The Dead Celebrities Club

by Susan Swan

  On the road, there was the noise of a vehicle, and I glanced out the window and saw a police car, black with the telltale white doors, an unmistakable replica of the cruisers in Highway Patrol, the old TV show with Broderick Crawford. Noisy gas-guzzlers, every one.

  The police car parked on Half Moon Lane, and two burly men, cartoon caricatures of officers of the law, got out and began walking up the drive.

  WIDA, my boyhood motto. When in doubt, avoid.

  Speaking into the intercom, I directed my butler, Dieter, to lock all the doors so the police would think there was nobody home.

  Let me handle this, okay? Earl hitched up his belt and headed for the door, moving in his odd shuffling gait.

  Moments later I heard him talking jovially to the officers, who sounded astonished to find him in my home.

  Earl, we got a ticket for the owner of that car, one of the policemen said, likely pointing at my Mercedes sedan.

  Silence. Then came the noise of backslapping and Earl guffawing, followed by the sound of the door closing and his steps returning to the den.

  Earl stood in the doorframe, grinning. You don’t need to worry about this, okay? He handed me an unpaid parking ticket for three thousand and five dollars. A harmless tchotchke, considering what was about to unfold.

  I’ve got something to say, he blurted.

  I waited a few seconds before I replied. You’re going to get another divorce.

  Yeah, well, maybe not. I’m going to run for president.

  You, our commander-in-chief, I exclaimed, chuckling.

  His face turned a candy apple red. I was all too aware of the warning signs, so I exclaimed: Good sir, that takes courage. Running for president. You’ve talked about it before, haven’t you?

  This country is totally fucked up. I’m going to fix it, okay? He assessed me with his peculiar eyes. You don’t think I can?

  If you can’t, nobody can, I replied. My answer seemed to satisfy him. He nodded as he headed toward the door. Then he paused. I hear something’s going down with the Department of Justice.

  What did you hear? I asked coldly.

  Earl dropped his gaze. Nothing good. You should get the hell out of the country.

  Nobody’s going to kick me off my front porch.

  I think that’s how I’d feel too. If I was you, he said, and left.

  4

  IT IS RAINING harder now, and through my hotel window, the mountains of the Adirondacks are dissolving into the evening mist. Sipping a bottle of hoppy local ale, I consider my options. Should I call Earl? I am a sixty-three-year-old man with a bad heart, and my lawyer, Malcolm de Vries, says my time in prison will go more easily for me if the warden knows about my social connections. Malcolm has seen Earl’s photograph in my office, Earl’s hand on the president’s shoulder. Behind the two men, in sagging, matronly folds, rise the tasteless velvet drapes that some addlepated decorator chose for the White House.

  Malcolm doesn’t know I’ve called Earl countless times without getting anywhere. When I ring, an assistant says Earl’s busy schedule is the reason he isn’t returning my calls, but the other day I found an old phone number I had misplaced. I take it out of my pocket now. I don’t want to wake Mother, so I make the call in her washroom, and Earl’s voice rumbles hello.

  Oh, it’s you, he snarls. You fucking woke me, Dale Paul, he says before the line goes dead.

  What’s the matter with my old pal? Has something gone amiss between us?

  I emerge from the washroom, feeling troubled. To settle my nerves, I pick up a hotel notepad and begin to doodle. Like Pater, I am an inveterate doodler, although my crude designs aren’t as fine as the dense, imaginative art of serious doodlers. Wielding my black Sharpie, I sketch a stooped woman whose figure radiates frustration. Underneath her I write GOOGIE in big block letters, and then I add a stick woman with only one eye and write KISTER.

  Next, I draw a stick man with ten darts sprouting from his head, the darts representing the ten charges of fraud against me.

  As I yoke together the figures like apples hanging from a bough, Caroline and Meredith burst through the door.

  How can you joke at a time like this? Meredith cries, staring at my doodle. You’re going to be locked up for twelve years. You could die in there!

  My cousin has forgotten to speak in a lowered voice, and Mother’s eyelids flutter open, her head still slumped at an odd angle, as if someone has cleaved her in two and pasted her back together.

  Dale Paul, don’t tell me you and Meredith are arguing again, she exclaims.

  Dale Paul is joking about going to prison, Meredith says, her good eye blazing. She lost her right eye in a childhood accident and wears a pair of hideous glasses to disguise the fact that it’s false. Like Pater’s side of the family, she is tall and big-boned, although her bulk is offset by her dainty, feminine head and the two grey braids hanging down her broad-shouldered back.

  Darling boy! You mustn’t joke, Mother exclaims. You could be raped!

  I’m going to a federal prison, Mother. Most of the men are doing time for non-violent crimes. It’s only the state prisons that house rapists and murderers.

  You’ll see, Googie. He’ll talk his way out of trouble. My girlfriend, Caroline, bless her, gives Mother a reassuring smile.

  I hope you’re right, dear, Mother replies. There’s nobody better than my son at convincing other people what to do.

  I’m not sure whether Mother is trying to insult or praise me. Things have come to a pretty pass when you don’t know if your own mother has stopped believing in you.

  Meredith, can you do something with my tray? Mother asks. And when are you going to fix yourself up? Older women shouldn’t wear their hair long.

  It hurts to see Meredith’s pained expression. Alas, Mother has trouble accepting anyone outside the core family, and her blood racism gets worse if you draw attention to it. I pretend not to notice and stick my sketch inside my briefcase, the usual receptacle for my doodles. I am a flâneur of the line — a fan of the hard-edged images we see around us, the flattened, cleaned-up look of comic books. All I need is smooth paper and a felt-tipped pen, although a ballpoint also works. It makes a bold line naturally, and it can make a very light line too.

