Needles & Sins (18 page)

As the funeral parlor locked its doors, I realized that all that I had now of him was a piece of glass and the empty shell of a house. And even that would soon be denied, once the family sold it. Even his ashes wouldn’t remain; those would be shipped north for burial once the cremation was complete.

I have to laugh as I think of the reactions in those first hours after his death. The phone calls. The tears. The shock. The first hurried clearing of the house. When his sister arrived late in the afternoon from up north, she barely said a word to me, but instead performed a silent reconnaissance of the house. She peeked into all the cupboards, knelt to peer under the couch and felt between his mattress and box spring. Finally, she got up the nerve to just ask.

“The guns, the knives…?”

“He left me instructions,” I said. “I disposed of them all.”

A troubled smile, and a nod. One less detail for her to worry about. The last thing the family needed at this stage was police interest in Mac’s unlicensed hobbies.

If she’d only known of the one important thing I had yet to dispose of. But, I suppose, she wouldn’t have understood. Hell, five years ago I wouldn’t have understood. Just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been ready.

It’s time now though. For me. I have to be ready.

In his bedroom, I shove aside the ancient metal frame of his single bed, and with a screwdriver pry up the loose board beneath. There’s an echo of a child’s scream as I lift out the small wooden box buried there, under the dead man’s bed. Is the echo from the children outside, down the block? Or is it from the delicately filigreed box, from the faces peeking out there amid the slim vines and trees embossed in its lid? It too, had lacked for a funeral.

I replace the board and the bed, and returned to the kitchen. On the strangely clean table, I lay them out. One violent glass frame after another. They are small things that the box divulges. Country housewives hang similar glass shards from strings above their windows to catch and bend the sun.

Mac used them to catch and bend dreams.

Bad ones.

Nightmares.

I spread the myriad shards of mottled glass until the entire table was covered. The fake woodgrain surface came alive with twisting, writhing shades of flame, of blackness, of blood. Reaching to the middle, I lifted one that I recognize as mine. An ancient face stared back at me through the slender trap of glass. An old man, by the look, and gentle. But I knew better. This father figure was a haunt who’d chased me through back alleys in the night, all teeth and black nails and rusted razorblades thirsting for my neck. It had been years since he’d plagued my sleep. Mac had trapped him here, along with so many others.

There was the malformed, hideous child that his sister had never borne. There was the grisly red-smeared traffic accident that once woke his niece up nearly every night, shaking and sweating with fear and grabbing at her belly to see if it was still whole. There was the nephew’s family dog, dragging its twisted body away from the road, trailing its lifeblood and back legs behind it. And there was his other sister’s late husband, a cold thin greying man with a tight fist that beat and beat and then stopped, as his leg sprang to motion, dealing out his love in sharp hard blows to the ribs. Monsters and madmen and murder.

Hard dreams to handle.

These visions and so many more Mac had captured and held from his family and friends over the years, until his box was full and his power stretched thin as an old man’s skin.

Only his will held these dreams here, and that will was gone now. Already some of the dreams had discovered that the cage that had bound them for so many years was gone, and I could see the shape and color of the woodgrain pattern through the clear glass they’d left behind. As I surveyed Mac’s collection, his life’s work, I began to cry. It wasn’t the emphysema, or the Old Milwaukee, or the cigarettes that had killed him.

It was the dreams.

Wiping the water from my face, I hefted the screwdriver and considered. The dreams would escape, no matter what I did. Dreams can’t be killed; can only be stopped for a while. Mac had taught me this: dreams are forever.

But if they can be trapped, can they be maimed? I wondered. Hobbled?

I looked down at the table and saw a miniature Ginny, being raped after hours at The Last Chance by a thug with long black hair.

