The Collected Short Fiction, page 15
A cold pulse of fear flows through Beltrane’s body. But before he can think of a response, a sound reaches them through the closed door. People are entering the church from the street.
Davis smiles suddenly. It’s an artificial smile, manic, out of all proportion to any possible stimulus. “They’re here! Come on!”
He leads him into the large room with the lectern and the rows of chairs. Two people—a young, slender Latina woman and an older, obese white man—have just entered and are standing uncertainly by the door. Although they’re dressed in simple, cheap clothing, it’s immediately obvious that they’re not homeless. They both stare at Beltrane as he approaches behind the pastor.
“Come on, everybody,” Davis says, gesturing to the front row of chairs. “Let’s sit down.”
Davis arranges a chair to face them, and soon they are all sitting in a clumsy circle. “These are the people I wanted you to meet,” he says. “This is Maria and Evan. They’re haunted, too.”
Maria tries to form a smile beneath eyes that are sunken and dark, like moon craters or like cigarette burns. She seems long out of practice. Evan is staring intently at the floor. He’s breathing heavily through his nose with a reedy, pistoning regularity. His forehead is glistening with sweat.
“I’m trying to start a little group here, you know? People with your sort of problem.”
“This is how we gonna get rid of it?” Beltrane asks.
Davis and Maria exchange glances.
“They don’t want to get rid of them,” Davis says. “That’s why they’re here.” He turns to the others. “Mr. Beltrane came here from New Orleans. He’s looking for his daughter.”
Maria gives him a crushed look. “Oh, pobrecito,” she says. The news seems to affect her deeply: her face clouds over, and her eyes well up. Beltrane looks away, embarrassed for her, and ashamed at his own optimism.
“His ghost is a city.”
This seems to catch even Evan’s attention, who looks at him for the first time. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” Evan says, and barks a laugh. “My family died in a fire two days after Christmas. The fucking tree! It’s like a joke, right?”
Davis pats Evan on the knee. “We’ll get to it, my friend. We will. But first we have to help him understand.”
“Right, right. But it wants to come out. It wants to come out right now.”
“Mr. Beltrane thinks he lost his city in the flood,” Davis continues.
“I did lose it!” Beltrane shouts, feeling both scared and angry to be among these people. “After Katrina came, I lost everything! Craig moved away after his place flooded! Places I go to are all shut down. The people all gone. Ivy... Ivy, she... she was in this empty old house she used to crash in....” His throat closes, and he stops there.
Davis waits a moment, then puts his hand on his shoulder. “But it’s not really gone, though, is it?” He touches Beltrane on the forehead, and then on his chest. “Is it?”
Beltrane shakes his head.
“And if it ever does go away, well, God help you then. Because you will be all by yourself. You will be all alone.” He pauses. “You don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”
Evan makes a noise and puts a hand over his mouth.
“I had enough of this crazy shit,” Beltrane says, and stands. Davis opens his mouth, but before he can speak the room is filled with the scent of cloves and cinnamon. The effect is so jarring that Beltrane nearly loses his balance.
Evan doubles over in his seat, hands over his face, his big body shuddering with sobs. The smell pours from him. Smoke leaks from between his fingers, spreading in cobwebby wreaths over his head. Beltrane wants to run, but he’s never seen this kind of thing in anyone but himself before, and he’s transfixed.
“Oh, here it comes,” Davis says, not to the others but to himself, his eyes glassy and fixed, staring at Evan. “That’s all right, just let it out. You have to let it come out. You have to hold on to what’s left. Never let it go.” He looks at Maria. “Can you feel him, Maria? Can you?”
Maria nods. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her hands are clutching her stomach, and Beltrane watches as it grows beneath them, accompanied by a powerful, sickly odor that he does not recognize right away. When he does he feels a buckling inside, the turning over of some essential organ or element, and he is overwhelmed by a powerful need to flee.
“Will you get rid of this?” Davis is saying, his face so close to Maria’s they might be lovers. “Will you get rid of your child, Maria? Who could ask that of you? Who would dare?”
Beltrane backs up a step and falls over a chair, sprawling to the floor in a clatter of noise and his own flailing arms. There’s a sudden, spiking pain as his elbow takes the brunt of his weight. The air grows steadily colder; the appalling mix of cinnamon and desiccated flesh roots into his nose. Davis kneels between the others, one hand touching each body, and once again his features seem to be tugging inward, even his round stomach is drawing in, as though something empty, some starving need, is glutting itself on this weird energy; as though there’s a black hole inside him, filling its belly with light.
“Please God, just let it come,” Davis says.
Beltrane tries to scramble to his feet and slips. A large, growing puddle of Mississippi River water surrounds him. It soaks his clothes. He tries again, making it to his feet this time, and staggers to the door. He pushes his way outside, into the warm, humid night, and without waiting to see if they’re following he lurches further down the street, away from the church, away from the shelter, until an alleyway opens like a throat and he turns gratefully into it. He manages to make it a few more feet before he collapses to his knees. He doesn’t know anymore if the pain he feels is coming from arthritis or from the ghost which has wrapped itself like a vine around his bones.
