by Poppy Brite
The gore was darkly shaded and looked slick, nearly wet. Trevor could not remember drawing it.
The house and whatever lived here had cast some nightmarish pall across his vision, hypnotized his hand, ruined his story.
Or had it?
The true story as Trevor had intended to tell it would have been strong and affecting in an understated way. Maybe this could be something splashier, stranger, and ultimately more memorable. He envisioned an ending for this version. The cops realize they’ve killed the musicians and sneak off, figuring they can blame the murders on niggers killing other niggers, But, as white men have failed to realize for too long, people aren’t stupid just because they’re poor. The black people of Jackson can read the death of their heroes like a bitter book whose pages are bound in dusky skin, writ large with blood spilled in hatred.
Jackson is not so far from New Orleans, cradle of dark religion and herbal wisdom from Africa, from Haiti, from the heart of the Louisiana swamp. And hoodoo knowledge has a way of traveling …
Trevor imagined the bodies of Bird and Brown rising back up, seeing dimly through smashed eyes, thinking dimly with smashed brains. They would be only shells, drained of music, of life. But like all good zombies they would be able to hone in on their killers. And they would have help …
In his mind he saw a full-page final frame. The cops crucified and burning on their own front lawns, nailed to crosses of blazing agony, their blackening, yawning forms silhouetted against the rich texture of the flames. It would have a crudely moralistic, E.C. Comics feel to it. But he wouldn’t ink it or color it; he would do it entirely in pencil, meticulously shaded and hatched and stippled, and it would be beautiful.
And he would sell this fucker, sell it to a market that could afford to print it right. Raw maybe, or Taboo. He loved Taboo, an irregularly published anthology of beautifully rendered, lovingly produced, weird and twisted comics printed mostly in stark blacks and whites, shot through here and there with a few pages of color alternately subtle, vivid, and disturbing. Everything from Joe Coleman’s mutilation paintings to the numerous intricate collaborations of Alan Moore had appeared in its pages, all printed on fine heavy paper.
Trevor’s jaw was set again as he bent back over his sketchbook. But now the emotion in his face looked more like strength than hardness. If he did this right, it would be the best thing he had ever drawn.
He drew for four more hours in the harsh electric light, until his eyelids grew heavy and sandy, until his fingers could barely uncurl from the pencil. Then he folded his arms on the tabletop and cradled his head and went effortlessly to sleep.
Sometime later the gooseneck lamp clicked off, leaving him in darkness broken only by the trembling, shifting moonlight that came in the windows, filtered through kudzu and twenty years of dust.
Trevor did not dream that night.
Kinsey Hummingbird woke on Monday morning hoping Trevor might have come back in the night, though he had not seen him all day Sunday. Kinsey couldn’t imagine anyone sleeping in that house. But apparently Trevor had; at any rate, he wasn’t here.
There were so many things Kinsey wanted to say to the boy—but he had to stop thinking of him as a boy. Trevor was twenty-five after all; even if he had had reason to lie, the chronology was right. Kinsey remembered the date of the McGee deaths well enough.
It was just that Trevor looked so young. That scared five-year-old was still a big part of him, Kinsey thought as he got up and went to the kitchen, though some flintier core must have kept Trevor alive and sane. There was an undeniable strength there; many people in Trevor’s situation would have retreated into the numb fog of catatonia or blown their brains out as soon as they were able to lay hands on a gun.
But even for a soul of enormous strength, what would a night in that house have been like?
After the investigation of the McGee deaths was over—and of course there had been little investigating to do; the bodies told their own mute tale—the cops had locked the door behind them and the family’s things had sat in the house, gathering dust in the silent, bloodstained rooms. A FOR SALE sign went up in the scrubby yard, but no one saw it as anything other than a ghoulish joke on the realtor’s part. That house would never be rented again, let alone sold.
