Ghost Road Blues
Page 56

Yet Ruger did not fight against the thing that held him; wouldn’t, even if he had the power. This was not something he could fight, his rage told him that, but more importantly, this was not something he should fight. Not this thing.
Ruger, you are my left hand. Again he heard those words echo in his brain.
Perhaps it was in that moment that Ruger began to understand why he had delayed leaving the Guthrie farm, and why he had let Tony drive the car. Those choices had worked to bring him to Pine Deep, and to keep him here. As the tide of events had swept along tonight he had sensed that some stronger purpose was having its way with him, that some will—stronger even than his—was putting things in motion.
Ruger, you are my left hand.
Now Ruger thought he understood, and he accepted what was happening. Welcomed it. The thing that held him in the darkness bent to his accepting ear and whispered terrible secrets in his dying ear.
After a long time, the night birds were driven to startled flight by the sound of Karl Ruger’s wild laughter.
Part III
Dry Bone Shuffle
Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too. Black ghost is a picture, black ghost is a shadow, too. You just see him, but you can’t hear him talkin’, Ain’t nothing’ else a black ghost can do.
Lightning Hopkins, “Black Ghost Blues”
Tombstone is my pillow, cold ground is my bed.
Blind Willie McTell
I got an axe-handled pistol on a graveyard frame that shoots tombstone bullets, wearin’ balls and chain. I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite, I hope some screwball start a fight.
Muddy Waters (after Willie Dixon), “I’m Ready”
Chapter 20
1
Malcolm Crow was deep down in the darkness and for a long time he did not dream at all, not while they brought him into the E.R. and then up to surgery. He did not dream while they pumped him full of drugs and stitched and swabbed and bandaged his body. He did not dream while he lay in post-op, or for the first few hours after they brought him up to his room.
It was only later, as the last of the night was wearing thin and dawn was coloring the edges of the horizon, that his mind finally gave way and he dreamed…
…he was walking through the town and Pine Deep was burning. Many of the stores were blackened shells with their windows blown outward by the heat. Smoke curled upward from the open doorways. The pavement was littered with a smudged scattering of broken bricks, twisted metal awnings, and millions of shards of broken glass.
Crow walked down the center of Corn Hill. He was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt and his clothes were torn and stained with grass and soot and blood. Some of the blood, he knew, was his own; most of it was not. Some of the blood was strangely dark and thick, and it smelled like rotting fish.
He carried a samurai sword in one hand; the blade was smeared with gore and bent in two places. The sword hung limply from his right hand, the blunted tip tracing a twisted line behind him in the ash that covered the street.
Above him the sky was as black and featureless as a tarp thrown across the top of the town, and yet he knew that above the black nothing of the clouds there was a moon as white and grim as a bleached skull.
As he walked down the street, weaving in and out between burning cars, Crow was drawn to the sweet sound of a blues guitar. He strained to hear the song and had to hum a few bars to lock it down. “Hellhound on My Trail.” The old Robert Johnson song but played with a different take on the refrain…less threatening, more wistful.
No, that wasn’t it. The sound wasn’t wistful, it was sad, like a lament, and as he walked Crow, sang the words.
“Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail.
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.”
The music played on and on until the song ended, but then the same song started up again. Crow walked all the way up to the top of Corn Hill and finally stopped at the entrance to the Pinelands College Teaching Hospital. The hospital parking lot was a shambles. Cars were on fire and overturned. An ambulance leaned on two wheels against a police car, crushing the car down onto flat tires. There were hundreds of bodies everywhere.
Crow looked at the bodies and his heart turned to stone in his chest.
He knew them.
He knew every one of them.
