Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (21 page)

 
          
The
town was a few miles down the read. In comparison to the trailers and scrubby
dirt yards of Violin Road, the buildings here looked square and sturdy. The
shops on the main street were colorful in the lethargic heat of the day. A
boarded-up storefront cast a baleful blind eye every few blocks, but such
things did not bother Christian. He was looking for dark windows, for neon beer
signs lit deep within shadowy interiors. There must be a bar. Somewhere in this
town must be a place where the townspeople could drink, fight, pass all the
long hot nights, spend their paydays away. Any redneck bar would do.

 
          
Christian
was beginning to wonder whether he might not be in one of the dreaded dry
counties of the South when a blue beer light caught his eye at last. The door
of the place was a thick slab of pine carved with twisted letters: THE SACRED
YEW. He eased the Bel Air over to the curb. There was always work for a good
bartender.

 
          
Kinsey
Hummingbird was an excellent bartender.

 
          
He
was also the confidant of troubled youth from Missing Mile and surrounding
counties.

 
          
Bad
kids, depressed and terrified kids, kids who found themselves adrift in the
Bible Belt–all came to Kinsey as if he were some sort of benevolent Pied Piper.
Before he opened the Sacred Yew, he had been a mechanic at the garage where his
father had worked before him. It was not unusual to see Kinsey’s long thin legs
sticking out from under a car while some forlorn teenager sat nearby talking to
Kinsey’s sneakers. The
metalheads
, the hippies born
decades too late, the sad ones swathed in black—all came.

 
          
Kinsey
Hummingbird was their guru; Kinsey Hummingbird was their oracle.

 
          
When
his mother died in the terrible fire out at the mill, Kinsey received a
substantial settlement and was able to open the Sacred Yew, or as the kids
referred to it, “the Yew.”

 
          
Sometimes
he looked at his club and felt a twinge of guilt that his mother’s gruesome
death had paid for it—she had fallen from a blazing catwalk and been impaled
screaming on a row of spindles—but the truth was that Mrs. Hummingbird had
always disliked her only son and had never troubled to hide it. Kinsey spent
most of his own childhood trying to figure out what he had done to make her
feel so mean. The Bible she spent all her free time reading said to love your
neighbor. Seemed like it would say something about loving your own son too.

 
          
Kinsey
was a whittled beanpole of a man, well over six feet with that apologetic stoop
so many tall thin men have. He always wore a cap with a feather in it pushed
back over his stringy hair. The club was his private dream. Frequently he
stared around at it in awe, expecting it to disappear before his eyes, hardly
able to believe he had made it happen. The insurance money had paid for it, but
he had built the stage, he had begun booking the bands, he had concocted the
little menu of finger sandwiches and homemade soups so that the club would qualify
as a “restaurant” and kids under eighteen would be able to come in without
getting carded, though they had to show their IDs to buy beer.

 
          
The
Sacred Yew was a place for Kinsey’s children. After the first precarious year
he made money, but that was not why he did it. He wanted the kids to have
someplace to go. He wanted them to have someplace where they could be happy for
a while.

 
          
But
sometimes it was a backbreaking job. Long ago he had learned that to make it go
smoothly, he had to attend to every detail himself the booking, the ordering,
even the decor.

 
          
When
there was no one else to do it; he also had to make the soup and sandwiches and
tote all the kegs and cases of beer. A week ago he had fired his latest
assistant bartender for serving beer to a fourteen-year-old, trying to put the
make on her. The boy was astonished when mild-mannered Kinsey Hummingbird
blessed him out; came within an inch of slugging him, then gave him his walking
papers. But the Yew could lose its license for a thing like that.

 
          
Nobody
fucked with Kinsey where the Sacred Yew was concerned.

 
          
So
he had been tending bar solo for a week. Steve and Ghost from Lost Souls?
helped him out sometimes–Ghost; whose grandmother had left him her house and
all the money he would ever require to live on, would do it gratis. But just
now they were busy practicing a bunch of new songs. They played at the club
once a week or more, and they were his biggest draw. People came from as far
away as Raleigh and Chapel Hill to see them. They were getting good, and he
wanted them to practice.

 
          
But
Kinsey was tired. So when the guy walked in and said he’d tended bar in New
Orleans for twenty years, Kinsey hired him on the spot. He wasn’t fazed by the
funereal clothes and the cold pale face, or by the fact that the guy was even
taller than him and maybe skinnier.

 
          
When
you ran a club, you met plenty of
weirdos
. This
particular weirdo struck him as a good bartender.

 
          
“Christian,
hm
? Were
your
folks Holy
Rollers?” That could drive anybody to a life of bartending.

 
          
The
guy shook his head. “It’s a family name.”

 
          
“Whatever,”
said Kinsey amiably.

 
          
That
same night, Christian fell back into the routine of popping bottle tops,
tapping kegs and drawing foamy draft beer into plastic cups, replying to small
talk without really hearing it.

 
          
The
bar seemed primitive: Kinsey served no liquor or even wine, only beer, and not
many varieties of that. Without shots to set up, without
Sazeracs
and Hurricanes to mix, Christian felt he was hardly working.

 
          
Gradually
and gratefully he came to realize that this was no redneck bar. He saw children
in black, which he had not expected in a small southern town, and he watched
them and began to know their faces. But he would wait. Some of these children
might be drifters or flotsam from the state university in Raleigh, but he could
not afford to be greedy too soon. He had waited before. Soon someone would come
to town, alone and a stranger, someone he could take safely.

