“I don’t know if it’s a fact or not, but it’s the truth.”
“Poor fucker,” Scarborough laughs, and he jabs a thumb over his shoulder at the distant statue. “And the best gig he could get was guarding this dried-up old cunt of a city.” He takes a crumpled pack of Camels out of his jacket and offers one to Starling Jane.
“It doesn’t even have a river,” she says sadly, glances at the pack of cigarettes and shakes her head. “If I died here, how would my soul ever find its way down to the sea?”
“I’m sure they have sewers,” Scarborough mutters around the filter of his Camel. He tries to light it with a match, but the wind immediately blows the flame out.
“That’s not funny.”
“Yes it is,” and he strikes a second match, but the wind blows it out, as well. “You just don’t have a sense of humor.”
“I just don’t want to die here.”
“No one from Providence has a goddamn sense of humor.”
“There are bad places in the world to die. I think this is one of them,” she says quietly, and Scarborough curses when the wind snuffs out another match. Starling Jane takes the book away from him and strikes a fourth one, cups a hand around the flame long enough for him to light his cigarette, then she blows it out and drops the smoldering match over the edge of the viaduct. Scarborough takes a long drag and then breathes out a smoky gray ghost for the wind to shred between its invisible teeth.
“You’re not going to die here, bluebird,” he says, trying very hard to sound certain even if he isn’t, her apprehension starting to rub off on him, and Scarborough wonders how much trouble he’d be in if he put her on a train straight back to New England.
“I’m sure that’s exactly what the others thought, but that didn’t stop her from killing them.”
“Yeah, well just do me a favor and shut the fuck up about it for five minutes, okay?” and he doesn’t look at her because it’s easier if he doesn’t have to see her eyes; he smokes his Camel and watches the cars passing them by, all the careless, oblivious faces safe behind windshields and steering wheels, and no one looks back at him. After a minute or two, Starling Jane starts whistling an old gospel song she heard on the radio the day before. Scarborough takes a last, deep drag and flicks the butt to the asphalt at their feet, zips up his leather jacket and starts walking back towards the concrete stairway.
“What now?” she calls after him, and “It’s time to have a talk with Mr. Silvey,” he says and keeps on walking.
At first he doesn’t even know that he’s going to Sadie, just walking, motion for the dumb and simple sake of motion, a talisman against inertia, and Deacon leaves Morris Avenue behind him and crosses the arched beam bridge on Twenty-second Street. Leaving Chance behind, too, and maybe later he’ll try to explain it to her and she won’t listen because she’s never been able to talk about that part of him or even acknowledge that it might be real. The old bridge carries him high above the train tracks, orderly tangle of iron rails and wooden ties below, the Rainbow Bridge according to a bronze plaque at the top, and the many crumbling balusters have been wrapped round and round with silver-gray duct tape, the city’s half-assed idea of repair after chunks of falling concrete smashed through the windshields of cars in the streets and parking lots below. That was a couple of years ago, and now the duct tape has begun to fray and disintegrate, as well.
“Leave it to Birmingham to try and fix a bridge with duct tape,” Chance said the first time they saw what the Street and Sanitation people had done.
Deacon pauses at the crest of the bridge to watch a freight train passing underneath, rattling away towards the sunset. Rusted boxcars and tankers filled with chemicals, empty bulkhead flats and gondola cars, finally the red caboose bringing up the rear. By morning that train will be all the way to New Orleans or Memphis or Biloxi, he thinks, and some part of him wishes he were going with it. He waits until the train has grown small and far away, and then Deacon follows Twenty-second southeast, past used-car lots and gas stations, finally crosses Eighth Avenue into a tract of run-down Eisenhower-era housing projects.
“Yo, white boy,” a husky male voice shouts from a backyard and someone laughs. “You lost? You need directions?” and Deacon doesn’t reply, keeps walking, keeps his eyes on the sidewalk, counting cracks and dandelions, the distance from one streetlight pool to the next, until he’s safely out the other side again. The street curves gently and climbs a hill, and there’s the apartment building where Sadie Jasper lives, red and chocolate-brown bricks and screened-in front porches, low rent but not quite a slum, so she could be doing worse. Next door to the building is a seedy little nightclub, The Nick, like a house trailer built from cinder blocks; one of his old haunts, a mecca for cheap beer and deafeningly loud rock music, pool tables and smoky darkness.
