Prologue

 

Missing Mile, North Carolina, in the summer of 1972 was scarcely more than a wide spot in the road. The main street was

shaded by a few great spreading pecans and oaks, flanked by a few even larger, more sprawlin g So uthern ho mes too far off any

beaten  path  to  have  fallen  to  the  scourge  of  the  Civil  War.  The  ravages  and  triumphs  of  the  past  decade  seemed  to  have

touched the town not at all,  not at  first glance.  You might think  that here  was a place  adrift  in  a  gentler  time, a place where

Peace reigned naturally, and did not have to b e b lazoned on banners or worn around the neck.

You might think that, if you were just driving through. Stay long eno ug h, and you would begin to see signs. Literal ones

like  the posters in the window of the record store that would later  become the Whirling Disc, but was  no w still known as  the

Spin'n'Spur. Despite the name and the plywood  cowboy bo ot  above the door, those  who wanted songs about  God,  guns, and

glory went to Ronnie's Record Barn down the highway in Corinth. The Spin'n'Spur had been taken over, and the posters in the

windo w swarmed with psychedelic patterns and colors, shouted crazy, angry words.

And  the  graffiti:  STOP  WAR  with  a  lurid  red  fist  thrusting  halfway  up  the  side  of  a  building,  HE  IS  RISEN  with  a

sketchy, sulkily sensual face beneath that might have been Jesus Christ or Jim Morrison. Literal signs.

Or figurative  ones, like  the  shattered  boy who  now  sat  with  the  old men  outside  the Farmers  Hardware  Store  on clear

days. In another life his name had b een Johnny Wiegers, and he had been an open-faced,  sweet-natured kid; most of the old-

timers  remembered buying him a candy bar  or a soda at  some point over the years, or  later,  cadging  him  a couple of beers.

Now his  mother wheeled him down Firehouse Street every day and propped him up so he could hear their talk and watch the

endless rounds of checkers they played with a battered board and a set of purple and orange Nehi caps. So far none of them had

had the heart to ask her not to do it anymore.

Johnny Wiegers sat  quietly. He had to. He had  stepped  on a  Vietcong land  mine, and breathed fire,  which  took  out his

tongue and his vocal cords. His face was gone to unrecognizable  meat, save for one eye glittering  mindlessly in all that ruin,

like  the  eye  of  a  bird  or  a  reptile.  Both arms and  his  right  leg  were  gone;  the  left  leg  ended  just  above the  knee, and  Miz

Wiegers would insist on rolling his trouser cuff up over it to air out the fresh scar. The old-timers hunched over their checkers

game, talking less than usual, glancing every now and then  at the raw, pitiful  stump or the gently heaving torso, never at the

mangled face. All of them hoped Johnny Wiegers would die soon.

Literal  signs  of  the  times,  and  figurative  ones.  The  decade  of  love  was  gone,  its  gods  dead  or  disillusioned,  its  fury

beginning to mutate into a kind of self-absorb ed unease. The only constant was the war.

If  Trevor  McGee  knew  any  of  this,  it  was  only  in  the  fuzziest  of  ways,  sensing  it  through  osmosis  rather  than  any

conscious effort. He had  just turned five. He had seen Vietnam broadcasts o n the news, though his family did not now  have a

TV. He knew that his parents believed the war was wrong, but they spoke of it as something that could not be changed, like a

rainy day when you wanted to play ou tside or an elbow already skinned.

Momma told  stories of peace marches she'd gone to before the boys were born. She listened to records that reminded her

of those days,  made her happy. When Daddy listened  to  his  records now, they  seemed to make  him  sad.  Trevor liked all  the

music, especially the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, who Daddy always called Bird. And the song Janis Joplin sang with his

daddy's name in it. “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Trev wished  he could  remember all the  words,  and sing the song himself.  Then he could pretend it was just him and his

daddy driving  along  this  road,  without Momma  or  Didi, just the two  of  them.  Then  he  could ride  up  front with Daddy, not

stuck in the back with Didi like a baby.

He made himself stop thinking that. Where wo uld Momma and Didi be, if not here? Back in Texas, or the place they had

left two days ago , New Orleans? If he wasn't careful he would make himself cry. He didn't want his mother o r his little brother

to be in New Orleans. That city had given him a bad feeling. The streets and the buildings were dark and old, the kind of place

where ghosts could live. Daddy said there were real witches there, and maybe zo mbies.

And  Daddy had gotten  drunk. Momma  had sent him out  alone  to  do  it, said  it  might  be  good for  him. But Daddy had

come back with blood on his T-shirt and a sick smell about him. And while Trev huddled in the hotel bed with his arms around

his brother and his face buried in Didi's soft hair, Daddy had put his head in Momma's lap and cried.

Not just a few tears either, the way he'd done when their old dog Flakey died back in Austin. Big gu lping, trembling sobs

that turned his face bright red and made snot run out of his nose onto Momma's leg. That was the way Didi cried when he was

hurt or scared really bad. But Didi was only three. Daddy was thirty-five.

No, Trev didn't want to  go back to New Orleans, and he didn't want Mo mma or Didi  to be there either. He wanted them

all  with  him,  going  wherever  they  were  go ing  right  now.  When  they  passed  the  sign  that  said  MISSING  MILE  TOWN

LIMITS, Trevor read it out loud. He'd learned to read last year and was teaching Didi now.

“Great,” said  Daddy. “Fucking great. We did better than miss the highway by a mile-we found the god damn mile.” Trevor

wanted  to  laugh,  but  Daddy  didn't sound as  if he were joking. Momma didn't  say anything at all,  tho ugh  Trev knew  she had

lived around here  when she  was a little girl his age. He  wondered if she  was glad to be back. He tho ught No rth Carolina was

pretty,  all  the  giant  trees  and  green  hills  and  long,  curvy  roads  like  black  rib bons  un winding  beneath  the  wheels  of  their

Rambler.

Momma  had  told  him  about  a  place  she  remembered,  though,  something called  the Devil's  Tramping  Ground. Trevor

hop ed they wo uldn't see it. It was a round track in a field where no  grass or  flowers grew, where animals wouldn't go. If you

put trash or sticks in the circle at night, they would be gone hi the morning, as if a cloven hoof had kicked them out of its way

and they had landed all the way down in hell. Momma said it was supposed to  be the place where the Devil walked round and

round all night, plottin g his evil for the next day.

(“That's right, teach them the fucking Christian dichotomy, poison their brains,” Daddy had said, and Momma had flipped

him  The  Bird.  For  a  long  time  Trevor  had  thought  The Bird  was  something like  the  peace  sign-it  meant  you  liked Charlie

Parker, maybe-and he had gone around happily flipping people o ff until Momma explained it to him.)

But Trevor couldn't blame even the Devil for wanting to live around  here. He thought it was the prettiest place he had ever

seen.

 

                                                                                           1

 

 

 

 

 

Now they were driving through the town . The buildings looked old, but not scary like the ones in New Orleans. Most of

these were  built of wood, which gave them a soft-edged, friendly look. He saw  an old-fashioned gas  pump and a fence made

out o f wagon wheels. On the other side  of the  street, Momma spied a gro up  of teenagers in beads and ripped denim.  One of

them, a boy, flipped back long luxuriant hair. The kids paused on the sidewalk for a moment before entering the record sto re,

and Momma pointed them out to Daddy. “There must be some kind of a scene here. This might be a good place to stop.”

Daddy  scowled.  “This is  Buttfuckville. I  hate  these  little  Southern  towns-you  move in,  and  three days later everybody

kno ws where you came from and how you make a living and who you're sleeping with.” He caressed the steering wheel; then

his fingers tightened convulsively around it. “I think we can  make it through to New York.”

“Bobby, no!” Mo mma reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. Her silver rings caught the sunlight.  “You know the car

can't do it. Let's not get strand ed on the high way so mewhere. I don't want to hitch with the kids.”

“No?  You'd  rather b e  stranded  here?”  Now  Daddy  lo oked  away  from  the  road  to  glare  at  Momma  through  the  black

sunglasses that hid his pale blue eyes, so like Trevor's eyes. Didi had eyes like Momma's, huge and nearly black. “What would

we do here, Rosena? Huh? What would I do?”

“The same thing you do anywhere. You'd draw.” Momma wasn't looking at Daddy; her hand still rested on his should er,

but  her  head  was  turned  toward  the  window,  looking  out  at  Missing  Mile.  “We'd  find  a  place  to  rent  and  I'd  get  a  job

so mewhere. And you'd stay at home with the kids, and there'd be nowhere to get drunk, and you'd start doing comics again.”

At  one time Trev  would have chimed  in  his  support fo r Momma,  perhaps even tried to enlist Didi's help. He wanted to

stay  here.  Just  looking  at  the  place  made  him  feel  relaxed  inside,  not  cramped  up  and  hurting  the  way  New  Orleans  and

so metimes Texas had made him feel. He could tell it made Momma happ y too, at least as happy as she ever felt anymore.

But he knew better than to  interrupt his parents while they were “discussing.” Instead he stared out the windo w and hoped

as hard as he could that they wo uld stop. If only Momma needed  cigarettes, or Didi had to go pee, or something. His brother

was toying with the frayed cuff of his  shorts, dreaming,  not even seeing the town . Trev poked his  arm. “Didi,” he whispered

out of the corner of his mouth, “you need to p ee again?”

“Uh-uh,” said Didi solemnly, too loudly. “I peed last time.”

Daddy slammed his hands against the wheel. “Goddammit, Trevor, don't encourage his weak bladd er! You know what it

means if I have to stop the car every hour? It means I  have to  start it  again too. And you know  what starting the car does? It

uses extra gas. And that gas costs money. So you take your pick, Trev-do you  want to stop and take a piss, or do you want to

eat tonight?”

“Eat tonight,” Trevo r said. He felt tears trying to start in his eyes. But he knew that if he cried, Daddy would keep picking

on him. He hadn't always been like that, b ut he was now. If Trev stood up to Daddy and answered back- even if the answer was

giving in-Daddy might be ashamed  and leave him alone.

“Okay, then, leave Didi alone.” Daddy made the car go faster. Trevor could tell Daddy hated the little town as much as he

and Momma liked it. Didi, as usual, was lost in space.

Daddy wo uldn't stop on  purpose  now,  not  for  any  reason.  Trevo r knew the  car was going to break  down soon; at  least,

Mo mma said so. If that was true, he wished it would go ahead and break down here. He thoug ht a place like this might be good

for Daddy if he wo uld only give it a chance.

“GodDAMM” Daddy  was wrestling with the  shift stick, slamming it with the heel of his hand. Something in the guts o f

the car banged and shuddered horribly; then greasy black smoke came streaming aro und  the edges of the hood. The car coasted

to a stop on the grassy shoulder of the road.

Trevor felt like crying again. What if Daddy knew he had been wishing for the car to break down right that very second?

What  would Daddy do? Trevor  looked  down at  his  lap, noticed how  tightly his fists  were  clenched against the  knees of  his

jeans. Cautiously he opened one hand, then the other. His  fingernails had made stinging red halfmoons in the soft flesh of his

palms.

Daddy kicked the Rambler's door open and flung himself out. They had already passed  through downtown, and now the

road  was  flanked  by  farmland, green  and wet-smelling.  Trevor  saw  a few  patches  of  writhing  vine  dotted with  tin y  purp le

flowers  that  smelled  like  grape soda.  They  had  been  seeing  this p lant for  miles.  Momma  called  it  kudzu,  and  said  it  only

flowered  once  every  seven  years.  Daddy  snorted  and  said  it  was  a goddamn  crop-killing  pest  that wo uldn't even  die  if  you

burned it with gasoline.

Daddy walked away from the car toward a cluster of trees not far from the road. He stopped and stood with his back to the

Rambler, his hands clenched at his sides. Even from a distance Trevor could tell Daddy was shaking. Momma said Dad dy was

a bundle of nerves, wouldn't even fix him coffee anymore because it just made him nervous. But so metimes Daddy was worse

than nervous. When he got like this, Trevor  could feel a blind red rage pulsing from him, hotter than the car's engine, a rage

that did not kno w words like wife and sons.

It was because Daddy co uldn't draw anymo re. But why was that? How could a thing yo u'd had all your life, the thing you

loved to do most, suddenly just be gone?

Momma's door swung open. When Trevor glanced up, her long blue-jeaned legs were already out of the car, and she was

looking at him over the back of the seat. “Please watch Didi for a few minutes,” she said. “Do some reading with him if you're

up to it.” The door slammed and she was striding across the green verge toward the taut trembling figure of Daddy.

Trevor watched  them  come  together,  watched Momma's arms  go around Daddy from behind. He knew her gentle, cool

hands would be  stroking Daddy's chest, she  would  be whispering meaningless soothing words in her soft Southern voice,  the

way she did for Trevor or Didi when they woke from nightmares. His mind framed a still sho t of his parents standing together

under the trees, a picture he would remember for a long time: his father, Robert Fredric McGee, a smallish, sharp-featured man

with black wraparound sunglasses and a wispy shock of ginger hair that stood straigh t up on top, the lines of his body tight as a

violin string; his mother, Rosena Parks McGee, a slender woman dressed as becomingly as the fashions of the day would allow

in  faded,  embroidered  jeans  and  a  loose  green  Indian  shirt  with tiny  mirrors  at  the  collar  and  sleeves,  her  long  wavy  hair

twisted into a braid that hung halfway d own her back, a thick cable shot through with wheat and corn silk and autumn g old.

 

 

                                                                                           2

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor's hair was the same colo r as his father's. Didi's was still the palest silk-spun blond , the color of the lightest hairs on

Mo mma's head, but  Mo mma said Trey's  hair had been that color too and Didi's would likely darken to ginger by the time he

was Trevo r's age.

Trevor wondered if Momma was out there soothing Daddy, convincing him that it didn't matter if the car was broken, that

this  would be  a  good place  to  stay.  He  hoped so. Then  he  picked  up  the  closest reading  material at hand,  a  Robert  Crumb

comic,  and  slid  across the  seat  to his brother.  Didi didn't  understand all  the things that  happened in these stories-neither did

Trevo r, for that matter — but both bo ys lo ved the drawings and thought the girls with giant butts were funny.

Back in Texas, Daddy used to joke that Mo mma  had  a  classic  Crumb  butt, and Momma  would  smack  him  with a sofa

pillow. There had been a big, comfortable green sofa in that house. Sometimes Trevor and Didi would join in the pillow fights

too. If Momma and Daddy  were really stoned , they'd  wind up  giggling so  hard  that they'd  lose their breath,  and  Trevor and

Did i could win.

Daddy didn't make jokes about Momma's butt anymore. Daddy didn't even read his Robert Crumb  comics anymore; he'd

given them all to Trevor. And Trev couldn't remember the last tune they had all had a pillow fight.

He rolled the  windo w down  to let in the  green-smelling air.  Though it was  still faintly  rank  with  the odo r of the frying

engine, it was fresher than the inside of the car, which smelled of smoke and sour milk and Didi's last accid ent. Then he started

reading the comic aloud, pointing to each word as he spoke it, making Didi  follo w along after him. His brother kept trying to

see what Momma and Daddy were d oing. Trevor saw out  of the corner of his eye that Daddy had pulled away from Momma

and was  taking  long strides down the highway, away from the car, away from the town.  Mo mma  was hurrying  after him, not

quite running. Trevor pulled Did i against him and forced himself not to look, to concentrate on the words and pictures and the

stories they formed.

After a few panels it was easy: the comic was all about Mr. Natural, his favorite Crumb character. The sight of the clever

old hippie-sage comforted him, made him forget Daddy's anger and Momma's pain, made him forget he was reading the words

for Didi. The story took him away.

Besides, he knew they would  come  back.  They  always did.  Your  parents could n't  just  walk away and  leave  you in the

back seat, not when it would be dark soon, not when you were in a strange place and  there was nothing to eat and nowhere to

sleep and you were only five years old.

Could they?

Momma and Daddy were far  down the road now, small gesturing shapes in the distance. But  Trevor could see that they

had stopped walking, that they were just standing there. Arguing, yes. Yelling, probably. Maybe crying. But not going away.

Trevor looked down at the page and fell back into the story.

 

It  turned  out  they couldn't  go anywhere. Daddy called a mechanic, an immensely tall, skinny young  man who  was  still

almost a teenager, with a face as long and pale and kindly as that of the Man in the Moon. Stitched  in bright orange thread on

the pocket of his greasy overalls was the improbable name Kinsey.

Kinsey said the Rambler had  thrown a rod that had  probab ly been ready to go since New  Orleans, and unless they were

prepared to drop several hundred  bucks into  that  tired  old engine,  they  might  as  well push  the car off the road  and  be  glad

they'd broken down close to a town. After all, Kinsey pointed out, they might be staying awhile.

Daddy helped him roll the car forward a few feet so that it was completely off the blacktop. The body sagged on its tires,

two -toned p aint a faded turquoise above the dusty strip of chrome that ran along the side, dirty white belo w. Trevor thought the

Rambler alread y looked dead. Daddy's  face  was very pale, almost bluish, sheened with oily-lo oking sweat. When  he took off

his sunglasses, Trevor saw smudgy purple shadows in the hollo ws of his eyes.

“How much do we owe you?” Daddy said. It was ob vious from his voice that he dreaded the answer.

Kinsey looked at Momma, at Trevor and Didi in the  crooks of her arms, at their  clothes and other belongings heaped in

the back seat, the duffel bags bulging up from under the roped-down lid o f the trunk, the three mattresses strapped to the roof.

His quick blue eyes, as bright as Trevor's and Daddy's were pale, seemed to take in the situation at a glance. “For coming out?

Nothing. My time isn't that valuable, believe me.”

He lo wered his head a little to peer into Daddy's face. Trevor thought suddenly o f an inquisitive giraffe. “But do n't I kno w

you? You wouldn 't be ... no ... not Robert McGee? The cartoonist who blew the brainpan off the American u nderground ' in the

words of Saint Crumb himself? . . . No, no, of course not. Not in Missing Mile. Silly of me, sorry.”

He was already turning away, and Daddy wasn't going to say anything. Trevor couldn't  stand it. He wanted to run to the

tall young man, to yell up into that kind, curiou s face, Yes, it is him, it is Robert McGee and he's everything you said and he's

MY DADDY TOO! In that moment Trevor felt he would burst with pride for his father.

But Momma's arm tightened  around him,  holding  him  back. One long  lacq uered nail  tapped  a  warning  on his  forearm.

“Sh,” he heard her say softly.

And  Daddy,  Robert  McGee,  Bobby  McGee,  creator  of  the  crazed,  sick,  beautiful  co mic  Birdland,  whose  work  had

appeared beside Crumb's and Shelton's, in Zap! and  the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other and everywhere in between,

all across the country . . . who had received and refused offers from the same Hollywood he had once drawn as a giant blo od-

swollen tick still clinging to the rotten corpse of a dog labeled  Art . . . who  had once had a steady hand  and a pure, scathing

vision ...

Daddy only shook his head and lo oked away.

 

Just  past do wnto wn Missing  Mile,  a  road splits  off  to  the  left  from Fireho use  Street  and  meanders  away  into  scrubby

countryside.  The  fields  out  here  are  nearly  barren,  the  soil  gone  infertile-most  believe  from  overfarming  and  lack  of  crop

rotation. Only the oldest resid ents of town still say these fields are cursed, and were once so wed with salt. The good land is on

the other side  of town, the  side  toward  Corinth, out where the  abandoned  railyard and the  deep woods  are.  Firehouse  Street

runs  into  State  Highway  42.  The  road  that  splits  off  to  the  left  soon  becomes  gravel,  then  dirt.  This  is  the  poorest  part  of

Missing Mile, the place called Violin Road.

 

                                                                                           3

 

 

 

 

 

Out here the best places to live are decrepit farmhouses, big rambling p laces with high ceilings and large cool rooms, most

of which  were abandoned or sold years ago as  the crops  went bad. A step below these are the aluminum trailers  and tarpaper

shacks, their dirt yards choked with  broken  toys, rusting  hulks of autos, and other  trash, their peripheries  negligently  guarded

by slat-sided, soporific hounds.

Out here only the wild things are health y, the old trees whose roo ts find sustenance far b elow the ill-used layer of topsoil,

the occasio nal rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu. It is as if they have decided to take back the

land for their own.

Trevor loved it. It was where he discovered that he could draw even if Daddy could n't.

Momma  talked  to  a  real  estate  agent  in  town  and  figured  out  that  they  could  affo rd  to  rent  one  of  the  dilapidated

farmhouses  for  a  month.  By  that  time,  she  said,  she  would  find a  jo b in  Missing Mile  and  Daddy  would be d rawing. Sure

enough, a few days after they moved their things into the house, a dress shop hired Momma as a salesgirl. The job was no fun-

she couldn't wear jeans to work, which  left her with a choice  of one Indian-print skirt and blouse or o ne patchwork dress-but

she ate lunch at the diner in town and sometimes stop ped for coffee after her shift. Soon she met some of the kids they'd seen

going in to the record store, and others like them.

If she could drive to Raleigh or Chapel Hill, they told Momma, she could make good  money modeling for university art

classes. Momma talked to Kinsey at the garage, who let her set up a payment plan. A week later the Rambler had a brand-new

engine, and Momma q uit the dress shop and started driving to Raleigh several times a week.

Daddy had his things set up in a tiny fourth bedroom at the back of the house, his u ntidy jumble of inks and brushes and

his drawing table, the one piece of furniture they had brought from  Austin. He went in there and shut the do or every morning

after Momma left, and he stayed in there most of the day. Trevor had no idea whether he was drawing or not.

But Trevor was. He had fou nd an old sketchbook of Daddy's when Momma unpacked the car. Most of the pages had been

torn out,  but  there  were  still  a few  blank  sheets  left.  Trevor  usually  took Didi  outsid e  to  play in  the  daytime-Momma  had

assured  him that the Devil's Tramping Ground was more than forty miles away, so he didn't have to  worry about accidentally

coming upon the pacing, muttering demo n.

When Didi was napping-something he seemed  to do more and more often these days-Trevor wandered throug h the house,

looking at the bare floorboards and the water-stained walls, wondering if anyone had ever loved this ho use. One afternoon he

found himself in the dim, shabby kitchen, perched on one  of the rickety chairs that had come with the house, a felt-tip pen in

his hand, the sketchb ook on the table b efore him. He had no idea what he was going to  draw. He had hardly ever thought about

drawing before; that was what Daddy did. Trevor co uld remember scribbling  with  crayons on cheap newsprint  when  he was

Did i's age, making great round heads with stick arms and  legs coming straight  out of them, as small  children  do.  This  circle

with  five  dots  in  it  is  Momma,  this  one  is  Daddy,  that  one's  me.  But  he  hadn 't  drawn  for  at  least  a  year-not since  Daddy

stopped.

Daddy had told him o nce that the trick was not to think about it, not in your sketchb ook anyway. You just had to find the

path between your hand and  your heart and your brain and see what came out. Trevor uncapped the pen and put its tip against

the unblemished  (though  slightly yellowed)  page of the  sketchbook.  The  ink  began  to  bleed into the  paper,  making  a small

spreading dot, a tiny black sun in a pale vo id. Then, slowly, Trevor's hand began to move.

He soon  discovered  he  was  drawing Skeletal  Sammy, a character  from  Daddy's comic b ook,  Birdland.  Sammy  was  all

straight  lines  and sharp points: easy to draw. The half-leering, half-desperate face, the long black coat that hung on Sammy's

shoulders like a pair of broken wings, the spidery hands and the long thin legs and the exaggerated bulge of Sammy's kneecaps

beneath his black stovepipe pants-all began to take shape.

Trevor sat back and looked at the drawing. It  was nowhere  near as good as Daddy's Sammy, of course; the lines weren't

straight, the black inking was more like scribbling. But it was no circle with five dots, either. It was immediately recognizable

as Skeletal Sammy.

Daddy recognized it as so on as he walked into the kitchen.

He leaned over Trevor's shoulder for several moments looking at the drawing. One hand rested lightly on Trev's back; the

other tapped the table nervously, fingers as long and thin as Sammy's, faint lavender veins visible beneath the pale skin, silver

wedding  ring  too  loose  on  the  third  finger.  For  a  moment  Trevor  feared  Daddy  might  snatch  the  drawin g,  the  whole

sketchbook; he felt as if he had b een caught doing something wrong.

But Daddy o nly kissed the top of Trevor's head. “You draw a mean junkie, kiddo,” he whispered  into  Trevor's ginger hair.

And he was gone from the kitchen silently, like a ghost, without gettin g the beer or glass of water or whatever he had come for,

leaving his elder son half elated and half dreadfully, mysteriously ashamed.

The carefully drawn fingers of Sammy's left hand were  blurring.  A drop of  moisture  on the p age, making the ink bleed

and furl. Trevor touched the wetness, then put his finger to his lips. Salty. A tear.

Daddy's, or his own?

 

The  wo rst  thing  happ ened  the  follo wing  week.  It  turned  out  Dad dy  had  been drawing in  his  cramped  little  studio. Had

finally finished a story, only a page long, and sent it off to one of his papers. Trevor couldn't remember if it was the Barb or the

Freep or maybe one of the others-he got them mixed up so metimes.

The paper rejected the story. Daddy read the letter aloud in a hollow, mocking voice. It had been a d ifficult decision, the

editor said, considering his reputation and the selling power of his name. However, he simply didn't feel the story approached

the quality of Daddy's previous work, and he thought pub lishing it wo uld be bad both for the paper and for Daddy's career.

It was the kindest way the editor could find to say This comic is a piece of shit.

The next day, Daddy walked into town and called the publisher of Birdland. The stories for the fourth issue were already

nearly a year overdue. Daddy told the publisher  there would be  no more stories, not now, not ever. Then he hung up the pay

pho ne and walked a mile acro ss town to the liquor store. By the time he got ho me, he had already cracked the seal on a gallon

jug of bourbon.

 

 

                                                                                           4

 

 

 

 

 

Momma had begun staying later and later in  the city after her modeling job s-having drinks with some of the other mo dels

one nig ht, going to so meone's apartment to get stoned the next. Daddy didn't like that, had even refused to smoke the joint she

brought him as a present from her friends. She said they wanted to meet him and the kids, but Daddy told her not to invite them

out.

 Trevor had gone into  Raleigh with Momma one day. He brought his sketchbook and sat in a corner of the big airy studio

that smelled of paint thinner and charcoal dust. Mo mma stood gracefully naked on a  wo oden podium at the front of the room,

joking  with  the  students  when  she  took  her  breaks.  Some  of  them  lau ghed  at  him,  bent  o ver  his  sketchbook  so  quiet  and

serious.  Their laughter  faltered  when  they  saw  the  likenesses  he  had  produced  of  them durin g  the  class  perio d:  the  stringy-

haired  girl whose granny glasses pinched her beaky nose like  so me torture  device made of wire; the droopy-eyed boy whose

patchy beard grew straight down into the collar of his black turtleneck because he had no chin.

But on this day Trevor had stayed home. Daddy sat in the living room all evening, sprawled in a threadbare recliner th at

had come with the house, his feet tapping out a meaningless tattoo on the warped floorb oards. He had the turntab le hoo ked up

and kept playing record after record, anything that his hand fell upon, Sarah Vaughan, Country Joe and the Fish, frenetic band

music from the twenties that sounded like something skeletons might jitterbug to-it all ran together in one long musical cry of

pain. Most of all Trevor remembered Dadd y searching obsessively for a set o f Charlie Parker records: Bird with Miles, Bird on

Fifty-second Street, Bird at Birdland. He found them, slammed one onto the turntable. The saxophone spiraled  through the old

house, found the cracks in the walls and spu n out into the night, an exalted sound, terribly sad but somehow free. Free as a bird

in Birdland.

Daddy  hefted  the  bottle  and  chugged  bourbon  straight from  it.  A  mo ment  later  he  let  out  a  long,  wet,  rippling b elch.

Trevo r got up  from the co rner where  he'd b een  sitting,  keeping  an eye  out for Momma's headlights,  and  started  to  leave the

room. He didn't want to see Daddy get sick. He'd seen it before and it had nearly made him sick too, not even so much the sight

of the thin, stringy whiskey-vomit as that of his father's helplessness and  shame.

His  foot  struck a  loose piece  of  wood  and  sent  it  skittering across  the  floor. Daddy had b een  doing repairs  around the

house a few days earlier, nailing down a board that had begun to curl away from the wall. Long silver nails and  a hammer were

still scattered around the hall doorway. Trevor began to gather up the nails, thinking Didi might step on o ne, then stopped. Didi

was smart enough not to go around the house barefoot, with all the splinters in the floorboards. Maybe Daddy would need the

nails. Maybe he would still finish the repairs.

At the sound of the nails chinking together, Daddy looked up from his bottle. His eyes focused on Trevor, pinned him to

the spot where he stood. “Trev. What're you do in'?”

“Going to bed.”

“Thass good. I'll fixyer juice.” Momma usually gave the boys fruit juice to take to bed with them, when there was any in

the  house.  Daddy  got  up  and  stumbled  past  Trevor  into  the  kitchen,  slapping  one  hand  against  the  door  frame  to  support

himself. Trevor heard the refrigerator opening, bottles rattling. Daddy came back in and handed him a glass of grapefruit juice.

A  few  d rops  sloshed  over  the  side,  trickled  over  Trevor's  fingers.  He  put  his  hand  to  his  mouth  and  licked  them  away.

Grapefruit was his favorite, b ecause of the interestingly sour, almost salty taste. But there was an extra bitterness to this juice,

as if it had begun to spoil in the bottle.

He must have made a face, b ecause Daddy kept staring at him. “So mething wrong?”

Trevor shook his head.

“You gonna drin k that o r not?”

He raised the glass to his lips and drank half of it, took a deep breath, and finished it off. The b itter taste shivered over his

tongue, lingered in the back of his throat.

“There you go.” Daddy reached out, pulled Trevor into his embrace. Dad dy smelled o f stinging liquor and old sweat and

dirty clothes. Trevor hugged  back  anyway. As  the side of  his head pressed  against Daddy's, a panicky  terror flooded through

him, though he didn't know why. He clutched at Daddy's shoulders, tried to wrap his arms around Daddy's neck.

But after a moment, Dadd y pried him off and gently p ushed him away.

Trevor went down the hall, glancing into  Didi's dark bedroom. Sometimes Didi got  scared at night, but  now he  was fast

asleep despite the punishing volume Of the music, his face burrowed into his pillo w, the faint light from the hallway casting a

halo on his pale hair. Back in Austin the brothers had shared a room; this was the first time they had slep t apart. Trevor missed

waking up to the soft sound of Didi's breathing, to the scent of talcum powd er and candy when Didi crawled in bed with him.

For a moment he thought he might sleep with Didi tonight, might wrap his arms around his brother and not have to fall asleep

alone.

But he didn't want to wake  Didi. Daddy was b eing too scary. Instead  Trevo r walked down the hall  to  his own  bedroo m,

trailing his hand along the wall. The old boards were damp, faintly sticky. He wiped his fingers on the front of his T-shirt.

His own  room was  nearly  as bare  as Didi's. They had been able to bring none of their  furniture  from Austin,  and hardly

any  of  their  toys.  Trevor's  mattress  lay  flat  on  the  floor,  a  rumpled  blanket  thrown  over  it. He  had  pinned  up  some  of  his

drawings on  the walls, though he  hadn't put up Skeletal Sammy and he hadn 't tried to draw any of Daddy's other characters.

More drawing s lay scattered on the floor, along with the comics he had scrounged from Daddy. He picked up a Fabulous Furry

Freak  Brothers  book,  thinking  he  might  read  it  in  bed.  The  antics  of  those  friendly  fools  might  make  him  forget  Daddy

sprawled  in the chair, pouring straight whiskey on top of his pain.

But he was  too tired;  his  eyes  were  already closing. Trevor  turned  off  his  bedside  lamp and crawled under the  blanket.

The familiar contours of  his  mattress cradled him  like a  welcoming hand.  From  the living  room he heard Charlie Parker run

down a shimmering scale. Birdland, he thought again. That was the place where you could  work magic, the place where no one

else could touch you. It might be an actual spot in the world; it might be a place deep down inside you. Dad dy co uld only reach

his  Birdland b y  drinking  now.  Trevor  had  begun  to believe  his own  Birdland  might  be  the  pen  mo ving  over the paper,  the

weight of the sketchbook in his hands, the creation of worlds o ut of ink and sweat and love.

He slept, and the music wove uneasily in and out of his d reams. He  heard Janis Joplin singin g  “Me and Bobby McGee,”

and remembered suddenly that she had died last year. From drugs, Momma had told him, taking care to explain that the drugs

 

                                                                                           5

 

 

 

 

 

Janis  had  been  using  were  much  worse  than  the  pot  she  and  Daddy  so metimes  smoked.  An  image  came  to  him  of  Daddy

walking hand  in  hand  with  a  girl shorter  and  more rounded  than  Momma,  a  girl  who  wore  bright  feathers  in  her  hair.  She

turned to Daddy and Trevor  saw  that her face was  a  swollen purple mass of  flesh, the  holes of  her  eyes  black  and  depthless

behind the big round glasses, her ruined features split in the semblance of a smile as she leaned in to give his father a deep  soul

kiss.

And Daddy kissed back . . .

 

Sunlight woke him, streaming thro ugh the dirty panes of his windo w, trickling into the corners of his eyes. His head ached

slightly, felt someho w too heavy o n  his neck. Trevor rolled over, stretched, and looked around the roo m, silently greeting his

drawings. There was one of the house, one of Momma ho lding Didi, a whole series of ones that he was pretty sure were going

to turn into a comic. He knew he could never draw the slick, tawdry world of Birdland the way Daddy had, but he could make

his own world. He needed to practice writing smaller so he could do the letters.

His  head slightly  logy but  full of ideas,  Trevor  rolled  off  the  mattress, pushed open the door of his room,  and  walked

down the hall toward the kitchen.

He saw the blood on the walls before he saw Momma.

It  would come out in the autopsy report-which Trevor did not read until years later-that Daddy had attacked  her near the

front door,  that they  mu st  have argued, that  there had  been a struggle  and  he  had  driven  her  back toward the  hall before he

killed her. That was where he wo uld have picked up the hammer.

Momma was crumpled in the doorway that led fro m the living room into the hall. Her back rested against the frame. Her

head lolled on the fragile stem of her neck. Her eyes  were open, and as Trevor edged aro und her body, they seemed to fix on

him. For a heart-stopping second he tho ught she was alive. Then he saw that the eyes were cloudy, and filmed with blood.

Her  arms were  a mass  of blood and bruise, silver rings sparkling  amid the ruin  of her hands. (Seven fingers broken,  the

autopsy report would say, along with most of the small bones in her palms, as she raised her hands to ward off the blows o f the

hammer.) There was a deep gouge in her left temple, anoth er in the center of her fo rehead. Her hair was loose, fanned around

her  sho ulders,  stiff with blood. A  clear fluid  had seeped from  her  head wounds and dried on  her  face, making silvery tracks

through the mask of red.

And on the wall above her, a co nfusion of bloody handprints trailing down, do wn . . .

Trevor spun and ran back down the hall, toward his brother's room. He did not know that his bladder had let go, did not

feel the hot urine spilling d own his legs. He did not hear the sound he was making, a long, high moan.

The door of Didi's roo m was closed. Trevor had not closed it when he looked in on Didi last night. High up on the door

was a tiny smudge of blood, barely noticeable. It told  Trevor everything he needed to know. He went in anyway.

The room was thick with the smell of blood and shit. The two od ors together were cloying, almost sweet. Trevor went to

the bed.  Didi lay  in the same po sition Trevor had left  him in  last  night,  his  head  burrowed into  the pillow,  one  small hand

curled into a  fist near his mouth. The back of Didi's head was like a swamp, a dark mush of splintered bone and thick  clotted

gore. Sometime during the night-because of the heat, o r in the spasms of death- Didi had kicked off his co vers. Trevor saw the

dark brown stain between his legs. That was where the smell came from.

Trevor lifted  the  blanket  and pulled  it o ver  Didi,  covering  the  stain,  the  ruined  head,  the  unbearable  curled hand.  The

blanket settled over the small still form. Where it covered the head, a blotch of red appeared.

He had to find Daddy. His mind clun g to some tiny, glittering hope that maybe Daddy hadn't done this at all, that maybe

so me crazy person had bro ken into their house  and  killed  Momma and Didi and left him alive for some  reason,  that Daddy

might still be alive too .

He stumbled out of Didi's room, felt his way along the hall, sprawled headlong into the bathro om.

That was where  Momma's friends fo und  him hours  later,  when  they drove  out  to see wh y  Momma hadn't  shown u p to

model that day; she was so reliable that they became worried immediately. The front door was unlocked. They saw Momma's

body first, and had nearly worked themselves into hysterics when someone heard the high toneless keening.

They found Trevor squeezed into a tiny space between the toilet and the old porcelain sink, curled as comp act as a fetus,

his eyes fixed on the bod y of his father. Bobby McGee hung from the sho wer curtain rod. It was the old-fashioned kind bolted

into the  wall, and had  held his weight all night and all day. He  was naked. His penis hung limp and dry as a dead leaf; there

had been no last orgasm in death for him. His body was thin nearly to the point of emaciation, lu minously pale, his hands and

feet  gravid  with  blo od, his face so  swollen  as to  be featureless except  for  the eyes bulging halfway  out  of their sockets. The

rough strand of hemp cut a deep slash in his neck. His hands and his torso were still stained with the blo od of his family.

As  so meone  lifted  him  and  carried  him  out,  still  curled  into  the  smallest  p ossible  ball,  Trevor  had  his  first  coherent

thought in hours, and the last he would have for many days.

He needn't have worried about accidentally coming upon the Devil's Tramping Ground, he realized.

The Devil's Tramping Ground had come to  him.

 

 

From the Corinth Weekly Eye, June 16,1972

 

By Denny Marsten, Staff Writer

 

MISSING  MILE—Grisly  traged y  has  struck  just  down  the  road.  Hardly  anyo ne  knew  that  the  famous  “underground”

cartoonist  Robert  McGee  was  living  in  North  Carolina  until  he  bludgeoned  two  members  of  his  family  to  death,  then

committed suicide in a rented house on the outskirts of Missing Mile.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                           6

 

 

 

 

 

McGee, fo rmerly of Austin, Texas, was 35. His work has appeared  in student and counter-culture newspapers across the

country,  and  he  created the  contro versial  adult co mic book  Birdland.  Also  deceased are his wife,  Rosena  McGee, 29, and a

son, Fredric McGee, 3. Surviving is another son, name and age unknown.

 

A  state trooper  commented at the scene, “We believe drugs were involved . .  . With  these  kinds of people, they usually

are.” Another  trooper remarked  that  this was the first multiple murder in Missing Mile since 19 58, when a man  shot his wife

and his three brothers to death.

 

Kinsey Hummingbird  of Missing Mile repaired the McGees'  car a few weeks before the  murders. “I didn't  see  anything

wrong with any of them,” Hummingbird said. “And if I had, it wo uld be nobody's business. Only the McGees will ever kno w

what went on in that house.”

 

He added, “Rob ert McGee was a great artist. I hope somebody takes good care of the little boy.”

 

No one would speculate on why McGee chose to let his eldest son live. The child has been taken into custody of the state

and will be placed in an orphanage or foster ho me if no relatives are located.

 

Twenty Years Later

 

 

Chapter One 

 

As  he walked  to  work  each  afternoon,  Kinsey  Hummingbird  was apt to  reflect upon  a variety  of  things.  These things

might be  philosophical (quantum physics, the  function of  Art in the  universe) or prosaic (what  sort of p erson would  take the

time to scrawl  “Robin Fuks” in a  freshly  cemented sidewalk;  had they  really  tho ught the legend  was important  enough to be

preserved through the ages in concrete?) but never boring. Kinsey seldom found himself bored.

The walk from his house to downtown Missing Mile  was an easy  one. Kinsey hoofed it  twice a day  nearly every day of

his  life,  only driving  in  when he had something too  heavy to carry-a pot o f homemade  fifteen-bean  so up,  for  instance,  or a

stray amplifier. The walk took him past a patchwork quilt of fields that changed with every season: plo wed under dark and rich

in winter; dusted with the palest green in spring; resplendent with tobacco, pumpkin vines, or other leafy crops through the hot

Carolina summer and  straight  on till  harvest. It took him past  a  fairytale  landscape  of kudzu,  an  entire  hillside  and  stand of

trees taken over by the exuberant weed, transfo rmed into  ghostly green spires, towers, hollows. It took him o ver a disused set

of train tracks where wildflowers grew between the uneven ties, where he always managed to stub his toe or twist his ankle at

least once a month. It took him down the wrong end of Fireho use Street and straight into town.

