Bone Music (21 page)

Lisa woke alone and confused in an alley in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

It was hours after midnight, so late that even the nightside streets were deserted — but Lisa was a world away from the nightside streets. The alley where she lay was surrounded by old wooden houses that had all but collapsed upon themselves, and as they crumbled the houses had filled the alley with rotting verminous debris. Lisa could feel it throbbing, thriving as she woke to push herself out of the filth and shake away the roaches that crawled upon her.

“Mama. . . ?” she called, but there was no one near enough to hear her. “Mama!” she screamed, but no one heard that, either. She hurried out of the alley, into the tourist streets where beggars slept oblivious along the sidewalks, calling and calling and screaming for her mother everywhere she went.

But no matter how she ran, the only ones who answered her were the bums who told her to be quiet.

Now she came to the docklands, and saw a great sign that said Welcome to the City of New Orleans. When she saw that she knew that something awful had carried her away, and that her mother was miles and miles from her, upstream on the river.

She walked more slowly after that, and she didn’t bother shouting. Because she realized something when she saw the river — she realized that she had to be calm, and walk as quiet as she could, or the awful things would find her when she couldn’t hear them come for her.

Maybe she was right, too. Lisa was right about a lot of things that day, and she regretted all of them.

Lisa followed the riverfront road south through the docklands. The Port of New Orleans was a dying enterprise, and Lisa saw it dying as she traveled south. Every block she went the docklands grew seedier and more abandoned, till finally a mile south of the French Quarter she realized she was walking in a ghost town. Here the docks and factories lay crumbling in ruins; even the river seemed to fester and boil as it ran along the ghost-town shore.

Somewhere along her way she made a turn to follow riverwise that only people who’ve been touched can make, and her way took her out of the mundane collapse of southeastern New Orleans, into a place where only the damned, the unlucky, and those with special gifts can go. Some people call that secret place the Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans, but wise people don’t call it anything at all.

Because the evil in that place knows when people speak of it, and it watches them quite closely.

Lisa had a sense about that — a sense, almost, of where she was. She thought, I should turn back, and she meant to do that. But then she heard a vague cacophony somewhere in the distance, and she followed it step by step by step into the east as the river bent south.

When Lisa came around the bend she saw the mansion, and the distant cacophony became an unsettling din, and she knew she’d found the fate that had carried her downriver to New Orleans.

And because she knew she’d found it, she faced it, no matter how it scared her worse than anything alive.

The mansion was a frightful old place, battered and abandoned-looking — but it wasn’t abandoned at all. Just the opposite, in fact: there were lights in all the windows, and when she got close enough to see the night-dark lawn Lisa saw that the mansion’s grounds were littered with the unconscious bodies of drunken revelers. There was a party in that place, but it wasn’t a party that anyone with any sense would ever visit.

Unless they absolutely had to.

Unless something in their hearts told them there was a destiny inside that place that they could not avoid. Lisa knew that kind of destiny when she stood at the edge of the drive that led to the mansion. She knew she could turn and run away, and maybe if she did she could have a life, a good life and a decent life and maybe someday she could find her mother again and she and Mama could drive back north to Harlem and their life and Lisa could grow old enough for school, real school like where they really teach you something instead of chasing you out onto a tarmac where the retard boys could pick at you, yes, yes, Lisa knew what there was for her if she turned around and ran.

And a part of her wanted to run back to that, and try to make it good.

But the biggest truest most honest chamber in her heart told her that something terrible had caught her, long ago, and that she’d never be free of it until she faced it and conquered it, and that was destiny.

And Lisa met it.

She wound her way along the drive, stepping gingerly and around the drunken derelicts until she reached the mansion’s great front stoop. There by the door with the doorknob too far above her head to open, Lisa had one last moment of trepidation. She was only Lisa! She was only a baby! The world was too big for her, and too terrible, and she didn’t dare to face it —

And then she saw the open door at the far end of the stoop, and she knew she had to face her fate no matter what it was.

It wasn’t bad at first.

