Bloodstone (2 page)

On the way to Thomaston to pick up his dead father’s things, Jeboriah Taylor found himself thinking back on the events that had shaped his life. He wasn’t usually one to dwell upon old memories, particularly those that involved his father. What was done was done; if you spent your life looking back, you had the tendency to keep running into walls. But tonight was different. Tonight was a celebration of sorts, a new chapter. Tonight he would finally be free.

Drinking and yelling, that’s what he remembered about his daddy. That and the thing his daddy had done, the thing that nobody in this town could ever forget, no matter how hard they tried. The thing that had shaped the family’s reputation in everyone’s eyes forever. And all that somehow had to do with another funny thing; the confrontation he had this morning with his Gramma Ruth, who was still alive, but going senile. He could never be sure if Ruth was following things or not. She hadn’t been truly herself for years. But this morning her eyes had been unusually bright, and he knew she was having one of her clear days. Jeb hadn’t been sure if she even understood her son had died until then.

“You going to that prison, Jeboriah?” she’d said, when he walked through the kitchen on his way to the door.

“Later today. I gotta pick up his things.”

“There’s nothing of his that suits a boy like you. He’s dead, Jeboriah. I don’t want his things in this house. I don’t want him buried near your Momma and I don’t want any service.” She peered at him until he got the uncomfortable feeling she could see right through his head and glimpse what he was thinking. “I want him buried somewhere far away from here. And I want you to promise me. Promise me you won’t even look at his things. Don’t touch them. Just throw them away.”

Jeb started to say something, but she had turned back to the stove and he could see she was already fading away, that light in her eyes a swiftly sputtering candle. Anything else he said would make little difference to her. He left her staring aimlessly into space, a smile on her face, as if she were thinking of things far away from him and her dead son.

What the hell all that had meant, he couldn’t say. Maybe she hadn’t been having one of her clear days after all, maybe her mind had run out on her again. But none of that really mattered anymore. Now he felt the dark all around him and the loneliness of the open road and he thought to himself,
tonight I’ll finally be free of it all. Free forever
.

Route 1 wound its way along the coast, through the old sea towns and stretches of thick woods. The road was already narrow and the way the pine trees crowded the shoulder made the corners tend to sneak up on you. But Jeb Taylor drove like he might take off at any moment, lift right off the ground and into space like some nightmare ship bound for the stars. He felt a strange kinship with the darkness of space, the way he’d heard talk about the coldness up there, the distance. He felt like outrunning whatever was chasing him, but no matter how fast the car went, whatever it was kept right on behind.

The car’s headlights sliced through the darkness ahead and the ’69 Chevy gobbled up asphalt and spit it out behind, dual side pipes growling like a wounded bear. Nothing like a ’69 for pure, raw speed. The seats were big and slippery and
the clutch was looser than a whore, but the engine was good old USA steel. Gas tank could eat a twenty quicker than you could turn around,
but ain’t nobody gonna catch me out here
unless he’s Superman
. Jeb used to watch
Superfriends
on Saturdays, and he always thought a good double barrel in the chest would stop the Wonder Twins, and maybe Aqua-man because he was such a pussy and talked to fish, but Superman could do anything. Superman was made of pure steel.

Into a straightaway the car surged again, the speedometer ticking up past eighty and still climbing as the tires scrambled for purchase. The dash lights were green and pulsed slowly as the alternator struggled along under the hood. Jeb’s face seemed to pulse like a bullfrog’s throat. He smelled burning oil and hot rubber, watching the road with one hand gripping the wheel, the other piloting the stereo controls.

The oldies station was playing one of his favorites by the Thunder Five:

    
The song suited his mood just fine. What was it like to go crazy anyway? Was it like old Annie Arsenault out at the swap shop who sometimes forgot her own name and wandered around outside buck naked? Crazy old witch sometimes made it all the way down Route 27 to town before anyone saw her. Jeb’s Gramma Ruth used to find her sitting on a bench outside the Railway Cafe wearing nothing but a straw hat, and when she tried to get her in the car old Annie Arsenault would tell her to go to hell.

Maybe
, he thought,
your daddy could have told you something
about crazy. But it’s too late for that now
.

