by Poppy Brite
“It must be a club,” Nothing said. All at once he made up his mind. Zillah might be glad to get rid of him; if not, then they could kill him here, right in the middle of Missing Mile. “You can let me out anywhere,” he told Twig. “I’m going to see that show.”
Twig slowed the van. “You’re leaving? Just when things were starting to get interesting?”
“Let’s at least eat him,” said Molochai in a loud sotto voce.
Zillah seemed to wake up. He raised his head and looked at Nothing. Nothing stared back at him for a long moment, trying to register just what he was seeing. The torn skin of Zillah’s mouth was knitting itself back together; its appearance was already closer to fresh pink scar tissue than raw wound. The smashed cartilage of his nose was straightening, rebuilding itself. And his gums were still bleeding—but not from the teeth he had lost. They bled because new teeth were coming in, poking white and shiny through the tender pink flesh.
“This is a goddamn pain in the ass,” said Zillah.
Nothing lowered his eyes. “I know.”
“Every second it’s growing back is agony. I can feel each cell stretching itself toward the next one, each nerve end screaming. And do you know when was the last time I had to be carried out of a place? DO YOU?”
“When?”
“1910. I was about your age. I’d been picked up by a pretty young artillery officer in Savannah, Georgia. I made him take me to a company party—posed as his little brother—where they served a punch you could have embalmed corpses with. It was made of wine, rum, gin, brandy, whiskey, champagne …”
Nothing thought of a concoction he and Laine had mixed in a Mason jar when they’d been learning to drink—an inch from every bottle in their parents’ liquor cabinets. They had dry-heaved for days.
“I lost control of myself. Broke a gentle lady’s arm, bit through her left nipple, and put out one of her eyes. It took five men to knock me out and carry me away. They hanged me from a live oak, and I cut myself down. And that was the last time it happened, do you understand? THE LAST TIME UNTIL TODAY!”
Zillah’s face was an inch from Nothing’s now; he could actually see particles of skin forming on Zillah’s lips, forming a thin web, then meshing.
“I understand,” he told Zillah. “I’m getting out here.”
Zillah stared at him. “No,” he whispered. “No. You mustn’t.” A strange smile played upon his half-healed features. “Your friends weren’t hurt, were they? And you’ve learned your lesson. Why don’t we stay and see the show with you?”
Then, at last, Zillah stretched out his hands. The palms were turned up and the fingers were trembling slightly. Nothing was almost sure the tremor was genuine. Almost. He took Zillah’s hands in his own and kissed them.
All through the remainder of the afternoon Steve was bored and restless. Ghost watched him do the Steve Finn equivalent of pacing the floor. He folded his long body into a hundred positions on the couch. He pulled the ratty coverlet around him and tried to read. He picked up his guitar, then his banjo, but put them down without touching the strings. He got out an old shoebox full of stuff Ann had sent him, letters and notes and postcards with weird little messages on them. With one finger Steve poked at an envelope, prying at the stamp with his fingernail, slowly peeling it away from the paper. Then he did the same thing to a second stamp. When he started on a third, Ghost got up and went to his room.
He took off his clothes and curled up in bed. For an hour he lay listening to the syrupy dark voices on the gospel radio station, trying not to think about the strangers who had broken into his house. He was sure he had dreamed about Nothing—for Ghost, having a dream about something he was going to do or somebody he was going to meet was as common as getting a call from a friend.
A recollection came to him. Something about the name Zillah. The flower-seller had mentioned that name, his pale face snapping up eagerly: “Have you news of Zillah?” That was the connection. But Ghost still didn’t know who they were or what they wanted in Missing Mile. And three of today’s visitors had a look that reminded Ghost of the twins on the hill: a sleek gloss, a well fed but somehow unhealthy look.
Nothing did not have that look, not yet. But the others were obviously old hands at—at whatever sort of pain and death they dealt. Ghost only knew that they didn’t feel human, though judging from the new bite mark on Steve’s hand and the bruises on his wrists and legs where Molochai and Twig had held him down, they were more corporeal than the twins on the hill.
Well, he was doing a great job of not thinking about them. He was glad toward early evening when Steve stuck his head in and said, “Let’s head on over and do the sound check. We can grab a couple of beers before the show.”
