Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (17 page)

 
          
Christian
turned onto Bourbon Street. The rain hadn’t stopped tonight’s carnival.

 
          
Crowds
huddled on the sidewalks and made occasional mad dashes across the street, like
fish darting between brightly lit riverbanks. The street was a riot of lights.
Glittering gold ribbons, pink and green martini glasses, a giant red neon
crawfish. He drove past Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House and remembered when
it had first begun serving that bitter liqueur. The sign proclaimed Since 1807,
and Christian had to trust it. His memory was good, but he had been in and out
of the city in those years, more restless then. He had seen Lafitte, though, a
handsome, sensual man who could hold forth on any subject and draw an audience
whether he knew what he spoke of or not. Christian’s eyes had met Lafitte’s
across a crowded barroom one night, and Lafitte had pulled a face at him,
toothy and menacing, then winked.

 
          
The
pirate had been drunk on absinthe, which produces visions. Molochai, Twig, and
Zillah would have loved absinthe in its true form, before the poisonous
wormwood was taken out of the recipe. But they had been mewling babes when it
was banned in the United States in 1912.

 
          
Inside
the strip clubs, spangles gyrated and flashed. Christian stopped his car for a
crowd of people milling across the street. Soldiers, tourists, street-corner
musicians–and the omnipresent children in black. He had seen those pale smudged
faces before, in the clubs, in his arms … but no, those had been different
faces.

 
          
Most
of the crowd was drunk. Some turned and waved at Christian, and he lifted a
gloved hand in return, half-smiling. Surely those could not be tears on his
face. He had not cried in too many years. He could not remember what crying
felt like. This was only leftover rain, dripping from his hair, pooling in his
eyes.

 
          
Christian
waved goodbye to the Bourbon Street crowd and wiped the rain from his cheeks.
Then he turned north and drove out of town.

 
          
As
early afternoon light touched her eyelids, the sleeping girl moaned and buried
her face in soft black oblivion.

 
          
Her
sheets and pillowcases had been plain white cotton until last week, when she
had run them all through the washing machine with six packages of black
Rit
dye. Now they were a flat bluish-ebony color that
stained her skin on hot nights. She nestled deeper into her inky bedclothes and
flung an arm across the mattress. Empty space. No warmth or scent except her
own, no reassuringly live flesh to press herself close to. The empty bed
brought her awake with a jolt, and for a moment she panicked. Waking up alone
robbed her of her frame of reference; she could barely remember who she was.

 
          
Then
she saw the room around her, the posters on the walls, the paint-smeared easel,
the clothes heaped on the floor of the big walk-in closet. Across the room she
saw herself in the mirror of her vanity, eyes round and startled, pale face
framed by tangles of long red-gold hair.

 
          
She
settled back with a sigh. She was Ann
Bransby
-Smith,
and she was in her own room, safe in her own bed, and never mind the sick
feeling it still gave her to wake up alone.

 
          
Not
until she rolled over and hugged her pillow close to her did she realize that
she had been thinking of waking up not with Eliot–even though she had spent
most of last night with him—but with Steve.

 
          
Even
the thought of his name made her heart twist. After all that had happened
between them, Ann still sometimes wished she could wake up with him, see his
dark hair straggling across the pillow and his intense face softened in sleep,
reach over and glide her fingers along the muscles of his back. God, but he had
always felt good beside her, on top of her, inside her.

 
          
Well,
almost always.

 
          
Well,
except when he made her hurt like hell.

 
          
That
was how she had started cheating on him in the first place: she’d wanted to
have sex with someone who didn’t leave her sore the next morning. Once she had
loved the sureness and strength of Steve’s touch, but drinking turned him rough
and seemed to make his bones sharper.

 
          
Ann
woke with gnawed nipples, bruised hipbones, a throbbing ache in her crotch that
turned to raw agony when she pissed. It was only good for an argument if she
mentioned it, and she still desired him, so after a while she shut up.

 
          
And
when she was honest with herself, she knew the rough sex wasn’t the only thing
that had driven her away. It was the music as well. Steve had already started
playing guitar when she met him, and at the time she had liked the idea of
having a musician for a boyfriend. She was happy for him when he started
getting good and excited when he, Ghost, and R.J. decided to form a band. R.J.
had never wanted it as badly as the other two—he’d always been a serious kid,
and Ann thought music was just too frivolous a calling for him—and had dropped
out early, but he still sat in with them sometimes.

 
          
All
that had been fine. But when it got too heavy, when it started to appear that
Steve and Ghost wanted to make Lost Souls? their life’s work, Ann balked. She
didn’t want to
he
a musician’s wife, spending months
alone in Missing Mile while he toured, worrying about money during the lean
years and groupies during the good ones. When they had started recording their
tape, the final wedge was driven in. The all-night sessions, the hours upon
hours Steve spent in Terry’s home studio talking about levels, tracks,
spillage, and other incomprehensible things he never bothered to explain to his
lowly girlfriend. He had never felt so intensely about her, Ann was sure.

 
          
At
any rate, she had known Eliot would make a gentler lover from the first time
she met him.

