I get a kick out of it, you know? No one ever catches onto me, no one that matters anyway, and I’m making a hell of a living. I perform a live stage show of “talking to the dead,” using a form of slight-of-mind called cold reading. Some of these poor bastards actually believe they’re talking to their dead grandfather, aunt, puppy, and that’s okay. They seem happy; enough to unbend their wallets so everyone’s prancing in daffodils.

So this girl came on to me after the last show. She was a cute brunette with three short lengths of beaded hair on the left side of her head and a killer body. She learned of my "supernatural abilities" from the television commercials I ran before arriving in each town. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, but these were the fruits of being a celebrity. I was cruising the profiteering bandwagon of the '80s. Women usually threw themselves at me like I’m a rock or movie star. I’ve lost count of how many I had over the last couple of years.

Naturally, she wanted to talk to her deceased brother. My assistants ran her credit card information through the online billing we had set up, only to find the funeral parlor had recently billed her for an extremely exorbitant burial. Looking through the obituaries of her hometown, they deduced her brother had committed suicide.

My well-oiled lines for this kind of thing soothed her pleas for details of why he killed himself. She gave me his name and he “spoke to her through me.” We assured her he was in a joyous place surrounded by loved ones at peace with happy memories of her. She seemed to feel a sense of closure.

Yeah. And all good dogs go to Heaven.

Afterward I had her backstage for a private reading. Hey, if the mortuary business can take advantage of her grief, why can’t I? And just when our make-out session was reaching critical mass, she pulls out a condom. Why do they always have those damned buckskins in their purse? So I told her we’re not going to do it if I have to wear that party favor. She hesitantly gave in to me. It was amazing what a little fame can do for you.

So now I was heading to a gig on Texas Highway 37. Out of nowhere, the engine started making this damn clanging sound like a monkey wrench in a Laundromat dryer. I just dropped a sultan’s salary on this rig.

I needed to get off the road so I took the next exit where a bent and warped sign announced the hidden town of Finnigan. It didn’t say Finnigan was 7 more miles off the highway. By the time I made it into town, the wind was picking up and I was stuck while the local town mechanic, “Goober,” looked at my ride. Only something found in Texas.

I shielded my face from the blowing sand and saw the sheltered relief of a bar named Gary’s across the dirt-paved road. I walked in the place and immediately noticed it was deceptively large and went all the way back to unseen depths. I was feeling a little nausea lately, like I have the flu or something, so I figured I should get something to eat to settle my stomach.

About a dozen good-old-boys were sitting in cheap, rotting upholstery listening to outdated country music. They tended their interests from cards to dominos to two tired pool tables and the liquor bar. A wall of plaques with photographs hanging from them ran to the far end of the building. There, the light bulbs were unlit, leaving the long wall fading down into darkness.

Avoiding a broken stool, I sat down on another. At the other end of the bar was a slight of a girlish form in a mocha tan sundress billowing with white flower patterns. Her back was to me and slight movements reflected a shivering luster off her satin black hair. She was transfixed to a TV wedged above the bar.

I had to see her face. Noticing her empty drink I asked, “Can I buy you a refill?” raising an eyebrow at her silly little flexi-straw.

“Hi.” She turned and flashed a youthful smile. “You surprised me.”

My surprise far outweighed hers. Her crystal Caribbean blue eyes, offset by lavish indigo hair, staggered me to the core. She was a diamond in the dirt in this drunken hut.

“I think I might get in trouble for buying a drink for an underage cutie,” I said, observing that she was definitely a minor.

She blushed and took a stool closer to me. “S’ok, I’m eighteen, nobody cares I’m here — I’m just drinking pop.” She glanced across the room. “That’s Dale, the chief of police, over there.” She tilted her head toward a chubby, uniformed man absorbed in a game of dominos.

I motioned to the bartender, pointing to her drink. “So this is the local hot-spot.”

“Hot-spot? More like a lukewarm stain.”

