Sex and Murder Magazine

By Anthony Beal

An ass-kicking in a glass.That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub.To my thinking, that’s a mighty fanciful name for a dark little shit-kicker’s alehouse out in the Baja desert, but that’s what they call the place.Browder could make a weapons-grade cocktail out of fucking amaretto and grenadine.And one sip knocks you to your goddamned knees.Don’t know how he done it.Ain’t sure I wants to know.

The stool at the north end of the bar near the toilets belonged to Zadora the seer.Brown, handsome lady of fifty, maybe fifty-five years breathing, always draped in silk rainbows. She had these salt n' pepper braids down the middle of her back look like creeping vines.I ain’t ever seen a night when she wasn’t sitting over there shuffling her damn Tarot cards in between
sips of Stout.Sometimes, they got drunk enough, rummies would ask her to tell their fortunes.Sometimes, if her glass was empty or she’d done run out of Swisher Sweets, she’d accept a donation of smokes or hooch, and be their patron saint for a spell.Most nights found her doing the same as the rest of Paradise’s regulars; chasing their demons to the bottoms of pint glasses and ale bottles, and demanding quick refills, hoping to drown the fuckers for good.

At the room’s south end, two stools down from the seat belonging to me, you could walk in here any night and find Old Man Solomon—“Old Man,” Browder calls him, and the guy ain’t seen three summers more'n I have—suckin' on fistfuls of stale peanuts and watching for visions in the cups of black coffee he always ordered.Black coffee.S’all he ever ordered anymore.Ain’t seen that poor bastard touch a drop of whiskey since the night he claim he seen his dead wife’s face smile up at him from a steaming cup of joe.He ordered it while sitting in this very same pub on that very same stool.Think he makes it his business to occupy that same seat and order the same thing night after night hoping for a second vision.And night after night, I’ve sat here sucking down bad beer like unwanted medicine and watched Old Man Solomon hobble home disappointed.I feel for the guy, but how you gon’ console someone so hell-bent on grieving?

The room’s only television had been mounted from the ceiling behind the bar.Only thing ever played on it was some regional news broadcast I ain’t never seen before.I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I’m not sure whether my TV gets channel sixty-six, but that’s the channel the TV’s always set on here.You can always recognize folks who ain't never been in here before, ‘cause the first thing they ask for after a drink is whether Browder can turn the channel to whatever boxing match or soccer game they know is on.Browder always claim channel sixty-six’s the only station the thing can pick up way out here in the desert.First-timers don’t always look prepared to believe him when he say that, but Browder’s a seven-foot-tall, shaved-headed, Aryan-lookin’ motherfucker with a goatee and a faceful of tattoos.He got arms on him look about as thick as a circus strongman’s thighs, too, so I ain’t never seen nobody even think about arguin’ with the dude.He say that’s the only channel it pick up, folks just let it go.

Tonight, I’d only been here for about an hour or so before in walked my man Carter.I didn’t know whether Carter was his first name or his last.All I know is from the night we first met each other here, he stuck his hand in mine and told me to call him “Carter” so that’s what I call him.Tonight, he looked strange when he come in, though.Had the look of a man who done just stepped out onto a tree limb and heard a “crack”

I gave him a nod when he looked up and seen me sitting where I always do, but I noticed he ain’t come over to me right away.He just stood there blocking the doorway and staring at me real frightened like; look like he was scared he was gon' catch something contagious if he came too close to me, or like I was on fire and he had done soaked his clothes in gasoline 'fore he come in.Felt like a full five minutes before he worked up the nerve to come over and see about having a drink.Some folks might say I shoulda have gone over to see what had set him jittering, but instead I stayed on my stool sipping black-labeled salvation the whole time he spent making up his mind whether to piss or go blind.The way I figured it, I hadn’t never brought none of my troubles in here and laid 'em at his feet, so I fucking well wasn’t volunteering to sort out whatever pile of shit he’d stepped in that was responsible for the look in his eyes.Nice guy, sure, but ask Carter for the time, he'd tell you how to build a fucking clock.

He finally come over and pulled hisself up onto the stool my foot shoved toward him.I ain’t ever knowed Carter to throw back anything harder than Stout, but tonight he ordered up a double shot of gin as chaser to a whiskey on the rocks.After that, he just sat there staring down at his size twelves like somebody’d done clued him in on the exact date and time of his death and had told him he was gon' win the lottery the day before it went down.

I asked him how things are going, speaking more out of courtesy than any desire to know what ailed him tonight.I asked this after letting maybe a full minute stretch between us without conversation.When he finally spoke, something in his voice set me questioning whether or not I was a religious man.

