Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

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      Cash was still in high school when I got busted, bringing in as much money as me, maybe more—the point being, we was in it together. But when the cops crashed in, drawing down on me at six in the morning, I didn’t know I was sitting on all that blow Cash had stashed to move the next day. One of the pigs brought it out from my closet, and I knew I was going to prison, thinking they’d planted it, before learning later it was Cash bringing us down. So I took the fall, same as he would have done for me, and then, maybe a year later, somebody murdered him before he could even pretend to turn himself around. That’s when I started doing hard time, awful time, rotting for nothing.

      I studied his murder once I got out, but that was fifteen years gone by, and nobody in Waco knew who he was running with in Austin. It was most likely wrong place, wrong time, somebody ripped off or somebody jacking him, guiding hand of fate or I didn’t know what. The missing finger made me think of a Mexican gang, some payback shit I didn’t know about.

      Let it go, our mother said when I asked about it time and again. Let him rest.

      I settled into a line cook’s job at Denny’s, settled into something with a girl named Connie. I don’t know if we just grew tired of one another or what, but once she went back to Dallas, I had time on my hands. When a stroke killed our mother, time was the only thing I had. I thought a lot about Cash then, wishing he was home with me to go through our mother’s belongings, to remember our lives together as kids, back before we could imagine everything would go to shit like it always does in the end.

      I didn’t know about Nikki until I found a box of Cash’s stuff in my mother’s closet. There was an address book in there with Nikki’s name scribbled across the pages, and lots of other words he wrote about her—how she was hot one day and cold the next, how she was the only one he’d ever love, a beautiful angel, a fucking bitch, his sweet, darling baby, a dirty little whore. There was a bundle of polaroids, too, pictures of this beautiful girl—Nikki, I guessed—some of her alone and half naked, and some of her with him near the end of his life, when he wore long sideburns and a sculpted leather cowboy hat. She must’ve been nineteen, twenty years old, Cash looking so proud in a picture of him and her by the river—you know he couldn’t half believe he got her.

      I flipped through them pictures, glad for Cash to have found such a piece of ass, but wondering too why it couldn’t be me that had her—right now, the living one—wondering if they killed her after they killed him, if they took her and did unspeakable things before dumping her across the border, or if they paid her off and let her go, if she betrayed him somehow, making it all the worse, because she was what he had and cared for. I wondered if they tied her down, like they tied Cash down. I wondered if she was true to him at the end, if she loved him then and forever, if she was still suffering for him to this day. I never had a girl tear at me the way she tore at him. I could tell from the pictures it was the kind of big bad love I’d only ever heard about in songs.

      I knew he lived with a band down on Duval Street, in the same house they killed him at. I drove down there and found the drummer, Bo, and asked about Cash’s girl, this Nikki he was so torn up over.

      “You’d never forget her,” Bo said, and I knew it was true, a fever starting to burn in me even then.

      I showed him one of the pictures, and he said it was her, said she worked at Stubbs back then, but disappeared maybe a month before they killed Cash.

      I thanked him and drove back to Waco. I sat in the Goat, night after night, looking at her pictures and wondering what had happened between the two of them. Connie wouldn’t return my calls from her high horse in Dallas, so I drove up there one night and banged on her door until she threatened to call the cops. But she wasn’t half as hot as that Nikki, the girl Cash had while I was rotting. It didn’t seem like I’d ever be so lucky as to find a girl as good as he found in her, a girl to love and get torn up over, a girl as beautiful as that. I could tell by the way she looked at him in the pictures how bad she had it for him, how bad they had it for each other. I wondered if she was still alive, torn up over Cash, still aching for something only a Chandler man could give her.

      5

      Alina

      I know something’s wrong by the tone of her voice, but even after she tells me Kyle’s dead, I don’t believe her.

      It’s a trick, I think. She must have learned he’s coming to Interlochen Wednesday to visit.

      “This is about next week,” I say, “isn’t it?”

      “Next week?”

      “You know.”

      But she doesn’t know.

      She tells me about the accident. Crying and everything.

      “Okay,” I say, still not believing, even though there’s electricity in my hands.

      “They’re going to scatter his ashes in the Sound Saturday,” she says.

      But he’s coming here Wednesday, I think.

      “This woman he died with,” she says. “It’s crazy.”

      And I’m like, “What woman?”

      “This girl he grew up with. Cynthia.”

      And I’m like, “What girl?”

      She doesn’t say anything then.

      I swear to god, she must be in shock.

      And then, for a second, it hits me. Kyle. But just as fast I don’t believe. Then I do, then I don’t, then I do. And I’m like, Kyle. Then nothing. My big heavy dorm phone against my face. Then Kyle. I’m crying hysterical so a part of me must know. But another part doesn’t. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit. Just him and me. He’s dead. One thing seems to have nothing to do with the other. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit.

      Nikki

      I walk the beach and boardwalk for hours, a faraway line of container ships shimmering through the waves of haze and humidity. When we first moved from Seattle, Alina wanted to live down here near the ocean, but my job selling ads for the Long Island Weekly barely covered our bills month to month. We kept looking for a place we could afford until we found our little cottage in Long Beach, and then it seemed like nothing could ever touch us again. The best part of Alina’s childhood has been here, the most stable part, and these last few months with Kyle have made her feel, I don’t know, fuller maybe, part of why I wanted to build something with him—because she loved him so much. And after so many years, it seemed like I was ready for something, too.

      A shopping cart sits on the beach, its tracks leading back to the water, as if somebody pushed it out of the ocean. I want to preserve her ignorance, buy her peace with my silence, but every second I wait to tell her feels like a betrayal.

      When I finally go home and call her, she makes me say it again and again—Baby, there’s been an accident. Kyle’s gone. Yes. An awful accident. No. Kyle’s dead. I’m sure, yes. Oh, honey. He’s gone. No, I’m positive—until she finally breaks, crying and crying, and I know I should have told her in person, of course I should have. What kind of mother gives her daughter such news on the phone? I couldn’t afford another ticket, though, and put off calling for far too long, hoping to never tell her, as though I could have kept her safe and away forever.

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