Whispers in the Night Read online

  “All right, all right. So, that big dude in there letting Zadora’s card-shuffling ability hash out his future for him, you’ve seen him in here before, right?”

  I ain’t never had much to say to the twenty-something in the army drabs, but I knowed him to be a regular. He hadn’t never caused no trouble that I ever seen. Most nights, you’d walk in and find him hugging the wallpaper between the jukebox and the restroom, and burning up clove cigarettes like smoking them was the only thing keeping him alive.

  “What about him?” I wanted to know. I won’t never forget what Carter said to me in reply. Them words is burned onto my goddamned brain. They’d be burned onto yours too, if you’d been standing in my shoes that night.

  “He dead, Lou. I know he dead ’cause I killed him last night.”

  All I could do was stand there still trying to decide whether or not religion was a stranger to me, and trying to keep the word “bullshit” from slipping through my lips.

  Don’t know what made Carter think he was going to drop a bomb like that on me without some kind of clarification to go along with it. He should have damn well known what my next question would be, but the son of a bitch made me ask it anyway.

  “The fuck you mean, he dead? How can he be dead when he’s in there right now having his fortune told and stinking up the joint with them damn clove cigarettes?”

  “I know, man. I know I sound like a lunatic, but you know me, Lou. You know that no matter what I might sound like right now, I ain’t crazy. And I’m telling you I killed that son of a bitch.”

  I decided then and there that he was crazy. I was standing alone a hundred miles out in the Baja in the dark with a crazy man.

  “Well, I’d tell you he don’t look so dead to me, and then I suppose we could have an argument, but we won’t. Instead, why don’t you start over from the beginning?” I would come to regret saying those words.

  “Before we do, I got another question for you,” Carter said. His speaking tone had taken on a lunatic’s sheen that unnerved me. I didn’t know how many more of his questions I was prepared to hear.

  He took my hand in his and pressed it between his palms. I don’t know whether he was the one shaking or whether it was me, but I could feel the tremors working their way up my wrist in that dark place behind the pub where moonlight didn’t dare to reach. They scrabbled up my forearm, and at the rate our conversation was going, they weren’t going to stop till they reached my toenails.

  “Do you remember the very first time you ever set foot in the Paradise Pub?”

  Something dark was bubbling up from inside Carter; something that seemed to take hold of him and didn’t seem intent on letting him go any time soon. I’d estimate that I probably outweigh Carter by a solid forty pounds and stand three inches taller than him, but I don’t mind admitting that at that moment, he scared the fuck out of me.

  What scared me more was that I found his question impossible to answer. Of course, a stubborn bastard like me would die before admitting such a thing, so I tried to rationalize it to myself.

  If there’s one thing I learned in all my years, it’s the number-one reason that hesitation can be a hazard. Hesitation is dangerous ’cause it betrays fear, and sometimes fear is a pheromone. This was one of those times. Carter must have smelled it, the way he lunged in to swallow up the silence as I stood ruminating. “Can’t recollect it, can you? Bet you can’t. I bet you fuckin’ can’t!”

  It pissed me off that he was right.

  “Hell, I been coming here for so long. At our age, there’s got to be a million places I drink at where I don’t remember the first time I ever went there.”

  This seemed admission enough for him. “That’s another thing,” he practically shouted, making me shush his ass in the darkness. For a man who’d seemed to have privacy concerns about speaking with me, his mannerisms was growing more conspicuous with every word he said. Sweating like a whore in church, he went on, “You say there’s a ton of places you drink at besides this one. So when the last time you been to one of them instead of coming here? Huh? When?”

  “Man, what the hell you driving at with these questions?” It was all I could think of to say, since I damned sure couldn’t recall having gone anywhere else to drink except Paradise Pub in a month of Sundays. I didn’t want him to know my memory was dust, of course. And if he knew the reason why I couldn’t recall anything removed from this creepy little alehouse out in the middle of nowhere, I felt terrified all at once of him telling me.

