Phantom Nights (19 page)

"Well, sure. God bless 'n keep her."

When they were alone, Alex pushed one of his spiral-bound notebooks across the Formica tabletop to Bobby and resumed eating. Chocolate malt and french fries backing up the burger.

Bobby read Alex's account of the rape of Mally Shaw, his face settling into an expression of gloom.

Before he could ask questions, Pee-Wee paid a social call.

"Ad-lay!" he said with a derisive twist of his little mouth, summing up the previous week's high point in national politics and his own distaste for the Democrats' choice to lead their ticket in November. "Sure did think old 'Cowfever' had a lock goin' in, but Truman's hard-on has always been for Stevenson. Ad-lay against a war hero, it be a sho'-nuff perscription for losin' the White House."

"Pee-Wee, you know you got to provide a decent burial soon for that old apron of yours before I declare it a public nuisance."

"Like hell you will!"

"How's your boy making out with that new wife of his?"

"Reckon it'll be a good marriage. They been together eleven days already, and she ain't left him but twice."

"Your grill is on fire again."

"True Willeh! Throw some flour on that, gosh dang it! 'Scuse us older boys here a minute, Alex. Bobby, you heard why scuba diving is like sex with a tall woman?"

"Haven't heard that one."

"No matter how big your tank is, you can't never get in deep enough!"

"Speak for yourself, Pee-Wee. Your ex-wife told Cecily yours didn't have no more twang to it than a one-string banjo."

Pee-Wee chortled. "How would she know, her root cellar was tighter'n a gnat's navel. Damn if I didn't almost go broke paying for those lube jobs just so's I could get me a little somethin' come Satiddy nights." He winked. "'Scuse us again, Alex, that wasn't meant for your tender ears."

When Pee-Wee returned to his chores Bobby looked at Alex and said, "What were you doing over to Mally's last night? Looking to diddle her yourself maybe?"

It was his angry tone more than the off-base accusation that alerted Alex; Bobby was deeply troubled by what he'd read. Alex calmly shook his head although his cheeks were reddening and stared his brother down. Bobby looked at the notebook under his right hand.

"Okay, that was—I know Mally Shaw wasn't uh—so what were you and Mally all about anyhow?"

Somebody used up a nickel at the jukebox to hear Hank Snow's
Rhumba Boogie
.

Alex leaned back in the booth, wiping his fingers on a paper napkin. Not taking his eyes off Bobby.

Bobby looked up again uncomfortably.

"This uh story of yours—"

Alex shook his head again, very deliberately, his lips clamped together.

"Okay. You heard and saw most of it. Mally let—him in her house when she should've known a sight better. Then one thing led to another while you were hiding out. Probably the only smart thing you did last night. Let me tell you. The man's reputation is, he's always been Woody Woodpecker with a big set of balls. Takes 'em and leaves 'em. So what do you want me to do? Arrest Le—the man on your say-so? Know how far I'd get with that? Hell, you're old enough to know the score, Alex. Rape is a booger to prove anytime, and when it's a nig—shit, forget it. Even saying she was still alive, Mally wouldn't dare open her mouth in her own behalf. I'd be out of a job in an hour with mouths to feed, and six months from now I'd be gone fishing and like as not never turn up again. Until maybe the concrete blocks they wired to my feet slipped off the bones. That's how they play it—man who has friends with a big stake in his future."

Alex was very still with cheeks fully fired up, causing his eyes to water a little from the heat of his disappointment and dismay. Then he reached for his notebook, but Bobby slid it away from him.

"Uh-uh. I'll just hang on to this, get rid of it when I can. Now tell me: There a chance anybody saw you out to Mally's last night?"

Alex half-rose from his seat to try to wrest the notebook from Bobby's grip.

"Sit down," Bobby said grimly. "I'm after looking out for your welfare, and all you ever do is think up new ways to make it hard for me. I said
sit down
, asshole!"

Alex's sore lips trembled. There was such pain and disillusionment in his brother's eyes that Bobby had to look away for a moment.

That's when Alex stuck his left index finger down his throat, triggered his gag reflex and vomited all over the table and Bobby as Sara Sundeen approached with Bobby's pot of coffee and his toasted cheese.

Alex had finished barfing and bolted from the booth before Bobby, looking at the undigested burger shotgunned across his shirt front, could recover from his astonishment.

"Oh my," Sara said, reaching for the wipe cloth tucked under her belt. "We'll just take that one off the bill."

Of Shadows and Phantoms

N
ow in the blue hour

Beneath a gemmy cusp of sky

In that landscape of surcease

Known as Little Grove churchyard

The boy lingers with more

Anguish than any boy can be prepared

To know,

Sun sinking west like a homesick

Heart

Gilding him with the hint of a halo

In a stoned church window.

