The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (25 page)

Ben pulled his pistol from the
shoulder holster and fired round after round into the people from the church.
Every time one dropped into the water more light streamed across the pond from
the trucks parked on shore. Ben emptied the clip and ejected it into the water.
He pulled another from a pocket and slapped it into his weapon. “Pauly, we
ain’t leaving you, no matter what this bitch says.”

A flow of vocalization came from the
remaining members of the church. Fifty tongues, maybe more, flapping to the
stream of consciousness in their heads. But these sounds were unlike the
nonsensical tongues I heard last night.

Ben fired at the lights in the trees.
I covered my ears as the rapid-fire shots turned into one long ringing sound in
my head.

“Pauly,” I yelled.

But he’d begun retreating from Preston
and Ben. I wanted to run ahead with them to bring Pauly back, but a voice from
behind me instructed me to, “Get into the boat.”

The tongues that our pursuers spoke
came in unison. Every man, woman, and child said the exact same thing at the
exact same time. “A potom cert ho vzal…” over and over.

I yelled, “Ben, shoot her!”

“Who the fuck you think I’m shooting
at?”

“Just get on the boat,” Pauly said,
walking toward Danicka.

“You boys get over here now,” the
other man on the boat called out. “Come on now, girl. You’re first.”

Hands tugged Ben’s bow out of my
hands. The water felt like lukewarm tea.

“Katy, get in!” Preston said, handing
me our phones.

“Not without you.”

Ben said, “We’re coming, but somebody
has to be first.”

With the boat sitting out there in the
water like that, Boggs now had a bigger target. The shots came closer. One
punched through the thin aluminum hull as they pulled me in.

The man with his hand on the outboard
motor’s tiller turned the boat away from Preston and Ben.

“Go and get them!” I yelled.

The old man at the bow said, “So they
can kill us all?”

“Are you okay with them only killing
one of us? Because that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t go up there and
get them.”

But he wouldn’t turn the boat.

“Ben! Shoot into the trees. We’re
coming to pick you up.”

The old man got low in the bow. “She’s
right. I’ll lay down some cover.” He handed me the flashlight. “Navigate.”

From beneath a bench he pulled out an
oilcloth sack. He quickly unzipped it and removed an old, well-cared for,
sawed-off double barrel. “Most of the time we pull in catfish or the occasional
carp. Every now and then you get a redneck cracker at the end of your line.
They listen better when you got one of these in your hands.”

He threw two shells in and fired
immediately. Bits of leaves drifted down to the water.

Boggs yelled, “Kill those lights,” and
continued to fire random shots in our direction.

The old man flicked the spent shells
into the water and reloaded. The boat sped

toward Preston and Pauly. The old man
fired again, but I noticed he couldn’t take his

eyes off Danicka.

“Watch where you’re shooting there,
George,” Ben said. “Don’t pay her no mind, okay?”

The old man reloaded.

“Ben, right here.” I reached out for
him as we drifted past. He handed me his bag.

“Don’t be afraid to use this,” Ben
said as handed me his pistol. “Preston, grab his arm.”

Pauly tried to twist away from
Preston’s grasp. He lunged forward, but Ben caught him by the wrist.

“Let me go! Motherfucker let me go! I
want to deal with this.”

George said, “Get in the boat, son.
Nadhima’ll help y’all take care of this. Let us get you home now.”

“Fucking stop it!” Pauly yelled. Spit
came from his mouth when he said it. His eyes looked crazy. Didn’t look
anything at all like Pauly.

George fired two more rounds into the
trees. The only shots returned came from the beach were the trucks were.

Danicka said, “For everything there is
a season. Paul, this is yours.”

Instead of reloading George leaned
over to help pull Pauly into the boat.

As Pauly struggled, Ben grabbed his
pistol and unloaded the rest of the clip into Danicka, now only a few yards away.
I’d seen him shoot crows with a BB gun from a hundred yards out and I know he
never missed. He tossed the pistol to me and went underwater. When he came back
up he had Pauly by the knees, pushing him right into the boat. He coughed as he
yelled, “Hold him down.”

Ben followed him in. As he turned to
grab Preston, he shouted, “Go, Andre! Go!”

Pauly kicked and squirmed from the
floor between the benches. He cussed and bit. George said, “It’s over now, son.
Y’all need to calm yourself.”

Preston took his hand and said, “We
can do this, man. I promisepromisepromise I will take care of this. Please
believe me, brother.”

“I am not your fucking brother. And
don’t you ever make that mistake again.” He sat up and pushed Preston away.
“I’m a dead man walking. You should’ve let me end it because you ain’t the ones
suffering. I’m the one who ain’t going to be able to sleep and I’m the one
who’s going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. So fuck
you for saving me and fuck you for thinking I give a shit about waking up
tomorrow morning.”

