“Long as you’re there when I need you.”
“Shit, Soldier. All I said was I’m scared. I didn’t say I was a coward. There’s a great fucking difference between the two.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” she says, studying the valley—the empty mills that are never really empty, the futility of a dozen ornate church steeples, the roaring white place where the Thundermist Falls were dammed in 1960, five years after a flood had almost destroyed the town. North of the dam, Soldier spots a low tree-shrouded hill rising from the rooftops and squalor, and she points it out to Odd Willie.
“Right there,” she says, thinking that in the summer the trees would be lush and green, hiding the cemetery and all its secrets. But in winter, the old trees are little more than the weathered slats of a crooked fence, revealing the patchwork of headstones and less modest monuments to the dead and departed that crown the hill. Markers to signal mortal loss, and the way down to George Ballou.
“Fuck me,” Odd Willie says and spits on the road.
“Don’t you forget,” Soldier tells him, still watching the tall trees surrounding Oak Hill Cemetery. “When the time comes, she’s mine. Any of the rest of these assholes, you can take your fucking pick. But she’s mine.”
“I love it when you talk like Clint Eastwood,” he says and snickers, then flicks the rest of his cigarette at a passing car. “It’s absolutely fucking beautiful.”
“Just don’t you get all trigger-happy down there and forget what I’m telling you.”
“Well,” says Odd Willie, “as much as I’d love to do the honors myself—and I’m not gonna lie to you about that, no, ma’am—I learned a long time ago, you come between some cocksucker and the object of her passionate fucking need for vengeance, and pretty soon the hounds are gonna be shuffling your happy ass off to Mama Hydra—”
“You really believe that stuff?” she asks, interrupting him.
“Like I said last night, it’s as good as anything else I’ve heard.”
“Yeah,” Soldier says and glances back at the car. Saben hasn’t moved. “That other shit we talked about—”
“—stays between me and you,” Odd Willie says. “I mean, until such time as they tie me down and some determined asshole comes at me with a pair of wire strippers and an acetylene torch.”
“Guess that’ll have to do,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”
Odd Willie Lothrop nods his head, and then he follows Soldier back to the car.
Odd Willie lives three flights up in a rat-infested Federal Hill tenement building that had been new when Calvin Coolidge was president and that should have been torn down long decades ago. It had been condemned, back in the 1990s, but that didn’t keep out the squatters or the crackheads or Odd Willie. It didn’t keep Soldier out, either. When the Bailiff had gone, she called Willie Lothrop and told him that she was on her way over. He sounded surprised, but not too surprised, and asked Soldier if she wanted to meet somewhere else, a bar or Swan Point or something more pleasant than his place. She told him no, his place was fine, that she just wanted to talk, that it was very important, and he told her to be careful on the stairs. “They’re getting worse,” he said. “I just about broke my goddamn ankle last week.”
“You could move out of that shithole, you know,” Soldier said, and she could almost hear him shrug.
“I got roots here,” he replied and hung up first.
So, less than half an hour later, she was ducking under the boards nailed across the front doorway of the building, picking her way through the dark lobby cluttered with refuse and filth and broken furniture. She had a flashlight, but didn’t turn it on. She could see well enough to find the sagging stairs leading up to Willie’s apartment.
“Who the hell are you?” a gruff female voice demanded from the shadows. “You best stay the fuck away from me, bitch, or I’ll cut you.”
“Will you?” Soldier asked, speaking to the lightless place where the voice had come from, imagining the woman cringing there amid the peeling wallpaper and old cardboard and rat droppings. “Will you really?”
“I ain’t messin’ around with you, cunt. I’ll slice you up so bad ain’t no doctor ever been born be able to put you back together again.” But the woman sounded more frightened than dangerous. Soldier imagined there were others, less bold, more frightened, cowering in the darkness of the lobby and the hallway leading deep into the ground floor of the building. She crossed the small room, stood at the foot of the stairs and squinted into the narrow stairwell that wound up and up and up, a right-angled whorl like the view from inside some geometrically improbable snail’s spiraling shell.
