Holding Smoke

  HOLDING

  SMOKE

  HOLDING SMOKE

  Steph POst

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Steph Post

  Cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-947993-88-4

  eISBN: 978-1-951709-02-0

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2019953165

  First hardcover publication:

  January 2020 by Polis Books LLC

  221 River St., 9th Fl. #9070

  Hoboken, NJ 07030

  www.PolisBooks..com

  Also by Steph Post

  Judah Cannon novels

  Lightwood

  Walk in the FIre

  A Tree Born Crooked

  Miraculum

  For Vito,

  My Number One.

  This Book, All the Books.

  1

  Felton closed his eyes against the flames, but he could still see them. Writhing. Hypnotic. Calling to him with the same siren song as the torrid heavens above and the Snake. Always the Snake, coiling to spring against the backs of his eyelids, always present, yet offering nothing, no respite, only the endless rasping of its bone-white scales, a sound Felton heard even in his dreams.

  A hand grasped his shoulder and shook him once, twice, until Felton’s eyes snapped open and he shrugged away from the touch of the teenager dangling a beer in front of his face.

  “Hey, man, you okay? You tripping out again? Having one of your visions? Seeing the future?”

  Tyler wagged the bottle of beer in his face and Felton leaned back in the sagging canvas camp chair, trying to focus on the shimmering gold label. Felton’s eyes drifted from the flashing glass to the kid standing behind it in low-slung corduroys and a black T-shirt with a large rip at the armpit. Felton squinted and read the word on the shirt—Metallica. Tyler had tried to explain to him that it was the name of a rock band. No, a metal band, Tyler had stressed. Heavy metal. Tyler had played a song on the van’s radio for him only a few days before as he sat in the backseat, somewhere on the road between Valdosta and Savannah. The music had been a needle in the back of Felton’s skull, and Tyler and Dustin had laughed when he’d clamped his hands over his ears and shoved his head between his spread knees, trying to escape the noise. Juniper had finally climbed onto the bench seat next to him and patted his wide, bowed back while yelling at the boys to turn the music down. Felton had cringed so hard he’d bitten the inside of his cheek and his mouth had stung with the taste of his own blood. Metallic. Metallica. And then Felton had understood. Tyler’s mouth had split open in awe when Felton later explained the revelation.

  Tyler scratched at the checkered beanie pulled down tight over his stringy, shoulder-length blond hair and set the bottle at Felton’s feet before turning to face the small fire in the center of their camp. The wood was damp and the fire mostly smoldered, with only occasional tongues of scarlet flickering up toward the bronzing sky.

  “Yeah, Juni’s friend Gage and his girl brought a couple cases with them, so we won’t need you to run up to the store for us after all.”

  Felton blinked and blinked again, wiping hard at his watering eyes with the back of his hand. He reached down and touched the glass bottle, nestled among the papery sugar maple leaves and fallen pine needles. It was real. He scratched at the gold label with his thumbnail. Real. Tyler tapped a cigarette out of a squashed pack and lit it and Felton smelled the foul, acrid smoke. Real. The cigarette smoke was real, which meant Tyler was real and he was giving a thumbs-up to Dustin and Juniper on the other side of the fire, sitting in the open door of their brown-and-yellow-striped van, passing a twist of paper back and forth, so they must be real, too. There was a man, slightly older than the teenagers, coming out of the woods with his hand at the zipper of his pants, but Tyler had said that Juniper’s friend had brought them beer, which meant that this man, and the tall, smiling woman he slung his arm around, were probably real as well. The sky above the pines was fading now into a wash of cinnamon, which meant it could have been a blaze of orange only moments before, which meant that it could be real. The sky was real and the fire was real and the people Felton had fallen in with after he’d crawled out of the Okefenokee Swamp were real. Dustin, laughing, was poking the campfire with a stick and the sparks crackled and twinkled as they drifted upward from the soft, shifting wood. Felton frowned as he concentrated on the ribbons of flame. The Snake was not real. No, the Snake was beyond incarnate. Felton sucked in a mouthful of air, brushed his fingers down through the sweaty fringe of brown hair crowning his head, and picked up the beer.

  “Where are we going next?”

