Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  “Okay,” Ghost said quietly. The attack on his areas of ignorance didn’t sting much, but the reference to fucking Eliot did, because he knew it would drive Steve up the wall. “I’ll leave if that’s what you want. I brought you something, though.” He put a cassette on the table next to Ann’s coffee cup. The words LOST SOULS? were printed in multicolored crayon on the liner.

  Ann stared at the tape, then up at him. Her tough composure wavered. Her carefully arranged expression began to crumble. “Oh, Ghost …” She picked up the tape and pressed it to her lips. A couple of stray tears made crystal tracks through the smudged black makeup. “I miss you. I even miss Steve. But I can’t go back.”

  “I know.” He knew some of what had happened between them, not all. Steve hadn’t told him everything, but most of it got through anyway. And the rest—well, he guessed he could see it now, in Ann’s deathly pale face, in her smudgy, haunted eyes.

  She and Steve had always been stormy together. Steve had blithely dated his way through high school, getting laid but never quite getting involved. His tastes were diverse. The only girls he couldn’t stomach were the ones who seemed to make themselves up according to some redneck template, with the bleached-blond bubble hairdo, the feverish streak of blush across the cheeks, and the eyeshadow of colors never seen in nature. He had casual girlfriends of all other types: hippies who liked to get stoned with him, preppies who thought him wild and slightly dangerous, smart girls who appreciated his compulsive reading habit.

  But Ann was the first one he had fallen for. In her way, Ann loved Steve as fiercely as she loved her weird father, and Steve wanted her more than he had wanted anything since he had learned to play the guitar. But one of the first things that had drawn them to each other was also one of the first things to start tearing them apart. They both pretended to be so tough and cynical that there was no room left to give each other the gentleness they both really needed. Steve had always been like that, and Ghost knew his way around it; there was an honesty between them that surpassed any facade Steve could put up. But Ann wouldn’t play that game.

  Ghost took a sip of his coffee. It was cold and too sweet even for him. He drank more of it anyway, because he didn’t want to ask the question that had come into his head. But it wouldn’t go away; it had worried him ever since Steve had come home that night, his shirt untucked and his eyes wild and a bite mark on his hand. So finally he spoke again. “That was a shitty thing Steve did to you. You could have called the cops on him—or told your father. What stopped you?”

  Ann laughed. It was a humorless sound. “Right, Ghost. The cops. ‘Officer, my boyfriend—the one I’ve been sleeping with for four years—he raped me.’ ” She made her voice deeper and spoke in an exaggerated redneck drawl. “ ‘Sure, little lady, we understand. You been givin’ it away, and now you want to take it back. Why don’t you come on down to the station and maybe you can show us exackly what he did to you.’ I don’t think they would have been too sympathetic. And Simon—well—” The bitter smoke from her cigarette swirled around her head, obscuring her eyes. “Simon would have killed him.”

  Ghost believed her. But she still hadn’t told him what he really wanted to know. “How come you did it, Ann? You loved Steve. Maybe you still do. How come you wanted to go running to that guy over in Corinth?”

  For a moment Ann only looked at him with something flickering far back in her eyes, and Ghost thought she might throw her cup at his head. But then she looked at her burning cigarette as if she had just realized it was there in her hand, and she sucked smoke deep into her lungs, coughed a little, and answered him. Her voice was hoarser than usual. “I believe in whatever gets you through the night,” she said. “Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M. knows all my secrets. And when I was lying in bed next to Steve feeling like I was about to fly apart and he wouldn’t hold me because we’d been arguing about some damn stupid thing—well, I went looking for something to get me through the night a little bit better.”

  Ghost couldn’t say much to that. Her point of view still bothered him, but he knew that was just because no matter how much he cared for Ann, he would always love Steve more. So he talked about mutual friends Ann hadn’t seen for a while—she had been afraid of running into Steve, and Eliot was apparently a virtual hermit with no close friends of his own and no interest in meeting hers. Ann hadn’t been getting out much.