No one at the party in the mansion even noticed Lisa for the longest time — their drugs, their obsessions, their conversations absorbed those people too thoroughly for any of them to see a child walk among their knees. Lisa used her invisibility for all that it was worth — here she stood in the shadows near a coatroom and listened to three ladies whisper conspiratorially among themselves about the end of the world; and when that conversation faded she wandered deeper into the party where the men dressed freakishly and all the women seemed enchanted; and now she forgot herself entirely as she gawked at the red-eyed whisperer who looked partly like a woman and partly like a man — and felt every hair on her body stand on end as she realized that the people around her weren’t people at all. They were — things, outré things that somehow had that knack of seeming like people, and once she realized there was a difference to distinguish she saw that none of them were people, none of them at all anywhere in the mansion were alive, were human, were born of man and woman people —

That was when Lisa knew she had to leave. It didn’t matter what destiny there was for her inside that place; it didn’t matter if she didn’t have the nerve to face her fate; it didn’t matter if she had to spend all her living days trapped in a lie that bent over and over on herself, Lisa had to go now now now —

But there was no way to leave.

Because every door she found was closed and locked, and even if she’d had a key to open one Lisa wasn’t tall enough to reach the handle.

All of the doors were closed! All of them!

All of them but one.

And that was the door that led to the basement.

Lisa knew better than to go into that basement.

Of course she did! She could smell that awful smell that wafted out the door, that smell like sulfur-rotten eggs, and she could hear the faint and distant screams of agony every time she passed near it.

That basement was the worst place she could go. The worst place in the world, and maybe in the next world, too.

And then the freaky man-woman shouted, and Lisa whirled around to see him pointing at her, shouting and pointing and screaming for someone to grab that brat before she gets away, and Lisa knew she didn’t have a choice.

No choice at all.

She had to run or she was lost, and there was only one way to go.

Into the basement.

Into the underground and down down down.

Like Orpheus.

To Hell.

The Present

Dan Alvarez cradled the dream guitar in his arms for the longest time — sat leaning against the boxcar wall, pressing silent chords against the frets, fingering the strings so carefully that he made no sound.

He was so careful not to make a sound. So careful! That guitar was a periapt — a charm like a talisman but large as life. It was the great King’s guitar; it was Elvis’s guitar. It was the music of the spheres made material and true. Dan Alvarez was a brave man, but he wasn’t brave enough to play that instrument alone.

After a long long while he fell asleep with the guitar still cradled in his arms. In his sleep he began to dream again, and now in his dreams he was a black hobo songster. In that dream it was half a century ago, and the blues were alive and thriving — not that awful crap you hear in city juke-joints but blues, vital and alive and as real as the fate that waits to welcome each of us to his grave. In that dream he hoboed from town to town across the countryside, making his meager livelihood with his sonorous guitar, and times were hard and folks were poor and Dan scarcely made it from one meal to the next, and if he didn’t know his licks so effing well he wouldn’t eat at all.

But he did eat, every day. And some days he ate damn well.

In his dream he pushed the plate away from him and pulled his guitar over his shoulder, and he sang. Before he realized what he was doing he began to play that periapt guitar.

The world shook as he picked its strings, and as it shook the Santa came to hear him.

When Dan Alvarez saw Our Lady of Sorrows the dream melted away to leave him back on the train rolling and rolling somewhere in America. On the train he was just nobody half-talent Dan Alvarez again — but even if he was just a would-be musician who made his living as a fry-cook at Denny’s, he sang the music of the world and played the chords that only the great ones master.

The Santa smiled on him, and Dan Alvarez supplicated himself before her. She was so beautiful, he thought. More beautiful than he could bear to see.

“Lady,” Dan Alvarez said, letting the guitar slide out of his hands, onto the boxcar floor, “Santa.”

The Lady smiled again, so beautiful. And now she pointed out the boxcar door — at the town lights that appeared on the horizon.

Dan knew what she meant. She wanted him to go to that place, wherever it was. That was the place she’d been prompting him all along — from the moment he’d first seen her outside his apartment window she’d been pushing him toward this place, this time, this moment.

Dan felt a sinking dread in the low part of his gut. He felt sweat beading up on his forehead despite the cool wind rushing through the open boxcar door.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “It scares me, Santa.”

The Santa watched him steadily, evenly; nothing in her expression shifted as Dan told her of his fear.

“I don’t want to go there, Lady,” Dan said.

But the Santa never heard him.

Because she was already gone.

The Present

The scariest part of Lisa’s descent into Hell was the loneliness.

Loneliness.

The moment she set foot on the stairway the party and the noise disappeared behind her in a haze of damnable possibility. It was as quiet and as empty on that stair as it was in the corridor that led to the fountain and the Gates of Judgment at the reflecting pool before Heaven and Hell, and lonelier, too, because each time she’d been to that hall the Santa had held her hand.