“Can I count on you?” he asked me, his eyes still enamored with them gum-soled gunboats hugging his feet.By this point in the evening, I’d poured enough whiskey down my throat to have drowned at least three of my five senses, so it was his turn to sit there with a drunk and gawking old man for a spell.

Browder come along about that time and set Carter’s drinks on the bar.By the time he left us, I’d remembered where I kept my tongue.

“Depends on what you want to count on me for,” I told Carter.I ain’t never heard nothing resembling good news follow a question the likes of what he was asking me. I knew I better damn well hear his whole tale before pledging him my allegiance.

“I want to know if I can count on you to listen to something I ain’t repeated out loud to nobody for fear of the rubber room they’d sling my ass in if I did.I need to know you ain’t gon’ chalk what I tell you up to my being a drunk in a place that lends itself to all kinds of local legendry.”

I knowed more than a few of the tales people told about this place.In these parts, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody whose cousin's brother's roommate's fuckin' proctologist had a story 'bout something happening to them in this very room.Everything from haunted urinals in the shitter to folks having shared drinks with the devil in the wee hours of the morning.

The oldest story I know 'bout the Paradise Pub says it’s a cursed place, and that that's why Indian Road 7734 what leads out to it don't appear on no map you'll ever lay eyes on.Lot of folks say you can't go looking for the pub, that it don't take nobody inside it that it don't want, but that it reveals itself every once in a blue moon to folks who deserve to be here.They say the ground beneath it was hexed generations ago by Indians living here who was angry over the white man putting so many of their men in early graves and their women in brothels. Don't know if I buy the whole curse bit, but I can see how them Indians would be pissed at having their entire way of life kicked down around their ears. At any rate, Carter seemed to think I was likely to dismiss whatever he was gon' tell me for another such story.

“Well, I’m listening, so go ahead and talk if you need to talk,” I said.

“In a minute,” Carter told me, making his chaser disappear, “First, you see the dude behind me having his fortune read at the other end of the bar?”

I looked past Carter, toward the opposite end of the bar where Zadora sat lightning up another cigarette and turning over Tarot cards.The mountain sitting beside her in the army jacket didn’t look as old as the socks I had on, but from where I sat, he looked 'bout as wide as Carter and me laid together head to foot.

“I see him.He ain’t altogether hard to miss.What about him?”

“Not here.Outside.” Carter said, tossing his head toward the door.

I didn’t relish giving up my stool, but curiosity had a hold of me.I found myself polishing off my glass of melted ice cubes and following him through the pub’s only door.

He brought me outside into an airless night so quiet you could hear a rat piss on cotton.I followed him around back of the building to the shadows where folks liked to park their cars and fire up doobies in the dark.

“All right,” I said once we’d backed as far as we could into the blackness, “Everything about you tonight has me figuring you’re in some kind of trouble.Am I wrong?

“You ain’t wrong,” he tell me, “and I ain’t in it by myself.Can’t say I’m sorry about that last part, neither.”

“Well, you gon’ tell me what it’s all about, or not?” I already missed the presence of a sweaty on-the-rocks tumbler in my palm.My patience was a candle burning at both ends.

“All right, all right.So, that big dude in there letting Zadora’s card-shuffling ability hash out his future for him; you’ve seen him in here before, right?”

I ain’t never had much to say to the twenty-something in the army drabs, but I knowed him to be a regular.He hadn’t never caused no trouble that I ever seen.Most nights, you’d walk in and find him hugging the wallpaper between the jukebox and the restroom, and burning up clove cigarettes like smoking them was the only thing keeping him alive.

“What about him?” I wanted to know.I won’t never forget what Carter said to me in reply.Them words is burned onto my goddamned brain.They’d be burned onto yours too, if you’d been standing in my shoes that night.

“He dead, Lou. I know he dead ‘cause I killed him last night.”

All I could do was stand there still trying to decide whether or not religion was a stranger to me, and trying to keep the word “bullshit” from slipping through my lips.

Don’t know what made Carter think he was going to drop a bomb like that on me without some kind of clarification to go along with it.He should have damn well known what my next question would be, but the son of a bitch made me ask it anyway.

“The fuck you mean, he dead? How can he be dead when he’s in there right now having his fortune told and stinking up the joint with them damn clove cigarettes?”

“I know, man.I know I sound like a lunatic, but you know me, Lou.You know that no matter what I might sound like right now, I ain’t crazy.And I’m telling you I killed that son of a bitch.”

I decided then and there that he was crazy.I was standing alone a hundred miles out in the Baja in the dark with a crazy man.

“Well, I’d tell you he don’t look so dead to me, and then I suppose we could have an argument, but we won’t.Instead, why don’t you start over from the beginning?”I would come to regret saying those words.