 
          
His
wages from the bar would not be quite enough to pay for the trailer he
rented—it was on Violin Road, but it was cheap—and the gasoline to drive to
work each night. On his way north he had seen wooden stands by the side of the
road. They sold flowers, fruit, trinkets. Behind his trailer was a scrap heap
and a great thicket of roses rioting wild. Christian cut the huge blossoms and
wrapped their stems in newspaper.

 
          
In
an overgrown patch of garden he found a few stunted pumpkins, a few gourds gone
dry on the vine. He got some sixpenny nails and a hammer from the hardware shop
in town, dragged several boards out of the scrap heap, put together a stand and
painted a sign.

 
          
When
the sun was not too bright, he drove around the outskirts of Missing Mile and
set up his stand on different corners. Sometimes people stopped to buy from
him; he answered their chatter with the practiced glibness that came from a few
centuries of bartending. From behind his dark glasses he watched their faces
and their throats, wondering how long it would be until his mouth began to
water at the smell of their blood.

 
          
Christian
would stay in Missing Mile as long as he could, and when he had saved some
money, he would fill the tank of his Bel Air and start driving north again.
North was where Molochai, Twig, and Zillah might be, and he still thought of
finding them.

 
          
Sometimes
at night he would take out the three bottles of Chartreuse he had brought from
New Orleans. He read the legend on the green-and-gold foil label again and
again, thinking of Wallace Creech and the children of the French Quarter and
the dirty slow river, but he never cracked the seals on any of the bottles. He
still remembered how the green fire had blazed through him on his last night in
New Orleans.

 
          
By
ten o’clock the next morning, Nothing was so hungry and lonely that he almost
cried from sheer relief when the biker stopped and picked him up.

 
          
Sleeping
in a barn hadn’t been any fun. He’d gotten out of the rain for a few hours, but
he woke up sore, hunger nibbling at his stomach and the taste of dust and rotten
blood in his mouth.

 
          
When
he stumbled out of the barn, morning sunlight blinded him for a moment. Nothing
squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them a crack, cautiously. The countryside
glistened in green splendor around him. Tendrils of vine crept up the side of
the barn, poked inquisitively through a hole in the roof. He dosed his eyes
again and breathed the smell of sunlight drying up last night’s rain.

 
          
Back
on the highway, not many cars went by. None stopped. He saw some men eating
biscuits and drinking coffee in a pickup truck, and saliva rushed into his
mouth. He spat on the side of the road; to swallow hunger-spit would only make
him hungrier.

 
          
Experimentally,
he put his hand on his stomach. Through the damp cloth of his T-shirt, it
already felt more hollow. Surely his hipbones were sharper than they had been
two days ago. He lit a Lucky and sucked up the smoke as if it were orange
juice.

 
          
The
next haft hour crawled by. Nothing walked slowly along the shoulder of the road
sticking out his thumb whenever a car went by. Everyone in the cars stared at
him, but no one stopped. Then he heard the growl of a motor around the bend
he’d just passed.

 
          
Something
was coming down the highway fast—no car, no decrepit pickup. A motorcycle. A
big one. He stared pleadingly as it approached, and when the driver saw him,
the bike slowed and pulled up short beside him.

 
          
“Where
you headed?” the biker asked. The question already seemed familiar.

 
          
“Missing
Mile, North Carolina.” Nothing wasn’t sure if he was really going there, but
the name had become a sort of talisman.

 
          
“Yeah?
I’m going to Danville. That’s almost over the Carolina border. Hop on.”

 
          
Nothing
had never been on a motorcycle before, though he had always wished he could
drive one. This was a heavy bike, chopped and
channelled
,
chrome winking through a layer of highway dirt. Nothing stood looking at the
machine until the biker said, “You want a ride or not?”

 
          
“Yeah,
sure.” Nothing looked up into the biker’s face. White blond hair going dark at
the roots, frazzled by wind. No crash helmet. Enormous hollow eyes, as round
and glowing as a
bushbaby’s
. Eyes like little moons,
set back in gray hollows of bone. A young-old face, road-tough yet somehow
melancholy, hanging over the turned-up collar of a black leather jacket.

 
          
“What’s
your name?” Nothing asked.

 
          
“Spooky,”
the biker told him, and it seemed right.

 
          
Nothing
climbed up behind Spooky and wrapped his arms around the biker’s waist.

 
          
Under
the heavy jacket
Spooky’s
body felt loose-jointed,
thin as a whippet. The wide saddle thrummed; it was like climbing astride
something living. Then Spooky let out the clutch, and the bike leaped forward.
The wind
pummelled
Nothing’s bare head, blew his hair
straight back, stung his eyes. He wondered whether they were going very fast.

 
          
Around
noon they stopped in a little town and got a bucket of fried chicken, which
they ate in an old tumbledown graveyard some miles down the highway. Nothing
wolfed the crisp flesh and sucked at the bones, but Spooky only picked at a drumstick,
peeling off shreds of meat and shoving them listlessly into his mouth. Nothing
licked the grease off his fingers and leaned back against the door of a
crumbling family vault. The iron bars shifted beneath his weight, and Nothing
waited to see whether he would spill in among the bones. The door held. A
little disappointed, he looked back at Spooky. The biker’s hands were shaking
now.