But there was no Santa here. No one followed her away from the party; no one greeted her on the basement stair to Hell; no one spoke or sang or called to her — until she reached the basement.

When Lisa rounded the last steps of the stairway she found Robert Johnson waiting in that basement anteroom of Hell. He sat in a folding chair on the far side of the room; a cheap tin lamp hung from the ceiling above him, shining on him like a spotlight. When he saw her he lifted his guitar onto his lap and began to caress its strings.

He was so beautiful, that Robert Johnson — his pretty pinstripe suit; his wide white-toothed smile so bright against that face as dark as pitch; his slender, nimble hands coaxing Grace from the strings of his guitar. He began to play, and his song was the most amazing thing — and the rhythm and just the whisper of a chance hiding in the melody, and Lisa stood listening transfixed agape, lost and away from everything she knew.

It didn’t matter anymore, she realized. It didn’t matter if this was Hell or New Orleans or a terrible memory from her first infancy; what mattered was the magic and the music and the whisper of a chance, and if that meant she had to follow Robert Johnson down to Hell, then that was what it meant, and even if Lisa was afraid she didn’t hesitate, not for a moment.

“Follow me down,” Robert Johnson sang, “Follow me down to Hell.”

And Lisa did.

The Present

Dan Alvarez climbed out of the boxcar when the train came to a stop. It was dawn by then, but even in the daylight it took him a long while to figure out where he was. He kept expecting to be somewhere in the South — in Memphis, maybe, or even in New Orleans — but the farther he went the clearer it became that he was a long way from either of those places. The dirt was wrong, for one, and the odd trees in the rubble were all wrong for the South.

Then he saw the water tower at the far end of the rail yard, and there on the side of it was the word Detroit in big blocky letters.

Dan thought, Detroit? What on God’s earth would she want me to do in Detroit? But even as he thought it something in his gut began to guess her purpose.

He didn’t like it. Not one bit.

As Dan passed the water tower the trainyard opened out into a wicked slum — a city built of paint-peeling wooden houses and run-down brick-face stores and uncertain structures falling in on their foundations. Even in the cloudless-bright summer morning there was a dankness about the place, a night-quiet foreboding that hung above the city, promising collapse.

When he’d gone a few blocks Dan began to think he should turn back, find himself another train, and hobo south to find a more inviting city. A few blocks after that he was sure he should turn back, and twice he stopped and turned around — and hesitated. And thought of the Lady, and remembered what she needed from him. And turned back around to walk deeper and deeper into the crumbling city.

Three miles from the trainyard Dan Alvarez saw the Lady standing in the shadows of a dead-end alley, beckoning to him. Dan didn’t hesitate an instant. He ran to her, ran to throw himself before her, promise her his service, beg her for her mercy.

But she disappeared again before he reached her.

And where she’d stood a vagabond lay death-still and wheezing half-covered with garbage from the overturned barrel beside him.

“Man,” Dan Alvarez said. “Oh man.”

He knew what the Lady meant him to do. Of course he knew! It was as obvious as obvious gets — no matter how disgusting it was.

Too damn gross. Too damn gross to think about, let alone to do.

“Mister?” Dan called to the bum. “You’ve got to wake up, mister.”

The drunk didn’t answer. Didn’t even stir. He was too far gone — drugged or drunk or deep asleep or something, Dan didn’t want to know, didn’t even want to think about it.

He stooped, leaned in close to whisper into the man’s ear.

“Mister!”

But that didn’t wake the man, no more than shouting at him had. Dan put his hands on the man’s shoulders and shook him, but that didn’t wake him either.

“Damn. Damn damn damn.”

Is he dead? Dan wondered. Why would she send me after a dead man?

He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t begin to imagine.

Unless she meant him to take the body to a morgue?

No, he wasn’t dead, couldn’t be dead — there, listen, he was wheezing again. Dead men don’t wheeze, do they?

Dan knew they didn’t, knew they couldn’t possibly. But he didn’t find the knowledge reassuring.

He put his hands under the man’s shoulders, lifted his stinking vomitous body to carry him over his shoulder.

Damn!

And carried him out of the shadowy alley, into the day.

In the light of day with the clean summer breeze carrying away the stink, Dan noticed how cold the body was, as if it really were the body of a dead man. And he was so light, too — he was a full-grown man, and not a young one, either, but he weighed no heavier than a child on Dan’s shoulder.

