by Unknown
“But that girl wasn’t done yet. She hitchhiked across two states and caught up with us at the next gig. She caused a big scene. Billy slapped her face, and she stomped off madder than a hornet. When we pulled out that night, nobody knew it, but Roxie had stowed away down in the baggage compartment”
Jimmy looked at me. “It was January, on a night like this. The temperature was down in single digits when we made the long haul through North Dakota. When we got to the next town, I opened the luggage compartment and found her frozen to death. She was blue.”
Jimmy’s voice cracked. “Poor little thing. I didn’t know she was down there. I…” His voice trailed off.
I said, “It wasn’t your fault, Jimmy. You had no way of knowing.”
Jimmy made no reply.
“And now she haunts this bus,” I whispered. “A restless spirit caught between worlds.”
Jimmy looked at me and frowned. “Now she’s revealed herself to you. She’s never done that before.”
“What does that mean?”
Jimmy’s face sagged. “I don’t know.”
We rolled through the night. All the other guys were asleep. I couldn’t make myself go back to the bunk so I stretched out in the back lounge. Skull had crawled to his bunk and was snoring peacefully down the aisle. I had the room to myself. I read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
As I drifted into slumber, a sweet odor drifted past my nostrils. I recognized the scent of clove cigarette smoke. Alarms went off inside my head. My eyes jerked open and there she was, naked in front of me.
There was no mistaking her intentions. “Come here,” she whispered through smeared lipstick. “I need you.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“What about him?”
“He loves you.”
“He was the only one who was nice to me. But now, you can be nice to me.” She slid into my lap.
I held up my hands. “I can’t do this. I just can’t.”
I felt the bus decelerate. Roxie pressed against me. I tried to stand, but she pinned me down with supernatural force. The bus rolled to a stop, and I heard the parking brake crank. Roxie would not stop. Within moments my face was smeared with her lipstick.
The door to the back lounge kicked open, and Jimmy waddled in with his two best friends, Smith and Wesson.
“I knew it! I just knew it!”
He aimed his pistol at me. It was a blue steel .38 S&W revolver with powder burns on the barrel. My heart pounded. Instantly, a million pores in my skin each secreted a tiny drop of sweat. It happened so fast that it momentarily stung like a thousand pinpricks. In a heartbeat I was bathed in sweat.
I could taste the fear in my mouth. It was the most scared I’d ever been.
Jimmy’s voice seemed to come from another world. He sounded distant and distorted.
“That’s my woman you’re messin’ with. Now you gotta die!”
“Hold on, Jimmy! Just hold on a minute! Let’s think this out, okay?”
I was talking fast now, like a used car salesman.
“Jimmy! Who are you gonna kill? You can’t kill her because she’s already dead. You can’t kill me because then I’d be dead too, and I’d be with her. You don’t want us to be together in the afterlife, do you? Well, that’s what will happen if you kill me. I’ll be haunting this bus too, along with Roxie. You don’t want that to happen, right?”
Jimmy’s voice was dry and bitter. “What was she doin’ with you?”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “She was all over me, man, but I didn’t touch her. I can’t. I really and truly prefer live women. Swear to God.”
Jimmy kept the pistol raised and pointed at me.
I said, “How do we know she didn’t plan this?”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “Why would she do that?”
“Well, if she wants to get it on with me, the best thing for her to do is get me dead. Then she’d have me all to herself. Now, I gotta figure she knows you pretty well, and she knew you’d fly into a jealous rage and pull your gun if you caught us together. So, it’s entirely possible that she engineered the whole thing.”
The gun barrel drooped slightly. Jimmy looked at Roxie.
“Is that true?”
Instead of answering, Roxie disappeared. She winked out and left Jimmy alone with the gun in his hand and decisions to make. I could see tears welling up in his eyes.
He shook his head. “My life ain’t worth a damn anymore. All I do is drive this rolling shithouse, day after day, year after year. I don’t even have a home address. I live on the road twelve months a year.”
I didn’t answer him. He had the gun. I waited to see what he would do.
“I wanna be with her,” he whimpered. “I love her.”