Missing Mile was not a large town, but it was big enough to have a run-do wn section. Kinsey walked through this section

every day, appreciating the silence of it, the slight eeriness of the board ed-up storefronts and soap-blinded windows. Some of

the empty stores still bo re  going-out-of-business  sign s. The best  one, which  never failed  to  amuse  Kinsey,  trumpeted  BEAT

XMAS  RUSH!  in  red  letters  a  foot  high.  The  stores  not  boarded  up  or  soap ed  were  full  of  dust  and  cobwebs,  with  the

occasio nal wire clothes rack or smooth mannequin torso standing a lonely vigil over nothing.

One  rainy  Saturday  afternoon  in  June,  Kinsey  came  walking  into  town  as  usual.  He  wore  a  straw  hat  with  a  tattered

feather  in  its  band and a long billowing raincoat  draped around his skinny shoulders.  Kinsey's general  aspect was that  of an

amiable scarecrow; his slight stoop did nothing to hide the fact that he was well over six feet tall. He was of indetermin ate age

(some of the kids claimed Kinsey wasn't much older than them; some swore he was forty or more, practically ancient). His hair

was long, stringy, and rather sparse. His clothes were timeworn, colorfully  mismatched,  and much mend ed,  but they  hung on

his  narrow frame neatly,  almost  elegantly. There was a great  deal  of the country in his  beak y  nose, his long jaw and clever

mouth, his close-set bright blue eyes.

The warm rain hit the sidewalk and  steamed back up, forming little eddies of mist around Kinsey's ankles. A puddle of oil

and water  made a swirling rainbow in the  street. A  couple  more block s  down Firehouse  Street, the good  end of town began:

so me shabbily  genteel antebellum ho mes  with  sagging pillars  and  wraparound  verandas, several of which were  fixed  up as

boardinghouses; a 7-Eleven; the old Farmers Hard ware Store  whose  parking  lot  doubled as  the  Greyhound bus depot, and a

few other bu sinesses that were actually open. But down here the rent was cheaper. And the kids didn 't mind co ming to the bad

end of town after dark.

Kinsey  crossed  the  street  and  ducked  into  a  shadowy  doorway.  The  door  was  a  special  p iece  of  work  he  had

commissioned from a carver over in Corinth: a heavy, satin-textured slab of pine, varnished to the color of warm caramel and

carved with irregular, twisted, black-stained letters that seemed to bleed from the depths of the wo od. THE SACRED YEW.

Kinsey's real home. The one h e had made for the children, because they had nowhere else to go.

Well .  .  .  mostly  for  the  children.  But  for himself  too,  because  Kinsey  had never  had  anywhere  to go  either.  A  Bible-

belting mother who saw her son as the embodiment of her own black sin; her maiden name was McFate, and all the McFates

were psychotic delusio naries of one stripe or another. A pale shadow of a father who was drunk or gone most of the time, then

suddenly dead, as if  he had never existed at all;  most  of  the  Hummingbird s  were  poetic souls tethered to  alcoholic bodies,

though Kinsey himself had  always been able to  take a drink or two without requiring three or four.

In 1970  he  inherited  the mechanic's  job from the  garage  where  his  father  had  worked off and on. Kinsey was better  at

repairing en gines than Ethan Hummingbird had ever been, though deep inside he suspected this was not what he wanted to do.

Growing older, his friends leaving for college and careers, and somehow the new friends he made were always younger:

the forlorn, bewildered teenagers  who  had  never asked  to be born and no w wished  they  were  dead, the  misfits, the rejects.

 

 

 

                                                                                           7

 

 

 

 

 

They sought Kinsey out at the garage, they sat and talked to his skinny legs sticking out from under so me broken-down Ford or

Chevy. That was the way it always was, and for a while Kinsey thought it always would be.

Then in 1975 his mother died in the terrible fire that shut down the Central Carolina Cotton Mill fo r good. Two years later

Kinsey received a large settlement, quit the garage, and opened the first-ever nightclub in Missing Mile. He tried to mourn his

mother, but when he thought about how much better his life had gotten since her death, it was difficult.

Kinsey fumbled in his pocket for the key. A large, ornate pocketwatch fell out and d angled at the end of a long gold chain,

the other end of which was safety-pinned to Kinsey's vest. He flipped the watch open and glanced  at its pearly face. Nearly an

hour ahead of sched ule: he liked to be at the Yew by four to take deliveries, clean up the last of the previous night's mess, and

let  the bands in for an  early sound check  if they  wanted. But it was  barely three. The  overcast day must  have deceived  him.

Kinsey shru gged and let himself in anyway. There was always work to do.

The windowless  club was dark and still. To  his  right as  he  entered was the  small stage he  had  built.  His carpentry was

unglamorous but sturdy. To his left was the art wall, a mural of painted, crayo ned, and Magic Markered graffiti that stretched

all the way back to the partition separating the bar area from the rest of the club. The tangle of obscure band names and their

arcane symbols,  song  lyrics,  and catchp hrases  was  indistinct  in  the  gloom.  Kinsey  co uld  only  make  out  one  large  piece  of

graffiti, spray-painted in gold, wavering halfway between wall and ceiling: WE ARE NOT AFRAID.

Tho se words might be the anthem of every kid who passed through that door, Kinsey thought. The hell of it was that they

were afraid,  every  one  of  them,  terribly  so.  Afraid they would  never  make  it  to adultho od and freedom, or that  they  would

make it only at the p rice o f their fragile souls; afraid that the world would prove too dull, too cold, that they would always be

as alone as they felt right now. But not one of them would admit it. We are not afraid, they would chant along with the band,

their faces bathed in golden light, we are not afraid, believing it at least until the music was over.

He crossed the dance floor. The sticky remnants of last night's spilled beer and soda sucked softly at the so les of his sh oes

with each step. Idly brooding, he passed the restrooms on his right and entered the room at the back that served as the bar.

He was b rought up short by the stifled screech of the girl bent over the cash drawer.

The back door stood open, as if she had been ready to leave in a hurry. The girl stood frozen at the register, catlike face a

mask of shock and fear, wide eyes fixed on Kinsey, a sheaf of twenties clutched in her hand. Her open handbag sat on the bar

beside her. A perfect, damning tab leau.

“Rima?” he said stupidly. “What . . . ?”

His voice seemed to unfreeze her. She spun and broke fo r the door. Kinsey threw himself over the bar, shot out one long

arm, and caught her b y the wrist. The twenties fluttered to the floor. The girl began to sob.

Kinsey usually had a couple of local kid s  working at the Yew, mostly d oing odd  jobs  like  stocking  the bar or collecting

money at the  door when a band played.  Rima had worked her way up to tend ing b ar. She was fast, funny, cute, and (Kinsey

had thought) utterly trustworthy,  so  much  so that he had let her have a key. When he had another bartender, he didn't have to

stay until closing time every night; on slow nights someone else could lock up. It was almost like having a mini-vacation. But

keys had a way of getting lost, or changing hands, and Kinsey didn't entrust them to many of his workers. He had believed he

was a p retty good judge of character. The Sacred Yew had never been ripped off.

Until now.

Kinsey reached for the phone. Rima threw herself  across  him, grabbing  for it with her free hand. They  struggled briefly

for the receiver; then Kinsey wrested it free and easily held  it out of her reach. The phone cord caught her purse and swept it

onto the  floor. The contents spilled, skittered, shattered. Kinsey tucked the receiver into the hollow of his shoulder and began

to dial.

“Kinsey, no, please!” Rima grabbed futilely for the phone again, then sagged back against the bar. “Don't call the co ps ...”

His finger paused over the last number. “Why shou ldn't I?”

She saw her op ening and went for it. “Because I didn't take any money. Yes, I was going to, but I didn't have time . . . and

I'm in troub le, and I'm leaving  to wn. Just let me  go  and you'll never see me again.” Her face was wet  with tears. In the half-

light of the bar Kinsey could not see her eyes. Her wrist was so thin that his hand could have encircled it two or three times; the

bones felt as fragile as dry twigs. He eased his grip a little.

“What kind of trouble?”

“I went to the Planned Parenthood clinic over in Corinth . . .”

Kinsey just looked at her.

“You  want me to spell  it  out?” Her  sharp  little  face  went  mean. “I'm pregnant, Kinsey.  I need  an  abortion.  I  need five

hundred dollars!”

Kinsey  blinked.  Whatever  he  had  expected,  that  wasn't  it.  Rima  had  arrived  in  Missing  Mile  just  a  few  months  ago.

Among  local  guys  who had asked her out and been turned down, the  word  was that  she carried  a torch for the  guitarist  of a

speed metal band back in her native California. So far as Kinsey knew, she hadn't been back to California recently. “Who  . . .

?” he managed.

“You don't know him, okay?” She swip ed a hand across her eyes. “An asshole who wouldn't wear a rubber because that's

like taking a shower with a raincoat on. There's plenty of 'em around. They shoot their wad and that's the last thing they have to

worry about!” Now her mean face had collapsed; she was crying so hard she could barely choke o ut the words. “Kinsey, I slept

with the wrong guy and he's not going to help me out, he won't even talk to me. And I don't want any goddamn baby, let alone

his.”

“At least tell me who. I could talk to him. There are things . . .”

She shook her head violently. “NO! I just want to go to Raleigh and get rid of it. I won't come back to Missing Mile. I'll

go to my sister's place in West Virginia, or maybe b ack to L.A. . . . Please, Kinsey. Just let me go. You won't see me around

here again.”

He studied her.  Rima was twenty-one, he knew,  but  her bod y  seemed years younger: barely five  feet tall, breastless and

hipless, all flat planes and sharp angles. Her straight, shiny brown hair was held back with plastic barrettes like a little girl's. He

tried to imagine that childish body swo llen with pregnancy, could not. The very idea was painful.

 

                                                                                           8

 

 

 

 

 

“I can't give you any money,” he said.

“No, I wouldn't—”

“But you can take your last pay envelop e. It's there on the bulletin board.” Kinsey let go  of her wrist and turned away.

“Oh, God, Kinsey, thank you. Thank you.” She knelt and began scraping together the contents of her purse. When she had

searched  out everything  in  the  dimness of the  bar,  she  went  to the  bulletin board  and  took down  her envelope. Kinsey was

hardly surprised to see her glance into it  as if making sure enough money was there. She turned  and stared at him  for a long

moment, as if deciding whether to say anything else.

“Good luck,” he told her.

Rima looked surprised, and a little guilty. Then, as if the milk of human kindness were too head y a potion for her parched

soul, she spun on her heel and left without ano ther word.

There goes my mini-vacation, Kinsey thought.

Thirty minutes later, with the lights turned up and the swampy area behind the bar half-mopped, he found the little white

packet.

It was nestled in a crack in the wooden flo or directly below the spot where Rima's purse had spilled. With the lights off, as

they had been when Kinsey caught her, it was unlikely that she would have spotted it. Kinsey bent, picked it up, and looked at

it for a long time. It didn't  look like much: a tiny twist of plastic, the corner of a Baggie p erhaps, with an even tinier pinch of

white po wder  inside.  No,  it didn't look  like  much  at  all.  But Kinsey knew  it  for  what  it  was:  a  towering  monument to  his

gullibility.

She  could  still  be  pregnant,  he  reasoned  as  he  walked  to  the  restroom.  She  really  could  need  money  for  an  abortion.

Somebody could b e giving her coke. Maybe she was even selling the shit to get the mo ney she needed.

Yeah, right. The things she had said about the father of her embryo-if embryo there was-hard ly suggested that he would

be  giving  her  free  drugs.  And Kinsey knew  that the market  for cocaine  in  Missing  Mile  was  very  poor  indeed.  You  could

hardly turn  around  without bumping into  a pothead or a boozehound, and they  treated psychedelics like  cand y, but coke was

another  thing. Most of  the younger kids seemed  to  think it  was boring: it didn't tell them stories  or  give them visions,  didn't

drown their pain, didn't do  anything for them  that a pot of strong  coffee co uldn't do  for a  fraction of the  price.  They  would

probably snort  coke if  it  was  handed to them, but they wouldn't spend  their  allowances  on it.  And most of  the o lder  to wnie

crowd couldn't afford it even if they wanted it.

Rima, though, seemed to have had a constant low-grade cold for the last couple of months.  She  was always going to the

restroom to blow her no se, but she always came back still sniffling. How clear was hindsight.

You  could still call the co ps, Kinsey  told himself as his cupped palm hovered over the  toilet bo wl, ready to tip the little

packet in. Sho w them this stuff. She couldn't be far out o f town yet.

His hand tilted. There was a tiny splash, barely audible; the packet floated serenely on the still surface of the water.

She had every intention of ripp ing you off. Bust her.

His  fingers  found  the  flush  lever,  pushed  it.  There  was  a  deafening  liquid  roar-Kinsey  thought  the  plumbing  in  this

building was of approximately the same vintage as the Confederate boardingho uses up the street-and the packet was gone.

Pregnant or not, she's in some kind of tro ub le. That's one thing she wasn't lying about. Why make it worse for her?

Later, mopping the floor near the stage, he glanced up at the art wall. The words WE ARE NOT AFRAID gleamed softly

at him, and he knew that wherever Rima was now, whatever she was doing, those words did not hold true for her.

He could not resent  letting  her take her last  pay,  though.  There  was always  a  chance  she  would use  the  money to help

herself,  to get  away  from  whatever  (or whoever) had mad e  her  stash cocaine  in  her pocketbook and steal from people  who

wished her well. There was always a chance.

Yeah. And there  was always a chance that John Lenno n  would rise from the dead and the Beatles would play a reunion

show at the Sacred Yew. That seemed about as likely.

Kinsey shook his head dolefully and kept mopping.

 

 

Chapter Two 

 

Zachary Bosch awoke fro m fascinating dreams, pulled the pillow off his face, rubbed his eyes, and blinked up at the green

lizard on the ceiling just above his head.

He slept in a small alcove at the side of the roo m, where the ceiling was lower and cozier than the rest of his lofty French

Quarter apartment. The plaster here was soft and slightly damp, cracked with age, yellowed fro m two years of Zach smoking in

bed.  Against  the  dingy  plaster  the  lizard   was  a  vivid,  iridescent  green.  Children  in  New  Orleans  called  such  creatures

chameleons, thoug h Zach believed they were actually anoles.

He  reached  for  the  ashtray  next  to  the  bed  and  the  lizard  was  gone  in  a  brilliant  flicker  of  motion.  Zach  knew  from

experience that  if you  were  fast enough to  catch them b y  the  tail, the  thready appendage  would come off,  still twitching,  in

your hand. It was a game he o ften played with the little reptiles but seldom won.

He  found  the  ashtray  without  looking, brought  it up  and  nestled it  in  the  hollow o f the  sheet  between  the  small  sharp

mountains  of  his  hipbones.  In  the  ashtray  was  a  tightly  rolled  joint  that  had  been  the  size  of  a  small  cigar,  a  pan atela  or

whatever the things were called. Zach hated the taste o f tobacco and its harsh brown scorch in his lungs; he never touched the

stuff. His friend Eddy put it simply if inelegantly: “If it's green, smoke it. If it's brown, flush it.”

Zach  had  smoked  half  of  this  particular  green  the  night  before,  while  concocting  a  news  story  to  plant  in  the  Times-

Picayune just to amuse himself, a tastefu l  little number about  some petrified fetus parts removed from a  woman's wo mb  ten

years after an illegal back-alley abortion. If  it wasn't true,  it ought to be-or rather, the public ought to  think it was. In today's

moral climate (cloudy, with a fascist storm front threatening), illegal abo rtions needed all the bad publicity they could get.

 

 

 

                                                                                           9

 

 

 

 

 

He had made sure to stress that the woman suffered great pain, bloated grotesquely, and was of course rendered infertile.

By  the  time  he  finished  writing  the  article,  Zach  had  caught  himself  feeling  tender,  almost  protective,  toward  his  hapless

fictio n. She was a true martyr, the finest kind of scapegoat, a vessel for imaginary pain so that real pain might be thwarted.

Zach  felt  for  a  book of  matches on  the floor,  found  so me from Commander's  Palace,  lit  the joint and sucked smoke  in

deep. The flavor filled his mouth, his throat, his lungs, a taste as bright green as the lizard. He stared at the matchbook, which

was a darker green. The restaurant was one of the oldest and most expensive in the city. A friend of a friend who was deep in

hock  on  his  American  Express  card  had  taken  Zach  to  the b ar  there  recently,  and  charged  Zach's  four  extra-spicy  Bloody

Marys to his Visa. They always did shit like that. Stupid patterns, intricate webs they wove that ended up trapping themselves

most tightly of all.

Geeks,  marks,  and  conspiracy  dupes.  In  the  end  they  all  amounted  to  the  same  thing:  sources  of  income  for  Zachary

Bosch, who was none of the above.

His  third-floor  apartment  was  full  of  dust  and  sunlight  and  tons  upon tons  of p aper.  His friends  who knew his  reading

habits, his smoking hab its, and his squirreling hab its swore the place was one of the most hair-raising  fire  hazards in all New

Orleans.  Zach figured  it was  damp enough  to  discourage  any flames  that escaped  his notice.  In  deep  su mmer,  water  stains

spread across the ceilin g and the fine old mold ing began to sweat and seep.

The paint had long since begun to peel, but this never bo thered Zach, since most of the walls were covered with scraps of

paper. There were pictures torn fro m obscure magazines that had reminded  him of something; newsp aper clip pings, headlines,

or sometimes single words he had put up for their mnemonic effect. There was a large head of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, High Epopt

of  the  Church  of  the  Subgenius  and  one  of  Zach's  favorite  personal  saviors.  “Bob” p reached  the  doctrine  of  Slack,  which

(among other things) meant that the world really did o we you a living, if only you were smart enough to endorse the paycheck.

There  were  phone  numbers, comp uter  access  codes and p asswords  scribbled on  yellow  Post-it  no tes whose glue would  not

stick  in  the d amp.  These  last were constantly  fluttering down  from the walls, creating  canary  drifts amo ng  the debris on  the

floor, and sticking to the soles of Zach's sneakers.

There  were  boxes  of  old  correspondence,  magazines,  yellowing  newspapers  from  all  over  the  world  and  in  several

languages-if he  couldn't read an item, he could find someone to  translate  it inside of an hour-distinguished dailies and raving

tabloids. And books everywhere, crammed into shelves  that covered one  wall nearly to the  high  ceiling, spread open or with

pages marked beside his bed, stacked into Seuss-like towers in the corners. There was every kind  of fiction, telephone books,

computer  manuals,  well-thumbed  volumes  with  titles  lik e  The  Anarchist's  Cookbook,  High  Weirdness  by  Mail,  Princip ia

Discordia, Steal This Book, and other useful bibles. A cheap VCR and a ho memade cable box were rigged  up to a small TV;

the whole setup was nearly hidden behind stacks of videocassettes.

Pushed up  against the far wall was  the heart of the chaos: a large metal desk. The desk was not visible as such, though

Zach could find anything on, in, or around it in a matter of minutes. It was heap ed with more papers, more books, shoebo xes

full of floppy disks, and the unmistakable signature of the ganja connoisseur: an assortment of ashtrays overflowing with ashes

and matches, but no butts. Marijuana smokers, unlike those who indulged in tobacco, did not leave spoor.

In the  center  of the desk, rising  above  the  ashtrays  and  drifts of paper  like some  mo no lith of plastic  and  silicon, was a

computer.  An  Amiga  with  an  IBM  card  and  Mac  emulation  that  allo wed  it  to  read  disks  from  several  different  kinds  of

computers, a sweet little machine. It was equipped with a large-capacity hard disk, a decent printer, and-most important for his

purposes-a 2400 -baud modem. This inexpensive scrap of technology, which allowed his computer to communicate with others

via any nu mber of telephone lines, was his meal ticket, his umb ilical cord, his key to  other worlds and to parts of this wo rld he

had never been meant to see.

The modem had paid for  itself  several hundred times over, and he had only had  this one for  six months. He had an OKI

900 cellular phone and a laptop computer as well, with a built-in modem to keep him mobile in case of emergencies.

Zach hunched h imself up on his elbows, stuck the joint in his mouth, and raked a hand through his thick black  hair. So me

French Quarter deathrockers sp ent hours before the mirror trying to achieve the precise combination of unnatural-looking blue-

ebony hair and bloomless translucence of skin that had been visited upon Zach by simple genetics.

It came from his mo ther's side of the family. They looked as tho ugh they'd gro wn up in basements, not that most of them

had ever been anywhere  near  a  basement, since they'd  been in  Louisiana for five  generations or  more. His  mother's maiden

name  was Rigaud, and she  hailed  from a muddy little village  down in  the bayou co untry where  the most exciting  thing  that

ever happened was the  annual Crawfish Festival. The hair and d ark  almond-shaped  eyes, he guessed,  came  from  her  Cajun

blood. The pallor was anyone's guess. Perhaps it came from all the time she had  spent in  various mental hospitals, in gloomy

dayrooms and harsh fluorescent corridors, as if such a thing could be inherited.

She was probably in so me lockup no w, if she was still alive. His father, a renegade Bosch who claimed a lineage back to

Hieronymus b ut whose visions had  all been seen through the b ottom of a whiskey bo ttle, had long since disappeared into some

steamy orifice of the city's night-side. Zach had  just turned nineteen,  and though he had  lived in  New Orleans all his life, he

had seen neither of his parents for nearly five years.

Which was fine.  All  he wanted  of them  was what he carried with him:  his  mo ther's weird coloring, his father's  devious

intelligence, a tolerance for hard liquor that exceed ed either of theirs. Drinking never made him mean, never made him bitter,

never made  him want  to  punch someone young and small and d efenseless, to bruise tender flesh, to steep his hand s in  blood.

He supp osed that was the main difference between him and his parents.

Zach  had  a  habit of pulling his hair  and  snarling it around  his  fingers wh ile  he  was read ing  or  staring at the  co mputer

screen between keystrokes.  As a result, it grew into a kind of mutant pompadour that cast the sharp planes and hollows of his

face into shadow, exaggerated his pointed chin and thin  peak y eyebrows and the gray  smudges  of co mputer strain around his

eyes.

Last  year  a  ten-year-old kid  on Bourbon  Street  had  run  after him calling Hey,  Edward  Scissorhands!  He  hadn't k nown

what it meant at the time, but  when Eddy showed him an ad for the movie of  that name, Zach was as close to shocked as he

ever got. The resemblance was scary. He  held the picture next to his  face and stared in the  mirror for a long  time. At last he

 

 

                                                                                          10

 

 

 

 

 

took  comfort  in  the  fact  that  he  never  wore  black  lipstick  and  Edward   Scissorhands  never  wore  big,  round,  geeky  black-

rimmed glasses like Zach's.

The movie bothered him, though, when Eddy too k him to see it. He always enjoyed watching Tim Burton's films — they

were eye  cand y, for  one thing-but  they left him  feeling vaguely pissed  off. They all  seemed to have  an agenda of relentless

normalcy hiding behind  a thin veil of weirdness. He'd loved  Beetlejuice until the last scene, which sent him storming from the

theater and left him kicking things all day. The sight of Winona Ryder's character, formerly strange and beautiful in her ratted

hairdo and smudged eyeliner, now combed out and  sq ueaky clean, clad in a  prepp y  skirt  and kneesocks and a  big shit-eating

sickeningly normal grin ... it was entirely too  much to bear.

But that, Zach sup posed, was Hollywood.

He took one more drag on  the joint and snuffed it out in  the ashtray. It  was  excellent pot, bright green  and  sticky  with

resin that smelled like Christmas trees, quick to set the brain buzzing and humming. He hoped somebody at the Market would

have more.  Zach felt around on the floor again,  found his  glasses, and put them on. The world stayed blurry at the edges, but

that was just the drugs.

Something nudged  his  hip  beneath the  sheet. The  remote  control for  the  TV  and  VCR.  He aimed  it  at  the  screen  and

smiled as he thumbed the ON button.

He found himself watching an Italian splatter movie called The Gates of Hell. Good old Lucio Fulci; his plots were brain-

numbing  nonsense,  every  character  dumber  than  a  bag  of  rusty  nails,  but  he  gave  great  gore.  And  nothing  normal  ever

happened in his mo vies.

A girl began to bleed from the eyeballs-Fulci loved eyeballs-then proceeded to vomit out her entire digestive tract over the

course of maybe a minute. She'd been parking with her boyfriend; such were the wages of sin. Zach pressed the reverse button

and watched the actress suck up her intestines like a plate of spaghetti in marinara sauce. Tasty.

A moment later he realized  that the movie was making him hungry, which meant it was seriously time for some food. The

remains of a muffuletta fro m the  Central Grocery were wrapped up in his little dorm-style refrigerator. Zach kicked the sheet

off, swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, rode the ensuing head rush for a minute, then stoo d and picked an expert path

through the debris to the fridge.

The  savory  smells  of  ham  and  Italian  spices, o iled  bread and  olive  salad  wafted  up  as  he  unwrap ped  the  greasy  pink

butcher paper. The big ro und sandwiches were expensive but delectable, and they made two or three meals if you weren't a big

eater, which Zach was not.

It wasn't as if he couldn't afford a muffuletta anytime he wanted one. Money was free, or nearly so; all he could need was

at his fingertips every time he sat d own at his desk and switched his computer on. But he had never quite gotten used  to having

enough to eat. His parents' kitchen cabinets never had much in them but bo oze.

The movie raged on. A priest had hung himself in the to wn o f Dunwich-original name, that-which flung wide the gates of

hell,  or  so mething. Zo mbies  with bad skin  conditio ns  seemed  to  be  able to  beam  themselves around  like refugees  from  the

Starship Enterprise. Zach thought of the only priest he had ever known, Father Russo, who said the masses his mother used to

drag him to every few months when she was coming off a bad binge. Twelve-year-old Zach had  gone to confession alone one

day,  ducked into  the booth  and  leaned his  aching  head against the  screen  and  whispered, Bless  me,  Father, for  I  have  been

sinned against. Hot tears squeezed out of his eyes as his lip s formed the words.

That is not  how the  Con fession begins, the priest replied,  and some  of Zach's hope  ebbed. But he persisted: My  mother

kicked me in the stomach and made me throw up. My father slammed my head against the wall. Can't you help me?

Bad  boy, telling lies about your parents. Don't you kno w you must obey them? If they punish you, it is because you have

sinned. The Lord says honor thy father and thy mother.

WHAT ABOUT THEM HONORING ME? he shrieked, slamming his hand against the flimsy wall of the confessional, a

hot  spike of pain  shooting  up his already-sprained arm.  Raking the  curtain back,  bursting into the  priest's side  of  the  booth,

yanking  his  shirt  up  to  display  the  technicolor  bruises  and  belt  stripes  across  his  skinny  ribs.  WHAT  ABOUT  THIS,

MOTHERFUCKER,  WHAT  DOES  GOD  SAY  TO  THIS?  Staring  into  the  priest's  startled  face,  seeing  the  tracework  of

broken  veins deepen  fro m red  to purple, the  weak watery  eyes  flare  with  pious  anger,  and  knowing  sickly that there  was  no

help here, that the priest was not really seeing him, that the priest was as drunk as his parents had been last night.

He had been hauled from the church and told not to  come back, as if he ever would; he collapsed on the stone steps and

sobbed there for an hour. Then he got up, hawked an enormous goober on the steps, and left with a silent pain that went deeper

than his bruises and abrasions, all the way down to the wounded soul that the Catholic church would never touch again.

It would be nice to see Father Russo  hanging and burning and bleeding from the eyeballs. Maybe the priest was dead now;

maybe he had the starring role in so me hellish Lucio Fulci film. Zach hoped so.

He chewed the last bite of muffuletta, licked the grease off his lips, and went diving for clothes. He came up with a pair of

army  pants cut off  at  the  knees  and  a T-shirt  that  pictured  JFK  grinning toothily  as  his  brains  exploded  in  vivid  silkscreen

color. Faded red Converse hightops without socks completed the ensemble.

It was time to go snag his two daily stashes. Then he could  come back here and get some work done.

 

June, as far as Zach was concerned, was the last to lerab le month in New Orleans until mid-autumn. The d ays were already

hot, but not as  mired in sodd en swelter as they would be through July, August, and most of September. During these ob scene

months  he  slept  all  morning  and afternoo n,  his  dreams punctuated  by the rattle and drip of his laboring air conditioner.  He

spent his nig hts cramming his head with information, words and images and the subtle semiotics they triggered in his brain, or

hacking paths through the infinite mazes of forbidden computer systems, or simply skating around the boards where he was not

just welcome but absurdly revered.

Only  lon g  after  sund own  would  he  venture  into  the  French  Quarter  to  prowl  the  gaslit  side  streets,  to  walk  among

euphorically dru nken, tourists and roustabouts on neon-smeared Bourbon Street, to meet his friends passing a bottle of wine in

front of Jackso n Square, or lingering in the dark bars and smoky club s of Rue Decatur, or occasionally thro wing a small party

in Saint Louis #1, the old cemetery on the edge of the Quarter.

 

                                                                                          11

 

 

 

 

 

But today he descended the stairs to the sidewalk, pushed the iron gate open, and drew in a noseful of the humid air as if it

were perfume.  And  it  was, of a sort;  it  felt  like  wet  cotton  in  his  lungs,  but  it carried  the fragrance  of the Quarter,  a  heady

melange  of  thousands of odors:  seafood  and  sp ices, beer  and  horseshit,  oil paints  and  incense and flo wers  and  garbage and

river mud, and underlying it all the clean crumbling smell of age, old iron, softly sifting b rick, stone trodden b y a millio n feet,

recording the infinitesimal imprint of each.

Zach's third-floor apartment  overlooked tiny  Rue Mad ison, one  of the two shortest  streets  in  the Quarter,  along with its

twin Wilkinson on the other side of Jackson Square. His row o f buildings was decorated with intricate black ironwork. Only a

block long, quiet little Madison ran straight into the technicolor melee of the French Market.

Zach passed the vintage clothing store on the corner, knocked on the open door and waved to the hippie proprietor (who

had recently given him a neighborly deal on a black frock coat lined with royal purple silk, though it would be too hot to wear

the thing until Christmas), then cut throug h an area  housing an informal bazaar where you could find useless crap or the very

treasures  of  Lafitte, depending  upon the day and your luck.  Then  he  was in  the  French  Market,  surrounded  on all  sides  by

delicious smells and harmonious colors and  all the symmetry and bounty of the edible vegetable kingdom, heaped together in

great glowing piles under one old stone roof.

There were  pyramids of  to matoes so achingly scarlet that  they hurt the eyes;  bushel baskets of eggplants like burnished

purple patent leather, the verdant green of bell pepp ers and the delicate, creamy green of the tender little squash called mirliton.

There were onio ns as large as babies' heads, red and gold and pearly white. There were nuts and ripe bananas and cool frosted

grapes,  fresh herbs b y  the  bunch, great  thick braids o f garlic  and  dried  red tabasco  peppers hangin g  from  the  rafters. There

were stalks of fresh sugar cane, sold by the foot so  yo u  could gnaw and suck  out  the sweet juice as  you walked through the

market smelling and marveling. There was homegrown rice, and barrels full o f shining red beans to cook it with, and long links

of  smoky  Cajun  sausage  to  throw  in for  flavo r.  There  was  a  fish  market  to  the  side where  you  could  buy fresh  crabs  and

crawdads and catfish, bright blue Gulf shrimp as long as your hand, even alligator if yo u liked.

And in front of every stand were the vendors hawking their wares, old men who had come in laden p ickup trucks before

dawn, their  faces  seamed  leather, black or  tan,  Cajuns, Cubans, occasional  Asians.  The  Market, Zach  thought, was probably

one of the  most  culturally  and  racially  diverse spots in the city. Good  karma for  a p lace where, not  two hundred years  ago,

slaves had done the morning shopping.

Every vendor had the finest, the freshest,  the cheapest goods in all the  Market; they all proclaimed so, each more loudly

than the next, until the clamorous praise for fruits and vegetables rose to the roof and spiraled out between the stone columns.

They would  sell it to you by the p iece, or the pound, or the whole damn lot if you fancied.

But  Zach  fancied  other  things.  He  walked  through,  looking  but  not  stopping,  until  he  reached  the  fringes  of  the  flea

market that took up the rear part of the building. Here the wares tended mo re toward the tacky or the weird, tables full of shell

magnets  and  ceramic crawfish  salt  shakers alternating  with  stands  that  sold  leather  jewelry,  boot  knives,  essential  oils  and

bundles of incense and suspicious-looking cassette knockoffs of whatever CDs the vendor had recently bought.

Several  of the people running  the weirder stands  nodded to  him. There  was  Garrett,  a  nervo us  kid  with bleached-blond

hair and great tragic angel-eyes, who painted pictures way too  scary for the Jackson Square portrait crowd; he had a table full

of  crucifix  pendants  and  rhinestone cat's-eye  sunglasses,  and  was  doing  a  brisk  business.  There  was  Serena,  purple-haired

patchouli-daubed priestess as calm as  her name, nodding happily  before  her altar o f bootleg  Cure  and  Nirvana; serene until

so me  unsuspecting  light-fingered  customer  happened  along  and  mistook  her  for  an  easy  mark.  Then   she  whipped  into

ultraviolent  motion,  straight-arming  the  hapless  thief  with  one  hand,  retrieving  her  merchandise  with  the  other.  There  was

spook y  Larese  with  her black  Cleopatra eyeliner and tattered velvet dress,  who  did  Tarot  readings o n the  square  when she

wasn't selling  her  homemade voodoo  dolls in the Market. Her  readings  were  not  lucrative; she told her  customers  so  many

accurate bad  things about themselves  that they almost always demanded  their money  back, and she always  gave  it back- but

with  a  date  scrawled  across it in indelible  Magic  Marker, a day and year  sometimes  far  in  the future, sometimes o minously

near.

Zach scanned the stands and tables. The sign changed locations every day, but someone always had it. Finally he spotted

it taped to a table of hats manned by a lean young man with  skin the color of cafe noir and a mass of dreadlocks that seemed to

burst  like snakes out of the top of his skull, twisting halfway do wn his  back, some  of the strands interwoven  with threads  of

purple, red, yellow, and green-the colors of Rasta and Mardi Gras. This gentleman went by the mellifluous name of Dougal St.

Clair. The sign taped to the edge of his table, neatly printed and d iscreet, read HELP us IN THE FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS!

ANY DONATION APPRECIATED.

“Zachary! I t'ink you need a hat, mon!” Dougal's face split into a grin sunny and stoned as his native Jamaica as he waved

Zach over. His voice was d eep and jo vial, with an accent like dark, sweet syrup. He plucked a broad-b rimmed black hat from

the jumb le on the table. An  Amish  hat, circled  with a handsome band of  black  leather and silver cockleshells. To  his  credit,

Dougal did  not plop it rudely onto Zach's head, just held it out until Zach had to take it. Zach held the hat in his hands but did

not try it on. Some of these guys could sell you anything.

“Actually,” he said, “I wanted to make a small donation to the cause.”

“Ya  mon. No problem.” Do ugal didn't exactly stick out his hand, just eased it to the ed ge of the table where it wo uld be

available in case anyone wanted to slip anything into it. Zach scisso red two twenties o ut of his pocket and palmed  them over.

Dougal's dark eyes flickered, clocking the amount even as he made the money disappear. He reached under his table and came

out  with  a  thick  pamphlet,  which  he  handed  over  to  Zach:  The  Dangers  of  Marijuana,  ever  so  imaginative  a  title,  the

propaganda zombies were really knocking themselves out with creativity these days. Zach tucked  the pamphlet into his pocket.

Dougal u nscrewed the top of a thermos and sloshed a genero us amount of steaming black coffee into the plastic cup. The

odor touched Zach's nostrils, rich with chicory. Dougal saw him squirming and offered the cup. “Finish it off, mon. Fresh this

morning fro m Cafe du Monde.”

Zach's hands itched to grasp the cup. He knew how warm and  comforting it would feel between his palms, knew ho w the

smooth slow-roasted flavor would roll over his tongue. Unfortunately, he also knew how the subsequent effects wo uld feel, his

heart  slamming  like a  caged  thing  against the  inner  meatwall o f  his  chest,  his  brain  drying  out  like a  sponge, his  eyeballs

 

                                                                                          12

 

 

 

 

 

seeming to jitter and buzz in their sockets. “I can't drink co ffee anymore,” he admitted. “I used to love it, but now it just gives

me the shakes.”

Dougal's heavy eyebrows drew together in genuine consternation. “But we got de second-best joe hi de world right here!

Jus' have a slug, it'll do yo u right.”

“I can't even drink decaf,” Zach said sadly. “My imagination's too good.”

“You're twenty?”

“Nineteen.”

“An' you quit drinkin' coffee—”

“When I was sixteen.”

Dougal shook his head. The frayed and  festooned ends o f dreads swayed gently around his face. “I t'ink you need to relax.

If I couldn't drink New Orleans coffee, I guess I'd be makin' even more donations to de cause than you do.”

“So what's the best joe?”

“Jamaican Blue Mountain, mon. Fry up some salt fish'n'ackee every morning, have two-three cups of Blue Mo untain, you

lose dem dark circles unda your eyes.”

Yeah, thought Zach, and die of a heart attack before I hit twenty-five.

They shot the shit for a few more minutes. (“Party tonight,” Dougal informed him, “buncha folks gonna dial de trip phone

at Louie's,” which translated to “An ywhere from three to twenty people are go ing to drop acid in St. Louis Cemetery tonight.”)

As he made his farewells and turned to go, Dougal stopped him. “You want de hat? Half price-no problem.”

Zach had forgotten he was still ho lding the black Amish hat. He started to toss it back on the table, then sto pped. He didn't

have a hat, and this one would keep the sun off nicely. He put it on, a perfect fit. Dougal nodded. “Very fine. Make you look

like a preacher man go ne b ad.” That sunny grin again, and Zach laughed too. These guys could sell you anything.

On  his way back, Zach stopped at a produce stand and bought a few hand fuls o f thin, twisted, lethally hot red and  green

peppers.  Once in  a  while  the  Market wo uld  get  some o f the orange and yellow scotch  bonnets,  or  habaneros, that  grew  on

bushes in Dougal's home country. They were said  to be the hottest pepper in the world-fifty times the heat of the jalapeno-and

they had a sweet, fruity flavor Zach loved. But the Louisiana peppers would do for now. He would snack on them later, while

swigging milk and speeding d own the highways of hackdo m.

He sup posed his strange body chemistry had its rewards. He missed coffee like a dear lost lover, but he knew no one else

who could hack on  acid, thrive  for  days on pot and Blo ody Marys  made of equal parts vod ka,  tomato  juice, and Tabasco,  or

munch ounces of near-pure capsicum without even a scorched tongue or a burning belly to show for it.

He walked back down Madison, checked his mail-two catalogs, one from Loompanics Unlimited, which sold  books about

ho w to obtain fake IDs and disable tanks and other useful thin gs, and one from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, which carried every fiery

sauce, spread, spice, and seasoning known  to h umankind. These he  filed on the  bed for leisurely perusal later, along with his

sharp new hat. His fingers were itchy, ready to pound some keys.

First he took  out the  antidrug  pamphlet  and  removed the bag of pot  taped  between  its  pages.  Tight green bud, packed

nearly  flat, laced with delicate little red hairs that spelled P-O-T-E-N-C-Y. Zach stuck his nose in  the bag and breathed d eep.

The smell alone was intoxicating, herbal and piney. Anything that smelled that good just had to be illegal.

He crumbled  some onto  a stray sheet o f paper,  removed  a co uple of  seeds and set  them aside to  throw in  a  field later,

packed the weed into his black onyx pipe and  lit up. The sweet smoke curled down into  his lungs, sent green tendrils into his

bloodstream, uncoiled the kno ts in his brain.

Aaaahhh.

Time to work.

He flipped the  box on,  stuck the phone  in the  modem's  cradle, and  dialed  an obscure  local  pirate  bulletin  board  system

kno wn as  Mutanet. The  BBS  was  an  info rmation exchange  for  all sorts  of  hackers,  phone  phreaks,  and  assorted  computer

weirdos. Zach had  discovered its  existence by writing a program that dialed  every phone  number in the area code and kept a

list of  the ones answered by  modems.  A little  time spent  discovering  which ones led  to  bulletin  boards-and  what o ther o nes

might be useful- had led him to Mutanet, and a combination of brashness, twisted humor, and demonstration of his abilities had

gotten him on.

