Currency of Souls

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  That’s hardly a revelation.

  “Maybe when this is over,” she says. “If it ever is, and if you don’t end right along with it.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “The Reverend’s house,” she says.

  “Why there?”

  “Beats me.”

  This puzzles me. I can’t figure out what he’d want up there, unless Hill had something he needs. Or something Cadaver instructed him to get. But what?

  “I’m sorry.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “What for?”

  “For…” I don’t know how to apologize for thinking her nothing but a common whore. Don’t know how to apologize for a scar I didn’t give her, or for my son’s casual and tactless confessions. Or for the fact that this whole town’s gone to seed and I never once tried to stop it. And the only reason I’m saying a goddamn thing at all is because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to say it again.

  “Sheriff?”

  But there are no words, and if there are, I don’t know them, so I do what any man does when what he feels he has to say gets lodged like a chicken bone in his throat.

  I tip my hat and leave.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hendricks opens the door to a scarecrow in a top hat.

  “What?” he asks, unwilling to extend even the pretense of courtesy to a man he once caught urinating on his doorstep.

  “Doc,” Kirk Vess says, crossed eyes wide. “You’re awake, good. That’s good.” As he searches for words that seem to be dangling just beyond his grasp, he snatches his hat from his head, revealing a greasy nest of hair that resembles a mound of limp noodles heaped atop a dirty upended bowl. Beneath the pallid brow and contradictory eyes, a single drop of clear snot, sweat, or water dangles from the tip of a fishhook nose, which in turn presides over an impossibly wide mouth, packed to capacity with thin black teeth. Hendricks has often wondered, judging by his scars and the man’s erratic behavior, if Vess, at some point in his unremarkable life, donated his brain to science. It summons the comical image of a bunch of perplexed medical students clustered around a stainless steel pan wherein stews Vess’s brain. Good lord, it shouldn’t be that shape should it? one might inquire, while another asks, Where’s the rest of it?

  Of Vess, he knows very little, except that the man is homeless and given to outbursts of violence, and that come autumn, he will disappear, to reappear in the first week of winter. What he does during this absence is unknown, but there are few, if any, folks in Milestone who care enough to ask.

  “Good, good,” Vess says again, fingering with pale tapered fingers the brim of a hat as flaccid as the man himself. He wears a coat torn at the elbows and frayed at the hem, the lapels encrusted with a substance of some indeterminate origin. He reeks of urine, alcohol and vomit, from his scabrous scalp to his sole-less boots.

  “What are you doing here?” Hendricks snaps. “If you’ve come to beg…”

  Vess squints, leans in a little as if unsure of what’s been said, then gasps and raises his hands, the hat flopping wildly as he protests. “No sir, no sir. Not money. What am I doing here? Big question. Keep asking it and no one has an answer. Course, they couldn’t really.” He shakes his head, dismissing a thought that perhaps didn’t even make sense to him. “I didn’t want to bother you for nothing, truth be told. But I had to ask someone who’d know where it might have come from or who might own it.”

  Annoyed, and loath to waste any more time on this odious creature, Hendricks takes a step back, intending to close to door. Vess’s pleas stop him. “No, wait! Sorry, sir. Just a tick. A sweep of sixty, please. I’ll show it to you.” He starts to rummage around in his pockets, which look flat and empty. “I kept it safe as I could, but it looks dead a long time.”

  Intrigued despite himself, yet fully expecting the man will produce a dead rodent from one of those pockets, Hendricks only closes the door half way, just enough to let Vess know if this is some ridiculous scheme, it will be revealed to the morning breeze and a quiet street, but not a gullible doctor.

  Frustrated, Vess begins to chastise himself in what sounds like an alien dialect. “Fffteck! Shlassen shlack!” Then with an apologetic look, he calms himself and reaches into the inside pocket of his coat. “Yes, yes. I knew it. I’m a fool,” he says and slaps a grubby palm against his forehead hard enough to make Hendricks jump. “Yes, hidden and safe,” Vess tells him and withdraws from the pocket a small brown bundle, which Hendricks mistakes for a stubby cigar. But as he prepares a suitably bemused tone with which to deliver his verdict, Vess, pale worm-like tongue poking from between his teeth, reverently unwraps the small parcel and holds it up, inches from the doctor’s face.