“No,” I cried, and brought the heavy end of the tool down to crush that vision. It shattered and sent other dreams flying off the table to crack and litter the floor. In the air, a scream, and a sparkle, and then … nothing. I repeated my attack on glass holding a monster intent on rending the limbs from a blond boy I recognized from last night’s wake; he’d grown at least a foot since this dream was captured. A slight flash, like the faintest slide of a prism, and he was gone. Again and again I brought the screwdriver down, shattering nightmares and adding crumpled dents to the fake grain of the plywood table. The air filled with the angry twinkle of freed visions, and I felt my heart stumble as they surrounded my head, a chattering, screeching host of untouchable teeth and talons. When all the glass was shattered, I spun about the room and swung the point of the tool like a dagger at the air, alive with nightmares and dream deaths. Tears ran down my cheeks as I begged the dreams to follow their catcher.

“Die,” I begged.

“Die.”

At last, the room was quiet, and I rose from where I’d fallen on the floor, surrounded by empty, clear shards of glass.

I left it all, and went back to my own room, far down in the shadows of the long hallway.

From beneath my own bed, I pulled out a single triangle of glass. I’d fashioned it from a broken attic window, smoothing its dangerous edges carefully with sandpaper and spit. It was the first talisman of my graduation from apprentice to dream catcher. I lay back on the bed, wondering how I could ever be as strong as Mac, to steal and seal so many dark visions. It was up to me now to carry on his work, to lighten lives of 3 a.m. heartache and sleep-stealing succubi.

I held up my one shard of glass to the light, and felt the weight of its pull on my heart.

Mac’s gasping face met my own.

“Let me die,” his dream whispered. “Please just let me go.”

Just days ago, I had captured this shade as he gasped and trembled in a troubled sleep.

Now I hold his dream to rue and remember forever.

It is the first weight in what will become my own collection of imprisoned dreams.

And I think that it will always be the heaviest.

—For Jerry

— | — | —

I read in an old book once that you can’t choose who you love and I guess it’s so. I want to have Trent as my own always, to have and to hold and all that, but the council goes and gives me Marta. Some nights she squirms beneath me like a handful of nightcrawlers, but I keep her pinned. It’s no effort really. I’m a half a horse heavier than her—she ain’t going nowhere. She lays there next to me afterward, mouth openin’ and closin’ like a fish caught up in the weeds by the tide. She complains then, squinting lids across black marbles in slits of pearl.

“You’re too heavy and you make me too hot,” she hisses, but I just smile.

“That’s my job—that’s the job of all men,” I retort. “Warmin’ the women.”

She always shuts up quick then and rolls away. I can’t wait ‘til her seed week is over and Trent can come back for the nights. This is the sixth month I’ve had her during her seed week and she’s yet to get big. If she don’t after this time, we can finally put her to some good use. Meanwhile, I just miss Trent. He never complains I’m too heavy. And he doesn’t squirm, he pushes right back. But I got to admit, the council is right. Women have to be got pregnant or there wouldn’t be no Trents. Fact is, there ain’t many women ‘round these days to get a child in. And most just can’t seem to hold a kid in their bellies.

I wish I could give Trent a son. We’ve talked, and he wants to give me one too. Maybe this time his trip will pay off.

Trent’s out now on a fuzzhunt to the city. Never know what kinda fuzz you find in those tumbledown ol’ towers. Council gave me one a couple years back that they found up there and after her first week I got to itching my own fuzz and pole like they was on fire. I thought it was cuz of all the pictures on her skin—dragons, snakes—boogie stuff. I went ‘fore the council and showed ’em what she done to me—got some whistles too when I dropped my pants. I didn’t pay the courtin’ no mind, just pointed ‘n’ screamed ’bout the fire she laid on me. I said it was probably poison from the pictures on her skin. Dragon bit me, I says, and council laughed. But doc say it’s just an itch, rub this on, and it goes away. But cuz o’ the itch, now I get the worst women—‘Last stop before the drop is Jack’s crop,’ the council says when they assign the women. Don’t wanna spread the itch. And Trent now got the same fire from me. Well, we give that fire right back to that picture girl, that’s for sure. The council sends more guys right back up to the city looking for more. Trouble is, most of the ones they bring back got something wrong with ’em. The skin falls off ’em when ya slap at ’em, they got sores ‘n’ walk crooked. And they never git kids.

Most o’ the guys ’re saying now we should stop the city runs. Ain’t none of us want to take the women home, and they don’t amount to nothing but a rash and a pile o’ bones in no time.

