Currency of Souls

it?”

“Weren’t anybody’s.”

I sit. Gracie slides one of the glasses in front of me. I look at it, wondering how I’m sitting here in a bar that’s all but burned to the ground, about to enjoy a whiskey that doesn’t exist with a woman who died in the fire. It’s a couple of questions too many, so I figure maybe I can tackle them later. “For Blue Moon.” I sink the drink. It burns, scalds my throat on the way down and sends fumes rolling back up that I vent through my teeth. It’s real all right, and the conclusion forces me to accept that everything else is too, even as the fire dances around us.

Gracie slams her whiskey without effort, without expression, but that’s Gracie for you. Woman could get shot in the ass and wouldn’t blink.

“I’d be lying if I said I expected to see you here, Gracie.”

“Why’s that?”

“You died, didn’t you?”

“I did, but you know as well as I do that the only reason I spent every wakin’ hour behind this goddamn bar is because my daddy—may he burn in Hell—made sure I would. Last thing that sonofabitch said to me was “This is your place, Grace, and it always will be. Nowhere else right for you and you’re not right for anywhere else. Turns out it was more’n just words.”

“You don’t seem too put out by it all.”

“Wouldn’t be much point in that, now would there?”

“Guess not.”

She looks as tired as I feel, and that’s somewhat discouraging. If you don’t get find rest even in death, where can you find it?

“So that’s why you came back?” I ask, holding out my glass. She tips the bottle, holding back a little, but I figure she’s earned that right, being as how she got cooked and I didn’t. “To look after a bar that’s not here any more?” As I say it, I feel the solid wood beneath my elbows and shrug. “Or at least, shouldn’t be.”

Filling her own glass again, she says, “Lotta things none of you barflies knew about my daddy, Tom. He made promises and broke ’em just like every other fool on God’s green earth. Nothin’ special about that. But then there were the kinds of promises he made sure couldn’t be broken. Learned ways to guarantee that there’d be a price if anyone broke their word. Some tried, of course, and ended up ass-up out where you were puttin’ the whore. Others went about tryin’ to find a way to have the promises dissolved, with magic and other nonsense. But my daddy, he had a little ’ol ace up his sleeve in that wife of his.”

“Didn’t know he married again after your Momma died.”

“’Course you didn’t. No one did, and that’s how he liked it. His little secret. I was only eighteen at the time, and she—Lian Su—wasn’t much older. Said he won the little bitch in a poker game on one of his trips to the Orient, but figured out after too long that he’d been the one who’d come away a loser, on account of how she wasn’t…right. Saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see, made things happen, could hex people and the like. Could make people forget themselves, cause accidents, summon quarrels from calm. All manner of voodoo shit.”

“I’m not sure the Chinese have voodoo, Gracie.”

“Well whatever it was, it wasn’t natural, and it was dangerous. My daddy was afraid of her at first, tried to lock her away in the guest room upstairs, but given the kind of man he was, it was only a matter of time before he started figurin’ ways to benefit from her “gift”. Next thing, he’s winnin’ poker games all over the place and those few unfortunates brave enough to challenge him end up missin’, or worse.” She shrugs as if the recollection doesn’t bother her, but it’s plain to see it does.

“If he was winning poker games, what’d he do with the money? No offense but this place was never what you’d call fancy.”

“He was a gambler, Tom. Anything he made got lost just as quick.”

“Right.”

“So a year later, Lian Su gets a letter tellin’ her her Momma’s sick, and she begs my daddy to let her go home. Not quite sure why she felt the need to get his permission. Never could figure out what his hold on her was, considering she could probably abracadabra him into a possum if she had a mind to. Whatever it was, he agreed, but on the condition that he be allowed to go with her, I suppose to make sure she wasn’t scheming to leave him. I know he was secretly wonderin’ if maybe her momma was rich and left Lian a fortune that he could then add to his own pocket. Lian had no choice but to grant his wish. So they went. Before they did though, she did somethin’ to me at my father’s request. Made sure I stayed right here tendin’ to his shithole till he got back.”

She steps back from the bar, her gaze hard, and slips the strap of her dress off one shoulder, letting it slip down almost to the nipple of her right breast. If she’d done this earlier, I might have been grateful for the glimpse, and eager to see more, but there are two reasons why there isn’t anything even remotely sexual about this moment. First, there’s the obvious fact that she’s dead, and as much as I was attracted to her in life, that’s a line even I won’t cross. Secondly, there’s some kind of symbol branded into the flesh of that breast, a large ugly pink thing that looks like a couple of wigwams behind a crooked fence trapped inside a square. Hovering above the whole mess is a couple of rough Japanese or Chinese symbols.

“What’s it mean?”

She shakes her head, tugs the strap back onto her slim shoulder, and I’m somewhat disturbed to note how hard her nipples are beneath the material, and how harder still it is for me to ignore the fact. “I don’t know, but it’s how he kept me here,” she says. “S’why I’m still here. Night before he took off, he tied me down, took off my shirt and had the bitch spout gibberish over me before she drew that symbol on my tit with the business end of a red hot Bowie knife.”

“Jesus. You ever try to leave?”

“First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin’ in my belly at the time.”

“You were—”

“No great loss. It was my daddy’s child anyway, so he did me a favor.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin’ from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin’ if I tried a third time, it might be the last.”

“Might’ve been a mercy too.”

“This look like mercy to you?”

“Guess not.”

“So my daddy comes back. Lian Su isn’t with him, and he’s loonier than a goddamn fox-gnawed hen.”

“What happened?”

“Beats me, but it don’t take a genius to figure out what might have happened to a Western man in an Eastern house of witches, does it?”

I shudder at the thought, or maybe it’s the cold, but despite how unnatural my circumstances might have become, the whiskey is once again doing its job and blunting the edges.

“He locks himself in his room for a week, and I leave him there, happy to have him starve to death, till I remember he’s the only hope I have of ever steppin’ foot outside this place. So I go up there and I find him curled up on the bed like a child, naked and whimperin’, and I grab him by the throat.” She extends her hand and throttles the air between us. “And I tell him I’m glad he’s gonna die, that it should have happened years ago. And I tell him I’ll help put him out of his misery if he just tells me how to get out from under the bitch’s hex. And you know what he does?”

I wait for her to continue.

“He laughs. That cocksucker laughs in this hysterical girly laugh and tells me this is my place, nowhere else right for me, and then gets right back to laughin’.”

“So he could have done something about it if he’d wanted to?”

“Don’t know. Maybe he knew how to lift the curse, maybe not, but I didn’t give him a second chance to tell me.”

I drain my glass, and damn that whiskey’s hitting the spot now. I’m even wondering if Gracie will object to letting me take another bottle off her hands for old time’s sake. But her eyes are all glassy. She’s back in that