Maybe he is dead, Dan thought — and then the vagabond began to mumble half-intelligibly.

What was he saying? Dan could almost make out the words — almost, not quite, and he said “What’s that?” but the derelict didn’t answer. The moment he heard Dan speak to him the man went silent.

Dan carried the man four blocks before he spotted the dive hotel. It was a broke-down sleazy motel place with a big sign out front that said this was the Dew Tell Motel, and God that place was gross, but if they hadn’t been so gross they never would have let Dan check in with that stinking vomitous drunk man weighing on his shoulder.

But they were what they were, and they took Dan’s money, and he thanked God for them.

Dan hauled the drunk across the parking lot to his room, room 5C. It wasn’t clean in there, but it was lots cleaner than Dan or the vagabond, so he carried the man straight into the bathroom and set him in the tub instead of setting him on the bed.

Took the guitar off his other shoulder, and set it carefully in the back corner of the closet. Closed the closet door to hide the guitar, and went back to the bathroom to look at the derelict.

He’s filthy, Dan thought. I’ve got to clean him, give him a shave, get some clean clothes on him.

The drunk farted loudly, and his gas made an emphatic, almost derisive sound against the tub. It almost made Dan think he was responding to Dan’s thoughts.

“Fart all you want,” Dan said. “I’m going to clean you up. If I’ve got to have anything to do with you, I’m going to get rid of that damned stink.”

He went to the tub, lifted the man’s slack body, and undressed him. He was even lighter and colder than he’d seemed when Dan had carried him — so cold and empty that if he wasn’t dead he was seriously ill, and maybe Dan ought to get him to the hospital. . . .

. . . .shit-smeared shorts; skin everywhere crusted with flaky scunge. . . .

Well, maybe he had to get the man to a doctor. But first he was going to get him clean enough to touch. Dan tossed the last of the man’s clothes onto the bathroom floor and turned on the hot water tap; pushed the faucet upward to engage the shower head.

Stepped away and let the streaming water begin to wash the vagabond clean.

It didn’t go very fast. Some of that crud was so thick it’d take hours for the water to wear it away.

He glanced at the pile of filth-encrusted clothes, trying to figure out how he was going to get them clean. And realized there was just no way. Even if he’d had a laundry to wash them in, they were so filthy that he could wash them over and over a dozen times and the things would still show stains, and maybe they’d just fall apart. He’s going to need new clothes, Dan thought. He looked at his own shirt and slacks, which were ragged and filthy from the fire in his apartment, from the run through burning Los Angeles, from the days-long journey by boxcar. I need clothes, too. There was a rummage store a couple blocks back — he remembered passing it just a few moments after he’d carried the derelict out of the alley. But I can’t leave him here, can I?

The derelict lay unconscious in the tub, oblivious to Dan, to the steamy water streaming down on him, oblivious to the world.

He isn’t going anywhere, Dan thought. And he was right, too.

But even so he hurried. Out the motel-room door; across the sun-warm blacktop of the motel parking lot; a block and a half down the street to the secondhand store.

He found shirts and shorts in the rag bin — they were stained and tattered, but cheap as they could be, because the store sold rags by the pound. Slacks were harder, because he had to guess the derelict’s size more carefully — he spent a couple minutes looking through the stacks of work pants before he realized there was no way he could guess a 37” 29” from a 35” 30”. And gave up, and grabbed a pair that looked more-or-less right and a pair of suspenders to make the difference work.

Carried the clothes to the counter, still rushing, grabbed a couple of disposable razors from a bin beside the register. As he worried about the passed-out bum soaking in the water, and what if he drowned?, and Dan knew he had to hurry. . . .

Until he got to the counter and saw the old woman.

There was something remarkable about that woman. Something — divine. Oh, you couldn’t see it by the way she looked. When Dan first saw her he thought she was a bag lady like a thousand other bag ladies he’d seen across the years — filthy, old, and worn; eyes that glittered crazy like she’d missed her medication three days running; there was a tiny drop of spittle leaking out the left corner of her mouth.

But no matter what he saw when he looked at her, when Dan stood before her at the counter he could feel the same majesty and grace he felt when the Santa came to him.

He set his purchases on the counter before her with the same supplication that a worshiper offers up a sacrifice, and waited for her to respond.