“Before we do, I got another question for you,” Carter said.His speaking tone had taken on a lunatic’s sheen that unnerved me.I didn’t know how many more of his questions I was prepared to hear.

He took my hand in his and pressed it between his palms.I don’t know whether he was the one shaking or whether it was me, but I could feel the tremors working their way up my wrist in that dark place behind the pub where moonlight didn’t dare to reach.They scrabbled up my
forearm, and at the rate our conversation was going, they weren’t going to stop ‘til they reached my toenails.

“Do you remember the very first time you ever set foot in the Paradise Pub?”

Something dark was bubbling up from inside Carter; something that seemed to take hold of him and didn’t seem intent on letting him go anytime soon.I’d estimate that I probably outweigh Carter by a solid forty pounds and stand three inches taller than him, but I don’t mind admitting that at that moment, he scared the fuck out of me.

What scared me more was that I found his question impossible to answer.

Of course, a stubborn bastard like me would die before admitting such a thing, so I tried to rationalize it to myself.

If there’s one thing I learned in all my years, it’s the number one reason that hesitation can be a hazard.Hesitation is dangerous ‘cause it betrays fear, and sometimes fear is a pheromone.This was one of those times.Carter must have smelled it, the way he lunged in to swallow up the silence as I stood ruminating, “Can’t recollect it, can you?Bet you can’t.I bet you fuckin’ can’t!”

It pissed me off that he was right.

“Hell, I been coming here for so long.At our age, there's got to be a million places I drink at where I don’t remember the first time I ever went there.”

This seemed admission enough for him. “That’s another thing,” he practically shouted, making me shush his ass in the darkness.For a man who’d seemed to have privacy concerns about speaking with me, his mannerisms was growing more conspicuous with every word he said. Sweating like a whore in church, he went on, “You say there’s a ton of places you drink at besides this one.So when the last time you been to one of them instead of coming here?Huh?When?”

“Man, what the hell you driving at with these questions?”It was all I could think of to say, since I damned sure couldn’t recall having gone anywhere else to drink except Paradise Pub in a month of Sundays.I didn’t want him to know my memory was dust, of course.And if he knew the reason why I couldn’t recall anything removed from this creepy little alehouse out in the middle of nowhere, I felt terrified all at once of him telling me.

“Lou, just answer the question.Humor me.It’ll all come together in a minute, I swear it will.Just bear with me and answer the goddamned question.Do you remember the last time you went anywhere other than here? Last time you had a really good meal? A really satisfying night's sleep?”

“No, I don't,” I sighed, searching in vain for my shoes where they hid inside the darkness pooled around my feet.They were as lost as I felt.

“I didn’t think you could,” he told me, softening his voice the way a doctor does who’s fixin’ to give a child patient a needle.“You don’t recall ‘cause you’re here every night, ain’t you?You’re here every night just like me, just like too damn many of the folks inside this joint right now.”

“You said something a few minutes ago about getting to the point,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, I did,” he answered, “and here it is.I was as clear-headed last night when I killed that big fat motherfucker inside as I am talking to you right now."

“And how clear-headed is that?” I asked.I was fighting like mad to hang onto my last little scrap of objective rationale, but Carter would prove to be a better grappler than I was.He seemed hell-bent on snatching it away from me.

“I killed him and I knew what I was doing and I did it anyways. There was something I just had to know for myself.And tonight when I come in here, sure as we’re standing here, I found his ass sitting inside laughing like nothing had happened.And that’s when I knowed what I come to tell you tonight.”

“Which is?”

“We're dead, Lou.We dead and we done gone to the devil.You, me, everybody inside that fucking bar.Dead.”

Crazy.

Crazy as a shithouse rat.

"Listen, man, if you and that kid had some form of altercation, that’s one thing–"

“We ain’t had no fuckin’ ‘altercation’, man!I’m telling you I murdered that motherfucker!I pressed the muzzle of this here pistol”—he dragged the Colt Diamondback that I knew he always carried out of his belt and shoved it up under my nose—“against his doughy fucking temple and splattered his brains all over the fucking sand.And I did that because of what I seen one night prior.”

I thought about saying I didn't want to hear anymore but it was too late to stop listening now.

His words shook as he talked. “Two nights ago, I was just getting in my car, fixin' to leave for the night, when I seen two of the regulars slip out the bathroom window and take off running into the desert.They didn't know I seen 'em. It was that cute little blonde trick what’s always callin’ us old-timers 'granddaddy', and that pot-smoking white boy always got his hair tied back in a ponytail. The way they kept looking over their shoulders at the place, you'd have thought the devil himself was on their heels."