Part of my brain could see what was coming. Another part wanted nothing more than for Jimmy to put the gun down. Whatever happened after that was all right, as long as the gun was out of his hand. Yet another, more optimistic part, prayed for any reasonable resolve, one where nobody got shot. But, as soon as the thought occurred to me, I knew it wouldn’t be like that. I knew what Jimmy was going to do. And I understood why.
Jimmy stayed the same. He sobbed a little more, but he stayed the same. Minutes passed. At last, he nodded to me.
I nodded back.
He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
There was nothing I could do.
He had figured it out.
The band never traveled by tour bus again. They never quite recovered from waking up to a gunshot and finding Jimmy’s brains splattered against the wall. The official investigation concluded that Jimmy was full of pills and depressed, and probably just couldn’t take it anymore.
But I knew better.
The bus was refurbished and leased to yet another unsuspecting rock band, now with two restless spirits permanently onboard. It’s probably still out there on the road somewhere, rolling to the next gig.
SEASON PREMIERE
JAMES SALLIS
IT WAS JUST after they hung Shorty Bergen that the rats showed up. No one had ever seen anything like them. They came swarming up over the bank of a dried-up riverbed, must have been close to a hundred of them, traveling all together. It was like locusts in those films of Africa, where the bugs sweep down and leave behind nothing but bare branches and stalks. Only the rats weren’t looking for vegetable matter. Johnny Jones lost his whole crop of chickens. At Gene Brocato’s they took down five sheep and a young cow.
“Rats don’t hunt in packs,” Billy Barnstile said. He and his partner Joe McGee were out in one of the power company’s trucks, checking lines. They’d pulled off the road to watch as the rats broke into twin streams around the farmhouse, then rejoined to sweep over Gene Brocato’s field. Within moments, it seemed, only bones remained where livestock had been.
“Never saw anything like it,” Joe McGee said. Of course, no one had ever seen anything like Shorty Bergen either. He looked like parts of two people glued together, this long, long trunk with a couple of stubby doll legs stuck on as an afterthought. “Boy’d had legs to match his body, he’d be eight feet tall,” his mother always said. But he wasn’t. He was four-and-a-half feet tall, even in the goat-roper cowboy boots he favored. Hair stuck out in bristles from his ears. His real hair, however often he washed it, always looked greasy, all two dozen or so limp strands of it.
What had happened was Shorty’d taken himself a liking to Betty Sue Carstairs, and there was two things wrong with that. Dan Carstairs was nearabouts the only person in town with anything like real money, and he loved his daughter, who’d come to him late in life, with a fierce pride—that’s one—and Betty Sue, for all her beauty—this is two—was simple as a fence post. When Shorty Bergen started bringing her candy and bundles of wildflowers he’d picked on the way through the woods, she babbled and drooled in delight. Didn’t have no idea how ugly he was, or that anything might be wrong in it or what he was up to. Her daddy’d alwa
ys brought her things. Now Shorty did too.
Pretty soon the rats were all the talk down at Bee’s Blue Bell Diner, which, if you didn’t eat at home, was where you ate in Hank’s Ridge.
“They ain’t come near town as yet, at least,” Lucas Hodgkins said. Some egg yolk and about a third of his upper dentures had slipped his mouth. He reached up and pushed the dentures back in. The egg yolk stayed.
“I hear you.” This was Froggie Levereaux, four tables away. People said he ordered that damned beret he always wore from Sears. He sure as hell hadn’t bought it in Hank’s Ridge. His nose put you in mind of the blade on a sundial. “You never know, though. Once they get a taste of human blood… I seen it happen with huntin’ dogs. Even with a goat, one time. Commenced to gobbling up small children like popcorn.”
Bee herself, a dry stick of a woman, was in the thick of it. “Don’t like it, don’t like it at all,” she said. Bee hadn’t liked much of anything in well onto forty-six years.
“Where’ve they been is what I want to know. None of us ever heard tell of ’em.”
“I remember when I was little, back in Florida, it used to rain frogs.”
“Frogs is frogs. Rats is rats.”
“It’s like that story about the paid piper.”
“Boils be next,” Judd Sealey said—a deacon down at the church. “Boils. Then—well, I can’t rightly remember. Seven of them, though. Seven plagues.”
