Disconnection (25 page)

Just a girl
, Stuart thought.
Just an innocent little fuckin’ Spic girl
.

Frank continued begging for his life. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” he managed between punches as layers of red blood poured from the downward curl of his lips. “You don’t
know!”

Stuart did not listen. He was on a mission to tear Frank apart just as he had torn to shreds the life of the little tango dancer.

When Frank finally laid in a blood pulp by the bayou shore—in a near comatose state, close to that of Ramona beside him—Stuart finally rose over the defeated man and turned his attention to the Spanish girl.

“Ramona,” he said, moving toward her. He began untying her feet and hands. “We’re takin’ you to the hospital, sugar.”

With what car?
A voice seemed to cry from the darkness. Stuart looked around him. There was no sign of a vehicle anywhere. How did he come to this part of the bayou? He still could not remember. Hell’s bells, if only he could remember.

“How did we get here?” Stuart asked the girl, but realized soon enough that the girl was hardly able to breathe, much less able to answer a question. “Much damn use you are to me,” Stuart mumbled as he pulled the bandana out of her mouth.

The sound of Frank’s shallow breathing brought another question to Stuart’s mind—
how did all this begin?

Stuart had been drinking. His headache made that clear. He had left the police station that morning—after that black cop’s seemingly endless interrogation—and after that…

Shit. I can’t remember
.

“Listen, honey,” he said to the girl. “I wanna help you, but I ain’t got no car. The only thing I know to do is go up yonder and find a road, see if anyone will help us. You understand? I’m not
leavin’
you.”

She was dying. Her pupils were dilating. Stuart had seen deer’s eyes go like that time and time again. The end was coming.

“You just hold on there, missy.”

But she would not hold on. Her breathing stopped entirely. Stuart leaned over her and tried CPR, but she would not resuscitate. Frustrated, Stuart beat the earth beside her head. “Didn’t even fuckin’ try!” he swore at her, and she stared back at him with two dark lifeless eyes.

Fuck me
, Stuart thought.
Fuck me ten times over
.

Stuart thought he was a good person. Other people throughout his life had labeled him as an attention junky, a racist chauvinistic ass wipe, a serial groom, a heartless hunting redneck alcoholic bastard. But Stuart had always held on to the idea that he was just misunderstood.

Killing, beating, raping a woman had never been on the menu. Never.

What had possessed him to hook up with a man like Frank anyway? Stuart glanced over at the bleeding body of the man. Stuart had to admit, he never had control of his actions when he was drunk. He could have easily befriended the fucker and not known what an animal he was. It was possible.

If only he could get back to Yazoo City. If only. He would change his ways, maybe. Stop drinking so much. Maybe give back to the community. Donate blood or some shit like that. Something that didn’t involve money. Stuart liked to keep his money. Five years ago he had been dirt poor after his second divorce and was wandering around a Yazoo City strip mall with two hundred bucks to his name when a sign in a store window made him pause.
NAMB WANTS YOU!
it said, with Uncle Sam pointing one decrepit finger in the direction of the reader.

Stuart had walked into the store, which wasn’t a store really, but an office of gray cubicles and solid white walls. A bubblegum-blowing twenty-something sat behind a cardboard desk reading a
Cosmo Girl
magazine.

“What the hell is NAMB?” Stuart had asked.

“National Association of Mortgage Brokers,” the girl replied, putting down her magazine. “You interested?”

Online mortgage broker courses had cost him seventy bucks and sixty days of his life, a cost that had paid him back tenfold, for now Stuart was well-off. Not rich, but well-off, and being well-off meant that Stuart liked to hold onto his money.

He would call Sandy when he came home. She was his third wife. She had red hair and pillowy boobs a man could sink his teeth into. Stuart still loved her, even though she had pointed a gun at him that night over something as silly as spaghetti. Anyway he couldn’t blame her for that incident—it wasn’t like it was her fault. She hadn’t been the same since 9-11. Something about seeing those planes crash through the twin towers had knocked the sense out of her. She had unraveled after that. Stuart had almost been surprised that she hadn’t tried to kill him earlier.