“Don’t you waste your time worrying about me,” Soldier told the woman. “You got way worse things to worry about than me.”
“Don’t you tell me what I got to worry over, bitch.”
Soldier laid her right hand on the banister and took the first step; she wanted a drink so bad it hurt, so bad she was beginning to feel sick, and she wondered what Odd Willie had upstairs. Odd Willie usually drank cheap tequila and cheaper malt liquor, but right now either one would be fine with her. She took a couple more steps.
“Who you is?” the voice asked. “You ain’t no angel. You ain’t no servant of the Lord Jesus.”
“No,” Soldier told the woman, “I’m not that. But you just wait. I expect someone else will be along shortly.”
“You some kind of hoodoo,” the woman sneered from her hiding place, and Soldier imagined her crossing herself or making some sign to ward off the evil eye. “You some kind of devil.”
“Close enough,” Soldier replied, and then she left the woman and climbed the stairs to Odd Willie’s floor. By the time she reached his front door she was out of breath and thirstier than ever. She had to knock four times before he opened up.
“I was on the can,” he explained, zipping his pants, snagging his underwear in the zipper, and having to start over again. Odd Willie was wearing black jeans and a black-and-white Buzzcocks T-shirt. There were several holes in the shirt, and he was barefoot.
“You know there’s a fucking crazy lady downstairs?” Soldier asked him, leaning against the doorjamb, trying to catch her breath. “I thought she was gonna try to exorcise me or something.”
“Yeah, that’s Betty. Don’t you worry about her,” Odd Willie said and tried his zipper again. “When she’s not high, which isn’t very often, she’s either seeing demons or waiting on the Second Coming or both.”
“Charming fucking neighbors you got,” Soldier said. “Now, you gonna let me in, or are we going to have to do this right out here in the hallway?”
He apologized and stepped to one side so that Soldier could get past, and then he shut the door and locked it. The apartment smelled like fried food and mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and the only light came from a few flickery fluorescent tubes he’d rigged up overhead.
“Like I said on the phone,” Willie started, “it’s taken care of. I set the timer for twenty minutes and left him inside the old House of Horrors—”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Soldier said.
“Oh yeah,” Odd Willie said, and giggled, and then he sat down on the mattress lying in the center of the room, the mattress stained and torn and heaped with dirty sheets and a stolen blue U-Haul moving blanket. “You already said that on the phone,” he smiled and nodded his head, made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pressed it to his left temple. “You want something to drink?”
“You fucking know not to ever ask me that question.”
“Yeah, but I got a brand-new bottle of Pepe Lopez Gold, hasn’t even been opened,” Odd Willie said and grinned at her. There was a blotch of something on the front of his shirt that looked like toothpaste, though Soldier was pretty sure Odd Willie Lothrop had never made the acquaintance of a toothbrush.
“Might as well drink paint thinner as that shit,” Soldier told him, and glanced about for someplace to sit down. Willie pointed her towards a
three-legged chair propped against one wall.
“Hell, it tastes like fucking paint thinner,” Odd Willie said. “But it generally does the job.”
“I came over because I have to ask you a question,” Soldier said, changing the subject because she had enough trouble right now without Odd Willie’s cheap-ass tequila. She sat down on the three-legged chair, leaning slightly to one side so it wouldn’t tip over.
“You could’ve just asked when you called.”
“It’s not that sort of question, Willie.”
“Then maybe it’s not the sort of question I want to get mixed up with.”
“Saben’s a spy,” Soldier said, and there, it was out, a big enough bomb to shut Odd Willie up for a second or two. “She was screwing Sheldon. The two of them were working for these pricks out in Woonsocket, and they set me up.”