Henry Guthrie sat with his back to a crushed Ford Bronco, his chest peppered with red bullet holes. A few feet away Terry Wolfe lay facedown on a massive and ornately framed mirror, its surface cracked and distorted; none of the images reflected in the shards were of Terry’s face. The image the broken mirror fragments showed was the face of some huge dog. Across the entranceway from where he stood, Mike Sweeney, the kid who delivered his paper, lay with a samurai sword through his chest. Crow looked down at his hand and saw that the sword he carried was now gone. There were so many others he recognized. Friends from town…other store owners…farmers…teachers from the college…staff from the hospital…cops. He knew them all. Or, almost all. There were four bodies he couldn’t put names to, though he felt he ought to know their names. One was a short, chubby young guy who lay in cruciform, his legs straight and arms out to each side. In one hand he held a tape recorder and in the other he held a gun, but the gun was fake. Near him was a very tall black woman who must have once been beautiful but not anymore. She had been savaged by someone. Something. There was so little of her left. Sickened and sad, Crow looked away. Two men lay propped against the wheels of a police car. One was middle-aged and black, the other was younger and white. Both of them had badges looped around their necks on cords and both had guns lying near them. The right hand of the black man and the left hand of the white man were stretched out toward each other and clasped. To Crow it didn’t look like a romantic grasp, but more like the way soldiers might grip each other in the last moments of a firefight gone bad. Crow felt he should know them, and felt sad that they were dead, but he could find no names for them, and so he moved on through the debris and through the dead.
He looked around, looking for Val…needing to find her, but needing not to find her like this.
He walked to the entrance of the hospital and peered inside. There was blood everywhere, and bodies. The slaughter was too horrible to grasp and so Crow’s mind went a little numb and he stared through it, just needing to find Val.
He was about to step across the threshold when a voice behind him said, “Don’t do it, little Scarecrow.”
Crow turned, startled by the voice. No one had called him Scarecrow in years. Not since he’d been a little kid.
There was a man there. He sat on the hood of a burned-out Saab, his bony legs crossed and a guitar lying across his thighs. His face was the color of coffee with just a small drip of milk in it—and Crow knew that this was how the man once described himself—and he wore his hair in a late 1970s style Afro. The man wore brown work pants and a white cotton shirt unbuttoned halfway down his thin chest. There were small pink scars on the man’s chest and on his hands. His hands were very large for so thin a man.
Crow looked at him.
“You don’t want to go in there, Scarecrow,” said the man. He was smiling, but his smile was sad.
“I have to find Val,” Crow said.
“Yeah, you do,” agreed the man. “But you don’t want to go into that hospital. Val ain’t in there…and you don’t want to meet what is in there. Believe me when I tell you.” The guitar player had a strong Mississippi drawl, and it was deep and soft and Crow liked the sound of it.
“I know you, don’t I?” he said.
“Yeah, boy, you did. An’ I’m sorry as all hell to tell you that you’re probably gonna have to get to know me again.”
“Were we friends?” Crow said. His voice sounded dreamy and on some level he knew that meant that the dream was coming to an end.
“Yeah, little Scarecrow…I guess we was at that.”
“Do you know where Val is?”
“Yeah, I know, but she ain’t here, man. You gonna have to keep looking for her. You gotta find her, man, ’cause these is evil times and she’s the heart. You may be the fist, but she’s the heart. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Crow shook his head.
“Do you remember…a long time ago I told you something about good and evil?”
“I…don’t remember.”
“Don’t worry, you will. Now, listen close, little man,” the man said and leaned forward over his guitar, his voice dropping to a whisper, “you gotta know this.”
Crow leaned closer, too.
“Evil…it don’t never die,” the bluesman said and looked left and right before adding. “Evil don’t die. It just waits.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, you do, but you don’t want to understand.” The man leaned back and laughed. “Hell’s a-coming, little Scarecrow. Hell’s a-coming and we all gotta learn to play the blues. ’Cause you know…it’s all the blues, man.” He grinned and strummed his strings. “Everything’s always about the blues.”
Crow drifted on into another dreamless place, but the sound of the blues followed him.
2
Outside the hospital window the dawn had given way to brilliant sunshine and a warm breeze out of the southeast. The rain had scrubbed the air clean and standing in the window of Crow’s room, Terry could see for miles. He hardly remembered seeing a morning so clear. Birds were singing, the nurses who came and went were smiling, and everything had a veneer of freshness and vitality.
Terry loathed it. He personally felt dirty and grubby and old. His clothes were a mess, his hands shook, and when he’d gone into the little bathroom to throw water on his face his reflection looked like a street person. He popped a Xanax and shambled back into Crow’s room and sank down into the chair.