  “Lou, just answer the question. Humor me. It’ll all come together in a minute, I swear it will. Just bear with me and answer the goddamned question. Do you remember the last time you went anywhere other than here? Last time you had a really good meal? A really satisfying night’s sleep?”

  “No, I don’t,” I sighed, searching in vain for my shoes where they hid inside the darkness pooled around my feet. They were as lost as I felt.

  “I didn’t think you could,” he told me, softening his voice the way a doctor does who’s fixin’ to give a child patient a needle. “You don’t recall ’cause you’re here every night, ain’t you? You’re here every night just like me, just like too damn many of the folks inside this joint right now.”

  “You said something a few minutes ago about getting to the point,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, I did,” he answered, “and here it is. I was as clearheaded last night when I killed that big fat motherfucker inside as I am talking to you right now.”

  “And how clearheaded is that?” I asked. I was fighting like mad to hang on to my last little scrap of objective rationale, but Carter would prove to be a better grappler than I was. He seemed hell-bent on snatching it away from me.

  “I killed him and I knew what I was doing and I did it anyways. There was something I just had to know for myself. And tonight when I come in here, sure as we’re standing here, I found his ass sitting inside laughing like nothing had happened. And that’s when I knowed what I come to tell you tonight.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’re dead, Lou. We dead and we done gone to the Devil. You, me, everybody inside that fucking bar. Dead.”

  Crazy.

  Crazy as a shit-house rat.

  “Listen, man, if you and that kid had some form of altercation, that’s one thing—”

  “We ain’t had no fuckin’ ‘altercation,’ man! I’m telling you I murdered that motherfucker! I pressed the muzzle of this here pistol”—he dragged the Colt Diamondback that I knew he always carried out of his belt and shoved it up under my nose—“against his doughy fucking temple and splattered his brains all over the goddamned sand. And I did that because of what I seen one night prior.”

  I thought about saying I didn’t want to hear any more, but it was too late to stop listening now.

  His words shook as he talked. “Two nights ago, I was just getting in my car, fixin’ to leave for the night, when I seen two of the regulars slip out the bathroom window and take off running into the desert. They didn’t know I seen ’em. It was that cute little blond trick what’s always callin’ us old-timers ‘granddaddy,’ and that pot-smoking white boy always got his hair tied back in a ponytail. The way they kept looking over their shoulders at the place, you’d have thought the Devil himself was on their heels.”

  I knew who he was talking about. I remembered back when they was new faces. They started showing up here not long after a bus rolled on Route 2, injuring two dozen people and killing three. I remembered them ’cause they looked too damn young to be regulars in a place like this. I recalled that the big dude in the army drabs started coming here ’round the same time.

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “I saw them get killed by some damn things that I don’t know what they was,” he told me.

  “What kind of things? Coyotes? Wolves?” I heard the questions dive off the tip of my tongue before I’d realized they were in my mouth.

  “Man, didn’t I just say I don’t know
what they was? They was some kind of monsters or something. They was big, too. Big big, and blacker than night and they scuttled around on all fours faster than my eyes could follow them. The way they jumped all over those kids, they never had a chance.”

  “The kids talk to each other before they took off running? They say anything that might account for what they was running from?”

  When he answered me, Carter’s voice sounded like there were ghosts living in it. “All I heard was her keep telling him it was their only chance. She talked like they was risking their lives if they ran and dead for sure if they stayed. Then those monsters come out of the dark like they was made of it and tore them kids to pieces. I swear my insides could feel the sound of them jaws, like bear traps snapping shut on arms and legs and throats. That fucked my shit up, man.”

  Maybe it was the drink in me, or maybe it was the sudden chill growing in the air, but I found myself believing him. That probably only meant I was as loony as he was, but my disbelief was eroding nonetheless.

  “What’d you do when you seen that?” I asked him.