Across the alley, in the alcove of a delivery door, he sees a mound of clothing and a duffel bag: this is somebody’s roost. A shadow falls over him as a figure stops in the mouth of the alley. The city light makes a dark shape of it, a negative space. “What you doin here?” it says.
Beltrane closes his eyes: an act of surrender. “I just restin, man,” he says, almost pleads. “I ain’t stayin.”
“You don’t belong here.”
“Come on, man. Just let me rest a minute. I ain’t gonna stay. Can’t you see what’s happening to me?”
When he opens his eyes, he is alone. He exhales, and it almost sounds like a sob. “I wanna go home,” he whispers. “I wanna go home.” He runs his hands through his hair, dislodging drowned corpses, which tumble into his lap.
Beltrane left the Avenue Pub behind, well and truly drunk, walking slowly and carefully as the ground lurched and spun beneath him. He summoned the presence of mind to listen for the streetcar, which came like a bullet at night; just last year it ran down a drunk coming from some bar further up the road. “That’s some messy shit,” he announced, and laughed to himself. The United Cab offices were just a few blocks away. If he hurried he could beat the rain.
Halfway there he found Ivy, rooting lazily through a trash can.
She was a cute little thing who’d shown up in town last year after fleeing some private doom in Georgia; she was forty years younger than Beltrane, but hoped lived large in him. They got along pretty well—she got along well with most men, really—and it was always nice to spend time with a pretty girl. He waved at her. “Ivy! Hey, girl!”
She looked up at him, her face empty. “’S’up, ’Trane. What you doin?” She straightened and tossed a crumpled wrapper back into the can.
“I’m goin to bed, girl. It’s late!”
She appraised him for a moment, then smiled. “You fucked up!”
He laughed, like a little boy caught in some foolishness.
She saw the bag he still clutched in his hand. “I ain’t had nothing to eat, ’Trane. I’m starving.”
He held the bag aloft, like the head of a slain enemy. “I got some food for ya right here.”
She held out a hand and offered him her best smile. It lit up all that alcohol in him. It set him on fire. “Well give it over then,” she said.
“You must think I’m crazy. Come on back with me, to my place.”
“Shit. That old cab?”
Beltrane turned and walked in that direction, listening to her footsteps as she trotted to catch up. The booze in him caused the earth to move in slow, steady waves, and the lights to bleed into the cloudy night. A cold wind had kicked up, and the buildings swooned on their foundations. Together they trekked the short distance to United Cab.
He found himself, as always, stealing glances at her: though she was gaunt from deprivation, she seemed to have an aura of carved nobility about her, a hard beauty distinct from circumstance or prospect. She was young enough, too, that she still harbored some resilient optimism about the world, as though it might yield some good for her yet. And who knows, he thought. Maybe it would.
The first hard drops of rain fell as they reached the cab. It had died where it was last parked, two years ago. It sagged earthward, its tires long deflated and its shocks long spent, so that the chassis nearly scraped the ground as Beltrane opened the door and climbed in. It smelled like fried food and sweat, and he rubbed the old air freshener hanging from the rearview in some wild hope he could coax a little life from it yet. The front seats had been taken out, giving them room to stretch their legs. The car was packed with blankets, old newspapers, and skin magazines. Ivy stared in after him, wrinkling her nose.
“This is it, baby,” he said.
“It stinks in here!”
“It ain’t that bad. You get used to it.” He leaned against the seatback, stretching his legs to the front. He hooked one arm up over the backseat and invited her to lean into him. She paused, still halfway through the door, on her hands and knees.
“I ain’t fuckin you, ’Trane. You too damn old.”
“Shit, girl.” He tried to pretend he wasn’t disappointed. “Get your silly ass in here and have some food.”
She climbed in, and he opened the bag for her. The shrimp retained a lingering heat from the microwave at the Pub, and they dug in. Afterwards, with warm food alight in their bellies and the rain hammering on the roof, she eased back against the seat and settled into the crook of his arm at last, resting her head on his shoulder. Beltrane gave her a light squeeze, realizing with a kind of dismay that any sexual urge had left him, that the feeling he harbored for her now was something altogether different, altogether better.
“I don’t know nothing about you, ’Trane,” she said quietly. “You don’t talk very much.”
“What you mean? I’m always talking!”
“Yeah, but you don’t really talk, you know? Like, you got any family around?”
“Well,” he said, his voice trailing. “Somewhere. I got a little girl somewhere.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “For real?”
He just nodded. Something about this conversation felt wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to focus. “I ain’t seen her in a long time. She got married and went away.”
“She just abandon you? That’s fucked up, ’Trane.”
“I wasn’t like this then. Things was different.” Sorrow crested and broke in his chest. “She got to live her life. She had to go.”
“You ever think about leaving too? Maybe you could go to where she live.”
“Hell no, girl. This is my home. This is everything I know.”
“It’s just a place, ’Trane. You can change a place easy.”
He didn’t want to think about that. “Anyway,” he said, “she forgot me by now.”
Ivy was quiet for a time, and Beltrane let himself be lulled by the drumbeat over their heads. Then she said, “I bet she ain’t forgot you.” She adjusted her position to get comfortable, putting her head back on his shoulder. “I bet she still love her daddy.”
