by Poppy Brite
But if he didn’t get his ass moving and find Trevor, he might never even see Missing Mile again. Zach took a couple more tokes, bent over to snuff the joint on the sidewalk. And then all at once a premonition hit him, stronger than any he’d ever had before: Get the fuck out of here. Now.
Zach began to straighten up, heard a door slam and heavy footsteps pounding down the stairs behind him. He dropped the joint, but before he could turn, a hard shove sent him sprawling across the sidewalk. He managed to get his hands under him and his chin up fast enough not to break any teeth, but he felt the healing cut on his lip burst open, saw fresh blood spatter the cement. His palms screamed agony. He felt sidewalk grit working its way into raw subcutaneous layers of flesh.
“You stupid fuckin’ kid! Leave you alone for five minutes and I find you smokin’ dope on the street corner!” A boot ground into the small of his back. The voice was familiar, deep and faintly gravelly. Shit, no, please, no, thought Zach. Make me fuck a zombie. Let me watch my own face rotting in the mirror. Please, anything but my dad.
Zach twisted away from the boot. A large hand wrapped around his wrist and hauled him up. He found himself staring up into the pale exasperated face of Joe Bosch, and remembered one of the scariest things about his father: even when he was beating the crap out of someone, usually his wife or son, his face never lost that wide-eyed, slightly harassed expression. It was as if he sincerely believed he was inflicting this damage for the good of all concerned, and was only pissed that they couldn’t see it that way.
When Zach left home, his father had been a foot taller than he, skinny but muscular. Since then Zach had grown six inches and gained thirty pounds. Joe must have kept growing too, for he still seemed just as big. Zach had always looked very much like his mother. He had her pallid coloring, her slender bones, her narrow nose and sulky underlip and thick blue-black hair. The almond shape of his eyes was hers too. Joe didn’t look so different; he was fair-skinned and dark-haired with sharp intense features, and could have been Evangeline’s brother. But Evangeline’s eyes were Cajun black. Joe’s were the color of jade.
His father’s relentless stare bored into him, dissected him, mirrored him. Zach could not even try to pull away. He remembered the consequences of evasive action all too well. The trick of being beaten up was to take what you couldn’t avoid and show just enough pain to appease their anger, but not enough to make them want more. If you awakened their lust for pain, they would make you bleed, break, burn.
But there was one thing Zach had never been able to control, one thing that had gotten him hurt more times than he could remember, and that was his smart mouth.
He looked straight into Joe’s eyes, wondering if there was anything of his real father in there or if this was a phantom like Calvin in the movie theater, a distillation of Birdland and mushrooms and his own fear.
“I know you can kick my ass,” he said, “but can you talk to me?”
“Talk?” Joe sneered. Zach saw a gold tooth, remembered a night when he was four or five, his father staggering in with blood pouring from his mouth. It looked as if he had been vomiting the stuff. He’d been in a bar fight over some woman, and Evangeline had screamed at him all night.
“Sure, Zach-a-reee.” His mother had named him after her own grandfather. Joe hated the name, always spoke it that way, with a taunting twist to his lips. “We can talk. What do you wanna talk about?”
“I’ve got all kinds of shit I want to talk about.” Zach had never dared say these things to his father. If he didn’t say them now, he never would. “Tell me why you hate me so much. Tell me why I have belt scars on my back that haven’t faded in five years. Tell me how come I could leave home and support myself at fourteen but you couldn’t even deal with your fucking life at thirty-three!”
He tensed, expecting to get slapped. But Joe only smiled. It turned his eyes brilliant and dangerous. “You wanna know all that? Then take a look at this.”
Joe stuck his free hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a used condom. Holding it by the rim with thumb and forefinger as if his own seed were distasteful to him, he thrust it in Zach’s face. The reservoir tip was split open, and a long thin string of come dangled from it, glistening in the purple light. The Bosch family heirloom.
“This is why I hate you,” said Joe. “I didn’t want a kid any more than you want one right now. I could’ve done anything with my life. Your momma didn’t want you because she was scared of being pregnant and too lazy to take care of you once you got there. But I had a future, and you killed it.”