Browsing the aisles of Potter’s Store one day deep in the summer of 1972, the FOR SALE sign outside the murder house already niggling at his mind, Kinsey found himself wondering what had happened to the McGees’ things. Potter’s was a cavernous thrift establishment downtown, huge and dim and cool, its rickety rows of metal shelves crammed with chipped plates and battered silverware and obsolete (though usually functional) kitchen appliances, its cracked glass display case filled with strange knickknacks and costume jewelry, its bins heaped high with musty clothing. Kinsey, with his love of junk, often spent long afternoons browsing here.
But he didn’t think the McGees’ belongings had ended up at Potter’s Store. He wasn’t sure what he thought he should have seen: bloodstained mattresses, maybe, or splattered shirts and dresses woven through the pile marked MISC WOMENS CLOTHS 25 CENTS. But there hadn’t been any jazz records or underground comics either, and there sure as hell hadn’t been a drawing table. He supposed everything was still out there, moldering in the silent rooms.
The house on Violin Road never sold. The FOR SALE sign was stolen, replaced by the realtor, whose optimism apparently knew no bounds. The paint on the new sign faded throughout the long dry summer. Tall weeds grew up around it, and it began to list. At last it fell face forward and was soon hidden in the long grass.
By that time kudzu had begun to climb the walls of the house. Where the children of Violin Road had thrown rocks through the windows, the insidious vine snaked in. Kinsey imagined it twining through the rooms, sucking nourishment from blood long dry. He did not doubt that this was possible. As a child, he had seen a kudzu root unearthed from the Civil War graveyard where his own great-great-great-uncle Miles was buried. The root, fully six feet long, had eaten its way through a grave and taken on the shape of the man buried there. Its offshoots formed four twisted limbs, the root-tips bursting from them at the ends like a multitude of fingers and toes. At the top had been a skull-sized tangle of delicate fibers in which the planes and hollows of a face could almost be made out.
Twenty years later the house was nearly hidden under its twining green blanket. Driving past it, you could barely tell that there was a house on the overgrown lot at all. Only the wooden porch and the peak of the roof showed forlornly through the vines. A stand of oaks shaded the house, their heavy canopy of foliage turning the yard into a deep green cave of light and shadow. The fronds of a willow brushed the roof, fingering the jagged edges of glass in the rotting window frames, strumming the kudzu like the strings of a lyre.
Kinsey wondered again how much of the family’s stuff was still in there. He knew kids had broken in over the years, daring each other, showing off. Terry, Steve, and R.J. had been in years ago, though Ghost would not even go as far as the porch.
So most of the things in the front room would be long spirited away. But not many kids would have gotten past the gouged and bloodied doorway to the hall, and Kinsey doubted that any would have made it farther than the first bedroom, where the little boy had died. The back rooms would be dusty but intact. He wondered what Trevor would find in them.
Kinsey measured coffee, poured cold tapwater into the machine, and, as the old percolator began to bubble and steam, fell to gazing out his kitchen window at his own backyard. He had a little vegetable garden, but otherwise the grasses and trees grew wild. Kinsey liked it that way, home to any flying, slithering, or crawling thing that cared to take up residence. But it was not as snarled and shadow-stained, not as forbidding a landscape as the house on Violin Road.
The house where Trevor must be now, even as Kinsey sipped his first milky cup of morning coffee.
Kinsey’s mother had cured him of Christian prayer long ago. He tried to think of a Zen koa
n that might be of use to Trevor, but the only one he could remember was “Why has Bodhidharma no beard?” which didn’t seem to apply. But then koans weren’t supposed to apply.
His head full of ghosts, little smirking Buddhas, and secondhand treasures, Kinsey stood woolgathering for the better part of an hour in his own clean comforting kitchen.
Hank Williams’s nasal twang poured out of the car speakers as raw and potent as moonshine spiked with honey. Zach pondered it as he drove. It should not have been a remarkable voice; it was nothing but a po’bucker whine straight from the backwoods of Alabama. But there was something golden and tragic in it, some lost soul that fell to its knees and sobbed every time Hank opened his mouth.
He’d been meandering north on I-40 and surrounding roads when he saw the turnoff for Highway 42. Zach loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and the sign reminded him that the number forty-two was the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It pulled him as inexorably as the lights of South of the Border had done. Soon he was driving down a two-lane blacktop shrouded in rags and tatters of predawn mist, and several times he caught himself singing lustily along with Hank.