“Fuck,” Odd Willie Lothrop muttered and ran his fingers through his oily black hair. “Fuck all. Frankly, I never would’ve thought the cunt had it in her. And, hey, I was asking around about Woonsocket and—”
“The Bailiff said she’s been in with that crowd for a long time, almost since the first night the hounds put her on the street,” Soldier said and glanced up at the ceiling. In places, the plaster had fallen away, exposing the decaying lath beneath. “There’s a kid. Saben got herself knocked up about nine years back. The daddy’s part hound, and—get this—he’s one of the Woonsocket mongrels.”
“Oh, man,” Odd Willie groaned and shook his head. “I really don’t think I want to hear any more of this shit.” He reached for the tequila, which was sitting on the floor near the mattress, cracked the seal and opened the bottle. He tilted it towards Soldier, but she swallowed and shook her head.
“Fuck me,” he said again and took a long pull off the pint bottle.
“There’s more,” Soldier said.
“There always is,” Odd Willie told her and wiped his mouth, then screwed the cap back on the bottle of Pepe Lopez and set it down on the floor. “What I want to know is why the hell they didn’t keep her out of Woonsocket after that?”
“The Bailiff claims he didn’t know.”
“And you believe him?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Soldier replied.
“Yeah. Right. That bastard knows every time we take a dump, and he didn’t know Saben was still getting her kicks in Woonsocket? Did they kill the little squealer?”
“No. They didn’t. They gave it to the Cuckoo. That was part of Saben’s punishment, and that’s where the dead priest comes in. He was a mule.”
“Yeah, well, at least I knew that much,” Odd Willie said and rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks. “I saw the tattoos before I torched him. He had the wings and the eye, right here,” and Odd Willie tapped his chest just below his sternum. “The wings and the eye, all in red.”
“Red,” Soldier said, wanting to get up and walk out, much too much said already, and she’d hardly even gotten started. She wanted to go back downstairs and maybe have some fun with crazy old Betty the junky, maybe show her a thing or two or three about devils and angels and keeping her goddamn mouth shut. She wanted to be home, or down in the tunnels below Benefit Street. She wanted to be driving, maybe down to Scarborough Beach or Napatree Point, maybe all the way the hell to Stonington. She could sit on the rocks, listen to the surf and watch the cold sunrise. She wanted to be anywhere but Odd Willie’s filthy little apartment.
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess he would have been red, wouldn’t he? The Bailiff said the old bastard had been whoring for the Cuckoo for almost fifty years. That would make him red.”
“This is so many flavors of fucked-up,” Odd Willie said, and this time when he giggled it made Soldier want to slap him. “So, when’d she start banging Sheldon?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
There was an alarm clock on the floor, not far from the tequila bottle, and Soldier saw that it was almost four. “You want to get some breakfast?” she asked Odd Willie. “Maybe get some fucking pancakes?”
“Pancakes?” Odd Willie said, like he wasn’t so sure what the word meant.
“Never mind,” Soldier said.
“So why the hell did she kill the son of a bitch?”
“That was her paycheck for throwing in with Bittern.”
“I thought you said she was spying for Woonsocket?”
“It’s fucking complicated, Willie,” Soldier sighed, and then she rubbed at her eyes, remembering the dream of the yellow house and the clock and Sheldon, wishing she could have gotten more sleep. “But in return for watching Bittern’s back, for keeping him posted, she got information. She was trying to find the kid. I’m not sure the Bailiff knows why the hell the priest ended up dead. But if I had to guess, I’d say he’s the one who muled out Saben’s kid, and she just wanted revenge. Maybe he wouldn’t tell her what she wanted to know.”
“Okay. So, what’s the Bailiff doing about all this?”
“We’re going to Woonsocket tomorrow afternoon,” Soldier said, and Odd Willie grimaced and then stared at the floor between his bare feet. “When we’re done with business, when everything’s squared away, then we take care of Saben White.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Jesus H. fucking Christ.”
“You got a problem with that?” Soldier asked, but Odd Willie just shrugged and laughed again.
“Hey, man, I just do whatever the hell they tell me. They say, ‘Yo, Odd Willie! Go fuck yourself,’ I start studying up on contortionism. They tell me to blow my own goddamn brains out, and you’re gonna find me sucking on the barrel of a gun.”