My fathers had it better. Twice as many women to warm back then. I remember waking up in the night and hearing both of them slapping and laughing as they worked on getting the latest ones’ bellies full. They liked to work at it together, then they’d leave the women all snuffling and whimpering and go back to their own room together. Had us a dozen brothers and sisters ‘fore the sick winter. That’s when it all started going bad. Council still shake their heads over it, blamin’ bad women, bad animals, somethin’. But the long ‘n’ short is, half o’ Boystown died that winter, all screamin’ mad, feverish and pus-y. Some had stuff fallin’ off of ’em by the time they died. And the ones that didn’t catch it ‘n’ die wish’d they did, ‘cause we had to live the winter on roots ‘n’ bark. Throwed out all the meat—didn’t know if it caused the sickness or not, but no one was chancing. Weren’t very many women to warm after that winter, I’m telling truth. Out o’ my three brothers and nine sisters, there was four of us left. Now there’s just me.

Last year 16 men—big chunk of our pop.—left Boystown. Said we was wasting cuz of the water or poison in ground. ‘The death and sickness is in the earth,’ they yelled and tried to make the council move Boystown. But we been here too long. My fathers and their fathers lived in this same house. Great grandads built it. Other men are the same. Their grandfathers and fathers went through the fires of hell to found our heaven, the council said. We ain’t leaving their legacy. Truth—I think the 16 were right and this ain’t no heaven, but I ain’t left neither. They didn’t take no women with them, said they’d find some that hadn’t had their jeans polluted. I thought they was stupid not to just wash their women once in a while, but hey, whatever. They’ll probably die out before they get a new town going. Maybe poison’s everywhere. We sure don’t find many women anymore.

««—»»

Trent came home the day I finished Marta’s seed week. Trent and I made some new fire that night, I tell you. And the council was licking each other’s balls too when Trent and his boys got back from the city—they not only found two scraggly girls, they fell upon a stash o’ canned vegetables. We haven’t had a good store of cans fer winter since I was a boy. Old ones say the cans from before is healthier ’n what we can grow now. I dunno ’bout that, but I remember they taste sweeter.

Council’s sending another group out tomorrow to bring back the rest of the stash. I’m going with this time, while Trent finishes a week with one of the women. She’s a lost cause, I know. She been through nine other guys and ain’t once got big.

And she stinks. Trent say it’s cuz o’ the sores on her, but I say she’s just rotten inside. “Wouldn’t even use her fer compost,” I say. She’d poison the garden.

He laughs and says, “Well that Marta ain’t much better, all teeth and ribs.”

I gotta agree.

««—»»

Two weeks it took us to get to the city. Scary lookin’ place, I tell you. My father Dan used to tell me people lived there who liked to do the deed with women, but I think he was just telling stories. What he don’t lie ’bout is that almost no one lives there now. Ones ya find there all seem to be broken and fallin’ apart, like the city itself.

We walk up to the first of the towers and they’s just leaning into each other like evil arches waiting to suck us in. Clouds hang over this place like that thick fog in the early morning; everything is grey—and quiet as death before dawn. Some buildings are tumbled flat on the ground, and we gotta walk for hours to git around ’em.

There’s rusted hunks o’ metal all around, things called cars, points out Mike, our leader. Cars used to go up and down these paths carrying people places, he say, but I’m not buyin’. With all the crevices goin’ cross the roads and all the trees and funny looking yellow creepy plants growing out of ’em, how would the cars be able to move? We gotta cut through ’em with knives sometimes just to pass single file.

We was in the city three days ‘fore we found the stash. Don’t know how Trent and his guys found it in the first place—we had to cut in and around half a dozen fallen buildings, and walk ‘neath a bunch that kissed each other in the sky and looked about like they was gonna come down on our heads before we got to the place. And then, it turns out, we gotta crawl through some thorny bushes into a flight of cracked and broken stairs. The stash is underground! Turns out, must a once been a food store here, and this big skyscraper crushed it into the dirt when it tumbled. But there’s still a bit of the old store not totally caved in that we kin get into through these stairs.