He had all kinds of work waiting and projects going: cred it card accounts to shave pennies from like wafer-thin slices of

salami, bank balances to augment, lists of phone codes to obtain for sale later. He had recently written a program that cracked

the encryp ted password system of the state police headquarters, and he was toying with the idea of wiping clean the records of

every drug offender he could find.

But right now  he felt like foo ling around on  Mutanet fo r a while.  He  wasn't sure what  made  him do  it-it wasn't  how he

usually began a work sessio n-and he was never sure what gods to thank, afterward. For the pirate board might have been the

only thing that saved him.

The system's logo app eared, along  with  a screenful of  warnings, exhortations,  and dire pronouncements, then  a prompt.

Zach tapped in his Mutanet handle (LUCIO) and his current password (NH3GH3), and he was in.

A  computer  BBS worked much  like a  real bulletin  board:  you could put up  items  for  anyone  to  read and respond to,  or

you  could  put messages  in  envelopes,  so to  speak,  for  the  eyes  of  one  person  only.  It  was  better  than  a  real bulletin board,

though,  because  no  one  could  deface  yo ur  messages  or  peek  into  your  envelopes  except  the  systems  operator,  who  wasn't

usually inclined to bother.

He had mail waiting, a message from a  talented  phreak named Zombi who had given him some  go od uncanceled credit

card numbers of the recently deceased. Grieving relatives didn't usually think to notify th e card companies right away,  and in

the meantime the numbers were ripe for misuse or dissemination. Maybe this would be something equally nifty.

He b rought up his mail and sat back in his chair.

And  the message filled  his  screen, flashing like Bourb on  Street strip-club neon, pulsing like a  vein in a junkie's  fevered

temple.

 

 

                                                                                          13

 

 

 

 

 

LUCIO. THEY ARE ONTO YOU. THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE. THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. RUN.

 

 

Chapter Three 

 

The Greyhound bus was slow and hot and  nearly empty. It smelled mostly o f smoke and sweat, a tired smell like the ends

of journeys,  but  underlying  that was a faintly  exotic  sweetness that  twined  into  the nostrils like  opium  smo ke. Probably  the

industrial  strength  disinfectant  they  used  to  slop out  the  rest  room at the  back o f the bus, but  to  Trevor  it  was the  smell of

travel, of adventure. At any rate, it  was an odor he knew as well as that of his o wn skin. He had spent a good  part of the past

seven years on Greyhound buses, or waiting for them in the quiet despair o f a thousand cavernous terminals.

The Carolina countryside rolled past his window, summer-green, then  dusk-blue, then a deepening, smoky violet.  When

he could no longer see by the dying sunlight that came through the window, he switched on the small bulb above his seat and

kept drawing, his hand movin g to the rhythm of the Charlie Parker tape on his Walkman. Now and then he raised his head and

stared briefly out the window. All the cars had their headlights on, rushing toward him in an endless dazzling stream. Soon it

was so dark that he could see only his own hollow-eyed reflection in the glass.

The fat redneck occupying the two seats in front of him heaved a great sigh when Trevor turned on the light. Trevor was

dimly aware of the man shifting in his seat, making a show of tugging his John Deere cap down over his eyes, his b ody giving

off a strong stale odor of cheap beer and human dirt. At last he turned completely around and stared at Trevor over the back of

the seat. Neckless, his head  looked like a jug resting on a wall; the skin of his face was seamed  and damp and blotchy, nearly

leprous. He might have been nineteen or forty. “Hey, you,” he said. “Hey, hippie.”

Trevor looked up but did not remove his earphones. He always listened  to music at a very low volume, and he could hear

fine with them on. “Me?”

“Yeah, you, who the fuck you think I mean, him?” The redneck gestured at an ancient black man asleep across the aisle,

toothless cavern of his mo uth gaping, gnarled hands twisting  around the nearly empty bottle of Night Train in his lap.

Ever so slowly Trevor shook his head, never looking away fro m the redneck's bleary, glittering eyes.

“Well anyway, you mind turnin' that goddamn light off? I got a real bad headache, you know?”

Hangover, more like.  Trevor shook his  head again, even more slowly, even more  firmly. “I can't. I have  to  work on this

drawing.”

“The  fuck  you do !”  More  of  the redneck's head  rose  over  the  seat, though there  was  still no  neck in  evidence. A  large

scarred  hand  appeared  as well.  Trevor saw black  half-moons  of  dirt  under each thick  nail.  “What's a freak like  you drawin'

that's so goddamn important?”

Silently  Trevor  turned  his  sketchbo ok  around   so  that  the  redneck  could  see  it.  The  light  showed  every  detail  of  the

drawing: a slend er woman half-seated, half-sprawled in a do orway, head thrown back, yawning mouth full of blood and broken

teeth.  Her  left  temple  and  forehead  were  smashed  in,  her  hair  and  face  and  the  front  of  her  blouse  black  with  blood. The

draftsmanship was stark and flawless, the frozen agon y eloquent in every line of her body, in every stroke of her ruined face.

“My mother,” Trevor said.

The  redneck's fat face  quivered.  His lips twitched ;  his eyes  went shocked, momentarily  defenseless, then flat.  “Fuckin'

freak,” he muttered loudly. But he didn't say anything else about the light, not for the rest of the trip.

The bus turned off the interstate at Pittsb oro and got on the narrow two-lane state highway. It stopped for minutes at a tiny

dark station in Co rinth; then there were no more stops, and it was irrevocable, it was true, he was really going back to Missing

Mile.

Trevor looked back down  at his drawing.  A line appeared between his eyebrows as he  frowned at it.  How  weird. In the

lower right-hand corner, without being aware of it, he had labeled the drawing. And he had  labeled it wrong. In big, dark block

letters he had printed the name ROSENA BLACK.

But his mother's name had been Rosena McGee. She had been b orn Rosena Parks, but she had died a McGee. Black was

the name Trevor had chosen for himself years ago, the name he drew under.

He didn't  erase the mislabel; it  was too  heavily penciled, would fuck up the p aper.  He  wasn't  mu ch for erasing anyway.

Sometimes  your mistakes  showed  you the  really interestin g  connections between your  brain,  your hand,  and  your  heart,  the

ones you might otherwise nev er know were there. They were important even if you had no idea what they meant.

Like now, for  instance. Coming back  here might be the  biggest mistake  he'd  ever mad e. But  it might  also b e the most

important thing he had ever d one.

He couldn't remember his last sight of Missing Mile. His mother's friends had carried him out of the house that morning,

and that was all he had known for a  while. Only one o f them, a man with large, gentle  hands, had been brave enough to edge

past Bobby's dangling body and pry Trevor from his niche between the toilet and the sink. The next thing he remembered was

waking up in a blank white room, smelling medicine and vomit, then screaming at the sight of a tube that snaked out of a bag

hanging by the bed and ran straight into  the crook of his arm. The flesh where it went in was puffy, red, sore.

Trevor had  thought  the  thing  was  alive,  burro win g  into  him  as  he  slept.  He  would never really  trust sleep  again. You

closed your eyes  and went somewhere else  for a few hours, and while you  were gone, anything could happen — anything  at

all. The whole world could  be ripped out from under yo u.

The nurse said  Trevor  had  not  been able to  hear people trying to  talk to  him, and  could  no t  eat  or  drink.  The  tub e had

pumped ground-up  food into his arm to keep him from  starving to death, or  so  he understood it. He was embarrassed  to  find

himself  wearing  a diaper.  Even Didi  was too  old for diapers.  Then  he  remembered that  Did i  wasn't anything  anymore but a

memory of a smashed shape o n a stained mattress. His family had been dead five days, had been buried while Trevor floated  in

that hazy twilight world.

The doctors at the  hospital  in  Raleigh called it catatonia. Trevor knew it was Birdland.  Not just the place where no one

else could touch you, but the place you went when the real world scared you away.

 

 

                                                                                          14

 

 

 

 

 

After  it  became apparent that  no relative or friend of  the family was  going  to claim  him, and  a  series  of cognitive tests

proved  he  was  functional  (if  withdrawn),  the court declared  Trevor  McGee  a  ward  of  the state.  He  was  placed in  the  North

Carolina Boys'  Home on  the outskirts  of Charlotte, an orphanage  and scho ol  whose operating budget  had been shaved  to  the

bone the previou s  year. There  was  no foster family  program,  no  special training  for  the gifted,  no therapy for the disturbed.

There was only an enormo us drafty pillared  school building and four outlying dorms all built of smooth gray stone that held a

chill  even  in  the  heart  of  summer.  There  were  only  three  hundred  bo ys  aged  five  to  eighteen,  all  kept  crew-cut  and

conservatively dressed, each with his  own personal  hell and none of  them  much inclined  to help  ease  the weight  of  anyone

else's.

The place  seemed  to  have  no color, no  texture. Trevor's thirteen  years there were a  collage  of blurred edges, featureless

gray  expanses,  empty  city  streets  sectioned  into  little  diamonds  by  the  chain-link  fence  that  surrounded  the  Home  and  its

grounds. His roo m was a cold square box, but safe because he could draw there without anyone looking over his sho ulder.

Most o f the other bo ys used sports as their escape, built their dreams around athletic scholarships to State or UNC. Trevor

was painfully clumsy; except for his right hand, his body felt wrong to him, like something he wasn't entitled to and shouldn't

have. He dreaded  the afternoons he was forced out to the playing fields  with  his g ym class, hot dusty tedium broken only by

occasio nal panic  when someone screamed at him to run o r swing or  catch a hurtling ball  that looked like a bomb  falling at a

thousand  miles per hour out of a dizzying clear blue sky.

His life at the Boys' Home had  been neither good nor terrible. He never tried to make friends, and mostly he was ig nored.

On the rare occasions that a group of predators chose him as their next target, Trevor returned their taunts u ntil he goaded them

into  attacking  him.  They  always  attacked  him  eventually.  Then  he  would  hurt  as  many  of  them  as  badly  as  he  could.  He

learned to land a hard punch with his left fist, to kick and claw and bite, anything that did not risk his drawing hand. He usually

got the  worst of it, b ut that particular group would leave  him alone afterward, and Trevor would mind his own business until

the next group came alo ng. From things he read, he suspected it was a lot like prison.

The  state  had  cut  him  loose  at  eighteen  with  an  option  to  attend  vocational  school.  Instead,  Trevor  headed  for  the

Greyho und station and bought a ticket for as far as the hundred dollars in his pocket would take him.

He  had  traveled   haphazardly  in  those  years,  zigzagging  between  cities  and  coasts,  picking  up  work  here  and  there,

occasio nally  selling a  sketch or a  comic  strip  for the  price of a bus ticket,  often  more. Sometimes  he  met people  that under

other circumstances he thought he might have called  friends. At any rate, people in the real world were more interesting than

any he had met in the Home. But as soon as he left a place, these acquaintances were gone as if erased from the world.

He never let anyone touch him. Mostly he preferred to be alone. If he was ever unable to d raw, Trevor thought he would

probably die. It was a possibility he always kept tucked away in a corner of his mind, the comfort of the razor or the rope, the

security of poison on the shelf waiting to be swallowed. But he wouldn't take anyone with him when he went.

He had not cut his hair for seven years. He had never had a permanent ad dress. He seldom visited a town or a city more

than once. There were only a few p laces he avoided. Austin. New Orleans. And North Carolina, until now.

His twenty-fifth birthday  had recently come  and gone, celeb rated only  by the crossing  of state lines, a thing that always

exhilarated him a little no matter how often he did it. Trevor often came close to forgetting his own birthday. All it had meant

in the Boys' Home was an ugly new shirt and a cupcake with a single candle on it, reminders of everything he didn't have.

And  besides,  his  birthday was  overshadowed  by  the  more  impo rtant anniversary  just  after  it.  The anniversary  that fell

tomorrow.

Twenty years since it happened, and  every year strung heavy as a  millstone round  his heart. Four-fifths  of his life spent

wondering why he wasn't dead. It was too long.

Recently he  had started havin g  a dream  of the  house on Violin Road. All through his childhood  Trevo r had  dreamed of

that  last  morning,  that  bloody  morning  that  seemed  to  drip  through  his  memory  like  molasses, dark  and  slow.  That  was a

familiar nightmare, infrequent now. But this new dream was different, and had been coming several times a week.

He would find himself sitting in the little back bedroom Bobby had used as a studio, staring at a blank sheet of paper on

the drawing bo ard. Trevor usually d rew co mics in his sketchbook, but Bobby had used looseleaf paper for Birdland. Only there

was no Birdland  on this sheet of paper. There was no thing on it, and he could think of nothing to put on it. It stared him in the

eye and laughed at him, and Trevor could almost hear its dry sardonic whisper: The abyss stares back into  you? Ha! Nothing to

see but a liver pickled in whiskey and the ashes of a million burnt-out dreams.

Awake,  Trevor  couldn't  imagine  not  bein g  able  to  draw.  He  could  always  make  his  hand  move.  An  emp ty  page  had

always been a challenge, a space for him to fill. Awake, it still was. But in this dream, the blank sheet of pap er was a mockery.

And he didn't drink whiskey, or any other kind of alcohol. He had never taken a drink in his life.

Trevor found that  this  dream bothered him more than the  ones  in  which he saw his family  dead. Drawing  had been the

only thing he cared about for such a long time. No w he was beginning to understand how  the loss of it could drive someone

insane.

He started to worry: what if  the hollow,  paralyzed feeling of  the dream infiltrated his waking life? What if somed ay he

opened his sketchbo ok and  his hand  went stiff, his mind numb?

The night he wo ke up with a broken pencil in his hands, the edges of the wood as raw as a fractured bone, the sound of the

snap still echoing like a leftover shred of nightmare through his lonely boardinghouse room, Trevor knew he had  to go back to

the house. He was sick of wearing his past like a millstone. He would  not let his art become one too.

The bus passed a  wreck just outside Missing Mile, a small car  crumpled in a ditch,  sparkling shards of glass picking  up

the whirling red and blue lights, making  the scene seem to revolve psychedelically. Trevo r cupp ed his hands  to  the window,

pressed   his  forehead  to  the  glass.  Paramedics  were  loading  someone  into  the  ambulance,  strapped  to  a  stretcher,  already

punctured with needles and tubes. Trevor lo oked straight down into the person's face and saw that it was a girl, maybe close to

his age, face drenched with blood, chest crushed in, eyelids still fluttering.

Then-he saw  it-the  life  left  her. Her  lids  stopped  moving  and  he  saw  her  eyes  freeze on  a  point  beyond  him,  beyond

anythin g he would ever see in this world. The medics kept moving, shoved her into the ambulance and slammed the doors, and

she was gone. Yes, she was gone.

 

                                                                                          15

 

 

 

 

 

Great, he thought. An omen. Just what I needed.

A  few minutes later the bus pulled  into the parking  lot of the Farmers Hard ware Store, the flatiron-shap ed building  that

stood  lo ne and proud  among lesser  downtown structures  like the  prow  of some  landlocked ship.  A small ticket office at  the

back  and a  bench  in  the  parking  lot  served  as  Missing  Mile's  bus station. The  Greyhound  groaned  to  a  stop  alon gside the

deserted bench.

Trevor  hoisted  his  backpack  and  made  his  way  down  the  aisle,  then  down  the  steps.  His  feet touched  North  Carolina

ground for the first time in two decades, and a shiver ran through him like a tiny electric chill. No one else got off.

The bus had seemed hot, but the humid swelter of the night outside made him realize it had been air-conditioned . The air

pressed  like a  soft  damp palm against  his  face, delicious with the  scents of  honeysuckle, wet grass, hot charcoal and the rich

oils of roasting pork. Someone nearby was cooking o ut to night.

The smell of barbecue  made his stomach roll over, then  growl: he  was either sick or starved.  Years of institutional food

had blurred  the  two  sensations. The Boys' Ho me was not  quite Dickensian, but  second  helpings were neither  kindly  looked

upo n by the cafeteria ladies nor much desired by the boys.

Maybe  by  now  Missing  Mile  had  somewhere  to  eat  besides  that  greasy  diner.  But  if  not,  the  diner  would  do. Trevor

decided to take a walk throu gh downtown. He couldn't go out to the house yet. Not at night. He was ready for anything, but he

was still scared.

He would be there tomorrow, for the twenty-year reunion.

Trevor only hoped he was invited this time.

 

Kinsey knew  to night was going to suck. Rima was scheduled to work, and Rima was  gone, finding someone  else  to  rip

off, having  raw  meat  scraped  out of her  womb,  coking  up her  little  brain  until  it  spun like  a  whirligig,  or  maybe  all  of  the

above.

So  Kinsey  would  be  working  by  himself.  Terry  Buckett's  new  band  Gumbo  was  playing.  Owner  and  manager  of  the

Whirling Disc record  store, Terry  also  played drums  and  sang  whenever  he  could  get  a  gig.  Gumbo  was  one  of  the  Yew's

biggest draws now that Lost Souls? were on the road, and it would be a busy n ight.

To  distract  himself,  Kinsey  decided  to  have a dinner special. It  would make him  even  busier,  but  he  loved  feeding  his

kids. He ran through  his limited repertoire. Curry? .  . . no, it would take too  long . . . lentil soup? no, he'd had  that  one twice

last week . . . gumbo, for the band . . . but his skills weren't up to it, and there was nowhere to get fresh seafo od, and he never

had been convinced you could make good gumbo anywhere but New Orleans. The Mississippi River water gave it that special

flavor, mayb e. At last Kinsey decided tonight would be Japanese Night.

He hiked ho me and put together a quick broth from some elderly vegetab les and a few pork bones in his freezer, loaded it

into his car, and drove slowly back into town  so as not to slosh it. The railroad tracks  were tricky, but he managed them with

aplomb. In town, he stopped at the little grocery next to Farmers Hardware and bought twenty packages of Oodles of Noodles

and several bunches of green onions. The rain had stopped, which meant it would be even busier.

Back at the  Yew,  Kinsey  took down  the  chalkbo ard  over the  bar,  selected  a  piece  of purple  chalk, and with a  flourish

Wrote JAPANESE NOODLE SOUP! $1.00!

If anyone ordered the special, Kinsey would ladle up a bowl of his homemade broth, pop in the noodles, throw away the

sodium-laden “flavor packet,” and zap the whole thing in the microwave he kept behind the bar. The green onions were for a

garnish, and he set to chopping them into  small, fragrant rounds. It was getting near eight. The band wouldn't start until ten, but

the kids often started drifting in this early to drink and eat and talk. Sometimes he opened the club at five fo r happy hour, but

he hadn't been happy enough today.

An hour later the Sacred Yew was nearly full. Admission was free until ten. After that he would have to find so meone to

work the  door. That was never hard: all the d oor people had  to  do was collect money, shoot the shit, and watch the  band for

free. If  they were o f age  they  got a  free  beer  too . The  club  served no  alcohol but  beer-bottled,  canned,  and  draft.  Still,  the

vagaries of North Carolina law made the Yew a bar and forbade the presence of those under twenty-one.

For  the place  to be an all-ages club-as  Kinsey  had intended all  along-it must qualify  as  a  restaurant  as well.  Hence the

noo dle soup, the sandwiches, the odd s and  ends of snacks he served. At first making the food had been a bother. Then he grew

to  like  it; now  his cookbook collectio n  was rapidly expanding. Regular customers gave them to him all the time, and  Kinsey

chose to  take these as a co mpliment.

Some of  the kids he knew,  the ones from Missing Mile and surrounding areas, most of who m attended a nearby Quaker

school called  Wind y  Hill.  There  was  a  public  high  school  too,  but  the  kids  there  were  mostly  metalheads  and  shitkickers;

Kinsey knew some of them, had even helped them work on their cars, but they didn't like the music at the Yew.

The kids  who came here were of a more artistic b ent, clothed in bright ragtag colors or ripped T-shirts and combat boots

or chic, sleek black, according to their various philosophies and passions. So me dyed their hair and cropped it, some let their

hair grow long and tied it with colored ribbons, so me simply shoved it b ehind their ears and didn't give a shit, or pretended not

to.  There  were  poets  and  painters,  firebrands  and  fuckups,  innocents  and   wantons.  There  were  Missing  Mile  townies  and

college kids from Raleigh and Chapel Hill, the ones with legal IDs and money for beer, the ones who paid his bills. There were

you nger kids furtively  fumb ling with flasks, adding liquor gotten from God knows where to their Cokes  from the bar. Unless

this was do ne in a particularly obvious or obnoxious manner, Kinsey usually turned a blind eye.

He had just hooked up a new  keg of Budweiser when Terry Buckett sat do wn at the bar. The band had done their sound

check earlier, and it was obvious they'd been practicing: they were tighter than ever, Terry's voice clear and strong, R.J.'s bass

line thunderous. “What do yo u call that style of music?” Kinsey had asked after listening to a couple of numbers.

“Swamp rock,” Terry had  said with a grin.

Now  he  grinned  up  at  Kinsey  again,  sto ned  and  amiable,  muscular  drummer's  forearms  propped  on  the  bar,  tie-dyed

bandanna wrapped around his dark curly hair. “Noodle soup, huh? Where'd you come up with that?”

“A cookbook called The Asian Menu,” said Kinsey. “With certain variatio ns.”

 

 

                                                                                          16

 

 

 

 

 

“I'll bet. Well, let's give it a try. Gimme a Natty Boho too.” National Bohemian was the Yew's bar brand. At a dollar-fifty

a b ottle it was a hot seller. Kinsey opened a frosty bottle and set it on the bar in front of Terry, then started  preparing the soup.

“Talked to Steve and Ghost today,” Terry said.

“Yeah? They call the store?” Steve and Ghost were the two members of the b and Lost Souls?; the spray-painted lyric WE

ARE NOT AFRAID was from “World,” the song they always used to close their set. Steve p layed a dark, fierce guitar; Ghost

had a voice like golden gravel running alo ng the b ottom of a clear mountain stream. A couple of weeks ago they had returned

from a gig in New York and  promptly  left town  again  for  a cross-co untry road trip in Steve's old T-bird. San Francisco was

their ultimate destination, but they would plan their route as they traveled, and they mig ht be gone for as much as a year.

“Yeah. The new guy answered, and Steve goes This is John Thomas from the IRS calling for Mr. Buckett.' I about pissed

myself when he handed me the phone. That little bastard . . .” Terry laughed and shook his head.

“Are they doing okay?”

“Sure. They're in Texas now. Steve said they played at a coffeehouse in Austin and the folkies loved 'em. Sold some tapes

too. Maybe I ought to check out Austin. You ever been?”

“No. One of my favorite underground cartoonists came from there, tho ugh. Bobby McGee.”

Terry frowned. “McGee? Wasn't he the guy who . . .”

“Yup.”

“That  house  is  still standing  out  on  Vio lin  Road,”  Terry  mused. “I  was  only  eight  when the  murders  happened,  but I

remember. They say it's haunted.”

“Of course they do. It might even be true. But his comic Birdland was brilliant, right up there with Crumb and—”

“Didn't he leave one of his kids alive?”

Kinsey served Terry a steaming bowl of  noodle soup. “Yes, he left a kid. A five-year-o ld son, I believe. And no, I don't

kno w what ever happened to him.”

“I bet he was fucked up real good,” said Terry, slurping thoughtfully.

“Excuse me. Could I get a bowl of that soup?” said a q uiet voice from the end of the bar.

Kinsey turned.  Neither  he  nor  Terry had  no ticed  the bo y  before;  the  bar was crowded  and  the kid  fit right  in,  tall  and

slend er, plain black T-shirt tucked into black jeans, wavy ginger-blond hair  grown long and pulled back in a ponytail from a

bony, almost delicate face. A battered gray backpack was slun g over his shoulder. He looked about twenty and carried himself

like someone maybe even yo unger, unsure of his welcome and not particularly wanting to be noticed.

But his eyes were arresting: a transparent, icy blue, large and round, irises rimmed with a thin line of black. They seemed

enormous in the thin face. Waif-eyes, thought Kinsey; hunger-eyes.

“You new in town?” Terry asked through a mouthful of noodles.

The bo y nodded. “I came in on the bus abo ut an hour ago.”

“That's new, all right.” Terry offered his hand. The boy looked confused for a mo ment, then reached out and shook. “I'm

Terry Buckett. I run the record store here, in case you need any sounds. Everything from Nine Inch Nails to Hank Williams.”

“Hank Williams, Senior,” Kinsey interjected.

“Senior, absolutely. For Bocephus you have to drive to Corinth-he's a little too all-American for us. Who're you?”

“Trevor Black. I usually listen to jazz.”

“Got some  of  that too.” Terry grinned at  the  boy.  After a moment's hesitation,  the  boy smiled tentatively  back.  Terry's

friendliness was hard to resist; he would keep talking until a p erson starting answering, even if it was just to sh ut him up.

Kinsey set a bo wl of soup in front of Trevor Black-the name  seemed vaguely familiar,  but  he co uldn't think  why — and

collected the boy's dollar. “I usually buy new customers a beer. If you're under twenty-one, I'll buy you a Coke.”

Trevor tucked a neat  bundle of noodles into his mo uth. “I'm twenty-five. But  I don't  drink. I'll take a Coke.” He chewed

the noodles, then frowned. “This tastes just like Oodles of Noodles.”

Terry snorted. “Kinsey practices what you call 'found cuisine.'”

“The broth is ho memade,” Kinsey said coolly. “Would you like your dollar back? Either of you?”

Terry just waved an impatient hand. Trevor seemed to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “No. This is fine.”

“So glad it meets with your approval,” Kinsey  muttered, turning away to get the  kid's Coke. Behind him  he heard  Terry

snort again. Kinsey closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It was going to be a long night.

 

An hour later Gumbo was churning away onstage, Trevor Black was still perched on his stool nursing his third Coke, and

the bar was a scene of utter chaos.

Kinsey  had  gotten  a  local  kid  called  Robo  to  collect  money  at  the  door.  Rob o,  at  eighteen,  was  well  on  his  way  to

becoming  Missing  Mile's  resident  stewb um-he  got  his  nickname  from  the  bottles  of  Robitussin  he  shoplifted  from  the

drugstore-but Kinsey figured he was just capable of counting dollars, stamping  hands, and managing not to pocket any of the

band's proceeds as long as Kinsey slipped him a couple of beers during the show.

The club was packed. Terry and R.J. Miller, Gumbo's bass player, had sat in with Lost Souls? a number of times and were

already  k no wn  as  solid  p layers.  The  guitarist  was  a  glam-rock  dynamo,  a  kid  named  Calvin  who  in  fact  bore  a  strong

resemblance to the  Calvin of comic strip fame, but punked out and tarted up considerably. Gumbo served  up  a foot-stomping

set, hot as Tabasco, intoxicating as Dixie beer.

Since the band started, Kinsey had been drawing co nstant cup s of draft, popping endless b ottletops. Just before eleven the

keg  of  Bud  ran  dry.  Kinsey  ducked  into  the  back  roo m  and  walked  a  new  one  on to  the  dolly.  The  kegs  were  heavy  and

awkward, and when he was in a hurry he u sually managed to roll them off the dolly and right onto his toes.

“Shit!” he said  loudly as this  very  thing happened .  As he  jerked his  foot away,  the keg  teetered  and  threatened to  tip.

Kinsey grabb ed at it. If it went over, the beer inside wo uld foam unmercifully. Customers were lined up three deep at the bar,

waiting to be served, and last call was just an hour away. Silently he cursed the treacherous Rima, wishing he had busted her

after all, if only for the cheap satisfaction it would give him right now.

 

 

                                                                                          17

 

 

 

 

 

Then  suddenly  someone  was  beside  him,  wrestling  with  the  icy  keg,  pushing  Kinsey  toward  the  taps,  the  cooler, the

impatient  mass  of drinkers.  “Go  wait on them-I'll hook it up. I  kno w how.” Skinn y  arms wrapped around the keg, heaving it

into  place;  deft  long-fingered  hands  were  already  tapping  the  valve.  Trevo r  Black.  Kinsey  wondered  if the  kid  really  was

twenty-five. He still looked more like nineteen, and the Yew could get busted if an underage person  was caught serving beer.

Kinsey shru gged and put it out of his mind . Taking the risk was better than losing business.

Fifteen minutes or so into the rush, Kinsey could tell Trevor had done this kind of work before. He was quick to figure out

where everything  was;  he  was  ab le to  duck  and  dodge  around  Kinsey  without getting in  his  way.  Since  he  didn 't  know the

prices, he just served drinks as fast as he could and left the register to Kinsey. Dollar bills flew into Kinsey's hands. The tip jar

jangled  with  change.  At  last  the  flood  of  customers  flowed  to  a  trickle,  then  stopped  altogether:  everyone  was  drunk  and

dancing, getting into Gumbo.

Kinsey went up front with a round of Natty Bohos for the b and. Terry flashed him a big smile and did a little flourish on

the drums. The club was hot and steamy, smelling of sweat and beer and clove smoke; the faces of the dancing kids were slick

with light, lost in musical rapture.

When Kinsey made his way back through  the crowd,  Trevor  was leaning against  the cooler  drinking  another Coke.  His

smile was tentative, barely a flicker. “Was that okay? To just jump in like that?”

“Absolutely not. You're fired.” They stared at each other for a mo ment; then Kinsey's mouth twitched, and all at once both

were laughing. “Seriously, do you want a job? You can keep all tonight's tips, and I'll start you at four-fifty an hour.”

Trevor shrugged. “I have stuff to do in Missing Mile-I don't need a job right away. And I'm not really a bartender. I've just

filled  in for one a couple of times.”

Kinsey raised an  eyebrow. “You could've  fooled  me.  Well, you can fill in  so me here if you want. Pick  up  a  shift  every

week or so.”

Trevor stared at the floor. “Maybe. It depends.”

Kinsey decided not to ask what it depended on. He seemed  to have wrecked the moment of camaraderie already. Trevor

was an odd bird, his conversation seeded with chill winds and ice pockets. Kinsey searched for a neutral topic to dissipate the

tension. “So, if you're not a bartender by profession, “what is it you do?”

Trevor kept looking at the floor, scuffed the toe of a ratty black sneaker over the worn boards. “I draw comics.”

Kinsey had thought the name was familiar. “Trevor Black . . . Didn't you have a page in Drawn and Quarterly?” This was

an undergro und  co mics magazine featuring some of the newest, most bizarre talent around.

Trevor looked surprised, then a little disconcerted, but he nodded. “Yes. That was me.”

“It was a good strip. You know, it made me think o f—”

A second wave of beer drinkers descended upon the bar clamoring for Natty Bohos. Trevor turned away to serve them so

quickly that Kinsey wondered whether he was glad to get off the subject. As Kinsey rang  up their purchases, his mind lingered

on the comic. It had been an odd, brief tale, an epiphany of sorts, something about a flock of birds rising fro m a man's charred

corpse like a  feathered,  jewel-eyed  soul. Kinsey  had been  about to say  how much  the comic's style  had remind ed him of the

late Robert McGee, the sharp inking and clean, graceful lines. He was sure Trevor had read Birdland. Po ssibly he knew McGee

had died here. Kinsey might even tell him about the time he'd fixed the McGees' car, just before the tragedy.

But the band  was winding down. The rush went on until last call, and then it was closing time, money to count, spills to

wipe up, hundreds of cups, cans, bottles to find and empty and sort for tomorro w's recycling pickup. By the time they finished

it was after three.

Kinsey  popped  a  beer,  then  picked  out  a  tap e  and  stuck  it  in  the  little  cassette  player  behind  the  bar.  Miles  Davis,

so mething from the fifties. The sound of the  trumpet filled the room, easy and  slow, smooth as eggno g spiked with whiskey.

Trevo r put his head  down on the bar. Kinsey leaned against the register and closed his eyes.

The music ended and an announcer's voice came on, part o f the tape, which had been recorded live o n Fifty-second Street

in the golden bebop d ays. The voice was deep, white, and juicy, and somehow seemed a distilled essence of its time; you could

easily picture the guy in his sharp suit  with its deep-cut lapels, hair slicked  back, cool  ofay cat. “Well! Yeah!  Miiiiles Davis.

Rememb er, you still have plenty of time to get to Birdland—”

Kinsey heard a strangled sob. He  opened his eyes and  stared  at Trevor, who  was rolling  his  head  back  and  forth on the

bar, his hands clawing at the scarred  wood. His  lips were pulled back over his teeth, and tears poured from his eyes.  Kinsey

could actually  see  them  forming  salty little pools  on the bar's varnished  surface.  He moved toward  the  boy.  “Hey,  Trevor?

What—”

“I don't have  plenty of  time to get  to  Birdland!” Trevor  cried.  His  voice sounded  as if  it  were  being pulled  out  of  him,

dragged over hot coals and rusty nails, tortured out of his throat. “I don't have any time at all-and I'm scared—”

“Bird land?” Kinsey said softly.

Trevor caught the puzzled inflection. He loo ked up at  Kin sey, the pale  flesh of  his eyelids swollen,  his clear eyes naked

and wet  and terrified. And  suddenly Kinsey  knew  that  face: a five-year-old bo y, in bad need of a haircut by some  standards,

too thin and hollow-eyed by any, standing on the side of a country road staring first at his mother, then at his father.

“Trevor McGee,” said Kinsey.

“Oh,  goddamn . .  .” Miserably, Trevor  nodded. Then  he was sobbing again. Kinsey went  aro und  the bar,  put  a cautious

hand on the boy's trembling shoulder, felt the muscles bunch up and flinch away from his palm.

“Don't touch me!”

“Sorry. I didn't mean—”

“No, I just can't—”

They stared helplessly at  each other.  Trevor's  face  was flushed, slick  with  tears. Everything in the way he held himself-

arms crossed  over his chest,  shoulders  hunched  —  screamed  Don't touch  me as loudly as Trevor's  mouth  had  done. But his

eyes were five years old again, and begged Hold me. Hold me. Help me.

 

 

 

                                                                                          18

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor might hate him, might even think Kinsey  was hitting  on him, but that  was just too bad. Kinsey  could not ignore

such pain. “I remember you,” he said. “I was the mechanic who fixed your parents' car. I wanted to help you then, and I want

to help you now.” Before Trevor could flinch again, Kinsey wrapped his long arms around the boy and held on tight.

He felt Trevor's body go ab so lutely rigid, felt him try to pull away. If he had kept trying,  Kinsey would have let him go.

But after a few seconds of struggle Trevor sagged against Kinsey's chest.

“I remember you too,” he said. “You recognized my dad . . . but he was ashamed of himself . . . ashamed of us ...”

“You poor child,” Kinsey whisp ered, “you poor, poor child.” The thin body was all sharp angles, all elbows and  shoulder

blades; it felt as fragile against him as that of a wounded bird. Kinsey imagined Trevo r's fear unfolding like treacherous wings

to carry him back to that house, back to the strange and painfu l year 1 972, to the death he no doubt thought he had deserved.

At  last the  crying faded  to an occasional  long tremo r that jerked  through the boy  like an electric current.  He  had  been

leaning hard against Kinsey, his sharp chin digging into Kinsey's shou lder. Now he pulled away and slumped on  the bar sto ol,

swiping at his face. Kinsey decided not to give him time to be embarrassed. “Let's go.”

Trevor gave him a half-wary, half-questioning look.

“You shouldn't be by yo urself tonight,” Kinsey told him. “You're coming home with me.”

He expected argument, mayb e refusal,  and  he  was  prepared to  push  the  issue.  But  if anything, Trevor looked  relieved.

Kinsey wondered whether the boy had been planning to hike out to  Violin Road, to sleep in that bad memory of a house. The

house of Trevor McGee's thwarted doom and, perhaps, of Trevo r Black's impending destiny.

Trevor slung his backpack over his shoulder, turned off the bar lights, and follo wed Kinsey out of the club, down the bad

end of Firehouse Street, into the silent silver-lit night.

 

 

Chapter Four 

 

Four rings. Zach  counted them with his teeth gritted, his free hand viciously shredding a fundamentalist tract he'd picked

up somewhere, Tomb of the Unborn.

Then the gentle click of a lifted receiver, muted Dixieland jazz playing in the background. “Hi, this is Eddy Sung.”

“EDDY FOR CHRISSAKE YOU GOT TO HELP ME I GOT TO GET OUT OF—”

The Dixieland changed abruptly to grinding industrial hardcore. “I'm sorry I'm not here, but if you leave your number I'll

call you back as soon—”

“AWWWW SHIT, GODDAMMIT, EDDY, PLEASE BE THERE!!! PLEASE PICK UP!!!”

A squealing snatch  of violins; then Edd y's answering machine beeped in his ear. Zach took a d eep sobbing breath, resisted

the urge  to slam his own phone into  the cradle hard enough  to  crack its casing, and tried to speak  calmly. “Ed-I'm in trouble.

You always said  you coveted my apartment, well, call me soon enough and you might get the goddamn thing.”

He  hung  up, spun  aimlessly in  the middle  of  the  room for  several  moments. The  computer  screen caught his  eye,  still

pulsing like  some  obscene digital  orifice.  Yes, you  could  fall  headlong  into  that screen,  that  alternate reality like  a  cradling

mouth or womb, never coming up fo r air, never realizing that so slowly, so smoothly  yo u took no notice, it was chewing and

digesting you . . .

No. Blaming the  computer  for his  troubles,  that was like a terminal lung cancer  victim blaming a pack o f cigarettes  or,

worse, his faithful old Zippo. It  was a tool and he had chosen to use it. His tro ubles were with They whose clammy suckered

tentacle  grasped the other end of that to ol. William  Burroughs had advised him  to know what was on the end  of his fork, but

had he listened? Of course not-and now the dirty tines were on the verge of impaling his tongue.

But in that direction madness lay.

He leaned against the doorjamb that led into the bathroom-with its polished sea-green tiles and its skylight in the ceiling

high  above the  tub, taking  a  shower here  was  like standing  beneath a sunlit  waterfall, and where would he ever find  such a

place again? A green waterfall of a bathroom-an apartment with all his things in it, a b lock from the wondrous bazaar that sold

everything  he  needed,  two  blocks  from  the  bank  of  the  Mississippi  that  coursed  .  through  the  city  like  a  thro bbing  brown

artery?

Before moving in here two years ago , Zach had spent  most of his time on the streets and at various  friends' houses. This

was the first place that had ever felt like home. He wasn't sure he knew how to live anywhere else, wasn't sure anywhere else

would have him.

But that  didn't  matter.  He  had  been  cutting  things  too close, taking  to o many  dumb chances. When  he  started  hacking

three  years  ago,  it  had  been just another  lark, another  way  of  amusing himself, a  curiosity like  getting drunk on  sloe gin or

watching the Psychic Friends Network on late-night cable TV. During his brief high school career he had taken an elementary

programming class and ended up getting himself kicked out of the school co mputer room, which robbed him o f his only good

reason to show up at the brain -numbing, tomblike institution at an inhuman hour each weekday morning.

At sixteen, two  years after leaving ho me, Zach d ropped out and started casting about for something better. He had known

immediately  that  hacking  was  it.  He'd  only  had  a  cheap  PC-clone  with  a  slow  modem  at  first,  b ut  fucking  around  on  the

undergro und  b ulletin  boards  he  found  with  his  automatic  dialing  program  led  him  to  wonder  about  other  networks,  secret

systems  and  databanks that  were  supposed to b e hidden but were actually right  there,  tantalizingly there, vibrating  behind a

thin membrane of co mmands and passwords.

Free information and money, if only you could get at it. Zach soon discovered that he could. And it was so  damn easy ...

But  if  they  caught  you  at  things  like  stealing  from  credit  card  companies  and  breaking  the  systems  of Southern  Bell,

affectionately  known  as  the  Gestapo  among  phreaks and hackers,  it could  be  worth  ten  years  in  a  federal prison. Sure,  you

might  get  out  in  half  as  many,  or  even  less.  But  the  tho ught  of even  one  day  in  the  pen  was  too  much  for  most  hackers,

conjuring up vivid images o f great tattooed baby-rapers and serial killers cornholing their lily-white butts, then snapping their

skinny neck s.

 

 

                                                                                          19

 

 

 

 

 

Zach let his knees buckle and  slid down the  door frame to  the floor. He'd kicked off his sneakers at  so me point, and  the

green tiles were blessedly cool against the soles of his feet. He saw the round mirror above the sink reflecting his emp ty room,

saw the dripping faucet that  over  the years  had  left a stain o n  the porcelain like the imp rint  of  rusty teardrops, saw the  blue

ceramic mug that held two toothbrushes, one p urple and one  black. He kept an extra because Eddy had  been known to sleep

over on occasions wh en they watched one bad film too many or talked too far into the night or simply drank themselves into a

stupor on the cheap  bourbon Eddy loved.