Maybe when he came home, they would fix things. He would tell her about being a murder suspect, and she would laugh at him. They’d go to the creek by his grandpop’s old house with a suitcase of Michelob and watch the water attract all shades of deer, deer that Stuart would no doubt one day kill. It would be like old times.

A cold hand came over Stuart’s wrist, knocking all thoughts out of his head. The surprise sent him straight into the air, his mouth gasping for breath.

“What the hell…?” he began, looking at his imprisoned wrist. He turned to see his capturer.

Ramona lay before him as she had before, only now, her eyes were wide open, and there was no mistaking the life that now reflected from her face.

“Stuart,”
she whispered.

Stuart quickly stood up, freeing his wrist from her wintry grip. “You were dead,” he mumbled.

“Find the chapel buried in the trees,”
she whimpered hoarsely. Her throat gurgled with blood. Her upper torso slid up and down on the grass like a poisoned serpent’s, but her eyes never left Stuart’s face.
“Find the chapel.”
She lifted her head from the ground. Her black hair, tangled with orange and yellow leaves, covered her face like a rotting pall.

“Listen, missy,” Stuart began as the fear in him dwindled, “I don’t go to church, it ain’t a Stuart Reed kind of place, if you know what I mean.”

Ramona reached out and touched his hand again, and a flash of scenery crossed Stuart’s eyesight like a film collage on TV. He saw a wooden chapel by the bayou, its walls and roofs ravaged by time. The image focused and twisted over and over until all Stuart could make out were spots and graphs, pieces of a scattered puzzle playing over a million places at once.

Dead grass and trees that looked as if they were vomited from the earth guarded the chapel’s entrances like medieval knights in brown velvet disguises.
Join us, Stuey
, the chapel called out to him.
Come on. Get saved. Repent
.

“Don’t listen,” Ramona ordered through blue, trembling lips. “Just see.”

The chapel laughed at Stuart as people began to enter its doors, and its chuckling sound drew a bullet in Stuart’s heart stronger and deeper than anything he had ever experienced before. He tried to close his eyes and lose the picture, but closing his eyes only made the vision stronger.

“Only three miles from here,” Ramona said. “You can do it.”

“Hey, Ramona,” Stuart mumbled breathlessly under the weight of his hallucination, “you don’t know me. I’m the world’s biggest fuck-up, okay?”

The Spanish dancer—he remembered her now, how well she had danced at the bar, how strong her legs had been, turning this way and that, how she had danced longer for him than anyone—seemed disgusted by his answer. “Sela needs you,” she said.

Sela? Hell, I know a girl named Sela
.

Stuart opened his eyes and realized that Ramona was no longer Ramona. The girl laying before him, resurrected from the dead, was no longer the color of cinnamon and ginger, but as pale as snow, and her eyes were light blue and shadowed with the color of eternity.

She could have been Woodrow’s slim little neighbor, that crazy girl with the Fishhook sign on her wall. But she wasn’t. Just a look-alike. Still, Stuart felt that he should know her all the same.

“Go,” the girl whispered.
“Go.”

Stuart stared incredulously as the girl laid her head once more to the ground and closed her eyes forever. Within seconds her body began to change to a darker hue, and she was no longer a Sela look-alike, but the sweet Spanish dancer Stuart now vaguely remembered almost falling in love with the night before.

Her words came back to him now:

Find the chapel under the trees
.

Stuart got to his feet just as the gulf wind rattled through the evergreens, the current of air carrying the scent of moss and midnight reveries.

Stuart looked in every direction, searching for the right way to go, the quickest way to the chapel. A song from his grandpop’s house came to him:

Going to the chapel and we’re going to get married, going to the Chapel of Love

(Go, just go)

“Hey, Stuey,” a voice called from behind him. Frank’s voice. “You forgot about me, Mr. Deer Hunter. Mr. Mortgage Broker. Mr. Fuck-Anything-That-Moves.”

What the fuck? People just keep rising from the dead in these parts
.

(GO)

Stuart, who had always prided himself in never running from anything in his life, started a mad dash into the woods. Breathlessly he ran, unsure of the direction. He could hear Frank behind him:

“Stuey, wait up, buddy. Just look at you! Won’t Sandy be so proud? You, runnin’ like a teenager.”

(Go, just go)

“You think she’ll be proud of your behavior last night? I don’t know, Stu, it’s a tough call.”