Jeb took the next corner a little too fast, and fat tires squealed on tar as the big car swung sideways into the wrong lane. He wondered for a moment as he twisted the wheel and pumped the brakes if he was going to make it. Then the car righted itself and he was left wondering whether he was actually trying to kill himself or whether he was just plain stupid. He drummed his fingers nervously on the steering wheel in time with the music. It was nerves, that was all. He had to be honest with himself, tonight of all nights; he was dreading what was ahead, what was waiting for him at the prison. Not for what his father could do to him physically, of course; it was way too late for that. Ronnie Taylor had died in his cell the night before from some kind of heart failure, and was already rotting away on a cold slab in the morgue.

No, Jeb was afraid of what other old memories might come floating to the surface. He hadn’t even seen his father in ten years, never mind heard his voice. The sound of that voice wouldn’t ever be able to touch him again; but he would surely see Ronnie Taylor in his dreams.

Thomaston State Prison was located just outside the town of Rockland, on a straight, dull stretch of Route 1. It looked like a factory building, and you might think it was somebody’s place of business, except for the high fences and razor wire. Jeb parked and went around to the visitor’s entrance, where he was met by a fat guard with a black mustache and a stain on his blue prison shirt that looked like mustard. The guard’s face was greasy and his collar ringed with sweat. “About goddamn time,” the fat guard said. His beady eyes blinked through pockets of fat. Jeb could see bits of white that clung to the hairs of the guard’s mustache, remnants of his last meal. “Taylor, ain’t it? What took you so long?”

“Sorry,” Jeb muttered. He tried but could not meet the guard’s stare. This was what he hated the most about himself.
When it came time to stand up to people, to show them who was boss, he just couldn’t do it. People took one look at him and assumed control like this guard was doing already.

Fucking fat bastard. I oughta show you a thing or two
…

But he didn’t say anything, just followed numbly along as the guard led him through a maze of corridors and barred doors. The doors rolled and clanged shut heavily behind them, sounding like distant thunder. They saw no one, but now and again noises floated down from the prison cells that sounded more animal than human. The corridors were thick with the smell of hot male sweat. Jeb couldn’t help thinking that this was where his father had spent the last ten years of his life, caged up like something less than a man. Something to be feared. But that was part of what his father had wanted, after all; and wasn’t that just a little of what he wanted too? For people to take a step back when they saw him, for the other person to look away first?

At a desk they met a second guard propped up next to a wall of television screens, his feet on the counter, hands locked behind his head. This guard was short and completely bald, his head so shiny and smooth it reflected the lights in the ceiling. “Watched you come in,” he said, as the other guard disappeared into another room. “Nice wheels.”

“My father’s car. Restored it myself.”

“Yeah?”

Jeb smiled at the man, wondering what he was thinking.
Bet you think my daddy stole it, don’t you, you prick? For all
I know he did. But it’s mine now
.

The fat guard came back from the inner room carrying a stack of papers in one hand and a suitcase in another. “This is all Ronald’s things,” he said, dropping the suitcase on the floor. “There ain’t a lot. Few old clothes, couple of books and girlie mags. You don’t go out shopping much when you’re in for murder, eh? No field trips to the mall.” He grinned, then slapped the papers down on the counter. “You
need to sign a few places here.” He pointed with a pen. “Here and here.”

“You’re Ronnie Taylor’s son,” the bald guard said, as if he’d figured out a riddle. He took his feet off the counter and sat up. “You must be how old, eighteen, nineteen maybe? I don’t remember seeing you around here.”

“Me and my father aren’t too close. Weren’t, I mean.” Jeb straightened up and handed the signed papers to the fat guard.

“Didn’t like him much?” the bald guard asked, persisting.

“Ronnie was an ornery bastard,” the fat guard interrupted. “Always causing an uproar around here, getting the inmates going so as we’d have to lock him up in solitary. Son of a bitch.” He looked at Jeb with little squinting pig eyes. Some crumbs fell off his mustache onto his shirt. “No offense.”

Jeb wanted to leave. The fat guard was blocking the door. “You said you wanted him buried, right?” the guard said. “Potter’s Field, eh? No service?”

Yeah, you fat sick blubbering pig, now get the fuck out of
my way
.

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Just making sure. Normally the funeral parlor has them cremated if nobody claims the body. The parlor will send you a bill for the plot.”

“How much?”

“Depends.” The guard paused, squinted at him as if sizing up the competition. “Costs less to cremate. What the fuck you care, anyway?”