There was  nothing  unto ward to it, though, nothing sexual, not  even  a  furtive  drunken  groping here or  there. Zach  liked

Eddy too much for that.

But  never  mind  who  he  liked. He  was  going  to  be  on the  road,  playing  it  lonely  for  a  while.  Hackers  were  scared of

prison, yes,  and  many of  them wo uld  turn informer  once they  were nabbed. But most would also  do anything  they could to

help a  fellow  outlaw, as  long as  they didn't endanger themselves. He  had been  communicating with  other Mutanet users for

more  than  a  year; it  was  like  frequenting  so me weird  little  coffeehouse, getting  to kno w the regulars.  He  trusted  Zombi as

much as an y of his less remote friends, knew Zomb i wouldn't send him such a message unless his lead was reliable.

And  it  surely  was.  Any n umber  of  scary  companies  and  agencies could be  after  him:  if they caught  you  stealing they

would try to fuck you up. And he had stolen a lot.

And didn't he have to admit, begrudgingly, that in some extra-perverse corner of his brain the id ea of having to get out of

town before sundown appealed to him? New Orleans had been the only constant thing in his life. But didn't he get an itchy foot

so metimes, didn't he sometimes think about just throwing all his stuff in his car and going?

Of  course  he  did.  Everybody  did ,  even  normal  people,  the  ones  with  triple  mortgages  and  orthodo ntists'  bills  and

responsibilities to everything except what they really wanted . Everyone dreamed  of the open highway unspooling like a black

satin ribbon beneath his wheels. It  was in the American blood, so me kind of racial memory. But most people never really did

it; they became tied to a place by friend s, possessions, habits. If you stayed in one place long enough, you started to send down

taproots.

And yet it was always a possibility, just getting up one day and taking off. It was the kind  of thing yo u thought about, but

seldom did.

Until you had to.

Zach felt a million possibilities starting to unfold  within him like a  garden of dark flowers. The perfume was  heady: the

scent of strangers, of unknown cities and to wns; the subtle bouquet of adventure and its twin, dan ger.

He was only nineteen and he wanted to  kno w everything there  was to know in the world, to do all things, to grasp  every

experience in  his hands and drink it do wn like whiskey. This co uldn't break his spirit, couldn't keep him down. So They were

after him,  the  shadowy, faceless,  infinitely  sinister They that  seemed a peculiarly  American  archetype of  terror:  dark  trench

coat,  glo wing  eyes  beneath  a  black  slouch  hat,  badge  in  hand  emblazo ned  with  the  dread  legend  FBI,  or  NSA,  or  worse,

extended  like  a  red-hot iron  ready  to  sear  its  brand into your forehead. Every  hacker, every phone phreak, every intelligent

criminal Zach knew had his or her own visions and nightmares of Them.

But just because They were after him didn't mean They could  get him.

He realized that his hands were clenched  into fists and  his  heart was pounding painfully. Excitement did that to him; he

supposed it wo uld  kill  him  someday, but  he  was  addicted to  it. He willed  his pulse  to slow do wn,  made  himself  un fold his

hands. Tomb  of the  Unborn  was still crumpled  in one palm. Should have b een  a horror  movie, he thought; too  bad someone

had  wasted  such a  great title  on  a  piece  of  anti-choice  propaganda,  for  that  was  what  it  was,  complete  with  color  shots of

shredded fetuses in puddles of their own go re.

He balled up the tract and threw it across the roo m, pushed himself to his feet, sho ok off the headrush, tested his balance.

Cool. He'd had a few bad moments there, but now he was ready for the next reel of the Grand Adventures of Zachary Bosch.

Zach didn't know if thinking of your life as a movie serial was healthy, but it certainly helped keep him sane.

 

Bourbon  Street runs  through the  Vieux  Carre for fourteen  blocks,  beginning on the more-or-less  north side, at  the wide

avenue called Esplanade. On that side of  the Quarter, Bourbon is funky and fashionable, paved with  cobblestones, lined with

dark  little  neighborhood  bars  and  dearly priced  studio apartments, haunted o n hot nights by  boys sweating in brazenly tight

leather.

The middle blocks of Bourbon are part tawdry carnival and p art efficient tourist mill, the tinsel and glitter of Mardi Gras

for  sale  year-round,  plastic  cups  of  beer  and  frozen  daiquiris  and  Hurricanes sold  right  on  the  sidewalk,  racks  of  T-shirts,

postcards,  plastic  alligators  and  mammy  dolls,  and  “N'Awlins  Voodoo  Kits”  side  by  side  with  window  displays  o f  glitter

condoms, penis neckties,  lurid latex  vibrators. Here are  the big strip clubs  with their  hucksters and  roustabouts outside, bars

flashing neon and touting endless drink specials, a few famous restaurants and a slew of  pretenders. Every souvenir shop  has

poppers of amyl nitrite for sale in the b ack. In  combination with the abuse  of other substances, indulging in these  makes the

head seem to lift off the shoulders and  fill the skull with a dazzling, infinitely expanding light.

But at the other end of Bourbon, the end that runs into Canal and the downtown skyscraper sprawl of the Central Business

District, a different  miasma  hangs over the  street. An air of  dinginess  that is  somehow timeless, a seedy, mysterious air. The

city  looms  above  the old  buildings of  the Quarter,  making them look  gray  and small  and slightly  faded.  The  bars  feature  no

specials or cutely named cocktails, but the drinks are cheap and strong.

On  this  end of Bourbon Street,  sandwiched between a  pawnshop  and a po-boy stand  was the  Pink  Diamond Lounge.  It

was identifiable as a strip club only b y  the  design stenciled on  the door,  a  nude female silho uette inside  a  figure  that  might

have been a diamond but looked a great deal more like a vulva. A lone bouncer nodded in the recesses of the doorway, letting

loose a halfhearted line  of  patter  when  any  likely  customers  passed by,  knowing they had alread y  heard it all  farther up the

street.

The interior of  the Pink Diamond  was  dark  except for the tiny,  garishly lit  stage. Smoke lurked in  the corners and  in a

swirling blue layer near the ceiling. A  few d ancers wriggled gamely in front of beer-stained tables-not on top of them, as was

 

 

                                                                                          20

 

 

 

 

 

popularly believed of table dances. No table in the Pink Diamond could bear the weight of a healthy girl, and most could have

been reduced to matchsticks by a ninety-pound junkie.

One dancer stood in the dust-choked area behind the stage waiting for her cue. A muffled cough and snort so unded over

the P.A. She  would bet  her  day's tips  that To mmy,  the DJ, was doing a line righ t  there in the  booth. Usually  he  went to  the

men's room, but the manager wasn't here today, and no one else cared.

“And no w-in her last set of the day-The Sweetest Charm of the Orient-MISS LEE!”

The first notes of her  music  pounded out of  the speakers, a Cure song cranked up so loud that the words  were distorted,

but it didn't matter because no one else in this club had ever heard of the Cure except maybe a couple o f the other dancers, and

no  one cared what  music  she danced  to  anyway as long as  she showed her tits.  Miss Lee threw back the  dusty velvet curtain

and  kicked  one  leg out, long  and  silky-pale, shod  in  a  spike-heeled,  silver-chained, black leather ankle boot, and the  crowd

went wild.

If you could call five or six unshaven, seedy-looking men a crowd.

And if a few listless hoots and whistles, the lewd waggling of a tongue in the general direction of her crotch, or the simple

act of lifting beer to mouth could be considered wild.

Miss Lee und ulated onto the tiny stage. A ring of glo be-shaped bulbs lit her from below, playing over her black vinyl T-

strap and  bra  as she  moved, showing o ff what curves she  had. Five  or six of the bulb s  were dead, spaced at uneven intervals

like rotten teeth in a jaw. She stalked to the pole placed strategically at center stage, wrapped her arms around it, and straddled

it. She arched her back and worked the pole with her hips, letting her mo uth fall open and her eyes slip half-shut into the dazed,

drugged-looking expression that was supposed to pass for ecstasy. Then she pushed away from the pole, paused in front of the

first stage rat, and began a slow insistent grind in front of his face.

After  a  couple  of  minutes  he  pinched  two  crumpled  dollar  bills  out  of  his  shirt  pocket  and  slid  them  into  her  garter,

making sure to run his nicotine-withered fingers as far up her thigh as he thought he could get away with. His sour scowl never

wavered. Miss Lee gave him a geisha smile and mo ved on to the next customer, who was marginally young and good-lo oking,

and therefore less likely to tip.

She wondered what they would think if they knew  where her stage name came from. She had been born in New Orleans

of  Korean  parents,  and   Loup,  the  Pink  Diamo nd 's  manager,  had  advised  her  to  pick  “some  kinda  fake  Chinese  name”  to

capitalize on her ethnic looks. (“Lotta guys go in for that kinda thing,” he'd added as if letting her in on a big gu y-secret.) She

had chosen the name Lee after a character from her favorite book, Naked Lunch. When a custo mer was nasty or business was

bad or she was just in no mood to shake her ass for a bunch of human dildoes, she would think of junk-filled needles jabbing

into putrescent veins, of swollen cocks leaking foul greenish slime, of beautiful boys fistfucking b y the light of a rotten-cheese

moon. It didn't make her happy, but it helped.

Her  second  song began. The Pixies'  “No.  13 Baby.”  She  glanced  over  at  the DJ  booth and saw Tommy grimace  at the

whining voice and churning psychedelic guitar: his tastes ran more to bands like Triumph and Foreigner, fake corporate metal,

maybe a little Guns N' Roses if he was feeling really radical.

Miss Lee reached back to unhook  her bra and felt a bill  being tucked into  the back of  her  garter, a dry  hand whispering

over  her  left buttcheek  and gone before she  could turn  her  head.  She  caught  sight  of the customer in one  of the mirrors  that

ringed the stage. A tall black guy, head down, already disappearing into the darkness o f the bar. For some reason the black men

who liked her seemed embarrassed by their attraction. Maybe because she was so pale.

Surreptitiously she reached  around and palmed the bill, slid it to the side of her leg. It was a ten. Jackpot. That pushed her

over the hu ndred-dollar mark, good money fo r the day shift: she could actually afford to go ho me.

She  stared at  her reflection receding into  infinity as she peeled the  vinyl  top away  from  her small  firm b reasts. A thin

silver chain connected them, attached to delicate rings through both o f her cafe-au-lait-colored nipples. The rest of her skin was

a pale matte almond, ribs showing through like slats in a shutter, body too scrawny except for her rounded shelf of a butt and

her tiny potbelly, legs muscled from six-hour shifts on spike heels and  long walks through the French Quarter.

Her  face  was  rather  flat,  her wide  lips  unrouged-she  hated  the  way  she looked in  lip stick,  especially  the  greasy  pink-

orange stuff  most  of the  other  dancers  smeared on  their mouths-and  her dark narrow  eyes smudged  with p urple shadow and

black mascara, half hidden by her messy platinum wig. “Yew got the mo st beautiful hair Ah ever seen,” a rube tourist had once

told her reverently, and how she had lo nged to whip it off and drop it in his lap.

Instead she had smiled sweetly and taken his money.

Third song. Prince's “Darling Nikki,” a small concession to the crowd, give  'em something they've  heard before.  And it

was a dirty song, the famo us  dirty song that  had  kicked  off  the PMRC's entire Crusade Against Dirty Music, or whatever it

was, by using the word masturb ating in its lyrics. Bless it. Miss Lee hooked her thumbs into the elastic of her G-string, pulled

the tiny scrap of vinyl tight over her crotch, so that the folds of her labia were all but outlined in shiny black. To get away with

this trick she had to  shave  her pubic  hair to  the approximate  size  and  shape  of  a  Band-Aid, and it still  wasn 't  enough; they

always wanted to see more.

“Pull it to the side,” some old fart would croak, waving a dollar in her face as if it were worth her job.

“Lemme see some hair.”

“Hey, are you a natural blond e?” That line was always good for a snigger.

The  men  who came  here  could  never  see  enough  of  her  body;  it was  as  if they  wanted  to take  her  apart. If  she  could

remove her G-string, they'd want her to bend over and  spread her cheeks so  they could look up her twat. If she co uld do that,

she supposed, they'd want her to unzip her skin and peel it off.

But it  was a job (though precious few of the men  who  paid her salary seemed to realize that; it  was amazing how  many

thought  the  dancers  did this to  meet  guys  or  get  erotic  thrills).  It  allowed  her  to  set  her o wn  schedule  and  paid  better  than

waiting  tables,  which  she  had  also do ne; dancing  was  mu ch  less demeaning. People saw restaurant  workers as auto matons,

extensions of the tables and chairs, fair game for anything from tip-stiffing to verbal abuse.

But dancers,  especially ones  with any kind of good  looks,  were often treated like  the epitome of  unattainable goddess-

hoo d. Even in a joint like the Pink Diamond, the men were crude and gross and often infuriatin g, b ut hardly ever flat-out mean.

 

                                                                                          21

 

 

 

 

 

And  if  they  were,  the  dancers  could  have  them  kicked  out.  Some  girls  tried  to  get  customers  thrown  out  just  for  making

raunchy remarks. Miss Lee thought this was stupid. Men who made such remarks were usually drunk, and d runk men usually

tipped b etter. And she couldn't help  pondering the morality of girls who  shook their tits in the face o f any guy with a dollar to

his name, but blanched when they heard the word pussy.

It was an okay job, but she wouldn't mind winning the sweepstakes to morrow.

She sank to the stage in a  mo dified split that  set them peering at  her  crotch  in  the eternal  Quest to See  Hair, collected a

few more do llars, and disappeared behind the curtain as the last strains of “Darling Nikki” died. She and the next dancer, a tall

muscular girl with bleached-blond hair and smooth eb ony skin who called  herself Bab y Do ll, groped their way past each other

in the cramped coffinlike area. “How are they?” Baby Doll whispered.

Miss Lee shrugged. “Not great.”

“Honey, they're never great.” Miss Lee laughed. Baby Doll dabbed at her lib erally applied pink y-orange lipstick, hoisted

her heavy breasts so that they rod e high and round in the D-cups of her red sequined halter top, and ducked onstage as Tommy

botched the lead-in to her first song.

Miss Lee walked  down a short shabby corridor  to  the dressin g  room.  The  heels  of her boots dug  into  the bare  concrete

floor and sent bolts of ago ny up her calves. Bo ots were more comfortable than the pu mps most girls wore, since they gave her

ankles some support, but at the end of a shift she could still feel every step she had taken on those four-inch spikes.

She tugged them  off as soon as she  hit the d ressing room,  collected the sweaty dollars stuffed into  her garter and her G-

string, peeled  off both,  and  dove into her  bag  for  street  clothes.  An oversize  black Ministry shirt, a pair of cutoffs,  and  her

Converse All-Stars, one black, one purple, safety-pinned and scribbled upon; she had another pair just like it at home. After six

hours on high heels, there was nothing more comforting than shovin g your sore toes into a pair of soft, sloppy sneakers.

She stopped by the DJ b ooth  to tip out-don't spend it all in one place,  Tommy, sniffle  snort-and cut through the club.  A

blubbery redneck she'd table-danced  for  earlier tried to wave her over, b ut she stared right through him and  kept heading for

the door. Once she was done, she was done.

Just  outside  the  door  she  stopped,  whipped  off  the  platinu m  wig,  and stuffed  it  into  her  bag. Her  hair underneath  was

black, buzzed nearly to  the scalp except for wispy bangs that fell over her face and a few long skinny braids sprouting here and

there. One of her small ears  was pierced with thirteen silver hoops beginning at the lobe and curling gracefully up around the

delicate rim. From the other dangled a single cross with a tiny ruby-eyed skull at its juncture.

She  ran her  hand  through  her  buzz  cut  and  breathed in  the  twilight  air  of  the  French Quarter  and  let Miss  Lee go  for

another night. She was Eddy Sung now, and her evenings were her o wn.

The gas lamp s were just beginning to come on, their soft yellow glow flickering on every corner. She thought of stopping

off for a beer and a dozen oysters on the half-shell somewhere. The salty, briny flavor of them always drove the taste of a day's

false smiles out of her mouth. But no, she decided, she wo uld go home and  check her mail and her messages, and then maybe

she wo uld call Zachary and see if he wanted to go eat oysters. They were supposed to be an aphrodisiac; maybe they'd work on

him.

Ha. She should be so lucky.

Edd y allowed  herself a rueful little laugh and set off throu gh the Quarter for home.

 

 

Chapter Five 

 

Zach  was already thro wing  the last  of his movable belongings into his car  when  Eddy arrived. She  had run all the way

from her apartment on St. Philip after hearing his message o n her answering machine, and her face was flushed and sweaty, her

breath co ming in harsh shallow gasps.

But Zach looked worse. His green eyes had a feverish sheen. Beneath a ridiculo us black bad -cowbo y hat she hadn't seen

before, his  peaked  pale  face was nearly  luminescent in the gaslit  gloom  of little Rue  Madison. He crammed  a  box of  papers

into the back seat of his Mustang, turned to grab another b ox, and saw Eddy. His face froze. For an instant he looked terrified.

Then he stumbled toward her and threw his  arms around her.  Her heart broke a little, but Eddy was used to this; it happened

every time she saw Zach.

“They got you?”

He nodd ed. The words I told you so hung in the air, but she would not dream of speaking them.

“How bad?”

“The warning said They know who you are, They know where you are. I don't think They really know where I am yet or

They'd be here. But They could be finding o ut right now. They could show up anytime.”

Edd y  glanced nervously back  toward  Chartres Street.  Except  for  an  occasional ripple of street jazz  or  burst of  drunken

laughter, all was quiet.

“I'm taking the incriminating stuff with me. The computers, my disks, my notebooks. The place will be clean if you want

to  move  in.  If  They  show  up  and want to  search, let  'em search.  They  won't find  a damn  thin g.”  He looked  pro ud,  defiant,

exhausted. Eddy reached up to touch her  fingertips to his perspiring  face. Her heart  was not just breaking but imploding. He

was all but gone.

“Co me sleep at my place ton ight,” she said . “No one can find yo u there. Leave in the morning, with some rest.”

He d idn't even hesitate. “I want to get as good a start as possible. If I go no w I'll have the cover of the night.”

The cover of the night. To Zach this was so me b ig ad venture. He was scared, yes-but more than that, he was excited. She

could hear  it in  the tremo r of his voice, see  it  in  the blaze  of his eyes. He was like a racehorse  getting ready to  run,  elegant

nostrils flaring, velvet flanks bunching and tensing.

She had thought perhaps one last nigh t together . . . But she knew what it would have been like. They would have stayed

up  drinking  and  smoking  pot  and  talkin g  until  dawn,  maybe  whipped  up a  batch  of  cayenne popcorn  and  watched  a  weird

 

 

                                                                                          22

 

 

 

 

 

movie or two. And that wo uld have been it. Zach didn't mind if she leaned against his shoulder, didn't mind a casual touch of

the hand or ruffling of  his unruly  hair. But an ything more obvio us on her part- like the couple of times she'd leaned o ver and

kissed  him  full  on the  lips-would  be met  with  “I  can't, Ed, I just can't.” And if she asked  why, she would get the infuriating

answer, “Because I like you.”

It wasn't as if Zach were celibate or gay, either. She had seen him pick up scores o f people at the clubs and b ars they both

frequented, and the ratio was only slightly in favo r of cute young males. He always seemed to go for the good-looking and the

empty-headed, preferab ly  drunk,  ideally  with  some absent girlfriend o r boyfriend  to  absorb the  aftershock. He had only one

inflexible rule: they  had  to have a place to fuck. He  wo uld  not take them  back to  his  sanctuary  of an apartment,  would  not

share his nest with his bimbos. Maybe he was embarrassed for his computer to see them.

The next day-or night-he would brush them off, not in an especially cruel way, but in a manner that left no d oub t that they

had been nothing  but caprices. It was, Edd y thought,  as if Zach considered sex a bio logical need on the order o f going to  the

bathroom: yo u didn't form an emotional bond with every toilet you  took a crap in, and when  yo u  were done, you flushed and

walked away- feeling better, to be sure, but not really thinking about what you'd just done.

It  raised  Eddy's blood p ressure, and frustrated  her, and made her crazy.  Any other  friend  or potential lover with such an

attitude  would  have  been  long  since  trashed.  But  Zachary  was  so  sweet,  so  smart,  so  co ol  otherwise  that  this  seemed  an

aberration, a flaw or handicap he could not be blamed for, like a strawberry birthmark or a missing finger. She sup posed part of

it  was the hell he had watched his parents put  each other through, and the  hell he had  endured  at their  hands. And  she  kept

hop ing part of  it could be blamed on his age; almost  any character defect was forgivable at nineteen. (Eddy was twenty-two,

and far more worldwise.)

“Won't they know your car?” she asked.

“I've already switched the plates.”

She glanced at the back end of the Mustang. Zach's license plate read FET-213, which looked awfully familiar. “Isn't that

the same one you always had?”

“I didn 't switch plates on the car,” he explained patiently. “I switched them in the DMV computer. My plate is comp letely

wiped out of existence, and I gave myself the plate of some Cajun's 1965 Ford pickup down  in Houma.”

“Oh.”

“It can't be traced to me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Trust me, Ed! I'm making a clean getaway. I just need to get going.”

They stood awk wardly in the deepening gloom staring at each other. “You already have a key,” Zach said. “You want the

extra?”

“No. You'll need it if you come back and I'm not home.”

“I'm not co ming back, Eddy,”  he said  gently.  “Not  for  a long time, anyway. I'll kill  myself before I'll let them  lock me

up.”

“I k no w.” She  would not lose  her composure,  would not  slobber  and  bawl,  would not b eg him to  take  her along. If he

wanted her along, he wo uld have said so.

“So-well-I can't call here, but I'll try to get in touch somehow.”

“You do  that.” She crossed her arms over her chest, shoo k a few tiny braids out of her face, fixed him with a steely eye.

“Eddy . . .”

“Don't  you fucking Eddy me! You  could have been  more careful! You didn't have to show o ff and take so many dumb

chances-it wasn't  like you needed  the money. You could  have .  . . stayed!”  Now she was crying. She bared  her  teeth at him,

narrowed her eyes nearly to  slits to hide the tears.

“I kno w,” he said. “I know.” He took two steps forward and enfolded her in his arms again. She laid her wet cheek against

the soft cotton of his T-shirt, breathed his smoky,  slightly sweaty  boy-smell, held  his skinny body tight  against her. This was

ho w it should have been all along.

Too  bad he hadn't agreed.

“Be safe,” she told him at last.

“I'll be careful.”

“Where will you go?”

He shrugged. “North.”

They stared at each other again, at a loss for words but no t yet ready to say good-bye. Then Zach leaned do wn and-ever so

carefully, as if touching together two live wires-placed his lips against Edd y's. She felt the electric thrill of contact, the very tip

of  his tongue  touching  hers,  and  an  exquisite  heat  exploded  from  the  center  of  her  womb.  For  an  instant  she  thought  her

innards would simply melt out of her pussy and run down her thighs, so intense was the rush. But then Zach pulled b ack and

stepped away.

“Gotta go.”

Edd y nodded, did not trust herself to speak. She watched him walk aro und  the front of the car, slide into the driver's seat,

turn  the key  in  the ignition.  The po werful  engine leapt to life, ready to carry Zachary Bo sch far away from New Orleans, far

away from Eddy Sung. The horn beeped twice and then he was pulling away from the curb, red taillights pausing at the corner,

then mergin g into the nighttime traffic o f Decatur Street.

Gone.

Edd y  stood  for several minutes in the shifting shado ws  cast  by  the wrought-iron balconies overhead.  She  glanced at  the

door that led up  to Zach 's place, touched the key  ring in her pocket, then shook her head. The Madison Street ap artment was

much nicer than her own  roach-infested closet, and she knew the  rent  was p aid for the  rest  of the year. Zach hated thinking

about mundane matters  like rent,  so  he p aid it off at the beginning of each  year when he renewed his lease. She wou ld  start

moving her things in tomorrow.  But  she could  not go up  there now, while  his  presence still lingered  painfully strong, like a

voice just beyond the range of hearing, like an ato m-thin membrane between reality and memory.

 

                                                                                          23

 

 

 

 

 

She turned and walked back up  Madison, turned left on Chartres, and headed for Jackson Square. The spires of St. Louis

Cathedral loomed ahead, moon-pale and  mysterious, stabbing like bony fingers into  the purple night sky. A brick co mmons lay

between the cathedral and the square, and kids in thrift-shop black and painted leather and  torn denim were already beginning

to congregate there, smoking cigarettes, passing bottles of cheap wine.

Edd y stopped at the bank machine on the corner of Chartres and St.  Ann. She still  had her day's pay in  her po cket, a fat

wad that rubbed again st her leg and  made her nervous. She would deposit it, saving out thirty dollars-enou gh to get goo d and

drunk. Then she might go and join the kid s on the square, or she might find a dark little bar and drown her sorro ws alone.

She filled out a deposit slip, stuffed her money in the envelope, popped her card into the slot and  punched in her personal

number, then the necessary informatio n. She heard little wheels grinding deep inside the machine. The screen asked her if she

needed travelers' checks  for that summer vacation. Finally her  eighty-dollar deposit was pro cessed and the  machine spit back

her card, then a printed receipt.

Edd y  turned  away,  glanced idly at the receip t, and sto pped dead  in  her  tracks.  A couple of  fratboy tourists  crossing the

commo ns  nearly  walked  into  her, swore at  her, and  stumbled o n. She ignored them,  kept staring dumbly at the slip  of paper.

She tried squinting and blinking, but the numb ers stayed the same.

She'd paid  her  rent a couple of days  earlier, and that p ut the balance  of her checking account  at a p recarious $380.82. It

no w stood at $10,380.82.

She'd never let Zach give her money. It was too dangerous for him, and she liked  taking care of herself.

But it appeared  he had left her a farewell present.

 

He got on Highway 90-other than superinterstates 59 and 10, which were as dull as direct-dialing a long distance call and

paying for it with your own credit card, the two-lane blacktop  was pretty much the only  way out of New Orleans-and left the

city under cover of the night. The Ro lling Stones song o f that name pumped mo no tonously in his head  (curled up baby, curled

up  tig ht),  an  unwelcome  echo from the  bruised  ache and  white-hot hatred  of his  eleventh  year. It  reminded  him  that he had

hardly any tapes  in  the car. He'd left his music, books,  and movies for Edd y, since he could always get more.  But he should

have  bro ught  a  few  for  the  road.  He'd  stop  and  get  some  later,  when  his  thoughts qu ieted  down  enough  to  make  listening

worthwhile.

He  was  already  sick o f  wearing his  new  hat, so  he  chucked  it  into the back  and  raked  a  hand  through his  hair. It was

tangled,  dirty,  and  felt  like  it  was  standing  up  at  fifteen  different  angles.  So  much  the  better  for  that  popular  Edward

Scissorhands look.

A  few miles out of New  Orleans, 9 0 wound past  an enclave of  Vietnamese restaurants  and stores, an exotic  little Asian

village set  down  in  rural  Louisiana,  nurtured by  the  bounty  of  the  rivers,  lakes,  and bayo us. Though Eddy  was  Korean, the

sight made him think of her, gave him an empty feeling somehow. He'd eaten dinner at her parents' ho use in Kenner once, had

been  served oyster pancakes and  a  wonderful concoction of rice,  fresh greens, seaweed,  raw fish, and  hot sauce heaped in a

giant glass bowl and called fea-dup-bop. Zach kept hearing it as fetus of Bob, but that hadn't lessened his appetite. Once Eddy's

mom  saw  he  loved  the  turbo-hot  sauce,  she  kept  plying  him  with  increasingly  fiery  tidbits  and  condiments  until  he  was

munching whole the deadly little red  peppers she minced into her kimchee.

It was then, he guessed, that the Sungs had decided their daughter just might be able to marry an American. Not that they

had  much to  say  about  any  of  Eddy's  actions —  though they believed  she  was a cocktail  waitress  at  the  Pink  Diamond,  or

pretend ed they did-and not that Eddy expected Zach to marry her.

He felt a twinge of unease that was as close to guilt as he ever got. He knew perfectly well how different Eddy had wanted

their friendship to be. But it was impo ssible for him. Loving so meone was okay, and fucking someone wasn't bad either. But if

you  did  both with the same person,  it  gave  them too much  power over you; it let them  plunge their  shaping hands  into  your

personality, gave them a share of your soul.

He had grown  up watching his  father change his  mother from a  sickly-scared  but  harmless creature into  a sadistic  bitch

with twisted knives for fingers and a spitting, shrieking mouth. A mouth full of broken teeth, to be sure-but all the pain she had

taken from her husband she gave back to her son, a gift wrapped in cruel words, signed in blood.

And  his parents  had  loved  each  other, in  whatever  mutually  parasitic  way  they  were  capable  of. He  had  watched their

heart-ripping  fights  and  sodden  reconciliations,  heard  their  anguished  lovemaking  through  the  thin  walls  of  many  cheap

apartments too often not to believe that so mehow they were passionately in love, or had been once.

There had  never been room  for  him. Zach sometimes thought that if  he  had not been b orn,  the two of them might have

managed  a kind of happiness to gether, Joe with his broken -backed dreams and  his fierce intelligence tamped down b y liquor,

Evangeline  with her bruises  and black eyes and always-hungry loins. If o nly his mother  had managed to scrape up, pun  most

certainly intended, the cash for the abortion she often wished aloud that she had had. If only his father's rubber hadn't broken-

and ho w many times had Joe taunted him about that damn rubber? The thing was practically a Bosch family heirloom.

In the  too-silent  darkness Zach  punched  at the buttons  of  the radio,  twisted the  tuning  knob.  Frizzly static  greeted  him,

then a spurt of jazz. A ripple of piano and tympani, a trembling, exalting alto saxo pho ne. He disliked the Dixieland jazz he had

heard all his life, as he did Cajun music and indeed anything with accordions or brass in it, anything that sounded like growing

up in New Orleans. Such music twisted barbs into his memory, ran too deeply into his blo od.

But this wasn't New Orleans stuff. Kansas City, maybe; it sounded less frenetically cheerful, exotic somehow, musing and

dreaming. He left it on.

After  the  Vietnamese  enclave,  the  highway  passed  through  an  interminable  stretch  of  beach  cabins  with  cute  names

(Jimmy's Juke Joint, Li'l Bit O'Heaven, Moon Mansion  replete with a big plywood ass shining  in  his  headlights) and private

driveways  that went straight do wn  to the dark  water on either  side.  This  was the beginning of bayou  country, and there was

very  little solid land. Zach pondered the name of his  own imaginary cabin-Hacker Hideaway?  Outlaw  Asylum? No: Bosch's

Blues. Check all Uzis and Secret Service b adges at the door.

Gradually the cabins grew sparser and shabbier; so me were bereft even of their names, or b ore signs with the words and

crude bright  illustrations  worn away.  Then  they  were  gone,  and  the  road  was  empty,  straight,  flanked  by  dark expanses of

 

                                                                                          24

 

 

 

 

 

water and woods and shadow. He crossed a bridge that arced high above the water, saw moonlight shimmering on the surface

like pale jewels.

The  radio  station  never  faded o ut, though  Zach thought he drove  fifty  miles  or  more, past  bland  green  vistas  and  ugly

stretches  of  consumerland, K-marts  and QuikStops and fast-food  charnelhouses  shut do wn against  the  night. In  one of these

towns a fried human ear had been found in a box of takeout chicken, like some cannibalistic remake of Blue Velvet by way of

Colonel  Sanders.  Zach  remembered  reading  the story in  some  tab loid  out  of  Baton  Rouge  and  wishing  he'd  thoug ht  it  up

himself, wondering if it were true or  whether there was  another prankster out there  somewhere, creating urban mythology in

giant digital strokes. The same song seemed to keep playin g over and over, as if the DJ had set the CD on infinite replay and

gone to sleep. The sax wailed and sobbed. The piano dreamed behind it.

At  last he  reached the Gulf  Co ast and  began his meandering  trek  along  it. The little  coastal  towns shut do wn after  ten;

there  was o nly  the long deserted  stretch of white beach broken by marinas and piers, and  beyond it the b lack expanse of the

Gulf of Mexico.

His parents had brought him here once, when he was ten or so. Zach remembered smelling the salt air as they drove down,

imagining the blissful caresses of the sand and water. In reality the sand  had had an unpleasantly powdery feel, like ordinary

playground  dirt;  there had been  a  scum  of  pollution at the  water's edge, a pale  brown  froth  that ebbed  and  flowed with  the

waves. It smelled faintly of dead fish, engine sludge, chemicals gone bad.

But out past the beach the water was the color of new denim, and  felt so goo d on his parched , abused skin. He had ducked

his head beneath the surface, seal-like,  and hadn't stopped  swimming out to  sea until his  father's harsh hands grabbed him by

the hair and wedged the back of his swim trunks up the crack of his scrawny ass.

The car swerved slightly to the right. Zach caught it at once, but the memories were starting to hyp notize him, to pull him

toward the water.

A  to wn  marker  flashed  by.  PASS  CHRISTIAN,  pronounced  not  like  “Christian,”  Zach  knew,  but  like  a  girl's  name:

CHRISTIE-ANN. He  was  already  in  Mississippi,  and  hadn't  even noticed.  Fine old Southern mansions loomed  sepulchrally

along the  left  side  of  the  road,  shrouded  in  ghostly curtains  of  Spanish  moss  and  the  giant  knurled  oaks  that  had  hung  on

through a hundred hurricane seasons or more. The beach on the right was p ure white, shining.

Zach hooked  a left off the highway and headed for Pass Christian's downtown, such as it was. A man was pissing against

a wall outside the Sea Witch Tavern. A dim, tempting b lue light burned somewhere deep in the bar, like a siren luring travelers

to a watery grave. The other buildings were dark and still.

After  driving  several blocks, Zach  came upon a lone  convenience store  called  Bread Basket, its  neon  flickering  fitfully,

flooding  its little  patch  of  town  with  erratic  dead  white  light. There  were  no  cars  in  the parking  lot,  but  Zach  saw  a  clerk

nod ding at the register, blond head drooping over the Slim Jims and Confederate lig hter displays.

As  he  parked  the car,  the  jazz tune  finally  ended.  He  heard  a  guttural  voice  as  of a  DJ roused  from  long  and  peaceful

slumber. “Uh. Yeah. That was, uh . . . 'Laura' by Charlie Parker ... a whole buncha times . . .”

The  inside  of  the  store  assaulted  his corneas  like  an  acid  vision  after the  calm  silver  and  charcoal  of  the  nig ht.  Zach

observed that the clerk had b een not napping, but studying with rapt attention a magazine spread out on the countertop. It was

open to a black-and-white photograph of a lanky, bare-chested, feral-faced b oy who loo ked a lot like the clerk himself.

“C'n I help you?” A plastic nametag was pinned to the lapel of the boy's blue polyester store jacket. LEAF. Hippie parents

would do the damndest things.

“Yeah. Can I smell your coffee?”

“Huh?”

“Your coffee.” Zach waved at the coffee machine and its trappings against the opposite wall. “Can I just smell it?”

“Sure ... I guess.” Leaf glanced down at the photo again, then unhurriedly closed the magazine. It was an old issue of GQ.

“If you're lookin' for Hawaiian Kona, though, you're out of luck. It's just evil ole homebrew.”

“That's  okay.  I  don't  actually  want  to   drink  an y.”  Zach  crossed  to  the  coffee  maker,  pulled  the  pot  out  o f  the  metal

apparatus that kept it at  sub -boiling point, and passed it  slowly back  and forth beneath his nose. Hot bitter steam wafted into

his face, moistened his tired eyes. He felt microscopic particles of caffeine traveling up his nostrils, into his lungs, out through

the interfaces of his bloodstream and straight into  the hard drive of his weary brain.

His heart gave a jump and began beating faster. The rush made his mouth dry. As he grabbed a bottle of mineral water out

of the cooler, he found himself wondering why a cute kid who read GQ and knew about Hawaiian Kona coffee was working at

a Bread Basket in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

At the register, Zach set his drink on the counter, added a lighter (patterned in gaudy pink and black zigzags, but no reb el

flag), and pulled out his wallet. He hadn't tried to access any of his various bank accounts before he left town, kno wing that all

of them could be watched. And he could get more. He'd only brought the stash of read y cash he kept for an emergency such as

this; he had always known that he might have to bail out someday, and that he would have to do it fast. No w he found that the

smallest bill in his wallet was a hundred.

“Can't change it,” Leaf said apologetically. “They only let me keep fifty do llars in the register after ten, and I haven't had

shit for business.”

“I'm really thirsty.”

“Well—”

Zach caught the other  boy's  eyes  with his own and held  them. Leafs eyes were  long  and slightly  tilted, gimlet eyes, the

same warm honey-gold as his hair. “Just give me the stuff,” he suggested. “I'll get you stoned.”

This was a simplified version of a hacker techniq ue known as social engineering. It could be used to reassure an o perator

that she was talking to  a bona-fide telco technician; it was good for all manner of scamming, impersonation, and general fraud.

This  cute  clerk  was  no challenge  at all. The seeds of  rebellion  were  already planted.  Zach  could see the kid mulling  it  over,

talking himself into it.

He leaned  an elbow on the co unter and offered his most charming smile. “What do you say?”

“Well . . . oh, fuck it. Take whatever you want. I don't care. I'm quitting so on anyway.”

 

                                                                                          25

 

 

 

 

 

“Thanks. That's real  neighborly o f you.”  Zach whisked  the lighter  into  his  pocket, cracked the  mineral water open, and

took a long gulp. It tasted flat and  dead, but then he was used to the carcinogenic soup that passed for tapwater in New Orleans.

Plenty o f flavor in that.

Leaf snorted. “Neighborly. Like you live in Mississippi. I'll bet you're from New York or something.”

Zach had n't heard that one before. People sometimes thought he was part Oriental-a fact that amused Eddy no end-but no

one had ever accused him of being fro m New York.

He d ecided the idea ap pealed to him. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “How'd you k no w?”

“The way you talk. And you don't look like you're from around here. The only other place you could've come fro m is New

Orleans.”

“Never been there.” In a burst of inspiration, Zach added, “Yet. It's where I'm headed.”

Their eyes met again and locked . For an instant Zach imagined that Leaf was able to look straight into his brain, to see the

lie arid the convoluted reason behind it, the miles he had already run and all the miles still ahead. But Zach knew that was not

true.

And even if it were, he could see in those warm ho neycolored eyes that this kid would n't care.

 

Leaf accepted Zach's offer and locked up the store, and they went into the back room to smo ke one of the joints Zach had

rolled for the trip . Leaf lounged o n a crate of toilet paper, long legs sp rawled before him. There was a small defiant hole in one

knee of the faded jeans he wore with his uniform shirt. The skin beneath was do wned with fine gold hairs.

Zach leaned against the opposite wall watching Leaf's nervous gestures, tasting Leaf's lips o n the joint. The stockroom of

a convenience store in Mississippi seemed a stupid place to get waylaid this early in the trip. But the damn kid was making his

mouth water.

“I'm quitting to morrow,” Leaf said after his third toke. “I hate this fuckin' place.”

“What are yo u doing here, anyway?”

“I'm  an art  student  in  Jackson.  Photography.  I  was  supposed  to  spend  the summer  here  taking  pictures,  preserving the

god damn history or something. But it sucks. None of the rednecks know anything and none of the rich old farts will even talk

to me. I don't know which stuff is supposed to be important. I guess I'll fail my project.”

“Can't you do some research?”

“What do you mean?”

“Go to the library, find  out where peop le lived, what houses are haunted, that kind  of thing. Most  of the old newspapers

are probably on microfilm.”

Leaf looked  up at  Zach. The  whites of  his  eyes were  shot  with a faint  scarlet tracery of veins, but the irises and pupils

were heartbreakingly clear. “I'm a totally visual person,” he said. “I hate reading.”

Zach b it his tongue hard, dug  his  fingernails  into the soft meat of  his p alms. That  was  the kind of  casual statement  that

could  send  his  blood  pressure  rocketing  if  he  let  it.  But  no w  it  produced  only  a  faint  twinge  in  his  heart,  like  a  filament

stretched  to  the breaking point. So the kid was vapid;  so  much the better.  It made things easy, and Zach would never have to

see him again after tonight. “You hate all kinds of stuff,” he said.

Leaf shrugged. “I guess.”

“Tell me something you like.”

This was evidently a tough one. Zach co uld see the kid sifting through possibilities, rejecting them one by o ne. “I like the

beach,” he said  finally.  “I  never  go  in the  water, but I like to  sit  on the  sand and stare  out  to sea.  It makes me  feel like  I'm

looking into infinity. You know?”