Weighted down with all these people,
the boat moved slowly through the twisted backwater channels that crawled
toward the main flow of water. The breeze made me shiver, and Preston sat close
to keep me warm. Nobody said anything once we were in the clear. This most
certainly didn’t feel like a win.

Andre steered cautiously through the
backwater to keep from hitting stumps. Ben and George took turns at the bow,
shouted out directions. But as we got closer to the river the wind picked up,
and bright lights from a power plant, like the one upriver from Morgantown,
comforted me after two days of darkness. I basked in the distantly warm glow as
we passed. The sound of the outboard drowned out the noise from the peepers
calling out from the shoreline. I would’ve preferred that sound to the sound of
nobody speaking to each other.

After we passed the power plant the
sky grew darker. Spring constellations, like Gemini and Leo hung low in the
sky. Venus dipped beneath the tree tops shortly after we reached our top speed.
I saw one shooting star and one satellite.

Then, as we approached a bridge I saw
headlights, cars travelling to and from dark destinations in the low hills
beyond the riverbanks. They reminded me that people lived here without wishing
harm to others. They only wanted to work and cash their checks and go to sleep
in a house where the roof didn’t leak. I tried to let these thoughts be the
ones I’d take to bed with me when I finally closed my eyes in a warm room.

And they would’ve been good thoughts.

But the motorcycles that sparked to
life as we passed, with their four headlights shining down on us, stole that
from me. When I closed my eyes, knowing that this was far from over, those were
the only lights I saw.

THE SECOND REVELATION OF
PRESTON BLACK

CHAPTER Seven

You
don’t know shit about hard times,

With
your hand-me-down Volvo and prep school rhymes.

You
can’t go back to nickels when you’ve been living on dimes.

No, you
don’t know shit about hard times.

“Hard
Times” Music and Lyrics by Preston Black

John
Lennon said, “Are you bloody mad?”

The phone only had a chance to ring
once. I knew the calls and texts were going to start when Dani showed up. Just
didn’t expect them to start at sunrise.

“Have you learned nothing? Even stoned
out of me head I’ve never mucked it up like this. I blame meself for thinking
you’d grow up. But you’re thicker now than you were a year ago. Like you got a
head full of pudding.” Lennon spoke with more of a fatherly tone than I remembered.
Didn’t sound at all like the John I knew.

And because I didn’t want Katy to wake
up, I didn’t say a thing to defend myself.

“Look, man. You’re halfy-halfy in a
pickle now, aren’t you? Stop with the whinging. The world isn’t analog anymore.
Why do you insist on acting like it is?”

I bit my tongue while I made my way to
the front door, past the kitchen and pool table and bar. Simoneaux raised his
hand in a good morning salute. I snaked between the tables and chairs, past the
drum kit that slept on a small riser next to an oversized PA system. I noticed
a dim neon cross hanging above the drum kit, and I realized at that very moment
that this juke joint transformed into Andre’s church come Sunday morning. Light
rain tapped the corrugated tin roof and the blue and green glass on Simoneaux’s
front yard bottle tree. When I opened the door to step onto the porch, the
breeze that greeted me felt like the first air I ever breathed. Since the door
would lock if I let it shut behind me, I kept a foot inside on that old
hardwood. As soon as I figured I had my privacy I said, “Look, man. How could I
know what to do? I asked Ben and he asked Katy’s mum and she told me what to
do. I didn’t invent all this.”

The door opened and Simoneaux looked
at me. I held my hand over the phone to ask him to give me a minute.

“Can’t protect you out here.” He
grabbed my shirt and pulled me back through the door, waggling his finger with
his other hand. “Best stay inside, son.”

Through the earpiece, John Lennon
said, “Look, if you’re planning on tiptoeing through life with your head up
your bum I don’t have a whole lot left to say to you anyway.”

“Don’t be like that, please.” But he’d
hung up already. “Fuck.”

“Watch your mouth, all right? I don’t
mind the language when I’m pouring, but I ain’t going to tolerate it at seven
in the morning.” Simoneaux walked across the swamp ash dance floor and back
into the kitchen. “Come on now, give me a hand.”

I looked at my phone thinking maybe I
didn’t blow it with John. But I knew his temper. When he finished, he finished.
I scrolled through the rest of the texts I got last night. Strummer. Two texts
from Lennon. One from Cliff Burton and one from Jerry Garcia. There were three
from a number I didn’t recognize. I opened the first of them and saw, looks like it’s high time we pow-wow…> but Simoneaux’s impatience kept me
from reading the rest.

