Jed’s Reunion

By: Matt Spencer
September 5, 2008

Jed steps through the door, sees so many faces that are hard, withered, tired, desperate, smells so much strong alcohol that it might be the cancer ward. But the antiseptic overhead lights splash on faded wood instead of white, the alcohol is for drinking instead of rubbing, and the smoke causing the cancer is still thick in the air, so it’s a bar instead of a hospital. He walks among the rednecks filling the place, sees he’s the only black man, reminds himself that this is Vermont, that these are northern rednecks. So no one will say shit, probably won’t give a flying fuck. If he gets in a fight, someone might throw around the word nigger and he might throw around the word honkie. He doesn’t plan to start trouble, though. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone but the old crone behind the bar. So he ignores the weathered conversations, ignores the jukebox ’til a Kris Kristopherson song he likes starts playing. He ignores the cold gunmetal against his ass, tucked in his jeans beneath his leather jacket, ’til he has to shift around it so he can sit comfortably on the stool.

“What’ll you have, sweetie?” asks the old crone in a voice so thick with smoke and barbwire, Jed’s surprised blood and shrapnel doesn’t spray in his face.

“Whatever’s cheapest on draft,” says Jed, a skinny mulatto man of average height who always comes across as impossibly tall and dark and hulking. It has something to do with his shaggy mane and beard, with his green eyes that always seem on fire no matter how calm he feels.

The crone sets Jed’s beer in front of him and the white girl who just sat next to him – the leather-skinned white womanwho somehow still looks like a girl – says, “Jed?”

“Yeah?”

Her yellow smile stretches and her blue eyes widen and glitter. Her hair’s still lush and wavy as ever no matter how many gray strands he spots. He gulps his beer fast to kill the rising nausea. “I thought it was you,” she sighs. “I was comin’ out of the Common Ground, saw a black man walkin’ towards this place…”

“Glad to know I have some distinguishing features.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t tell me you’ve gone all sensitive and such. I think that’s what I always loved about you… You were always such an insensitive bastard, not like them pussy hippies.”

“You came from the Common Ground. Obviously you still like those hippies OK.” Yeah, he remembers her telling him what an insensitive prick he was, back when they were teenagers. Only man around with the balls to leave my pussy sore, she said once, and he’s glad she doesn’t repeat it now.

“Oh, I don’t hang out with ’em. I was goin’ to see someone, settin’ up an appointment.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“Look Jed, I’m wearin’ the scarf you gave me. I still have it. I came out of the Common Ground, saw you walkin’, and I just knew you’d come in here. So I just knew I had to let you see me with your scarf on, so I ran all the way home for it.”

“All the way home, huh.”

“Oh, my apartment’s just a couple blocks from here.”

“Nice of you to make the effort, though. It still looks good on you. How’s Phelps?”

“I ain’t seen him in years.”

He can tell she’s lying, but that doesn’t mean she can tell him where Phelps is. In fact he’s almost sure she can’t, so he doesn’t press the issue either way. “How’ve you been, Brigid?”

“Bad,” she sighs casually, like she means the last few days and not the years it’s been since they saw each other. She gets her drink, lights two smokes and passes one his way without him having to ask. “I hear you have a wife and a kid.”

“How’d you hear that?” Jed draws on the cigarette, ignoring the pain in his gut and sides, telling him he’s speeding up his own slow suicide.

“I ain’t fallen out with everyone you still talk to sometimes,” she says.

“That’s good to know.”

“So is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That you got a wife and kid.”

“I got a kid. I’m not married to the woman. I stay with ’em when I’m not out and about on business.”

“So you’re out and about on business now?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“I’m trying to catch up with Phelps, actually.”

“You got business with Phelps? What kind?”

“The kind of business Phelps is into.” This could mean all sorts of things, none of them good.

She laughs weakly. “And here I thought you might have ended up being the upstanding citizen out of the three of us.”

“I guess I am, sometimes.”

Her voice drops to a whisper. “It got to do with the tower?”

“Yeah,” he says in a tone designed to tell her they’re not having that conversation here, no matter how quiet she keeps it.

“So would she mind if I kissed you?”

Jed shrugs, almost lets himself smile. “Like I said, I ain’t married to her.”