A screen full of scrolling numbers flashed through Zach's head. He nodded .

“I like sleeping.”

Another nod, this one coupled with the barest suggestion of a shrug. Tell me so mething I couldn't have guessed.

“I like you o kay.”

They had both known they weren't just locking themselves back here to smo ke a joint, but the rest of their agenda had to

be  obliquely  tested, so  that n o one would  lo se  face. Zach  knew the  game and approved.  He  smiled and raised  an  eyebrow,

waited for more.

“Oh, just come over here and let's fuck.”

Now that  was  Zach's  id ea  of  an excellent  pickup  line.  He  slid  across to the  case  of toilet paper and suddenly Leaf was

upo n  him,  face  p ressed  up  against  his,  o ne  hand   slipping  under  his  T-shirt,  the  other  squeezing   his  leg  beneath  his  lo ose

cutoffs. Leafs mouth found his and closed over it, hot little to ngue probing and searching, piney flavor of the weed still on his

lips. His spidery hands flew over Zach's skin as if trying to memorize its warmth and texture. His to uch was starving, frantic.

The poor kid probably hadn't been laid all summer.

Zach pushed him gently back against the wall, u nbuttoned the tacky polyester uniform, stroked the boy's smooth chest and

the hollow of his rib cage, managed to calm him down a little. He kissed  the side of Leafs throat; the pulse that beat there was

as agitated as his o wn. The skin smelled o f soap and  salt, tasted of clean sweat.

Leaf slid to  the concrete  floor  and  sprawled b etween Zach's  knees, p ressed  his face into  Zach's  stomach  and  mumbled

so mething unintelligible. Zach cupped the boy's chin, tilted  the sharp  feral face up to his own. “What did you say?”

“I want to make you come.”

“How?”

Tho se  exotic  honey-colored  eyes  tried  to  meet  his,  then  wavered. Leaf  wasn't  used  to  talking  dirty.  “How?”  he  asked

again.

“I want to suck yo ur dick.”

The words increased his desire, made him ache and burn. “Go on,” Zach said through clenched teeth. “Just do it.”

The boy's hand s fu mbled with the button fly of Zach's pants, friction driving his hard-on nearly to the point of pain. Then

all at once Leafs hot mo uth slid onto him, then pulled all the way back to a teasing, flickering tongue-tip, then swallowed him

 

                                                                                          26

 

 

 

 

 

deeper yet. Zach felt the pot and  pleasure swirling in his skull, deliciously mingling. God love the kid, it turned  out  he knew

what he was doing after all.

Zach always app reciated it when people surprised him.

 

Twenty minutes later, stocked up with a handful of lighters, a sixpack of mineral, water, and two bags of jalapeno potato

chips, Zach  renewed  his acquaintance  with Highway 90. It  would take him through Biloxi, through  the tag-end of Alabama,

and all the way to Pensacola in ano ther hour or two. After that, he thought, he would get off 90 but keep heading east, all the

way to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Somewhere, he knew, there was a beach that was clean.

Leaf hadn't asked him to stay overnight, hadn't seemed put  out in the slightest by the encounter. After getting each other

off  they  had  rested  together  for  a  few  minutes,  embracing  loosely,  catching  their  breaths.  Zach  had  spent  the  moments

appreciating the spare,  elegant  lines of the  boy's face and  body,  admiring the  sheen o f his silky  hair  in  the  half-light  of  the

storeroom. Then by some silent mutual consent they rose and pulled  their clothes to gether and went blinking back o ut into the

unmerciful brightness of the store.

At the do or they clasp ed hands briefly. “By the way,” Leaf told him, “I like yo ur shirt.”

Zach glanced down at himself. He was still wearing the exploding Kennedy head. He wo ndered id ly if some buried  sixth

sense had made him put it on this mornin g as a twisted metaphor for what was to follow.

“Thanks,” he said, and gave Leaf's talented fingers one final squeeze. In its way it was quite a tender farewell.

The day had followed a steep  curve down to hell, but now  it seemed to be inching back  up. The interlude with Leaf had

relaxed him, left him feeling sharp and awake, as if Leaf had imb ued him with some vital essence ... as indeed he had. Surely

there was some energy in come, some electrifying charge.

And Zach had given as good as he got. He always deserted in the end, like the bastard Eddy thought he was, but he always

tried to  make  his  lo vers  feel good  in  the brief  spans of time he spent  with them. He had even left Leaf  with another  tightly

rolled, sticky joint to stave off tomorrow night's ennui.

All  in  all,  Zach  mused  as  he  reconnected  with  the  silent  ribbon  of  highway,  it  had  pretty  much  been  the  perfect

relationship.

 

 

Chapter Six 

 

Trevor  awoke  from  a  dream  of  blank  paper  laughing  up  at  him,  his  mind  a  monochrome  wash  of  panic,  his  heart

clenching around a core of emptiness. If he couldn't draw ... if he co uldn't draw . . .

The sheets  Kinsey had given  him were twined around his legs, sodden  with  nightmare  sweat. Trevor  kicked them  away

and shoved himself upright. His bag lay on the floor next to the sofa. He pulled out his sketchbook, opened it to a clean page,

and sketched furiously for several minutes. He had no idea what he was drawin g; he was only reassuring himself that he could.

When  his  heart  stopped  pounding  and  his  panic  began  to  fade,  Trevor found  himself  staring  at  a  rough  sketch  of  his

brother lying on a stained mattress, small hands curled in death, head crushed into the pillow. He remembered that today was

the day his family had died.

Trevor felt like throwing the book across the room. Instead he closed it and slid it back into  his bag, found his toothbrush

in the zipper pocket, then stood up and stretched. He heard his shoulders crack, his spine make a noise like a muffled burst of

gun fire.

Despite the flattened cushio ns and the occasio nal sharp end of a sp ring, Kinsey's sofa had been a welcome place to sleep.

Trevo r was surprised to  find it comforting to be invited into  someone's home, to  have  a  known hu man presence  in  the  next

room. He had grown used to cheap hotels and run-down boardinghouses. On the other side of the wall might be drunken sobs

or  curses,  the  moist  tempo of  sex,  the  silence o f an  empty room-but never anything  familiar,  never  anyone  who cared  that

Trevo r Black was there.

Kinsey's  living  room  was  sp arsely  furnished  with  more  thrift-shop  relics:  an  easy  chair,  a  reading  lamp,  a  wooden

bookcase  listing  under  the  weight  of  too  many  volumes.  Paperbacks,  mostly.  Trevor  read  some  titles  as  he  passed.  One

Hundred  Years  of  Solitud e,  The  Stand,  Short  Stories  of  Franz  Kafka,  whole  shelves  of  Hesse  and  Kerouac,  even  Lo!  by

Charles Fort. Eclectic tastes, that Kinsey.

There were some crates of co mics too, but Trevor did not look through them. He had his own cop ies of Birdland. Coming

upo n other cop ies in a comic shop or so meone's collection was always unnerving, like seeing someo ne he had thought dead.

There was no TV, Trevor noted ap provingly. He hated TV. It brought back memories of a crowded dayroom at the Home,

the sweaty  smell  of  boys,  voices raised  in fury  over  what channel  to  watch.  The  stupidest  ones  had  always  screamed  for  a

cartoon show out of Raleigh called Barney's Army. Barney was a cartoon character himself, squat and ugly, announcing kids'

birthdays and cracking lame jokes between Looney Toons shorts. He was so  badly animated that no part of him moved but his

pitifully stubb y, flipperlike arms,  his prognathous jaw, and his big googly eyes. Trevor figured he had probably hated Barney

as much as any real person he had ever known.

The bathroom  tiles  were spotless, d eliriously cold against h is bare feet.  He used the Tom's of  Maine  cinnamon-flavored

toothpaste on the edge of the sink, then splashed cold water on his  face. For a long mo ment he stood starin g  into the mirror.

His father's eyes looked back at him, ice rimmed in black, faintly challenging. Do you dare?

You bet I do.

The door of  Kinsey's  bedroom  was  ajar.  Trevor peeked  into  the shad y  room.  Kinsey's tall form lay  sprawled across the

bed, skinny  legs  half-covered  by  a  vivid  patch-work  quilt. He was the  only person Trevor had ever  seen  who  actually  wore

pajamas-bright blue ones, the same co lor as his eyes, patterned with little gold moons and stars. Trevor hadn't even known they

made pajamas in Kinsey's size.

 

 

 

                                                                                          27

 

 

 

 

 

For  a  few  minutes  he  watched  the  gentle rise  and  fall  of  Kinsey's  chest,  the  draft  from  the  op en  window  that  stirred

Kinsey's  scraggly hair, and he  wondered if  he had ever slept  so  peacefully. Even when Trevor  wasn't  having bad dreams his

sleep was uneasy, sporadic, full of flickering pictures and half-remembered faces.

But the lumino us  face of the clock on Kinsey's nightstand (no cheap digital job, but a molded-plastic relic done in early

sixties aq ua, its corners rounded and streamlined) told him it was nearly noon. He  had to go. Not to the  house yet, no ;  but he

had to take the first step toward the house.

Trevor slung  his  backpack o ver  his  shoulder, stepped  out  into the tranquil  Sunday  morning,  and  locked  Kinsey's door

behind him.

 

The road that led out to Missing  Mile's small graveyard was hot and flat and muddy. Trevo r was accustomed to  walking

city streets, where the lang uid haze of summer was shot through with blasts of air-cond itioning from doors constantly o pening

onto the sidewalk, where you could always d uck under an awning or the overhang of a b uilding, into a little pocket of shade.

But this road, Burnt Church Road according to the crooked signpost where it ran into Firehouse Street, offered no shade

except the occasional leafy canop y of a tree. The houses out here were few and far apart. Most had been built on farmland, and

the road was bordered by fields of leathery tobacco and bristling corn. This was a nicer area than Violin Road; the dirt here had

not yet been farmed to death. The houses were not new or fancy, but their yards were large grassy expanses unmarred by scrap

heaps or the rusting hulks of autos.

The sun beat mercilessly on the road and on the coarse gravel that paved it, broken granite like the crushed leavings of a

cemetery, mired  in  wet red  clay, catching the light  and shattering it into a  million razored fragments. Trevor was  glad when

clouds  began  to  blow  in,  a  slowbrewing  summer  thunderstorm  on  the  way.  His  brain  felt  baked  in  his  skull,  and  his  skin

already tingled with fresh sunburn.  His  backpack  was waterproof, to  keep  his sketchbook dry. If the storm  held long enough,

he wo uld start a new drawing at the graveyard. If not, he would sit on the ground and let the rain soak him.

Trevor could feel the nearly silent presence of death up ahead, not precisely watchful, not even really aware, but someho w

detectable. It was like a frequency on a radio, or rather the empty space on the band between freq uencies: there were no signals

to pick up, but still you heard a faint electric hum, not quite silence, not quite sound. It was like being in a roo m someone had

just left, a roo m that still bore the faint scent o f breath and  skin, the subtle displacement of air. An epileptic kid had died on his

hall at the Boys' Home once, pitched a grand mal fit in the hours before d awn, when no one was awake to help  him. Trevor had

woken in the cool, still morning and known that death was close by, though he hadn't known who it had come to, or how.

But the graveyard gave off only a quiet buzz like crickets in the sun, like the cogs of a watch beginning to wind down. Set

back  at the shady dead end  of Burnt Church Road,  surrounded by woods on three  sides, it was a  place that felt  like surcease

from pain. Trevor had never seen the burial place  of his family. As  soon  as it  came into  view,  he knew  that this was a fitting

prelude to going ho me.

Of course they hadn't let him attend the funeral. As far as Trevor knew, there had been no prop er funeral. Bobb y McGee

had burned most of his bridges when they left Austin, and they had no family but each o ther. The town, he supposed, had paid

for the interment of three cheap pine coffins.

Later,  a  group  of  comics artists  and publishers  had  taken  up  money  for  a  sto ne.  Someone had  sent  Trevor  a  Polaroid

snapshot of it years ago. He remembered turning the picture over and over in his hands until the oil from his fingers marred the

slick  paper, wondering who  had  cared  enough to  visit and photograph the  grave of his family  but not enough to rescue him

from the hell that was the Boys' Home.

He also  remembered a  drawing  he  had do ne soon afterward,  a cutaway view  of the grave. He made the  headstone  look

shiny and slick, as if  some thick  dark  substance coated  the  granite. The earth  below  was  loamy, seeded here  and  there with

worms,  nuggets  of  rock,  stray  bones  come  loose  from  their  moorings.  There  were  three  coffins,  two  large  ones  with  long

shrouded forms  within, their folds suggesting ruined faces. The shape in the littlest coffin was  strange-it might have been one

form grossly misshapen, or two small forms mingled.

Mr. Webb, the junior high art teacher who hid Listerine bottles full o f rotgut whiskey in his desk, had called the drawing

morb id and crumpled it. When Trevor flew at him, skinny arms outstretched, hands hooked into claws going unthinkingly for

Webb 's  eyes,  the  teacher backhanded  him before  he  knew what he  was  doing.  Both  were  disciplined,  Webb with  a  week's

suspension, Trevor with  expulsion from  art  class  and confiscation  of his sketchbook.  He  covered  the walls  of his room  with

furious  art:  swarming  thousand-legged  bugs,  soaring  skeletal  birds,  beautifully  lettered  curse  words,  screaming  faces  with

black holes for eyes.

They never let him take an art class again.

Now here was the place of his drawing and his dreams, the place he had imagined so  often that it alread y seemed familiar.

The graveyard was much as he had pictured  it, small  and shad y  and overgrown, many of the stones listing, the roots of large

trees  twining through the graves  and down into  the  rich  soil,  mining  the  fertile deposits  of  the  bodies  buried  there.  Trevor

wondered whether he might find Didi's face in a knothole, the many colors of Mo mma's hair in a shock of sun-bleached grass,

the shap e o f his father's long-fingered hands in a gracefully gnarled branch.

Maybe. First, though, he had  to find their grave.

Trevor rummaged  in his backpack,  found a can of Jolt  Cola,  popped the top,  and tipped  the warm soda  into  his  mouth.

The  sickly-sweet  taste  foamed  over  his  ton gue,  trickled  into  the  cracks  between  his  teeth.  It  tasted  horrible,  like  stale

carbonated saliva. But the caffeine sent immediate electric tendrils into his brain, soothed the pounding at his temples, cleared

the red cobweb s from his vision.

It was the only d rug he had much use for. Once he'd started to develop a taste for speed, but quit the first time he detected

a tremor  in  his  hand. Pot reminded him too  much of  his parents in  the good  days, back  when  Bobb y  was  drawing.  Alcohol

terrified him;  it  was nothing more than  death, distilled  and  bottled. And  junk  held such a morbid fascination for him that he

dared not try it, though he had been in plenty of low haunts and back alleys where he could have had some if he'd wanted  to.

He knew it was supposed to be clear, yet he imagined it black as ink, swirling out of the needle and through his veins, lulling

him into so me dreadfully familiar nightmare world.

 

                                                                                          28

 

 

 

 

 

He drank the last vile swig of Jolt, stuck the empty can b ack in his backpack, and set out on a meand ering path through

the graveyard. The  ground  was  uneven, the weeds  in some  places  tall  enough  to brush the  tips  of  his fingers.  He caught at

them, let them slip thro ugh his hands.

This  was not Missing Mile's only burying  ground. Trevor  had glimpsed a few  small  church cemeteries  on his way into

town, and he remembered that the surrounding woods were seeded with old Civil War graves and family plots, sometimes just

two or three rough-hewn stones in a lonely little cluster.

But this was the oldest one still in use. There were recent stones, letters and dates chiseled so sharply that they seemed to

float just above the slick surface of the  granite. Flecks of quartz  and mica  cau ght the  receding light. There were old markers,

stone crosses and arched tablets of slate, their edges crumbling, their inscriptions beginning to blur. There were the small white

stones of children, some topped with lambs like smooth cakes of soap partly melted in the shower. Some graves were splashed

with gaudy color, flo wers arranged in bright sprays or tortured into wreaths. Some had gone undecorated for a very long time.

And some had never been decorated.

Pain shot through his hands. Trevor found  himself standing  before a long, plain slab o f granite. He realized he had been

stand ing there for several minutes, working his hands against each other, twisting his fingers together until the joints screamed.

He made himself flex them, one by one.

Then he raised his head and looked at the gravestone of everyone he had ever loved.

 

McGEE

 

ROBERT FREDRIC FREDRIC DYLAN ROSENA PARKS

 

B. APRIL 20, B. SEPT. 6 , B. OCT. 20,

1937 1969 1942

 

DIED JUNE 14, 1972

 

Trevor had forgotten that his brother's middle name was Dylan. Momma had always told people it was for Dylan Thomas,

the poet. Bobby p ointed out that the kid  was born in '69; no matter what anyone said, everyb ody wo uld assume he was named

after Bob Dylan. It would hau nt him all his life.

But Bobby had taken care of that.

During his walk out here Trevor had wondered if they might all start yammering at him, their voices worming up through

six  feet of  hard-packed earth, through  twenty  years  of d ecay and dissolution,  over the  chirrup  and  buzz of  insects in the tall

grass and the slow rumble of the storm coming in. But, though he still sensed the soft hum of the collective dead, his own dead

were silent. Now that he was  here he felt curiously flat, almo st disappointed; no one had spoken to him, no skeletal hand had

thrust up to grab his ankle and  drag him down with them. Left out again.

Trevor  knelt  and  laid  his  palms  briefly  against  the  coo l  stone,  then  pu t  his  backpack  down  and  stretched  out  on  the

ground. In the center of  the grave, over Didi,  he supposed. It  was hard to believe that  Didi's body, the bod y  he had last seen

stiff and cold in bed with its head smeared like overripe fruit across the pillow, lay directly beneath him. He wondered if any

reconstruction of the heads and faces had been done, or if Didi's fragile skull had been left to fall to pieces like a broken Easter

egg.  The  ground  was  warm  under his back,  the  sk y  overhead pregnant  with  clouds,  nearly black.  If  he  was  go ing  to do  any

drawing here, he'd better get started.

He unzipped his bag and took out his sketchb ook. A  pencil was wedged into the coiled wire binding. Trevor fingered it

but did not pull it o ut just yet. Instead he turned to the drawing he had finished  on the b us. Rosena Black: the dead version of

Rosena McGee, with none  of her wit or warmth,  with  no thing but a  cold ruined shell of a body.  Seven fingers broken as she

tried  to  fight  Bobby  off  in  the  doorway  to  the  hall,  beyo nd  which  lay  her  sleeping  sons.  Had  she  been  trying  to  grab  the

hammer, and if she got it, would she have killed her husband with it? Trevor thought so.

That would  have changed every part of the equation but one: Bobby  would still be dead, and Trevor would still be alive.

Only if it had go ne down that way, at least Trevor would  know why he was alive.

He reached  into  his  backpack again,  felt  way do wn deep in  the bottom,  found a battered  manila envelope and  took out

three  folded  sheets  of  paper.  The  folds had worn through  many times over,  had  been tap ed b ack  together  and  refolded  until

so me of the photocopied words on the paper were nearly illegible. It didn't matter; Trevor knew them by heart.

They all  followed the  same format. Robert  F.  McGee, Rural Box 1 7,  Violin  Road, male Caucasian, 35  yrs, 5—9,  130

pounds, blond hair, blue eyes. Occupation: Artist. Cause of death: Strangulation by hanging. Manner of death: Suicide. Other

marks: Scratches on face, arms, chest area . . .

He knew Momma had  made  those scratches. But they hadn't  been  enough, not nearly enough. Fingernails weren't  much

use once the fin gers were broken.

He fold ed the autopsy  reports  and  slid  them  back into the  envelope.  He had  sto len them  from his  file at  the Home and

carried  them with him since then. The  paper was worn soft  and  thin,  read  a  thousand times.  The  ink  was  smud ged with  the

whorls of his fingerprints.

The storm was very close now. The hum of in sects in the grass, the trill and call of birds in the surrounding woods seemed

very loud. The afternoon light had taken on a lurid greenish cast. The air was full of electricity. Trevor felt the fine hairs o n his

arms standing up, the nape of his neck prickling.

He flipped to a clean page in his book, freed his pencil, and began sketching rapidly. In a few minutes he had roughed out

the first half of his idea for a strip.

It stemmed from an incident in a biography of Charlie Parker he had read at the Home. In his thirteen years there, Trevor

had read just about everything in the meager library. Most of the other kids wondered why he wanted to read anything at all, let

alone a book about some dead musician who had played a kind of music that nobody listened to anymore.

 

                                                                                          29

 

 

 

 

 

The incident had  happened when Bird was touring the South with the Jay McShann Orchestra. Jackson, Mississippi, was a

bad place for black people in 19 41. (Trevor doubted it was any great shakes for them no w.) There was a curfew requiring them

to be off the street by eleven P.M., so unless they wanted  to risk arrest or worse, the band had to be finished and packed up by

ten-thirty.  There  was  no  hotel  in  Jackson  that  wo uld  admit  them,  so  the  musicians  were  farmed  out  to  various  shabby

boardinghouses and private homes.

Bird and the singer, honky-tonk bluesman Walter Brown, drew cots on the screened porch of someone's house. They were

out of the converted barn where they had played and back at the house b y eleven, but since their usual lifestyle kept th em up

until the small hours, the musicians were  far from  sleepy. They  lay on their cots under the  meager yellow  glo w of the porch

light,  passing  a  flask and  sweating  the  liquor  from  their  pores  as  fast  as  they  swallo wed  it in  the  sodden  Mississippi  heat,

slapping at the mosquitoes that slipped through holes in the  screen,  shooting the shit, talking of mu sic or beautiful women or

perhaps just how far they were from Kansas City.

At mid night the police showed up, four beefy good old boys with guns and nightsticks and necks as red as the blood they

were itching  to spill. The  burning porch  light  was  a  violation  of  the  “nigger  curfew,” they said, and Bird  and  Brown  could

come along to the station with them, and if they didn't care to come peacefully like good boys, why then, they were welcome to

a few lumps on the head and a pair o f steel bracelets.

Charlie Parker and Walter Brown spent three days in Jackson jail for sitting up talking with the porch light on. Charlie had

the sharpest tongue, and so came out of it the worst; when McShann was finally able to bail them out, Bird 's close-cropped hair

was still stiff with dried blood where the nightsticks had split the skin over his skull. He h ad not been allowed enough water to

wash the crust of blood away. Brown claimed to have kept his mo uth shut, but sported some lumps and bruises of his own.

Bird  had  composed  a  tune  to  commemorate  the  incident,  first  called  “What  Price  Love?”  but  later  retitled  “Yardbird

Suite.” His fury and wounded pride wound through the song like a crimson thread, a sobbing, wailing undertone.

How to get all that into a single strip, a few pages of black-and-white drawings? Ho w to  best show the tawdry tenement

where they had been sequestered, the  weathered  wood and torn  tarpaper  houses, the narrow, muddy streets, the  stupid malice

on  the faces of the  cops? It was the sort of thing  Bobb y  had done effortlessly in the three  issues  of Birdland. His stories had

taken place mostly in the slums and beat sections of New York or New Orleans or Kansas City, not Jackson, Mississippi, and

his human characters had been fictional junkies and street freaks and jazz musicians, no t real ones.

But the mood  of  Birdland,  the  stark,  slick,  slightly hallucinatory  drawings,  the  distorted reflections  in  puddles and the

dark  windo ws of bars, the constant low-key threat of  violence, the feeling that everything in the  strip was  a little larg er  than

life, and a little louder, and  a little weirder- that was what Trevor wanted to capture here.

For  now, though,  he  was  just  sketching  in  the panels  and  their  contents,  space  for captions  and  word  balloons, rough

figures  and  backgrounds,  the barest  hints o f gestures and expressions.  The  faces  and  hands  were his  favorite  part;  he  would

linger over them later. He had  already drawn Bird hundreds of times. The handsome fleshy features appeared on the margins of

his pages and woven into his backgrounds nearly as often as the face of his father.

He  reached  the  part  on  the  porch,  just  before  the  police  arrived,  and  the  first  time  Walter  Brown's  face  appeared  in

closeup. His pencil slowed, then sto pped, and he tapp ed the eraser against the page thoughtfully. He realized he had never seen

a p icture of Brown, had no idea what the singer looked like.

No problem: he  could wing it, improvise the man's face like  a jazz solo. He already had a hazy picture in  his  head, and

even as he thought about it, the features grew clearer. His fantasy Walter Brown was a very youn g man, about twenty-but then

they had all b een  young,  mostly younger  than Trevor was  now-and boyishly thin to Bird's fleshiness,  with  high cheekbones

and slightly slanting dark-almond eyes. Handsome.

This was how he usually worked:  pondering an idea  for  months, turning it over and  over  in his head until  he had  nearly

every panel and line worked out. Only then did he put pencil or pen or brush to paper, and the thing spilled full-b lown onto the

page. Bobby had been the  same  way, working  in  feverish bursts and starts. And  when  the inspiration  was gone,  it  was gone

forever.

At least if that  happens to  me,  Trevor reminded himself,  I won't have anyone to kill. There was  no person he had cared

that  much  about.  Incidents  like the one with the art teacher  were a different thing altogether. Yo u could  cheerfully  rip such

people's head s off and drink the fo untaining blood from the neck-stumps in those first few minutes o f blind rage, if the fragile

constraints of civilization and lack of p hysical po wer did not bind you.

But later, when you had time to thin k on it, you realized that nothing co uld be gained by hurting such people, that perhaps

they were not even alive enough to feel pain. You could make better use of your anger by keeping it to yourself, letting it gro w

until you needed it.

Still ... if you loved someone, really loved them, wouldn't you want to take them with you when you died? Trevor tried to

imagine actually holding someone down and killing them, just breaking them apart, watching as the love in their face turned to

agony or  rage or confusion, feeling their bones crack and their bloo d flow over your hands, under the nails, greasing into  the

palms.

There was no one  with whom he would want such intimacy. Kinsey had hugged him  last night in the club, had held him

as naturally  as o ne  might  hold  a  suffering  child.  It  had  been  the  first  time  Trevor  had  cried  in  another  person's presence  in

twenty years.  For that  matter,  it  was  as  physically  close  to another  person as he had been  since the  man  with gentle hands

carried him o ut of the house, since his last glimpse of his father's swollen face. These two brief meetin gs of clothed skin were

all he'd had.

No, he remembered. Not quite all.

Once, when he was twelve, a slightly older  boy  at the Ho me had  caught him alone  in  the shower and pu shed him  into a

corner. The boy's hands had scrabbled over his slick soapy skin, and Trevor had felt something in his head snap. Next thing he

knew three counselors were p ulling him off the kid, who was curled in the fetal position on the stall floor, and the knuckles of

his left hand were throbbing, bruised, and blood  was streaking the white tiles, swirling do wn the silver drain . . .

The old er boy had a concussion, and Trevor was confined to his hall for a month. His homework and meals were brought

to him. The solitude was wo nderful. He filled eighteen notebooks, and one of the things he drew over and over was the shower

 

                                                                                          30

 

 

 

 

 

stall with the boy in it: head smacking the cold tiles at the precise moment of impact; skinny bod y curled in a half inch of water

threaded with his own b lood. His blood that Trevor had spilled before he even knew what he was doing.

And the weird thing was, the boy's hands had actually felt good sliding over his skin. He had liked the feeling . . . and then

suddenly the boy had been on the floor with blood coming out of his head.

He had plenty of time to think about what he had done, and what had made him do it, the violence inherent in his genes, in

his soul. That was the first time he could remember considering the comforts of suicide.

Trevor stuck his pencil behind his ear, laid  his sketchbook on  the ground  in  front o f him. He let  the fingers of his right

hand slide down the soft inner skin of his left forearm.  The skin there was mottled with old scars, years  of slashes and cross-

hatchings done with a single-edged Exacto razor blade, the same kind he used for layouts. Perhaps a hundred thin raised lines

of skin, paler than the rest of his arm, exquisitely sensitive; some still reddened and hurt once in a while, as if the tissue deep

inside his arm had never quite healed. But if you went deep enough into the tissue, no scar ever healed completely.

And this map of pain he had carved out of his skin, this had been no half-assed  attempt  at suicide, anyway. Trevor knew

that to kill yo urself you had to cut along the length of your arm, had to lay it open  from wrist to elbow like some fruit with a

rich red pulp and a hard white  core.  Had  to  cut all the way to bone, had to sever every major  artery and  vein. He had  never

tried it.

These  cuts  he  had  made  over  the  years  were  more  in  the  nature  of  experimentation:  to  test  his  domain  over  his  own

malleable flesh, to kno w the strange human jelly below the surface, part layer up on cell-delicate layer of skin, part quickening

blood, part pale subcutaneous fat that parted like butter at the touch of a new blade. So metimes he would hold his arm over a

page of his sketchbook, let the blood fall on clean white pap er or mingle with fresh black ink; sometimes he wo uld trace it into

patterns with his finger or the nib of a pen.

But he hadn't done it for years and years. He thought the last time  had been on his twentieth birthday, two years . o ut of

state's  custody, the ill winds of adulthood and poverty blowing down his neck.  It was  as if America had begun the decade of

the eighties  by shattering  some  great  cosmic  mirror, except  that the  seven years  of bad luck  hadn 't ended  yet.  The  wizened,

evil-faced d ybb uk  in the White House had been as alien a being as Trevor could imagine, a shriveled yet hideously animated

pup pet thrust into power by the same shadowy forces that had controlled the world since Trevor was five, forces he could not

control, could barely see or begin to  understand.

He had  spent the night of his twentieth  birthday wandering  around New Yo rk City, riding the subways alone, slamming

down coffee  and  cappuccino  and  espresso in every dive  he  passed,  finally achieving  an  exag gerated state of awareness  that

went beyond percep tion into hallucination. He ended up huddled in a grove in Washington Square Park, furtively slicing at his

wrist with a dull and rusty blade he dug out of his pocket, trying to let some of this electric energy out with the blood before it

rattled him to p ieces. Toward dawn he fell into restless sleep and dreamed o f angels telling him to do  violence-to  himself? to

so meone else? he could not remember when he woke.

He didn't know why he had stopped cutting himself after that. It had just stopped  working : the pain couldn't co me out that

way anymore.

Trevor sat up straight, shook himself. He'd nearly started to doze here in the gathering storm on his family's grave. He saw

an image of his flayed wrist above a white sheet of paper, dark sluggish b lood making Rorschach blots on the page.

The  first  drops  of  rain  were  hittin g  the  spo ngy carpet  of  grass  and  pine  needles,  dark  streaking  and  blotching  on  the

headstones. Lightning sketched  across the sky, searing jagged blue, then thunder  rolling in like a slow  tide. Trevor closed his

sketchbook and slid it into his backpack. He could wo rk on the Bird strip later, at the house.

The rain began to come down in great gusting sheets as he left the graveyard. By the time he reached the road, the ground

was already wet enough to sink and squelch under his feet, mudd y water oozing into his socks and sneakers. The trees bowed

low over the road, then lashed the wind-torn sky.

A ways do wn the road, Trevor realized  that he had barely glanced at the headsto ne as he left, had  not touched it at all past

the first initial contact. It was  numb, dead, like the  fragments  of memory and  bone that  lay beneath it.  Maybe  they had been

there  once,  but  as  their  flesh  decayed  and  cru mbled  in  the  sodden  Southern  ground,  their  essences  had  leached  away  too.

Maybe he could find his family in Missing Mile, or so mething of them. But no t where their bodies lay.

He had plodded most of the way back to town when he heard a car coming slowly up the road  behind him, grinding over

the coarse wet gravel. He thought briefly of trying to thumb, just as quickly decided against it. He was already soaked through;

nob ody would want his so ggy ass on their upholstery.

Now the car was close  enough  that he  could  hear its  wipers  sluicing  back  and  forth  across  the  wind shield.  The  sound

triggered  a  memory  so  distant  it  was  barely  there:  lying  in  the  back  seat  of  his  father's  car  one  rainy  afterno on  in  Texas,

listening to  the  shush-skree  of the wipers  and  watching  the  rain  course  down the windo ws. One  of  the  great San  Francisco

contingent of cartoonists-Trevor  couldn't remember which one-had been p assing  through town, and Bobby was showing him

the sights of 1970  Austin, whatever they may have been. The other cartoonist was busily rolling joint after joint, but that didn't

stop him from running his mouth as much as Bobb y. For Trevor in the back seat everything blurred together like different h ues

of watercolor paint: the co mfortable sound of the adults' voices, the sweet herbal tang of the pot smoke, the afternoon city light

filtering through a veil of rain.

Momma must  have been at  home with the baby. Didi had been sick with one thing or another for a good part of his first

year. Momma worried over him, fixed him special nasty-tasting organic mush,  kept watch over him as he slept. Just as if she

thought it mattered, just as if they all lived in a universe where Didi was going to grow up.

Trevor kept  walking, did  not  register that  the  car  had  pulled up  behind  him  until  a  horn  blipped.  He turned and found

himself staring at the headlights and grillwork of his father's old car, the o ne who se back seat he had dozed on that rainy day in

Austin, the one they had driven to Missing Mile. The two-to ned Rambler, or its twin, co mplete with a crimp that had graced its

front bumper since 1970.

His father's car, the windshield opaque with reflected light, the windows obscured by beads and drips of rain. Bobby's car

coming  down  Burnt  Church  Road,  from  the  direction  of  the  graveyard.  And  the  window  on   the  driver's  side  was  slowly

crankin g down.

 

                                                                                          31

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor thought there might be tears on his face. Or maybe it was only the rain, dripping out of his sodden hair.

He stepped forward to meet the car and whatever was inside it.

 

 

Chapter Seven 

 

Just after dawn,  Zach left his car in the parking lot  of a p refab pink motel and  walked ou t onto the  dirtiest beach he had

ever seen.

He'd kept on a steady northeastern course all night. Shooting past Pensacola at two, he had intended to go straight o n east

to Jacksonville b ut had been diverted by a highway sign pointing out the turnoff to a town called Two Egg. Zach might never

set foot in Florida again; he had to see Two Egg before he left.

But the town was eerie even  for rural Florida in the small hours of the morning. The buildings on the downtown strip all

seemed to have been built in the early fifties, that time of false prosperity and  fake space-age optimism. There was that look of

the  Plexiglas  pillar  and  chromium  arch,  the  kidney  shape  and  the  fashio nable  sign  of  the  atom.  But  now  these  fabulous

structures  were  abandoned,  left  behind  by  the  chill  silicon  void  of  the  millennium's  end.  Their  aqua  paint  was  faded  and

peeling, their once-wondro us swoops and starbursts and  streamlined angles rusting, falling away.

The buildings seemed to sway and nod over the street as if trying to p ull Zach into their sterile dream. The street was full

of trash, crumpled fast-food bags and torn newspapers d rifting like aimless ghosts. The swamp was reclaiming the town on all

sides;  stagnant  to ng ues of water lapp ed  at the sidewalks, cattails  grew  in every vacant  lot.  Altogether, the  town  made  Zach

think  of  the  opening  helicopter  landing  scene  of  Romero's  Day  of  the  Dead  as  filmed  on  the  ruined  set  of  The  Jetsons:

desolation in wh ich rotting corpses might rise, set against a backdrop as garish and sad as a forgotten cartoon.

He got out of Two Egg in a hurry. Thirty minutes later he crossed the state line into Georgia.

Now he was on Tybee Island, according to the signs he'd been nearly too bleary-eyed to read by the time he finally hit the

coast. Just east of Savannah, Tybee was a cheap resort area frequented by redneck and middle-class family groups all summer.

The island was honeycombed  with seaside motels, fried seafood shacks, shell stands, and those  weird, ubiquitous little Indian

boutiques  with their  unvarying  invento ry of gauzy cotton  clothes,  incense,  out-of-date  rock  posters, cheap  jewelry, and d rug

paraphernalia.

This early, nearly everything was closed. Zach paid cash for a room at the Sea Castle Motor Inn, parked his car behind the

Pepto-Bismol-colored building, and walked down to the beach.

The Atlantic  Ocean  looked  dark  and  murky,  not quite  slate,  not quite  green.  The  foam  that laced  the breakers  was  like

whipped cream squeezed out of a can, thin and u nappetizing, u nnatural-looking. And the sand-a hund red times worse than the

chalky whitish stuff on the Gulf — gray and wet and heavy, like silt, like sludge. Zach nudged a heap of it with the toe of his

sneaker and uncovered a  broken  plastic shovel, the  wrapper  from a Payday  bar, the  gritty, sticky wad of a  used condom. He

kicked sand back over the whole mess and watched it fall in a dirty spray, only half hiding the trash.

He had  thought the  ocean would soothe his jangling nerves. Instead the sight  of it endlessly heaving and churning made

him feel tight inside, lost somehow, as if this was not the place he had meant to co me to at all. He had also thought there would

be other teenagers on the beach, that he would be able to blend in and look like part of some holid ay crowd. But at this early

hour the beach was nearly empty, and the few people he saw were middle-aged coup les or terribly young parents with herds of

tiny children. Even when he took his shirt off and let the fledgling sun beat on his pale back and shoulders, Zach felt about as

inconspicuous as Sid Vicious at a Baptist co vered-dish supper.

He  was  beginning  to  realize  just  ho w  little  he  knew  about  life  outside  of  New  Orleans.  But  that  was  all  right:  with

intelligence and intuition, he could hack it.

Hacking was defined as the manipulation of any complex  system, as in “I can't hack getting dressed tonight, so I'm going

to  the club  in  my  bathrobe.” The complex system could be numbers on  a screen or the relays  and interchanges of the phone

system; those were mechanical, and all you had to  do was learn them. The crucial fact many computer hackers never seemed  to

realize-and  the  reason  some  of  them  were  perceived  as  such  geeks-was  that the  world  and  all  its  sentient  beings  and  their

billions of stories comprised the most intricate, fascinating system of all.

He pushed himself  up off the gray sand and walked  to  the  edge of  the  water.  The  glare caught  the round lenses of  his

glasses, made his eyes sting and tear. Fine; he felt like crying an yway. A breeze tainted with the odors of wet salt and crude oil

caught his hair and pushed it back from his face, dried the faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. The tears and the

wind felt good together.

Zach looked up and down  the beach, followed the  juncture of sand and water until it merged into infinity. South of  here

were the Georgia Sea Islands, where the rich language and culture of the Gullah people had dried up over the past century like

so many fronds of marsh grass never woven into baskets, like so man y magical roots never fashioned into pro tective “hands.”

North was the rest of the Atlantic Seaboard, more than a thousand miles of that churning, strange-colored ocean stretching all

the way up to the unimaginably toxic sands of New York and New Jersey.

Soon the beach b egan to get crowded, and Zach saw  that he would never be able to blend in here. The redneck d ud es in

their drawstring jams  and  scraggly little mustaches,  the d udettes with  their bleached-permed-frosted  hair  and  cottage cheese

asses and scary, leathery tans, the kids that were hideous little replicas of their parents in Teenage Mutant Ninja drag-all stared

at Zach as if he might be  so mething nasty that had washed up overnight and hadn't floated  back out yet. It was time to crash,

time to sleep  now so he could blow this boring joint by nightfall.

Back in his roo m at the Sea Castle, Zach stripped out of his sweaty cutoffs, laid his glasses on the nightstand, and crawled

into  the  double  bed.  The  sheets  were  worn  but  clean  and   cool.  He  nestled  into  the  pillows,  closed  his  eyes,  felt  delicious

exhaustion wash over him, thought of the kid Leaf and sud denly had a raging boner that was never going to let him sleep in a

million years, noway, nohow.

Zach leaned  over  the edge of  the bed and ru mmaged in one  of his bags, found a string of  little blue plastic  packets, and

tore  one  off.  He  never  used  rubbers  for  sex  unless  the  other  person  insisted-and  many  of  his  lovers  in  New  Orleans  had

 

                                                                                          32

 

 

 

 

 

insisted; he was kno wn for mo re than his pallid good looks and  mysterious wealth (which combination had convinced a certain

set of  French  Quarter  kids  that Zach  was a vampire and another set entirely  that he was dying of  AIDS  and whooping  it  up

while he still cou ld). But he always used them for beating off. Not a one had bro ken yet, and he figured he was getting into the

thousand s.

He fitted  the slippery  little sheath over the  head of  his  dick and unrolled  it, sliding  his hand down  with  it, pretending it

was Leaf's mouth.  The weight of the sheet  was Leaf's hands, the  extra pillow  was Leafs  skinny b ody pressed smooth  against

his own. But when he came, Leaf disappeared and Zach saw an achingly blue wave crashing and  foaming on pure white sand.

The rubber, as always, remained intact. Maybe they had made the things flimsier back in '72.

