By Jimmy Cajoleas
I needed to talk to the redhead at the bar. The signs were clear. She had a nose ring and a tattoo of California. A roach perched on a bottle stared directly at her. I dropped some change on the counter, and it was a nickel and two pennies. That equals seven, the number of completion. I shredded a napkin and it spelled out my name. You ignore the natural world at your peril.
I came to Dutch Bar every night at exactly the same time in hopes of getting served. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance. When I was twelve I was hexed by my neighbor after I squished his pet bullfrog who had wandered into the street. I was on my bike. It was an accident, but the frog didn’t care. He said “Ribbet!” three times and no one has noticed me since.
I tapped Greg the bartender on the shoulder.
“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
I’d heard that signs might lead somewhere terrible but you should follow them anyway. But tonight didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a successful conversation with anyone but my mother in nearly a month. Or maybe it was the mild and constant nausea I felt since my father disappeared.
At that moment the jukebox played the song “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, a song of great spiritual power, so I decided to follow the signs.
I said hello to the redhead but of course she didn’t notice. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “ are you talking to me?”
Her name was Jo Anna. She smoked Kools and offered me one, said she liked my hairdo.
“My mother curls my hair once a month.”
“You shouldn’t tell people things like that.” Jo Anna pulled out a picture of a smiling woman in a short yellow dress. “Have you seen this girl?”
“Are you a bounty hunter or something?”
“No. This is my sister Marilyn. She ran away two years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Got a lead she was down this way. Think you could help me find her?”
That felt like a quest. Quests are how curses are broken. I was getting pretty desperate out here.
“Well? Can you help me?” Her eyes were soft brown, the color of a newborn deer.
“I think I know a place where we could look.”
Jo Anna called a cab and I took her to the Slops.
The Slops were an old neighborhood where millionaires lived in the forties. A development company bought the Slops a decade ago and gutted all the buildings and then went bankrupt. Cops didn’t come to the Slops, but broke and lonely people did. Late at night, the Slops were overflowing with them.
A woman in a leopard-print leotard set up a snare drum on a street corner. A man beside her played the saxophone. I hate the saxophone.
I tapped Byron Knight on the shoulder. Byron ran the cee-lo game. He was a popular guy, knew everybody in the Slops, even the ones with the knives and missing fingers.
“What are you doing down here?” He slapped me on the back because I’d saved his pet albino rat from a dog once.
“We’re looking for this girl. Her name’s Marilyn.”
I handed him the picture of Jo Anna’s sister.
“It’s a couple of years old,” Jo Anna said. “I doubt she’s changed much.”
He took the photo and studied it.
“I know her. That’s Lord Chaney’s girl. Works at the Double Time.”
Jo Anna hugged me. She said to take her to Lord Chaney right now.
I told her it wasn’t that simple.
Lord Chaney was a wrathful man. He owned a bar called the Double Time near the outskirts of the Slops. They said he could read crow bones and lit black candles at midnight. They said he had concubines. They said he had killed so many men their ghosts lined up outside his door, weeping and wailing and waiting on their turn to haunt him.
I was scared, but this was a quest. You have to be scared for a quest, otherwise it’s impossible to be brave.
The Double Time was the last bar in the farthest reaches of the Slops, where men with guns rode slow down neighborhood streets and everyone was afraid. It was housed in an old clothing shop from the thirties. Half the mannequins were still there, defaced and painted up. Some looked like clowns and some looked like little girls.
There was a pool table with a blood spot in the middle of it. One guy didn’t have any hands. He held the cue between two nubs. A girl with a scar on her lip winked at Jo Anna. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a broken heart. The mannequins stood among the people like quiet angels.
“This place doesn’t feel right,” said Jo Anna.
“That’s because it isn’t.”
Jo Anna spotted her sister first. She had long pigtails down to her waist. Her arms were covered in illustrations, redbirds and stars and a dead tree with roots that spread down into her shirt. She had a hunting knife in her back pocket and was pregnant, a tray of beers balanced on the top of her belly.
“Marilyn?” said Jo Anna.
Her sister’s eyes squinted then got real big. She dropped her tray and drinks went everywhere and I tried to clean up the mess. The sisters embraced.
Marilyn bent down, her face crinkled up all angry and whispered at me, “Get her out of here!”
“We’re not leaving without you. We’re on a quest.”
“Meet me out back,” said Marilyn, and ran behind a curtain to the back of the bar.
I took Jo Anna by the arm. She was trembling.
“We got to save her.”
Jo Anna and I went outside and waited. I thought Marilyn wasn’t going to come. I thought she’d bring Lord Chaney and bad men with guns. I thought we’d get carved up and dragged a mile down the blacktop.
But when Marilyn came out the back of the Double Time, she came alone. Marilyn and Jo Anna hugged each other. They cried. There was good in the world and I was a part of it.
I grabbed Jo Anna by the hand.
“Let’s hustle.”
It was slow-going with Marilyn’s belly and all. I kept looking around for Lord Chaney. A crow flew right by my head, perhaps a sign. Everywhere was a dark alley for someone to jump out of. All the lonesome people with their blankets watched us from behind dark windows. But we got back among the people. I thought we’d be safe there. I listened to Jo Anna and Marilyn become sisters again. I bought us corn dogs from 7-11.
Then I felt a pair of eyes on me. My left elbow hurt.
Up walked a stray orange cat. I knew what that meant. The music quieted down and everyone perked their ears. A man stepped into the light. He had long curly hair down to his shoulders. He had an earring made out of a finger. It was Lord Chaney. He grinned, four teeth left in his mouth.
“Marilyn, honey? I think you better be coming back with me.”
“She ain’t yours,” I said.
“That a fact?” Lord Chaney said to her. “You ain’t happy with me, here in the Slops? Living like a queen?”
“Feel more like a slave,” said Marilyn.
Lord Chaney doubled over laughing. “Oh Lord, she feels like a slave. I could’ve made her my slave but I didn’t. Hell no. I made her my wife. And she can’t leave me. You hear that?” He grabbed Marilyn by a pigtail. “You can’t leave me.” He bit her on the ear.
“It’s true.” Marilyn pulled up her pants leg and showed us the tattoo. It was a fishhook with a circle around it and an Egyptian eye in the middle. Done with a knife. It meant she was his. Those were the rules.
“Plus you got our son in your belly there. You got a piece of me living inside you for always. Only thing that can set you free is death,” said Lord Chaney. “I know you’re brave, but you ain’t brave enough for that.”
I wasn’t afraid of dying, only worried about my mother and her fish back in our apartment. I felt my pocketknife. It was green. I won it by throwing rings around a bottle at the fair.
“Fuck it,” I said.
I jumped at Lord Chaney. But Lord Chaney had the Twitchy Eye, and he noticed everything. Also he was quick, and his knife was bigger. He stuck it right in my belly.
“Too slow,” said Lord Chaney, while I bled on his shoes. It was like we had signed a contract. Byron Knight and an old man were watching us. They were witnesses. Byron bowed his head. Lord Chaney walked away, jingling the change in his pocket. Jo Anna cried.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Am I going to die?”
“I didn’t mean for you to.”
“When I’m gone, take me home to my mother.”
The band struck up a song. An old woman prayed to Jesus. I thought of my mom making grilled tilapia and talking to my dad’s empty chair. People gathered around me, shaking tambourines, singing. Looking right at me. The curse was broken. I was so happy. The blood was all over the pavement. Jo Anna cried and her tears fell in my mouth.
It was all for me.
Jimmy Cajoleas is from Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.