Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

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      “And if it doesn’t work out, she can come home.”

      He looked so open and vulnerable, so hungry to help.

      “I appreciate the offer,” I said. “I really do,” and he said, “So let me do this,” and I wondered if I could—for Alina’s sake, but also because I thought falling into his debt might be good for me, too, an act of faith, a kind of surrender. I didn’t want to hold myself so tight forever. I surprised us both when I took him up on his offer a few days later, grateful for his help, until Burke called, and then I was just grateful for a place to hide Alina, pulling back from faith and surrender as fast as I could.

      Kyle loved me, I know that much, whether I deserved it or not. But he was in love with Cynthia, too, and had been for years. She was rich like him and careless about money, careless about everything, the way rich people always are. The nudes he painted of me had her eyes, the reason I couldn’t love him right, because he was in love with her, the lie I told myself, the lie I keep telling.

      3

      Burke

      I did fifteen years for Cash, most of them after he was killed down in Austin, and when I got out all I wanted to do was get in the Goat and go. But of course nobody’d taken care of her—the one thing I asked Cash to do—hoses rotted, radiator rusted, tires shot to hell, even though he told me he used the fuel stabilizer and put her up on blocks. But no. It was the same beer cans and doughnut sacks and empty packs of cigarettes from 1986 scattered all over her cracked and rotting upholstery, one of the vent windows wide open. You’d think I’d have been filled with rage to see such a mess, but I was past all that, something I learned from Carl down at Huntsville—the guiding hand of fate deciding everything for a reason, so you might as well just surrender to it and become its instrument, since that’s all you’re ever going to be anyway.

      After Cash died, that GTO was the one thing I had on the outside besides our mother, starlight black with a bobcat kit I installed myself. It was a ’67 convertible I picked up over in Corsicana when I had more money than I knew what to do with, a year out of high school and thinking the ride would never end. Another trick Carl taught me about doing easy time was finding a place in your mind nobody knew about, a place you escaped to and lived a secret life you couldn’t live inside. I made the Goat that place in my mind all them years at Huntsville—driving around with beer on ice in back, Suzy Mullins or Kate Blisdale in the bucket seat beside me wearing a yellow tube top or baby tee, a sweet powdery smell mixing with the gas and weed and beer smells inside the Goat, and Zeppelin or Skynyrd on the tape deck pushing us out to eternity.

      When I got out of our mother’s truck, finally home from Huntsville, the Goat’s cover was shredded—hail storms, she told me—the finish flat and dull and pocked. Nothing like what I imagined all them years away. You’d think after that long inside a man would have all kinds of pent up energy ready to explode, but doing time mostly just wears you out, like years gone drunk or dreaming. Our mother was worn out too, my time away and Cash dead and gone, so that I could hardly stand to sit with her nights in front of the television, a nervous energy starting to run under the weight of all them wasted years. Even with my parole officer hounding me to get a job, start over and find a girl, I knew I had to align myself first and figure out what the guiding hand had in store for me.

      I sat in the Goat most evenings, smoking and watching the sun go down. Our mother came out one night with a can of beer she knew I wasn’t supposed to have and sat beside me in the dark. “There’s plenty of girls who’ll love a hardworking man,” she told me. “Plenty of girls who can forgive the past.” I got up the next morning and started circling job ads in the newspaper. That’s when the anger started rising, the Goat behind our mother’s house used up and the anger rising as the guiding hand found its use for me. Not that I could see it yet. Not that I could name it. But I could feel it a little, change coming like a cool wind, something shifting down in my guts guiding me toward a life I wanted to live, a sweet cool wind just beginning to blow.

      Cash

      Sometimes I hated her, sure, just like anyone, but mostly I loved her. I was just trying to take us back to before, and she was the one who always played that Billie Holiday song, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” the words I spit back in her face later—not that it did any good. I was fucked up is all, this pressure grinding me down like I was going to explode if she didn’t wake up and help take us back where we belonged. I had everything before she took it away. That ain’t right—to give somebody something and then yank it away. I gave her a bracelet once, turquoise and silver, and found it broken on the floor of her room at Duval after her and Melanie ran. That pissed me off more than anything—just how easy she could throw things away, like there was never a thing between us. But I forgave her. Even though I wanted to kill her sometimes, it was only in my mind, and I forgave her, me going to her like I did that night really just a part of my forgiveness.

      Nikki

      I woke not knowing or knowing it wrong, Cash in my bed, but thinking it’s Daryl. Then knowing it’s Cash, not Daryl. And if not Daryl, it’s not what I dreamed it was of us making love, but something else. And if something else—I started to thrash. He punched me hard, cutting me with his ring. He punched me again and I pretended surrender, this roar in my ears. Because it was not Daryl, because it was something else, he should have known I would never surrender. If he knew me at all, he should have known that much.

      I reached and pulled and finally grabbed the knife from my pants pocket on the floor by my bed, fumbling with it behind his back, all this hatred and fear running so hot inside me. I opened it and lifted it and brought it down hard, and after he jumped, howling, I jumped, too, ready to stab again if he should come at me, screaming at him from the top of my lungs to get out, get out! He scrambled away while I stood on my bed with the knife cocked, my heart beating through my whole body, and I never felt so powerful—until the adrenalin wore off and I didn’t want to live anymore if he was alive.

      But I didn’t drop down to my bed like I wanted to.

      I went looking for Daryl, looking for people to surround myself with. I couldn’t find the right people though, so I made my way to the big house on Duval, hating Cash as hard as I could, stoking my hatred to make myself strong. Because I thought it would be him or me. Because I knew he would get a gun or a knife or just use his hands, and he’d come back for me and do it again. And he’d kill me. I didn’t want to give up my life like that, but my hatred was running out, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to hurt him, to kill him. I didn’t think I could, even though I knew I had to.

      I found him sprawled on the basement couch at Duval, barely awake on liquor and pills. I stood over him, but I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t know how to get back to myself. I’d always been strong, but that part of me seemed gone. I ran upstairs looking for something until I found a bigger knife, and then I tied him with twine—he was unconscious. I chopped off the tip of his finger, his pinky, hardly knowing myself at all. I bandaged the stub and ran, not knowing he’d bleed to death from his earlier wound, the stabbing, not knowing I’d be the one to survive.

      I took his fingertip with me to Oregon, wrapped in a pink silk pouch. I still have it. I kept telling myself it doesn’t count as rape if you’ve slept with the guy before, not half believing it even then. But I had to tell myself something. I lived off my hatred and fear for months, hunkered down like an animal as Alina came to life inside me. I made myself strong for the baby, thinking of the Patti Smith lyric—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”—and how I didn’t owe anybody anything. I was all rage and impotence, impotence and rage. After Alina was born, I realized Cash had been right all those СКАЧАТЬ