I knew who he was talking about. I remembered back when they was new faces. They started showing up here not long after a bus rolled on Route 2, injuring two dozen people and killing three. I remembered them 'cause they looked too damn young to be regulars in a place like this. I recalled that the big dude in the Army drabs started coming here 'round the same time.

"What about them?" I asked.

"I saw them get killed by some damn things that I don't know what they was," he told me.

"What kind of things? Coyotes? Wolves?" I heard the questions dive off the tip of my tongue before I'd realized they were in my mouth.

"Man, didn't I just say I don't know what they was? They was some kind of monsters or something. They was big, too. Big big, and blacker than night and they scuttled around on all fours faster than my eyes could follow them. The way they jumped all over those kids, they never had a chance."

"The kids talk to each other before they took off running? They say anything that might account for what they was running from?"

When he answered me, Carter's voice sounded like there was ghosts living in it. "All I heard was her keep telling him it was their only chance. She talked like they was risking their lives if they ran and dead for sure if they stayed. Then those monsters come out of the dark like they was made of it and tore them kids to pieces. I swear my insides could feel the sound of them jaws, like bear traps snapping shut on arms and legs and throats. That fucked my shit up, man."

Maybe it was the drink in me, or maybe it was the sudden chill growing in the air, but I found myself believing him.That probably only meant I was as loony as he was, but my disbelief was eroding nonetheless.

“What'd you do when you seen that?” I asked him.

“Didn't do nothing. Any man my age who think he gon' outrun a pack of animals that caught prey young and spry enough to be his grandkids is a damn fool. I was too scared to do anything but wait for them to come rip my skin off. But they didn't, maybe 'cause they seen I wasn't trying to escape."

Carter might have been a damned surgeon when it came to spinning a good yarn, but I had to stop him here. He'd slipped a word in that last sentence that bugged me.

"Escape? Escape from what? From who?" I asked. He let the question hang out there in the dead air and twist a little before speaking again.

"If you can stand there and ask me that, then you ain't been listening. Anyway, I watched the things disappear back into the blackness they come out of without paying me no mind. When they was gone, I threw my car in gear and tore the hell out of there.The thing is, I don’t remember ever getting home.”

“What?”

“I’m serious, Lou, and I’m fucking scared, I don’t mind telling you.I got onto Road 7734, the very same road we're looking at now—" he jabbed a finger toward the front of the pub and the uncharted dirt-and-gravel road, "—and watched the Paradise Pub fade into my rear view mirror.Then within five minutes, I found myself driving up the road leading to it.I could see it through the fucking windshield.How is that possible?How the fuck is that possible on a road straight as a fucking arrow, Lou?”

“It ain’t possible,” I told him, suddenly needing to sit down, “It ain’t possible.”

It wasn't. Indian Road 7734, that alleged phantom service road that only reveals itself to the deserving, is a solitary, Southward-heading straightaway. It's got as much curve or loop to it as a number two pencil.Ain’t no way in hell a body could possibly have ridden it in a circle, I don’t give a damn how drunk they are.

Carter kept on selling. “So the next night, last night, I come in and the first thing I see is those two kids, drinking, laughing, having a grand old time.Not a mark on either of them to suggest that they'd been minced not twenty-four hours prior.It was like the night before had never happened.So I made sure I didn't touch a drop of beer or liquor. I lured that big dude outside and shot him in the head. I had to fucking know, Lou. I had to see if it'd work a second time. And tonight, he’s in there right now, probably drinking himself dumb as me.”

I’d heard enough.I told him I’d prove to him that things couldn’t be what he thought they was.I’d get in his car with him and we’d take that drive home together.I could leave my car here for a night without worrying about it.Anybody stole that piece of shit, they’d bring it back before they got ten feet with it.Probably bring it back with a dollar stuck in the glovebox.

I followed Carter around the corner of the building to his car, a slightly newer piece of shit than mine was. We climbed in and gave the rattling vehicle a couple of minutes to warm up.

“I hope you’re prepared for what you about to experience,” he told me, as he piloted his car onto the dirt road.

*****

An ass-kicking in a glass.That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub.To my thinkin’, that’s a mighty fanciful name for a dark, little shit-kicker’s alehouse out here in the Baja desert, but that’s what they call the place.Browder could make a weapons-grade cocktail out of fucking amaretto and grenadine.

The sounds of tires crunching on gravel was the only sound to break the silence as we pulled up in front of the pub.I swung my legs out of Carter’s crappy ride and drew a deep breath as I stood up.Inside, I took my usual place two seats down from Old Man Solomon.“Old Man,” Browder calls him, and the guy ain’t seen three summers more than I have.As always, the night found him staring into a cup of coffee with tears in his eyes.He didn’t acknowledge me when I bid him good evening, and I really hadn’t expected him to.Sometimes you said things just to be neighborly.