A bunch of black-and-white photos hung
on the wall that led back to the kitchen and office. Simoneaux at varying ages
with all kinds of musicians. Old black guys with Gibson Les Pauls and ES-355s.
The only man I recognized besides Simoneaux was Son House. The rest looked
almost as important though. I meant to ask him about them, but as soon as I
came through the swinging kitchen door he handed me a pint glass and pointed to
a mound of white dough he’d rolled out on the countertop. He said, “Biscuits.”

The proper technique eluded me, so he
clasped my hand in his and slammed the rim of the glass into the dough, showing
me how to make perfect little moons. “Don’t skimp on the butter.”

He watched as I twisted the glass and
pulled out a perfect little baby biscuit. He smiled as I slathered melted
butter all over before setting it on the baking sheet. He turned, and after a
weird silence I figured I’d ask him about the Son House picture. But as soon as
I opened my mouth he cut me off. “Going to tell you a bit about this Hoodoo
now, so you can wrap your head around it. You keep on listening while you cut
those.”

I nodded, even though he’d turned his
back.

“About sixty—fifty years ago I ended
up in the old ‘colored’ jail down in Thibodaux. Manager of Rouse’s says he saw
me putting cigarettes into my pocket, ’cept when the police showed up my
pockets was empty. Maybe it happened sixty years ago. Anyway, my mama’s sitting
outside the jail and this Hoodoo stumbles up the street. He looks at her and
says, ‘Your boy’s about to become a scapegoat for every unsolved crime in
Lafourche Parish, you know that?’ Course she knows. Why the hell else she be
sitting out there?”

Simoneaux wiped his hands on an old
rag and brought another pint glass over to the dough. He started cutting
biscuits right along with me as he went on. “Says to my mama he’d get me out
for fifty dollars. Fifty may as well be a thousand, right? But she goes into
town and pawns a silver cross her daddy hid away for hard times. She figured
times weren’t going to get no harder than this. She gave that old Hoodoo the
money and next thing I know this mojo bag come right through the window of my
cell. He hollered at me, telling me to tie that coin ’round my ankle and chew
on those hawthorn leaves and ginger root like a rat in the cane. He told me to
spit that juice all along the cell door and in the corners, and I chewed until
my jaw wouldn’t move no more and hid that sack down round my nuts so them
guards couldn’t find it come pat-down. When trial came I went to face charges
on ten or eleven different offences. I prayed to Saint Valérie and Saint
Vitalis that morning to be safe. Let me tell you, that jury was full of some of
the reddest necks you ever saw. Real Sons of the Confederacy types. They had me
convicted as soon as they seen me walk in. But you know what?”

He stopped.

“I’m listening.”

“A spirit appeared in that courtroom
as soon as them proceedings started. A murder victim. Said one of the jurors
beat him to death in the cane then burned the fields. Lead the sheriff right to
the remains.”

I nodded.

“Don’t play no games with me, son.”

“I’m not. I totally believe you. I
know what it feels like.”

“It appeared in the
Daily
Comet
if
you think I’m shitting you. You want to hear the best part?”

“What’s that?”

“It happened April 28—Saint Valérie’s
feast day.” He grabbed a bottle of rye whiskey from a shelf above the sink,
flipped his pint glass over and poured a generous four fingers into it. “Who
got that Hoodoo now?”

“You do?”

“That’s right I do. That’s why you’re
here. The way some folks see it, you fucked up by going down to that particular
intersection. But I know men who’d done a lot worse for love. Ain’t a thing wrong
with that. You listen to me and I’ll keep you and your girl safe.” Simoneaux
pulled a yellow legal pad out of a drawer and started scribbling.

“What about my brother?”

He wrote for a few minutes while I
waited for an acknowledgement. Finally, he looked up at me and said, “Well, a
lot of that depends on him.”

He put the list on the counter and
left. I read it—
1.
wash dishes 2. marinate pork tenderloin 3. start a pot of red beans cooking
. He’d
scribbled out a recipe below. Not a single item on his list had anything to do
with keeping me or Katy or Pauly safe. But I didn’t mind. Being told what to do
was a hell of a lot easier than making mistakes on your own.

Katy came in as I finished the dishes
and asked what I needed help with. I told her exactly what Simoneaux told me.
Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore jeans and a little grey
Uniontown Red Raiders T-shirt she found in my closet the day I moved out of my
apartment. The girl who’d left it was a featured twirler the year WVU won the
Orange Bowl, but Katy never asked where it came from.