  Tyler turned back to Felton with one pierced eyebrow raised, almost as if he’d forgotten the lump of a man stuffed into the flimsy chair behind him. Felton raised the bottle to his lips, letting the lukewarm liquid trickle down his throat. He hated the taste. Tyler raised his knobby shoulders in a shrug and dropped his cigarette butt.

  “Not sure. Juni was talking earlier about driving out to the coast. Somewhere near Charleston, I think. Said she’s got a cousin out there who owns a seafood shack on the water and we can pick up shifts or something.”

  The cherry on his cigarette winked out as Tyler carefully mashed it with the toe of his sneaker. Van. Vans. Skate shoes, not sneakers. Tyler had taught him about that, too. Felton’s own leather loafers had warped and cracked so badly after being under inches of water for weeks in the swamp that he’d had to leave them by the side of the road. He was wearing a pair of Adidas now. Kicks. Juniper had shoplifted them for him from a highway outlet mall, after only knowing him for a few days. Felton thought of her, holding the box out to him, just the sliver of a gap in her front teeth peeking out through her grin. He liked the black-and-white stripes.

  Tyler shook his head and shivered. He crossed his arms and rubbed at his raw, pink elbows.

  “I mean, if I wanted to wait tables, I could’ve just stayed in Montgomery. Gotten a job at Applebee’s or something. Western Steer. Finished out my senior year. We all pooled our money and got the Voyager so we’d be free, man. Serving fish sandwiches to tourists doesn’t sound like free to me.”

  Felton nodded along, though he wasn’t sure he agreed with Tyler. The three teenagers had been living on ketchup sandwiches and saltines when Felton had finally stumbled out of a thicket of bald cypress and greenbrier at the northern edge of the swamp and collapsed in the middle of their campsite. With hands and feet and face abraded, his clothes and hair infested with chiggers, his pack lost, his tongue swollen and lips spackled with sores, Felton had only been able to curl himself into a ball at the feet of the bewildered kids and sob. Juniper had kneeled beside him, dribbling water from a plastic bottle into his mouth, breaking up crackers into small pieces, feeding him like a bird, while Tyler and Dustin slipped his wallet out of his pocket and pinched it open to peer inside. It had been stuffed full of crinkled, soggy bills, but they’d left them untouched. When the teenagers had struck their site the next morning and piled into the van, heading north, Felton had been riding in the backseat.

  His wallet had slimmed down since then and Juniper couldn’t shoplift everything, so Felton could see the girl’s point in wanting to find jobs. At the same time, such mundane concerns seemed incomprehensible to him, as if shouted down from the top of a well. Felton, at the bottom, his cheek against the stone, heard nothing but echoes. He was one of them, yes, but he was only half in their world. Felton jerked his head up and stared at the back of Tyler’s beanie. He wond
ered, with a tremor of self-consciousness, how long he’d been silent this time. For how long he had disappeared.

  Tyler turned around to him again. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets and a scowl was etched across his face. Felton had the feeling that Tyler had been talking to him, though he couldn’t remember any of the words. He cleared his throat to show that he was listening, or trying to at any rate. Tyler grunted and pointed across the fire, whispering.

  “I said, do you think there’s something going on between those two?”

  Tyler’s voice seemed to be cutting through a wall of static to reach him, but Felton widened his eyes and tried to force the buzz away. Through the mare’s tails of wafting smoke, he could see Juniper and Dustin, still sitting together. Juniper had the end of her long, copper braid in one hand, comparing its length to one of Dustin’s black dreadlocks she held in the other. Dreadlocks. Dustin had taught him that word. And Juniper had taught him to play cat’s cradle, a child’s game she couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Music and hairstyles and games with bits of string. Felton knit his brows, trying to understand how the pieces fit together. They had to. It had to mean something. It had to be revealed.

  Tyler lit another cigarette and Felton became distracted by the zigzag of smoke as Tyler waved his hand around while he talked.