  “I found more, but I wasn’t sure whether disturbing it was a good idea. I don’t need no ghosts on my tail. Isn’t that right? Not when I’m out of place.”

  Hendricks doesn’t answer. Instead, ignoring the smell from the man, he adjusts his spectacles and steps closer.

  “Told her I’d bring it back before she even know’d it was gone. Have to respect women you know. Even I know that and I’ve forgotten a lot.”

  Hendricks raises his eyes and appraises the man anew, not because he has developed any kind of respect or admiration for his guest, but because he is now as suspicious and wary of Vess as he would be toward any man who showed up at his door with the remains of a human finger in his pocket.

  * * *

  Iris is on my mind as I steer the truck out of Winter Street. Woman like that makes me think of the future, no matter what she does for a living or how screwed up she may be because of it. Makes me want to help her, to fix her somehow, and in the process maybe fix myself. And that doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t know a damn thing about her except that she’s a whore, that she’s been with any number of men, including my son, and I’m not sure that’s something I wouldn’t see in her every time she smiled at me.

  I can’t shake the feel of her lips on mine, though. It’s enough to distract me, take me away from the cruelty I’ve brought down on myself, to a place where everything isn’t sharp edges and pain, death and ruin. A place I’d like to stay, and might have, if Brody hadn’t just jerked me out of my thoughts.

  “Check that out,” he says, sounding amused. “There’s someone out there.”

  I check the rearview to see where he’s looking and then I spot it.

  I’m a little ways past Hendricks’ place when I slam down hard enough on the brakes to make the truck shudder into a fishtail. The smoke from scalded rubber sweeps past my window.

  “Jesus,” Brody groans, grunting as he shifts himself back onto the seat.

  Bloodshot dawn glares at me from over the hills.

  Between this road and the river, there’s a field. Dan Cannon, the previous occupant of the house Doc Hendricks now calls home, used to grow corn there. Now it’s barren and yields only a harvest of rocks. Tonight, someone has lit a fire in there a few feet from an oak tree with spindly branches that was the bane of Cannon’s prematurely short existence, and from here, I can see a figure moving sluggishly around it, the flames revealing a craggy ruined face I’m too afraid to admit I know, disfigurement and all.

  “Isn’t that…?”

  “Yeah,” I mutter. Milestone doesn’t have two giants. After what happened at Eddie’s it shouldn’t even have one. But that’s Wintry up there, doing what looks to be some kind of a slow-motion drunken war dance around the fire.

  * * *

  “You know what to do,” Cadaver says. He is hidden in the shadows beside the tree, shadows that refuse to be burned away by the light from the fire. Wintry tries to fill his lungs with enough air to power the words, but gives up at the realization that there is nothing he can say that the old man doesn’t already know. He wants to die now, but it appears even in his darkest fantasies he’s been wrong to think even an end to his suffering would come without a price. And tonight, here, that price has taken the shape of a dark pair of hands wriggling their way free of t
he oak tree’s trunk, pushing forth from the rotten bark, thick fingers trembling.

  It is dark despite the fire.

  It is cold despite the heat.

  And those hands, now clenching and unclenching at the end of scarred and meaty forearms, are hands Wintry knows.

  Near the roots of the tree, a battered work shoe is wrested free. Dirt and bark tumble; the fissure widens. At the top of the tree, almost but not quite at eye level, pale white orbs, striated opals, fix Wintry with a raging glare. Beneath it a sharp nose, shooting breath to clear the passages of bark and rot. Inevitably then, a mouth, dirty teeth bared above a pointed chin bearded with moss.

  “Loser,” says the black devil as he jerks free of the tree to stand before his son. “No-good sonofabitchin’ loser.”

  “You know what to do,” Cadaver says again, but now that there are two men before the fire, it is unclear to Wintry who is being addressed. His father does not spare the old man a glance, but nods faintly.