“BULLSHIT!” Zach felt his face flushing, his eyes burning with anger. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! I’m just your excuse for being a failure. Nobody made you—”
Joe jammed the rubber between Zach’s lips and deep into his mouth. The thing slithered over his tongue, squeaked nastily against his teeth. Zach was so startled that he almost sucked it right down his throat. For a moment his father’s fingers scrabbled over his tongue, hard and dirty; then they withdrew, and there was only the slimy feel of the rubber, its latex-and-dead-fish flavor.
Zach felt bile rising in his throat. He twisted his face away from Joe’s hand and spat the thing out on the sidewalk where it lay like a severed skin in a pool of spit. The taste of Joe’s come still filled his mouth, like sulfur and salt and murdered dreams.
“Swallow it,” Joe told him. “It could have been you.”
Zach felt his mind beginning to drift away on a thin tether. “This isn’t happening,” he said. “You aren’t real.”
“Oh yeah?” said Joe. “Then I guess this won’t hurt.” He cocked his right arm. Zach saw the flash of a big gold ring an instant before the fist smashed into his face.
The pain was like a sunburst exploding through his head. Zach inhaled a freshet of blood. Behind his eyelids he saw a sudden flare of electric blue. He’d read that when you saw that color, it meant your brain had just banged against the inside of your skull.
Joe hit him again and his lips smeared wetly across his teeth, soft skin splitting and shredding. This made the time Trevor had punched him look like a love tap. Joe let go of his arm and Zach crumpled to the sidewalk. He couldn’t open his eyes, though hot tears were searing them. He curled into a fetal position and wrapped his arms around his head. His father was screaming at him, half sobbing.
“You goddamn smartass BRAT. Always thought you were smarter than me. You and that CUNT, with your pretty faces. How pretty are you gonna be NOW? How smart are you gonna be with your fuckin’ BRAINS STOMPED INTO THE SIDEWALK?”
Joe’s boot connected with the base of Zach’s spine, sent a hot wave of pain up his body. He’s going to kill me, Zach thought. He’s going to kick me to death right here in the street. Will my body back at the house die too? Will Trevor wake up next to me with my head bashed in and think he did it?
The idea was unbearable. Zach rolled over, saw the boot drawing back to kick him again, grabbed his father’s ankle and yanked hard. If Joe went down, Zach knew in that instant, he wasn’t getting up again. Zach would kill him if possible—with a bottle or a chunk of brick if he could grab one, with his bare hands if he couldn’t. Fuck not fighting back; all bets were off.
But Joe didn’t go down. Zach managed to throw him off balance and he stumbled, then recovered with a great roar of rage and drove the toe of his boot into Zach’s shoulder. The muscles instantly contracted into a shrieking knot of agony. Well, that’s it, Zach thought through the pain. That was my chance and I blew it and now he’s just gonna kill me worse. He could already taste the dirty boot heel plowing into his mouth, his teeth splintering, blood spraying over his tongue.
But instead of stomping his face, Joe reached down, grabbed Zach’s arm, and pulled him back up. It was obvious that Joe would be perfectly willing to yank his shoulder out of its socket if Zach resisted. “You’re smart enough to get into places but not smart enough to know when you’re not wanted,” he hissed into Zach’s face. His breat
h was scented with peppermint and rotgut gin. “You’re meddlin’ here and I’m gonna stop you. Don’t fight me or I’ll put out one of your eyes. I swear it.”
Zach believed him. He remembered a time just before he had left home for good that Joe had thrown him against the wall and held a lighted cigarette less than an inch from his right eye, threatening to burn it if he blinked. Evangeline had snatched the cigarette, taken a slap across the face that knocked her down, then cussed Zach to ribbons for having provoked his father with some smartass remark. Later he had noticed that his eyelashes were singed.
Joe pulled out the poor man’s weapon he had always carried on the streets of New Orleans, a knotted sock half full of pennies. The black wool was stiff with dried blood. He slapped it against his palm thoughtfully, then grinned and swung it around his head, winding up for the blow.