Ghost got dressed fast, pulling on a pair of jeans torn out at the knees, a baggy T-shirt and sweater, his army jacket, his hat with the colored streamers. When he went out, Steve was standing by the front door rattling the knob, jiggling his guitar case, glancing toward the window every few seconds. Ghost decided not to talk about the visitors. Not yet. Steve would bring it up if he wanted to.
Ghost was relieved to get into the T-bird and sit back, watching the cold empty roads slip by, letting Steve vent his frustration on the steering wheel, the gas pedal, the radio whose knob he twisted as if wreaking vengeance on the music. The roads were nearly empty tonight. Ghost saw a rusty blue pickup, its bed piled high with pumpkins that mirrored the pale orange light of the moon. He saw a Greyhound bus going north. The air inside the T-bird was heavy with Steve’s restlessness. Ghost knew Steve would get very drunk tonight.
Well, what the hell. So would he. Maybe.
But after the music was over.
At the Sacred Yew, they did their sound check. Ghost sat on the edge of the stage, swinging his legs, listening to Steve curse the club’s shitty PA, occasionally singing a few lines into the microphone. When the check was over, Steve headed for the bar, a separate room at the back of the club. Ghost followed, trailing his fingers along the hand-painted, crayoned, and Magic Markered mural on the wall. He had drawn part of the mural himself. Anyone who wanted to add to it could—Kinsey kept pens and finger paints behind the bar.
Ghost knew every corner of the Yew, every one of the fancy antique-gold ceiling tiles Kinsey had put in, every graffito in the restrooms. When you played at a club forty weeks out of a year, it got to be home.
As soon as Ghost came into the bar, Steve handed him a can of Budweiser. Kinsey Hummingbird was serving at the bar, smiling his awkwardly amiable smile, already setting up a second beer for Steve. Steve finished his first one and started on the next.
Ghost sipped his beer—he didn’t need it, not tonight; he would drink music—and watched the kids come in. Soon the club was full of them. College students from Raleigh, and dropouts like Steve and Ghost. High school students from Windy Hill, the hippie Quaker place, but hardly any from the county school; they were all metalheads over there. Younger kids too—junior high kids smoking Marlboros and Camels, kids trying to look jaded and managing only to look bored. Kids with wide-open innocent faces and easy smiles, kids with long dark hair and eyeliner, kids with razor scars on their wrists, kids already sick of life, kids happy to be alive and drunk and younger than they would ever feel again.
They were so very young, Ghost thought as he stood among them, feeling their pain and their exuberance, their stupidity and terror and beauty brush his mind. They were so young, and they wore their thrift-shop jewelry, their ragged jeans, their black clothes like badges of membership to some arcane club. Some club that required drunkenness—on cheap liquor, on rainy midnights, on poetry or sex. Some club that required love of obscure bands and learning to lie awake at 4:00 A.M., bursting with terrors and wide-awake dreams.
None of these kids was Nothing. Ghost looked for the long silk coat, the lank black hair, the three lurking figures that would surround the boy. But he was not here, though many of these kids looked like him—the same big, black-rimmed, blasted eyes, t
he same pale flickering hands. Ghost hoped Nothing wouldn’t come. Not with those three. But he knew they would be there.
Something in him ached for that boy. For the sadness in his face, for his eyes yearning to stay young. He wanted to grab Nothing away from his companions and tell him that sometimes everything could be all right, that pain did not have to come with magic, that childhood never had to end. And yet he wondered whether Nothing had not known all those things when he made his choice. Whatever that was.
The right choice was not always clear. Nevertheless, Nothing had had to make one. Ghost had felt him do it, right there in the bedroom as he woke up, and he had felt the boy grow a little older. He felt his mind straining at something it could not quite grasp, and the feeling was odd; there wasn’t much Ghost could not empathize with. He reminded himself that he had not really tried, had not wanted to try.
Then Steve grabbed Ghost’s arm and dragged him through the crowd toward the stage. It was time to play. Ghost felt the small shiver of something like stage fright and something like wild intoxication, when the room swims, when you can no longer stand up straight or trust your eyes.
