by Poppy Brite
He locked the door behind him and dug in his pocket for matches. FINISH HIGH SCHOOL FOR $50! the matchbook cover exhorted him. His first drag filled his lungs with bitter, delicious smoke.
By the time half the joint was gone, Steve had decided he was in dire need of a tattoo. It would be a grinning skull with black bat wings veined bloodred, and it would have a rose clenched in its teeth, and in the center of the petals the name ANN would be etched in flaming letters. He would show it to the bitch next time he ran into her. Then she would know how he really felt about her, and she would die of guilt.
Maybe there was time to drive to Fayetteville tonight. That was where the tattoo parlors were. Steve stashed the joint in his pocket and started out of the restroom. He raised his beer to his mouth and scanned the crowd, looking for Ghost, meaning to get their equipment loaded up and start for Fayetteville. Instead he saw a girl standing at the bar talking to Terry, a girl with long gold-red hair beneath her vintage 1940s mourning hat, with a tough, pretty face. A girl who shaped her words with her hands, whose hands were paint-stained and delicately ugly. Between the forefinger and middle finger of her right hand, a Camel cigarette burned.
On the third finger of that same hand Steve saw the dull gleam of a ring. He couldn’t make out the design, but he knew what it was. A pair of hearts, wrought in silver and turquoise, interlocked. He had given her that ring, and she still wore it.
Ann had come to see him play tonight.
Steve started to duck back into the men’s room in case she turned around. But then she lifted her arm in a gesture he remembered well, lifting her heavy hank of hair off the back of her neck for a moment. The lapel of her black suit jacket folded back. Beneath it she wore a lace tank top, also black. Steve saw the sideswell of her breast, and above that the dark auburn tuft of her armpit hair.
That had surprised him when he’d first started going out with her, back in their senior year of high school when she was still just Ann Bransby-Smith, the cute redhead in his psychology class. He had never before gotten laid with a girl who had armpit hair. It was sort of weird, but it seemed somehow to go with the black turtleneck sweaters she wore and the beret she pulled down over her ears sometimes.
“Artsy chicks who paint aren’t allowed to shave their pits,” she’d told him that night. Steve had only looked up at her—she was half-straddling him on the couch, her jeans still zipped up but her shirt off and her hair hanging in her face. He wasn’t sure whether she was kidding, and he didn’t especially care, since his hand had slipped inside the filmy cup of her bra and her nipple was as hard as a piece of candy beneath his fingers. A few minutes later he discovered that she perfumed the hair under her arms, and from that moment on, those tufts had not disturbed him in the slightest.
Until now. That fleeting sight filled him with such a miserable surge of desire and loneliness that he almost spit out his mouthful of beer. He thought about how fucked up the past month had seemed without her. Playing wasn’t fun anymore; she got into all the songs somehow. Even drinking wasn’t fun—often as not he got hung up in a jag of self-pity, cursing her name, crying in his beer, hurling things she had given him against the walls of his room. He was sick of working at the Whirling Disc, sick of reading, sick of his dreams. Only spending time with Ghost seemed to help, but even Ghost couldn’t be there all the time, though Ghost often came padding into Steve’s room and sat in the dark with him when Steve couldn’t sleep at two in the morning. Ghost did that, but he couldn’t do everything. He couldn’t be Ann, with her smell of paint and tea-rose perfume and Camel smoke, with her welcoming body.
Steve circled around the bar and approached Ann from behind (From behind, the demon in his mind said wickedly, yeah, I remember that one pretty good, but there were lots of other positions too, and he told it to shut up). She was saying something to Terry, who nodded sagely and glanced past her at Steve. Terry raised one quizzical eyebrow. Steve shrugged and reached out to touch Ann’s shoulder.
At the same moment, R.J. raised his head and regarded them all with bleary good humor. “Hey, Ann!” he exclaimed. “Hey, Steve! You guys getting back together or what?”
