The Covenant by Jeff Crook Page B

everybody who could maintain being in both worlds at the same time, having to keep a sane face while you’re questioning some john about what happened to his hooker, listening to his lies while she’s standing there the whole time, bleeding on the rug, looking at her own brains slipping down the wall.
    My special friends had cost me my job, my marriage, any semblance of a normal life. I had tried to drive them out of my head by filling my veins with smack. I knew I wasn’t the only haunted ex-junkie in this crazy old world, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Plenty of people in my boat had eaten bullets or walked off a pier in an effort to make the voices and the visions stop. The only thing that kept me from hanging myself in a closet was the thought of hanging there forever, waiting like a spooky house decoration for the next confused little girl who had been born with a caul on her head to come along and open the door to my hell and join me there.
    I stopped shooting to listen, waiting for the rap of hammers, the endless chatter of the workers, the throb and rumble of their machines. There was nothing. I’d never felt more alone in my life. A house this old should have been choked with ghosts. It was as though something had driven them out. Driven them out and taken their place.
    When in Rome, I thought. A siesta sounded like a good idea. I shut down the lights, capped my lens, and stepped outside. The fitz of a beer bottle opening spun me around. Deacon sat in a dining room chair on the porch, leaning back against the wall like a gunslinger in an old Western. He held a dripping bottle of Abita beer out to me, an unopened one in his other hand.
    I accepted his offering and sat on the step, my legs crossed in front of me. “I don’t usually drink before five,” I lied as I took a swig.
    Deacon opened his bottle and held it up to a shaft of sunlight filtering through a hole in the roof. “I usually don’t drink after five, so we’re even.”
    I lit up and let the smoke drain out of me in a long slow sigh. It was like I’d been holding my breath for an hour. Sweat dripped from my hair into my eyes, dangled from the tip of my nose. The heat of the day had crept into the house while I worked and wrapped its woolly arms around me and clamped its thick, musty-smelling fingers over my mouth. Now a delicious bit of breeze fanned across the porch. I took another drag and felt my lungs ache from lack of abuse.
    â€œIt’s a hot one,” Deacon said. I allowed that it could be considered warm for a day in May. He tasted his beer and set it on the porch beside his chair. I got the crazy idea that he didn’t really drink at all. I sucked mine down in about three swallows and rolled the empty bottle against my knee.
    â€œThis kind of heat reminds me of Kuwait.” He pushed his chair away from the wall and sat with his hands on his knees, leaning forward, the big aviator sunglasses resting on his nose so that I couldn’t see his eyes at all.
    â€œSo it’s true what Holly said. That you were in the military before you started this preaching dodge.”
    â€œGo Army. First Armored Division. Desert Storm. You strike me as ex-military yourself. Squid?”
    â€œCoast Guard.”
    â€œMust have been hell.”
    â€œI could tell you stories,” I laughed. I spent the war aboard the Cape Hazardous protecting Maryland crab boats from Saddam’s Atlantic fleet.
    â€œWe were one of the first across the border at the beginning of the invasion. Them Iraqi boys had had the fight bombed out of them and started giving up as soon as they saw our tanks. My unit didn’t fire a shot in anger. I remember, it was about the fourteenth hour, we jumped this group of Republican Guards coming out of their fortifications and running toward us with their hands in the air. They didn’t have any weapons, but it was making the captain nervous so he told me to