Hands plucked at Ghost’s clothes, at the streamers on his hat. He was greeted by a multitude of young voices. He felt the brush of their fingers and their minds; he breathed their cigarette smoke. Then they were stumbling onstage, Steve and Ghost, Lost Souls? come back again.
Steve clawed at his guitar, letting loose the night’s first jangling scream. Ghost glanced at the set list taped to the floor, scrawled in Steve’s illegible handwriting, and the words of the first song rose to his lips. He stepped up to the microphone and, gripping it with both hands, whispered those words: “Don’t go on the beach.… Realize the lions have come in …”
The audience swayed at the touch of his voice. He looked into those upturned young faces bathed in dim stagelight, the fresh faces, the pale hollow-boned faces with their darkly lined eyes.
And there in the middle of the crowd was Nothing, not swaying but standing very still, his face tilted up with the rest, his eyes wide and shadowed. His three friends were there too, clustered around him. Zillah stared at the floor, his face in darkness. One of the two bigger ones poked Nothing and shouted something into his ear, but Nothing only shook his head and kept staring at Ghost.
Then, as the first song ended, Zillah looked up at the stage. Even from behind the lights, from fifteen feet away, Ghost could see that Zillah’s face was perfect as a mask again. His nose was straight, his lips full and lustrous. There were no bruises. There was no swelling.
Zillah caught him staring and smiled.
Smiled with a complete mouthful of sharpened, shining teeth.
Ghost faltered. He forgot the words of the next song. Steve was trying to give him the cue, but Ghost couldn’t look at him, couldn’t turn his head away from that perfect mouthful of teeth. What was he dealing with here? What the hell had decided to visit itself on Missing Mile?
The moment of silence stretched, became unbearable. Now Steve was at the back of the stage fucking with the equipment, trying to cover for him. They did a couple of songs that required a prerecorded bass and drum track, and Steve was turning knobs that didn’t need turning, adjusting levels that were already set. But how long could that stretch out? Where were his words?
Then Ghost tore his gaze away from Zillah’s shining smile and looked out over the sea of faces again, and the spell was broken. So Zillah had new teeth, new skin. So what? He and Steve had a show to do. The fragile faces could not be turned away; the burning hearts could not be quenched by disappointment. Ghost felt a righteous anger fill him. Hypnotized by a smile? Oldest trick in the book! It couldn’t trick him, though, not now. He had to sing.
Steve was staring at him, half pissed off, half scared. He tapped his foot three times and gave Steve the nod. And when Ghost started singing again, the words poured from him like a river of gold.
They played “Mandrake Sky,” an odd chiming melody, the first song Ghost had more or less composed on his own, then an assortment of their older songs, rocking numbers. Ghost began to be drunk on the music. When he felt himself swaying, he clung harder to the microphone.
The audience was a sea. The music pulled like the Mississippi; he could be swept away, he could drown. But drowning might be sweet. In his throat, his voice was thick wine. The pale hands snatched it and bore it up on a cloud of clove smoke. For those children Ghost sang harder, letting his voice soar, pushing it down deep and gravelly, stringing it out in a howl like a shimmering gold wire.
Between him and Steve the electricity crackled. Ghost clenched his hands in front of him, raised his face to the gilded tiles of the ceiling. Steve shook his head madly. His hair stood out like a scribbled black cloud. Sparkling drops of sweat landed sizzling on his guitar, on the audience, on Ghost’s upturned face. Ghost licked the sweat off his lips and tried to breathe. There was no breath left in him. The audience had taken it all. In him there was only song, endlessly swelling. If he did not let it out his heart would burst.
He had forgotten all about Zillah’s perfect new face.
At the end, Steve joined Ghost at the microphone to sing backup on the last song. It was “World,” the song they always closed with. Steve’s fingers stroked the strings, lingering on them, making them chime. “World out of balance,” Ghost sang. Steve gave the accompanying line, “World without end,” in his usual off-key tenor. But Steve’s singing was better tonight than ever before. It was still pretty bad, but there was an element of rawness to it, a hoarseness born of beer and sorrow. The audience rose on tiptoe. “WE ARE NOT AFRAID,” Ghost chanted, throwing his shoulders back, pushing his voice harder. “WE ARE NOT AFRAID.”