On the television, a channel sixty-six newscaster was covering another car accident out on Route 2. That's all there seemed to be on the tube anymore. It looked like a bad one, too: three cars, drunk drivers, no survivors.Fucked-up business.

“Well?” Carter said, draining his first drink of the evening in one gulp.

“Well what?”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“What you talking about, man?”

“Think.Tell me the last thing you remember.”

Last thing I remembered was getting into his ride last night and falling asleep.Next thing I knowed, we were pulling up in front of the Paradise Pub.I told him as much.

“Let’s go outside,” I told Carter, emptying my glass.

*****

We tucked ourselves into the shadows behind the pub.Something felt familiar, felt right about this.Carter lit up a smoke and said to me, “You remember anything I said to you last night?”

“Some,” I told him, “Got some holes in my recollection, though.”

“I told you about how I killed that big army-jacketed dude; how I’d seen other patrons die here and reappear at the bar the next night, happy as can be.”

“Yeah, I got that,” I told him, as I noted for the first time the absence of a single star sharing the night sky with a full moon.“But where the fuck are we?How the hell’d we get here?”The words were barely out of my mouth before I was sorry I asked.

“I guess if either of us knew that, we wouldn’t still be here, right?” I added quickly.

I turned to walk back inside when I heard Carter’s voice behind me.“Wanna know something?Under proper circumstances, I could get used to it here.”

Seems like when he told me that, the sky got a little blacker.I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach the way a roller-coaster rider does right before the car plummets over its highest peak.

“I have to think that’s your ass talking, ‘cause your mouth knows better,” I replied.We hadn’t had nearly enough to drink yet for him to be coming at me with that kind of crap.

I heard the pub’s front door come open then.A couple of drunken denim-and-flannel shit-kickers come stumbling out of the place, having apparently reached the point in their evening where it was time to drop their pants in the dark and test which of them had the quicker gag reflex.

Carter’s eyes looked oddly shiny in the darkness behind the pub.I backed away from him, and was relieved to see he was too concerned with making his point to pursue me. That didn't mean my retreat had escaped his notice, though.

“Slow down and think on it a minute.We’re the only ones who know, Lou.We’re the only ones who know we’re in Hell.Ain’t you given a thought to what that means?”

“All I’m thinking about is getting the fuck out of here, wherever ‘here’ is.I ain’t had much time to consider indulging every depraved little fucking fantasy my subconscious has to offer me.”

“Well,” Carter said as he drew his pistol and studiously perforated the scalps of the two denim-and-flannel fuckers, “Maybe you should.”

Felt like something in the left side of my chest ripped in two when I seen that.I couldn’t breathe.A luminous shade of red rose into the blackness of the night sky as I reeled.I saw the heavens turn the color of turbid blood, like a backlit canopy of black sackcloth with Hell’s inferno glowing behind it.I looked for Carter as my knees gave way. Actually made eye contact with him for a brief moment before I started to slide.My last thought as the ground rose to greet me was that I had to be hallucinating.Couldn’t find no other explanation for his eyes suddenly going missing from a face so moldered that it was sliding off his skull in hunks of gray-black meat that splattered his shoes with black blood and pus.

*****

An ass-kicking in a glass.That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub.

I found myself sitting in my usual seat.The stool at the north end of the bar near the toilets had the seer perched on top of it.Her deck of Tarot cards was spread out atop the bar where she sat reading a rummy his fortune.My thoughts turned to Carter, and I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse to find myself remembering more and more with each new moon.The one thing I still couldn’t remember was going home between visits to the pub, and the worst part of that was that I found it didn’t concern me so much.

I’d lost track of how long I’d been here.A week? A year?Did it even matter anymore?Most nights, I just sat here trying not to wonder how many times I’d relived the same night’s activities. I tried not to wonder what sin I’d committed in order to end up here, or how many of my fellow patrons here sat wrestling with the same question.

Tonight, for the first time, I got Old Man Solomon talking a little. I tried to take his mind off those damned coffee cups that keep his face so long. Had I known where the conversation would lead us, I might not have pursued it.

"I see your friend has figured things out," he said quietly after we'd exchanged a few amenities. I felt equal parts offended that he'd called Carter my "friend" and fearful over what he might be alluding to. Carter was changing in ways that made me want to spike his drinks with a little holy water. Whatever he was becoming, he damn sure wasn't my friend, not no more.

When I didn't answer, he told me, "You know what I mean. There's nothing to be gained by playing dumb, am I right?"