I smiled and offered my hand. “I’m Ricky. Ricky Peterson.”

She took it with cool softness. “I know who you are. I seen your TV commercials.”

She pronounced it “Tie-Vie” but that’s the way they talked around here. I couldn’t help but notice her being a perfect mark for a psychic reading and just old enough for some “quality time” with me.

“You look thinner in person,” she commented.

I froze. Time to reroute this seduction. “Well, you know how TV always adds ten pounds.” Truth be told, in the last six months I had been dropping pounds like loose change, but I’ll gain it back after the stress of the tour. “What’s your name, farm girl?”

“Amie,” she said, smiling.

“Does your Dad work around here, Amie?”

“Used to, before he died. Now he’s over there.” She didn’t look up or down but over my shoulder with a sour expression to the wall covered with plaques.

“No, I mean his spirit; his soul,” I say, turning to look at the wall. It showed a variety of small brass memorials. There were people’s names with a year inscribed below mostly of men. “What is this, anyway?”

“The Dead Wall,” a baritone voice said from behind me.

I turned to see a tall lean man standing next to Amie, holding a pool cue straight up by his side like a castle guard’s pike. He was dressed in complete Old Western style attire, all in black except for silver filigree around the edges. He had an Adam’s apple sticking out like an internal elbow.

“The Dead Wall? You sayin’ that’s where they are? But I had you all pegged for Christians,” I chided, “Heaven and Hell, you know.”

“Sometimes Hell won’t have ‘em,” said the cowboy, spitting into a spittoon with uncanny accuracy.

Amie snickered sourly beyond her years. “Besides, I ain’t got a post card or phone call from Heaven yet.” She pointed her chin up at the trophies. “Up there, well that’s something different.”

I turned around and saw a plaque with red and blue borders in the sloppy motif of a toddler. The pictures of four young children and a teenage girl adorned its edges. The inscription was simply “Jim Cadistro,” dated this year.

“This Jim fellow must have been a father or a teacher of some kind,” I said as I reached out to touch the memorial. “You have to admire people like this because—”

When I touched the placard, something unusual happened. My hand went into the brass, breaking the skin of the metal like it was perpendicular liquid. Something else happened... to my mind. I was becoming someone else.

Animals. That’s all they are.

Someone who is angry.

Yeah, they’re the future of the world and all that other crap, but to me they’re just life-enders.

Extremely angry.

I’m in a miserable cracker-box home a way out of town with a wife who insists on taking in foster children.

We need the money we get for them. I can’t think of a better solution, so I shut up and sit in the smell of dirty laundry and cat piss enduring the situation.

Always squalling, bawling, and needing. They’re like pigeons. Disease-infested vermin swimming in bacteria, that’s what they are.

There are five. My two slack-eyed imbeciles, two booger factories whose names I can never remember, and Courtney, she started it all.

Courtney. So fresh and nubile. Fifteen years old and she don’t have a clue how sexy she is. The way she talks, the way she moves, the lines of her body, all a cry for the wild. But when I come to her room at night, she pushes me away. Why doesn’t she want me? And now my wife is getting suspicious.

Been a long time in the thinking and more than a few beers before I am out in the yard at three a.m., dousing the siding with gasoline. They’re all asleep. I quietly fixed long screws in all the doors and windows, sealing them in.

One match is all it takes for the fire to embrace the house. The screaming comes a few minutes later. I have my gun in case one gets out, but I’m going listen to the shrieks until they stop before I put the barrel in my mouth.

I stand outside of Courtney’s bedroom. I laugh while she begs and claws at her window for help.

So I’m there in the light of the fire, thinking of what they’ve done to me, listening to their pleas, when I see the damnedest thing. A huge image of a sitting woman, overlaid on the flames.

The woman’s image competes with the fire for reality. Soon the blaze and the screams are flying away and a different world comes flickering to the forefront.

I’m at that bar. The bar in Finnigan, Texas.