  Ghost gave her the news, such as it was. R.J. Miller’s supposedly male cat had a litter of seven kittens, six solid black and one a sort of green. Terry, who owned the Whirling Disc record store in town, had gone on vacation and left the assistant manager in charge. The guy had filled out the form wrong when making an order, and they received a huge shipment of Ray Stevens albums. When he got back, Terry started playing the records all the time as punishment. Twenty times a day or more they were treated to the annoying country singer performing classic numbers like “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” or “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way).”

  He told Ann these things and made her laugh a little. He didn’t tell her how much Steve was drinking, or that he had started robbing Coke machines again. She didn’t ask how Steve was either. But when he hugged her goodbye on the porch and rode his bike away, he thought she looked a little happier, a little less pale and drawn. Not much, but a little.

  A little worm of worry for her had already begun to gnaw in Ghost’s heart. He didn’t count it as a premonition. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between them and his ordinary feelings. But any friend of Ann’s would be worried about her, seeing how she was now. If the worm kept gnawing, he would pay more attention to it.

  He pointed his bike toward home. By the time he got there, the ugliest image he had picked up from Ann—Steve on top of her, shoving her down into the mattress—had almost faded from his mind.

  13

  Nothing fingered the colored glass bubbles in the partition between diner booths of torn maroon vinyl. The Greyhound had taken him down through Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs, down along anonymous highways flanked by chemical processing plants, cigarette mills, housing developments and the dull blue and green aluminum walls meant to protect them from the noise and smell of the highway.

  The scenery was boring and oppressive at first. It made Nothing wonder whether he might be travelling deeper and deeper into the dead world populated by his parents and teachers and the sad, desperate friends he had left behind. Surely these couldn’t be the roads that led to home.

  But now, deep in Virginia, the roadsides were lush and green, even in the middle of September. He was sitting in a truck-stop diner somewhere south of nowhere, watching the afternoon light fade, staring at the ripped vinyl and the greasy tables and the flashy jukebox that didn’t have the decency to play green and mournful country music, but played the pop top twenty over and over by the hour. Nothing held his backpack close to him. The place reeked of hamburger grease and cardboard-flavored coffee. But the colored glass bubbles in the divider were as beautiful as anything back home in his room. He wished he could somehow steal just one of them. By this time he wished he could have put his whole room in his backpack and carried it away with him.

  He glanced through the window at the bus station across the parking lot, lit a Lucky, tapped it, and rubbed ash absently into the thin torn cloth of his jeans. The jeans were soft and comforting, decorated with black ballpoint swirls, a chain of safety pins, artistic rips. His hightop sneakers chafed each other, tapped together impatiently, wanting to get back out on the road. There was a hole in one sneaker, over his little toe.

  He found the Lost Souls? cassette in the pocket of his raincoat, opened the plastic case, and took out the paper liner. The liner was a grainy photocopy, a picture of an old gravestone dappled with shadow and sunlight, surrounded by pine needles and twining kudzu vines. Across the gravestone the words LOST SOULS? were printed in rainbow crayon. All five hundred copies were supposed to have bee
n lettered by the band. He pictured the guitarist, hunched tall and awkward on the floor, pressing down too hard with the crayons and breaking them, cussing and turning the whole project over to the singer. The singer was surely in charge of the color yellow and with his fingers would have touched this paper, would have swirled in the question mark that kept the name from being stupid.

  Nothing looked at the other side of the paper liner, at the photo of the two musicians. Steve Finn, sitting with his guitar between his knees, grinning with a certain easy cynicism, his messy dark hair shoved behind his ears and a can of Budweiser not quite concealed behind the pointy toe of his left boot. And the other one, the one who slid his eyes away from the camera, whose knobby wrists lay crossed in his lap. Whose patchwork clothes were too big and whose hair fell from under his straw hat as pale as tangled rain, half-hiding his face, obscuring him.

