think he’s the devil.

  I don’t, but I’m sure they’ve met.

  “Evenin’, Reverend,” Cobb says, without looking at the man. Cobb’s afraid of Hill. We all are, but the nudist’s the only one who greets him.

  “What do the young children of Milestone think when they see you walking the streets with your tool of sin flapping in front of their faces, Cobb?” the Reverend asks, louder than is necessary. “Immodesty is a flagstone on the path to Hell, or were you operating under the false assumption that nakedness is next to Godliness? Think your “gift” gives you the freedom to disregard common decency?”

  Cobb turns pink all over, and doesn’t reply.

  The Reverend grins. His large piano key teeth gleam. Gracie sets his drink down in front of him. She doesn’t wait for payment.

  I’m alarmed to find myself choked up, gut jiggling, trying to contain a laugh. “Tool of sin” is bad, even for Hill. Sure, he makes my skin crawl every time I see him, but even though I know there’s nothing funny about this situation, nothing funny about what goes down here in Milestone’s only functioning bar at this same time every Saturday night. As it turns out, the humor must already have been on my face, because those coal-dark eyes of his move from Cobb’s pink mass to me, and his grin drops as if someone smacked him across the face.

  “Something funny, Tom?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Your smile says different.”

  “Who can trust a smile these days, Reverend? I sure don’t trust yours.”

  That’s enough to give him his grin back. He scoops his rum off the counter and saunters over to my table with all the confidence of a man who enjoys his work, who’s going to enjoy knocking the town sheriff down a few pegs. He drags back the empty chair opposite me, sits, and studies me for a second. I feel like carrion being appraised by a vulture.

  His face is only a shade darker than the little rectangle of white at his collar.

&nb
sp; “Tell me something, Tom.”

  “Shoot.”

  At this, Hill looks over his shoulder, to where the kid is still sweating, but I’m willing to bet that sweat’s turned cold now. The Reverend turns back and winks. “Better not say that too loud. Someone might take you up on it.”

  “He’s confused,” I tell him, and take a sip of my whiskey. Beer’s a pleasant drink, and requires patience; whiskey’s a straight shot to the brain, and I need that now if I’m going to act tough in front of the only man in Milestone who scares me. “He should be gunning for you.”

  Thunder rattles the rafters; the smoked glass flickers with light, illuminating the rain pebbled across its surface.

  “Maybe so,” the Reverend says, “But he knows better than to shoot a man of the cloth. He’s a God-fearing soul. He wants vengeance without damnation.”

  “Bit late for that isn’t it?”

  His lips crease in amusement. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  I decide not to humor him. “Who is it tonight?”

  Cadaver has stopped counting his pennies.

  “Straight to it, eh? I like that.”

  “Cut the bullshit.”

  He clucks his tongue. “Profanity. The mark of an ignorant man.”

  I wish that were true. I’d love to be ignorant, sitting here with my drink, trading barbs with a priest who may or may not be the devil himself. At least then I wouldn’t see what’s coming.

  “So who’s driving?” I ask, and everyone but Wintry turns to look. He’s watching the mirror.

  The Reverend reaches into his pocket and tosses a pair of car keys on the table between us. “You are,” he says, and every hard-earned ounce of my defiance is obliterated. He might as well have shoved a grenade down my throat and locked me in iron skin. I release a breath that shudders at the end. No one in the bar sighs their relief but I see shoulders relax, just a little, and hear the clink of Cadaver’s pennies as he goes back to counting.

  On the table, there’s a ring of six keys. Three of them are for the prefabricated hut that passes as my office. Two are for the front and back doors of the prefabricated hut that passes as my house. The last one’s for my truck, and the keys have fallen so that one is sticking straight up, toward the Reverend. It’s not a coincidence.

  “You know how it goes,” he says, and sits back in his chair. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be all that surprised. You’ve dodged the bullet for quite a while, haven’t you?”

  His face swells with glee. I imagine if I punch him right now, which is exactly what every cell in my body is telling me to do, his head would pop like a balloon. But no matter how satisfying that might be it won’t change the fact that tonight my number’s come up. I get to drive. Hill, son of a bitch that he is, is still only a messenger, a courier boy. Putting a hurting on him wouldn’t make a difference.

  Cobb speaks up, “Hell, Tom, I’ll drive for you. It’d keep me out of the rain. Besides, I told ’ol Blue Moon I’d take him up a bottle of somethin’. Kill two birds with one stone, right?” His nervous grin is flashed for everyone’s approval, but he doesn’t get it. No one even looks at him, except me, and though I don’t say it, I’m grateful. I know Cobb walks around in the nip for one reason only—he wants to be noticed, remembered for something other than his gift, or maybe he does it to draw attention away from it. A hey look everybody! Underneath my clothes I’m just the same as you! kind of gesture. It doesn’t work, and I guess, like the rest of us, he’s tired of trying, tired of waiting here every Saturday night to find out if he’s going to have to murder someone else. Considering what he can do, and what he’s had to do in the past, it’s got to be tougher on him than most of us. Like being God and the Devil’s Ping-Pong ball. I also know, even if the Reverend allowed it, Cobb wouldn’t follow the rules tonight. Chances are, he’d drive my battered old truck right off the Willow Creek Bridge, be smiling while he drowned and poor old Blue Moon Running Bear would have to go without his whiskey for a little while longer.