Both guards were looking at him now. Jeb’s throat felt as if it were about to close; he was starting to sweat. He looked at the floor. The corners of the room were yellow and crusted with dirt.

“Maybe you ought to talk it over with the rest of the family?”

“No. Cremate him.”

The fat guard looked like he’d just won something. He led
Jeb back through the dim hallways, unlocking and locking the doors as they went. Each one clanged again, and this time the sounds seemed hollow, following them as they continued to the outer doors. Jeb carried his father’s suitcase in his right hand, the handle slippery under his sweating fingers. An image of the bald guard hung in his mind; watching him through the cameras, hands clutching his belly, laughing. Those damn guards had been laughing at him the whole time, but what was he going to do about it?

If I were back there now I’d shut their mouths
. He imagined jacking the fat guard up against the wall with his forearm, holding him there while he gave the other one a look, saying,
don’t fuck with me, I’ll look through my father’s
things whenever I goddamn please
. The other one just standing white-faced, nodding yes sir, whatever you say sir.

The plastic handle of the suitcase felt as if it were on fire in his hand. He imagined something moving around inside, thumping and wriggling and bulging. Popping the latch, lifting the lid, feeling things flying out at him, liquid screams through open mouths, nightmares and memories of nightmares thrusting their cold, moist jaws into his face. And he felt that if he opened it now it would be like opening up his father’s life again, ready to swallow him whole.

Ronnie’s an ornery bastard
.

Maybe he was
, Jeb thought.
But not anymore. My daddy’s
dead now, and nothing else. I’m free now, you hear me?

He left the fat guard behind and when he was out of sight of the doors, he broke into a run for the car.

Early the next morning the two strangers left the town of Holy Hill and continued on, skirting the larger cities of Columbia and Florence, following the back roads as they had for days now. Angel was a silent companion. Since the outburst at the motel it was almost as if she weren’t there at all. The man felt a great breaking within him, as if the ground were caving in beneath his feet. His world had been an unsteady one for almost as long as he could remember, and it seemed that it would remain that way forever. He wondered again, as he had a thousand times before, what he really expected to accomplish. Again he came up with the same answer; he didn’t know.

As they passed through Chadbourn he tried speaking to her. “You know I don’t mean to hurt you.”

He was sure she wouldn’t reply, but after a moment, she said, “I don’t know anything.”

“You can trust me. I know I haven’t given you much reason for it, but you can.”

“Can I trust these?” She held up her arms, exposing the cruel purple bruises that ran around her tiny wrists.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “I deserved that. I won’t handcuff you anymore. Just don’t run.” It was all he could say.
Please
God, don’t ask for anything else
. She was so pale, so thin and
fragile. It seemed impossible that she could have survived what he had put her through, was putting her through.

“I won’t run,” she said simply.

He wanted to say,
So you do understand? You know that I
would do anything to stop this? That I would take myself in
your place, if it would do any good?
“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I could eat.”

And so they stopped at a Burger King, and he forced himself to walk without looking at her, without touching the handcuffs in his pocket, without searching the crowd of empty faces for the one who would sense the distance between them and call the police.

For Billy Smith, the nightmares had begun one night about a year after he had been let out of jail. He was working at the time in the kitchen of a little Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. It was the third job he had held in the past four months. He was in the midst of a depression that held him in its grip like some sort of creature from the deep; a depression born out of equal parts self-pity, and self-loathing for what he had done.

He was a convict. He had been to prison, had watched what men did to each other there, primed the depths to which mankind could sink. He wondered if you could see it in his face; if there was some sort of clue to his past written in the pattern of his flesh. Yes, he had suffered, he had felt his own soul ripped away and dipped in something foul and stuffed dripping back into place; and he wondered if the smell clung to him like cigarette smoke. He watched the eyes of people passing him to see if a spark of recognition would alight on him and begin to burn.

But San Francisco swallowed thousands like him every day, and he finally realized two things. The first thing was that most people did not give a damn who he was or where he’d been. The second was that ending up alone in a city
such as this one was as good as a suicide attempt. No smoking gun, but suicide all the same. Every morning he walked the short distance from the restaurant to his apartment in the lower hills, and every evening he walked home, thinking how easy it would be to simply disappear, how the world would go on without missing a beat. If he had not been born, would anything have been different here? It wasn’t likely. His life was like a grain of sand against the ocean, and the tide was relentless and all-powerful.