Deacon glances back the way he’s come, towards the projects and downtown, towards home, the dusk deepening quickly to night, and then he looks back at the apartment building. There’s a light burning in one of Sadie’s windows, and he imagines her busy at the noisy old Royal typewriter she writes her stories on, the desk she built from a door and two sawhorses. By now, Chance is probably starting to wonder where he is, when he’s coming home, if maybe he’s found a liquor store.
He follows the short, crunchy path of crushed brick-and-limestone gravel from the sidewalk to the front door of the building, finds it unlocked and steps inside. The hallway smells like Indian food and stale cigarette smoke, the fainter stink of mold, and he walks down the short hall lit by bare, irregularly placed forty-watt bulbs. Sadie’s place is up on the second floor, and Deacon climbs the stairs two and three at a time before he can think better of it, before he talks himself out of seeing her.
Her place is right at the top of the stairs, and he knocks a little harder than necessary, afraid she won’t be there after all, that maybe she only left the light burning so it wouldn’t be dark when she comes home. No one answers, so he starts to knock again, and then “Hold your horses,” Sadie calls out from inside. “I’m coming.”
Deacon takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, wishing that his heart would quit racing. Not like he’s doing anything wrong, seeing an old friend he’s hardly spoken to in ages, not like he’s come here looking for booze or a fuck, just someone to talk to, someone who’ll listen to the things Chance won’t.
The door opens, and Sadie’s standing there in a long black T-shirt a size or two too large, BAUHAUS and a silk-screened shot of the sleepwalker from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, fishnet tights and a pair of pink socks on her feet. At first she looks confused more than surprised to see him, Deacon Silvey the very last person she expected to see tonight, and then Sadie laughs and smiles. Her startling ice-blue eyes seem very bright in the dim light.
“As I live and breathe,” she says in her worst Tennessee Williams drawl. “Will you just look at what the cat dragged in,” and he smiles nervously back at her.
“Are you busy?” he asks. “I know I should have called first, but I—”
“Are you kidding me?” and she steps over the threshold and throws both her arms tight around his neck, washing him in her private aroma of cloves and tea rose, vanilla and the stuff she uses to dye her hair the color of ripe cherries. Her hands are warm and damp.
“If you’re busy, I can come back some other time. I really should’ve called first,” Deacon says again.
“Phooey. I was just doing dishes,” she says. “So you practically saved my life.” And then she takes him by the hand and drags him out of the hallway and into her small and cluttered apartment. The smells of Indian cooking and cigarette smoke are immediately replaced by sandalwood incense and a slightly stronger, more pervasive version of the Sadie smell, something he’d probably find cloying if it weren’t so nostalgic. She points him at a threadbare sofa upholstered in corduroy the color of mustard, and “Sit your fanny down,” Sadie Jasper says. “I’ll be right back. Want some coffee?”
“Sure, if it’s not
too much trouble.”
“Milk, no sugar, right?”
“Yeah,” Deacon says.
“Coming right up,” and she disappears through a curtain of amber plastic beads.
Deacon steps past the magazine-littered coffee table, sits down on the sofa, and its shot springs groan and creak loudly beneath him. He glances around the room, at the plaster walls decorated with an incongruous mix of horror movie posters and Pre-Raphaelite prints, Dario Argento and John Carpenter rubbing shoulders with Rossetti and Waterhouse. The floor is stacked with books and videotapes because there’s no room left on any of the shelves. A moth-eaten, taxidermied raccoon stands sentry on top of the television set, surrounded by a circle of votive candles and a couple of bird skulls. Almost everything exactly the way it was the last time he was in Sadie’s apartment, and he tries to remember how long ago that was.
“Does Mrs. Silvey know you’re here?” Sadie calls from the kitchen, and “No,” he shouts back at her.
