S H Mansouri - [BCS273 S01] - Through the Doorways, Whiskey Chile (html) Read online

  Through the Doorways, Whiskey Chile

  By S.H. Mansouri

  Run through the doorways, Whiskey Chile, to daddy’s doorknobs golden-dipped,

  where blood is a corn mash river running wide and deep.

  Run through the doorways, Whisky Chile, your momma’s wings been clipped,

  where wrath and fury are cradles that rock the chile to sleep.

  —a bullfrog’s lullaby

  Momma died when he was eight—something about a slip off the front porch during a fierce thunder storm that disappeared just as suddenly as it had arrived, a flash of quicksilver light above the shrouded plains of Fallen Cain. Daddy was a weirdoo hexer long before the folks of Jubilee had fallen under his dark whiskey curse. Long before Jubilee was even a mote on the map of this desolate plane.

  Brady Nokes learned all he could from his daddy. How to stoke a fire from a bullfrog’s belly (that’s how we first became acquainted); how to draw water from a cactus crab without getting stabbed in the jugular vein; how to tell the difference between a solid path to tread on and a crack in the fabric of time.

  Daddy worked a mirage almost as well as he mixed the finest corn mash this side of Fallen Cain, when it wasn’t bent-up and twisted and flipped upside down after his distillery went up in a great big ball of blue flame. That’s how Brady’s daddy became the Whisky King of Jubilee, and how his momma took a spill that ended her life long before she ever got a chance to see him brood the way he does. Both accidents, I suppose, if you’re apt to believe in tall-tales and chicken bones.

  Oh, they held a respectable funeral for him, alright, Father Clyde Tessier reading from the book of Babylon while Daddy’s coyote runners, seedy grunts who’d transported his fine spirits in all four directions (up, down, left and right, as far as their lackluster minds could comprehend), pillaged what was left of the distillery when the afterglow of his botched weirdoo waned. It still burned bright, though, a blue ball of flame about the size of a chile’s angry fist, an eternal reminder of the Whiskey King’s ambitions to set the world’s throat on fire with eighty-proof delight.

  But young Brady refused to lick on the pond scum, the suds above the liquid gold, particularly because the casket was empty; no one had ever found the body, not even a charred finger bone to toss inside the brittle pine box they’d buried some pony ashes in. Hexers like daddy didn’t take a dirt nap that easily; there was always an angle, a hidden pocket, an ace up the sleeve. And that ace has put the folks of Jubilee into a mindless stupor ever since.

  He’d stuck with the runners until he was old enough to put Wrath and Fury through their foreheads, a score settled with gunsmoke and blood in the wee hours of the night—until he grew up and got to searching for something more than pony ashes to put in Daddy’s pine box, scratching at old scabs until they’d bled again.

  Where he’d executed the coyote runners in their sleep that night, a ramshackle shed no more than a weeks’ journey by horse from Fallen Cain, a doorway appeared, framed in white paint and sealed in solid oak the color of silt on the bed of some forgotten stream.

  The doorways were a sore spot for Brady, digging deep into his guilt-ridden heart. They looked like the front door back home in Fallen Cain. They looked like Momma’s entrance on the porch where she’d call him in for supper when the sun was falling asleep. They looked like a slip off the front porch because he’d taken too long to answer her calls. Only, instead of the golden knob that Brady had known as a child, there was an unblinking eye staring dead ahead, pronged in throbbing red veins.

  The doorway’s where we started.

  Brady galloped through on Trudie’s arthritic back and ended up at the top of a hulking mountain that had no right being there. Daddy’s idea of a good ole time. The path ahead was skewed and steep and winding, like the good lord had run a fickle finger down the remnants of a mudslide. Trudie whinnied and yanked on the reins, hooves sliding nearly half way down the mountain path until it plateaued, where Brady decided to take a load off and a gander, sizing up the route suspiciously.

  At the bottom of the mountain, off in the distant sunbaked plains, was the Whisky King’s old distillery, a gutted, blackened shack with a faint blue light glowing somewhere inside its scorched remains.

  “A carrot,” Brady said, “a poisonous, good-for-nothing carrot dangling out in the middle of nowhere for us to chase, Jeremiah. You see that, don’t you?”