The little town only caught his attention because of its curious name and weird architecture; to his road-weary eyes it seemed that the entire downtown was decorated with wagon wheels and spinning barbers’ poles. He almost drove on through, but caught himself drifting across the center line and decided to stop for a quick nap.
Zach pulled into an alley and came upon a small lot where several other cars were already parked. The friendly local deputy-dawg wouldn’t bother him here; at any rate he was only going to stretch his tired bones across the seat, close his eyes for a few minutes, then get moving again …
He slept for six hours in the parking lot behind the Whirling Disc record store. The lot was also used for storage by an adjacent auto parts store, and the Mustang was not noticed among the other junkers for some time. When he finally woke, the sun had risen high and hot, his body was bathed in sweat, and Terry Buckett was peering into the car, tapping worriedly on the window.
“Man! I thought you were dead for sure!” Terry took a hit off Zach’s pipe and passed it back, shaking his head, letting the fragrant smoke leak out the corners of his mouth. “You looked like somebody had shot you and left you lyin’ there across the seat. All that was missing was the brains on the window.”
Zach suppressed a shudder. He didn’t think the FBI would shoot a hacker on sight, but he wasn’t sure about the Secret Service. (The NSA probably kept hackers alive for torture and interrogation later, but their jurisdiction was largely military, and military secrets had never much appealed to him.)
They were sitting on crates in the dim, cool back room of the record store, and though Zach felt an undeniable echo of Leaf and Pass Christian, Terry was obviously as straight as the day was hot. There was no definable characteristic that told him this; the pheromones just weren’t there. It was a good thing too, Zach thought; after stewing in his own juices all morning he was sure he stank abominably.
As if to confirm this, a girl with long brown hair stuck her head through the curtain, blinked big Cleopatra eyes against the gloom, and wrinkled her nose. “Terry?”
“Back here, Vic.” The girl picked her way through the boxes and rolled-up posters, long gauzy skirt swishing around her ankles. When she got closer, Zach saw that she was wearing a skintight tank top, as if to accentuate the fact that she had absolutely no breasts. Eddy had had a phrase for strippers built like that: Nipples on a rib.
The girl leaned down to Terry. Zach thought they were going to kiss, but instead Terry blew into her mouth a long stream of smoke, which she sucked in expertly. Tendrils of it seeped from her narrow nostrils and curled around her head. Terry cupped the back of her thigh through the full skirt. “This is my gal Victoria. Vic, meet Zach. He just rolled into town this morning.”
“Looks like we gain two for every one we lose.” At Terry’s questioning look, she added, “You told me about that guy who came in Saturday. Now him.”
“Yeah, so who’d we lose?”
“Omigod, you don’t know!” Victoria clapped her hands over her mouth. Zach wasn’t sure, but it looked as if she might be hiding a sudden, guilty smirk. “That girl Rima? The one Kinsey fired for stealing from the Yew? She had a wreck out on the highway. Totaled her car and broke her back. They found cocaine all over the place.”
“Gee, Vic, you sound pretty upset about it.”
“Yeah, right.” From the sudden chill in the air Zach guessed that Rima had come on to Terry at some point, though if she was such a loser he doubted Terry had slept with her. Terry seemed like that rarest of all creatures, a genuinely guileless Decent Guy. Besides, you probably couldn’t get away with much in a little town like this.
“Well …” A shadow passed over Terry’s face. He obviously felt bad about the girl, but didn’t want to hurt Victoria’s feelings, “She didn’t kill anyone else?”
Victoria shook her head, and Terry brightened a little. Zach believed this was known as Looking on the Bright Side, also as Pulling the Wool Over Your Own Eyes. He didn’t say anything, though; the last thing he needed now was to annoy anyone.
So he loaded another bowl and sat around the back of the store with them for a while longer, listening to gossip about people he didn’t know, occasionally asking a question or offering a comment, hacking the scene, making the connections, weaving himself into the net. It was possible anywhere, though it could be a damn sight tougher than breaking into a computer.