The curtain parts again, Sadie carrying two steaming, mismatched coffee mugs, and then the beaded strands swing and clack noisily together behind her.
“I’d just made a fresh pot,” she says. “The milk’s skim. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Er, no,” Deacon says, taking the mug she holds out to him. “That’s fine.”
She sits down at the other end of the creaky yellow sofa and blows on her coffee. “Would it piss her off if she found out?” she asks, and it takes Deacon a second or two to realize what she’s asking. He shrugs and stares at his milky coffee; it smells like chicory, and he hates the taste of chicory.
“These days I never know what’s gonna piss Chance off,” he says. “But yeah, I think it probably would.”
“Does she think I’m a bad influence?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m flattered,” Sadie says and sips tentatively at her coffee.
“She’s just afraid I’ll start drinking again. I can’t say that I blame her. I’m a bastard when I’m drunk.”
Sadie nods her head and dips a pinkie finger into her coffee.
“Hell, I’m a bastard period, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Sadie says and licks a drop of coffee off her fingertip. “When’s the kid due?”
“Almost any minute now,” he says and sets his mug down on a magazine cover.
“That’s gotta be a total mind-fuck, Deke. I mean, I can’t even begin to comprehend how someone copes with that sort of responsibility.”
“Join the club,” Deacon says, wishing he hadn’t left the apartment without his cigarettes. He considers bumming one or two off Sadie, but she probably doesn’t have anything but Djarum cloves, and he’d rather smoke a dirty old mop.
“Do you know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl? They can tell you that now, can’t they?”
“If you want to know, but Chance wants to wait until it’s born and find out the old-fashioned way.”
“Have you guys decided on names already?”
Deacon picks up his coffee cup again, chicory or no chicory, and takes a swallow before he answers.
“Joe, if it’s a boy, after Chance’s grandfather.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“If it’s a girl, either Emma Jean or Elizabeth. Chance hasn’t made up her mind yet.”
Sadie shakes her head. “If I ever had a daughter,” she says, “I’d name her Hermione, after that girl in the Harry Potter books.”
“I’m sure she’d just love you for that,” Deacon replies and drinks more of the coffee, trying to ignore the peppery aftertaste.
“It’s no worse than Chance. Why didn’t her parents just name her Opportunity and get it the hell over with?”
“You might just have a point there, Miss Jasper.”
Sadie laughs out loud and leans back against the sofa, pressing herself into the tattered cushions; she props her feet up on the table, and Deacon can see that there are small holes worn in the toes of both her pink socks.
“I’ve really fucking missed this, Deke. I mean, I’ve really missed you. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to the way we used to talk.”
“Yeah,” he says and sets his cup down again. “I guess that’s why I’m here. There’s something I need to talk about, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who wouldn’t think I was crazy.”
“What do you—?” she starts, but the phone in the kitchen rings, and “Shit,” Sadie hisses. “Just a minute, okay? I’ll be right back, I swear. It’s probably just my mother.” And then she leaves Deacon alone on the mustard-colored sofa and vanishes into the kitchen again. He sighs and stares across the room at the stuffed raccoon, which seems to be watching him intently from the top of the television with its dark glass eyes.
“Yeah, well fuck you, too,” he mutters at the raccoon and finishes his coffee.
Deacon was drunk the night he met Sadie Jasper for the first time, back in the day, years ago now, but just a few months after he’d finally left Atlanta. The boozy good-old days, and he worked every other night at a Southside coin-op laundry and then at a produce warehouse in the mornings, sleeping away the afternoons and staying drunk as much as possible, as much as he could afford. A steamy August evening, and she’d talked him into going to an abandoned warehouse with her to see a ghost. Nothing half as simple as that, but that’s what they would say whenever it came up later—“Remember the night we saw the ghost in the Harris building?”
Sadie had heard people talking, rumors that Deacon had once worked for the police, that he could find dead people and missing bodies and even murderers just by visiting crime scenes, by touching an article of clothing or a corpse.
