“Things is bad,” Monty informed him, sighing through his dirty blond beard. “I don’t have nothing. You got to go to the Ninth Ward.”
Sean drummed his fingers on his thighs. “I don’t feel like walking that far.”
“Well, I hear there is this guy. A Creole, young guy, called Jean the Rat. You might find him behind this store on Dumaine. I don’t know if he have powder.”
“That’s okay. Got the cross street?”
Sean walked fast, knowing Cristina was waiting for him back at Café du Monde, and even though he’d left her enough cash to keep her eating and drinking and in the good graces of the waitstaff, he knew she wouldn’t wait forever. He was in her good graces right now, but she could easily turn on a dime. Not that he couldn’t handle her at her worst; he was just enjoying her sweet mood too much to lose it now.
He found the store—half wigs and beauty supplies, half tourist center advertising “CAJUN VOODOO CEMETERY TOURS”—and lingered at the window awhile before decidedly turning down the alley.
Monty wasn’t lying. By the back door, a young man sat cross-legged on a folding lawn chair, reading a magazine.
“Hey,” Sean said, hanging back. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Jean, right?”
“Hello, Sean. Took you awhile, was kind of hoping you weren’t coming.” The man smoothed down the pages of the magazine and turned. Ángel.
“The hell are you doing here?” Sean snarled. Damn. Damn, damn. He was never going to get back to Cristina in time. Not like this. He had to ball his fists to try to stop the vibration of his muscles. “Where’s Jean?”
Ángel spread his hands. “You’re looking at ‘im,” he replied, putting on a perfectly faked accent.
“No way. They said you were—”
“I’m all things to all people, Sean. Don’t you get it yet?”
The pattern of bricks in the wall behind Ángel got wavy-lined all of a sudden, and the sound of water roared in his ears.
“Yeah? Well, you’re a fucking hypocrite to me.” His headache flared back. Spiked. His hands trembled out of his pockets. “All that fucking talk about bad choices, and you’re fucking selling?”
“I give people what they choose for themselves. So what’ll it be?” His accent wavered, from the Caribbean Spanish Sean had first pinned on him, to New Orleans native, to something else, and back to Spanish again. The waviness got worse. “Meth? No, not yet. And we already know pot isn’t strong enough.”
Sean clutched his head, stumbling sideways. “You know.”
“White powder? Black tar?”
Sean just breathed heavily in response, trying to find the steady lines of the world again. Ángel rose from the chair and glided toward him like a shark, like a heat mirage.
“Take it now,” said Ángel. He felt a plastic bag pressed into the palm of his claw-tight hand.
“You don’t understand,” he said weakly as Ángel closed his hand around it. Even as he protested, he felt relieved, knowing he wasn’t going back to Cristina empty-handed, knowing this horrible pain would be ending soon. Then Ángel turned his attention downwards to Sean’s jeans, reaching into the pocket for the money as if they were his own (and they were, of course). He drew the wad out, counted some bills off, and slid the rest back, and the pressure of his hand, oh God . . . Sean closed his eyes, but that only made him feel unanchored, as if he were about to drift away with the black water that marked where the city ended.
He leaned against the wall of a building, and Ángel leaned with him until Ángel’s chin was tucked against his jaw.
“Leave,” whispered Ángel. Then Sean sensed him moving away, and when he spoke again, it was from a greater distance, and his words hit colder and deeper. “There’s a storm coming. Go back to where you came from. Someone else is waiting for you there.”
The pain in his temples flew away at that, so he risked opening his eyes again. Ángel’s face seemed sad. He stroked a hand down Sean’s cheek, down to cup his neck. Sean couldn’t speak. He fought off the urge to kiss him.
“Something about you,” Ángel said. “I wanted to save you—I’m such a cold old bastard, I haven’t wanted to do that in a long time—but I can’t save you from yourself, and I can’t save you from the gun you’re going to face down. But I’ll save you from this, and maybe then you’ll save yourself.”