“Rodents, is what they are.” Bud Gooley shuddered. “Teeth don’t never stop growing.”
The sound of the screen door out to the kitchen swinging shut brought a hiatus to the conversation.
Jed Stanton shook his head sagely. “You ever know Stu Ellum to leave behind a perfectly good bite of pie before?”
Froggie Levereaux ambled over and finished it up for him.
“Man’s got him a worry for sure,” Bee said.
Dan Carstairs warned Shorty Bergen to stay away from Betty Sue and went into some detail as to what would eventuate if he failed to do so. Thing was, taken as he was with Betty Sue, Shorty Bergen had gone damn near as simple as the girl herself. He’d just stand there smiling up at Dan Carstairs. Nobody laid claim to having seen it, but everyone knew how one Saturday evening when Shorty Bergen came courting, Dan Carstairs proceeded to have his farmhands stretch Shorty out against an old wagon wheel, and went at him with a bullwhip, dousing him with salted water afterward. Shorty Bergen never said a word, never once whimpered or cried out. Next day, there he was as usual, with flowers and candy for Miss Betty Sue.
Stuart Ellum lived two or three miles south of town on what had once been a thriving apple orchard. Years back some unknown disease had attacked the trees, moving from limb to limb, turning apples into lines of tiny shrunken heads. Limbs twisted and deformed, trunks bloated, the trees remained.
Stu Ellum also had a daughter, Sylvie. The two of them lived in a shack overgrown with honeysuckle and patched with old tin signs for soft drinks. There’d been a wife too for a while, but no one knew much about her, or just when it was she left, if leave she did. A hill woman, they said. Some of the old women used to avert their eyes whenever she came around.
Sylvie never showed any interest in going into town the way Stuart did a couple of times a week, or really in leaving the place at all. She cooked, cleaned their clothes in the stream nearby. Other than that she’d sit on a rickety chair outside the cabin watching bees, wasps, and hummingbirds have at the honeysuckle, or head off into the woods and be gone for hours at a time.
Then a while back, in one of the hollows where people hereabouts are wont to dump garbage, she’d come across a TV set and hauled it back to the cabin. Its innards were all gone, but the glass in front was still good. Sylvie put it up on an old crate in one corner of the cabin and commenced to carve little tables and beds and chairs and buildings. She’d set these up inside, then go across the room and sit watching. One day when Stuart Ellum walked in, he saw she had insects, a grasshopper, a katydid, sitting at the little table inside the TV, acting out whatever scene Sylvie had in her mind.
Over the next several weeks, Shorty Bergen had got himself horsewhipped a second time, beat with axe handles till three ribs broke, and thrown in the pen, hobbled, with one of Dan Carstairs’s famously mean-tempered goats. Each time he popped right back up. Carstairs would head out to check on the ploughing or to buy feed and come back and there that boy’d be, sitting on the porch holding hands with Betty Sue.
Must have been right about then that Dan Carstairs decided on taking a different tack.
He started putting it out that Shorty Bergen had raped his Betty Sue. She wasn’t the first either, by his reckoning, he said, and menfolk all round the valley had best look to their wives and daughters.
Probably nothing would’ve come of it, except a couple families over the other side of the mountain started saying somebody’d been getting to their girls, too. Never mind that just about everybody knew exactly who it was had been getting to them. That kind of thing, once it starts up, it spreads like wildfire. Wasn’t more than a month had passed before Shorty Bergen woke to a flashlight in his eyes and a group of stern-faced men above him. They dragged him outside, tied a rope around his neck in a simple granny knot and threw the rope over a limb, and a bunch of them hauled at the other end. When the limb broke, they started over, and got the job done, though it took some time.