  All Nothing knew about the duo came from this picture and the cryptic liner notes (“I like to drink my watercolor water”), those things and the long trainwhistle music and the spooky, wistful words of the songs. But he imagined personalities for them, felt as if he knew them. Lost Souls? belonged to the crowd of spirits inside his head, the ones he used to wish he was squeezed against on Saturday nights when Jack’s car went too fast around a curve and the others screamed for another hardcore tape. Those, his old friends—with their leather jackets and their skull bongs, their Marlboro hard packs and their thwarted dreams—those were teenagers. Nothing knew he was either a child or an ancient soul; he had never been sure which.

  He tugged at the drop of onyx and the tiny silver razor blade that dangled from his earlobe. He fingered a ballpoint pen in his pocket. Then he unzipped his backpack, dug for his notebook, and pulled a postcard from between the scribbled, singed, softly ragged pages. It was the postcard he had written while drinking his parents’ whiskey, but he had not yet mailed it. The gold leaf caught the light as he laid the card on the table.

  GHOST, he had addressed it, c/o LOST SOULS? 14 BURNT CHURCH ROAD, MISSING MILE, NORTH CAROLINA. He wrote no zip code—they hadn’t included one on the tape case. Maybe Missing Mile was too small to have a zip code. But, thank whatever gods watched over him, he had remembered to put a stamp on it. He could hardly afford to buy one now.

  He finished his cigarette, lit another, tried to make out the time through the layer of grease on the wall clock, glanced over at the bus station again. But it was no good. He couldn’t get back on a bus even if he wanted to. The money from his mother’s jewelry box had run out two towns ago. His stomach hurt, and he had thought of spending his one remaining dollar on a burger or some pancakes. But what if it was the last dollar he ever got? He had to save it for something he really wanted: a new notebook, a cup of expensive coffee, a black slouch hat in a thrift shop somewhere. He could always steal cigarettes. You had to spend your last dollar on something important.

  He was going to have to start hitching. He’d never done it before—he’d tried to catch rides to Skittle’s or the record store back home, but the young townie matrons only eyed his long raincoat, his lank black hair, and stepped on the gas. And hitching out on the highway, with the wide flat sky stretching away overhead and the great trucks like dragons screaming by—well, that was a different affair. Anyone might stop. Anything might happen.

  He kissed the postcard and dropped it into a mailbox near the bus station, then crossed the parking lot and climbed a grassy embankment to the highway. Among the mosaic of dirty gravel and shattered glass on the shoulder of the road, he found a single long bone as dry and clean as a fossil. A chicken bone, probably, that somebody had tossed out a car window. But it might be raccoon or cat or even—Nothing shuddered pleasurably—a human bone. Maybe someone had been thrown from a wreck, or some hitchhiker like himself had been hit and killed here, and the policemen who cleaned up the mess had overlooked a finger or two. Nothing put the bone in his raincoat pocket and closed his hand around it. It nestled there, making a place for itself next to Lost Souls?

  An hour’s worth of cars went by, sleek and faceless, windows rolled up against the coming night. Colors melted across the sky; the sun died its bloody evening death. Out here, away from the lights of the diner and the bus station, the sky was a deep violet pricked with stars like glittering chips of ice. A night wind was freshening, and Nothing began to shiver. He had almost decided to go back and try to sleep in the bus station when the Lincoln Continental screeched to a stop beside him.

  The car was unwieldy and enormous, salmon-pink splotched with great woundlike patches of rust. A rope trailed from the rear bumper, unravelling, its end stained dark. The car’s interior, once white maybe, reeked of something rancid.

  As he got in, Nothing saw the green plastic Jesus on the dashboard, but before he could reconsider the driver leaned across him and pulled the passenger door shut. Nothing realized suddenly what the rancid smell was: sour milk. It made him think of the Dumpsters behind the school cafeteria when they hadn’t been dumped for a while.

  “Where you headed?” After a moment’s hesitation, the driver added, “Son?”

  The green Jesus glowed faintly in the dimming light. Nothing dragged his gaze away from it and looked into the driver’s face, but not before he had realized that the eyes of the Jesus were painted red. “Missing Mile,” he said. It was the only place he could think of on a second’s notice. “North Carolina.”