“So you’re Deacon Silvey,” she said and smiled, a triumphant, pleased-with-herself sort of smile. “The psychic criminologist,” and Deacon shook his head.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I’m just a drunk who sees things sometimes.”
“That’s not so unusual,” Sadie said.
“That’s what I keep telling people, but no one ever seems to listen.”
But he followed her to the old Harris Transfer and Warehouse Building on Twenty-third Street, walking a few steps behind her, sipping from his quart bottle of McCall’s, the cheap gin so none of it would ever matter, not now or in the morning, and what could this little goth girl have to show him, anyway? Just a game, and maybe if he played along, maybe if he looked at her spooky place, oohed and aahed whenever oohs and aahs were called for, maybe he wouldn’t have to sleep alone for a night or two.
“I used to know a girl,” Sadie said. “Back when I still lived with my parents down in Mobile. She was a clairvoyant, too, but it finally drove her crazy. She was always in and out of psych wards.”
“I’m not clairvoyant,” Deacon said. “I get impressions, that’s all. What I did for the cops, I helped them find lost things.”
“Lost things,” Sadie said thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it.”
“A good word for what?” he asked and glared up at the building, late-nineteenth-century brick, rusted iron bars over broken windows, and those jagged holes either swallowing the streetlight or spitting it back out because it was blacker than midnight under a coffin in there, black like the first second before the universe was born, and Deacon was beginning to wonder if he’d underestimated Sadie Jasper.
“You’ll see,” she said, and this time when Sadie smiled it made him think of a very hungry animal or the Grinch that stole Christmas. Deacon took another long pull off the bottle of gin and wiped his mouth.
They didn’t go in through the front door, of course, the locked and boarded-up front door set inside its marble arch and HARRIS chiseled deep into the pediment. Instead, she led him down the narrow alley to a spot where the iron burglar bars had been pried loose and there were three or four plastic milk crates stacked conveniently under the window. Sadie scrambled up the makeshift steps and slipped inside, slipped smooth over the shattered glass like
a raw oyster over sharp teeth, like she’d done this a hundred times before, and for all he knew she had. Deacon looked apprehensively up at the building again, had another swallow of McCall’s, and then checked for cops before he followed her.
However dark it had seemed from the outside, it was twice that dark inside, and the broken glass under Deacon’s boots made a sound like walking on cornflakes.
“Better hold up a sec,” Sadie said, and suddenly there was light, the weak and narrow beam from a silver flashlight in her hand; white light across the concrete floor to show glittering chips and shards of window, a few scraps of cardboard and what looked like a filthy sweater lying in one corner. Nothing else, just that wide and dust-drowned room, and then Sadie motioned towards a doorway with the beam of light.
“The stairs are right over there,” she said and started walking towards the doorway. Deacon stayed close, not wanting to get too far away from the flashlight. The air in the warehouse smelled like mildew and dust, a rank, closed away from the world odor that made his nose itch and his eyes water.
“Oh, you’ll want to watch out for that spot over there,” Sadie said, and the beam swung suddenly to her left and down and Deacon could see the gaping hole in the floor, big enough to drop a pickup truck through, that hole, big enough and black enough that maybe it was where all the dark inside the building was coming from, spilling up from the basement or subbasement, perhaps, and then her flashlight swept right again, and he didn’t have to look at the hole anymore. Now there was a flight of concrete stairs instead, ascending into the nothing past the reach of Sadie’s flashlight.
“It’s all the way at the top,” she said.
“What’s all the way at the top, Sadie? What’s waiting for us up there?”
“It’s easier if I just show you, if you see it for yourself,” and then she started up the stairs, taking them two at a time and carrying the light away with her, leaving him alone next to the hole. Deacon glanced forlornly back towards the broken window and then hurried to catch her. They climbed up and up and up the spiral stairwell, like Alice tumbling backwards and nothing to mark their progress past each floor but a small landing or closed door or a place where a door should be, nothing to mark the time but the dull echo of their feet against the cement. Sadie was always three or four steps ahead of him, and finally he yelled at her to slow the fuck down.
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