Ann’s back stiffened. Her head whipped around, and a red-gold strand lashed across Steve’s face. Her eyes met Steve’s and seemed to crack a little. Out of that fault line spilled all the nights, all their nights. The wild sweat-slicked ones when nothing short of devouring each other would satiate their hunger. The quiet beery nights on the front porch of the house, sitting with Ghost, who always knew when to stay up talking past midnight and when to go to bed early. The nights lying across Steve’s bed in the half-darkness of the moonlit window, before the Penthouse centerfold went up, watching life go by and not needing to chase it because they were together and that was enough.
Those nights, and the psychobloody ones when they said things that could not be taken back, when they didn’t care what they said. “I just can’t compete with alcohol, can I?” she had asked one bitter night, and he had responded, “Fuck, no—you’re not that good.”
But that was nothing.
That was nothing compared to the night, the one he couldn’t bear to remember, the one he couldn’t help remembering in every gory detail.
When he had thrown Ann on the bed and unzipped his pants, he had ceased to be Steve Finn. Maybe that was a cop-out, but that was how it had felt. His sense of selfness had deserted him. The feeling of Ann’s body beneath him, bucking and struggling against him, was remote as a figure on a movie screen. In fact, the whole thing was like a movie; watching a badly faked snuff film might have given him the same sense of mild, free-floating disgust.
The shame and horror at what he had done hadn’t hit him until, driving home, he had looked at his hand on the steering wheel and seen the mark of Ann’s teeth. Tiny beads of blood were welling up from the imprint, which circled the base of his thumb. What had he done to make her bite him that hard?
Get home, his mind had chanted. Get home, to Ghost. Just get there and you’ll be okay. He had. They hadn’t talked much, but Ghost had sat up with him until he could sleep.
The next few weeks had dragged by. He missed her, he ached for her; he hated her; he pictured her making wild sweet love with her schoolteacher boyfriend. He called her house and hung up twice. Then one time her father answered, and he worked up his courage and asked to talk to her. Surely she wouldn’t have told her father what he had done. But Simon only informed him in accents more clipped than usual that Steve was not to try to see Ann, telephone her, or communicate in any way. This was the only warning, Simon told him. On his second attempt Steve would be disposed of.
Arguing with Simon Bransby was like smoking a big joint of killer grass and then trying to take an exam in Nietzschean philosophy or organic chemistry. You had no idea what made sense and what was bullshit; Simon bombarded you with words faster than you could sort them out. Steve had hung up again.
He had not seen Ann since then. Until now. He was very high and more than a little drunk, and here she stood before him, come to see him and Ghost play at the Sacred Yew. A few minutes ago he had been thinking about getting her name tattooed on his arm.
The crack in her eyes closed, and she smiled what Steve recognized as her most guarded smile. “Hey, Steve. How’ve you been?”
Steve wanted to grab her, to bury his face between her breasts and sob for all those lost nights, even the ones that had ripped both their souls open. He wanted to wipe that fake glossy smile off her face. He couldn’t stand to see that smile on the lips he knew so well, the lips he had nudged open with his tongue, the lips that had brought him to the forbidden zone between pleasure and madness. The betraying lips. Were they printed with the kisses of the teacher from Corinth? He wanted them for himself, wanted to reclaim them.
But even as drunk as he was, he could not. To do that, he would have to show his desperation. He would have to apologize or cry or something. Such raw openness, with its possibility of scorn, was not in Steve. Ghost ha
d it, but Steve’s dark eyes hid his soul as Ghost’s pale ones never could. So he only smiled back, as easily as he was able, and offered her his half-full bottle. “Wanna beer?”
“Natty Boho, huh?” she said. Steve winced. She liked Rolling Rock, he knew that. But her voice was the same as ever, that tender voice roughened by too many Camels, with the hoarse little catch in it, like a fingernail on a jagged piece of tin.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. Jesus. Brilliant repartee.
“Oh well.” She took a swallow and managed not to grimace. “Ghost brought me a copy of the tape. Oh, wait, did he tell you he came over?” Her hands played nervously with the tattered veil of her hat. Obviously she didn’t want to get Ghost in trouble.