  The man nodded and turned back to the road. “Heard about the place. Maggot’s nest of sin, nightclubs and bars, fast women.” He scowled at the highway.

  Nothing looked more closely at the driver. He seemed very white. His face was unlined and pale, with a kind of crazy exalted beauty to it, but the hair that hung in it was the color of flat, hard-packed ice. The man’s hands were as spindly as two white spiders on the steering wheel, and the pale wrists disappeared into folds of cloth as white as milk. Was he wearing robes?

  The white hands skittered on the wheel. “Have you been saved?”

  “Shit,” said Nothing softly.

  “What was that?”

  Nothing looked out the window at a graying landscape. Born-agains made him into a smartass. “Yeah. I was saved once, at a party. I was almost sober, and my friend gave me another drink.”

  One of the hands shot off the wheel. Nothing flinched, thinking he was about to get smacked, but the hand only crawled through the clutter on the front seat and came up with a smeary purple-inked tract clutched in its fingers. Saved by the Blood of the Lamb.

  The man dropped the tract in Nothing’s lap. A long white finger touched Nothing’s leg through a rip in his jeans. “You read that,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure. I will.” Nothing started to stuff the tract into his backpack.

  “Now.” The voice was ice-edged. Nothing thought of frozen milk, of shattering crystal. “You read me them words now. Sing it loud and clear.”

  “No way. Fuck that.” Nothing pushed himself back against the door. “Let me out.”

  “I could tell you were a sinner from the minute you climbed in. Christ shows them to me, and it’s my duty to save them. I got to do it. I got to do it.” The driver’s voice sounded almost frightened now. “You got to read, it’s my duty to make you.”

  The needle of the speedometer was jittering, climbing. Sixty. Eighty. The Lincoln slipped on the shoulder, sprayed gravel, righted itself.

  Nothing unfolded the tract. The last fiery sliver of sun was just slipping down behind the pines. The tiny violet letters squirmed and blurred before his eyes. “I can’t read it,” he said. “Too dark.”

  The driver touched a button. Dull light flooded the car. The man glanced sideways at him, and Nothing saw that the irises of his eyes were red. No, not red. Pink. Bright jewel-pink. Nothing was so intrigued that he forgot to be afraid. “Can you see?” he asked.

  A kind of radiance suffused the man’s face, lighting up that crazy horrible beauty, making it glow. “My affliction,” he said. “They call me albino. I call it the hand of
Jesus upon me. I am stricken, and I walk with Him.”

  “They’re pretty,” said Nothing. “I wouldn’t mind having pink eyes.”

  The radiance disappeared. The speedometer trembled up to ninety-five, “God-given affliction ain’t pretty. You go on. You got to read.”

  Nothing picked up the tract again. As he shifted in his seat, his foot crushed something on the floor. Now he could see where the sour smell came from: dozens of empty milk cartons littered the floorboards, some fresh, some faded with age. Missing children smiled sunnily up at him, refusing to acknowledge that now they were probably just scattered bones in a culvert somewhere.

  Nothing took a deep breath and opened the tract. The paper felt slick and cheap between his fingers. “ ‘What is eternal life?’ ” he began.

  “Go on,” the driver told him. His breathing had begun to quicken.

  An hour later it was full dark outside the dusty windows. The Lincoln was cruising at eighty. The albino had made him read four more tracts, and between that and the sour-milk odor, Nothing’s throat felt as if someone had poured hot sand down it.

  “ ‘Don’t let Satan deceive you, for he lies. BEING SAVED IS THE ONLY WAY INTO HEAVEN.…’ ” Nothing faltered. His voice was as hoarse as if he had just smoked a whole pack of Luckies. If the albino was going to kill him and dump him in a ditch somewhere, they might as well get it over with. If he stopped now, maybe he’d still be able to scream.

  “I can’t go any more,” he said, afraid to look at the albino. Instead he stared out the window. The countryside was dark. Rain had begun to speckle the windshield, streaking down through a patina of dust and highway grit. There was no light anywhere, not by the side of the road, not on the horizon. Heavy clouds blotted out the moon.