  I wondered if Brady knew I could understand him.

  He must have thought I was special, showing up the way I did right after that horrible thunderstorm—must have thought his momma sent me from above. I was only following the rainclouds, though (not to trivialize divine intervention), hoping to find some wet spot to hole up for a spell, when I found him crying and mumbling something about not being able to make fire the way his daddy had wanted, and that his momma had earned her angel wings too soon.

  He was always chasing the Whiskey King, I think, searching for approval, for the shine of a rotten tooth. I burped out a ball of fire to cheer him up, and we’d been inseparable ever since. Yeah, I could understand the man called Whisky Chile from day one... only, he couldn’t understand me, so I croaked and hoped he got the message: one for yes, two for no, three for only weirdoo knows.

  He patted his front pocket, my home on the road, in silent agreeance and jumped down from Trudie’s back.

  “Trudie, old friend, I hate to say it, but this is where we part ways,” he said. “Go with the birds, be the prey, stay on the weirdoo path with hooves calling thunder and rain. I’ll make it quick.”

  He leaned his bald, sweaty head against Trudie’s ribcage, gently stroking her rusty coat in small circles with a callused hand, then reached for the hunting knife strapped to his thigh.

  Midway down the mountain, with a heavy heart and an itching suspicion that the Whiskey King had tampered with the terrain, Brady Nokes cut Trudie’s belly open and piled her entrails at a fork in the mountain path. She went down without a sound, a sacrifice the weirdoo way for the temporary gift of second sight.

  “Show me the way to Jubilee,” he ordered the steaming, dust-caked guts. They squirmed a bit, then foundered. Brady wrinkled his brow, perplexed, as any chile who thinks he knows it all looks when things get lost or misplaced.

  It wasn’t lack of daylight that would fail the trick; though evening was fast approaching, the sun was still dead-center overhead, burning the back of my neck like a lye-slathered slap. It was something else Daddy had taught him that he’d failed to remember; bottled-up bad memories. Tumbleweeds bounced down the mountain alongside us, their eyeballs ogling, then disappeared; dropped right through the path into nothingness. I burped a ring of smoke to jog his memory.

  “Fire then smoke—ass-backwards if you ask me,” he said. “Showtime, Jeremiah.”

  He pulled me from his pocket.

  I croaked and groaned, belly flat then pregnant as I sprawled out on his open palm. He approached the pile of guts, crouched, and slapped me on the back. “Out with it,” he urged, “quit your belly-aching and burn, bubba.”

  My belly roiled a mixture of oil, flint, and sulphur, and I spat out a ball of fire onto Trudie’s bloated insides. They crackled and hissed but didn’t dance yet, not the fleshy jig Brady’d hoped for. He placed me back in his pocket and grabbed his pipe, a three-foot-long hollow of briarwood, from the satchel affixed to Trudie’s saddle.

  He dipped the pipe-bowl packed with evil-eye weed in the pyre, took a step back, and inhaled like it was the last breath he’d ev
er take.

  What came out was a cloud of white smoke in his own likeness, a doppelganger, a spirit double that hovered while his body, a few feet behind, quivered in a frozen trance, pipe in hand. A puff from the evil-eye’ll get you seeing things veiled by a hexer’s hand. But you gotta look quick, before you can’t hold it any longer and keel over like a hollow log in the wind. That’s when the trick is spent.

  With the evil-eye upon his spirit, he must have seen through the mirage; seen the trail ahead truncate to a death-drop not thirty paces out; seen the Whiskey King’s eye in the form of a menacing storm cloud, wincing as Brady’s face went a bruised shade of black and blue; seen that the town of Jubilee was a half day’s journey to the east, across a sweltering terrain of dying trees and spiraling cacti and horned roots burrowing in and out of cracked earth where nothing natural should grow; seen the entrails dance, charred horse-meat like a bloody hand, wet carrion pointing up to a sky of emerald green, that sickening, dome-shaped horizon undulating in the distance.

  With a start, a shuddering jiggle like falling through a frozen lake, his true body’s lungs expanded, funneling his spirit back inside through parched lips, thin and blistered, back to the dull droning ache of a weary heartbeat and an empty stomach. Back to a thirst quenched only by the Whiskey King’s demise.