I watched Carter from my stool where he stood laughing and chatting up some dude in a leather biker jacket.I noticed Carter wasn't drinking beer tonight. Hadn't heard him order nothing but cola all night. I wondered what that was about.

"Nobody's playing with you, old man," I told him. Damn Browder had me calling Solomon "old" now.

"Have it your way," he told me, returning his attention to the cup of coffee set before him, "A word to the wise is sufficient, or so it's said."

"If you've got something to say to me, then say it," I told him. I wasn't about to be baited.

"I'm saying that I know what it is to want someone to stop the world so you can get off. But the devil of it is that once the world stops for you, it's hell to start up again. Can't be done, most times."

"That what happened to you? Is that what happened to all of us here?" I asked him.

He shrugged, retreating, "I can only speak for myself. We tell our own tales here, Lou. It is 'Lou', isn't it?" His eyes followed Browder to the far end of the bar.

I nodded as a terrible dawning burned my mind.

Old Man Solomon leaned close to me and whispered "A word to the wise: The coffee here isn't the best by any means, but there aren't any demons in the pot."

I would have settled for knowledge of where the hell I was and what the story was with the place. I didn't feel ready to know everything Carter apparently knew. He was getting too damn bold, and I didn’t like it.The way he saw it, he told me, it was all he could do not to lose his last few shreds of sanity.The way I saw it, his last shred of sanity flew over the cuckoo’s nest the minute he killed his first victim.The topic had evolved into one of those things that friends who want to stay friends just don’t talk about.

I reminded myself he wasn't a friend anymore as a crash rang out. Carter had emptied his drinking glass and busted it over the head of the biker he was talking to. The bandanna-clad man went down and didn't move. Blood like Burgundy sauce spread over the floorboards to halo his head. No one reacted.

“Carter, man, what the fuck you think you doing?” I shouted at him, getting to my feet.

Fixing me in place with a look I ain’t never seen on a man that had more than ten seconds of life left in him, he answered, “I’m learning in death how to live.”

I replied, "I don't know about Indian curses or what in hell's going on 'round here, but ain't nobody dead except maybe for that dude lying at your feet." I don't know what made me think he'd buy what I was selling. I didn't even buy it.

"Sometimes, Lou, dying is the highest, truest form of living.I've often wondered whether the dead imitate the living; whether everybody we've ever loved and lost are still kicking around somewhere, carrying out the same habits and mannerisms they did when they was alive.I know now that they do, 'cause I'm one of them. And like it or not, so's you."

He'd finally struck me speechless. All I could do was gape at him and wonder whether it hurt to go insane.

"Let me teach you how to live," he told me.

Time slowed down as he remembered the pistol in his belt, swung it up fluidly to align it with my right eye socket, and blasted away the rear portion of my skull.

*****

An ass-kicking in a glass.That’s what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub.But I’d had enough for tonight.I was headed home.

Climbing into my car, I recalled a conversation I'd had with the seer.I'd figured on finding someone other than crazy fucking Carter to talk to tonight.I figured on that not long after heading into the men’s room to take a whiz and finding him crouching in the room’s only stall with his dick embedded in the frothing, gore-caked eye socket of some sweaty redhead prone to selling blowjobs in that very same bathroom after she’d had a couple of highballs.

If you coulda seen the grin on that fucker’s face when he looked up and seen me watching him, you’d know why I left early tonight.

Drive home seemed to take twice as long as usual.Night driving around these parts always felt like driving through a mausoleum.Desert was so damn sterile and soundless.It sucked to be the poor bastard driving through the Baja at night with a busted car stereo.Music tended to kill some of the monotony of my drive, which varied between forty minutes and an hour, depending on road conditions.Tonight, when I turned the stereo on, I found Nick Cave wailin’ “Your Funeral…My Trial” at me like I’d pissed him off.Since my choices seemed to be that or static, I let him yell at me while I drove.

And drove.

I knowed something was wrong after missing the exit that I usually take to get home.When I say I missed it, I don’t mean I’d passed it.I knowed I hadn’t.What I mean is that it wasn’t where I knowed it was supposed to be.I’d half convinced myself that I must have fell asleep at the wheel and passed right by the son of a bitch until I caught sight of a little glimmer on the horizon.Figuring it might be a gas station or a sheriff’s depot where I could catch my bearings and figure out where I’d made my mistake, I made up my mind to pull over when I reached it.

And the nearer I got to it, the more convinced I grew that ol’ Nick was ridin’ with me, and that I’d indeed made my way onto his shit list for reasons as yet unknown to me.

I was coming up on the Paradise Pub.