For a few minutes he lay with his mind wandering and his hand still moving idly. Not until warm tendrils of come started

trickling b ack  down into his  pubic hair did he  pull the thing  off, knot the end of  it, and  to ss it in the  general direction of  the

toilet. He heard a small wet  plop  that  meant bull's-eye, though the room was so small it would've been hard to miss. If  every

sperm was sacred, Zach figured he had made more offerings to the altar of the porcelain goddess than any other.

When he  woke up later and saw the condo m floating like a pale chrysalis in the blue-tinged water of the bowl, he would

pee on it and then flush it. Zach thought his body was a nifty machine and had a healthy appreciation of its many functio ns.

He  turned  over,  stretched  his lan ky  arms and legs across  the  unfamiliar expanse of  mattress,  pushed  his head  into the

mound of pillo ws. One of them lay snug against his side like a warm body sinking into sleep. For an instant he wondered how

it would  be to fall asleep and wake up with someone next to him every morning, bodies fitting together in easy familiarity, skin

smelling of each other and the safe shared  bed.

But only fo r an instant did he think he might like it. These were thoughts that usually only came to him on leaden winter

mornings, when the needling rain of a New Orleans cold spell streaked his windowpanes.

The pillow was his only constant bedmate, in all its malleable, comforting fo rms. He held it close and pressed his face into

it, smelled cotton and  detergent and the lingering ghost of  his come, damp and salty as the ocean,  but  cleaner. In  a while the

image of his own bed faded from behind his eyes, and Zach b egan to dream of a long expanse of silky, sugary white sand, of

water the color of the sky, of sky the color o f the sun.

 

When he  woke the room was full of sunset's first light, deep pinks and lavenders that lay in overlapping petal-like layers

across  the bedclothes and  made him think he was still dreaming. As co nsciousness seeped back in, Zach contemplated going

out to the beach to watch the sun set and get something to eat. A steady edge o f hunger was gnawing at his stomach. But all the

happy couples were probably stro lling hand in hand in the g rimy surf. Zach decided to stay in and order a pizza.

He  paged  through  the  phone  boo k,  ripped  out  the  Domino's  ad  and  tore  it  into  tiny  p ieces-they  supported  Operation

Rescue and other heinous fascist causes-then dialed a local p arlor and ordered  a twelve-inch pie with triple jalap enos.

Thirty  minutes  later,  his  hair dripping  from a fast shower, Zach  mu nched  pizza  and  drank  grap e  soda from the motel's

machine while he studied his new atlas. He'd stopped  to fill the Mustang's tank somewhere near Valdosta, and while it had not

been nearly as fine an adventure as his stop in Pass Christian, he had scored three tapes, a hot Slim Jim, and the b ook of maps.

He saw that 1 —9 5 north from Savannah would take him all the way into  North Carolina.  Zach didn't  like interstates, but he

was well away fro m New Orleans now and ready to cover some more distance in a hurry.

And  after  North Carolina,  where? Leaf  had  thought  him  a New  Yorker.  Zach had always been  intrigued by  the idea of

such a tiny island-bound city crammed full of people of every possible race, gender, and persuasion, entire cultures and culture

wars, systems o f magic and religion, infinite microcosms. Maybe now he could get lost there.

He finished his pizza, d ropped off his roo m key at the office, slapp ed on his new Hank Williams tape, and headed north.

 

Just  before  midnight  Zach  sat  drinking  a  Bloody  Maria  at  the  Sombrero  Lounge,  a  colorful  co nfection  of  a  building

molded  primarily of  pink  stucco, orange neon, and thousands of twinkling  white fairy lights. The South of the Border theme

park on 1-95 had drawn him in like a bug to a gaud y flame.

SOB's  increasingly surreal billboard s  loomed along the  highway  for thirty  miles  before  the  park, all  3-D papier-mache

sculp ture and moving parts, giant hot dogs and spinning sheep and the smirking mustachioed mug of pedro, the SOB mascot. It

was like a little city set do wn in  the middle of nowhere, halfway between New Jersey and Disney  World (as one of the signs

bragged), and after three hours of dark interstate flanked by monotonous stretches of farmland and stands of pine, its tacky bars

and souvenir shops  with  their  Easter egg paint  jobs of  purple and  pink and chartreuse  had  looked  to  Zach like  the  lights of

Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras.

As he finished his drink, an eye-watering blend of tequila and Tabasco with a splash of tomato juice, an idea came to him.

He  left  the  bar and  drove  across  the  complex  to  pedro's  motel,  paid  cash  for  one  of  the  “heir  conditioned”  roo ms, dug  his

battery-p owered  laptop  comp uter  out of the  back  seat  and  took  it  inside,  along  with  the  OKI  900  cellular  phone  he  carried

everywhere. Zach had tumbled the phone, or reprogrammed it to generate a new ID n umber each time he used it. It could not

receive calls, but neither could his calls be traced.

The  furniture  and  walls of the room  were  painted pink, the bed  heart-shaped,  with  a  mirror  on  the ceiling and a  slick

spread of lurid  red  satin.  No  doubt you  could put  a  quarter  in  and  summo n  the  Magic  Fingers.  Instead, Zach  turned  on the

laptop,  entered  a  stolen  MCI  credit  card  number,  and  dialed  into  the  composing  dep artment  of  the  New  Orleans  Times-

Picayune.

Over  a  year ago  he  had disco vered that the newspaper had  a  program  that let reporters type  in their  stories from home.

He'd  created  an  account  for  himself,  changing  his  password  every  time  he  planted  an  item  in  the  paper.  Currently  it  was

ZYGOTE, thanks to his last story about the petrified abortion. He log ged on and changed it to pedro. Then he typed:

 

GODDESS SEEN IN BOWL OF GUMBO

by Joseph Boudreauxn Staff Writer

The Goddess Kali is known in Hinduism as

the Mother and Destroyer of Creation-But

 

                                                                                          33

 

 

 

 

 

can she make a roux?

In a twist on the well-known Jesus-in-the-plate-of-spaghetti theme, Parvata Sanjay of India spied the Hindu goddess in his

bowl during a recent visit to New Orleans, while samp ling the seafood gumbo ata popular French Quarter restaurant. “Her four

terrible arms were outstretched,” said Sanjayn, “and her bloody, lolling tongue was clearly visible. It was only a pattern in the

soup, formed by the oil on the surface, but I believe all patterns have significance. ”

Might Mr. Sanjay have sampled a few Dixie beers as well?

The Calcutta native plans to co ntinue his American travels in North Carolina, wherehe says he wants to try the barbecue.

 

Zach added the sequence of characters that meant an editor had approved his cop y. Then with a few more  keystrokes he

sent  it  on  its  merry  way  to  the  printing d epartment,  where  it  joined  the  other stories ready  to  be  printed  in  next  Sunday's

edition. It was easier to bury items in the Sunday paper-they  were hungry fo r filler and didn't look twice at the shit that came

in.

 He knew Eddy would be  watching the  paper for hidd en news o f him. The mention o f Kali wo uld catch  her eye, and she

might also notice  that  he had reversed the Indian surname and first name. Calling the guy Mr. Parvata Sanjay was something

like calling an American Mr. Rogers Fred.

Other friend s and outlaws might see it and recognize his hand too. Maybe some of Them wo uld see it too, for that matter,

but Zach didn't think They would connect it with a hacker on the run.

He lo gged out and b roke the phone connection, turned off the comp uter, and carried it back out to his car. A quick pee in

the pink -tiled  bathroom, room key left in the door, and Zach was gone. After sleeping all day he was ready to drive all night,

and anyway  he  co uldn't stand  the  thought  of  lying  there in  that slick  red  heart-shap ed b ed, staring  at his o wn lonely, horny

body in the mirror overhead.

South of the Border disappeared behind him. Soon it was only a faint fuchsia glow on the horizon. As the night deepened

and the traffic thinned to nothing, it seemed to Zach that the whole country lay over the next rise, around the next bend of the

highway all lit up and wide awake, violent and strange and joyous, just waiting for him to come find it.

 

 

Chapter Eight 

 

Trevor didn't know what  he expected  to see inside the Rambler as the driver's window wound down: a grinning skeleton

dirt-crusted  and worm-festooned, dry bone finger beckoning him in? His father's flesh restored, black shades balanced on his

blade  of a nose, intense  eyes  blazing throug h  smok y  lenses? Or Bobby  as he had looked  the last time Trevor saw  him, dead

eyes bulging, tongue jutting like a ro tten melon, chin and bare scrawny chest slicked with drool, streaked with gore?

Whatever  he  expected,  it  wasn't  the  smiling  face  of  Terry  Buckett,  the  affable  second -generation  hippie  who  had

introduced himself at the bar last night. The owner of the  record store, Trevor remembered. Procurer of jazz  sides, retailer of

the magic that had made Bird so little money during his own lifetime.

“Hey, Trevor Black. It's pouring down rain, or d idn't you notice? Catch a ride, man.”

Terry cocked a thumb toward the passenger d oor. Trevor made himself walk around the front of the car, heard wet gravel

crunching under his feet though he could not feel it, heard the roar and thrum of the idling engine. Perched high on its wheels,

the Rambler looked  like a child's  sketch of  an  automob ile,  a small rectangle atop a larger  one  precariously balanced on  two

circles. It  was a boxy,  plain, yet  so mehow rakish  machine. It  was not the sort  of car  in  which you expected to see a  ghost; it

was not the sort of car you expected to be a ghost.

Trevor raised his left hand and wrapp ed his fingers around the door hand le. It was cold to the touch, beaded with rain. He

pulled  the heavy door open and slid  in, across the  dirty-white vinyl seat his butt had polished in cloth diapers  and Osh-Kosh

overalls, the  seat that  had  stuck to  the  backs  of  his legs  when  it was hot, the  seat that  Didi had peed  on a couple  of  times,

though most of his accidents had been confined to the back.

Terry  lounged  comfortably  on the other side  of the seat,  curly  hair  pulled back in  a faded blue  bandanna, dark amused

eyes  looking Trevor up  and down. Terry's features  were blunt,  not  quite handso me;  his  bushy eyebrows  nearly met over the

bridge of his nose, and he needed a shave. But his face had a friendly, squared look, a face that wouldn't take any bullshit but

wouldn 't give you any either. Make him a little seedier-looking and he could have been a character drawn by Crumb.

Terry put the car in gear, eased off the clutch, and started rolling do wn Burnt Church Road again. He seemed to be in no

great hurry to get anywhere.

“Where did you get this car?” Trevor asked.

“Aw, I've  had it forever. Kinsey used to help  me fix it whenever it  broke d own, but I've learned to  do most of the work

myself.  I  lo ve  these  old engines.  No  damn  electronics to  get  fucked  up,  just  a  bunch  of  metal  and  grease. You know  these

wipers still run on vacuum tu bes?” Terry indicated the slushing  windshield  wipers as though pointing out an artifact of  so me

forgotten  civilization.  “So mething  else  Kinsey  told  me  about  this  car.  It  used  to  belong  to  a  famous  cartoonist  who  killed

himself here in Missing Mile. Pretty weird, huh?”

Trevor sagged back in the seat and let out a long unsteady breath. Terry glanced over. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah.” He  sat  up,  swiped  water  out  of  his  eyes.  His  shirt  was  sticking  to his  skin,  outlining  his  ribs.  His  jeans  were

sodden, unpleasantly heavy. “Just wet. And cold.”

“Well, look,  I was going into town  to  do some  errands, but my house is just back down  the road. You  want to  stop  by

there and towel off? I'll even give yo u a dry T-shirt, I've got a million of 'em.”

“No, I'm fine—”

But Terry was alread y turning the car around. “I forgot to get stoned before I left any way. Consider it done.”

 

 

 

                                                                                          34

 

 

 

 

 

A  couple of minutes later the  Rambler turned into a long  gravel driveway and  stopped in front of a small wooden house

whose paint was not so much p eeling as  fraying  at the edges. A couple of rocking chairs were statio ned on the  porch  among

various whirligigs, wagon wheels, pirated street signs, and crates of empty beer bottles. Country kitsch gone weird.

Terry  led  the way up  the porch  steps,  through the  to wers  of  junk, and unlocked the front  door. “Watch out for  the hex

sign. It's supposed to be bad luck to step on it o r something.”

Trevor looked down as he crossed  the threshold. Someone had painted two  interlocking triangles, one red  and one blue,

with a silver ankh at their juncture. “What's it for?”

“Don't  ask  me. This house belongs  to  my friend  Ghost,  who's  even spookier than  you might guess  from  his name.  His

grandmother was some kind of witch.”

“He  isn't here, is he?”  Trevor hoped  he wasn't  about to meet yet another of Missing Mile's friendly freaks. He had only

wanted a ride, not an impro mptu afternoon party.

“No,  his  band  is  on  tour.  Extended  tour.  I'm  minding  the  farm,  which  means  free  rent  and  a  lifetime  supply  of  good

karma.”

“How come?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Terry shrugged. “Miz Deliverance was a good witch. What color shirt do you want?”

“Black.”

“But of course.”

Terry  tossed him a cotto n T-shirt printed with the Whirling Disc logo-a little long-haired man who looked  like a hipp ie

version of the  man on the Monopoly game, twirling a record on the end of  his candy-striped cane- and pointed him down the

hall  to  the bathroom. Trevor placed his wet  feet carefully  on the  mellow  hard wood floors. He was  intrigued by the idea of a

house with good karma, a house that held memories of love and music.

He pulled the heavy wooden d oor of the bathroom shut behind him, tugged his wet shirt over his head and dropped it on

the floor. It was just a plain black tee like almo st every other shirt Trevor owned; he had one with a po cket, but that was getting

fancy. The little Whirling Disc man was a rad ical departure for him.

Trevor unbound his ponytail,  leaned over the  old clawfoot bathtub  and wrung a stream of  water from his hair. Then he

rump led it with a towel and let it hang lo ose to dry. It rippled halfway down his back, ginger like Bobby's, shot through with a

few strands of pale gold  like Mo mma's.

The mirror in the bathroom made him nervo us; he had a strong sense of someone looking back at him from its depths. He

put his lips close against the wavy silver surface, whispered “Who is it?” But nothing answered. There was only his own high

pale forehead melding with its own reflection, his o wn eyes merging into o ne misshapen transparent orb that stared mercilessly

back at him, his o wn long somber face disso lving to mist at the edges. He stood back from the mirror and  watched his nipples

shiver erect, his skin prickle into goosebumps.

Trevor pulled the Whirling Disc  shirt o ver his head and  hu rried  back  down the hall to the living  room, where Terry was

just firing up a fat, pungent joint.

“I don't suppose you do this?” Terry asked after a long toke. Blue smoke leaked out o f his nostrils and the corners of his

mouth; narrowing his eyes against it, he looked sybaritic and handsomer than before. Trevor hesitated. Terry held out the joint,

waggled it enticingly.

What the  hell, Trevor decided, and reached out to take it  with  his  left hand.  He'd smoked  pot before, but not for a  long

time, and never much. It had  been one of Bobby's drugs. But pot had never made Bobby puke and sob like a baby, had  never

made him pick up the hammer or whispered in his ear how he might use it. And Bobby had smoked it when  he was drawing.

Trevo r thought it might be good to try some right before he went in the house.

So he  wrapped his lips around the  wrinkled end of the joint, slightly damp with Terry's spit but  not unpleasantly so, and

took a deep drag.

Big mistake.

He hadn't eaten anything since Kinsey's dubious noodle soup last night at the club, hadn't drunk anything b ut a few Cokes

and a warm,  noxio us  Jolt. Suddenly his stomach  felt like a  small  pouch o f cracked  and  shriveled  leather,  his  tissues  and the

meat of his brain felt scorched by the fire that burned inside him.

The joint slipped from his fingers and skittered down his arm, leaving a long singed trail along the old tracework of scars.

He heard Terry say something, felt his knees begin to buckle.

Big round bursts o f light appeared in front of his eyes, b lue and red and sparkly silver, spinning like crazy constellations.

Then blackness waltzed in and wiped them all away.

 

Terry  couldn't  believe  it  when  the  kid  collapsed  on  his  living-room  floor.  He  had  seen  stoners  toked  to  the  point  of

zombification, staring at a TV screen as if it might brin g nirvana. He had seen drinkers gone to drooling stupo r in every sort of

compromising  position  and  location,  including  on  the  toilet.  He  had  even  seen  a  nodding  junkie  or  two.  But  never  in  his

twenty-eight years had Terry Buckett watched anyone p ass out from o ne toke on a joint.

He retrieved the burning spliff from the folds of Trevor's shirt, patted down the kid's scrawny chest to make sure no  stray

embers were setting him aflame, checked out the glowing end o f the joint but saw  no thing amiss, smelled nothing weird. The

pot couldn't be laced with anything: Terry had already rolled three or fo ur joints out of this particular bag, which came from a

trusted  so urce.  His  own  buzz  was  just  starting  to  tickle  the  edges  of  his  brain,  leafy  and  benign.  It  was  no thing  but  good

Carolina homegrown. This pale trembling youth must be in pretty sorry shape.

He  checked  to  see  if  Trevor  was  breathing,  gently  pulled  up  one  o f  his  eyelids  to  make  sure  he  hadn't  had  a  brain

embolism or something. The silvery-pale  eye glared at Terry,  making him think Trevor  was  in  there somewhere, not too  far

away. As he wedged a cushion from the sofa under Trevor's lolling head, the kid started muttering, ”. . . m'okay . . . fine . . .”

“Yeah, you look great,” said Terry. He went to the kitchen, found a dishrag that was mostly clean, ran it under cold water,

went back and draped it over Trevor's face. Trevor raised a limp hand to swipe at it, got halfway, then let the hand fall like a

dead white b ird by his side.

 

                                                                                          35

 

 

 

 

 

“Hang  loose,” Terry told him.  “Don't go away.”  He  paused  beside  the stereo and scanned  the portion of his  vast record

collection he  had already managed to cart over here, wondering what music Trevor might like to surface from oblivion  with.

Jazz was one of the  few categories Terry's collection lacked; he liked it okay  but  had never accumulated any o f his own, had

always vaguely figured it was the sort of music you had to be an expert on to really appreciate.

Finally he selected an old Tom Waits album, dropped the needle on it, and returned to the kitchen to be a gracious host.

 

Trevor woke with  a  damp sour-smelling  membrane  over his face  and  a  strange guttural  voice groaning in  his  ears.  He

clawed frantically at the membrane and it came away in his hands, cold and dank and foul. How lo ng had he been gone? It felt

like min utes but could have been an hour, no more; the light had n't changed.

The walls seemed to to wer toward an infinitely high point overhead. They were decorated with vintage acid rock posters

whose lurid colors swirled and gyred, the bands' names taunting him: Jimi Hendrix Experience, Captain Beefheart, Strawberry

Alarm Clock. All had been in his parents' record collection.

The  room  was  furnished  mu ch  like  his  childhood  home  in  Austin:  bookshelves  of  cinder  blocks  and  particleboard,

comfortable sofa with sagging cushio ns and the nap o n the arms worn thin, table that looked like a refugee from so meone else's

trash pile. Early Starving Artist, or Poverty Deco. Trevor saw parts o f Terry's drum set strewn about the room, a cymbal in the

corner, a snare prop ped between a bookcase and the doo rway that led to the hall. There was only one difference between this

stranger's ho use and the one he remembered living  in with his family: this  one felt  so mehow safe. His  parents'  ho me had felt

safe once too, but that was so long ago Trevor could barely remember.

He tried to sit up and felt his brain starting to spiral off into the ether again. A snippet of dialogue from Krazy Kat drifted

through  his mind: Just imegine having your “ecto sp asm” running around william & nilliam among the unlimitless etha'-golla,

it's imbillivibilImbillivibil  it was. Yet it  would seem he'd swooned in Terry's living room,  or whoever's living room this  was.

How fucking embarrassing. Terry didn't seem  to  be around, and Trevor thought  that when  he felt able to stand he  might just

slink out of this safe place, walk the rest of the way into town, then out to Violin Road.

Yes, that was what he thought he wo uld do-until he smelled the aroma wafting fro m the kitchen. It rooted him to the floor,

made his nostrils flare and his head  throb with longing. Oily-dark, bitter-rich, utterly compelling.

Coffee.

 

Terry  finished  making  two  generous  sandwiches,  poured  two  mugs  of  joe,  p icked  up  the  plate  in  one  hand   and  both

steaming coffees in the other. Precariously he edged back through the kitchen, into the living room, and held out the mugs to

Trevo r. “Do you want sugar o r—”

He  was  surprised again  when  the  kid  seized a  mug  and  drank  down  the  hot  black  coffee in  what  looked  like  a  sing le

swallow. Terry winced, imagining the bitter brew blazing down his own smoke-seared  throat, but Trevor just sighed and licked

his lips and held up the empty mug. “Can I have another?”

“Should I just bring the whole pot?”

“Yes.”  He seemed  serious,  so Terry  went b ack  to  the  kitchen  and  got  it, along with  the  bag  of  sugar  and  a  couple of

spoons. Trevor poured himself another cup, stirred in a meager spoonful of sugar almost as an afterthought, and drank half of it

at once. Terry to ok his first sip. “I thought you could use a bite to eat too.”

“What is it?” Trevor hadn't noticed the plate of sandwiches until now.

“Olive loaf and mustard on whole grain.”

“Olive loaf?”

“Yeah, it's kind of a classic around here. A while back, Kinsey wanted to have New Orleans Night at the Yew and serve

muffuletta sandwiches, right? But he didn't kno w how to make the Italian olive salad.  So he made these fucked-up things on

sub rolls with boiled ham, sliced pepperoni, and olive loaf. They were awful but we all choked 'em down. Since then I've kind

of gotten to like it.”

Trevor took a sandwich and  bit cautiously at the  very  edge of  it, stayed poker-faced,  managed not  to  shudder. Then he

seemed  to inhale  and  the whole thing  was  gone. He picked up the other  half  of the sand wich and repeated the  process,  then

poured himself another cup of coffee.

“You, uh, want me to fix another pot of Java?”

“I don't know.” Trevor looked up, and an odd shadow passed over his face. It was as if he had managed to relax fo r a few

minutes, to  let down  a  little  of  his  guard,  and  then  he  had  suddenly remembered  some  awful  thing he had to  do.  “Maybe I

better just go.”

“It's okay, man. I'm in no hurry. That's the whole point of o wning  a business, you know-yo u set yo ur own hours and pay

people good money, nobody yells at you if you're a little late.” Or a little stoned.

Spooning coffee out of  its fo il bag,  Terry mused over the  enigma in his living  room.  There was something  very  strange

about this new kid: he seemed nervous and aloof, but at the same time terribly lonely. It was as if he had no social skills, as if

he were some kind of space alien who had read extensively about people and their habits and customs, maybe wanted to kno w

more, but was only now making first contact.

And he put away java the way Terry's car chugged motor oil. Terry wondered what Trevor was trying to stay awake for.

One thing was certain: Missing Mile had  itself another live one.

 

Trevor stayed long eno ugh to  drink mo st of the second pot of coffee. Terry finished  the joint  and ran his mo uth in wh at

seemed  like a friendly way,  talking  about  music, the  town,  even co mics  once he  found  out  Trevor d rew  them.  Trevor didn't

usually talk about it, but Terry asked so many questions that he couldn't help answering some.

At  least  Terry  didn't  mention  Bobby  McGee,  bu t  then  Birdland  probably  wasn't  his  sort  of  thing.  He  liked  the  Freak

Brothers,  predictab ly, but  most  of his  other  favorites  featured  gu ys  in  capes  and  long underwear beating  up guys  in  black.

(There was an awkward silence here; then Trevor, unable to help himself, mumbled “I hate that shit.” Terry just shrugged.)

 

 

                                                                                          36

 

 

 

 

 

Terry  seemed  kind  enough;  still Trevor could  not shake  the  idea  that he was being surreptitiously  examined  like  some

three-headed sid eshow attraction. In few other places had people seemed as curious about him, as interested in him, as here. It

was as if they sensed that he was a hometown boy, or nearly so.

Finally Terry stood up and stretched. Trevo r saw a flash of bare belly beneath his T-shirt: the skin lightly tan ned, with the

barest  beginnings of  a  roll of  fat  and  a thin line  of pale  brown  hair d isappearing into the  waistband  of his jeans.  “Guess we

better get moving. You want a ride somewhere?”

“Violin Road.”

“Pretty dead out there, man. You sure?”

“That's where I'm stayin g now.”

Terry  glanced  at  Trevor,  seemed  to  wrestle  with  something  he  wanted  to  say,  evidently  decided  it  was  none  of  his

business. “Okay. Violin Road it is.”

The rain had stopped but the day was still overcast. The air felt heavy and  moist against Trevor's skin, like an unwanted

kiss. The Rambler gunned through town and bumped over the railroad tracks. It was Sunday afternoon, and nearly everything

seemed to be shut do wn, doors locked tight, windows dark and shaded. Freak subculture or not, Missing Mile was still in the

heart of the Bible Belt. The thought of his lambs being able to bu y a tube of toothpaste o r get a cup of coffee on Sunday was

surely a terrible affront to the Lord.

Then they were turning off Firehouse Street onto another gravel road, one that changed to rutted dirt after  half a  mile or

so. Violin Road. Trevor felt a loo senin g in his chest, a hot ribbon of excitement uncoiling in his stomach. The scrap heaps and

rusted  hulks  of  automo biles,  the  unpainted  trailers, the  castle-like  sp ires  of  kudzu  slipped  past,  less  substantial  than b lurry

images in old photographs. His eyes swep t the roadside.

Then, suddenly, there was the house: his hell, his Birdland.

It was set farther back from the road than he remembered. The porch and the peak of the roof were barely visible through

the rioting  growth  that  had  taken  over  the  yard.  A  weeping  willow at  the  side  of  the  house  had  not  been  much  taller  than

Mo mma's head; now its pale green fronds caressed the roof. A verdant tangle of goldenrod and  forsythia, Queen Anne's  lace

and pokeweed and bro wn -eyed Susans ran rig ht  up to the  porch steps,  which  were partly crumbled.  Kudzu  was draped over

everything like a green blanket, tendrils twining between the po rch railings, through the broken windows.

“You can let me out here.”

Terry slowed the Ramb ler to  a crawl, looked around. This far out, Violin Road was sparsely populated ; there was no other

house in sight. “Where?”

“Right here.”

“The murder house?”

Trevor did n't say anything, waited for  the car to slow enough so that he could jump out. Terry seemed to have forgotten

that his foo t was on the gas; the Rambler inched along at ten miles per hour. “Oh shit,” he said . “I think I kno w who you are.”

“Yeah, I'm starting to feel like a local celebrity or something. Thanks for the ride. I'll see you at the Yew.”

Trevor grabbed his bag and pushed the passenger door open, prompting Terry to apply his brakes at last. Trevor's sneakers

hit the scrubby grass at the sid e of the road; then, before he could  think about it, he was sprinting toward the house.

“Be careful, man!” Terry yelled. Trevor pretended not to hear. Then the Rambler was sp eeding up, disappearing down the

road, thro wing mud in its wake. It round ed a b end and was gone.

Trevor stood alone in the yard,  panting,  staring at the  house. A  few patches  of weathered wood  and  broken  glass were

visible through the growth; other than that the face of the house was mostly hidden.

The  grass  just  brushed  his  knees.  As  he  pushed  through  it,  sparkling  drops  of  water  scattered  to  earth,  grasshoppers

whirred away fro m his invading feet. He ducked under a dripping bower of vine and was there. No more o bstacles lay b etween

him and the  house. The  steps were mostly  intact,  and he thought the  porch  would hold him.  The  front door was barely ajar.

Beyo nd that was dusty darkness.

Trevor closed his eyes for a long moment,  heard the sigh and  hush  of leaves,  the high shrill  drone of insects,  the distant

conversatio n of birds . . . and beneath that, a subliminal voice whispering to him, making itself heard over years of ab sence and

decay?

He was afraid so. He hoped so.

He o pened his eyes, took a deep b reath of sunlight and the verdant smell the rain had left, and put his foot on the first step.

 

 

Chapter Nine 

 

The air in Birdland was golden as slow syrup, green as the light that filtered through the kudzu, weighted with damp ness

and rot. The cool decaying scent of a house  abando ned for decades, made up of many things: the black earth under the floor,

the dry droppings  of animals, the d rifts  of dead  insects sifting  to  shards of iridescent chitin beneath shimmering tapestries of

cobweb. In the random shafts of sunlight that fell through the lattice of roof and  vegetation, dust motes slowly shifted, turned.

Each  one  might  represent  a  memory  Trevo r had of this  house, a particle  of the universe charged  with  the terrible  energy of

years.

He moved  deeper in. Here was the  living room, the  husks  of  the ugly chair  and old  brown sofa that  had  come  with  the

house moldering in a corner, reduced to skins of brittle colorless cloth stretched over skeleto ns of wood and wire. The rain had

come in through the holes in the roof, and the room smelled of slow damp decay, of fungal secrets. Here were the remains of

the stacked milk crates  where  the records had  been stored. Most of  the records were gone, probably stolen by  kids  who had

made it this far in, though b y the end of that summer the magical vinyl wh eels would have been as warped as if they had spent

two months in a slow o ven.

A few fleeting images of album  covers came to him: Janis  Joplin's Cheap  Thrills  with art by R.  Crumb, the psychedelic

hologram  of  the  Rolling  Stones'  Satanic  Majesties  Request  that  could  induce  dizziness  if  he  stared  into  it  too  long,  a

 

                                                                                          37

 

 

 

 

 

pho tograph of  Sidney Bechet that had scared him a little to lo ok  at, because the muscles of the jazz  saxophonist's cheeks and

neck were so developed that his head appeared swollen, elephantine.

Here  was  the  doorway  leading  into  the  hall,  where  Mo mma  had  died.  Her  blood  had  long  since  faded  to  a  barely

discernible pattern of streaks and spatters on the wall, not much darker than the shadow and grime around it. But here and there

the  wooden  frame  had  been  splintered  b y  hammer  blows  that  missed.  And  in  two  spots,  one  on  either  side  of  the  door,

Mo mma's  fingers  had  dug  into  the  wall hard  enough  to  leave  gouges  in  the  plaster.  That  must  have  happened  when  Bobby

didn't miss.

In the autopsy report was a list of substances found under her fingernails: wood, plaster, her husband's blood and her own.

And little divots of Bobby's skin, strands of Bobby's  hair. She had fo ught him off hard. She had died in intimate contact with

him.

Cause of death: blunt trauma. Victim had  fifteen  separate wo unds made by a claw hammer, five to the head, three to the

chest area,  seven  to the arms and  hands. Three of the  head  wounds and  two of  the chest wounds could  in and  of themselves

have been fatal.

Had Momma died quietly? This was something Trevor had wondered about for a long time. She might have wrestled with

Bobby in a desperate silence at first, not wanting to wake the boys and scare them with another fight. But once she realized that

Bobby  meant  them  harm, Trevor  thought,  she  would  have  started screaming.  She wo uld  have tried  to  hold Bobby  off  long

enough to let them get out of the house.

And the injuries she had taken before her death: seven broken fingers, a splintered collarbone and a shattered  tibia, three

cracked ribs,  a  blow  sunk so d eeply into her chest that  it  penetrated  the breastbone. Could she  have remained  silent  through

those?

Trevor  didn't  think  so.  He  probably  could  have  slept  through  anything  that  night.  He  remembered  the  bitter-tasting

grapefruit juice Bobby had given him before bed, the dull loginess of his head the next morning when he wo ke. And a notation

in his file at the Home said there had been Seconal in his blood when he was brought in.

Bobby had drugged him, which meant he had p lanned the murders. But had he planned to leave Trevor alive, and drugged

him so he would sleep through it all? Or had he drugged bo th boys, planning to kill both, and changed his mind about Trevor

for some reason?

And what about Didi? Trevor wondered if his brother had seen his death coming. He had found Didi curled on his belly,

ruined head burrowed deep into the pillow, as if Bobby had killed  him in his  sleep. But unless Bobby had given  him Seconal

too, Trevor didn't think Didi could have slept through the sounds of his mo ther dying. Bobby could have killed him sitting up

in bed-o r cowering- and then arranged him back into the peaceful sleeping position as if trying to absolve himself.

Fredric  D. McGee,  Box 17, Violin  Road,  male  Caucasian, 3  yrs, 2-6,  25  pound s,  blond  hair,  brown  eyes.  Occupation:

None. Cause  of death: blunt trauma.  Victim had  approximately  twenty-two  separate wounds, all in head/neck area.  Cranium

and brain were comp letely destroyed . . .

Trevor imagined  Didi's eyes as the hammer descended. He sq ueezed his own eyes shut and slammed the heel o f his hand

against the door frame. A rain of dust sifted do wn. The pain in his hand-his left hand, of course; he didn't hit  things with his

drawing hand-made the image of Didi fade. And,  in a far corner of the living room,  a crump led sheet  of newspaper suddenly

rustled, then tore. The sound was nearly heart-stopping in the silent room.

Trevor turned away  from  the  doorway,  walked o ver  to the corner and nudged the paper with  his  toe. He could see  no

mouse  or  insect,  nothing  that  co uld  have  made  it  move,  let  alone  tear.  He  picked  it  up  and  smoothed  it,  and  the  headline

screamed off the page at him. “I HAD TO DO IT,” SAYS KILLER. The word killer was ripped  neatly in half.

Trevor examined  the paper more closely  and saw that  it  was a Raleigh  News and Ob server d ated  October  1986,  years

after he  had  left Missin g  Mile.  The headline  story  was  about a man  in  Corinth  who had given his pregnan t  wife  an abortion

with a 30.06, firing sixteen shells into her belly. Even in the womb children  were not safe from their fathers. Trevor imagined

the sizzle of  ho t  lead tunneling into unformed fetal flesh, the raw,  blood y  reek ed ged with the  firework smell of  cordite. But

Bobby hadn't been giving any interviews after murdering his family, not hi this world anyway.

Trevor pictured  the front page of hell's  daily, printed on asbestos but still singed  at the edges, Bo bby's huge-eyed,  shell-

shocked  face  in grainy b lack  and  white o n the  front  page.  And  the  headline  would  say-what? — ANOTHER  FUCKED-UP

GUY KILLS FAMILY, THEN SELF. ONE KID LEFT ALIVE; “WE'LL GET HIM LATER” SAYS DEVIL. Minor demons

yawning over steaming mugs of bitter black coffee and brimstone, blearily scanning the news but not thinking much about it;

this was business as usual in hell.

He felt the house drawing him  in, fillin g  his mind with images and icons till he  overflo wed like a pitcher of dark liq uid.

Caffeine sang in his vein s. He dropped the newspaper,  walked  through the doorway stained with his mother's blood, past  the

kitchen on his left, and slowly down the hall, cocking his head and listening as he passed each room, trying to see through the

half-clo sed do ors.

On  the right  side of  the hall  was his p arents' bedroom,  then Bobby's studio. On the  left was Didi's  room,  then Trevor's,

then the tiny bathroom where Bobby had died. He remembered standing here before, looking at the afternoon light filtering in

through the rooms, falling in golden slants across the hall floor, and wondering if he would ever be able to draw well eno ugh to

capture it.

He could do it now. But the light was subtly different, murkier, with a greener tinge to it. After a moment Trevor realized

it must be because o f the kudzu growing over the windows of the rooms, catching the sunlight and staining it.

He continued to the end of the hall, trailing his hand along the water-stained wall. On his right was the studio, on his left

the bathroom. Bobb y's hell and purgatory. Or was  it the  other way around? Trevor guessed that  was one o f the things he had

come to find out.

He looked to his left and saw the faint gleam of light on dirty porcelain, the buckled shower curtain rod above the black

chasm of the tub. How many hours was it now until the exact mo ment when Bobby had fastened the rope and stepped off the

edge of the tub? How many hours until the twentieth anniversary of his neck snapping?

 

 

                                                                                          38

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor's eyes moved over the peeling walls, over the dark rectangle of the mirror, found the space between sink and toilet

where he had curled his five-year-old body into the tightest possible ball. He wondered if he could fit there no w. He wo ndered

what he wo uld see if he did.

Instead  he  turned  and  went  into  the  studio.  The two  large windows  were  intact,  and  the  room was dusty  but  otherwise

clean. Trevor brushed off the tilted surface of Bobby's drawing table. He preferred to draw on a flat surface, having gotten used

to his desk at the Home, but the folding table was one of the few things Bobby hadn't sold or thrown out when they left Austin.

It had his stains and  gouges,  his razor slits and scars,  his sweat grimed into its grain, mayb e his tears too. Maybe his secrets.

And maybe his nightmares.

Trevor sat on the sawed-off bar stool that Bobby had used as his drawing chair. It wobbled as it always had, but held. The

light in here was good , even with the vines and tall grass covering the window, but so me drawings tacked up on the wall were

in shadow. He didn't want to see them now any way; he had enough of Bobby here to suit him for a while.

Trevor got his own pencils and sketchbook out of his bag, arranged them on the table, and flipped to the story he had been

working on at the  graveyard. The story  of how  Bird and  Walter Brown  went  to  jail in Jackso n, Mississippi,  for  talking  on a

screened porch one fine summer night.

Left arm curled around his sketchbook, head bent down far over the page, hair hanging like a pale curtain around his thin,

determined face, Trevor drew for three hours. When he looked up, the room was veiled in blue shadows and he realized he had

barely been able to see the page for ten minutes or more. He saw Bobby's old gooseneck lamp still clamped to the edge of the

table, and without thin king he reached out and pushed the button that turned it on.

Stark electric light flooded the room, threw the spidery shadow of his fingers clutching the pencil onto the pitted tabletop.

Trevor's drawing trance broke.  He  sho ved himself back  from the  table, nearly tipped the stoo l  over. Only his fear made

him keep his balance.  He  did  not  want  to  be on  his back  on the floo r of  this room just  now.  His  gaze swept the corners,  the

ceiling, the darkening windows,  came to rest on the brown cord snaking from  the base of  the lamp to the  wall socket below.

The  thing  was  plugged  in.  But  how  could  the  wiring,  the  bulb,  last  twenty  years?  An d  as  long  as  he  was  asking  stupid

questions, how could the fucking electricity be on?

He  wondered  if it  might  never have  been turned  off, if  their  delinquent  bill  might  have been  passed  over  by an idling

computer or some such. He distrusted all engines and mechanical systems but esp ecially co mputers, whose insides he pictured

as like some silver, sinister, impossibly intricate painting by Giger.

But Trevor didn't think the power could have stayed on for two  decades without someone at the switches noticing or the

house catching fire. When you subtract the impossible, what's left? The improbable, the strange b ut true. The supernatural, or if

you liked, the supernatural: outside the bo und aries of most experience, but possible in a place where no boundaries are drawn.

Trevor settled back on the stool and glanced up at the wall, at the drawings tacked there,  done on sketchbook paper now

yello wed and curling at the edges. Most had sifted away to faint scratchings of ink or graphite, imp ossible to make out. But the

one his eyes came to rest on was still clear enough.

It was Bobby's last drawing o f Rosena, of whom he had done so man y: facial studies framed in cascading hair, with tender

mouth and large lustrous eyes; sinuous nude fantasies made flesh; long graceful hands like rapid sketches of birds in fligh t. But

in  this  one  Rosena  sprawled  in  the  hall doorway, head  thrown  back,  face  battered  in.  Except for slight differences in  style-

Bobby had a heavier hand with the shad ing, and a way of capturing the fall of light on hair that made it lo ok nearly wet-it was

identical to the drawing Trevor had done in his sketchbook on the Greyhound, on his way to Missing Mile.

Trevor stared at  the faded  picture, nodding ever so slightly, not even surprised anymore. Either Bobby had  known ho w

she would look in death before he killed her,  as if  he'd had some vision,  or he had  gotten out his sketchbook and  drawn her

broken body before he had gone into the bathroom to han g himself. Maybe somewhere around here was a sketch of Didi dead

too. Trevor had done one this morning, barely awake, coming out of his dream of not-drawing.

But now he was here, on the very sp ot where he sat in the dream, and he co uld still draw.

His  jaw  was set,  his  eyes  wary,  a  shade  darker than  before. Though  he did  not  know  it, he looked  like a man  who has

taken blows but is no w ready to deal some of his own.

He glanced  down  at his o wn sketchbook and for the  first time  really saw  what  he  had  just  drawn,  and  all  the  hardness

drained  out of his face. His mouth fell open; his throat slammed shut; tears started in his eyes. Caffeine and adrenaline sizzled

through h is veins, made his heart carom against the walls of his chest. He could barely remember drawing this. It wasn't even

ho w the story was supposed to go.