“I’ll do her, Willie. I’ll pull the trigger. I just want you to know what’s going down.”
“That’s awfully fucking thoughtful of you,” he snorted and glanced up at Soldier. “But you said you were here because you wanted to ask me a question, and so far all you’ve done is delight and beguile me with all this goddamn good news. And, by the by, you do know it’s supposed to fucking snow tomorrow, right?”
Soldier leaned forward on the three-legged chair, and the wood creaked and popped. Beneath the unsteady fluorescent lights, Odd Willie’s skin made her think of some pallid, waxy cheese. She opened her mouth to ask him for the tequila, all the words she needed lying like ashes on her tongue, her right hand extended, but the Bailiff was there to stop her. The Bailiff standing at the foot of her bed, the Bailiff and his braided beard, and there’s a fat, grinning devil that she’d like to introduce to Crazy Betty downstairs, something bad enough to make even the most demented, Jesus-loving crack whores sit up and take notice. Bad enough to keep Soldier’s hands off the bottle, the bottle from her lips.
Maybe it’s time you start asking a few of those questions, the dream Sheldon had told her, Sheldon Vale with two bullet holes in his head and a single tarot card on Miss Josephine’s big table. Maybe it’s time for you to try and remember.
“When’s the first time you ever saw me, Odd Willie?”
And Willie Lothrop just stared back at her for a moment, and she could tell from the apprehensive shimmer in his eyes and the furrows in his forehead, from the way the corners of his mouth twitched slightly, that he wasn’t sure what she was asking him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Soldier said, measuring out her words like some powder or elixir that might heal or might poison, depending on the dose, “when’s the very first time that you clearly remember seeing me in the warrens?”
“Fuck all if I know,” Willie grunted. “What the hell kind of silly question is that?”
“How old do you think I am?” she asked him.
“None of us knows how old we are,” he replied, looking even more confused, and he reached for the tequila again. “Not exactly. None of us knows that, Soldier. The Cuckoo—”
“Willie, I’m asking how old you think I am. Just fucking guess. We were warren mates, weren’t we?”
“Sure,” Willie replied, replying too quickly as he twisted the p
lastic cap off the pint of Pepe Lopez. “I mean, yeah, so we must be just about the same age, whatever the—”
“So, what’s your earliest memory of me?” she asked again, her mouth as dry as all the deserts that have ever baked beneath the sun. Odd Willie took a drink of the tequila, and she watched his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. “It’s a simple fucking question,” she said.
Willie burped and set the bottle down without screwing the cap back on. “I don’t know,” he said. “Hell, Soldier. I’m tired, and I’m drunk, and I don’t know what the fuck you’re even getting at. We were kids. We fucking grew up together. How am I supposed to remember the first time I saw you?”
“So you remember me as a child?” she asked him, getting in one last question before she lost her nerve.
“To tell you the motherfucking truth,” Odd Willie muttered and tapped once at the skin between his shaved eyebrows, “I’m starting to think maybe you exchanged a little more than just pleasant conversation with the freaks downstairs. Maybe Betty gave you a turn at her pipe.”
Soldier nodded, then let the chair rock back on all three of its legs, and she took a deep breath and let it out again. She imagined that the last of her resolve went with it, out her nostrils and between her teeth, bleeding away into the ugly too-white light, the last bit of courage she could spare for the night, the night that was almost morning, and she had to hold something back for Woonsocket and George Ballou and Saben White.
“Forget it,” she said. “This shit with Saben’s got my head all over the place. Do me a favor and forget the whole damn thing, all right?” and Odd Willie shrugged and looked at his dirty feet again.
“Do you pray?” Odd Willie asked.
“You mean Mother Hydra and all that shit?”
“Yeah,” Odd Willie said. “That’s what I mean.”
“No,” Soldier told him, because she figured she owed him at least one honest answer. “I don’t. What about you, Odd Willie? Are you a true believer? Do you await the cold fucking embrace of the vasty abyss?” and she smiled.
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