  Trudie’s fly-encrusted carcass called out to birds of prey overhead, circling vultures and red hawks whose passing momentarily blotted out the sun as they looped and dove in a dance of ruffled feathers, and crows as big as wagon wheels perched on the crumbling cliffside ahead, waiting to strike a bargain. They’d be his way in, as the entrails foretold, over the snares and woes laid out to keep him out of Jubilee forever.

  “Ga-zaaww, ga-zaaww!” he called out, tossing kernels of maize at Trudie’s frazzled mane. “Come and get it!” A favor for a favor was the weirdoo way. Food for safe passage to the next doorway.

  After Trudie was picked apart, we soared high on crow’s wings, the shadow of a man spread-eagle like a sacrificial stick-man between two sets of crooked talons roving over twisted trees that swatted with brazen claws at Brady’s boots, cactus-needle volleys arching then descending harmlessly out of reach. Twice I saw those crows wink at me, hoping to pluck dessert from Brady’s pocket before we landed at the second doorway, and twice I turned their hungry eyes away with flame, singeing Brady’s shirt as I panted nervously.

  Night had fallen, swaddled us in its cold embrace, a thousand opal eyes below twinkling treacherously like torchlight on jagged shards of glass.

  Brady let go of their knotted legs as we neared a cave hidden by bramble and wild sage, a smooth plate of white granite palming its yawning maw politely. Had the Whiskey King grown bored of Brady’s parlor tricks, feeding him just enough rope to hang himself?

  Behind, from the misty thicket borne of thorn and dying branch we’d passed over unmolested, a sound like churning gravel grew louder.

  Heaven forbid I’d ever get Brady to run from a fight; he was too hard-headed, too proud to lay his guns down and talk his way out of a pickle. But as that churning sound began to multiply, a dozen shovels digging at a single grave, I felt his heart pound against my pocket, and I thought, for once, he’d know the odds were stacked against him, know he’d end up being picked apart by those same crows he’d dangled from if he didn’t turn tail and run.

  He slammed his back against the stone plate covering the cave, bramble cracking and snapping under his weight, and reached for Wrath and Fury, twin-sister revolvers, hexed to hammer through the trunks of trees so long as his mind was in the right place, steeled against doubt, and fear, and suppression of his third eye, which came from drinking too much hooch. Spear-length needles cut through the mist, chipping chunks of granite, pinning Brady’s gallon-sized hat to the stone plate as he dropped to the ground with a phlegmy grunt.

  I leaped from my pocket, afraid he’d crush me like a sweaty grape.

  Cactus crabs—deadpan succulents—mostly mind their own business, stabbing rattlers and rabbits if they get too close to the mother-patch, crawling on all fours and fives only during mating time to mount their queens or croon for their beaus, or when bands of wasteland scavengers wage war against them, poaching their prickles for the sheer hell of it, draining all that life-sustaining water from their tummies. It takes a lot out of them to mobilize; kills some just to uproot themselves. Something sinister was influencing them, riling up the patch, something hidden behind that covered cave where Brady quickly rose to his feet, a scatter of blood spurting as he yanked out a needle lodged in his thigh.

  “I can’t see a damn thing. Light it up, Jeremiah—light the whole thing up!” He rolled to his side, propped himself up on one grinding knee, and pulled Wrath and Fury from their leather dresses.

  I didn’t envy his size, he was too big to hide in the cracks like I was fixing to do. So long Brady, it’s been fun! Hope you find your daddy at the bottom of a bottle. I’d be more than content, a bit guilt-ridden, though, to light some desperado’s half-chewed cigars for the rest of my life if it meant saving my own slick hide. I had tadpoles to tend to, schools of them neglected because I chose to make my home in the pocket of a crying boy too blind to see that no one really wanted him around. He wasn’t much of a hexer in the weirdoo way—never bathed or washed that ragged shirt of his—and couldn’t understand a word I said. Communication’s crucial for such an unlikely pair as us.

  Brady and his bullfrog...