The wind sighs in the vernacular

Of the estranged. There in uplifting

Night he stands ready once more

To welcome the
Dixie Traveler.

It is the cloudless time

Between the limepit noon of summer

And the mockingbird's dark,

Time of crossings and recrossings,

Of going and returning—of

Shadows and Phantoms that appear

To the occult eye as dew

Gathers on blades of grass,

Pallid Sisters and Brothers

Rising to the occasion

From little houses of the dead,

Sepulchres of the shattered

Grail.

The rusted bell tolls. But he, lusting

Now for more than antics, for the

Bravest step of all, cannot hear

Beyond the
Dixie Traveler
's

Iron thunder. His heartbeat

Swells, his mind is filled

With a bluesy reckoning:

If you don't have what it takes,

Some pretense of folly,

There can be no love lost or gained.

He is kindled by the headlamp

Of the
Traveler
; studies it

With the pierced, deep look

Of the entranced. Night seals

His world. The stars

Grow older, but slowly.

Surcease. Tears at his grave

(He knows) will settle

Like a melancholy rain. O

The fickle-hearted! Now he trusts

Only the entrancement, mirrors

That reflect inward.

The
Traveler
is here, and it is

time for him to board.

He steps forward and puts a foot

on the shining rail to meet

His Titan—

—Steps forward—

"A
lex Gambier, what the hell did you think you were doing?"

From where he lay on his back in gravel seven or eight feet from the now-empty rails, stunned as if swept back from the wheels of the passing train by a blow from a wing of an angry angel, Alex blinked to clear his cloudy vision and looked up into the eyes of Mally Shaw, who was standing over him, hands on hips in a scolding attitude. No wings but anger to spare. The moon, the stars in their appointed places becoming visible to him past Mally's squared shoulders, brightest around her head, coronal.

At first thought he was dead, then,
no
, dreaming. But the dead knew no pain, according to the preachers. As for a dream, you didn't hurt from scraped elbows while dreaming.

"Go and throw your life away like that, for
what
? Don't you know what I would give, just one more day, one
hour
, even, to get out of here, have me a deep breath of air, eat corn on the cob just dripping with melted butter—I never figured you to be so dumb."

"Get out of where?" Alex said, hearing the last rattle of the club car of the
Dixie Traveler
as it cleared the long trestle over the Yella Dog, then belatedly hearing his own effortless words in his mind even though the voice was not familiar. He scrambled up off the right-of-way ballast, away from the figment, the apparition his brain was trying to pass off as Mally Shaw. Not doing such a bad job of it, actually: she was perfect in form, not scarred like an ancient obelisk nor bloody from hounds' teeth, wearing a dark blue dress with moonflowers on it he'd seen her wear before—his body was moving, but his head reeled; Alex did a spin and fell again and heard her laugh.

"Oh boy. Better just to take it easy for a little while, get your balance back."

"You're supposed to be—in the Promised Land." That voice that must be his.

Mally looked around with amused skepticism. "I'm sure enough not, punkin," she said. Her expression sobered. "How much more time do you need to get used to that notion?"

"Well, if you're not dead—"

"Oh Lord. I'm plenty dead all right. Can't take that back."

He tried to get up but his head wasn't ready; he fell hard on his butt.

"Then what are you doing here." Alex cried in exasperation.

Mally gave him a long look.

"Don't know for sure. But it's bound to have something to do with you, Alex. And maybe some unfinished business of my own."

Jean Valjean on the
Pegasus

New Gunslinger in Town

True Obsessions

E
ddie Paradise Galphin had finished throwing up under the catalpa trees behind the delivery entrance of Godsong and Wundall's funeral home and was halfway through a cigarette when Ramses Valjean came outside, put down his medical bag and Eddie's Speed Graphic camera, and stood in the driveway of the one-story frame building rubbing his sore eyes. The sun had set, but the sky was still alight at treetop level. What breeze there would be to make the coming night bearable stirred the leaves above their heads and smelled of fresh-cut hay from a nearby pasture.

Eddie strolled over with a show of cockiness to the man who had seen him run from the room in which Mally Shaw's body still lay in all of its shrunken ghastliness on a zinc-top table—but Eddie was going to put that image out of his mind. He was going to . . . Sure. In about six months, if he was lucky.

"How long will you need to develop the photographs we've taken?" Ramses asked him.

We've taken
was being generous; Eddie had managed with panicky heart and rising gorge to get one shot at Ramses's direction before abandoning his camera and quitting that room with its morbid airs on the dead run. No telling how many other plates Ramses had exposed. Or of what use they were to him. His own daughter? If he wasn't such a cool customer and a doctor to boot, Eddie might have entertained dark suspicions about Ramses Valjean.

"I've got my own darkroom, so soon's I make it back to the house—"