Now, it happened that Sylvie had taken a liking to Shorty Bergen. One of the ways he scraped together a living was by scavenging what people threw away, everything from chairs to simple appliances, and fixing them. Then he’d take them around and sell them for a dollar or two. He’d only been by Stuart Ellum’s cabin twice, since Stuart always told him they had everything they needed and then some, but Sylvie never took her eyes off him either time, and afterward was always asking Stuart about him. Before that, whenever she told Stuart about her shows, they were full of doctors and nurses, rich men who lived alone in great sadness, and young women suddenly come upon unsuspected legacies or gifts, like all those soap operas she’d seen on a visit to her aunt in the city. Once she saw Shorty Bergen, though, all her shows centered around him. Shorty was running for sheriff, but the rich man who owned everything hereabouts was bound and determined to see him defeated. The doctors at the hospital had done something to Shorty at birth. A withered Native American shook a child’s rattle of feathers over his still body and warned that if Shorty were to die, his spirit would sweep like a storm across the land, cleansing it, purifying it.
“Girl? Girl? What have you done?” Stuart Ellum asked as he ducked to enter the cabin. All the way back from the diner he’d been thinking about what he’d heard there, about that pack of rats overrunning everything, sheep and cattle going down beneath them, a flood of rats laying waste to everything in its path.
“Shhh, it’s the news,” Sylvie said.
Behind the glass of the TV two rats sat upright in tiny chairs looking straight out into the room. They took turns talking, glancing down at the table before them from time to time, other times looking at one another with knowing nods.
Soon Sylvie clapped her hands silently and turned toward him.
“What did you want to ask me, Daddy?”
As she turned toward him, so did the two rats sitting at the little table inside the TV. Then they stood and took a bow. Their eyes shone—the rats’ eyes, and his daughter’s.
I AM COMING TO LIVE IN YOUR MOUTH
GLEN HIRSHBERG
This must be the very pinnacle of good fortune, he thought. To have every moment of his death observed by those beautiful eyes-it was like being borne to death on a gentle, fragrant breeze.
–YUKIO MISHIMA
IT HAPPENED THE first time during the 4:00 A.M. feeding, and Kagome believed she was dreaming. This was not unusual; she almost never slept anymore, and most of her life felt like dreaming, now. She’d already flushed out Joe’s catheter, sponged gently at the pus that dripped incessantly from the tumor that had devoured
his upper lip, and replaced the nutrient bag on the IV stand. Now she was sitting quietly, holding his skeletal, freezing fingers in her own. Briny, Joe’s Burmese, lay curled in the permanent indentation he’d made for himself across Joe’s thighs. Once or twice, the cat half-raised one nictitating lid, flicked its stub of a tail back and forth as though sweeping the room with radar, and went back to sleep. Out on the deck, the shadows of the oaks swayed in the winter wind spooling silently down the San Gabriels, and the Nuttall’s woodpecker that never left, even in the snow, knocked once against whichever pine or telephone pole it had lodged in this night.
I am coming, she heard, half-heard, rolling the bones of Joe’s fingers with her thumb.
It was like the interferon year all over again. In a way, despite the realities of the current situation, watching him then had been worse. He’d slept even more, for one thing, sometimes as many as thirty hours in a row, and never less than twenty. But his sleep had been more disturbed, riddled with tremors that racked him for minutes on end, haunted by dream demons Joe clearly remembered afterward but rarely described to her. Tall things, he’d murmur. Whisperers.
Sometimes, that year, the moments when he wasn’t shuddering or dreaming were more frightening still. His face had been less drastically scarred, then, but also tended to go sickeningly slack, drain of everything that identified that hawk-nose, these flippy earlobes, this slightly upturned mouth, as Joe’s. Looking into it had been like staring at the drawn shades of a house that had been termite-bombed.
And yet. Back then, there’d also been that one, absurd element of hope. That the interferon regimen might just work. Kill every deadly cell inside Joe but still leave Joe.
Whereas now, hours or days from the end—not weeks, she’d been assured, not even one week—Joe rarely so much as twitched. Sometimes, as she tended to him, his eyelids fluttered, but contentedly. At least, Kagome insisted to herself that was the case. And sometimes, right at this moment, he’d actually awaken and look at her, and she’d see that formidable engine in there fire one more time, all that ferocious fight, all those useless things he somehow knew locking into place behind his retinas. Once, he’d told her he loved her, that she was the only reason he was still battling. Mostly, though, he glanced at the feedbag and said, “Kidney pie. Rock on.” Or, if they had a chemo or oncologist appointment later that day, “Shotgun.”