The cops were meant to show up with their nightsticks drawn, bash Bird and Brown around some, then haul them off to

jail with bruises and bleed ing scalps. That was what had really happ ened.

But in this version, the cops never stopped bashing.

There were  closeups  of  hard  wood  connecting  with skulls, skin  splitting  and  curling back  fro m  the edges o f wo unds,  a

freshet of  blood coursing  from  a  nostril, an eye go ne to  pulp  and  swollen tissue, a  spray  of  broken  teeth  on the  ground  like

splinters  of ivory  scattered on  dark  velvet. Bird and  Brown lay crumpled  at the bo ttom of  the final page like animals  hunted

down and killed for their pelts, adrift in a spreading pool of gore.

The gore was darkly shaded  and looked slick, nearly wet. Trevor could not remember drawing it.

The house and  whatever lived here had cast some nightmarish pall across his vision, hypnotized his hand, ruined his story.

Or had it?

The true story as Trevor had intended to tell it  would  have been  strong and affecting in an  understated way. Mayb e this

could be something splashier, stranger, and ultimately more memorable. He envisioned  an  ending for this version.  The cops

realize they've killed the musicians and sneak off, figuring they can blame the murders on niggers killing other niggers. But, as

white men have failed to realize for  too  long, people aren't  stupid just  because they're po or. The black people of Jackson can

read the death of their hero es like a bitter bo ok whose pages are bound in dusky skin, writ large with blood spilled in hatred.

Jackson is not so far from New Orleans, cradle of dark religion and herbal wisdom from Africa, fro m Haiti, fro m the heart

of the Louisiana swamp. And hoodoo knowledge has a way of traveling . . .

 

 

                                                                                          39

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor imagined the bodies  of Bird and  Brown rising back up, seeing dimly  through smashed eyes, thinking dimly with

smashed brains. They would be only shells, drained of music, of life. But like all good zombies they wo uld be able to hone in

on their killers. And they would have help . . .

In his mind he saw a full-page final frame. The cops crucified and burning on their own front lawns, nailed to crosses of

blazing  agony, their  blackening,  yawning  forms  silhouetted  against the rich  texture  of  the  flames.  It  would  have a  crudely

moralistic, E.G. Comics feel to it. But he wouldn't ink it or color it; he would d o it entirely in pencil, meticulously shaded and

hatched and  stippled, and it would be beautiful.

And he would sell this fucker, sell it to a market that could afford to print it right. Raw maybe, or Taboo. He loved Taboo,

an irregularly published anthology of beautifully rendered, lovingly produced, weird and twisted comics printed mostly in stark

blacks and whites,  shot thro ugh  here and  there with  a few p ages of color  alternately subtle, vivid, and disturbing. Everything

from Joe Coleman's mutilation paintings to the numerous intricate collaborations of Alan Moore had appeared in its pages, all

printed on fine heavy paper.

Trevor's jaw was set again as he bent back over his sketchb ook. But now the emotion in his face looked more like strength

than hardness. If he did this right, it would be the best thing he had ever drawn.

He drew  for four more hours in the  harsh electric light, until his eyelids grew  heavy and  sandy, until his fingers  could

barely uncurl from the pencil. Then he folded his arms on the tabletop and cradled his head and went effo rtlessly to sleep.

Sometime later the gooseneck lamp clicked off, leaving him in darkness broken only b y the trembling, shifting moonlight

that came in the windows, filtered through kudzu and twenty years of dust.

Trevor did not dream that night.

 

 

Chapter Ten 

 

Kinsey Hummingbird woke on  Mo nd ay morning  hoping  Trevor  might have come b ack  in the  night, though he had  not

seen  him all  day  Sunday.  Kinsey couldn't imagine anyone sleepin g  in that house. But apparently  Trevor  had; at  any rate, he

wasn't here.

There were so  many  things  Kinsey  wanted to  say  to the  boy-but  he  had  to stop  thinking  of  him  as  a  boy. Trevor was

twenty-five after  all;  even if  he  had had reason  to lie,  the  chronology was right. Kinsey remembered the date of  the McGee

deaths well enough.

It was just that Trevor looked so young. That scared five-year-old was still a big part of him, Kinsey thought as he got up

and  went to  the kitchen,  though  some  flintier core must  have kept Trevor  alive  and  sane.  There  was an undeniable  strength

there; many people in Trevor's situatio n  would have retreated into  the numb fog of catatonia or blown their brains out as soon

as they were able to lay hands on a gun.

But even for a soul of enormous strength, what would a night in that house have been like?

After the investigation  of the McGee deaths  was over- and of course  there had been little investigating  to d o; the bodies

told their own mute tale-the cops had locked the door behind them and the family's things had sat in the house, gathering dust

in the  silen t, bloodstained rooms. A FOR  SALE  sign went up in the scrubby yard, but no one saw it as anything other than a

gho ulish joke on the realtor's part. That house would never be rented again, let alone sold .

Browsing the aisles of Potter's Store one day deep in the summer of 1972, the FOR SALE sign outside the murder house

already  niggling  at  his  mind,  Kinsey  found  himself  wondering  what  had  happened  to  the  McGees'  things.  Potter's  was  a

cavernous  thrift establishment downtown,  huge  and  dim  and cool,  its  rickety rows  of  metal  shelves  crammed  with  chipped

plates and battered silverware and obsolete (though usually functional) kitchen appliances, its cracked glass display case filled

with strange knickknacks and  costume jewelry, its bins  heap ed high with  musty clothing. Kinsey, with his love of junk, often

spent long afternoons bro wsing here.

But he didn't think the McGees' belongings had end ed up at Potter's Store. He wasn 't sure what he thought he sho uld have

seen:  blood stained  mattresses,  maybe,  or  splattered  shirts  and  dresses  woven  through  the  pile  marked  MISC  WOMENS

CLOTHS 25 CENTS. But there hadn't been any jazz records or underground comics either, and there sure as hell hadn't been a

drawing table. He supposed everything was still out there, moldering in the silent rooms.

The  house  on  Violin  Road  never  sold.  The  FOR  SALE  sign  was  stolen,  replaced  by  the  realtor,  whose  optimism

apparently knew no bounds. The paint on the new sign faded throughout the long dry summer. Tall weeds grew up around it,

and it b egan to list. At last it fell face fo rward and was soon hid den in the long grass.

By  that  time  kudzu  had  begun  to  climb  the  walls  of  the  house.  Where  the  children  of  Violin  Road  had  thrown  rocks

through the windows, the insidious vine snaked in. Kinsey imagined it twining through the rooms, sucking nourishment from

blood  long  dry. He did not doubt that  this  was possible. As  a child, he had  seen a  kudzu  root unearthed  fro m  the Civil War

graveyard  where his own  great-great-great-uncle  Miles  was buried.  The  root, fully six feet  lo ng, had eaten its way through a

grave and taken on the shape of the man buried there. Its offshoots formed fo ur twisted limbs, the root-tips bursting from them

at the ends like a multitude of fingers and toes. At the top had been a skull-sized tangle of delicate fibers in  which the planes

and hollows of a face could almost be mad e o ut.

Twenty years later the house was nearly hidden under its twining green blanket. Driving past it, you could barely tell that

there  was a house on the overgrown lot at all. Only the  wooden porch and the peak of the roof showed  forlornly throu gh  the

vines.  A stand  of  oaks shaded  the house, their heavy  cano py  of  foliage turning the yard into a deep  green cave  of  light and

shadow. The fronds of a willow brushed the roof, fingering the jagged edges of glass in the rotting window frames, stru mming

the kudzu like the strings o f a lyre.

Kinsey wondered again  how  much of the family's  stuff  was  still in  there.  He knew  kids  had  broken in  over the  years,

daring each other,  sho wing  off. Terry,  Steve,  and  R.J. had been  in  years ago,  though  Ghost would  not  even go as far  as the

porch.

 

 

                                                                                          40

 

 

 

 

 

So  most  of  the  things  in the  front  room  would  be  long  spirited  away.  But  no t  many  kids  would  have  gotten past the

gou ged  and  bloodied  doo rway  to the hall,  and  Kinsey  doubted  that any would  have  made  it  farther than  the  first  bedroom,

where the little boy had died. The back rooms would be dusty but intact. He wondered what Trevor would find in them.

Kinsey measured coffee, poured cold tapwater into the machine, and, as the old  percolator began to bubble and steam, fell

to  gazing  out his kitchen  window at his own  backyard. He had a little  vegetable  garden,  but  otherwise the  grasses and trees

grew wild. Kinsey liked it that way, home to any flying, slithering, or crawling thing that cared to take up residence. But it was

not as snarled and shadow-stained, not as forbidding a landscape as the house on Violin Road.

The house where Trevor must be now, even as Kinsey sipped his first milky cup of morning coffee.

Kinsey's  mother  had  cured  him  of  Christian  prayer  long  ago.  He  tried  to think  of  a  Zen  koan that  might  be  of  use  to

Trevo r,  but the  only one he could remember was “Why  has  Bodhidharma  no beard?” which  didn't  seem  to apply.  But  then

koans weren't supposed to apply.

His head full of ghosts, little smirking Buddhas, and seco ndhand treasures, Kinsey stood woolgathering for the better part

of an hour in his o wn clean comforting kitchen.

 

Hank  Williams's nasal twang  poured  out of the  car  speakers  as  raw and potent  as  moonshine  spiked  with  honey.  Zach

pondered it as  he drove. It  should not  have  been a  remarkab le voice;  it  was  no thing but  a po'bucker  whine straight  from the

backwoo ds of Alabama. But there was something golden and tragic in it, so me lost soul that fell to its knees and sobbed every

time Hank opened his mouth.

He'd been  meandering  north  on 1 -40  and  surrounding  roads  when he saw  the  turnoff  for  Highway  42.  Zach  loved  the

Hitchhiker's  Guide  to  the  Galaxy  series,  and  the  sign  reminded  him  that  the  numb er  forty-two  was  the  answer  to  life, the

universe, and everything. It pulled him as inexorably as the lights of South o f the Border had done. Soon he was driving down

a two-lane  blacktop  shrouded in rags  and tatters o f predawn mist, and several times he caught  himself singing  lustily  along

with Hank.

The  little town  only caught  his  attention  because  of  its  curious name and  weird  architecture;  to  his road-weary  eyes  it

seemed that the entire downtown  was decorated with  wagon wheels and spinning b arbers' poles. He almost d rove on through,

but caught himself drifting across the center line and decided to stop for a quick nap.

Zach  pulled  into  an  alley  and came  upon  a  small lot  where  several  other  cars  were  already  parked.  The  friendly  local

deputy-dawg wouldn't bother him here; at any rate  he was  only going to stretch his tired bones across the  seat, close his eyes

for a few minutes, then get moving again . . .

He slept for six hours in the p arking lot behind  the Whirling  Disc record store. The lot was also used for storage by an

adjacent auto parts store, and the Mustang was not noticed among the other junkers for some time. When he finally woke, the

sun had risen high and hot, his body was bathed in sweat, and Terry Buckett was p eering into the car, tapping worriedly on the

windo w.

 

“Man! I thought you were dead for sure!” Terry took a hit off Zach's pipe and passed it back, shaking his head, letting the

fragrant smoke leak out the corners of his mouth. “You looked like somebody had shot you and left  yo u lyin' there across the

seat. All that was missing was the brains on the windo w.”

Zach  sup pressed  a  shudder.  He  didn't think the FBI would  sho ot  a  hacker  on sight,  but  he  wasn't sure about the  Secret

Service. (The  NSA probably kept  hackers alive for torture and interrogation later,  but their  jurisdiction  was  largely  military,

and military secrets had never much appealed to him.)

They were sitting on  crates in the  dim, cool  back room of  the record store,  and though Zach  felt an undeniable echo of

Leaf and Pass Christian, Terry was obviously as straight as the day was hot. There was no definable characteristic that told him

this; the pheromones just  weren't there. It  was a good thing too, Zach thought; after stewing in his o wn juices all morning he

was sure he stank abominably.

As if to confirm this, a girl with long brown hair stuck her head through the curtain, blinked big Cleopatra eyes against the

gloom, and wrinkled her nose. “Terry?”

“Back here, Vie.” The girl picked her way through the boxes and rolled-up posters, long gauzy skirt swishing around her

ankles.  When  she  got  closer,  Zach  saw  that  she  was  wearing a  skintight  tank  top ,  as  if  to  accentuate  the  fact that  she had

absolutely no breasts. Edd y had had a phrase for strippers built like that: Nipples on a rib.

The girl leaned down to Terry. Zach thought they were going to kiss, but instead Terry blew into her mouth a long stream

of  smoke,  which she  sucked  in  expertly.  Tendrils  of  it  seep ed  from  her  narrow  nostrils  and  curled  around  her  head.  Terry

cupped  the  back of her  thigh  through  the  full  skirt.  “This  is my  gal Victoria. Vie,  meet Zach. He  just rolled into  to wn this

morning.”

“Looks like we gain two fo r every one we lose.” At Terry's questioning look, she added, “You told me about that guy who

came in Saturday. Now him.”

“Yeah, so who'd we lose?”

“Omigod , you do n't know!” Victoria clapped her hands over her mouth. Zach wasn't sure, but it looked as if she might be

hiding a sudden, guilty smirk. “That girl Rima? The one Kinsey fired for stealing from the Yew? She had a wreck out  on the

highway. Totaled her car and  broke her b ack. They found cocaine all over the place.”

“Gee, Vie, you sound pretty upset about it.”

“Yeah, right.” Fro m the sudden chill in the air Zach guessed that Rima had come on to Terry at some point, though if she

was  such  a  loser  he  doubted  Terry  had  slept  with  her.  Terry  seemed  like that  rarest  of  all  creatures,  a  genuinely  guileless

Decent Guy. Besides, yo u pro bably couldn't get away with much in a little town like this.

“Well  .  .  .” A shad ow passed  over  Terry's face.  He obviously felt bad about the  girl,  but didn't want to  hurt Victoria's

feelings. “She didn't kill anyone else?”

Victo ria shook her head, and Terry brightened a little. Zach believed this was known as Looking on the Bright Side, also

as Pulling the Wool Over Your Own Eyes. He didn't say any thing, though; the last thing he needed now was to anno y any one.

 

                                                                                          41

 

 

 

 

 

So he loaded another  bowl  and  sat around  the back  of the store  with  them  for  a  while longer,  listening to  gossip  about

people  he  didn't  know,  occasio nally  askin g  a  question  or  offering  a  comment,  hacking  the  scene,  making  the  connections,

weaving himself into the net. It was possib le anywhere, though it could be a damn sight tougher than breaking into a computer.

When Terry's  morning crew (one sleepy-looking teenager with a tattoo  so  fresh it was still b leeding)  sho wed  up,  Terry

and  Victoria  took Zach  down  the street for  greasy grilled  cheese sandwiches  at  the  local  diner. The waitress  refilled  Zach's

water  glass  with  tea,  and   when  he  took  a  sip  of  it  without  noticing,  his  nerves  began  to  crackle  and  fizz  like  a  string  of

firecrackers. For all of that, he felt good. He liked this to wn.

After  lunch  Victoria  had  to   go  to  work -she  sorted  and  mended  old  clothes  at  so me  downtown  thrift  shop-and  Terry

offered  to  sho w Zach the local dive  before he went b ack  to  the record store. By the time they  were halfway  down the  street,

Zach was eagerly picturing the inside of a bar. It would be calm and dark and air-conditioned, like a little pocket of nighttime

in the middle of the hot afternoon. It would be co mfo rting with the sharp scents of liquor and the grain y smell of beer on tap , lit

by the soft watery glow of a Budweiser clock or a neon Dixie sign. He might have been picturing any of a hundred b ars in the

French Quarter, b ut the Sacred Yew was like none of them,  and Zach had yet to learn how difficult it  was to find Dixie  beer

anywhere but New Orleans.

 

Trevor woke  at the drawing table with cramped  muscles,  an  aching  head, and a painfully full  bladder.  The green-tinted

sunlight  streaming  through  the  studio  windows  mad e  him  wince  and  rub  his  eyes  as  he  had  seen  Bobby  do  in  the  grip  of

countless bourb on han govers. But he had n't had the dream of not-drawing last night.

He stood up without looking at the pages he had drawn, stumbled out of the room, back thro ugh the hall and living roo m,

out onto  the vine-shrouded po rch where he stood urinating into the kudzu, squinting out at the empty road.

The day glistened in emerald splendor, grass stems and spid erwebs still bejeweled with yesterday's rain, inviting Trevor to

come out and enjo y the sun awhile. Instead he stood for a few minutes in the shelter of the porch, breathing deeply of air that

did not smell like mildew or dry rot. From the quality of the light he thought it was early afternoo n.

This time twenty years ago, Mo mma's friends from the art class had been coming up these steps,  knocking worriedly on

the door, then letting themselves into  the house  and find ing  him among the bodies. The man  with the gentle  hands had been

picking  him up, carrying him out of the carnage. For an instant Trevor almost remembered what he  had been thinking  at that

moment: so mething about the Devil. But it eluded him.

Soon he turned and went back into the soft gloom of the h ouse. Without giving himself  time to think about it he crossed

the livin g roo m, walked a few paces down the hall, and let himself into Didi's roo m.

It looked smaller than he remembered, but that might have been due to the kudzu vines that had burst through the windo w

and taken over more than half the room. They twined up the walls, aro und the light fixture on the ceiling. They trailed into the

closet on Trevor's  left, where he  could still  see  a  few of  Didi's  to ys  mired in  the leaves, as  if the kudzu  had  actually  twined

around  them and  lifted them  off the  floor. A smiling  plush octopus, a  windup grandfather  clock, a once-red rubber ball. All

were covered in dust, faded with time and neglect. Twenty years never touched by a little boy's hands, a little boy's love.

The kudzu filled the left half o f the ro om with rustling heart-shaped leaves and shifting green shadows. The mattress sat in

a clear sp ot to the right. Instead of a tiny body it bore only a huge, irregular bloodstain, dark crimso n  and wet-looking in the

center,  fadin g  to the most  delicate  pale bro wn  around the edges.  Trevor  noticed  splotches  and  runners  of  blood on  the  wall

above the mattress too, five or six feet up. How many blood  vessels were in the brain? And how far could they spray when the

head  was crushed  like a  juicy grape, made to spill out  the red secrets  of its wine, the  electric potion of  its cerebral fluid,  the

very chemistry of its thoughts and dreams?

It's a glorious summer day, some remotely, annoyingly sane voice in his head nagged him, and here you are buried in this

tomb of a house staring at the twenty-year-old deathstain of a brother you barely had time to know.

And another part of him answered, We get to the places where we need to b e.

He pulled the  Whirling Disc T-shirt  over  his head, let it fall to the  floor,  and stretched out on Didi's mattress. Stale dust

puffed up from the ticking as he centered his head on the bloodstain. It was stiff and dry against his cheek, and smelled only of

age, with perhaps a  faint sour undertone like the memory of  spoiled  meat.  He nuzzled  his face into the stain, spread  his arms

wide as if to embrace it.

From  so mewhere in  the  room came  a  faint  popping sound, then  the noise of  something heavy  hitting the floor.  Trevor

jerked reflexively but did not look around. He wasn't sure he wanted to see what new surprise the house had dealt him. Not yet.

Can't you even give me a minute with Didi? he thought. Can't I even have that before I have to start thinking about you again?

But b y now he knew he wasn't calling the shots, not many of them anyway. He had come here to learn, and whatever was

here would teach him . . . something. He pushed himself up on his elbows and turned to look into the corner of the room from

which the sound had come, over b y the closet.  A small dark object lay near the edge of the kudzu, as if it had tumbled out of

the vines. The object was perhaps  a  foot long,  half-shrouded in shado w.  Trevor  tried to tell  himself it  could  be  anything.  A

stick. A stray piece of wood.

A hammer.

He got  up  and  crossed the  room,  stared at  it  for  a  long  moment,  then leaned  down and picked it up. The stout wooden

handle was scuffed and streaked with dark stains. It felt slightly warm in his hand. The head and  claw were rusted , caked with

a  delicate,  crumbling  dry  brown  matter  like  powdery  fungus,  like  desiccated  petals.  He  touched  his  finger  to  it,  rubbed  it

against  his  thumb.  The  scrim  of  matter  between  them  felt  dusty,  gritty.  Pale  bro wn,  like  the  edges  of  the  bloodstain.  He

remembered  reading  so mewhere that any human tissue would turn to some shade of brown eventually, given time. It was the

color of all skin, the color of waste, the color of rot.

Cause of death: blunt trauma . . .

Trevor had no idea what had happened to the hammer that had killed his family, but he knew it could not have stayed in

the house. It wo uld  have  been taken  as evidence,  photographed, probably even fitted into the holes in their  skulls to prove it

was indeed the murder weapon. That was how they did things. Yet he knew too, just as surely, that this was the same hammer.

 

 

                                                                                          42

 

 

 

 

 

He stood for a long time turning it over and over in his hands. He felt a few slow tears leaking from his eyes, running into

his mo uth or dripping off his chin. But he had done most of his crying  last night, with Kinsey. Now he was beginning to feel as

if he were being taunted. Here's a hammer; what can you do with it?

He d idn't know yet.

But when a noise came from the living room-no scrape or creak o f the house, he was already starting to get used to those,

but a distinct footfall-he wh irled and raised the hammer befo re he knew what he was doing.

And when he heard a stranger's voice, Trevor moved swiftly and silently toward the door.

 

“Shit! I b etter get back to the store before it pours. Tell Zach I'll see him later if he decides to hang out.”

Terry tipped a quick salute at Kinsey, who was on his knees ripping several weeks' worth  of silver duct tape off the stage,

and  took  his  leave  o f  the  Sacred  Yew.  A  few  minutes  later  Zach  came  out  of  the  rest  room,  his  face  and  hands  freshly

scrubbed, his dark eyelashes still beaded with water, settling his glasses on the narrow bridge of his nose. “It's raining,” he told

Kinsey.

“I heard. How could you tell?”

“The ceiling's leaking. I p ut th e trash can under it.”

Kinsey sighed, pushed his feathered hat back over his stringy hair, and kept tugging at the d uct tape.

“Did Terry leave? I was going to ask him if he knew a place I could crash.”

“He'll let you have his spare bed room if R.J. isn't camped there. You can sleep on my co uch, too, if you'll do me a favor. I

was going to d o it myself, but I need to stay here and make sure the p lace doesn't flood. The landlord won't fix our pipes and

so metimes a heavy rain just comes right in.”

Zach had  an open Natty Boho in his hand -he'd grabbed it out of the cooler and slapped two dollars on the counter before

Kinsey could card him-and looked in no great hurry to go anywhere, but he agreed readily eno ugh. “Sure, I'll do you a favor.”

“There's a young man living in an abandoned house out o n the other side of town.” Kinsey explained briefly about Trevor,

giving none of  the details of why he was in the house. “He  has no electricity  or runnin g  water.  I brough t  in a few things for

him-blankets, bottled water, some food. Think yo u could take it out to him?”

Zach looked dub ious. “Okay.”

“He doesn't bite.”

“Oh, well then forget it.” Zach saw Kinsey's blank look. “Sorry. What's he doin g in this abandoned  house?”

“I'll let him tell you himself, if he wants to. You'll like Trevor. He's lived  in New Yo rk-the two of you can compare notes

on that pestilent hellhole.”

Zach fo llowed Kinsey behind the bar to get the box of supplies. Kinsey noticed that Zach's hands were restless, nervous,

their slender spatulate fingers always manipulating something: skating over the keypad  of the adding machine, to ying with the

pho ne. Once he reached for the keys of the cash register, b ut drew back as if realizing that would be impolite. The boy seemed

to have a fascination for switches and buttons. He refrained from actually pushing them, but stroked and tapped  them gently as

if wishing he could.

Kinsey gave  him directions to  the  house  and  let  him  out  the  back door.  Zach  could  hard ly  miss  the  place;  there were

several run-down houses on Violin Road , but only one that was barely even there. Kinsey went back into the club. Now a thin

trickle of  water was seeping  from  under the door  of the  men's  room. If the rain  kept up,  he could spend the whole afternoon

mopping and wringing, mopping and wringing. Damn the landlord.

He wasn't sure he had d one right by sending Zach out to Violin Road, but it felt right somehow. He hated the thought of

Trevo r staying o ut  there another  night  witho ut  food  or water.  Someone should at least  make sure he had n't  fallen  through a

rotten floor and broken his neck.

Zach was an all right sort, if a little shifty. Kinsey didn't think he was really from New York, or anywhere near it. There

was a type of New York accent that sounded something like his voice, true. But Kinsey had heard a distinctive one from New

Orleans-a weird b lend of Italian, Cajun, and  deep-South-that sounded a lot closer. And Zach had perked up visibly when Terry

mentioned that the name of his band was Gumbo.

But if he wanted to be fro m New York, then he was fro m New York as far as anyone around here was concerned. Kinsey

only asked questions when he could tell a kid wanted him to. Right now Zach, no last name offered , looked like he wanted to

stay as far away from questions as possible.

 

Zach swerved to avoid the swollen carcass of a possum in the road, slowed, and turned into a likely-looking driveway. It

was barely more than a rutted track losing a battle to tall grasses and wildflo wers; the ho use itself was so o vergrown that it was

invisible from the road unless you were looking for it. Zach thought it looked like a wonderful place to live.

He finished his beer, got o ut of the car, and pulled the box of supplies out after him. Kinsey had put a six-pack of Coke in

with the bottled  water, blankets, and various packaged food. There was even a pillow in  a flowered case at the  bottom of the

box. Whoever this Trevor Black was, Kinsey had done him up right.

The rain had slacked off some, but it was still drizzling drearily, beading on his glasses, making his hair straggle into his

face. The day had taken on a cool, slightly eerie cast. Zach hoisted the box and lugged it up the steps to the vine-draped porch.

The front door hung askew on its hinges, half open. Zach knocked, waited, knocked again. No response. He squinted into

the damp gloom of the hou se, then shrugged and let himself in.

For  a moment he stood in the  center  of the  living room  letting  his  eyes  adjust to the  absence  of light. Gradually  details

resolved  themselves  and he saw the holes in  the ceiling, the vines  twisting in the windows, the  rotting  hulks  of  furniture.  A

tendril of unease touched him. He cleared his throat. “Hello?”

Nothing. The doorway to the hall was a black rectangle, the wall around it smeared with indistinct dark stains. Zach stared

at it, feeling worse. What had that old hipp ie sent him into?

He would just put the box down here on the  floor and turn around and go. Nothing to it. He lowered it halfway, his eyes

never leaving the hall door.

 

                                                                                          43

 

 

 

 

 

When a tall pale form appeared in the doorway, Zach stifled a scream and dropped the box. It hit the floor and tipped over

on  its side. A can of  Chef Boyardee ravioli rolled across the floor, disappeared under  the couch. Ab surdly, Zach wondered if

Kinsey had remembered a can opener.

The  pale  form  came  out  of  the  darkness  to ward   him.  A  shiftless,  sk inny,  ridiculously  beautiful  boy,  long  blond  hair

spilling over his sho ulders and dirt-smudged chest, eyes wide and blazing and utterly mad, a rusty claw hammer clutched in his

upraised  hand .  He looked like  some  malevo lent  avenging  angel,  like a  pissed-off  Christ  come  down  off  the  cross  ready  to

pound in some nails of his own.

Zach stood paralyzed as the h ammer-wielding angel, presumably Trevor, descended on him. He could not seem to make

himself  speak.  He  did  not want  to die  like a character in a splatter  movie,  did not want to die quick and stupid or slow and

mean, with a ch unk  of  metal buried in his  frontal  lobes and syrupy blood  gradually obscuring  the du mb, startled  exp ression

frozen on his face for all eternity. But even less did he love the idea of turning to run and feeling the claw end of the hammer

take a divot out of his skull.

His heart caromed crazily off the walls of his chest. A wire-thin pain shot do wn his left arm. Maybe he would  just have a

heart attack and avoid the whole thing.

Trevor's other hand snaked out,  wrapp ed long fingers roun d Zach's  wrist. His touch was galvanizing, akin  to  an electric

shock or a whole pot of coffee. Zach thought his nerves might just rip out of his skin and go twining up Trevor's arm like the

stinging tentacles of jellyfish.

But his synapses refused to save  him. Think,  his  mind yammered, flex your  brain  and  THINK  because  if you don 't  it's

going to end up splattered all over this dirty  floor,  and is that any fate  for this rare  and superior organ that has served  you so

well for nineteen  years?  Wanna go  for  twenty? Then HACK  THIS  SYSTEM,  D00D! What's  the first thing you  need? THE

PASSWORD!

“TREVOR!” he hollered. “NO!!!”

He had made his voice as loud and sharp as he could. He saw Trevor hesitate, but his grip on Zach's wrist didn't loosen,

and the hammer stayed upraised, ready to fall.

But p asswords always required more than one try. “Trevor!” he sho uted again, letting an extra edge of fear and deference

creep into his voice. “Kinsey sent me! Please don 't kill me! Please!”

Zach felt a tiny bright pain deep in his head, wondered if that was the spot where the hammer wou ld go in or if he had just

managed  to have an aneurysm instead of a heart attack. It seemed the body always had some time bo mb lurking in its depths.

But some  of the madness  appeared  to  melt  off  Trevor. His eyes  met  Zach's,  really  saw  Zach,  and  a glassy  film  cleared

from them. The  black-rimmed irises  were the palest, most  delicate ice-blue; moments ago they  had been muddy  with  killing

rage. Now Trevor looked horrified, and years younger. He let go of Zach's wrist. His shoulders sagged. He tried to swallow but

could not seem to work  up the spit; the curve of his throat  worked convulsively.  The  skin  there was  creased with sweat and

grime, as if he had not shaved or bathed in days.

Okay. You fo und  a crack in the system; that doesn't necessarily mean you're in. Verify yourself. Reassure the system that

you belong here.

“Trevor? I ... didn't mean to scare you. My name's Zach and I'm new in to wn too and . . . uh, Kinsey from the club sent me

out to bring you this stuff.”

The quicksilver  eyes  flickered; then  Trevor's  lips moved. His voice was deeper than  Zach  had expected,  and very quiet.

“You must think I'm crazy.”

“Well-” said Zach, and stopped. Trevor tilted  his head. “Well, it would help  if you put the hammer do wn.”

Trevor stared at the grisly tool in his hand  as if  he had no idea how  it  had gotten there. Then,  very  slowly, he  bent and

placed the hammer on the floor. “I'm sorry,” he muttered. “I'm really, really sorry.”

Bingo!  In with  full  user  privileges! Bells and  whistles should have been  going off in Zach's head. But he didn't  feel as

triumphant as he usually did when he cracked  a system. He was starting to remember that Trevor was more than a system; he

was a p erson, and people were volatile things, and  that hammer was still within easy reach.

And  on  top  of  all  that,  the  stricken  look on  Trevor's face  and  the jagged  catch in  his  voice  were so  genuine  that  Zach

actually felt a  little sorry for him. He was a  beautiful bo y  with  fierce  intelligence  behind the  craziness  flickering  in  his  eyes.

Zach wondered what had brought him to this place, to this extremity.

“You're the only person who ever tried to kill me that apologized for it afterward,” he said. “So I guess I accept.”

A trace of a smile migh t have crossed Trevor's face. It was gone b efore Zach could be sure. “How many other people have

tried to kill you?”

“Two.”

“Who were they?”

“My parents.”

Trevor's eyes went very wide, p aler still. Then suddenly they shimmered  with tears. A couple spilled over the rims of his

eyelids before he could  stop them, great fat crystal drops of p ain.

Once  in a while  you  happen purely  at random  upon the right password in a million,  the unguessable code sequence,  the

needle in a program's haystack. Once in a while, you just get lucky.

“I can explain everything,” said Trevor.

 

The tho ught of what he had nearly done made Trevor feel light-headed. The house spun around  him; the floor threatened

to tilt, to yawn wide open beneath his feet.

He couldn't  remember  what he had been  thinking as he  grabbed  Zach's  wrist.  He  wasn't sure he had been thinking;  his

mind had felt as empty as the rooms of the house, and that scared him worse than anything.

“I can explain  everything,” he said, tho ugh  he doubted he really could,  and doubted  even  more that Zach wo uld want to

hear it.

But Zach just shrugged. “Sure, if you want to talk about it. I'm not hurt. It's no big deal.”

 

                                                                                          44

 

 

 

 

 

Trevor looked at him. Zach was trying to smile, but his face was terribly pale in the gloom, and  his eyes still sho wed too

much white. Even his hands were shaking. Trevor wondered what kind of threat Zach would consider a big deal.

“I want to talk about it,” he said. “Let's go outside.”

They walked around to the side  yard and sat beneath  the glistening canop y o f the  willow. The  leaves back here were so

thick  that  the ground was almost dry,  though a shimmer of droplets fell on them from  time to time. Trevor was still  shirtless,

and the water beaded on his shoulders, made trickling paths through the dirt on his chest and back.

Zach seemed to be watching him closely, waiting to  hear what he had to say. In the daylight Trevor saw that his eyes were

a startling shade of green, large and slightly tilted. His face was fine-boned, sharp-featured , interestingly shadowed by his wild

spiky hair and the  round black frames of h is glasses. Trevor  realized who  Zach resembled:  his drawing of Walter Brown,  the

singer who'd been arrested with Bird in Jackson, Mississippi. The singer  whose face Trevor had had to imagine because  he'd

never seen the man's picture. The likeness wasn't exact, but it was strong enough to p ut him more at ease with Zach. This was a

face he knew, a face that pleased his eye.

Trevor began to talk.  The  words came slo wly  at first, but soon he could  not  stop. Never in his life  had he talked  for  so

long at one time. He told Zach everyth ing: the deaths, the orphanage, the dreams, the things that had happened since he'd been

back in the house. He even talked about the time he had cracked that kid's skull open in the shower, though he didn 't mention

ho w much he had liked it.

He was surprised at how good talking felt. Not since he stopped letting blood fro m his arm with a razor blade had he felt

such a welcome sense of release, of p oison draining from his system.

He wasn't sure why those two words Zach had spoken — my parents-had op ened him like this. Certainly there had been

other kids at the Home who had taken  plenty o f abuse fro m their parents, and probably would have told Trevor about it if he

had asked. But those kids had not appeared in the house of his childhood like embodiments of someo ne he had drawn. Those

kids had not stood  their ground and talked him out of ... whatever he had been about to do. He  had never gripp ed those kids'

thin wrists hard enough to leave red impressions o f his fingers in the flesh.

And if he had, he doubted they wo uld have stayed around to hear his reasons why.

 

Trevor's face was hidden behind curtains of long hair, and his voice was so low that Zach had to lean in close to  hear it.

Trevo r kept sneaking looks at Zach as if to  gauge his reaction, but would not look him full in the face.

Slowly the tale unfolded, beginning with the bloody history that had been branded upon the house before Zach  was even

born.  He would have heard  much of this in town soon enough, Trevor said  rather bitterly; word  was no doubt getting around

Missing Mile that the last survivor of the  murd er family  had come home. He  said it just like that, the murder family, as if he

knew that was what they would be called in the local legends that must have unfolded around  them. But Trevor's own story got

weirder and weirder until hammers were appearing from thin air and drawings were undergoing sinister mutation betwixt hand

and page.

Zach kept nodding his encouragement. He  was far too fascinated to let Trevor quit. Back in h is familiar French Quarter,

back in his comforting little corner o f cyberspace, Zach thought he had seen strange things, maybe even done some. But he had

never met anyone who had lived through experiences  like this, anyone who had taken such damage and remained among the

walking wounded.

Eventually Trevor's flood of wo rds ran down and  he sat staring  out through the drifting, glistening fronds of the  willow.

Through the  undergrowth  one  weathered  corner  of  the house was just  visible, paler  gray than  the threatening  afternoon  sky.

Zach  watched a single raindrop  making its  way  down the  knobby ridge of  Trevo r's  spine.  At last Trevor  said,  “I  don't  kno w

why I told you all that. You still must think I'm crazy.”

“Maybe,” Zach told him, “b ut I don't hold it against you.”

It  was obvious no one had ever said such  a thing to Trevor before. He didn't  know what  to  make of it. He looked wary,

then surprised, and finally tried a tentative smile.

Zach  thought Trevor might indeed  be  quite  insane,  but  was developing  a  healthy  respect  for  him  in spite  of  it.  Terry,

Victoria, and Kinsey were fun to hang out with, but if he was going to stay in Missing Mile for any len gth of time, he wanted

Trevo r for his first friend.

He'd have  to  sublimate the  attraction,  tho ugh. He'd done it before, once he realized that  he  actually  liked someone.  He

didn't think it would be a problem: whereas Terry gave off the wrong kind of pheromones, Trevor didn't seem to give off any.

It was as if he had no sexual awareness at all. Zach caught himself wondering how hard it would be to teach him.

He watched the raindrop  finish  its navigation of  Trevor's  spine and disappear  beneath the  waistband  of his jeans. There

was a d usting of the palest golden hair there, slightly damp, right in the hollow of the b ack . . .

He b it his lip painfully and realized that Trevor was asking him something. “Huh?”

“I asked what you do.”

“Oh.”  After  the  raw  ho nesty Trevor  had  shown  him,  Zach could  not  entirely bring himself  to  lie.  “Well, I  work  with

computers.” With great relief he watched Trevor's eyes  glaze over. It was the look of the willful computer illiterate, complete

with  the hasty  little  nod that  said  that's  enough, that's all  I  need  to know, p lease  don't start  talking ab out  bits  and  bytes and

drives and megarams and all that incomprehensible mop. Zach had seen that look hundreds of times, welco med it. It meant he

wouldn 't have to answer any unco mfortable questions.

He dug into h is pocket and found his last prerolled joint, flattened  and mauled b ut more or less intact. “Do yo u mind?” he

asked. Trevor shook his head. Zach produced one of the lighters Leaf had given him and  set it afire.

Trevor's nostrils flared as the smoke drifted past his face. “I better not,” he said when Zach offered him the joint, though

Zach saw his fingers twitch as if wanting to reach for it. “I smoked some pot yesterday an d almost passed out. I'm not used to

it.”

 Zach gathered all his considerable nerve. “Want a shotgun?”

“What's that?”

 

 

                                                                                          45

 

 

 

 

 

Oh  god. How  to exp lain a  shotgun without making  it  so und like the obvious scam it is? I'm not  going  to take this any

further,  I'm really  not,  I  LIKE  him,  dammit,  but there's  no  harm  in  a little innocent  frustration. “It's,  uh,  where  one person

breathes in the smoke  and then  blows  it into the  other person's mouth. See, my lungs filter the smoke before you get it, so it

won't be as strong.” Yeah, right. Heavy science gain' down.

Trevor hesitated. Zach tried not to slip into social-engineering mode, but he thought he could feel the power radiating in

great joyous waves through his brain now. He felt as if he could convince absolutely anybody of absolutely anything. “C'mon,”

he said. “Po t's go od for you. It relaxes yo u, clears out your b rain.”

Trevor eyed the smoldering joint, then shoo k his head. “No, I better not.”

“What?” Zach  couldn't  hide his surprise. He had  known Trevor would say yes as surely  as he'd kno wn Leaf wou ld give

him those damn lighters. “Why?”

Trevor studied Zach's face as intently as anyo ne ever had, more intently than most of his one-night lovers had done. Zach

felt almost uncomfortab le under the scrutiny of those striking, serio us eyes. “You really want me to do it, don't you?”

Zach  shrugged, but he felt Trevor  had looked straight through his skull to the  whorls of his devious, treacherous  brain.

“It's more fun getting stoned with somebod y, that's all.”

Another long searching look.  “Okay then. I'll take one.”  Zach thought Trevor  might as  well have  added, But don't fuck

with me too  much, hear? He realized that his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, that his blood was surging and his head

felt like a helium balloon  ascending fast  into  an achingly blue, cloudless  sky. No one  ever got to  him this way; this  was  the

way he liked  to make o ther people feel.

He took a deep hit off the joint, held it in for a second, then leaned over and exhaled a long steady stream of smoke into

Trevo r's  o pen  mouth.  Their  lip s  barely  grazed.  Trevor's  felt  as  so ft  as  velvet,  as  rain.  Ribbons  of  smoke  twined  from  the

corners of their mouths, swathed  their heads in an amorphous blue-gray veil. Zach kept his eyes open and saw that Trevor had

closed his, as if being kissed. His eyelashes were a dark ginger color, the p ale parchment  of his eyelids shot through with the

most delicate lavender tracery  of  veins.  Zach thought  of p utting his  mouth  against  those  eyelids,  of  feeling the  lashes silky

against his lips, the secret caged movement of the eyeball beneath his to ngue . . .