“Fuck you,” Sean tried to shout, but it came out as a sob.
“Chao,” Ángel said, and the word in his mouth sounded like a bell ringing. He turned, folded the chair smoothly, walked up the rusty black metal steps to the back door, and disappeared.
Sean tightened his fist around the baggie.
Sean slithered up Cristina’s body as it rose and fell underneath him, undulating like a wave and making him delirious with want. She was wordlessly begging him to fill her, drawing him into—
She froze. Her hips stilled, and her hands wandered across his chest until she found a spot by his left nipple where she paused to pick flecks of something off his skin.
“Wax?” she asked. “You get a little freaky with that john last night?”
He groaned in frustration and propped himself up on his elbows. She held out a finger, a little smooth hunk of wax balanced on the tip, for him to see, and his cock throbbed, thinking of last night. Thinking of Ángel sucking dick.
“He was just an asshole with a weird fetish. The real freak was Ángel, the guy I was working with, if that’s even his name. Guy was practically psychic, and get this . . .”
Tongue loosened by the bliss of the high and the sensation of her body underneath his, he told her everything, from that first forty dollars to Ángel’s many uncanny appearances over the past days, the way their job working as brothers had turned bad, Ángel’s multiple hypocritical lectures and hazy, ominous threats.
“But seriously, fuck him, he doesn’t own this city. I’ll leave when I’m fucking ready.”
Cristina, uncharacteristically quiet, didn’t reply.
He’d totally lost his hard-on. At least he’d gotten Cristina off, anyway.
“Red and black,” she said in a quiet voice, smoothing her glossy hair from her eyes more times than she needed to. “You said red and black.”
“It was a nice hoodie. I figured he must have been a local or from further down south, because tourists don’t wear that kind of stuff in summer. Guess that’s why I remembered it, specifically.”
“Okay, that’s it. We’re getting the fuck out of here, now. Tonight. Fuck, it’s too late, tomorrow morning, yeah, we’ll go to the bus station.” She rocketed off the bed and began pacing the tiny room, naked and gorgeous and hair flying every which way, but damn, she was freaking him out.
“What, do you know that guy? Is he some kind of—”
“Santo Niño de Atocha,” she said, and crossed herself. “Elegguá. The opener and closer of the way. Those are his colors. In this city they call him Papa Legba.”
“You don’t believe it.” She was into that stuff, he knew, burned candles for luck, but this was a leap into the abyss. Orishas walking the earth. No. “Maybe he was a follower, and he thought Elegguá was in him, riding him. There’s a million explanations.”
“He tests people,” she said, avoiding his eyes as she rummaged through her clothes and stuffed them into her suitcase with determined, jabbing fingers. “I don’t know if you passed or not, but if he said get the fuck out of Dodge, then I’m gonna pay attention. Come on, baby. Look, there’s a strip club in Jacksonville, the manager said I could always get work there. We had a good time”—and her face twisted as she tried to make herself believe it—“but we have to go now, okay? Okay?”
“This is bullshit. I’m not going anywhere.”
He was ready for an onslaught of fury and screams. What came next was much more unsettling. Cristina sat on the carpet, held her knees, and rocked herself.
“Please,” she said. “Please, baby. I want to go.”
“Let me smoke some more. I have to think about
it.”
She jumped to her feet and hurried to get everything ready for him: passed him the cardboard tube and lit the flame under the foil, holding it for him with downcast eyes, like an offering. The smoke rose and he chased it down, taking all the sweet and bitter into his lungs, into his blood, letting himself be taken over and carried to where everything was in the right place at the right time, perfect forever and ever.
“We could make it last longer, if you slammed it like me,” he heard Cristina say a little peevishly, down below somewhere on another plane of existence.
“Maybe nest time,” he slurred. “We can go. Sure. S’all the same. Come back later.”
“Yeah, we can always come back later. I’ll run all this by someone who knows their shit. There’s a right time for everything.”