Trevor, Zach promised silently, if I see you again—no, WHEN I see you, I’m taking you away to the cleanest, whitest, bluest, warmest beach you ever saw, and I’ll buy you all the paper and ink you want, and we’ll keep each other as sane as we want to be and love each other as long as we’re alive. We’ll let go of our pasts and start making our future.
Then his father’s slap plowed into his skull. Joe hit him so hard that the sock split right open. In the instant before his mind went out, Zach saw its contents raining down around his head, shimmering, sparkling.
Not pennies. Tiny diamonds.
Trevor kept following the street he had chosen. It led him deeper into the factories where he wasn’t sure he wanted to go, but there were no cross streets anymore, and he would not return the way he had come. There was nothing in those bars for him, nothing but the bottles frosted with dust and filled with poison, nothing but Skeletal Sammy’s crumbling bones.
He passed a shining, bubbling pool of black liquid enclosed by a chain-link fence, a vast decrepit building with white steam billowing from hundreds of broken windows, a railyard where rusty boxcars lay scattered like children’s blocks. There was a weird toxic beauty to the landscape. Like alien terrain, Trevor thought at first; but this desolation was peculiarly human.
His fingers itched for pencil and paper. He could actually feel the satisfying sensation of the graphite tip gliding over the page, the slight textured catch of the paper’s grain, the minute sympathetic vibration in the bones of his hand. He thrust both hands into his pockets and walked on.
The street began to curve away in a strange perspective, as if the horizon line didn’t quite mesh with the sky. He saw the corner of another empty lot up ahead, then realized it wasn’t empty after all as the edge of a building became visible, set back farther from the street than the others. Something else was odd about the building, and after a moment Trevor realized what. It was made of wood. The structure he saw was a wooden porch, here in this industrial wasteland of steel and concrete.
It cast a flat black shadow on the ground, the shadow of a peaked roof and spindly railings, like any of a million porches on a million rambling old farmhouses. You saw them plenty driving around rural areas of the South. You didn’t see them much, though, in the industrial sections of vast gray deserted cities.
A few more steps and his conscious mind saw what his back brain had known all along. It was the house from Violin Road, set down stark and solid in the middle of this necrophiliac dreamscape, the same as it had ever been, hardly looking a part of the world it now inhabited.
If not the seed of Birdland, the house was surely its rotten core; if not an actual part of this dead world, the house was surely its source. Trevor knew he was going back in there now. If he died this time, it would be as if he had never lived these twenty years. If he didn’t, then the rest of his life belonged to him.
And to Zach, if he still wanted any part of it. It’s the house where you lost your virginity after a quarter century, too, Trevor reminded himself. But that was another source of its power over him, as visceral as the deaths.
Remember, he thought dreamily, you still have plenty of time to get down to Birdland …
But now there was no more time. Now he was all the way down.
Without its yardful of weeds and green veil of kudzu the house looked stark, broken-backed, sculpted of splinter and shadow. The windows rippled with opaque colors, reflecting some light Trevor could not see. As he crossed the featureless lot they flared violet, then faded to bruise.
He mounted the steps, pushed the listing door open, and went in. The living room was just as he remembered it: ugly chair and sofa sagging but not completely gone to mold and mildew; the turntable surrounded by crates of records. His heart missed a beat as he saw another figure in the dim room.
Crouching near the hall doorway was a slender woman in a loose white camisole and a red skirt with matching elbow-length gloves. Long black hair spilled over her shoulders and down her back, rippling with unearthly blue highlights.
Her head swiveled and her face tilted up to him: pale, sharp-featured, startlingly lovely. Her enormous dark eyes were slightly tilted, smudged with shadows. Trevor realized three things at once: the woman looked just like Zach; she was holding something in her cupped hands; and she was wearing only a white one-piece shift, no gloves. The skirt was so stained with blood that he had thought it a separate piece of clothing. Her arms were swathed to the elbows in gore.
She raised her hands and showed him what she held. Trevor saw a gelatinous glob of blood shot through with dark veins, the black dot of an eye, five tiny curled fingers.