But she didn’t respond. She stood at the counter staring at him, weighing him as the Santa had weighed him.

After a while she smiled at him, and Dan thought he would cry.

“You’re an angel, aren’t you?” Dan asked.

He knew the truth before she even began to answer him: he could see through to her heart, no matter how she looked at first. It didn’t matter that she wore the strangest smile on her worn and filthy face; that her skin was blotched and mottled with sickly-looking blemishes; that there were wide dark gaps in her mouth where three teeth should have been.

Nothing could disguise her from him. Not even the stinking, filthy overcoat, six months out of season.

“If you need those things, Dan Alvarez,” the angel said, “they’re yours. Go with God. Follow your heart.”

And then Dan stood alone in an empty, abandoned shop. All the secondhand store goods were gone, and the windows were boarded over, and if it weren’t for the door ripped half off its hinges Dan never would have got himself out of that place.

When he got back to the hotel room Dan Alvarez found the tub clogged with grit. There was filthy water spilling out all over the bathroom floor, and if it hadn’t been for the extra drain in the center of the floor there would have been an awful mess to mop.

But there was a drain, and the floor wasn’t any problem, not really. The real problem was the vagabond — he was bobbing around in the water like a drowned man when Dan got to him, and the water was up over his face sometimes and sometimes not, and he’d took a lot of water down his lungs, to judge the way he coughed when Dan pulled him up out of the water.

So much water down his lungs. Coughing and coughing it up as Dan pounded on his back. But the coughing didn’t seem to wake him, and the pounding didn’t either, and Dan began to think the poor sot would’ve drowned without even noticing he was about to die, and then he thought ha ha what if he’s already dead, you can’t drown ‘em when they’re already dead, and he almost started to laugh at that till he realized there was something very wrong, something very very wrong. Because the guy just coughed up more water than anyone could breathe in and survive, and what the hell was going on?

What the hell?

Crazy, all of it was crazy. Dan couldn’t make any sense of it. How could anybody. . . ?

Dan couldn’t figure. There wasn’t any way to figure, and no point trying when the business at hand was so awful — the filth, the matted hair everywhere on his body, and Dan pulled three big clots of filth away from the drain but the tub still clogged again.

Cleared the drain again, got the soap and a washcloth, and began to try to scrub the derelict clean.

Hard, disgusting work. Damn near hopeless work, but Dan kept at it, and slowly, slowly the derelict came clean.

Soaped down the man’s hair, rinsed it, soaped and rinsed it again. Pushed it back, out of the way; grabbed one of the disposable razors from the place he’d left it by the sink.

Soaped the face and scraped away the bristly beard, bit by bit by bit.

When he was halfway done shaving the man, he had an awful laugh.

He looks like Elvis, Dan thought. Imagine that! Like something from the headlines on a supermarket tabloid, I Found Elvis — Miracle in Detroit, and Dan had another laugh. What a joke, I Found Elvis. Ha ha.

Scraping and scraping with the razor, and two, maybe three times Dan thought he cut the man, but he never bled. When he was done Dan soaped and cleaned the man’s face one final time, then turned off the water and let the tub drain. When it was empty he patted the man dry with a towel, lifted him out of the tub, and carried him to the chair on the far side of the hotel room.

He did his best to dress the man. But it wasn’t easy — he was all slack and wobbly, and putting clothes on him was like trying to shovel air into a sack.

Shirt over his head; shorts, slacks —

And something in all that pushing and pulling must’ve shaken the man more than half-drowning in the tub, because suddenly his eyes were open.

“What they hell you trying to do to me?” the man asked.

And Dan gasped.

“I said, ‘What you doing?’”

And gasped again.

“Huh? What are you, some kind of a pervert?”

“Just getting you dressed, that’s all.”

Because Dan knew that voice, and he could never ever ever mistake it.

“You ought to show a little respect.”

The voice was Elvis’s voice, and no matter how impossible that was — no matter how Elvis was twenty years and more dead and buried on the grounds of his Graceland mansion, it was Elvis and no other who spoke to Dan.

“Elvis. . . ?”

The man’s eyes brightened for a moment — and then suddenly his expression became querulous and uncertain.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Dan blinked. “I don’t want nothing,” he said. “I just found you passed out in an alley, that’s all. I figured I ought to help.”

“I bet you want to help,” the deadman said. He snorted derisively. “You and everybody else.”