  “Very noble of you,” Hill says, sounding bored. “But this isn’t a shift at the sawmill. There’s no trading.” He looks Cobb up and down. “But don’t worry. You’ll get your turn. You get that car yet?”

  “Wife doesn’t let me drive it. Not here. Not when I’ll be drinkin’.”

  “Then either lie or quit drinking. But get it.”

  “All right.”

  Cobb offers me a sympathetic glance. I wave it away and look hard at the priest. “Who is it?”

  From the breast pocket of his jacket, he produces a pack of Sonoma Lights. “Anyone got a light?”

  When no one obliges, Gracie tosses him a box of matches, which he grabs from the air without looking—an impressive trick that leaves me wishing like hell he’d fumbled it. He lights his cigarette and squints at me through a plume of blue smoke. “You want the name?”

  “No. I’d like to keep what little sleep I get at night. Unless you want to take that too.”

  “Oh now, would you listen to this? You make it sound as if you’re the victim!” He barks a laugh and swivels in his chair to face the bar. “Is that what all of you think? That I’m the bad guy, come to destroy your lives?” He turns again, addressing Cadaver and the kid this time. “That you’re all just innocents, forced to do the bidding of some wicked higher power?” He shakes his head in amazement. “Don’t fool yourselves folks. Until I came along you were hanging in Purgatory, waiting for a decision to be made either way. You should be thanking me that you’re not all roasting in the fires of Hell.”

  “So that’s not what this is then?”

  He leans close, eyes dark, twin threads of blue smoke trailing from his wide nostrils. “Not even close, Deputy Dawg.”

  We stare at each other over the table. I try to will the kid to take his shot. I don’t even care who he hits. But the kid isn’t moving, just watching, just like everyone else. The rain keeps raining and the thunder keeps thundering, but inside Eddie’s there isn’t a sound, until I speak.

  “This will end, you know.” It’s a threat that has no weight behind it. I want this to be over; I want things to be the way they were before my wife died, before the kid got it into his head that my skull would look better spread across the wall; before we all ended up here as slaves to our sins, but it’s too late. There’s no turning back now. Things have gone too far. Hill knows this, knows surer than shit that all of us are going to be here next Saturday night and the Saturday night after that, and the one after that until we’ve paid off whatever debt it is he’s decided—or more accurately, whoever controls him has decided—we owe.

  But tonight isn’t going to be that night, and as blue light fills the cracks in the rundown bar, I reach across and slide the keys toward me.

  “I know it will end,” the Reverend answers, and pauses to take a deep drag on his cigarette. “Tonight it ends for you.”

  I close my fist around the keys and let them bite into my palm.

  “You get a thief and his girlfriend,” he continues. “The guy shot a pump jockey in the face, killed a woman and injured a little kid. The girlfriend’s an addict and a whore. No one will miss them.”

  “Someone will. Someone always does.”

  The priest sits back again and smiles. “That’s not for us to worry about.”

  “Not for you maybe.”

  “These missives from your goody-goody conscience are getting to be a real bore, Tom.”

  “This, from a priest.”

  His smile fades. “You’d best get moving, Sheriff. Your people need you.”

  I throw back what’s left of the whiskey, then grab the bottle to keep me company. Hill won’t object—he likes us good and drunk—and though Gracie might be pissed that she’s out a few dollars, she won’t say anything either. She understands the nature of dirty work.

  I stand and jingle the keys in my palm. “When this is over,” I tell him. “You’re the only one going to Hell.”

  He doesn’t answer. Instea
d he slides my glass in front of him and puts his own thumb over the print. It fits perfectly. He chuckles and turns his chair around so he’s facing the bar. Flo avoids his gaze and slips her hand over Wintry’s. Everyone goes back to doing a real bad job of pretending nothing’s amiss.

  At my back, Cobb grumbles on.

  The few steps to the front door feel like a condemned man’s walk to the electric chair, the lightning through the windows only adding to the effect.

  As I reach the door and grab the brass handle, the lightning reveals the skeletal profile hunkered nearby, the shadows of the coin towers like knives jabbing at his chest. He’s looking out the window, darkness pooling in the hollows of his eyes as, in what passes for a whisper, he says, “Someone’s comin’.” Then I hear it. Hurried footsteps, confused shuffling, and I move back just in time to avoid getting my face mashed in by a hunk of weathered oak as the door bursts open almost hard enough to knock it off its hinges. Rain, wind and shadows fill the doorway. Without knowing, or caring who it is that’s standing on the threshold, I lunge forward, plant my hand in the middle of the figure’s chest and shove them back out into the storm. “Get the hell out of here,” I tell them, in as hard a voice as I can muster under the circumstances. Hill would love this, more recruits for his twisted game. But whoever it is I’ve just tried to dissuade, grunts, pivots on a heel, slams back against the door for balance and reaches out an arm toward where I’m standing, ready for anything.

  Anything but the gun that’s suddenly thrust in my face, the steel barrel dripping rainwater. “Get the fuck back inside,” a man’s voice says, and then a woman stumbles forth from the darkness and collapses on the floor. The rain that drips from her sodden form is pink. She’s bleeding somewhere but right now all my attention is focused on the black eye of the gun that’s three inches from my nose.