Brigid Robinson kisses Jed Chandler very close to his mouth, and he reminds himself he’s not in the rural south, that the rednecks who see the kiss won’t lynch him for it. It shouldn’t even register as an issue. Didn’t he spend enough of his teenage years here? Has he really spent so much time back in the bigoted world of his roots? For a moment he thinks the bar’s warmth has chased away the chill he carried in, and he almost shifts to kiss her back. Then someone else opens the door to come in or go out, a wind gust hits him, the pain in his guts stabs at him, and he keeps staring at the shelf of liquor bottles on the back wall. For some reason he hopes she doesn’t see him flinch. He finishes his beer and orders another.

“I like seein’ you again, Jed, even if you are an even colder bastard than ever. I see Phelps, want me to tell him you’re lookin’ for him?”

“No.”

“So it’s like that, huh.”

“Yeah. Are you gonna tell him?”

“You said not to, so I won’t.” Her eyes drop, but he still believes her.

Jed Chandler drinks several more beers with Brigid Robinson, chewing on all the old times they can stand to talk about, then he pays and goes out to the streets to ask more questions. No one has answers that’ll do any good, so he walks back towards the bus station. He buys a ticket to the next town on his list, the next place in Vermont where Phelps might be. His rotting guts rip at him from the inside outward, and it’s something to focus on besides memories of being a teenager in Brattleboro, Vermont, memories of him and Brigid and Phelps, of the Bloody Tower on the hill in the woods. Phelps always went on and on about the Bloody Tower. It was one of the first conversations Jed remembers after his parents moved him here. Plenty of people told him the story of the structure. Back at the turn of the century, the owners of the local mental institution had the inmates build it, thought the hard day’s work of regular manual labor would do the crazy people some good. So the medieval-style stone tower rose as a lookout point, and people went up into it to use it for that purpose. Then the inmates started sneaking out at night and jumping from the top. So the owners of the institution padlocked the door. In the following decades, the spot became a gathering point for local kids to smoke up and make out. Local kids like Jed, Brigid, and Phelps. Some people say the ghosts of all those suicidal crazy people still haunt the place. Phelps had even wilder ideas.

“Vampires live in there,” Phelps once told Jed with wide eyes. “Me and Beaver and Brigid and some other kids were gonna go up there last Halloween, for a vampire hunt.”

“A vampire hunt? What do you mean?”

“I mean with wooden stakes and shit! I tell you, man, they’re all over this town! You know those top floors on all the apartment buildings on Main Street, the real dark, expensive ones that no one goes up to? Vampires live there, man. I’ve seen ’em through the windows at night. And I’ve talked to dudes who’ve been up there, dudes who’ve seen… other shit. But it’s the tower where they really hang out, where the center of it is. We had bolt cutters and everything, but Brigid got scared, then the cops started harassing us on the way, and that plan kind of fell through.”

Jed wasn’t sure why Phelps and the others hadn’t just taken a rain check. Phelps didn’t say the cops took away the bolt cutters. Jed didn’t believe in vampires, but there were plenty of other holes he could have poked in the story. From what he remembered of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, wasn’t it kind of stupid to go on a vampire hunt by night, on Halloween no less? It didn’t matter, or so it turned out. It was early summer by the time Phelps got it in his head to go on another vampire hunt at the tower. He had bolt cutters again, and this time it was only Brigid and Jed going with him. It wasn’t long after all those murders shook up the town, and maybe Phelps blamed that on vampires. They cut the padlock and didn’t find any vampires inside. They didn’t find anything you’d expect by looking at the outside of the tower. The inside was bigger than the outside, and there were no stairs leading to the top. No, there were stairs leading down… and down, and down, and down…

Jed can’t recall the specific look of any of the Hieroglyphs he saw by the light of the torches lining the sandstone walls of that staircase, and he doesn’t want to. He’d finished disbelieving his own senses by the time they reached the bottom, and he still wants that idea back more than anything. He’s spent nights keeping himself awake, so afraid he’ll dream of it then wake up remembering everything. What he does remember is the river Styx spreading blackly outward from the sandstone dock. It had to be the river Styx, and Jed had never believed in that any more than he did in vampires. But what else could it have been? Except it wasn’t a river, but a whole ocean of nothingness spreading out beneath the endless underground night. Then came the splash of heavy oars, pulling a boat closer and closer through the murk. Jed thinks he almost saw the boat, saw the pale, slender figure of the oarsman drawing closer. That’s when he and his friends screamed and ran back up the stairs, out through the doors that were supposed to have led into the tower to the vampires, back into the sunlight of the summer Vermont forest. They never looked back as they ran out of that forest. When Jed went back to the tower a week later, a new padlock had been put on. Looking at the cylindrical structure, he’d felt sure that should the door have opened, he’d have found nothing but a winding staircase leading up to the top where the crazy people used to jump to their death.