Behind him, Steve sang, “Let the night come, let the night come …” That wetness on his face was only sweat, or so he would claim. And Ghost wouldn’t say different, not for anything. “We are not afraid,” he whispered, and the audience whispered back, “Let the night come …”
Steve shoved his guitar into its case, snapped the catches shut, and headed for the bar. He was already half-drunk, and he registered that this was not Kinsey Hummingbird handing him his beer. This bartender was even taller and paler, and a hell of a lot weirder-looking, but Steve didn’t remember seeing the guy before. A vague impression of a black hat and sunglasses flashed into his mind. It didn’t mean anything to him, and he forgot it.
Ghost had wandered off into the crowd. At the bar Steve saw a curly head wrapped in a tie-dyed bandanna: Terry Buckett, who owned the Whirling Disc record store where Steve worked, who played drums on their tape and sat in on their shows sometimes. Terry had been out of town recently. When he saw Steve, he signalled the bartender for two more beers. The bartender took two bottles of National Bohemian out of the cooler. Natty Bohos, Terry called them. Steve called them possum piss, himself, but Terry was buying.
“What’s up?” Steve asked after a long and companionable swig.
“Been tripping for two weeks, man. Hey, no shit—bike tripping. You know I rode down to New Orleans?” Steve knew, had in fact discussed it with Terry at work, but Terry talked to so many people that he often forgot who had heard what. “They got a bar in the French Quarter”—Terry was just about drooling at the memory—“serves twenty-five-cent draft every Thursday night. And they play these same two Tom Waits albums over and over all night. Blue Valentine and Heart Attack and Vine …”
Steve imagined the place. The floor would be sticky, the walls slicked with blue light from an old beer sign. The records would get scratchier every Thursday night, as if Tom had progressive cancer of the larynx. He wished he were there, sucking the foam off his fifth or sixth draft, forgetting all about Missing Mile and the Sacred Yew. (Those aren’t the things you really want to forget, said a small demon-voice in his head. It was quiet enough to be ignored, but a couple more beers would drown it for sure.) Terry’s bar sounded pretty good. Maybe he and Ghost could take the T-bird on a road trip one of these days.
“Man, you can get some heavy shit down there in the Quarter,” Terry said. The new bartender was turned away, filling plastic cups, but his back had an attitude of listening. “I got an ounce of this stuff called Popacatepetl Purple. Couple bong hits of that’ll give you some heavy mind groove—”
“Did somebody mention bong hits?” R.J. Miller boosted himself onto a bar stool on Terry’s other side. He had grown up from a skinny hyperspace-machine-building kid into a skinny young man who could play a bass line like the thunder of God, but right now he was having trouble holding onto his beer. He swayed against the bar, then managed to prop himself up on his elbows. His glasses were crooked. He pushed them up with his forefinger. “Hey, Steve. Awesome show, man.”
Terry considered him gravely. “How many beers have you had?”
“Three,” said R.J., and burst into sudden laughter. “Seriously, you guys, what about those bong hits? You wanna go outside or what?”
“You’re not old enough to smoke,” Terry told him. Under the bar, Terry nudged Steve’s knee. Steve looked down. Terry was holding a pack of Camels. From the pack protruded the end of a joint, fat and twisted. Steve palmed the joint and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.
“Popacatepetl Purple,” Terry said softly. “You look like you could use some heavy mind groove.”
Absurdly, Steve felt tears start in his eyes. His friends loved him. Girls might fuck you over, but you could always count on your friends. “I gotta find Ghost,” he told Terry. “I want to smoke this with him.”
“Sure,” said Terry. “Enjoy it, huh?” He turned to R.J. and started talking about the strip clubs on Bourbon Street. R.J. had gone to sleep on the bar, his head cradled in his arms, his face smooth and blameless as a child’s. His fourth Natty Boho sat in front of him, untouched.
Steve pushed his way through the crowd, still carrying his half-finished beer, smelling clove smoke and the dusty musk of thrift-shop clothes, searching for the streamered beacon of Ghost’s hat. He saw black berets, bright dyed hair, pale scalp showing through buzz cuts. Ghost was nowhere to be found. “Fuck it,” Steve muttered finally, heading for the men’s room. He couldn’t carry the joint around all night. He guessed he would just have to smoke the whole thing himself. Life was rough.