*****

“You can’t tell me you ain’t curious,” Carter told me, seating himself beside me once I’d come back inside.On the TV, photographs of people who’d died in some drunk driving accident flickered.Their vacant eyes set me trembling.A nice looking black couple, a mildly overweight, but gorgeous Latina and her brother.None of them had survived.

“I can’t tell you nothing if you done already made up your mind that you ain’t listening,” came my reply.

“It won’t let you leave, Lou.Remember those stories about a curse on the land that we always thought was bullshit?Well I think it's time we wrap our brains around the fact that they ain't.”

I ordered up a cup of black coffee, prompting Browder to eye me for a curiosity before going to get it. The coffee machine sat at the other end of the bar near Zadora's stool. Overhead, coverage of the car accidentto unfold.

"Looks like the place will be seeing some new faces soon enough," she told Browder, tipping her chin at the screen in a gesture that I didn't understand, but would soon come to. He said something in reply that I couldn't hear because Carter spoke to me at the same moment.

“I’ll let you kill me if you want, Lou.I’ll sit still for it one time.You gotta experience it.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I spat, succeeding only in making him laugh ‘til his eyes watered.

“I wish I could, man. Goddamn if I don’t,” he said.

*****

"I can't believe you're fucking serious," Carter told me the next night, climbing into the passenger seat with me. I couldn’t believe he was actually coming along. Don't know what had made me invite him anyway. He seemed all too content here.

"Oh, I'm heart-attack serious," I told him, firing up my car's engine, "We are shaking this fucking mob scene tonight."

I turned the car onto 7734, heading opposite the direction I'd traveled in some nights ago. If I couldn't find my way home, then I'd get us back to Route 2 and consider my options once we got there.

"You think we can just motor out of Hell like a couple of bored tourists? Don't you understand that we're home? We're home, Lou."

Not five minutes on the road and he was getting on my nerves already. "If you buy that, then what the fuck did you say 'yes' for when I invited you?"

"I came along so I could prove to your ignorant ass that the reason we can't leave is that we're right where we belong," he told me, "Now stop the car."

The muzzle of his Diamondback kissed the side of my throat.

"I ain't gon' ask you but one time," he said, leaning on the gun, making its presence painful against my neck.

I was sick of a lot of things in that moment, but mostly of him. "Fuck you and that gun. You claim you've already shot me in the face and killed me a few nights ago. What more you think you gon' do to me?"

"Pull the fuck over or we'll kick off every night for the rest of fucking eternity with me putting a bullet up your ass. They won't 'kill' you, but they'll hurt like a bastard. Every. Fucking. Night."

Our bluffs waltzed with each other for another second before mine got sumo heaved off the table. I pulled to the side of the road. "Satisfied?" I asked him, making a mental note to bust his ass later and pray the old memory would hang onto it.

"Almost," he told me, grinning like death's head with only the dashboard lights to illuminate his features, "Get out."

I stepped out of the car.

He leveled the gun on my groin and shot me.

"You'll thank me for this, brother," he told me before driving away smiling and leaving me writhing around on the roadside. If the scent of my blood released into the air didn't set the creatures he'd talked about on me, then the piece of hollering I was putting on surely would.

And did.

The nightmare creatures from Carter's tale came out of the darkness of the night as if woven from it. Black hulking things with leather for skin and hellfire in their throats.

The creatures filled my ears with sound as they exposed my entrails to moonlight and fed on them. Bones cracking like glass rods. Bear traps snapping shut. Screams of the dead.

*****

An ass-kicking the following night behind a pub in a moonlit desert. That's what Carter got 'cause that's what he deserved.

When I came to myself, I was standing over Carter with blood on my fists and in my hair that didn't belong to me. I dropped to my knees, bringing my two-hundred-thirty-odd pounds down hard in the pit of his stomach. My hands found his throat. My thumbs dug into his larynx as I squeezed. I did this without knowing the reason for it, but something in his smirk refused to let me feel badly about it. Every breath I drew convinced me further that the bastard had it coming and that if I ever remembered what he'd done to deserve this, then he'd really be in some trouble.

"I'm proud of you, brotherman," he gurgled, smiling before going limp in my arms.

It should have bothered me that I'd just murdered the murderer who I'd chastised for being what I had become. Instead, I felt great.

God help me, I felt fucking great.

*****

"All right, you convinced me," I told him the next night when he sauntered into the pub smiling 'I told you so's at me, "I want to give it a try. I want to kill somebody tonight."

"Hot damn, now you're talking, Lou," he laughed, clapping me on the back as Browder sat a couple of lagers in front of us. I thanked Browder, but I didn’t drink the bitch. I wasn’t drinking nothing else in this fucking place until I tested out a theory. I hoped Carter would polish his off though, since the round was on me. If my plan worked like I hoped it would, it was the last round I'd be buying for quite some time.

