Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (19 page)

 
          
Ghost
couldn’t say much to that. Her point of view still bothered him, but he knew
that was just because no matter how much he cared for Ann, he would always love
Steve more. So he talked about mutual friends Ann hadn’t seen for a while—she
had been afraid of running into Steve, and Eliot was apparently a virtual
hermit with no close friends of his own and no interest in meeting hers. Ann
hadn’t been getting out much.

 
          
Ghost
gave her the news, such as it was. R.J. Miller’s supposedly male cat had a
litter of seven kittens, six solid black and one a sort of green. Terry, who
owned the Whirling Disc record store in town, had gone on vacation and left the
assistant manager in charge. The guy had filled out the form wrong when making
an order, and they received a huge shipment of Ray Stevens albums. When he got
back, Terry started playing the records all the time as punishment. Twenty
times a day or more they were treated to the annoying country singer performing
classic numbers like “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” or “Everything Is
Beautiful (In Its Own Way).”

 
          
He
told Ann these things and made her laugh a little. He didn’t tell her how much
Steve was drinking, or that he had started robbing Coke machines again. She
didn’t ask how Steve was either. But when he hugged her goodbye on the porch
and rode his bike away, he thought she looked a little happier, a little less
pale and drawn. Not much, but a little. A little worm of worry for her had
already begun to gnaw in Ghost’s heart. He didn’t count it as a premonition.

 
          
Sometimes
it was hard to tell the difference between them and his ordinary feelings. But
any friend of Ann’s would be worried about her, seeing how she was now. If the
worm kept gnawing, he would pay more attention to it.

 
          
He
pointed his bike toward home. By the time he got there, the ugliest image he
had picked up from Ann—Steve on top of her, shoving her down into the
mattress—had almost faded from his mind.

 
          
Nothing
fingered the colored glass bubbles in the partition between diner booths of
torn maroon vinyl. The Greyhound had taken him down through Maryland and
northern Virginia suburbs, down along anonymous highways flanked by chemical processing
plants, cigarette mills, housing developments and the dull blue and green
aluminum walls meant to protect them from the noise and smell of the highway.

 
          
The
scenery was boring and oppressive at first. It made Nothing wonder whether be
might be travelling deeper and deeper into the dead world populated by his
parents and teachers and the sad, desperate friends he had left behind. Surely
these couldn’t be the roads that led to home.

 
          
But
now, deep in Virginia, the roadsides were lush and green, even in the middle of
September. He was sitting in a truck-stop diner somewhere south of nowhere,
watching the afternoon light fade, staring at the ripped vinyl and the greasy
tables and the flashy jukebox that didn’t have the decency to play green and
mournful country music, but played the pop top twenty over and over by the
hour. Nothing held his backpack close to him. The place reeked of hamburger
grease and cardboard-flavored coffee. But the colored glass bubbles in the
divider were as beautiful as anything back home in his room. He wished he could
somehow steal just one of them. By this time he wished he could have put his
whole room in his backpack and carried it away with him.

 
          
He
glanced through the window at the bus station across the parking lot, lit a
Lucky, tapped it, and rubbed ash absently into the thin torn cloth of his
jeans. The jeans were soft and comforting, decorated with black ballpoint
swirls, a chain of safety pins, artistic rips. His
hightop
sneakers chafed each other, tapped together impatiently, wanting to get back
out on the road.

 
          
There
was a hole in one sneaker, over his little toe.

 
          
He
found the Lost Souls? cassette in the pocket of his raincoat, opened the
plastic case, and took out the paper liner. The liner was a grainy photocopy, a
picture of an old gravestone dappled with shadow and sunlight, surrounded by
pine needles and twining kudzu vines. Across the gravestone the words LOST
SOULS? Were printed in rainbow crayon. All five hundred copies were supposed to
have been lettered by the band. He pictured the guitarist, hunched tall and
awkward on the floor, pressing down too hard with the crayons and breaking
them, cussing and turning the whole project over to the singer. The singer was
surely in charge of the color yellow and with his fingers would have touched
this paper, would have swirled in the question mark that kept the name from
being stupid.

 
          
Nothing
looked at the other side of the paper liner, at the photo of the two musicians.

 
          
Steve
Finn, sitting with his guitar between his knees, grinning with a certain easy
cynicism, his messy dark hair shoved behind his ears and a can of Budweiser not
quite concealed behind the pointy toe of his left boot. And the other one, the
one who slid his eyes away from the camera, whose knobby wrists lay crossed in
his lap. Whose patchwork clothes were too big and whose hair fell from under
his straw hat as pale as tangled rain, half-hiding his face, obscuring him.

 
          
All
Nothing knew about the duo came from this picture and the cryptic liner notes
(“I like to drink my watercolor water”), those things and the long train
whistle music and the spooky, wistful words of the songs. But he imagined
personalities for them, felt as if he knew them. Lost Souls? Belonged to the
crowd of spirits inside his head, the ones he used to wish he was squeezed
against on Saturday nights when Jack’s car went too fast around a curve and the
others screamed for another hardcore tape. Those, his old friends—with their
leather jackets and their skull bongs, their Marlboro hard packs and their
thwarted dreams—those were teenagers. Nothing knew he was either a child or an
ancient soul; he had never been sure which.

