The Devil Take the Blues--Chapter 21

Chapter 21

?Beatrice

A week here and gone. A week of tending the store, running errands with Frank, and listening to his stories by the fire each night. We had worked out a sort of truce between us. I did not understand why he stuck around—the Axeman was gone, and so our bargain should have been finished. He claimed that he was having too much fun recording music to leave. However, as I learned, he was not the Axeman, and as time went by, I gradually believed him that he did not delight in taking my sister’s soul. Her date would have been set for ten days hence, but I did not worry about that now.

So each night, after he had recorded a song or two with the next hopeful, we sat by the fire and he spun stories as intricate as Scheherazade’s. His time in the golden, sun-drenched Caribbean with its turquoise seas to the frozen, wild tundra of the arctic, down in the deepest jungles where wild beasts roamed. From Africa with its wild weather to China and India with their magnificent temple. How he met shamans, Sherpas, and sheepherders; his time in the darkest parts of the sky, traipsing through the blackness of space, into regions where light could not escape. (“Tickles your innards,” he said of the last one.)

Sometimes, we spent an evening simply sitting together and reading by the fire, which was far more pleasant than I imagined. His presence no longer felt like an intrusion into my life, and I was no longer quite so resentful of him. My heart had softened, step by step, story by story.

And slowly, like a dream, or perhaps the fabrication of a tapestry, he began to awaken my curiosity and wonder for the world outside of Azoma. During these quiet times, I began to believe that we could be friends. But always, in the back of my mind, I thought of Agnes.

Just as now, I thought of her. Perhaps my powers of conjuring had become stronger since summoning Frank, but my sister materialized in my store.

Relief was honey on my tongue. She still lived; she still breathed. She was still warm. But a heaviness clouded her. Dark storm clouds hung under her eyes. A paleness to her skin that I had not noticed before. A thinness to her wrists that made her bones stick out.

But when did we ever really notice suffering, when our own problems pressed on our hearts? Did we ever want to help people or just ease our own worry? All I saw was my sister, alive. That was enough.

“Agnes!” I came around the corner so quickly that I hit the edge with my hip. Pain blossomed in my side, but it might as well have been like throwing a firecracker at a freight train for all I noticed it.

She browsed the canned goods and glanced my way. “Mornin,’” she mumbled.

I wrapped my arms around her, but she flinched.

“Did I hurt you?” I asked, looking down to see if I stepped on her feet accidentally.

“No.” She shrugged me off. Why was there a brick wall around her?

I opened my arms to hug her again, but she hesitated. That hesitation was like a physical blow to my chest. “Agnes, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just saw you the other day. Not like we don’t see each other every spare moment in our lives.” She swept her shopping sack around so that it crossed in front of her chest. “I just needed to get some beans, not get squeezed to death.” Walking over to the counter, she slapped some coins down, then turned back around. “I gotta get home.” She started walking toward the door.

I didn’t even bother to count the coins. “I’ll come with you. Walk you home.”

“You don’t have to.” She pushed past me and opened the door.

I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. “It’s no trouble. We can talk on the way. We haven’t talked in a couple of days.”

But Agnes simply strode away. She walked toward the woods, toward a bridge that separated the town from its environs. This was a different bridge than the one that had burned down the night Angelo…got caught in the rain.

“Agnes, wait!”

Into the woods I went. I ran so that I caught up with her. I touched her shoulder, and Agnes jumped nearly a foot in the air.

“Will you please just stop?” I demanded.

“No, you stop, Beatrice.” She whipped a strand of hair that sweat had plastered to her face. “You’re always hovering around me, checking in every moment. Just leave me alone, OK?”

The river roared nearby. The rope from the bridge creaked with age. Those were about the only sounds that made sense. Surely not what my sister was saying. I did not understand the words coming out of her mouth.

“Just come back to the store, we can have some iced tea, and—” I reached for her.

“Stop trying to control me!” She turned and stomped away.

*

I left the store for the rest of the day and went back to Frank’s house. As much as I wanted to rush to Agnes, her words stopped me.

Why had she pushed me away? What had I done? What was my crime? Was it loving her too much, caring too much?

She didn’t realize that I was trying to protect her, that that was all I had ever wanted. Something was wrong with Agnes. Where was my sweet sister?

When Frank returned home, I met him at the door. As soon as I laid eyes on him, such an upwelling, a surge of emotion took hold of me that I could scarcely breathe in its intensity.

“Thank you for saving her,” I said.

“I did no such thing.” For once, Frank did not smile.

“You did. You helped me kill him. The Axeman.”

He shook his head. “I stayed within the confines of the rules. All I did was make the conditions right for you.”

When I looked into his eyes, I did not see an eternal being, an itinerant wanderer who loved music more than human souls; I did not see someone who dabbled in time and the affairs of men. I only saw a man.