When she tied an apron around her
waist, I saw that the bite marks on her arm had purpled a bit, but looked like
they were healing.

She soaked the beans in a stock pot,
then started the sausage and ham hocks in another big pot. I watched her chop
onions and a bell pepper. “Katy?”

“Preston?” she replied, without ever
looking up from the cutting board.

Instead of asking what I wanted to
ask, I said, “How you feeling?”

“Good.” She slid part of the onion
into her hand and dropped it into the pot. “And scared. But mostly good.”

“About all this…” I said, not really
sure how I wanted to follow up. “You know, I never wanted to be alone. I saw
Pauly and my mom pray and I prayed too, not because I believed, but because I
wanted to believe and be part of something. Part of me had to know there was
more out there than only what I saw with my own eyes, and part of me had to
know I’d see my mother again. But praying did make my life better. It didn’t
calm me or make me feel closer to God—it forced me to rely on Pauly and my
friends because it left me feeling so empty. I still hope there’s something out
there, but these people—the ones that took you—I hope they ain’t right about
what it is.”

I slid my hands around her waist and
kissed her neck and cheek. At first all her muscles tensed up. As soon as I
felt that, I pulled away, but she grabbed my hand and pulled it around her
waist. I said, “This never should’ve happened.”

I could feel her smile. So I spun her
toward me and kissed her. She set the knife on the counter behind her and put
her hands around my neck. I could smell the onion on her fingertips, but didn’t
care. She said, “This summer we’ll run away. We’ll go to Outer Banks and get a
house and write songs all night long. I’ll get that wine you like and we’ll eat
hush puppies and crab cakes and gain twenty pounds. We’ll get nice and brown in
the sun and sleep in. And everybody will say all our new songs are weak because
we didn’t suffer enough and we’ll just laugh. Right?”

“Sounds like a plan.” I went in for
another kiss.

She turned her head, giving me her
cheek instead of her lips. “Doesn’t it? You say it like you don’t really mean
it.”

“No, I mean it. And I’m ready. I want
to focus on what we got in front of us, okay? Like getting you home.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to get out of here. Your mom
and Jamie are coming down to help us sort everything out and take us back.”

“Why? Because I spent a day at the
Reverend Hicks’s Camp for Wayward Girls? We haven’t cancelled a show yet and we
aren’t about to start cancelling shows now.”

“Katy…”

“What, Preston?” She clenched a fist
and held it against her hip. “You start running now and you know what you’re
going to end up with? Sore feet. That’s it. You said you’d do anything for me,
right?”

I laughed. “You want to cash that one
in right now?”

“By my accounts it’s a lifetime
supply. There ain’t no ‘that one’ about it. It’s time to put your dukes up,
boy.”

Pauly’s Uncle Louie used to say that
to me when I was little. He was the biggest man I’d ever know until I saw him
on a hospital bed after open heart surgery. “I know. I already have a plan.”

She clasped her hands behind my neck
and rested her head against my chest. “When were you planning on telling me
about this plan?”

I took a deep breath because I knew of
only one way to clear Pauly’s slate and free everybody from Dani’s tangled
words in one fell swoop.
And that it would hurt.
“Never.”

I kissed Katy’s forehead and cupped my
hand beneath her chin.

She kissed me back, and then pulled
away.

I said, “What?”

“You need to take care of your
brothers.” She wiped her hands on her apron and grabbed two pint glasses from a
rack above the big stainless dishwasher.

“Water. Lots and lots of water. And
don’t let either one of them leave. Especially Pauly. Mr. Simoneaux said tie
him down if you have to, but don’t let him out of this building.” She pointed
to a plastic pitcher by the sink. “And tell Ben that the West Virginia
contingency will be here soon.”

I filled the pitcher with tap water
and backed into the hall. As the door swung the other way, Katy added,
“Ibuprofen’s in my purse.”

In the rear of Simoneaux’s juke joint,
across from the office where Katy and I slept, sat a storeroom. Through the
little window I could see cans of beans and cases of beer and booze. I flipped
the light switch, stepped inside, and waved off the acidy/sweet stench of
whiskey puke.

Ben’s bedroll leaned against a shelf,
unrolled, next to his PTSD drugs—Zoloft, Klonopin, Paxil. He slept on the floor
beneath it, curled up into a little ball. Pauly slept farther back, sprawled
out like he’d been shot. His shoes were off, one arm covered his face, and his
foot rested on Ben’s hand. Between them sat a bottle of Jack, half-full with
the lid screwed on. When I prodded Ben with my toe, I saw the second bottle—the
empty one—beneath Pauly’s head like a pillow. “Up and at ’em, sunbeams.”