They stopped talking, and eventually she drifted off to sleep. He kissed her gently on her forehead, listening to the storm surrounding the car. The air was chilly, but their bodies were warm against each other. Outside was thrashing darkness, and rain.
Beltrane awoke with a fearful convulsion. The car was filling with water. It was pouring from Ivy, from her eyes and her mouth, from the pores of her skin, in a black torrent, lifting the stored papers and the garbage around them in swirling eddies, rising rapidly over their legs and on up to their waists. The water was appallingly cold; he lost all feeling where it covered him. He put his hands over Ivy’s face to staunch the flow, without effect. Her head lolled beside him, her face discolored and grotesquely swollen.
He was going to drown. The idea came to him with a kind of alien majesty; he was overcome with awe and horror.
He pushed against the car door, but it wouldn’t open. Beyond the window, the night moved with a murderous will. It lifted the city by its roots and shook it in its teeth. The water had nearly reached the ceiling, and he had to arch his back painfully to keep his face above it. Ivy had already slipped beneath the surface, her lamplit eyes shining like cave fish.
All thought left him: his whole energy was channeled into a scrabbling need to escape. He slammed his body repeatedly into the car door. He pounded the glass with his fists.
Beltrane awakens to pain. His limbs are wracked with it, his elbow especially. He opens his eyes and sees the pavement of the alley. Climbing to his feet takes several minutes. Morning is near: through the mouth of the alley the streetlights glow dimly against a sky breaking slowly into light. There is no traffic, and the salty smell of the bay is strong. The earth has cooled in the night, and the heat’s return is still a few hours away.
He takes a step toward the street, then stops, sensing something behind him. He turns around.
A small city has sprouted from the ground in the night, where he’d been sleeping, surrounded by blowing detritus and stagnant filth. It spreads across the puddle-strewn pavement and grows up the side of the wall, twinkling in the deep blue hours of the morning, like some gorgeous fungus, awash in a blustery evening rain. It exudes a sweet, necrotic stink. He’s transfixed by it, and the distant wails he hears rising from it are a brutal, beautiful lullaby.
He walks away from it.
When he gets to the street, he turns left, heading down to the small harbor. The door to the church is closed when he passes it, and the lights are off inside. There’s no indication of any life there. Soon he passes the shelter, and there are people he recognizes socializing by its front door; but he doesn’t know their names, and they don’t know his. They don’t acknowledge him as he walks by. He passes a little restaurant, the smell of coffee and griddle-cooked sausage hanging in front of it like a cloud. The long white masts of the sailboats are peering over the tops of buildings. He rounds a corner and he is there.
The water of the bay glimmers with bright shards of light as the sun climbs. The boats jostle gently in their berths. A pelican perches on a short pier, wings spread like hanging laundry. He follows a sidewalk along the waterfront until he finds a payphone with a dial tone. He presses zero, and waits.
“I wanna make a collect call,” he says, fishing the slip of paper Davis gave him out of his pocket and reciting the number.
He waits for the automated tone, and announces himself. “It’s Henry. It’s your dad.”
A machine says, “Please hold while we connect your call.”
Leaning over the small concrete barrier, he can see the shape of himself in the water. His reflection is broken up by the water’s movement. Small pieces of himself clash and separate. He thinks that if he waits here long enough the water will calm, and his face will resolve into something familiar.
Wild Acre
First published in Visions Fading Fast, February 2012
Three men are lying in what will someday be a house. For now it’s just a skeleton of beams and supports standing amid the foundations and frames of other burgeoning houses in a large, bulldozed clearing. The earth around them is a churned, orange clay. Forest abuts the Wild Acre development site, crawling up the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hickory and maple hoarding darkness as the sky above them shades into deepening blue. The hope is that soon there will be finished buildings here, and then more skeletons and more houses, with roads to navigate them. But now there are only felled trees, and mud, and these naked frames. And three men, lying on a cold wooden floor, staring up through the roof beams as the sky organizes a nightfall. They have a cooler packed with beer and a baseball bat.
Several yards away, mounted in the back of Jeremy’s truck, is a hunting rifle.
Jeremy watches stars burn into life: first two, then a dozen. He came here hoping for violence, but the evening has softened him. Lying on his back, balancing a beer on the great swell of his belly, he hopes there will be no occasion for it. Wild Acre is abandoned for now, and might be for a long time to come, making it an easy target. Three nights over the past week, someone has come onto the work site and committed small but infuriating acts of vandalism: stealing and damaging tools and equipment, spray-painting vulgar images on the project manager’s trailer, even taking a dump on the floor of one of the unfinished houses. The project manager complained to the police, but with production stalled and bank accounts running dry, angry subcontractors and prospective homeowners consumed most of his attention. The way Jeremy saw it, it was up to the trade guys to protect the site. He figured the vandals for environmental activists, pissed that their mountain had been shaved for this project; he worried that they’d soon start burning down his frames. Insurance would cover the developer, but he and his company would go bankrupt. So he’s come here with Dennis and Renaldo—his best friend and his most able brawler, respectively—hoping to catch them in the act and beat them into the dirt.
