We try singing down the gospeclass="underline" “Swing Low,” “Go Tell It,” “Amazing Grace.” Used to draw them out, but that was in Christian towns. There’s no God in Tadesville.
Arnie sets down his guitar, makes like he’s squinting at the buildings. “We’ll have to browse.”
I start picking “Will the Circle?” but it’s for show, like before. We have to browse.
Arnie eases off the trailer, slow because there’s nothing left in his hip sockets. Clutching at the door handles, he pulls himself to the driver’s door, drops onto the seat coils. He sighs through what’s left of his teeth. He’ll wait for us behind the wheel.
Billy levers himself down with his good leg. His right leg broke years ago and healed crooked. He keeps it strapped with his belt. He hobbles for the grocery.
Whiffer goes toward the General Feed, though what he’s expecting there I don’t begin to wonder.
I latch my case, walk to the intersection, and turn down the side road. It’s always cooler there, under the leaves.
I walk down the half mile. The trees, thick and twisted, caress each other like vipers.
I know the spot. I set down the banjo.
“Are you greedy, banjer man?” The soft Southern voice brushes my skin like cold silk. It smells of mold. I cannot see her. Only the wind, moving the leaves.
I squeeze between trunks grown so thick they’ll soon touch. One hundred, two hundred yards in, I look everywhere. There is no cottage, no ruins of a foundation. Still, I move through the trees. It is my need.
The specks of yellow sun on the leaves turn orange, then gray, embers snuffing in a dying fire. I push through the bramble as fast as the arthritis and my tea bag lungs allow, screaming as the thorns rip at my scabs to get at the soft, unhealed pink underneath. There is no cottage. There never was, except as a shadow the germ beginnings of my greed needed to see.
“Greedy, banjer man?” she whispers, through the wind, through the leaves.
“You know I am, you bitch,” I yell, hell’s own supplicant. I push on.
When the last of the gray between the trees goes black, when the wind kicks up and chills the wet of my sweat and the new blood oozing out of my skin, when the shakes come so bad I can’t go on, I start to feel through the darkness for a way out. It’s almost over for another day.
Sometimes I see her then, in that last thin light. Faint, a mist, back in the woods. Laughing and swaying in the trees, mocking the weakness she has claimed at last.
I stand on the road, waiting for my raggedy breathing to regulate. I check my watch. It doesn’t work, but I know it’s been more than an hour. Arnie, Billy, and Whiffer will have gone to wherever they go. Arnie is real firm about not waiting more than forty-five minutes. I bend down, find the rope tied to the banjo case. For dragging. After the woods, I have no strength left for carrying.
I start back to town. There’s no going the other way, no finding a road to Kalamazoo. That part’s over. I’m greedy now, welcomed in Tadesville.
I always stop at the big oak where the shiny box hangs. I put it in plain view, back when I had hope that someone would come along. Back before it hit that this place was for us alone-Arnie and Whiffer and Billy and me.
And her. Especially, her.
I feel inside for the paper-this paper-and know again the little death as my fingers close around it. Nobody will come.
I give the twine a tug to make sure the string is still taut and then head back to the Pontiac, dragging my banjo, taking what comfort I can summon from the spongy, dark places on my skin and the lump the size of a walnut that’s growing on my forehead.
I tell myself it will end soon, when the spongy places and the walnut ripen. That nothing will come after, except peace.
It can’t last forever, I say to the dark.
Sure as hell.
Limbo by Steve Brewer
I snapped awake on a cold autopsy table.
A white-haired man with rimless eyeglasses stood over me, a scalpel in his hand, poised to slice my bare chest. I grabbed his wrist before he could break the skin.
The surprise was too much for the old man. The color drained from his face until he was as white as the smock he wore. His wide blue eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, his arm tearing free from my grasp as he crumpled to the floor.
I sat up and looked around. The room was chilly and close, lit only by one bright lamp that dangled above my aching head. The shiny steel table had a drain built into it. Shudder.
I was naked and, except for the headache, seemed uninjured. The usual chunky, hairy body. “Semper Fi” tattoo on my forearm. Football scar on my knee.
I dropped my legs off the side of the table and my feet reached the cold concrete floor. I bent and checked the old guy’s neck for a pulse, but I could tell at a glance that he was gone. Served him right, the son of bitch. Trying to cut me open-
As I straightened up, a glimmer of light caught my eye, off to the left. I looked over my shoulder, but found nothing. Feeling unsteady, I turned all the way around, searching for the source of the light, but it stayed just past my field of vision.
A washing-up sink stood in the corner. Above it hung a round mirror, and I stepped over the dead guy to reach it. My face looked the same, flat-nosed and square-jawed and dinged from a lifetime of fist-fights. I needed a shave.
A shaft of yellow light beamed from my head, just above my left ear. What the hell? I reached up and let the light play on the palm of my hand. Where was it coming from? Gingerly, I pressed my hand against my scalp, covering the beam, feeling for its source.
That’s when I found the bullet hole.
I nearly joined the dead man on the floor. What the fuck was happening here? No blood, not much pain, but there was no doubt about the hole in my skull. I dipped a fingertip into it. A neat round hole, felt like a.38. When I pulled my finger away, yellow light poured out.
I didn’t like that. Made me feel dizzy, weak. I covered the hole with my hand. Looked in the mirror. Lifted my hand away. Light beamed from the gunshot wound. I covered it again.
“I’m light-headed,” I said to my reflection in the mirror. Neither of us laughed.
Good to hear that my voice still worked. Clearly, I had survived getting shot in the head. The light must be a hallucination or brain damage.
Maybe I was simply dreaming. With my free hand, I slapped my own cheek. I felt the impact, but it didn’t sting, didn’t burn the way it should. I did it again. Nothing changed.
I leaned toward the mirror. I seemed pale, like maybe I’d lost a lot of blood when I got shot in the head.
It dawned on me to check my own pulse. I felt my throat, then my chest. No heartbeat, no familiar thump-thump. Frantic, I took my hand away from my scalp long enough to feel my wrist. Still no pulse.
Jesus Christ. I was dead. Up walking around, feeling okay except for a headache and the weird light beaming out of my skull. But dead.
That explained the autopsy room. I looked at the coroner sprawled on the floor. He’d just been doing his job. No wonder he keeled over when the corpse’s eyes popped open. I wished he were still alive. Maybe he could explain the sunbeam pouring from my head.
I went to a white metal cabinet in the corner and opened the doors. Medical supplies. I pawed through stuff, locating gauze and adhesive tape. Light streamed out of my head while I used both hands to put together a bandage. I slapped the bandage over the hole and pressed the white tape against my bristly hair. The bandage glowed from inside. I stuck more strips of tape over it until no light seeped through. I didn’t know what that internal light was all about, but it seemed important that I not lose it all.
The windowless room was small, old, clearly not part of a hospital. Must be in a little town or a rural area, someplace where the local doc acted as coroner. But how did I get here? Had there been an ambulance? Cops? I couldn’t remember.