And then he would think about the three lives that would have been saved if he had never existed. Three lives that had been worth so much more than his, an orphan child who had been cursed from the very first breath he took into his lungs.

He went on because there was nothing else to do. He thought sometimes about ending his life, but the details of the act were too much. It seemed funny to him that even in a life such as his, the will to survive was too strong to overcome. In the restaurant, he was a good worker, silent, a loner. If the others in the kitchen ever noticed the prison tattoo on his upper arm, they did not mention it. If there was something in his sweat that stunk of the hole, they did not show it. There were plenty of ex-cons working in the grimy little shops of Chinatown. Some of his co-workers were ex-cons themselves. If nothing else, there was strength in numbers.

But he was restless. Later, he would begin to understand how he had been waiting for something to happen. Each day his restlessness would increase, and he would begin to get the strangest urges, the need for movement, for escape, for confession. He shared his secrets with the voices in his head. It was as if he could hear someone whispering back but was not quite able to make out the words. These words were important, he was sure, and the fact that he could not hear them drove him crazy. If only he could understand, he would have a plan. He would have something to get him out of bed in the morning.

Finally he knew he had to move on. Down the coast, perhaps to Los Angeles or San Diego. Or maybe he would go east, yes, that seemed the thing to do. He would quit the job at the restaurant, take what little cash he had, pack up his few things and get in a car, any car, and he would drive until he found a place that felt right to him. Once there he could find a job (he wasn’t picky, anything would do), a place to live, and then he would start listening for the whispers. Perhaps they would never come again.

That night he dreamed he was standing just outside a large circle of people in the darkness. A fire raged within the circle and the people were chanting in low voices. The firelight played about their features, making them seem like panes of rippling glass. They danced; their faces as they turned towards him took his breath away, as if he were looking straight through their skins and into their souls, at the animal in them. Their chanting seemed to take shape in the air around them, to become almost palpable in the smoke, to slide and slither like snakes about his ears. And yet he seemed on the verge of hearing for the first time all the secrets that had been dangling just out of his reach.

As he stood transfixed, unable to move even a single muscle, he heard a voice calling to him—
You must come, William.
You must come home
.

The oddly powerful dream stayed with him the next morning as he packed his things, and kept playing through his mind even as he got into the old Volkswagen he’d bought just days before from the owner of the restaurant. He did not usually remember his dreams for more than a few minutes, if at all. This one did not seem to be a dream at all, but a memory. He got as far as Salt Lake City without stopping, driving from dawn to dusk and into the night, and stayed in a small motel on the outskirts of the city near the great salt flats. He could smell them through the open window as he lay in his room that night and listened to the sound of rock and roll coming from the nightclub across the street. It drew
him out into the night, walking across the empty parking lots, past the backs of the dark stores and rows of neat suburban houses. In Salt Lake City everything seemed so quiet and clean. He wasn’t sure he liked it. The streets of San Francisco were raw and dangerous at night. But there was life on those streets; here, the world seemed like an old man drawing his last breath.

As he stood looking out across the vast white stretch of salt it began to take on features in the dark, as if a face were traced there just under the surface. He heard the whispering again, stronger now.
Dead men walking
, he thought he heard it saying. But that didn’t make any sense, and he turned away. There were no faces floating in the salt flats, and no voices. He was losing his mind.

What seemed like thousands of years ago, his life had been on some sort of track, he had had a purpose. His adopted mother, who had finally lost a long bout with cancer a month before his seventeenth birthday, had always told him that the most important thing was to go to school and search out your future. Find what interests you and you’ll figure the rest out later. Nobody ends up doing what they set out to do; lawyers become firefighters, singers end up running restaurants, beach bums make a million in the stock market, brokers turn into beach bums.

And alcoholics turn into killers. Education had done nothing for him, in the end.

He returned to his empty room near the flats and that night the dreams came back with a vengeance.

He was standing on a hill, the stars peppering the sky above his head. There were great empty stretches of black on either side, making him feel as if he were standing on the deck of a boat in an endless sea. The hillside was cool beneath his bare feet and a light breeze ruffled his hair. He could smell pine needles, and the sharp, bitter smell of smoke.