He wanted to say hell no, that’s not how the real world worked, in fact it didn’t work at all, it kind of tumbled over itself and fell apart and was all wrong and didn’t make sense but kept going anyway. But he was too high to talk, really, so he just nodded.
It’s time to go away for a while.
Shut up, Ángel.
The full day’s journey to Jacksonville passed in a pleasant dopey haze, Sean staring out the window at the endless stretches of scrub pine that lined the highway. Sleepy Cristina’s head nudged up against his shoulder, her eyes blindfolded with a scarf to shield them from the light.
After the crowds of New Orleans, Jacksonville felt sad and empty and ugly, like a ghost town that didn’t know it had died. The sprawl still held a lot of people, though, and they found some familiar faces the first night out.
A week later, Cristina got fired from the strip club.
Two weeks later, he stayed glued to the television set all day, watching footage of people waiting on their roofs for rescue from the black water. He didn’t want to be alone, but Cristina was in jail on a bullshit charge. A newscaster predicted ten thousand people dead. He cried a little bit and cursed a lot more, just throwing the words out into the air of the hotel room, letting the buzzing roar of the air conditioning unit swallow them down.
There’s a storm coming.
Then he went out to score. The New Orleans money having long since run dry, he sold the jeans for twenty dollars.
Three weeks later, he was hanging out in the shadows by a rest stop, keeping one eye out for cops and the other out for tricks.
Two months later, he got into the wrong car.
“Think you’re going somewhere?”
It was the kind of smile Sean imagined Jeffrey Dahmer would have had: not at all desperate or impatient or cagey, but just very, very, very calm.
Click.
And the gun, that was a strange sort of thing too, wasn’t it, so snub-nosed and swallowed up in the meat of the man’s palm that it looked like a toy, not the kind of gun the cops carried, not the kind that had a nice weight and meant serious business like you could jam it into your waistband, then lift up your shirt corner at just the right second to intimidate a man or impress a girl. Not that kind at all.
He wanted to believe it was a toy so badly that his bones ached, but he couldn’t quite manage to rewind his memory and erase the sight of silver marks etched across darker, greasier metal.
“Close the door.”
I could open the door wider, he thought, and let the black water come rushing in. Let it swallow me like the city. Instead, he uncurled his fingers from the door handle as the meaning of the marks flowered in his mind. Triple arrows for Beretta, for completion of the pattern, for choosing to fuck his life until it came down to this.
I give people what they choose for themselves.
He understood everything. The gun wasn’t for shooting him with, or even threatening to shoot him with. It was a message, and the message said—
“You’re taking me all the way.”
The message said—
The john took his cock out of his jeans and held it in his fist—like it was a weapon too—leering the whole time, daring Sean to test him.
The message said, I’ve shifted your entire fucking paradigm, kid. Now anything can happen.
Anything.
Afterward, Sean swallowed a mouthful of cum-salty spit and what was left of his pride and crouched to gather the crumpled bills scattered across the gravel of the wide shoulder. Somewhere on the way to catching a balled-up note, he lost his balance—or maybe the strength in his knees finally gave out—and he ended up on his ass, stunned stupid and watching his money rolling merrily away like tumbleweeds in the backdraft of a passing semi-trailer.
He realized he was shaking.
The money—well, at least the money meant this would be over soon. He pulled himself to his feet and went chasing down the dark highway after it.
Seventeen dollars.
At least he paid.
“I lied,” said Cristina. “I was always someone else. I’m always pretending. There’s no me left. I’m hollow inside. You go ahead and leave me; I’ll just go on pretending.”
“Get off the fucking cross with that shit. I’m leaving, yeah, and you’re coming with me. We just need some . . . some . . . perspective.”
He swung his pack onto his shoulder and took three steps toward the library doors that led out to the street. Stopped. Looked back over his shoulder. She wasn’t following.
“We were doing fine.”
He turned to face her, but he felt a tide pushing him away, backward into a different future.