“Yeah, he told me.” And it was no big deal, not like I yelled at him or nearly decked him or anything …
“It made me want to come see you play again. I’m glad I did. That was a damn good show, Steve. You two are getting too good for this town.”
Terry slid off his bar stool and hauled R.J. down by the back of his collar. After testing his balance, R.J. managed to remain precariously upright. “We’ll catch you later, man,” said Terry. “Hey, here—you want these?” He put a fresh beer in Steve’s hand, and another in Ann’s. A Rolling Rock and a Bud. Before Steve had a chance to thank him, Terry had dragged R.J. off through the crowd.
“You think we’re too good for Missing Mile?” Steve said. Another scintillating reply. Jeeesus …
“Yeah. I mean, Kinsey’s great, but how much farther can you go playing at the Sacred Yew? You ought to take it on the road. You could get as big as R.E.M. or somebody like that. You could travel. You could get to be famous.”
Steve looked at the beer in his hand. He popped it open and drained a third of it in one swallow. Then he opened his mouth to answer Ann, and what came out was “You really want me out of town, huh? I guess your boyfriend over in Corinth can still get it up for you.”
OH, JESUS. He hadn’t meant to say that. It was the demon. He should have stuck with sparkling wit like “yeah” and “uh-huh.”
But it was too late. Ann’s face had snapped shut, her eyes hardened. “You bastard,” she said. “You couldn’t wait, you couldn’t even talk to me—”
“Listen—Ann—”
“Shut up! You had to get a jab in right away, didn’t you? Like you were the one who should be pissed at me. Like I raped you, not the other way around!”
“Dammit, shut up for a minute—”
“Shut up? Keep my voice down maybe? That’s real good, Steve. That’s so good you can shove it up your ass.” Now she was turning away. She thought she was so tough, but she was turning away to hide her tears. Before he could reach out and stop her, she was pushing her way through the bar crowd, her head down, making for the door. Steve started to follow, but the demon spoke up again: Wait a second. She started all this, she fucked around on me. What the hell is she pissed off about? Let her shove it up her own ass.
He turned back to the bar and met the cold eyes of the new bartender, who must have seen the sordid little melodrama from the beginning. But under the coldness in those eyes was a strange sympathy, a look of solitude and wisdom. The bartender raised one shoulder in a tiny shrug: Such is life, friend. And in his long thin hand was another can of Budweiser, cold and frosty and waiting for Steve to grab it.
Ghost prowled around the club for maybe fifteen minutes, staying in the shadows, saying hello to people he knew but not stopping to talk to them. Instead, he watched Nothing. Right after the show he had found himself wanting to talk to Nothing, though he wasn’t sure what he wished to say. Maybe only to offer a word of kinship. To say I can’t heal your pain, but I can see it. And you don’t have to be lost. Not forever. So he waited and hoped that Nothing would move away from his three friends, if only to go to the restroom or something. But they huddled in a tight little knot passing a flask with a Grateful Dead sticker on its side—Ghost could just make out the roses and the grinning skull.
The two larger friends laughed a lot and sloshed the liquor in their mouths before they swallowed it. But Nothing and Zillah were quiet. Zillah always seemed to have his hands on Nothing, touching the sleeve of Nothing’s raincoat, speaking occasionally (with his soft, untorn lips—but Ghost would not think about that, not now) into Nothing’s ear. Leaning in close, protective or predatory or both. Zillah probably would have followed Nothing into the restroom. Nothing stood silently, looking very young and a little nervous, his face lit orange by the glowing eye of his cigarette.
After a while the air inside the club began to press on Ghost’s face. It was heavy with smoke and the neon-bright energy of the kids. A girl in black silk shimmied to the music piping over the PA system. A boy with long unruly hair played air-guitar furiously, miming a Steve Finn lick for his friends. Other kids shouted back and forth, fluttering hands stamped in ink with the many-boughed Yggdrasilian logo of the club. Ghost passed them on his way to the door. His head swarmed with their conversation and their stray thoughts.