Behind and below him the stretch of blackness was broken
by a scattering of lights. He looked down at the roughness beneath his feet, and realized he was standing at the edge of a huge flat slab of rock jutting out into space. Below the lip of the rock the treetops swayed in the breeze.

The smell of smoke assaulted him. The heat of it against his face. And the sound of something scraping across the rock behind him.

He did not want to see what it was. Oh no, he did not.

William
.

He turned; his mother stood there, but not the mother he remembered from his childhood. Cancer had ruined her. Her hair hung in mossy clumps against her face. Her skin was black and running with open sores. Her cold, dead eyes were covered with a yellow film. They were not his mother’s eyes. The person he had called mother was long gone.

Her cracked lips opened to speak again. He screamed without sound; and behind her rose the legions of the dead, hundreds of them, ripping themselves out of the ground and pulling themselves up the hill onto the rock. Among them he saw the woman and two children he had killed, their mangled bodies and broken limbs reaching up as if in prayer. He backed away until he could feel the drop beneath his feet, and the heat of the fire burning his neck.

And the voice, always there, always the same.
Break the
circle, William. You must come
home.

After Burger King they got back in the car and continued east, but the mood between them had changed. He could sense it in the way she sat in the seat, the way she watched the scenery through the window, the way her breathing had eased. It had been the first time she was out of the car with him, in sight of other people, and she hadn’t run screaming for help. She knew he had a gun in the car, but he hadn’t brought it into the restaurant with him and he was pretty sure she knew that too.

You must come home
. The words tortured him, running
through his mind at the strangest moments, like a record that kept skipping. What did it mean?

He glanced at Angel in the passenger seat. “You want to know why we’re here,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you what I know, if you’ll listen.”

“What good will that do? Are you going to let me go? I don’t think so.”

He shrugged. “I can’t promise you anything. All I can do is tell you my story.” He glanced at her again. “I thought maybe…you’d understand.”

“Understand what? That you’re nuts?”

“That I don’t have a choice.”

He told her about the dreams. His life after the accident, in San Francisco, the odd sense of urgency he felt that drove him on, the whispers, and finally, the dead. And the face he began to see everywhere, starting the day after his Salt Lake City nightmare. That next morning he had driven southeast for hours, the drive passing in a frenzied blur. He could still see that little pattern of lights below him in the night from his dream, and those lights began to take shape for him, the brightest ones becoming the line of brow and nose, two of them eyes, and others tracing the cheekbones and jaw. That night he stopped in a small town outside Santa Fe and fell asleep in his car, and this time he saw the face in sharp and complete detail. A beautiful woman. Throughout the day, he kept seeing it in the strangest places; in the bathroom mirror, in the pattern of clouds overhead, among the ripples of the motel pool as he walked by. He had to find this woman, and bring her with him. That was what he had been asked to do. He had never been so sure of anything in his life.

Instead he tried to run, going back west, but the farther he got the worse the dreams became, until they were coming during waking hours and with such force he had to pull the car over to the side of the road and wait them out like a bad thunderstorm. Visions now, in broad daylight. And always her face, in the pattern of leaves beside the road, in the raindrops
running down the windshield. He turned back, because the visions would drive him crazy if he did not. He began to plan. The thought of not being able to find her never entered his mind; he knew that when he got to the right place she would be there. But he must be ready. Something told him she would not come with him voluntarily.

“Finally, there you were. On the beach. I’d been looking for you so long, I could hardly believe it. But your face was perfect. I’d seen it a thousand times, I knew it by heart.”

She studied him from the passenger seat, as if trying to decide how much to believe. “You said you were a dealer. I believed you.”

That part had been easy. She was so desperate for a fix she would have followed him anywhere. He’d gotten her back to his car;
I could use a little now
, she’d said.
Sure
, he’d said. He’d opened the driver’s side door and the chloroform was right there on the seat and no one in sight. He was fishing for something, anything to make him stop when it hit him again like a sledgehammer to the face:
dead people walking those
who are born again DO IT DO IT DO IT NOW
and he moved smoothly and quickly, forcing her head into the wet cloth. She bucked and crumpled against him without a sound, and he pushed her into the car ahead of him, setting her up in the passenger seat like she was asleep. He threw the cloth with the chloroform in it on the ground, looked around and saw no one. And that was it; he was gone.