When Terry’s morning crew (one sleepy-looking teenager with a tattoo so fresh it was still bleeding) showed up, Terry and Victoria took Zach down the street for greasy grilled cheese sandwiches at the local diner. The waitress refilled Zach’s water glass with tea, and when he took a sip of it without noticing, his nerves began to crackle and fizz like a string of firecrackers. For all of that, he felt good. He liked this town.
After lunch Victoria had to go to work—she sorted and mended old clothes at some downtown thrift shop—and Terry offered to show Zach the local dive before he went back to the record store. By the time they were halfway down the street, Zach was eagerly picturing the inside of a bar. It would be calm and dark and air-conditioned, like a little pocket of nighttime in the middle of the hot afternoon. It would be comforting with the sharp scents of liquor and the grainy smell of beer on tap, lit by the soft watery glow of a Budweiser clock or a neon Dixie sign. He might have been picturing any of a hundred bars in the French Quarter, but the Sacred Yew was like none of them, and Zach had yet to learn how difficult it was to find Dixie beer anywhere but New Orleans.
Trevor woke at the drawing table with cramped muscles, an aching head, and a painfully full bladder. The green-tinted sunlight streaming through the studio windows made him wince and rub his eyes as he had seen Bobby do in the grip of countless bourbon hangovers. But he hadn’t had the dream of not-drawing last night.
He stood up without looking at the pages he had drawn, stumbled out of the room, back through the hall and living room, out onto the vine-shrouded porch where he stood urinating into the kudzu, squinting out at the empty road.
The day glistened in emerald splendor, grass stems and spiderwebs still bejeweled with yesterday’s rain, inviting Trevor to come out and enjoy the sun awhile. Instead he stood for a few minutes in the shelter of the porch, breathing deeply of air that did not smell like mildew or dry rot. From the quality of the light he thought it was early afternoon.
This time twenty years ago, Momma’s friends from the art class had been coming up these steps, knocking worriedly on the door, then letting themselves into the house and finding him among the bodies. The man with the gentle hands had been picking him up, carrying him out of the carnage. For an instant Trevor almost remembered what he had been thinking at that moment: something about the Devil. But it eluded him.
Soon he turned and went back into the soft gloom of the house. Without gi
ving himself time to think about it he crossed the living room, walked a few paces down the hall, and let himself into Didi’s room.
It looked smaller than he remembered, but that might have been due to the kudzu vines that had burst through the window and taken over more than half the room. They twined up the walls, around the light fixture on the ceiling. They trailed into the closet on Trevor’s left, where he could still see a few of Didi’s toys mired in the leaves, as if the kudzu had actually twined around them and lifted them off the floor. A smiling plush octopus, a windup grandfather clock, a once-red rubber ball. All were covered in dust, faded with time and neglect. Twenty years never touched by a little boy’s hands, a little boy’s love.
The kudzu filled the left half of the room with rustling heart-shaped leaves and shifting green shadows. The mattress sat in a clear spot to the right. Instead of a tiny body it bore only a huge, irregular bloodstain, dark crimson and wet-looking in the center, fading to the most delicate pale brown around the edges. Trevor noticed splotches and runners of blood on the wall above the mattress too, five or six feet up. How many blood vessels were in the brain? And how far could they spray when the head was crushed like a juicy grape, made to spill out the red secrets of its wine, the electric potion of its cerebral fluid, the very chemistry of its thoughts and dreams?
It’s a glorious summer day, some remotely, annoyingly sane voice in his head nagged him, and here you are buried in this tomb of a house staring at the twenty-year-old deathstain of a brother you barely had time to know.
And another part of him answered, We get to the places where we need to be.
He pulled the Whirling Disc T-shirt over his head, let it fall to the floor, and stretched out on Didi’s mattress. Stale dust puffed up from the ticking as he centered his head on the bloodstain. It was stiff and dry against his cheek, and smelled only of age, with perhaps a faint sour undertone like the memory of spoiled meat. He nuzzled his face into the stain, spread his arms wide as if to embrace it.