  “Pop,” Wintry croaks.

  “Lucius,” his father says, and the mere mention of Wintry’s given name is enough to unleash a cascade of unwanted memory:

  That voice, resentful, and almost always raised in anger.

  That mouth, sneering, twitching a little with each punch of those piston-like arms, smiling slightly at the cries, the injury, the fear.

  Those hands, blackening his mother’s eye, shattering her nose, loosening her teeth.

  Those hands…tousling the boy’s hair before bedtime, before the bad time.

  Those hands, ripping off his clothes, breaking his bones.

  Those hands. Around his neck, squeezing. And the words: Toughen up you little shit. Fight me. I’ll keep hittin’ until you do.

  “How are you here?” Wintry asks, softly, not because he is threatened, which he is, but because his throat is raw and sore and the words feel like rocks being forced through a whistle.

  “Don’t matter.” His father takes a step closer. He is a big man, bigger than his son but not as tall. The difference never mattered though. His father’s fists were always a great leveler, as Wintry suspects they will be now. “What matters is I’m here, and I’m more here than you, palooka.”

  He advances another step and Wintry, already quivering from the shock of his injuries, is close to rattling free of the shoes that have been melted to his feet. Into the firelight steps his father, a man who, until tonight, existed only in memory.

  “I don’t want this,” Wintry says, then turns his head to look at Cadaver who appears to have woven himself into a mesh of dead branches. “Make it stop.”

  “Only you can do that, son,” Cadaver replies.

  Narrow face taut with rage, the man before the fire chuckles. “Hell, he ain’t gonna do shit. He ain’t never done a damn thing worth a damn thing. He nothin’ but a worthless punk sent to steal all I had from me and make my wife ashamed of what she let into the house.” His smile widens, teeth gleaming in the amber light. “Shit. He didn’t find out till prison that we wasn’t his folks.”

  Wintry sighs. “What do you want with me?”

  “To put you down, boy. Just that. To put you down so’s you remember what you done.”

  “I don’t need to fight you to remember.”

  “Sure you do. You think you got ghosts now Lucius, but you’re forgettin’ all the good ones. All the real big mean ones, ain’t that right ’ol man?”

  Cadaver says nothing, just goes on watching.

  “So right here, tonight, me and you’s gonna dance. You gonna get the chance to swing a few, see if time’s taught you somethin’, see if you grew some balls up the river, and if you don’t, then you gonna be hurtin’ even worse by the time I get through with you. But I’ll be your Pop for a spell and do you a favor, for ’ol times sake. I’ll let you in on a secret.”

  Whatever the secret is, Wintry has no desire to hear it. The fire is licking at his skin though he’s far enough on the other side of it to be out of reach of the flames, and the worst of the heat. Every nerve screams with pain, every muscle spasms, every organ revolts. He wants to lay down and die, most certainly does not want to be here in the heat facing down a man who died of prostate cancer while his son was in prison.

  “For every blow I land on that cooked-up face of yours, you’ll remember somethin’ you forgot. You’ll remember some of the bad things you done that you don’t blame yourself for no more. You’ll see the little bits of truth. You’ll see yourself. Then maybe you’ll understand why I was the way I was with you.” His father leans over the fire enough to let the flames singe his short scraggly beard. “I saw what you was becomin’ boy, and you was becomin’ me.”

  For just a moment, Wintry sees an aspect of the devil floating in the flames. “You want me to fight you?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” His father is enthused. “Go a few rounds with your old man, see what happens. See what you remember. See if you’ve changed.”

  “I…can’t fight. I’m hurt bad.”

  “Everybody hurtin’, Lucius. That shit don’t fly with me. Think I weren’t hurt when my brother dropped you off on my doorstep with no money to keep you? Think I weren’t hurt when my wife left me for a bucktoothed guitar playin’ crackhead from San Antone? Think I weren’t hurtin’ when every bit of company I tried to keep got scared off as soon as they heard tell of a kid? Or when they fired me from a job I’d had for over thirty years? Fired for drinkin’ and why, Lucius? Why was I drinkin? Because nothin’ ever worked right for me, and you weren’t nothing but another wrong thing in it. Everythin’ I had I gave up to raise you right and you fought me all the way no matter what I did to toughen you up. So you stand tall now boy and be a man. Fight me for the last time. This here’s long overdue.”