Outside, in the night, the air felt as clear and hard-edged as slivers of ice. Ghost breathed it in deep and blew it out. Pale steam plumed from his mouth and his nostrils. For a minute he stood on the sidewalk in front of the club, his hands deep in the pockets of his army jacket fumbling with the objects he found there. Rose petals. An old ace of spades he had found in the dead grass at the end of their driveway, water-marked and crusted with dirt. A guitar pick, the lucky one Steve had given him. Then, his hands still in his pockets, he crossed the street and stood in the middle of the empty block.
Missing Mile was not a large town, but it was big enough to have a couple of run-down areas. The Sacred Yew was right in the middle of one. The kids didn’t care, and Kinsey liked the cheap rent. Some of the shop windows were boarded up or broken. Ghost stood in front of a building that had last been a dress shop. Magic Marker signs in the display window still announced GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! and ALL STOCK 75% OFF! and, optimistically, BEAT XMAS RUSH!
But between the signs the window was soaped in great cakey swashes. Looking through one of the gaps, Ghost saw a pink torso splashed with moonlight and shadow. Above it, a smooth, featureless oval of a head gazed back into the dark recesses of the building. A mannequin, left behind to preside over ruin.
He did not turn when Ann came silently out of the club, her hair flying like a banner behind her, cold tears dripping off her chin. He stood looking through the window of the abandoned dress shop for a long time. The only voice in his head was his own, and his thoughts drifted like the clouds up by the moon. Then, sometime later, he sensed a presence behind him.
When he turned, Zillah and Nothing were across the street, standing by the club door. Zillah was still for a moment, seeming to scent the cold night air. Then he started down the street, walking fast, not looking back at Nothing. Nothing hurried to catch up.
After a moment, Ghost followed too.
Christian turned away from the rangy guitarist without asking him to pay for his beer. He had learned to know when a customer needed a drink on the house. The boy nodded his thanks and walked away, already raising the beer to his lips.
As Christian pulled the Michelob tap forward and began drawing another beer, he glanced up at the bar clock—and his breath caught in his throat. The glass clockface was reflecting three lights at once: the purple glow of the ancient TV set that flickered all night up in the corner; the green luminescence of a beer sign across the room; and the yellow of someone’s striking a match. That was all, but for a second those three colors flared together, and in that circle of glass Christian saw the tawdry splendor of a hundred Mardi Gras nights—the fire, the liquor, the beads, the burning glow of Chartreuse—all up there in the dusty clockface.
A wave of homesickness such as he had never known shuddered through him. It did not matter that his bar had been way down Chartres, far from the heart of the Quarter. In that moment he saw only Bourbon Street, the neon carnival going on all night, the gl
itter that lit up the dawn. And he thought suddenly that New Orleans was his home as no place had ever been—not in all his years. He must go back. Better to face the dry danger of Wallace Creech than to stay in this dark little town serving endless cups of bad draft beer through every endless night.
Then, with an effort, he stilled his thoughts. Of course he could not go back. He had abandoned his bar. When no rent check was sent to the owner, the bar and supplies would be seized, would no longer belong to him. And did he wish to die at the hands of one such as Wallace, to die for the dogged obsessions of a sick old man, or to have to kill him and his endless string of true believers?
No. He would stay here, where fate and the highways had brought him. He would serve beer and sell roses as long as they grew. He would put away money. Someday, when he knew Wallace had to be dead, he could return to New Orleans. But for the present, as soon as he had enough money, he would go north to look for the others.
He drew another beer. Above the noise in the bar a loud voice said, “Hey, Count Dracula, can we get a drink?”
Christian turned, his shoulders stiff, his eyes frigid. But the two faces before him were familiar and as comically surprised as he must look. The ridiculous smudges of kohl around the eyes. The masses of ratted hair framing pallid cheeks. One of them held a sticky red lollipop in his hand. They had let their hair grow longer and wilder, and their style of dress was now tinged with punk. One wore a studded leather collar around his neck; the other’s black denim jacket seemed to be held together chiefly by hundreds of safety pins. Otherwise Molochai and Twig had changed not at all since Christian last saw them, waving goodbye from the windows of their van on that Ash Wednesday night fifteen years ago.