Brattleboro slipped farther and farther through Jed’s memories over the years. Then he’d been sitting outside the coffee shop in Nashville, the ex-rays from the doctor’s office fresh in his mind. The pale man with short-clipped blonde hair, dressed in plain hemp clothes, sat across from him and started asking about Brattleboro. At first Jed thought the guy was some kind of neo-nazi, but his manners were too refined for that. And neo-nazi or not, how’d the guy know his name? The FBI, maybe? No, that didn’t wash either. Jed looked at the porcelain skin and the liquid movements, and he wondered for a second if this was one of Phelps’s vampires after all. The man asked about Phelps, and he asked about Brigid. And he asked about the tower, and what the three of them had seen as teenagers when they’d cut the bolts.

“Well,” said the pale blonde man once Jed told what he remembered, “sounds like a really fucked up drug experience, if you ask me.”

“I’d pretty much written it off as such,” Jed said.

“No you hadn’t. So how many people did you tell?”

“None, really. If I’ve ever described it to anyone, I told ’em it was a really weird drug experience, like you said.”

The pale blond man studied Jed’s face and said, “I believe you. So what about your friends?”

“Brigid would never have told anyone. Not even me or Phelps could get her to talk about it back then.”

“I believe you. So what about Phelps?”

“Well, he stopped going on about Brattleboro being infested with vampires after that. For a while, he didn’t say anything. We sort of stopped hanging out with each other. I’d see him around, and more and more he was hanging out with these punk kids who tried to be inner-city gangbangers and shit. I heard about him through Brigid. She said he was selling drugs, first just weed and stuff, then harder shit. Hell, I’d known there was stuff like that in Brattleboro, but not nearly to the degree I was hearing about from Brigid. It was weird! Shit, you’d think those kids were trying to build their own little Mafia in the town instead of just being little wannabe-gangbangers. Anyway, Brigid was hanging out more and more with those little punks, so I hung out less and less with her. It wasn’t that I was worried for myself particularly. It was just too sad to watch. Then I heard rumors about Phelps, raving how the town was full of portals to other dimensions, portals to hell, shit like that. It was pretty messed up. I tried not to listen. I left for college not long afterwards.”

“Do you stay in touch with many people from this town? This Brattleboro?”

“Not really. There are a few people I hear from occasionally.”

“Brigid?”

“No,” Jed said hurriedly.

“Phelps?”

“Not really, no. Sometimes old friends will call me, and they’ll mention him. They say he’s been all over the place, but apparently not out of the state much. And he’s been into all sorts of hardcore crime. I think he’s been in and out of jail a few times. They say he gets crazier and crazier.”

“Do they say anymore about his wild stories?”

“No.”

“They will soon. Things will begin to happen throughout the world that will make your old friend Phelps remember what the three of you saw when you cut the padlock and went underground. It’ll click together in his head in new ways. He’ll rave to people about what he saw. He’ll rave about things he didn’t know he knew. Those of my coterie can’t have that happen, not yet.”

Jed rolled his eyes. “Whatever. What the fuck do you – what do the people of your coterie… Jesus fuckin’ Christ… – want me to do about it?”

“We want you to find your friend Phelps for us, and kill him.”

“Right. Whatever.”

“If you don’t find your friend Phelps and kill him, we’ll find your friend Brigid and kill her.”

Jed remembers going cold, cold as this New England air he’s rediscovered since. “You’re full of shit. How you expect to track down Brigid?”

“We tracked you down.”

“So why don’t you track down Phelps yourself?”

“We found you first. You’re more convenient.”

“Man, so who the fuck are you with, anyway?”

The pale blonde man sighed. “I don’t see the point in telling a nigger like you. You’ll all be dead soon anyway, and I don’t just mean the niggers. I mean the whites, the blacks, the yellows, the reds, all you people. But maybe not you. Maybe not your old friend Brigid. Maybe not even your woman and your child, if you do what we say. All you need to know is, the world you think is yours belongs to those of my coterie. Or it will, once we’ve purged it of the devils that hounded us across the great dark ocean on whose banks you stood beneath the tower. The gods of your legends are tame reflections of the gods of my people, and the true gods have promised your world to us once we’ve rid it of its demons. The point is, before long, your friend Phelps will be inspired to start raving again about what he’s seen. And it’ll be before it’s convenient for us, before it can stop making a difference. If you kill him before then, maybe it’ll give you and your loved ones a chance. Maybe it won’t. As I’ve said, you and your loved ones can take your chances, or I can kill you now and my people will have the extra hassle of doing all that work. We’ve done the necessary work to find you. We can do more.”