“I didn’t have the money for a doctor,” she said, “So I hit myself in the stomach until it bled. I just wanted the damn thing out of me. Do you hear? Out!”
Trevor advanced on her, stared her down. A quick hot vein of anger pulsed in his head. Zach had suffered unforgivably at the hands of this woman. “You did not,” he said. “You didn’t want him but you had him anyway, and you two tortured him as long as you could get away with it. That was nineteen years ago and your baby’s doing fine. Where are you now, you fucking evil bitch?”
The woman crumpled back against the door frame. The bloody mess slid out of her hands. Trevor had to resist the urge to scoop the lonely detritus into his own hands and sob over it. That mangled thing wasn’t Zach, couldn’t be. It was only a neverborn phantom.
He remembered that Zach’s mother was named Evangeline, like the poem. “Go away, Evangeline,” he said. “Get out of my house. I hate you.”
Her huge stricken eyes settled on Trevor. He couldn’t tell if she was hearing him; she hadn’t responded directly to anything he said. “You’re a ghost,” he told her, “and you’re not even the right one.”
Her head fell back. Her hands curled into claws. A shudder went through her, and for a moment the outlines of her body blurred, as if she were passing through some unseen membrane. Then all at once her hair was turning to cornsilk shot through with streaks of darker gold, matted with blood. Her features grew softer, rounder, her breasts heavier. Her arms hung by her sides, a mass of blood and bruise. Trevor found himself looking at his own mother, Rosena McGee, as he had discovered her that morning.
He remembered the first day he had come back to the house, when he switched on the light in the studio and saw Bobby’s drawing of this scene, identical to the one Trevor had done on the bus. At the time Trevor thought maybe Bobby had drawn it before her death, as a sort of dry run. But it was too exact; with Rosena struggling, he never could have landed the blows as precisely on her flesh as he had done on paper.
No. He had killed her, and then he had sat down here with his sketchbook and drawn her. Then he had tacked the drawing to the studio wall before he went in and killed Didi. Trevor had no proof of this sequence of events, but he could see it all too clearly. Bobby hunched on the floor before her broken body, hand flying over the paper, eyes flickering with manic intensity from Rosena’s dead face to the page and back again. But why?
His mother’s eyes were open, the whites filmed with blood. There were deep gouges in her forehead, her l
eft temple, the center of her chest. All had bled heavily. From the head wounds had also trickled some clear substance—cerebral fluid, he supposed—that cut pale tracks through the blood. Trevor noticed that unlike himself and Skeletal Sammy, Rosena was not in forties-noir costume; she wore the same embroidered jeans and cotton dashiki top she’d had on the night she died.
What the hell did that mean? What the hell did any of it mean? He suddenly wanted Zach here with him as badly as he had ever wanted anything. Zach could unravel intricate patterns of logic, perhaps explain them. And if there was no logic in Birdland, then Zach could hold him, give him somewhere to hide his face so he would not have to keep looking into his mother’s bloody eyes.
No. This was what he had come for. He had to see everything.
Rosena’s body blocked half the doorway. Trevor edged by, careful not to let his leg brush her. He could picture the stiff sprawl of her limbs if he were to knock her over, could hear the hollow sound her head would make hitting the floor. When he was nearly past, he could also imagine how it would feel if she reached out and wrapped a hand around his ankle. But Rosena remained motionless. He could not believe that she would ever harm him.
He pushed open the door of Didi’s room and looked through the crack but did not enter the room. There was a tiny body sprawled on the mattress. Even in the dim light Trevor could make out the dark stain surrounding the head.
Had Bobby drawn Didi after killing him too? Maybe, but Trevor didn’t think so. It would have been getting very late by then, and Bobby didn’t want to see another dawn. But where had he gone next? Straight into the bathroom with his rope, or somewhere else?
So many questions. Trevor was suddenly disgusted with himself for asking them when there seemed to be no answers. What the fuck did it matter what Bobby had done? What difference could it make to him now? He should never have eaten those mushrooms, should never have catapulted himself over into Birdland. He had left Zach behind, and he didn’t know how to find his way back, and everything here seemed like a senseless dead end.