  Wintry raises his head, realizes that at some point during his father’s seething monologue, he has fallen to his knees. The wet grass burns rather than soothes and it takes every ounce of strength he has left to stand again. When he does, the fire turns gray, then a darker red, and the hands, his father’s awful hands are poking through it and separating, like a swimmer parting water.

  Tongues of flame lash from the fire, one of them narrowly avoiding Wintry’s face. Instinctively he ducks, groans and shields his eyes, wondering as he does so why his father spoke so passionately about fighting if he means to burn him alive. But the fire carries on past him until it touches the grass a few feet away and ignites. It is as if someone has touched a match to a gasoline trail poured in a perfect rectangle. The perfect shape for a boxing ring, the name of which has always puzzled him, because it isn’t a ring at all.

  “This won’t…” Wintry starts to say, but gives up, the words too heavy in a mouth too weak.

  “Straighten up,” his father commands, and steps through the flames. Wisps of smoke curl from the shoulders and sleeves of his denim jacket, which he shrugs off to reveal a soiled and yellowed vest beneath. The gray tangle of his chest hair streams smoke, blackens and curls. He stands three feet from his son. “Let’s go boy.” Sinewy muscles grow taut as he assumes a fighting posture, shoulders hunched slightly forward, fists raised so that only his eyes are visible above the dark work-roughened knuckles. He bounces every so slightly on his toes, an old man trying to prove he’s still as fast as he was in his glory days.

  “I can’t fight you.”

  “You can and will. Don’t you disappoint me again boy. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

  Wintry shakes his head. “You’re dead.”

  “Not tonight I ain’t. Now put ’em up and fight, you little pussy.”

  Wintry looks at him, at this impossible caricature of his father, fashioned from oak and clay and ivy, and hate, and shakes his head again. “You want me to hit you. That all?”

  “Be a fine start.”

  Cadaver is still just a shadow and quieter than the dark. Watching.

  Abruptly, there is a sound like a baseball hitting a bag of cement and darkness explodes before Wintry’s eyes. The world d
rops away, he falls—for a brief moment he is floundering weightless in outer space—and then the ground slams into his side, eliciting a silent cry of pain from him as burned flesh is crushed. Stars whirl across his field of vision; the wounds on his face ignite anew. The earthy smell of wet grass and the fiery agony in his skull keep him from tumbling headlong into merciful unconsciousness.

  “Now,” his father says. “That’s one. You should’ve seen it comin’. Pay attention.”

  Wintry tastes fresh blood on his lips. He opens his eyes wide. Field and fire are gone; his father vanished. This is no longer Milestone, but a back alley somewhere in Georgia. Wintry is lying on his side in a puddle. It’s cold, and soothing, and for a moment he relishes the relief, until he realizes there are people around him. He raises his head, into the rain of which he has only now become aware, and sees water sluicing down the groove in the barrel of a silver gun. Above it, made blurry by the rain, the gloom, the steam that billows from the vents in walls around the alley, and the proximity of the muzzle, which demands his attention, he sees a smile just as silver as the weapon. A man with a hat nods, cocks the hammer.

  “Who the bitch now?” the man says and starts to pull the trigger.

  Drawing from memory infinitely stronger than the pain, Wintry is on his feet, almost slipping on the slick concrete, then hunkered low and running, not away, but into the man with the gun, the man who he knows has been hanging around the gym, offering the kids little baggies, parachutes from which he promises an escape from the doomed plane of their lives, fairy dust to sprinkle on their troubles. Caught by surprise, the man does not do as he is expected to do. He does not quickly alter his aim. Instead he throws up his hands, the gun drawn back as if he intends to use it as a weapon, but by then it’s already too late. Driven by fury Wintry plows into him…

  …and there is fire, and cold, and pain. And his father, looming over him.