Stuart screamed
(like a fucking girl, damn it)
when he tripped over the root of a cypress tree, spraining his ankle when he fell, hurting the arm that was already injured from when he was thrown out of Johnnie’s Cabaret.

“You only went there ’cause you’d been kicked out of every titty bar in N’awlins, ain’t that what you told me, Stu? That little ole Spanish bar at the end of Bourbon. Hell, I was only there to see Ramona. Little spic bitch. Ain’t she got the cutest legs you ever seen? I thought I had nearly died and gone to heaven the first time I saw Miss Ramona.”

Stuart worked at standing up again, and it took work, and during this time he could hear Frank’s voice coming closer.

“Yes, sir, Ramona was always my favorite dancer. I’m glad you told me to go and get her for you, Stuey, or else I would have never had the courage to talk to her.”

As Stuart began running again—or what was the closest thing to a run, with that damn sprained ankle—memories of the night before suddenly began spiraling before him, bouncing off the trees, kicking through the mud and dust.

(She was sweet and her name was Ramona and she danced for me. She said she danced because there was no food and her
madre
was sad and her padre had left and she was the only one to feed her and her little brother and keep a roof over their heads. I like to think we made a connection but she went and danced for another man. I said to her, sugar, I’ll pay you two hundred if you dance for only me.)

“It’s catching backup with you, ain’t it, Su? You rememberin’? Remember what Ramona said to you, offerin’ her a lousy two hundred bucks like that, to dance for you all night. Ha! She makes more than that in an hour, bro!”

(She said no, and I offered three hundred, and she said no again. Hell’s bells, I didn’t know how to keep her next to me. She just fuckin’ enchanted me, I couldn’t explain it. I said to the guy next to me, man, I would do anything to keep the Spanish honey with me all night.)

“Anything meant anything, bro!” Stuart could hear Frank yell through the trees.

“I didn’t mean for you to abduct her!” Stuart yelled back as he limped through the bayou’s thickness.

“All’s well that ends well, Stuey! You think Ramona was hurt? Hell, Ramona wasn’t even half hurt. Nothing like your first wife, Rebecca. Remember her? You came home every night of that marriage with beer on your breath, stinking like another woman’s perfume. She yelled at you and you told her to stop bein’ such a bitch. She left you after you were found by the sheriff in the Riverside Baptist church’s Sunday school room humping the preacher’s wife and her two sisters. You remember, Stuey, do ya?”

How did he know these things?
Stuart asked himself.
How could he possibly
…?

“I know because God sees all, Stuey. God sees all. Remember the night she found out she was pregnant, and you convinced her to marry you again? Remember that? The baby was born and then he died and you weren’t home to heal the heartbreak, my friend. You were over there at the cathouse lookin’ for more pussy. You came home and she had used the vacuum cleaner cord to tie a knot around her neck. You didn’t even go to the funeral, Stu, that’s the sick kind of bastard you are. You locked yourself in a pretty tail’s house and drank yourself into a stupor.”

“I drank because I couldn’t deal with it!”

“You drank because you are a coward, Stu. Always were. You kill deer because you can’t kill men. You couldn’t kill me. Congratulations, Stuey, for being able to outsmart an animal. In interspecies warfare, you’ve proven that humans are still on top.”

“Fuck you!” Stuart screamed. “Fuck you, buddy, at least I never murdered a harmless girl…”

His words broke as a sudden sharp pain in his calf made him tumble over into the grass. Stuart was nearly blinded by the darkness, but when he placed his hand on the wound, he recognized it for what it was—a bullet wound. Stuart reached into the painful gash inside his calf—he’d had to do this once before, when he was accidentally shot by his near-sighted cousin Ricky at deer camp last year—and pulled out the bullet. He held the pellet up to his eye and studied it with what little light he had.

Damn. Mother-fucker shot me with my own gun
.

“You down, Stuart?” Frank asked in the near distance.

Stuart did not reply. In the seething darkness he waited as close to the earth as possible. The minutes dragged on.

“Hey, Stu, where’d you go, bub?”

Come a little closer, shit-for-brains
.

“Don’t play games now. I shot you fair and square. Say, is this the gun Sandy used on you?”