 
          
At
first Eliot had seemed exotic: twenty-nine to Ann’s twenty-one, divorced, with
a real job as a junior-college English teacher and half a novel sitting on his
desk. He was a regular customer at the Spanish restaurant where she waited
tables. He always sat in Ann’s section and started leaving her giant tips.
Eventually he asked her out. “You disturb me,” he had told her,

 
          
“but
you intrigue me.”

 
          
The
line sounded stupid when Ann thought about it later, but by then she had
already slept with him and had mistaken his tentativeness for tenderness. At
least when Eliot went down on her, her clitoris didn’t feel as if it were about
to be sucked out by its roots. At least when Eliot’s penis (she could not help
noticing it was thinner and much pointier than she was used to) was inside her,
it didn’t feel like an angry fist battering her cervix. At least Eliot waited
until she was wet. These days, such things were luxuries.

 
          
Also,
Eliot had had a vasectomy. He was very proud of it and sometimes wore a bright
orange button that said I Got Mine! If you asked him about it, he would launch
into a speech about how None of Us Have the Right to Bring More Children into
This Cruel, Overpopulated World. Ann didn’t care for the button or the speech,
but it was nice being able to go off the pill.

 
          
Her
sleep patterns and her depression patterns were so erratic that she had been
forgetting as many as she remembered.

 
          
So
it didn’t matter when she read the half a novel and couldn’t think of anything
to say about it. It was a study of a rural family in Virginia. It was Tough and
Gritty, but Sensitive. The hero turned out to be the youngest son, Edward, who
went to the University and became a teacher of English. Edward was also the
only character who didn’t talk in dialect —Eliot had written his doctoral
thesis on William Faulkner, and had never really gotten over it. It didn’t
matter that Eliot talked sneeringly of her “redneck boyfriend”—whom he had
never met and never would-and derived a perverse glee from hearing that Steve
was a college dropout. It didn’t even matter that underneath all her
self-righteousness she felt like the lowest kind of lying, betraying bitch.
None of these things mattered to her in the slightest.

 
          
Until
Steve found out.

 
          
Ghost
knew about it first, of course. He had always been able to see inside her head,
the way he could see inside Steve’s head and almost anyone else’s if he chose
to.

 
          
Ann
had seen Ghost looking at her strangely, then looking away when she stared back
at him. He would not question her or accuse her, but she knew he knew.

 
          
She
had let herself into their house one day while Steve was at work. She stood in
the doorway of Ghost’s room, watching him write something in a spiral notebook.
When he finally looked up, he didn’t seem surprised to see her. His pale blue
eyes had been calm but guarded.

 
          
“Are
you going to tell him?” she said.

 
          
For
a long moment Ghost only looked at her, and she didn’t think he would answer at
all.

 
          
Then
he lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug and shook his head no—but in those small
movements Ann saw what pain it was causing him to keep such an ugly secret from
Steve. All the guilt and the sorrow washed over her then, and she fell on
Ghost’s bed, buried her face in his musty-rose-scented heap of blankets, and
sobbed out the whole sordid tale. Ghost patted her back and stroked her sweaty
hair, and all the time she knew she was telling him things he didn’t want to
hear. But he listened anyway, because he was Ghost. Because he was good.

 
          
And
of course Steve found out anyway. Whether he sneaked into her room and found
her carefully hidden journal, or whether the unspoken communication between him
and Ghost was so strong that he picked it up without Ghost having to say
anything, Ann never found out.

 
          
Everything
happened so fast. Steve came over one night when her father was out, and he
knew.

 
          
He
didn’t come right out with it, though. He walked around the edges of it; he was
manic, almost raving, then sullen. She could see in his eyes that he hated her.

 
          
“All
right!” she shrieked finally. “All right! I fucked somebody else and I liked
it! He’s a better lover than you. He’s smarter than you. He’s not a goddamn
drunk—”

 
          
She
was just getting warmed up when his hand flashed out and slapped her hard
across the face.

 
          
The
blow had enough force behind it to throw her backward onto her bed. She lay
there for a moment, her heart and mind stunned. Steve had never hit her. No one
but her father had ever hit her. Her cheek and jaw went numb, then began to
tingle. Steve would beg her forgiveness, surely. But he stood over her, his
dark eyes blazing, and when she tried to struggle up he planted the sole of his
boot square in her crotch and shoved hard. A lick of pain shot through her.

 
          
“You
cunt
,” Steve said. His voice was quiet,
inflectionless. “I know how to make sure you won’t do any more fucking around
for a while.”

 
          
And
Steve’s hands went to his belt buckle.

 
          
Ann
threw herself back against the wall. Suddenly Steve was on the bed with her,
pinning her there, trapping her. She thrashed against him and felt him getting
hard.

 
          
Seeing
him excited by her terror scared her worse, made her limp. She kept trying to
push him away, but she was weak now, and he was so strong.

 
          
He
yanked her skirt up, thrust two guitar-callused fingers into her vagina. They
were dry and felt as if they would tear her open. Now he had her hips pinned
beneath his.

 
          
His
jeans were down around his knees. His cock was shoving at her, battering into
her.