 
          
He
tugged at the drop of onyx and the tiny silver razor blade that dangled from
his earlobe. He fingered a ballpoint pen in his pocket. Then he unzipped his
backpack, dug for his notebook, and pulled a postcard from between the
scribbled, singed, softly ragged pages. It was the postcard he had written
while drinking his parents’ whiskey, but he had not yet mailed it. The gold
leaf caught the light as he laid the card on the table.

 
          
GHOST,
he had addressed it, c/o LOST SOULS? 14 BURNT CHURCH ROAD, MISSING MILE, NORTH
CAROLINA. He wrote no zip code—they hadn’t included one on the tape case. Maybe
Missing Mile was too small to have a zip code. But, thank whatever gods watched
over him, he had remembered to put a stamp on it. He could hardly afford to buy
one now.

 
          
He
finished his cigarette, lit another, tried to make out the time through the
layer of grease on the wall clock, glanced over at the bus station again. But
it was no good. He couldn’t get back on a bus even if he wanted to. The money
from his mother’s jewelry box had run out two towns ago. His stomach hurt, and
he had thought of spending his one remaining dollar on a burger or some
pancakes. But what if it was the last dollar he ever got? He had to save it for
something he really wanted: a new notebook, a cup of expensive coffee, a black
slouch hat in a thrift shop somewhere. He could always steal cigarettes. You
had to spend your last dollar on something important.

 
          
He
was going to have to start hitching. He’d never done it before—he’d tried to
catch rides to Skittle’s or the record store back home, but the young townie
matrons only eyed his long raincoat, his lank black hair, and stepped on the
gas. And hitching out on the highway, with the wide flat sky stretching away
overhead and the great trucks like dragons screaming by—well, that was a
different affair. Anyone might stop. Anything might happen.

 
          
He
kissed the postcard and dropped it into a mailbox near the bus station, then
crossed the parking lot and climbed a grassy embankment to the highway. Among
the mosaic of dirty gravel and shattered glass on the shoulder of the road, he
found a single long bone as dry and clean as a fossil. A chicken bone,
probably, that somebody had tossed out a car window. But it might be raccoon or
cat or even—Nothing shuddered pleasurably—a human bone. Maybe someone had been
thrown from a wreck, or some hitchhiker like himself had been hit and killed
here, and the policemen who cleaned up the mess had overlooked a finger or two.
Nothing put the bone in his raincoat pocket and closed his hand around it.

 
          
It
nestled there, making a place for itself next to Lost Souls?

 
          
An
hour’s worth of cars went by, sleek and faceless, windows rolled up against the
coming night. Colors melted across the sky; the sun died its bloody evening
death.

 
          
Out
here, away from the lights of the diner and the bus station, the sky was a deep
violet pricked with stars like glittering chips of ice. A night wind was
freshening, and Nothing began to shiver. He had almost decided to go back and
try to sleep in the bus station when the Lincoln Continental screeched to a
stop beside him.

 
          
The
car was unwieldy and enormous, salmon-pink splotched with great
woundlike
patches of rust. A rope trailed from the rear
bumper,
unravelling
, its end stained dark.

 
          
The
car’s interior, once white maybe, reeked of something rancid.

 
          
As
he got in, Nothing saw the green plastic Jesus on the dashboard, but before he
could reconsider the driver leaned across him and pulled the passenger door
shut. Nothing realized suddenly what the rancid smell was: sour milk. It made
him think of the dumpsters behind the school cafeteria when they hadn’t been
dumped for a while.

 
          
“Where
you headed?” After a moment’s hesitation, the driver added, “Son?”

 
          
The
green Jesus glowed faintly in the dimming light. Nothing dragged his gaze away
from it and looked into the driver’s face, but not before he had realized that
the eyes of the Jesus were painted red. “Missing Mile,” he said. It was the
only place he could think of on a second’s notice. “North Carolina.”

 
          
The
man nodded and turned back to the road. “Heard about the place. Maggot’s nest
of sin, nightclubs and bars, fast women.” He scowled at the highway.

 
          
Nothing
looked more closely at the driver. He seemed very white. His face was unlined
and pale, with a kind of crazy exalted beauty to it, but the hair that hung in
it was the color of flat, hard-packed ice. The man’s hands were as spindly as
two white spiders on the steering wheel, and the pale wrists disappeared into
folds of cloth as white as milk. Was he wearing robes?

 
          
The
white hands skittered on the wheel. “Have you been saved?”

 
          
“Shit,”
said Nothing softly.

 
          
“What
was that?”

 
          
Nothing
looked out the window at a graying landscape. Born-
agains
made him into a smartass. “Yeah. I was saved once, at a party. I was almost
sober, and my friend gave me another drink.”

 
          
One
of the hands shot off the wheel. Nothing flinched, thinking he was about to get
smacked, but the hand only crawled through the clutter on the front seat and
came up with a smeary purple-inked tract clutched in its fingers. Saved by the
Blood of the Lamb.

 
          
The
man dropped the tract ill Nothing’s lap. A long white finger touched Nothing’s
leg through a rip in his jeans. “You read that,” he said.

 
          
“Yeah,
sure. I will.” Nothing started to stuff the tract into his backpack.

 
          
“Now.”
The voice was ice-edged. Nothing thought of frozen milk, of shattering crystal.

 
          
“You
read me them words now. Sing it loud and clear.”

 
          
“No
way. Fuck that.” Nothing pushed himself back against the door. “Let me out.”