  “I mean, sure, he’s older than me. He can already buy cigarettes and whatever. Get a real tattoo. I get what she sees in him. But I always thought, I mean, me and Juni …”

  Tyler’s voice was going in and out again and the smoke from the cigarette was mingling with the smoke from the fire and the miasma eventually engulfed Felton in totality, swallowing him like a wolf devouring the sun. Felton turned and looked from side to side. The smoke was everywhere, all around him. He couldn’t see Juniper and Dustin thirty feet away; he couldn’t see Tyler standing right in front of him. Felton took a deep breath and clamped his mouth shut, but he could feel the smoke still getting inside him, winding down the canals of his ears, burrowing underneath the beds of his fingernails, trickling through his pores. His eyes weren’t watering, though, and now the flames were fully visible to him, spiraling higher and higher, until the fire became his entire world. Felton finally unclenched his fists and looked deep into the heart of it. He opened his eyes as wide as possible, felt them peeling back, as the pale Snake languidly spun out toward him, its mouth gaping, piceous and mirrored with stars.

  “The remnant shall return.”

  The Book of Isaiah. For almost two months, the Snake had been mute, the Scripture bitten back as if they’d never been uttered at all. But now Felton’s eyes were open and the Snake’s mouth was open and he was struck by its glistening fangs. Felton did not fully understand the annunciation, but he would heed. He stood up with outstretched arms, knocking the camp chair back behind him, but the Snake receded and the smoke dissipated in whorls, and the fire shriveled to a small apple of flame, still hissing and popping in the settling dark. Felton dropped to his knees and lifted his palms, crying out.

  “The remnant shall return! The remnant shall return!”

  Tyler jumped back, almost stumbling to get away, but Juniper came to him. She held her hands tight to her chest, nervous, but curious, too.

  “Felton? What is it?”

  He shook his head haltingly as the enormity of the decision fell upon him.

  “What is it?”

  Felton stood unsteadily, but met Juniper’s eyes and spoke with a ringing, clarion certitude.

  “It’s time.”

  *

  Ramey clenched her jaw and pressed her sharp-toed cowboy boot down on the accelerator. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. The balding tires of the Cutlass tore through the gravel shoulder at the edge of the highway’s curve, but still the speedometer climbed. Ramey gripped the wheel tighter as long, snarling strands of dark auburn hair lashed across her eyes and cheeks and caught at the corners of her lips. As the straightaway loomed ahead, Ramey pounded her palms into the steering wheel, once, twice, and she wondered what would happen if she just closed her eyes, buried her head in her hands and let the car take her. Into a tree. An oncoming set of headlights. The quiet of oblivion. A place where there were no more schemes, no more arrangements, no more bribes. No more shootouts in the front yard or bodies in the back. No more guns, no more blood, no more conversations through glass. The night could have her. Ramey wouldn’t resist.

  She ground her teeth together. But then she would never see Judah Cannon again and all the heartache, all the dead in the ground, all the sacrifice, would have been for nothing. With the silhouettes of slash pines whipping past her in the shades of twilight descending, Ramey weighed out the choices of her life. She thought of the Egyptians, who after the death of a man left his heart inside his body so it could be balanced on the scales against the feather of truth. So many years ago, in a dusty classroom smelling of sweat and mold and teenage hormones, Ramey had watched a documentary on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It had bothered her then and it bothered her now, as the unbidden memory wormed its way into her mind. It was the hearts of men that were measured and it was the goddess Maat and her feather who decided their fate. Light enough, and the man’s soul would go on to heaven. A heart too heavy was found wanting and eaten by another goddess, Ammit. The man’s soul would then linger in the lost land of the dead forever. Ramey raked her hair out of her eyes and eased up on the gas. It was true. Men’s hearts were weighed by women, but who was there left then to cradle her own? Ramey took her foot completely off the accelerator and coasted to a stop alongside an overgrown field on the slanting shoulder of Highway 100.

  She had just come from her last meeting with Sheriff Dodger up in Starke and Ramey knew she should feel elated or, at the very least, relieved. To hand over the final payment, she’d met Dodger in the back parking lot of a strip mall with so many abandoned storefronts it looked like its teeth had been knocked out. A nail salon and a Hobby Lobby were the only two establishments still in business. She had waited for the sheriff for over an hour, leaning against the driver’s side door of her car, smoking one cigarette after another as she watched the sun gradually sink and gild the October sky. When Dodger had finally arrived, navigating his cruiser slowly through the row of battered dumpsters like a shark seeking out drops of blood, he’d refused to get out to greet her. Ramey had sighed, flipped her sunglasses up on her head, and pitched her last cigarette butt to the crumbling asphalt at her feet. They could’ve played at the power struggle all day, but Ramey had just wanted it over.