. . . and he was doing a damn fine job of sublimatin g his attraction, wasn't he?

He pulled back, shaken. Once he decided he  wasn't  going  to be  turned on b y  so meone, he  just wasn't anymore. At least

that  was how it had always been. He let himself have anyone he wanted unless he  had good reason not to want them, and his

libido had always p aid back by giving him complete control.

Until now.

Trevor lay back on the damp grass and put a  hand to his forehead.  Zach saw pine needles snarled in his  long  hair, fresh

dirt under his fingernails, tiny beads of water trapp ed in the fine hairs around his nipples.

“So,” said Trevor, blo wing out his shotgun, “how did your parents try to kill you?”

“My dad beat the shit out of me for fourteen years. My mom mostly just used her mouth.”

“Why did you stay?”

Zach shrugged. “Nowhere else to go.” From the corner of his eye he saw Trevor nod. “Sure, I could have run away when I

was nine  or ten, but there  would 've been a  lifetime of  stiff dicks in Town Cars  waitin g  for  me. I waited until I knew I  could

take care of  myself some way besides giving blowjobs. Then I ran. Just disappeared into another part of the city. They  never

tried to find me.”

“What city?”

Zach hesitated. He still didn't want to lie to Trevor, but he could n't start giving different stories to different people.

“You do n't have to tell me if you don't want to.”

“New Orleans,” Zach said, not even sure why. “But don't tell anybo dy.”

“Are you on the run or something?”

Zach's silence sp oke vo lumes.

“It's  okay,”  said  Trevor. “I've  been  running  from  this  place  for  seven  years.  But  you  know,  you  get  sick  of  it  after  a

while.”

“Yeah, so you come back and it tries to make you bash people's brains out.”

Trevor shrugged. “I wasn't expecting company.”

Zach  started  laughing.  He couldn't  help it.  This guy  was  so fucked  up  .  .  .  but smart, and despite his weird  asexuality,

entirely too beautiful. Trevor stared at him for a moment, then tentatively joined  in.

They grinned at each other in ganja-swirled camaraderie. Suddenly Zach found himself wondering again if it mightn't be

possible  after all to love someone and  make love with them too. So mething about such  a spontaneous sweet smile on a face

that didn't smile too often made him wonder why he had always denied himself the physical pleasure of a p erson he truly cared

for. Would n't  it  be  fun  to  see  someone-all right  then,  someone  like  Trevor-  smile  that  way  just  because Zach  knew  how  to

make him feel good? Maybe even more fun than getting sucked off by a cute, all-but-anonymo us stranger in the back room of

a convenience store in a state he might never see again?

Probably not. Probably it would end  in cutting words and tears, pain and blame and regret, maybe even blood. Those were

the risks of such a relationship, almost guaranteed.

But  where  along the line  had  he decided  that  he  could  not take  those particular risks, while cheerfully  taking- indeed,

seeking out-so many others?

Trevor was  watching  him  closely. He looked as  if he wanted  to  say What  are you  thinking?  but didn't. Zach  was  glad.

He'd always  hated  that question; it seemed  people  only  asked it of  you when you  were  thinking about  something you  didn't

want to share.

Instead, very hesitantly, Trevor asked, “Have we met before? Do I kno w you?” He frowned as if that weren't precisely the

question he wanted to ask, but he could not find the words for the right one.

Zach shook his head. “I don 't think so. But . . .”

“It feels like we have,” Trevor finished for him.

 

                                                                                          46

 

 

 

 

 

Zach snuffed the half-burnt joint and  put it back hi his pocket. They sat in silence for a few min utes. Neither wanted to be

the first to say too much, to take this strange new notion too far. Zach mused on ho w irretrievable words were in the real world.

In many ways he preferred the simplicity of the computer un iverse, wh ere you could revise and delete things at will, where you

acted and the system could only react in certain ways.

But there you ran up against an eventual wall of predictability. Here the slightest shift in semantics cou ld make a situation

run wild, and that appealed to him too.

The  rain  had  nearly  stop ped.  Now  it  began  to  co me  down  harder  again,  thou gh  they  were  still  protected  beneath  the

canop y of branches and vines. The sky rumbled with nascent thunder, then erupted. All at once it was po uring.

Zach  saw a chance to d efuse the awkwardness. He caught Trevor's  arm and pulled  him  up , noticing  ho w Trevor's flesh

seemed to simultaneously cleave to and cringe from his touch. “Co me on!” he urged.

“Where?”

“Don't you want a shower? This is our chance!”

“Out here?”

“Sure, why not? Nobody can see us from the road.” Zach ducked  out from under the curtain of willow fronds and ran to a

clear patch in the  yard. He kicked  his  sneakers off,  pulled his  shirt  over his  head, stuck  his glasses in his pocket, and started

unb uttoning his pants. Trevor followed, looking doubtful. “Are you going to get naked?”

Zach  undid  the  last button and  let  his cutoffs  fall.  He  wasn't  wearing any u nderwear.  Trevor  raised  his eyebrows, then

shrugged, unbuckled his jeans, and pushed them down over his skinny hips. If he'd  gro wn up in an orphanage, male nudity was

probably no  big deal to him.

The rain sluiced over their  bodies,  washing away the  grime of  the road and  the old crumbling house. Trevor was only a

wet  b lur  several  feet  away;  Zach  could   barely  see  him  flinging  his  arms  about  as  if  dancing  or  p erforming  some  wild

invocation.

Zach raised his face to the downpour and  let it fill the tired hollows of his eyes, wash the taste of smoke fro m his lips. He

was not aware that he was grinning like a fool until he felt rain trickling between his teeth, over his tongue, and do wn his thro at

in a little silver river.

 

 

Chapter Eleven 

 

Kinsey was mopping up the last of the water as the early evening barflies began to drift in. Terry was closing up shop  at

the Whirling Disc and wishing Steve Finn were in town. The new guy had  fucked up an invoice and  ordered twenty cop ies of

Louie's  Limbo  Lounge, an obscure  album of exquisitely bad strip-club  music, instead of the two Terry  had meant  to  special-

order.  Now  they  could  hear  such  classics  as  “Torture  Rock,”  “Beaver  Shot,”  and  the  amazing  “Hooty  Sapper-ticker”  by

Barbara & the Boys whenever they so desired.

Terry started to call Poindexter's in Durham to see if they wanted any, but decided fuck it and went instead to buy his girl

a beer. A gaudy sunset bathed the downtown in  red  and purple light, and  the slowly darkening streets  glistened with the rain

that had fallen all afternoon.

One  by  one  the  streetlights  flickered  on.  Terry  remembered  a  summer  two  or  three  years ago  when  there  had  been  a

plague  of  Luna  moths.  The  huge  insects  beat  against  windo ws  and  swarmed  around  streetlights,  their  broad  fragile  wings

catching  the  light  and  making  it  shift  strangely,  their  colo r  like  nothing  else  in  nature-the  palest  silver-green,  the  color  of

ectoplasm  or  the  glow  o f  radiation.  You  could  find  drifts  of  them  tattered  and  dead  in  the  gutter,  their  fat  furred  bodies

shriveled to husks.

Soon a flock of  bats descended upon the town, roosting in the  treetops  and  church bell  to wers  by day, swooping out  at

night to catch the Luna moths in their tiny razored jaws. If the show at the Sacred  Yew was boring, the kids would congregate

on the street and watch the shadowplay o f leathery and iridescent wings, strain to hear the high needling squeal of the bats over

the churn of  guitars and percussion from  the club.  One night Ghost  had mused  aloud that  to  the bats, the  moths' blood  must

taste like creme de menthe.

Terry  wondered what had become  of the new kids.  He thought Zach might  have just hit the other side of town and  kept

driving;  that boy  looked  like  he might  have somep lace to  be  in  a  hurry.  And he guessed  Trevor  was still  out at  the  murder

house. Hell of a thing, Bobby McGee's son co ming back after all these years.

Well, Kinsey would know the lo wdown. Terry hastened his step toward the Yew, toward friends and music and the taste

of a cold beer in his favorite bar on a summer's evening.

 

By ten o'clock Terry had had five cold beers and had forgotten all about Zach. But Zach had no t hit the other side of town,

had not even returned to his car except to check the locks and pull it around to the side of the house. He had found a place he

liked, and he had every  in tention  of setting  up camp here  for a  few days  unless Trevor objected. But  he  did n't think  Trevor

would.

When they came in from the rainstorm, Trevor excused himself to put on dry clothes and disappeared down the hall. Zach

followed  a  few  minutes later  and  found  him  sprawled  on  a  bare  mattress  in  one  of  the b ack  bedrooms.  Naked  and  almost

painfully thin, long hair spread out around his head like a co rona, he was already deeply asleep.

Zach  watched  him  for  several  mo ments  but could  not disturb him. Trevor  had  spent the last three  nights  sleep ing  on a

Greyho und bus, a couch, and a drawing table; he deserved some bed rest. Zach got one of Kinsey's blankets and covered him.

As he did so he saw gooseflesh shivering across Trevor's chest, water droplets still caught in the cup of his navel and the damp

tangle of his pubic hair. He imagined the salty taste those droplets would have if he were to bend down and lick them away.

Now you  want to  molest  him  in  his  sleep. It  was  Eddy's voice,  out  of nowhere.  Christ, Zach, why  don't  you just  buy a

blow-up love doll on Bourbon Street and be done with it?

 

 

                                                                                          47

 

 

 

 

 

Fuck you, Eddy.

As  he  turned  away  fro m  the  bed  he  noticed  drawings  tacked  to  the  walls.  Monsters  and  fanciful  houses,  unfamiliar

landscapes.  And  faces,  all  kinds  of  faces.  A  child's  drawings-but  a  child  with  obvious  talent,  with  an  eye  for  line  and

proportion, with an untrammeled imagination. This was Trevor's own room.

Zach left Trevor to sleep and started exploring the house. At the end of the hall was the bathroom where Bobby had died.

There was no window in this room, and  Zach  did not think  to  try the switch. He stood on the threshold staring into the  unlit

chamber, saw porcelain  gleaming dully b eneath layers of dirt and cobweb. The shower curtain rod was bent, almost  buckled.

Zach wondered if Trevor had seen that yet.

Something about the bathroom's geometry seemed wrong, as if the angle at which walls met ceiling were slightly skewed.

It made Zach  feel  dizzy, almost nauseated. He turned away and went into the room across the hall,  which was the studio. He

saw Trevor's sketchbook lying open on the drawing table and slo wly flipped through the pages. The drawings were very good.

Zach had read one issue of Birdland, and he thought Trevor's style was already technically better than Bo bby's. The lines were

surer, the faces finer and more subtle, with layer upon layer of nuance lurking in the expressions he captured.

But Bobby's work had always had a certain fractured warmth to it. No matter how sordid and vile his characters were-the

junkies and glib beatniks and talking saxophones who got laid more often than their  human counterparts-you always felt they

were pawns in  an indifferent universe,  butts  of  an  existential joke  with  no  punch line. Trevor's  work  was  harsher, icier. His

universe  was  not  indifferent  but  cruel.  He  knew  his  punch  line:  the crumpled, bleeding  woman  in  the  doorway,  the  broken

bodies of the musicians, the burning cop s.

And others, as Zach paged back through the book. So many others. So many beautifully drawn dead b odies.

He checked out the master bedroom and its  walk-in closet, saw  little of interest-the  parents hadn't b rought much of their

own stuff, p robably; after fitting Bobby's art supplies and the kids' things in the car there wouldn't have been much space left.

He crossed  the hall  to  Didi's  room,  stopped dead on  the threshold  and  stared  at the huge dark mass boiling through  the

windo w,  then  realized  it  was  kudzu.  Zach  wondered  ho w  long  it  would  be  before  the  vines  filled  the  room  from  floor  to

ceiling. He took in the  bloodstain on  the mattress, the spatters high on the wall.  Trevor said the hammer  had appeared  in  the

opposite corner, next to the small closet. Zach looked at the area, even prodded the kudzu with the toe of his sneaker, but found

nothing unusual.

He had heard o f objects instantaneously being transported from one place to another; they were called “apports” and  were

supposed  to  be  warm  to  the  touch,  as  Trevor  said   the  hammer  had  been.  Zach  wasn't  sure  he  believed  in  apports,  but  he

couldn't think of another way it might have gotten there. If it was the same hammer.

But if it wasn 't, where had the dried blood and tissue come from? Zach didn't even want to wonder. It had  to be the same

one; that made more sense than thinking Trevor had bought ano ther one and smeared it with sheep brains or something. Zach

was not an implicit believer in the supernatural, but he didn't believe in scaring up improbable natural exp lanations just to rule

it  out,  either.  Nature  was  a  complex  system;  there had  to  be  more  to  it  than  anyo ne  could  understand  from  looking  at the

surface.

The kitchen was large and old-fashioned, with a free-standing sin k and a gas range. A real farmhouse kitchen, or so Zach

imagined. He opened the refrigerator and was surprised to see the lig ht come on. He hadn't tested the electricity, he realized; he

had forgotten about it until now.

In the fridge  was a juice bottle with a half inch of b lack sludge at the bottom, some kind of vegetable matter mummified

beyond  recognition,  and  a  Tupperware  container  whose  contents  he  dared  not  contemplate:  he'd  heard  Tupperware  coffins

could preserve  human  remains  for twenty  years  or  more, so  who  knew  what  they  could  do to  leftovers?  Zach retriev ed  the

Cokes and bottled water fro m the living room and arranged them on the shelf next to the juice.

He checked Trevor again, found  him  still  sleeping. Zach began to get  bored. He picked his way across the living roo m,

went o ut to his car, and got the bag that held his laptop computer and cellular phone. He thought he might be staying here for a

few  days, and  he  wanted  to give Eddy  a  more specific  message than the  one  he  had left  last  night. If  he d ialed  in  now, he

thought he could just make the deadline.

Zach accessed the Times-Picayune's computer, typed rapidly fo r several minutes, then pressed the keys to send his article.

After he had done that, he was still restless. He found a square of yello w Post-it notes in his bag, scribbled down a few phone

codes, and stuck them on the edge of the table. They were numbers he might need in a hurry, and he didn 't think Trevor would

mind.

Then, just for the hell of it, he dialed into Mutanet. He didn't log in with his own password, o f course, since They might be

monitoring the board. But Zach had long since acquired full systems-operator privileges on Mutanet, though he had discreetly

neglected to mention this fact to the sysop. The sysop fancied himself a Discordian, or worshiper of the chaotic goddess Eris,

and his p assword was POEE5.

First Zach read the messages on the main board, scanning them for his handle.

 

MESSAGE: 65

FROM: K0DEz KID

TO: ALL MUTANTS

“Lucio” got busted today!!

Hahahahahahaa! ! ! ! !

 

MESSAGE: 73

FROM: ZOMBI

TO: K0DEz KID

If you had a googolth of Lucio's hacking

skill you would not take such sick joy in

his misfortune-You're wrong, KiddO-somebody warned him Sat. nite and he's long gone

 

                                                                                          48

 

 

 

 

 

 

MESSAGE: 76

FROM: AKKER

TO: MUTOIDS

Zombi's right! I, Akker the H-akker,

founder of the Data Acq uisition and Retrieval Team (DART), cracked the Secret

Service's system and found the warrant to

search Lucio's house. It was I who warned

him in time! ! Power to DART! ! ! : -)

 

MESSAGE: 80

FROM: ST. GULIK, YR. HUMBLE SYSOP

TO: ANYONE READING THIS

Lucio can't get on this board anymore. I

disabled his account. If he tries to con-tact you, d on't talk to him. For all we know he could  have gotten busted and turned

informant. Anyone known to still have contact with him will be kicked off Mutanet! A paranoid hacker is a free hacker!

 

That caught Zach's interest, so he checked the sysop's personal mail. There was only one message.

 

FROM: ZOMBI

TO: ST. BOGUS

FUCK  YOUR  FASCIST  BOARD-,  D00D!  YOU'D  BE  THE  FIRST  TO  TURN  RAT  IF  A  KKKOMPUTER

KKKOPNAILED  YOUR  WHITE  ASS!!!  YOUR  ADDRESS  IS  622  FRAZIER  ST.  IN  METAIRIE  AND  IF  YOU  KEEP

TELLING kidZ WHO  NOT  TO TALK TO,  I WILL  FIRST POST IT ON  BOARDS  ALL OVER THE  COUNTRY, THEN

COME  OVER  THERE  AND  PERSONALLY  INTRODUCE  YOUR  TEETH  TO  SOME  OF  THAT  CHAOS  YOU'RE

SUPPOSED TO WORSHIP (BUT DON'T SEEMTO) ! AND BY THE WAY,, AKKER DIDN'T WARN LUCIO

... I DID!! !

 

Zach nearly fell off his chair, laughing. He'd known he could count on Zombi. He left two messages, the first on the main

board where everyone could read it, the second perso nal.

 

FROM: LUCIO

TO: ST. PARANOID

Pleez don't kick me off the board-, Br'er

Sysop! Pleez! Pleez!! Pleeeeeez! ! !

 

FROM: LUCIO

TO: ZOMBI

A googol times-, thanks.

 

Then Zach logged off Mutanet, maybe for the last time.

After turning the computer off, he felt disoriented. He  was used to spending hours each day in front of the screen. Those

few  minutes had only whetted  his appetite,  had made his  fingers  tingle b ut hadn't  given them the supersensitized buzz  he got

from a marathon sessio n of pounding the keys. But he didn't need money yet, and he wanted to lie low for a few days.

He noticed Trevor's backpack sitting on the kitchen counter. The zipper was half op en, and Zach could see the corner of a

comic book poking out. He glanced to ward  the door, then went over to the bag, cautiously tugged the zipper all the way down,

and began to  nose through the contents.

To Zach this was no different from examining Trevor's credit rating or police record, either of which he would have done

guiltlessly and  without hesitation  if he  had reason  to. But he  did n't care about  those things. He wanted to know what  Trevor

carried around with him, what he kept close to him.

Here were all three issues of Birdland, battered copies in plastic bags. No surprises there. A Walkman and some tapes . . .

Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker, and, just for good measure, Charlie Parker ... a b lack T-shirt, a pair of underwear, a toothbrush

and other assorted toiletries. Pretty boring. Zach dug deeper, and his fingers touched worn p aper. An envelope.

He  pulled  it  out,  unfolded  the  contents  carefully.  The  three  sheets  of  paper  were  taped  and  retaped  at  every  crease,

wrinkled to  the texture of fine silk. Much of  the text  was  indecipherab le,  but  fro m  what  Zach  could  make o ut, he suspected

Trevo r had it memorized.

Multiple defensive wounds . . . A blow to the chest penetrated the breastbone and ruptured the heart, and co uld in and of

itself have been fatal . . .

Due to gross trauma, victim's brain could not be removed in one p iece . . .

Robert F. McGee . . . Occupation: Artist . . .

Each report was signed by the county coroner and dated June 16, 1972. Yesterday had b een the twentieth anniversary  of

the McGees' deaths; tomorrow would be the twentieth anniversary of their autopsies.

Zach imagined the three naked bodies lined up on steel tables whose blood g utters were black with clotted gore. He could

picture  them  much  more  clearly  than  he  wanted  to,  their  skin shockingly  livid,  their  wounds black  and  purple,  their  torsos

crisscrossed with Y-shaped autopsy scars that bisected each p ectoral muscle and went all the way do wn to the pubic bone. The

woman's breasts hanging slack and darkly veined  like  fruit  gone  rotten  on the  tree,  her long  hair  stiff with  blood .  The little

boy's  head  tilted  at an awkward angle because the  back of  his  skull  was  gone,  his soft pink  lips sealed  with  a  crust o f dried

 

                                                                                          49

 

 

 

 

 

blood, his fingers permanently curled  like a doll's. The man with his eyes squeezed  halfway out of their sockets by the p ressure

of the rope, giving him a goggle-eyed stare that would last until the eyeballs fell into the cranial cavity.

Zach folded the autopsy reports and jammed them back into the envelope. It was as if Trevor had imagined the  scene so

many times that it was imprinted on these sheets of paper like some sort of psychic snapshot. Zach glanced over his shoulder

again, but the doorway was still empty. He wasn't sure if he had been afraid of seeing Trevor, or something worse.

Enough  snooping  for  now.  It was making  him jumpy.  He  put the  envelope back and fou nd  a  fat paperback book in the

very bottom of  the bag. Thou Shall  Not Kill  was  the true tale  of a man named John  List who  had  calmly and  systematically

murd ered five members of his family- wife, mother, two  sons,  and a daughter-and  then disappeared  for  eighteen years. The

back cover said they had caught him through the TV show America's Most Wanted.

The book fell op en in Zach's hands to page 281, where the spine was cracked. List was killing his older son, fifteen-year-

old Johnny. He'd struggled with the bo y in the  kitchen, shot him in the back as he ran down the hall, caught up with him and

shot him nine more times as h e tried to crawl away fro m his father toward some imagined safety.

Zach checked out Johnny's school picture in the section of photographs at the center o f the book. A skinny, grinning kid

with badly cut dark hair and birth-control glasses and ears that stuck out goofily. Looked like a hundred computer geeks Zach

had kno wn, not so different from how he had looked at fifteen. This shit could happen to anybod y.

He sat d own at the table  and began to read about the Lists. He didn't  usually read this kind of  thing, but it was  a pretty

interesting story. They didn 't find List's family until a month later, lined up on sleeping bags in the giant ballroom, their bodies

black and swollen.

When it grew too dark to see the page, Zach got up and switched the overhead light on without thinking about it. He read

for two hours, until he heard stirring and yawning from the bedroom.

Trevor appeared in the kitchen doorway, his hair rumpled and tangled, knuckling sleep from his eyes. He had put on a pair

of baggy black sweatpants but remained shirtless. “Was I out long?”

“Couple hours. I thought you could use it.”

“Why are you reading that?”

Zach put the book down. “Why are you? I mean, it's none of my business, but it seems a little depressing for so meone in

your situation.”

Trevor pulled out the other chair and sat down at the table. “I always read boo ks like that. I keep hoping “one of them will

make me understand why the guy did it.”

“Any luck?”

“No.” Suddenly Trevor looked  up,  speared him with those  eyes.  “Anyway,  I meant why  are you  reading that book  th at

was in my bag? I didn't say you could go in my bag.”

Zach held up his hand s. “Sorry. I just wanted something to read, and  you were asleep. I didn't touch anything else.”

Great. They'd make a perfect pair: a professional snoop and a privacy freak. Zach guessed  now was probably not the b est

time to tell Trevor ho w much he had liked the drawings in his sketchbook, and he didn't think he'd better mention the autopsy

reports at all.

Trevor still didn't loo k happ y about the matter, but let it drop. He noticed Zach's Post-it notes, peeled one off the table and

read it. “What's this?”

“A phone card number.”

“What's it for?”

“Making phone calls.”

Trevor gave Zach a lo ok, but decided to let this pass too. “Are yo u hungry?”

“Starved.”

They retrieved Kinsey's can of ravioli from under the couch and ate it cold with forks scrounged out of a kitchen drawer.

It was awful, but Zach felt better after he had cho ked it down. He watched Trevor drink two Cokes the way some guys drank

beer, putting the stuff away with more  regard for quick  chemical effect than thirst or taste. He was starting to think he could

watch Trevor all night.

“Do you want something else?” he asked, thinking they might go out to the diner.

Trevor looked at him rather sheepishly. “Could I ...”

Anything, Zach wanted to say, but settled for “What?”

“Could I have some more of that pot?”

Zach laughed and fished the half-burnt joint out of his pock et. It was a bit damp, but fired up  fine. “I thought you weren't

used to it,” he said.

“I'm not. I never really liked it before. But my dad used to  smoke a lot back when he was drawing, and I just thought . . .”

“What?” Zach asked gently. “That you could figure out why he stopped?”

Trevor shrugged. “If I really wanted to figure that out, I'd start drinking  whiskey. Bobby used to say pot made him more

creative, and after he went dry, he wouldn't smoke even when Momma tried to make him. It was like he didn't even want to try

anymore.”

“Maybe he just knew it was gone no matter what he did.”

“Maybe.”

They sat at the table talking and smoking. As Trevor passed him the joint, Zach noticed th e tracery of slightly raised white

scars  on his left forearm. He had to put some on the  outside, Zach thought, to match  the ones on the  inside. But  he didn't  yet

kno w Trevor well enough to say that. Instead he talked o f New Orleans, the daytime bustle of the French Market, the way the

cobblestone streets looked at night under the gas lamps all black and gold,  the neon smear  of Bourbon Street, the river like a

dirty brown vein pulsing through the city.

At  last  they both began to yawn.  Trevor stood up, stretched hugely. Zach  watched the  lo ose sweatpants ride low on the

ridges of his hipbones, then wond ered why he was staring; he'd already seen it all this afternoon. “Do you want to  crash here?”

Finally. “That'd be great.”

 

                                                                                          50

 

 

 

 

 

“You  can  have  the  big  bedroom.  There's  a  mattress  and, uh  .  . .”  Trevor  stared  at the floor.  “Nobody died in  there or

anythin g.”

Zach hadn't expected an invitation to bed down with Trevor, was still trying to convince himself he didn't want one. But

he couldn't help feeling disappointed as he said good night and left the kitchen.

He untied his sneakers, took off his glasses, and  was about  to lie  do wn on the sagging double  mattress when  he realized

that his head and back were throbbing in tandem. He'd been running on pure adrenaline for more than twenty-four hours; no w

the pot and the long drive had finally kicked  in to give him the great-granddaddy o f all body aches, and he hadn't brought any

kind of medicine.

He  padded down  the  hall  to Trevor's  room, saw  that the light was  still on,  and  tapped  at  the  door.  “Do  you  have  any

aspirin?”

Trevor was sprawled in bed reading the John List b ook. “Yeah, I think so.” He sat up and rummaged in his bag, came up

with a single white pill. “Here you go. I think this is my last one.”

“Thanks. G'night again.”  Zach went to  the kitchen and drank  fro m  the  faucet, put  the pill in  his  mouth, and  washed it

down. A chill ran along his sp ine as he passed the hall doorway and returned to his room. It was dank and dim, empty except

for  the mattress  and  some  moldering cardboard  boxes in  the shadowed  recesses  of  the closet,  the window  an  inky rectang le

beaded with rain.

For the first time in hours Zach found himself un nerved by the house. Sitting in the bright kitchen talkin g with Trevor was

one thing. Sleeping by himself in the bedroom of a suicide and  a murder victim whose blood still stained the p lace . . . that was

another.

But he wasn't afraid of ghosts, he reminded himself. He lay down on the dusty  mattress, pulled one of Kinsey's blankets

over him, and closed his eyes.

A  few  minutes  later  his  heart  gave  a  nauseating  lurch  and  began to  race  so hard  he  thought  it  might  just pu nch  right

through his  breastbone  like  an angry  fist  made  of  muscle  and  blood. Then  his  whole  chest  seized  up  and  he  was  sure the

tortured organ had simply ceased to beat, that in seconds he would  realize he was dead.

He  felt  the  house  gather  itself  around  him,  its  rotting  boards  alive  and  watchful,  its  d arkness  ready  to   enfold  him  in

velvety arms and claim him for its own.

 

Trevor turned out the light and lay back on his mattress, listening to the slow creak and drip of the house. He thought th at

so mewhere deep within the hundreds of tiny noises there might be a murmuring voice. He wondered . what having Zach here

would do to the ho use's subtle chemistry. He wondered why he had let Zach stay.

It was only fo r one night, he told himself. Zach was an outsider too, and he would surely want to move on tomorrow.

But that didn 't explain the weird sensation they'd had of almost recognizing each other this afternoon. And it d idn't explain

the tightness Trevor felt behind his eyes when he looked at Zach, or the uneasy warmth deep in his stomach when he thought

about Zach now. He was so smart . . . and so strange . . . and he had the smoothest skin, like matte paper . . .

Probably it was just the pot. Trevor had smoked too much. Stupid to think it could teach him anything of his father; it was

only a drug, its effects as subjective as those of sleep or sorro w. Even alcohol was nothing but a drug. In his heart he k new it

hadn't made Bobby kill his family any mo re than the hammer had.

The idea of being drunk still made Trevor feel sick, tho ugh . All he could remember was the stinging scent of whiskey that

had surrounded Bobb y like a cloud as he watched his five-year-old son drink Seconal, then hugged him goodnight for the last

time.

Trevor heard a floorb oard  creak in the hall, then a closer sound. The  door of his room,  which he had pushed to, slowly

swinging open. His bo dy stiffened and his ears strained; he felt his pupils dilating hugely, painfully against the blackness.

“Trevor? You still awake?”

It was Zach.

He  thought  of  not  answerin g,  of  pretending  to  be  asleep.  He  couldn't  imagine  what Zach  wanted  now.  But  Zach  had

listened to him this afternoon.

“I'm awake,” he said, and sat up.

“What was that medicine yo u gave me?”

“Aspirin, like you asked for.”

“Are you sure it was aspirin?”

“Well, Excedrin. That's what I always take.”

“Oh,  god.”  Zach  laughed  weakly.  “That  shit  has  sixty-five  milligrams  o f  caffeine  in  every  tablet.  I  can't  deal  with

caffeine.”

“What happens?”

“It hits me like speed. Bad  speed.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing.” He felt Zach's weight settle onto the edge of the mattress. “I'm not gonna b e able to sleep fo r a while, though. I

thought maybe we could talk some more.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to talk to me?”

“Why sho uldn't I?”

“I don't understand  why you  like me. The first time  I ever laid eyes  on  you,  I tried to knock your brains  out. Now I've

poisoned you. How co me you're still here?”

He heard Zach try to laugh. It came out more like a moan. “Just persistent, I guess.”

“No. Really.”

“Well ...” A shudder ran through Zach's body, into  the mattress. “Do you mind if I stretch out here?”

 

                                                                                          51

 

 

 

 

 

“I guess not.”

Trevor mo ved to one side of the bed.  He felt Zach arranging  himself on the  other  side,  thought he could  feel  electricity

crackling off Zach's  skin. When  Zach's  elbow  brushed  his,  it  gave Trevor a sensation  like the shock  one  gets  from  walking

across a carpet and then touching metal.

“First of all,” said  Zach,  “you didn't try to  knock my brains out. You stopped. Second,  yo u didn't  know caffeine  would

hurt me.”

“Even so—”

“Even so, seems like I would have figured out b y now that you aren't exactly good for my health?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Maybe I'm not in this for my health.”

“In what?”

“Life.”

“Then what are you in it for?”

“Um . . .” He felt Zach shiver. “To keep myself amused, I guess. No, not amused. Interested. I want to do everything.”

“You do ? Really?”

“Sure. Don't you?”

Trevor thought about it. “I think I just  want to see everything,” he said at last. “And sometimes I'm not even sure I want

to. I just feel like I have to.”

“That's because you're an artist. Artists remind me of stills.”

“Of what?”

“Of  stills.  What  they  use  to  make  moonshine.  You  take  in  information  and  distill  it  into  art.”  Zach  was  silent  for  a

moment. “I guess that's not such a good  analogy from your point of view.”

“It's okay. A still doesn't have much choice about making moonshine. The choice is up to the person who drinks it.”

“Then I'll drink your moonshine anytime yo u want to give me some,” said  Zach. “I admire you. That's why I didn't leave

this afternoon. You may be crazy, but I think you're also very brave.”

Suddenly  Trevor  felt like  crying again.  Here was this young  kid on  the  run  fro m  some  sinister unknown,  this  curious,

generous, resilient soul who could stand  up  to a  stranger with a hammer and make friends afterward, and he  thou ght  Trevor

was brave. It didn't make sense, but  it sure made him feel  better. He couldn't  remember the last  time anyone had told  him he

was doing something right.

“Thanks,” he said when he could trust his voice. “I don't feel very brave, though. I feel scared all the time.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Something brushed the side of Trevor's hand, then crept warmly into the palm. Zach's ringer, still trembling a little. Trevor

nearly jerked his hand away, actually felt his muscles tensing and pulling. But at the last second, his own fingers curled around

Zach's and trapped it.

If he went, he wouldn't take anyo ne with him. That was the one thing Trevor had promised himself.

But if he had someone to  hang on to, maybe he wo uldn't have to go. At least, not all the way do wn.

Zach's touch sent little currents through his hand, into his bloodstream. The old scars on his arm throbbed in time with his

heartbeat. In the darkness he could just make out Zach's shining eyes. “What do you want?” he whispered.

“Could you . . .” Zach squeezed his hand, then let go. “Could you just hold me? This damn Excedrin . . .”

“Yes,” said Trevor. “I think I can. I'll try.”

Gingerly  he  reached  out and  found  Zach's  bare shoulder,  slid  his  arm  around  Zach's  chest,  moved  closer  so  that their

bodies were nestled like two spoons in a drawer. Zach's heart was hammering madly, his muscles so taut it was like hugging an

electrical coil about to blow.  His bo dy  felt smaller and frailer than Trevor would have expected. It reminded him of  sleeping

with Didi; they had often nestled together in just the same way.

“The damndest thing,” Zach said into the pillow, “is my head still hurts.”

Trevor laughed. He co uld  hardly believe  any of this  was happening. He  would wake up  and find  that he'd  slept  another

night at the drawing table, had invented this bo y, this impossible situation. He wasn't  supp osed to be feeling like this. He had

never felt like this. He was supposed  to be finding out why he was alive.

But he was very aware of Zach's skin against his own, as smooth as he had imagined it, and he didn't want to pull away. If

anythin g, he wanted to get closer. • He wondered if this might have something to do with why he was alive.

Trevor pressed his face into the soft hair at the back of Zach's neck. “Are you supposed to be here?” he asked very softly,

half hop ing Zach wo uld not hear him. “Is this part of what's supposed to happen?”

“Fuck supposed  to,” said Zach. “You make it up as you go along.”

 

Holding each other like a pair of twins in the womb, they were able to sleep.

Sometime just before dawn,  a  slow  shimmering began in  the air near the  ceiling just above  the bed.  It deepened into a

vaguely circular whirlpool pattern something like the waves of heat that swim above asphalt in the heart of a Southern summer.

Then tiny white fragments of paper b egan to fall, appearing in the air and seesawing slowly down. Soon  a funnel-shap ed cloud

of them was swirling like a freak sno wstorm in the hot, still room.

Trevor and Zach  slept on, no t  knowing,  not caring. The  bits  of  paper  collected on  the  floor, the bed,  the  boys'  sweaty

sleeping bodies.

Dawn found them still locked tightly together, Trevor's face buried in the hollow of Zach's shoulder and his arms clamped

across  Zach's chest,  Zach's hands clutching Trevor's so tightly that  Trevor would later find the  indentatio ns  of Zach's nails in

his palms.

Awake, they had been afraid to touch each other at all.

Asleep, they looked as if they would be terrified to ever let go.

 

 

                                                                                          52

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve 

 

As luck would  have it, Eddy had a hacker in her apartment when the Secret Service kicked the d oor down.

His  name  was  Stefan,  better  known  on  Zach's  beloved  pirate  boards  as  “Phoetus,”  and  he  was  one  of  the  few  local

computer outlaws who knew Zach's real name and  where he  lived . Even if Zach hadn't  wanted  him to have this information,

Phoetus  could easily have  chivied  it  out  of  the  vast grid  of  data  kept  under  electronic  lock  and  key b y  the  phone  company.

Zach said he was very good.

He ran with a local gang o f hackers  who called themselves  “The 0rder 0f Dag0n.” (Hackers, Zach had explained to her,

often employed a unique spelling system in which f's were replaced  with ph's, plural s's with z's, and ordinary o's with zeroes.)

It amused Eddy  to  picture Lovecraft's blasphemous  fish-frogs of  nameless design  flopping, hopp ing, croaking, bleating, and

surging  inhumanly through the spectral moonlight  all the way from Innsmo uth to New Orleans  and the  surrounding swamps,

where  they  had  presumably  set  themselves  up  with  the  latest  technology  and  started  tapping  phone  lines  and  cracking

databanks.

He came k nocking at her door early Tuesday morning, sometime around eleven. Eddy had spent all day Sunday and most

of  Monday  trundling  her  stuff  from  her  old  apartment  over  to  Madison  Street  in  a  little  red  wagon  she  usually  used  for

shopping and laundry. It didn't  dawn o n  her until she was  making the  second-to-last trip that she could have  hired a moving

van. Having thousands of dollars in the bank was difficult to get used to. She kept expecting someone to stop her on the street

and tell her there had been a mistake.

Which of course there had been-b ut with luck, They wo uldn't find  out about it.

By Monday night she  was  so re  and exhausted. She  had collapsed  on Zach's bed, thinking she  would just rest  for  a  few

minutes, then get up and go to the corner liquor store for a flask of rotgut. She could drink if she wanted to; she didn't have to

get up and drag herself to the Pink Diamond tomorro w afternoon; she could call that hairy failed ro ck star Loup and tell him to

blow.

Of course, she would do no such thing. She would inform him politely that she was taking some time off, and she hoped it

wasn't too inco nvenient, and he could  call her if he needed a dancer to fill in so metime. Then, if he called, she would have to

search madly for excuses not to.

Sometimes the leftover shreds of her upbringing could be a real bitch. In Korean etiq uette there was no such thing as a flat

no. You  left all possibilities open, no matter how  ambiguous. You never caused the  other person to lose face. Not even if he

was a sexist, coke-snorting asshole.

She took one last look at the twenty-five wagonloads of her stuff strewn around the room along with everything Zach had

left. It was a mess. Edd y decided to rest her eyes for a few minutes.

When she opened them again sunlight was streamin g through the open window, a green lizard was poised on the ceiling

spearing her with its jeweled gaze, and someone was knocking lightly but rapid ly at the door.

She  opened  it  and  Phoetus  slipped  through  the  crack.  He  was  perhaps  seventeen,  very  thin,  tall,  and  loosejointed.

Something abou t  his  posture and gait reminded Edd y  of those  posters of Evolvin g  Man. Pho etus was  somewhere around the

midpoint, where the head and muscle structure were more human than ape, but the arms still dangled a bit too low. His curly

brown hair looked as if it might lighten two or three shades if he washed it, and his eyes were nearly  hidden behind lenses as

thick and swirly as the bottoms of Coke bottles.

He looked blankly at her. “You're not Zach.”

“No, Stefan. I'm Edd y, remember? We met at the Cafe du Monde once.” She had been  having coffee and beignets  while

Zach nibbled the Thai bird peppers he'd just bought in the Market and chased them with a cold glass of milk. They had a table

by the railing, and Zach hailed the nervous, pasty-skinned boy as he skulked  by, dodging street performers, avoiding the eyes

of tourists.

When introduced, the guy stared at Eddy as if petrified by the sight of her, leaned over the railin g to mumble so mething to

Zach-it sounded like “the eunuchs' holes are wide open”-and sidled quickly away toward the river.

“Who was that?” Eddy inquired.

“That was one of  the most brilliant phone-systems guys on  the planet. He's also  the sysop of a pirate board called  'The

Lurking Fear' and a member of the 0rder 0f Dag0n. He's way underground. Sociable type, isn't he?”

As  usual  when  Zach talked  about  his hacker  buddies,  Edd y  understood  about  half  of it, but  she  always  looked  at  her

telephone  a bit more warily afterward.  Who knew what unspeakable presences waited within those  wires  like swollen  silver

spiders clinging to a fiber-optic web?

Stefan stood by  the door  wringing his hands  and  staring at her in sweaty panic.  Eddy realized with something like  awe

that  he  might  never  have  been  alone  in  a  room  with  a  girl  before.  The  thought  was  oddly  touching.  She  would  have  to

remember not to  make any sudden moves, otherwise she might frighten him clean away.

“Zach's not here,” she told him. “He doesn't actually live in New Orleans anymore.”

“I heard he might have gotten busted.”

“Who said so?”

“I hear things.”

That much she didn 't d oub t. “He wasn't b usted. He got away. But he's okay-I got a message from him.”

The hacker looked aghast. “He didn't call you here!”

“No.  He put  a  message in  the  paper, in secret code.”  She  sho wed  him  the  folded  page  of  yesterday's  Times-Picayune.

Goddess in a bowl of gumbo, indeed. “See, I think this means he's in North Carolina, maybe heading for New York next.”

He scowled at the paper. “Secret code? This is kid stuff!”

“I suppose shutting  down the 911  system  is  mature,” Eddy  said coolly. Zach  had told  her  how Phoetus  bragged on  the

boards that he could overload every emergency telephone circuit in the city if he wanted to.

 

 

                                                                                          53