“We were never doing fine. That was the lie. That was always the lie. Please. Please come with me. I’ve got this relative in Portland, she’ll—”
“She’ll what, Sean? What’s she gonna do to fix all this?”
She spread her arms, spinning in a circle, like she was gesturing to some scene of destruction. But it was just the Jacksonville Public Library, shelves and tables and neat rows of cheap computer monitors.
Someone at a nearby table, buried in a stack of books, hissed at them and glowered, but didn’t have the balls to come over.
“She says if I go to rehab, she’ll put me up. Help me get my GED.”
“Rehab?” Cristina laughed bitterly. “What are you gonna do in rehab? You’re so fucked up, you’re beyond saving. Last time we got high, you cried the whole time. I couldn’t get through to you no matter how hard I tried, could I? I had to go out and get money myself.”
“I don’t want to die.” There was a permanent cold spot on the nape of his neck, where the gun barrel had pressed down, and he wasn’t sure it would ever go away. “I guess that’s what it comes down to. And I know I can’t rescue you, but all you have to do is come along, okay? It’s a long way to Portland, and I’ll be lonely.”
“You don’t love me. Just fuck off already.” She threw her hand in front of her face, hiding her eyes, and ran into the women’s bathroom. Sean stood there stunned, and would have gone after her, except for the hand that dropped onto his shoulder just then.
“All right, kid, you and your girlfriend are making a scene. Time to move it along.” The rent-a-cop looked overtired, sick of his job, and sick of people like Sean.
He slapped the long-suffering hand away. “I was fucking leaving anyway. Fuck you, man.”
Every cubic inch of his body had something wrong with it. He wanted to drink and vomit at the same time, a totally horrifying paradoxical urge, and the soles of his feet itched like he’d stepped in a nest of fire ants. He knew his shirt was soaked with sweat down the back, but he was in too much agony to care how he looked. The pill will kick in soon, he promised himself as he staggered forward in the bus station line. He’d still be in a world of hurt, but it had to be more bearable than this. God, the next few days, as he rode across the middle of America.
“Portland,” he croaked. The bills trembled out of his hands onto the Formica counter.
“Looks like I can get you a window seat on the first leg. A one-way ticket, I take it?”
Sean looked up from where he was staring, hypnotized, at t
he pattern on the counter. “What?”
Ángel smiled at him through the Plexiglas. “A one-way ticket?” he repeated, blandly friendly.
For a second, Sean was relieved, because it all made sense now. Ángel was a good-looking guy who happened to have the conman’s gift of crawling into people’s minds, and here he was, another Hurricane Katrina evacuee, waiting for the city to dry out and the dead to be buried and working at a Greyhound ticket counter . . . Fuck, that didn’t make any sense at all.
Elegguá. Señor de los Caminos. “No,” he whispered.
Ángel looked disappointed. “No?”
“No. I mean—yes. Yes. A one-way ticket. Yes.”
He felt his eyes shivering in their sockets. The Plexiglas swirled with smoke. Melted into milk. He couldn’t see through it anymore.
When the spasm passed and he raised his head from the counter, there was a CLOSED sign where Ángel had sat. And a ticket under his right hand. One-way.
It’s time to go now.
I’m ready.
Five years later and an ocean away, Sean’s story continues in
The Druid Stone.
Storm Moon Press:
The Saturnalia Effect
Salting the Earth, a story in the Like It or Not anthology
Loose Id:
Hawaiian Gothic (June 2012)
Carina Press:
The Druid Stone (August 2012)
Dreamspinner Press:
Bookended
Violetta Vane grew up a drifter and a third culture kid who eventually put down roots in the Southeast US, although her heart lives somewhere along the Pacific coast of Mexico. She’s worked in restaurants, strip clubs, academia, and the corporate world and studied everything from the philosophy of science to queer theory to medieval Spanish literature. She has a faintly checkered past, a cinematic imagination, and a passion for stories that make readers shiver, sweat, and think.
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