"Yeah. I mean, there ain't shit else to do up in this motherfucker, so I'll play it your way for a while," I said, hoping he was buying my line of bull and wouldn't smell the shit on my breath until it was too late.

"It grabs hold of you, don't it?" Carter said, "Told you I knew what I was talkin' about." I lifted my glass in salute.

"Let me hold your pistol a minute," I murmured, locking my eyes on a patron across the room who I knew Carter would take for my mark. He practically leered at me as he handed it over, eager to see me walk the walk.

Sucker.

I stood up, turned to face the bar and its bottled demons, and made a wish.

I trained the gun on the bottles behind the bar. I opened up on the top shelf stuff first. The blue label. The gold label. The imported spirits. Colored flasks burst into sparkle dust, slopped expensive vodkas and brandies all over the counter, the floor, the ice bins. Fractured bottle fragments leapt into the air. The sickening sweetness of rums and tequilas and liquors wafted as each pull of the trigger blew apart the bottles that housed them, raining glass shards over every inch of floor and countertop.

I'd succeeded in getting Browder's attention. He rushed toward me with graveyards for eyes.

"Are you looking to die, old man?" he asked me, frothing with rage at my impact on his inventory.

"You have no idea," I told him.

"Tough." he said.

My mama used to tell me that if wishes were horses, beggars could ride. Her words came screaming back to me as I watched a wave of Browder's skillet-sized palm prompt every glass shard and every drop of spilled liquor to leap back into place.

If I'd blinked I would have missed it; the flash reverse motion of exploded glass vessels reconstituting like jigsaw puzzles assembled by phantom hands. I cussed at the sight of the full, intact bottles sitting unbroken as you please upon the tiers of the bar behind him.

“Do you honestly think you’re the first of the insects I collect ever to attempt what you just did?” he said. His mouth had a way of smiling without letting the rest of his face in on the act.

Carter's gun hadn't helped me worth a damn, but I kept it between Browder and me anyway. I felt less naked with it there. “What the hell is this place?” I demanded, no longer doubting my knowledge of the answer to the question, but fearing to know what I knew, “Where am I?”

“It’s like the man said,” he told me, nodding at Carter, “You’re home.”

“I tried to tell him,” Carter assured the bartender who seemed to be gaining height by the second.

“Bullshit,” I declared, unsure which of them I was addressing.

Browder told, “Listen, old man.I’d say I was sorry for your loss, if I truly were.Truth is, though, that you deserve to be here as much as any of these other losers.”

I ain’t never been the kind of man to let a face-to-face insult stand.I figured it was time to die with my boots on, so I stepped up to the bar and hoisted myself up on my palms as close to his nose as I could.“The fuck did I do to deserve your ugly fucking mug pouring me that piss-spiked sewage you call beer night after night without end?”

“What, indeed,” Browder told me, snatching up a nearby newspaper kept on hand for drunks who read while they boozed and hurling it into my arms. “Even a befuddled old sot should be able to add two plus two.”

I took his statement as my cue to turn to page four and found a black and white photo of a little girl name Emily at the top of the page. She was African-American, 'bout six years old. A couple of cottony-looking pigtails framed her little apple of a face. She had a smile on her that I couldn't help returning even though it was just a photo. It was the last smile that would ever touch my face.

Emily had my last name.

The article accompanying the photo cited my name as the driver of the vehicle that had killed us both when it plunged into a ravine on our way to the house where her mother and her new husband lived. According to the article, I'd had three times the legal amount of alcohol in my system.

I needed to sit down and scream my way through the tears that followed the revelation, so that's what I did. I'd had a daughter. I'd had a daughter whom I'd killed and a wife, and had apparently fucked up the latter relationship so severely that she'd moved on. And my punishment was to have to choose every night for the rest of eternity. Either sit here and let the memories drive me mad as Carter, or drink them dead.

Old Man Solomon came to rest a hand on my shoulder and told me, "My wife, Loretta was her name. Four-car pileup. Could have been avoided if I hadn't fled after accidentally running down a mother and child. I hung on for three weeks on life support. Everyone else died instantly."

The pub door opened. When I looked up and seen the pretty Latin girl from the accident on the television earlier walk in, I nearly died. Apparently, it wouldn't be the first time.

Solomon said, "I don't want to forget my Loretta. Guess I'm not like most folks. Most folks who end up here want to forget their sins. They all want to forget eventually."

He hobbled away as Browder returned to offer me a cup of black-labeled anesthesia.

I watched a stronger man than myself make his way to the restroom, and I ordered up an ass-kicking in a glass.