Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

By the time the rains came, we didn’t have much left in us besides a whisper. There wasn’t a way out, and the words that might have found one were hard to cough up. Honest explanations, sob stories, alibis . . . even the truth seemed like begging. Russell couldn’t do it, and I didn’t want to. If you asked me, our words belonged in our bellies the same as our guts. Our stories, too. Wrapped up in our skins, locked in bone houses we’d built for them . . . way down deep.

Like they say: to each his own. It was that way for me and it was that way for Russ. We fell into silence. Summer slipped into fall. The black wind howled, and the rain beat down. The fruit rotted on the vine. Russell got a cough. I listened to it night after night in one tent or another, and soon I heard little else. The cough rattled, and it made me think of a desperate man trying to pick a safe, twisting the dial ’round and ’round, the tumblers never falling in place. But the dial spun on, and the storms drenched the land, and our work washed away in a flood. And soon there was nothing to do but turn our backs on the fields and orchards, the rain and the mud.

We found a new way of doing things.

A way that let us put away our words for good.

No more honest explanations. No sob stories. No alibis.

We started over.

We did our talking with a gun.

The first one was a .38 missing the pistol grips. Russell took it from the labor contractor who tried to cheat our crew out of one last payday, a mouthy little runt named Koslow. Russ also took the bankroll Koslow was going to pocket for himself. Only the idiot didn’t get the message. He figured he was still the boss, and he started jabbering about company muscle and cops and what was going to happen to us.

So Russ smacked him around with the busted pistol. As big as Russ was, it was like watching a tiger bat around a house cat. Koslow was lucky it ended that way. Russell carried a German trench knife in a steel scabbard that hung from his belt, and I had no doubt he knew how to use it. Anyway, the bastard was smart enough to shut up before it came to that, and we took his car keys to seal the deal.

We never paid a price for what we did. At least, not the kind of price you’d figure. And if what we did felt good, Russell didn’t say so and neither did I. I didn’t say anything about how the roll of greenbacks felt tucked into my pants pocket, either. But the truth is that having those bills in my jeans gave me a hard-on . . . the first one I’d had in months. Jesus, life is funny.

The stolen Ford took us north of Fresno. We bought some groceries at an Armenian market along with a few bottles of bootleg wine. I picked up a local paper and a local map. Pickings were slim, but I knew what I was looking for. I checked the obituaries and circled a few addresses, and we drove around casing houses. The rain had slacked off at long last, but that black dog of a wind was still behind us . . . ahead of us . . . everywhere. It raged like a twister and wiped away the clouds, pushing them over the mountains to the east. The sky it left behind was as flat and gray and empty as the country roads we traveled.

The Ford’s bald tires hummed over blacktop as we drove from one house to the next. I crossed addresses off the obit page as we went — most of the places were in town, with too many neighbors around. Finally we found an old ramshackle farmhouse just past the outskirts where the windows didn’t light up at night.

The house was surrounded by overgrown fields, set back from the road down a gravel drive that twisted through an old stand of eucalyptus. We parked the car, and Russell yanked his German Nahkampfmesser from its steel scabbard. In his big hands it looked like a butter knife. Two seconds later he levered open the back door, and that was that.

Inside, there was nothing to greet us but a boxed-up sour smell — not like death, but the kind of feral scent that lingers in a house when there’s an animal holed up in the crawlspace. Either way, the stink didn’t bother me. Even a dead man’s clapboard was a big step up from a leaky tent in a migrant camp. And anyway, the smell wasn’t so bad on the second floor.

There were two bedrooms upstairs. We couldn’t tell which one had belonged to the dead man. To tell the truth, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me was that my bed was soft, and I slept better in it than I had in months. My brother was another story. That lingering cough had Russell up and down all night. He must have memorized every corridor. Hearing him move around in the darkened house, I wondered if my brother had ended up in the dead man’s bedroom, even toyed with the idea that Russell’s cough was some kind of ghostly echo. That’s the way things would have ended up in a pulp magazine. But I tried not to think about it, and eventually that twister wind spun over the old gables and took those sounds away.

The only bathroom was next to Russell’s bedroom. It was a dull little pocket with a burned-out lightbulb and a little bit of a window set high near the ceiling. Most nights that window allowed enough moonlight to let you do what you needed . . . or maybe it allowed too much. In the middle of the second night, Russ smashed the bathroom mirror. He said he saw a shadow moving behind the glass. He slept better after that, though some nights I was sure I heard him rooting around in that dark bathroom, shifting pieces of that broken mirror in the sink like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But Russ never said a word about it, and I didn’t ask.

I’d get up in the morning, and the broken glass would still be there. I’d wash up, my eyes staring at me from the same broken shards as they had the day before. Russell never did clean up the mirror. Of course, I didn’t clean it up, either. I could have, but I didn’t want to mess with it. After all, I hadn’t broken the thing, and I figured we’d earned letting things go at least a little bit after busting our asses to survive for so long. Even if it couldn’t last, it seemed a stretch of rest was the least we deserved before we faced up to whatever was coming next.

Slice it up neat and clean: We both knew that we should move on. But neither one of us said it, and one day seemed to snake into the next before we could make a new start. I gained a few pounds eating the groceries we’d bought at that Armenian market. Russell drowned the last of his cough in wine. He’d developed a taste for the grape in France and slept sounder for it now, but it didn’t help where it really counted. A couple slugs too many and Russ would end up out in the scrubby yard beneath the moon, staring at the stars with that lone eye of his, shouting at the cosmos in gutter Deutsch I figured he’d learned from a German whore. The dead man’s house was in the sticks — there was no one around to hear but me . . . except the sky, I suppose — and it sounded like my brother was cursing the gods, or maybe their absence.

Those words spilled out, and across the fields, and into the night. Maybe there was nothing to understand in them at all. I just sat in the house and listened. There wasn’t much else to do. We hadn’t found a radio, and there wasn’t a single book in the whole place . . . not even a pulp magazine. I loved those things, but no dice here. The only reading material was that local newspaper I’d bought at the market. I read it over and over, until I got the idea that simple act had set the whole world in stone. So I burned the paper in the fireplace. After that I fell asleep in an armchair while Russell drank and shouted at the stars.

Late that night I awoke to the sounds of my brother’s screams. I crossed the room in two steps. Headlights washed the front of the house. A black Nash was parked on the gravel driveway. I snatched open the front door and the cold wind blasted me along with sounds that would have been right at home in a backwoods butcher shop.