I pushed Frank against the wall of our house. My lips crashed into his with a force I didn’t recognize. Our mouths opened at the same time, our tongues twining around each other, heat rising from the floor.

He whipped around me, so that my back was now against the wall and pressed himself against me. I wrapped my legs around him, didn’t care that it was not exactly what I wanted, not exactly who I wanted. I buried his face so far beneath kisses and relief and gratitude and sheer force of will. The body had wisdom, sometimes. The body possessed a deep fount of knowledge.

But this was not wisdom.

I pushed him gently off me, but kept my eyes locked with his as I took his hand. Led us to his bedroom, where I had not set foot in since I had married him.

We shut the door behind us, out of habit, privacy, instinctual.

Slowly, I unbuttoned his shirt, button by ivory button. He lifted my mouth again to meet his. Our breaths mixed and kissing him felt like he was stealing part of my soul. But was that not love?

I stripped him of his shirt, so that he the white wifebeater was revealed. He kissed me hungrily, probing, searching.

“I want you.”

“I know.”

I undid his belt. Placed my hand on the button just below his navel.

“No more distractions,” he muttered.

I stopped. “What do you mean?” I searched his face for answers.

He only closed his eyes, leaning toward me. “Nothing. No sisters. No piano players. Just us.”

He bent to kiss me once again, but I placed a hand on his chest. “No piano players? Do you mean Angelo?”

“No.”

The lamp in his room illuminated his eyes. He said that he was adept at looking for lies; now, I was too. I had learned from the best.

“Frank.”

He wiped his face with one hand. “He’s gone now, what does it matter?”

Too quick to shrug it off.

“What did you do?” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Beatrice, I—” He reached for my hand, but I snatched it away.

“What did you do?”

“I kept my end of the bargain!”

The gas light sputtered. Branches scraped at the window.

Frank swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He spoke more softly than before. “I kept my end of the bargain. He wanted to be famous, so I made him famous. I had a connection with a recording studio in New York. So he left.”

It started in my toes. The anger. It pulled up the energy from the very earth, the core, where flame and metal spin and create their own field. I drew on the power of land, feeling it deep in my bones. It radiated through my chest, my arms. This was something so much deeper than fury. I didn’t shake. My heart didn’t beat faster. I was absolutely calm.

I didn’t understand it. Angelo should have meant nothing to me. But he did. Only at that moment did I realize how much I wanted him, how much I tried to fill the void with other things.

“You made a bargain with him? Why?” I was barbed wire and razorblades. I was teeth and claws and rusty nails. I was lightning and heart attacks.

Frank yanked his shirt from the floor. “He made it of his own free will. I happened to save him from those f—” He took a breath. “From those cowards who attacked you in your home. He needed help, and I needed a musician.” Once he replaced his belt through the loops, he added, “Beatrice, I did not condemn him to an untimely death. On this, you may trust me.”

“Right.”

I needed to move. I needed to throw something. Instead, I asked, “Why were they there?”

Frank blinked. A tell. “What?”

“Why. Were. They. There. At my house. Sheriff Beau and his pawns. How did they know we were there, together?”

“Well, I certainly did not tell them.” He threw up his hands. “Am I at fault if some wannabe Sheriff got drunk off whiskey in the woods and happened to spy you?”

I glared at him. “Where did Johnny get the whiskey? You bought some at the store.”

“I didn’t give it to him.”

Frank and I stood toe to toe. Then he walked around me.

“And no sisters? What do you mean?” My blood still sang in my ears. “My sister’s killer is dead.”

He slumped onto the bed. “Beatrice, you said you wanted to find the Axeman. Not your sister’s killer—”

I couldn’t hear any more. I turned, not saying goodbye.

And ran.

I ran out of the house, down the lane. Ran across town. Ran until my chest ached, my heart hurt with the power of blood, instead of the power of pain. Anguish. Despair. If I ran, I couldn’t cry. If I ran, I didn’t have to look back. My Daddy always told me that in a race, you never looked back.

I gave up. If Frank told me that Agnes was fated to die, well.

Weren’t we all?

I had tried. I had tried, given everything I had. Fought with every breath, and yet we would still both perish. But that was how life was. You lived until you didn’t. You breathed until you couldn’t. Everyone died. Everyone would eventually go. Wasn’t it better this way, that we would get less time with each other? So that it would hurt less? If it hurt this much to think about her death in eighteen years, what would it be like in forty, fifty, or sixty? I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I couldn’t bear it now.

And I could not watch my sister die.

So I chose not to.

If she wanted to push me away, let her. If Frank wanted to lie to me, let him. The only person I wanted to see in the world was Angelo. And I knew where to find him.

I ran to the train station. Bought a one-way ticket to New York.

And got the hell outta Louisiana.