  “Sherriff.”

  She knocked a cascade of manila folders, candy bar wrappers, and an empty tin of Skoal onto the floorboard and slid into the passenger’s seat. As usual, everything in Sherriff Dodger’s vehicle was sticky—the door handle, the leather seats, shiny at the seams, the dash. Ramey tried to make herself as small as possible, crossing her legs tightly and drawing in her shoulders. Her head was cocked high, though, and her eyes fierce and uncompromising as she leveled them at the sheriff. Dodger leered at her and wedged a stained handkerchief out of the back pocket of his uniform pants.

  “Well, hey there, Miss Ramey Barrow. And ain’t you just as pretty as a peach and twice as sweet this evening?”

  Dodger blew his nose, sputtering and honking, and then wadded the handkerchief up and jammed it back into his pocket. He wiped his runny eyes, one eyelid drooping down much farther than the other, and scratched at his bristling walrus mustache.

  “I got to admit, I’m going to miss our little meetups over these past couple months. You sure do bring a ray of sunshine into an old man’s day, you know that?”

  Ramey’s only response was to pointedly reach into the purse at her shoulder. She withdrew a bulging envelope and slapped it into the sheriff’s outstretched hand. The last one.

  She watched as Dodger flipped open the envelope and riffled through the bills inside. Ramey could distinctly remember watching her father, Leroy, pass an envelope across the scratched Formi
ca of their kitchen table, littered with overflowing ashtrays and beer cans, and Dodger accepting it without so much as a squeeze. The two men, and Sherwood Cannon, usually, all younger in age then, but already forged hard and bitter in looks, had sat around the Barrow kitchen table too many times to count, playing poker and passing bribes, and Ramey could never once remember any of them opening an envelope of cash to count it.

  And she had paid attention. Closely. Especially as she grew into her teens. Flipping cards, slamming beers, sometimes just the three of them, sometimes Leroy, Sherwood, and another odd combination of men on their payrolls. Some she had to keep her eyes on at all times, some she didn’t, but she’d refused to abandon her vigil nonetheless. They never brought their wives or girlfriends, and even before Ramey’s mother had run off with her ice cream truck driver, Wynonna had always managed to disappear out the back screen door whenever a pickup with a gun rack in the back pulled up into the yard. So it was always just the men, drinking and fussing and fighting, with the Cannon boys and their friends doing pretty much the same out in the front yard or back in the pinewoods. Aubrey, Ramey’s younger, and prettier, sister had hidden in their shared bedroom, galloping her plastic ponies across the dull orange carpet and endlessly brushing out their pastel manes. As Aubrey grew older, the ponies were lost under the bed and replaced by stacks of Tiger Beat and Sweet Valley Highs, but the door had remained locked and Ramey had understood why.

  Instead of hiding, Ramey had watched. The men at the table, the boys in the yard, the closed door protecting her sister. In doing so, she picked up curse words and insight and scars. The burn on the inside of her thigh from the man who had put his cigarette out on her bare leg as she’d walked past him toward the fridge was one she would never forget. Before Leroy had even been able to get to his feet, Ramey had broken a beer bottle over the man’s head, glass shards and Schlitz and blood spraying out all over the flung hands of five-card draw. The wound wasn’t her first, and by no means would it be her last, but in the whip of her shoulder, in the crack of her wrist, Ramey had found her place. She’d grown up knowing the world was for men. All the girls where she came from did. Some, like her sister, buried themselves in River Phoenix dreams and hoped the world would be different one day. Some girls learned early to laugh, some to use the body that would one day be used against them, some simply gave up and retreated to the shadows. Ramey watched. And that day, she had fought. And she’d continued to watch, and to fight, sometimes silently, sometimes until her throat was raw and the bruises bloomed, always choosing the hardest road, it seemed, because she preferred the broken glass to the giggle or the wink or the darkness. Ramey didn’t necessarily think she was smart, but she was stubborn as hell, anyone could give her that, and she had been determined to carve out a space for herself in a realm that, so often, seemed to have no use for her.