  “Didn’t do nothing. Any man my age who think he gon’ outrun a pack of animals that caught prey young and spry enough to be his grandkids is a damn fool. I was too scared to do anything but wait for them to come rip my skin off. But they didn’t, maybe ’cause they seen I wasn’t trying to escape.”

  Carter might have been a damned surgeon when it came to spinning a good yarn, but I had to stop him here. He’d slipped a word into that last sentence that bugged me.

  “Escape? Escape from what? From who?” I asked. He let the question hang out there in the dead air and twist a little before speaking again.

  “If you can stand there and ask me that, then you ain’t been listening. Anyway, I watched the things disappear back into the blackness they come out of without paying me no mind. When they was gone, I threw my car in gear and tore the hell out of there. The thing is, I don’t remember ever getting home.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious, Lou, and I’m fucking scared, I don’t mind telling you. I got onto Road 7734, the very same road we’re looking at now”—he jabbed a finger toward the front of the pub and the uncharted dirt-and-gravel road—“and watched the Paradise Pub fade into my rearview mirror. Then within five minutes, I found myself driving up the road leading to it. I could see it through the fucking windshield. How is that possible? How the fuck is that possible on a road straight as a fucking arrow, Lou?”

  “It ain’t possible,” I told him, suddenly needing to sit down. “It ain’t possible.”

  It wasn’t. Indian Road 7734, that alleged phantom service road that only reveals itself to the deserving, is a solitary, southward-heading straightaway. It’s got as much curve or loop to it as a number-two pencil. Ain’t no way in hell a body could possibly have ridden it in a circle, I don’t give a damn how drunk they are.

  Carter kept on selling. “So the next night, last night, I come in and the first thing I see is those two kids, drinking, laughing, having a grand old time. Not a mark on either of them to suggest that they’d been minced not twenty-four hours prior. It was like the night before had never happened. So I made sure I didn’t touch a drop of beer or liquor. I lured that big dude outside and shot him in the head. I had to fucking know, Lou. I had to see if it’d work a second time. And tonight, he’s in there right now, probably drinking himself dumb as me.”

  I’d heard enough. I told him I’d prove to him that things couldn’t be what he thought they was. I’d get in his car with him and we’d take that drive home together. I could leave my car here for a night without worrying about it. Anybody stole that piece of shit, they’d bring it back before they got ten feet with it. Probably bring it back with a dollar stuck in the glove box.

  I followed Carter around the corner of the building to his car, a slightly newer piece of shit than mine was. We climbed in and gave the rattling vehicle a couple of minutes to warm up.

  “I hope you’re prepared for what you about to experience,” he told me, as he piloted his car onto the dirt road.

  An ass-kicking in a glass. That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub. To my thinkin’, that’s a mighty fanciful name for a dark, little shit-kicker’s alehouse out here in the Baja Desert, but that’s what they call the place. Browder could make a weapons-grade cocktail out of fucking amaretto and grenadine.

  The sound of tires crunching on gravel was the only one to break the silence as we pulled up in front of the pub. I swung my legs out of Carter’s crappy ride and drew a deep breath as I stood up. Inside, I took my usual place two seats down from Old Man Solomon. “Old Man,” Browder calls him, and the guy ain’t seen three summers more than I have. As always, the night found him staring into a cup of coffee with tears in his eyes. He didn’t acknowledge me when I bid him good evening, and I really hadn’t expected him to. Sometimes you said things just to be neighborly.

  On the television, a channel sixty-six newscaster was covering another car accident out on Route 2. That’s all there seemed to be on the tube anymore. It looked like a bad one, too: three cars, drunk drivers, no survivors. Fucked-up business.

  “Well?” Carter said, draining his first drink of the evening in one gulp.

  “Well what?”

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “What you talking about, man?”

  “Think. Tell me the last thing you remember.”

  Last thing I remembered was getting into his ride last night and falling asleep. Next thing I knowed, we were pulling up in front of the Paradise Pub. I told him as much.