“He’s back,” booms the cowboy, chalking his pool stick in front of himself. He made a mocking face. “Did you have a ‘ghostly experience’?”

Dizzy and out of phase in plain sight and covered with the poison film of Jim Cadistro’s insanity, I stumbled to the nearest stool and accidentally put my head down in the middle of an ashtray. I raised it, spitting and batting the butts off my face.

Jim Cadistro. Something important about that name. Jim Cadistro. I shook my head then remembered. The girl with the three short beaded braids on the left side of her head. He was her brother.

We were a hundred miles from nowhere. This didn’t make sense. I pointed to the memorial and asked, “How did you get a plaque for this guy? Did he live around here?”

Amie shrugged. “New ones appear all the time, and the rest just move back down to the end of the building.” She pointed to the blackness swallowing the far end of the lengthy room. “We don’t ask questions and we sure as hell don’t touch ‘em like you did.” I watched her and the cowboy bow their heads in private laughter.

“She had a name, you know,” Amie says, who is definitely on the dark side of thirty now. “Do you even remember?”

I turned to her with a stupid grin, feeling a cigarette butt fall from my mouth...

“...Her name. The girl with the braids. You spent last night with her.”

This was impossible. Amie’s hair is now more pewter-grey than sable. She was aging before my eyes, and what was with the mind-reading routine?

“The girl’s name is Twila Somer,” Amie said into what now looks like a whiskey sour. “She works for a place called Rozer Pharmaceutical. I guess she’s some kind of undiscovered genius. In five years, she’s going to find a cure for AIDS. Well, she would have if you hadn’t killed her.”

“What are you talking about?” This is too much. “I didn’t kill her!” As I spoke, I watched Amie age into her 90s or even 100s. Her skin cracked and I saw one of her fingernails fall into her drink. The cowboy by her side, who seemed fine a minute ago, now wore the sagging skin of a dying Basset hound.

“You have AIDS, Ricky Peterson,” she rasped while standing. “Why do you think you’ve been ill lately?”

Smiling nervously, I get the joke. “Okay. This is some kind of mental spook show here. You really had me going.” I said, edging away. “You ought to take this on the road.”

Amie grinned at him, a tooth falling out of her wilting face and rattling onto the bar. Her eyes, dancing in the light of youth not an hour before were now milky and blind.

I backed up toward the door and as she spoke her skin started falling away in these filthy, decayed rags. “In fact you will kill dozens. For the last two years, during the most sexual time of your life, you have been spreading this disease.”

A jolt of 200 proof panic and my wiseguy image was gone. Running to the door I fumbled for the exit. Realizing it had changed to a realistic mural on a solid cement wall, I slumped in disbelief.

I turned and suddenly saw living glistening eyes in Amie’s dead skull. “And those dozens you will kill will also kill others, unaware of their condition. The numbers will keep doubling as they infect more innocents.”

I looked to the bartender for help, but he was now just a heap of a darkly webbed substance. Frantically searching the room, I saw an emaciated woman eating the guts out of the reclining Officer Dale who was unbothered by it as if he was pondering his next dominos move. The cowboy was now standing aside with the meat of his body dropping away, splattering onto the floor in slimy chunks. Now a near-skeletal form, he said, “Time for his walk, Amie.” He snatched my arm above my elbow. I tried to scream at his cold, wet touch but could only expel a squeaky chirp. Amie’s peeled cadaver quickly moved forward. I tried to kick at them, but it was like punching marble statues. In a blink, Amie grabbed my other arm. They dragged me toward the far end of the building towards an inky howling nothingness. Loose paper flew into the suction of the icy void. I screeched and bawled until my face was a sheet of bubbling snot. They joined in clattering laughter. They pulled me away, kicking and screaming, pausing briefly to point out something on the wall to me.

A plaque inscribed “Ricky Peterson” with today’s date etched. Attached was a photograph of Twila Somer, smiling with life’s promise.