So here Jed waits for the bus, shivering so bad he thinks the seams of his leather jacket might shake loose and leave him naked against the snow. He tugs the jacket closer around him, and the bus runs late. Maybe he’ll go get a hotel room. The ticket will be good for the next bus tomorrow, no matter what schedule the printed details specify. He’s learned that from lots of bus travel in his searching. A long rusty Impala pulls into the lot and the window rolls down.

“Aw no, Jed, you can’t be leavin’ town so quick, not when you just came back.”

     Jed finally smiles at Brigid. No, he guesses he can’t. He doesn’t see any pale blonde men around. And if he does, well, he has the gun the one in the Nashville coffee shop gave him. So they drive back through the thick of town, park behind a dilapidated building not far from the bar where they met earlier. He follows her up the narrow, dry-rotting staircase, and decides this must be the new Brattleboro crackhouse. Phelps used to live in the old Brattleboro crackhouse, right next to the bar, before it was torn down and a parking garage was built in its place. Jed and Brigid talk about the old days, then they act like it was still the old days, not talking about vampires or cursed towers, but not keeping their clothes on any better for it. All the exertion hurts his sides and his guts like it never used to. He hopes she doesn’t notice, hopes she thinks he’s the same mean, rough bastard she fell in love with in high school, rough bastard who loved her and made her sore like no other guy could, before they found the river Styx together.

     Afterwards she says, “Some part of me hopes you never fuck her quite like that, Jed.”

     “Who?”

     “Your baby’s mom.”

     “No, I don’t guess I ever have.” He notices her date book open on the nightstand, sees the words due date written next to the initials PT. “You need me to leave you any cash, honey?”

     “No, not you, Jed. It’s just nice to feel you naked next to me again.”

     “Yeah, I guess,” he says, not thinking he’ll live long enough to pass any diseases he’s caught from her onto his baby’s mom. Hell, he never expected to get laid again before checking out, particularly after his meeting with the pale blonde man in the coffee shop. He never even cheated on his woman ’til tonight, not that it matters much now.

Jed sleeps a while, before Brigid shakes him awake. “You’d better go, Jed.” Jed gets dressed and takes a thick stack of bills from his pocket. “You don’t need to, honey,” she says.

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

She presses his fingers closed around the money and edges them gently back towards his pocket. “Just go quick.”

Jed walks down the narrow stairs and bumps into a gangly, wild-haired white boy with bulging veins all over his body. “Hey nigger,” says the man covered in bulging veins, “what you doin’ here?”

Jed resists the urge to break the man’s neck. “Visiting an old ladyfriend of mine.”

“She don’t live in room 1138, do she, nigger?”

Jed sizes up this spindly fuck and says, “Actually she does.”

The spindly fuck goes rigid. “Then you better have some money for me, asshole. Or she better.”

Jed’s already reaching for the waistline of his jeans under the back of his jacket. “I didn’t leave her any, and you ain’t gettin’ none either.”

The spindly asshole honkie has also been reaching for a weapon, and he draws it quicker than Jed can pull his gun. Jed never gets used to how quick these paranoid crackheads can be. He spills off the top step into the asshole honkie and they bounce together down a flight of steps before his gun goes off into the man’s heart.

“Goddamnit, Phelps,” Jed rasps as the man jerks and twitches to a stop beneath him, “how the hell did you and her get to this point together?”

Phelps’s switchblade slides out of Jed’s cancerous left lung, and Jed guesses there’d be no point in the question even if Phelps were alive to answer. It doesn’t matter to a man trying harder and harder to pull in air but only pushing out blood. Nor does it matter why he couldn’t find Phelps ’til now. For all he knows, people didn’t even know Phelps by his real name anymore. They never would have gotten out, either of them, and they never would have turned into stoner hippies. And even if there were ever other options, what good could either of them have taken from it? Jed guesses he thought better of himself. That’s why he bothered to leave.

At the top of the stairs, Brigid comes out of her room and starts screaming. At least she’ll never have to scream for the pale blonde man in the Nashville coffee shop, never have to scream for whatever was coming out of the darkness of the Styx beneath the Bloody Tower. At least Jed doesn’t think so, hopes not, but everything’s dissolving into darkness and agony, so he’s not making sense of much. At the end of all this bullshit, it’s the best thought he can find.