  “Let’s go outside,” I told Carter, emptying my glass.

  We tucked ourselves into the shadows behind the pub. Something felt familiar, felt right about this. Carter lit up a smoke and said to me, “You remember anything I said to you last night?”

  “Some,” I told him. “Got some holes in my recollection, though.”

  “I told you about how I killed that big army-jacketed dude, how I’d seen other patrons die here and reappear at the bar the next night, happy as can be.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” I told him, as I noted for the first time the absence of a single star sharing the night sky with a full moon. “But where the fuck are we? How the hell’d we get here?” The words were barely out of my mouth before I was sorry I asked.

  “I guess if either of us knew that, we wouldn’t still be here, right?” I added quickly.

  I turned to walk back inside when I heard Carter’s voice behind me. “Wanna know something? Under proper circumstances, I could get used to it here.”

  Seems like when he told me that, the sky got a little blacker. I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach the way a roller-coaster rider does right before the car plummets over its highest peak.

  “I have to think that’s your ass talking, ’cause your mouth knows better,” I replied. We hadn’t had nearly enough to drink yet for him to be coming at me with that kind of crap.

  I heard the pub’s front door come open then. A couple of drunken denim-and-flannel shit-kickers come stumbling out of the place, having apparently reached the point in their evening where it was time to drop their pants in the dark and test which of them had the quicker gag reflex.

  Carter’s eyes looked oddly shiny in the darkness behind the pub. I backed away from him, and was relieved to see he was too concerned with making his point to pursue me. That didn’t mean my retreat had escaped his notice, though.

  “Slow down and think on it a minute. We’re the only ones who know, Lou. We’re the only ones who know we’re in hell. Ain’t you given a thought to what that means?”

  “All I’m thinking about is getting the fuck out of here, wherever ‘here’ is. I ain’t had much time to consider indulging every depraved little fucking fantasy my subconscious has to offer me.”

  “Well,” Carter said as he drew his pistol and studiously perforated the scalps of the two denim-and-flannel fucker
s, “maybe you should.”

  Felt like something in the left side of my chest ripped in two when I seen that. I couldn’t breathe. A luminous shade of red rose into the blackness of the night sky as I reeled. I saw the heavens turn the color of turbid blood, like a backlit canopy of black sackcloth with hell’s inferno glowing behind it. I looked for Carter as my knees gave way. Actually made eye contact with him for a brief moment before I started to slide. My last thought as the ground rose to greet me was that I had to be hallucinating. Couldn’t find no other explanation for his eyes suddenly going missing from a face so moldered that it was sliding off his skull in hunks of gray-black meat that splattered his shoes with black blood and pus.

  An ass-kicking in a glass. That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub.

  I found myself sitting in my usual seat. The stool at the north end of the bar near the toilets had the seer perched on top of it. Her deck of tarot cards was spread out atop the bar where she sat reading a rummy his fortune. My thoughts turned to Carter, and I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse to find myself remembering more and more with each new moon. The one thing I still couldn’t remember was going home between visits to the pub, and the worst part of that was that I found it didn’t concern me so much.

  I’d lost track of how long I’d been here. A week? A year? Did it even matter anymore? Most nights, I just sat here trying not to wonder how many times I’d relived the same night’s activities. I tried not to wonder what sin I’d committed in order to end up here, or how many of my fellow patrons here sat wrestling with the same question.

  Tonight, for the first time, I got Old Man Solomon talking a little. I tried to take his mind off those damned coffee cups that keep his face so long. Had I known where the conversation would lead us, I might not have pursued it.

  “I see your friend has figured things out,” he said quietly after we’d exchanged a few amenities. I felt equal parts offended that he’d called Carter my “friend” and fearful over what he might be alluding to. Carter was changing in ways that made me want to spike his drinks with a little holy water. Whatever he was becoming, he damn sure wasn’t my friend, not no more.