  But he’d always treated me well—kept my belly filled with flies from every rotting carcass, shit pile, and creek we’d stumble upon, like a pesky little brother with a burning gift almost as awful as his own unrelenting fury to purify, with fire, what the Whiskey King had tainted. I respected that.

  But mostly, I didn’t want to see him die before facing the man who’d taken his heart, all soft and squishy from Momma’s magic touch, and crushed it with an iron fist when he’d grown tired of all the crying... the mourning for the dead. But when he was still, focusing his weirdoo through gleaming long-barreled sights, damn could he blast his way through all that pain and suffering. Brothers burn together, I thought. The weirdoo way or bust.

  Seeing him bleed the way he did stirred a fire in me I’ve yet to know the equal of. I braced myself, belly buried deep in the cold soil, and spewed a song so vengeful Mephistopheles would dance. It caught the thicket, the brush, the spiraling roots, the knuckles of wood, looming, nightmarish fists manacled in wreaths of thorn, ablaze. My war cry even singed needles still whizzing through the air. Through smoke and mist, cactus crabs collapsed, imploded, sloughing steaming green hide that hissed and popped like corn in a cast-iron kettle.

  And that’s when Brady lost it.

  “I’ll bury you, put you in that pine box and watch you suffocate!” Blam-blam! Wrath barked back a chorus line. Blam-blam! Fury remarked.

  He trudged towards the burning thicket, tears wobbling in his angry eyes, squeezing thunder from the sisters’ thighs, a deafening cacophony of lead and powder, hammer and pin.

  “Give me back my momma!” he screamed as he fell to his knees, emptying his burden in a flurry of gunfire that left the crabs crippled and leaking, scuttling back to their darkened patches. His fingers pulled on empty chambers now, a click-clicking tap-dance, like metal raindrops, drowning out his wailing grief.

  For the first time in weeks, my belly was empty. I was running on the last of my steam. Brady was shattered, his weirdoo seeping out through physic cracks. It was just what the Whisky King wanted, I figured.

  “Croak, croak.” Not this way, not before you face him, Whisky Chile.

  He wiped his eyes and put the sisters back to sleep. Still, he didn’t move from his spot, kneeling, half-way buried in the soil like a starving seed praying for rainfall to come.

  “Croak, croak.” This time with a bound in his direction.

  I’d seen him break before, most times in his sleep. He’d twitch and lash out, flail to push away at something which wasn’t there, the sha
dow of a dream always sleeping beside him. “Run through the doorways,” he’d mumble, “run, whisky chile;” figured it was Momma speaking to him.

  I jumped in his pocket and pissed. “Croak,” with a smile.

  “Son of a horny-toad,” he mumbled.

  Son of a drunken skin sack.

  “Cold-blooded, cactus snack.”

  He began to smile, breathing deeply again.

  “Croak.”

  “I guess you’re right, bubba. Can’t let it get to my head. Gotta reload the girls and get to moving this stone. Strange,” he said, rising to his feet, “never thought he’d hide a doorway like this, most are out in the open. You think he’s scared?” he asked.

  “Croak, croak.”

  “You think I’m scared, then?”

  “Croak.”

  He went pale for a second, his grizzled jaw dropping defeatedly.

  “We get what water’s left from the crabs, and keep it pushing. Fear or no fear, weirdoo be damned, we’re going through that wall.”

  Wrath and Fury sung again, a dozen scattered notes across the wall, falsetto chips and baritone chunks. “It ain’t moving. The hell you want from me now!” he barked, pounding his fists against the cracked granite wall. Two chicken-scratched lines appeared on the stone, questions for the Whisky Chile to answer. He leered at the blue lettering, no doubt Daddy’s drunken scrawl.

  WHO LOVES YOU?

  It was a cruel joke, even by a hexer’s standards, answered only in a manner befitting the King himself. I swallowed hard, hoping any number of accolades he’d never earned, words of encouragement he’d never heard, phantom limbs which had never rocked him safely to sleep, somehow lessened the pain of the two words he was about to speak. I wiggled a bit, mule-kicked his heart to soothe him in my own twisted way. He patted my pocket and spoke.

  “No one.”

  The line vanished. Only one left.

  HOW WILL YOU DIE?

  He held the sisters tight, and grinned.