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING, I file thoughts of Earl away in The Vault of Unpleasant Things and prepare myself for the act of self-surrender. After our breakfast of scrambled egg whites and Canadian bacon, I say goodbye to Mother, who clings like a child to the tail of my suit jacket until Meredith gently pries me loose.

  My cousin settles, grim-faced, behind the wheel of my Mercedes sedan while I slide into the front passenger seat and unfold the map the hotel clerk made to guide us. The map shows a back road to the prison, a route the journalists are unlikely to know.

  I’ve never had a driver’s licence, so the sight of Meredith sitting behind the wheel doesn’t bother me the way it might other men who aren’t going to drive for a while. Caroline, tall and lithe, jumps into the back seat, clutching her untidy bag of manuscripts. She is an editor at a London publishing house, where she tends her authors like a junkyard dog, and she has brought along some work in case there is a long wait at the prison. I know what you’re thinking — nobody in her right mind would do such work when escorting her lover to prison. You don’t know Caroline. The more stress she feels, the harder she goes at it. If I ask her to put down her piles of typed papyrus, she smiles absent-mindedly and stares right through me.

  Onward we drive, away from the ersatz inn with its air of faded luxury, its baronial fireplaces built from ledge rock chipped out of the hills. Off and away we sail down potholed roads lined with rundown clapboard bungalows and ugly shingled houses.

  In the back seat, Caroline stops making notes. We’re being followed, she whispers, widening her lovely eyes.

  Meredith looks up at the rear-view m
irror and sees a van with a satellite dish. I point at a side road. Go down there, Kis.

  My cousin drives slowly at the best of times, but today she makes the tires squeal as she turns off the main road and speeds down a driveway winding through a birch forest. At a fork in the road, she turns again and continues to drive at high speed until we find ourselves on an overgrown laneway. She switches off the motor. There isn’t a sound in the entombed hush of the woods, so I light up the joint I’ve brought for the occasion. Meredith quickly pushes the button to lower the car windows, and the two women exchange eye-rolls as they wave the smoke from their faces.

  A few yards down the road, a derelict mansion stands in a shady grove of aspens, its outside beams covered in shaggy slabs of bark. I know enough from visits upstate to recognize the Great Camp style of the region. An image of Teddy Roosevelt’s old house in the Adirondacks springs to mind: the handmade twig chairs, the garland of yellow birch bark scrolls over the fireplace, and the same design repeated above the wooden doors of the house — everything homey and yet costing the earth.

  It’s all coming back: Mother’s stories about Teddy’s quaint home away from home, and Melvil Dewey ordering the Lake Placid Club to use his idiotic spelling reforms on the club menus. Dewey’s motto had been “Simpler spelin’,” and club menus regularly featured dishes of Hadok, Poted beef, Parsli, Letis, and Ys cream.

  Always alert to the need for apology, Meredith decants her broad shape from the driver’s seat and strides over to the mansion. Nobody here, she calls after peering into one of its broken windows. From the woods comes a faint melancholy trill. The lament of birdsong.

  Back on the main road, the van with a satellite dish has disappeared. We drive until we see a small wooden sign that says fci, which stands for Federal Correctional Institute. Meredith makes an abrupt right turn. Immediately we come to one of the wild blue-black rivers you see upstate. We don’t know our car has already passed under a hidden surveillance camera, and we drive in full innocence into a long meadow surrounded by pinewoods.

  A tall hill, a small mountain really, rises up behind a low ridge that accommodates two immense fenced-in compounds. The prison’s maximum- and low-security buildings are separated from each other by a few miles of service road. The larger compound sprouts guard towers that evoke the medieval campaniles you might see on a rinky-dink castle.

  On the ridge, a white pickup truck with police lights on its roof drives along the service road that joins the two compounds, dipping in and out of view as it winds through the trees.

  Do you remember Mr. Eric driving you to boarding school? Meredith asks.

  Only too well. I shake some Tums into my palm and chew them distractedly.

  Meredith winks at Caroline. Dale Paul used to sing clang-clang whenever we drove through the school gates. It used to make Mr. Eric laugh.

  Don’t be absurd, I retort. Mr. Eric never liked anything that made me unhappy.

  Or so you thought, darling. Thrusting her tongue against her white, even front teeth, Caroline thinks for a moment before she points at the maximum-security prison and exclaims: Oh my god, those guard towers.

  Look. I’m not staying there. At least, as far as I know.

  I’m glad you find it funny. Caroline rolls her eyes, and Meredith makes a prissy tock-tock sound against the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

  6

  THE ROAD AHEAD is blocked with cars and satellite trucks. When the journalists spot us, some of the reporters climb out of their cars and run over, their cameras flashing like meteor bursts. I get out of my sedan, followed by Caroline and Meredith.

  How does it feel to be a felon? a man shouts. Did this feckless scribe really think I would answer such a question? Several reporters yell more egregious remarks: Traitor! Scum! You ripped off our vets!

  It’s shocking to experience head-on the vector of human anger; the effect is so extreme it feels impersonal, as if a tornado of hatred has been directed your way by malevolent natural forces.

  Caroline places her hand on my arm. Don’t talk to the journos.

  But I’m already clearing my throat. Smoothing down my dark hair. Why bother hiding what I do well? Modesty is just a convention, and I know how to tap dance for the newshounds, how to digress into tangents that none of their pack has the wit to grasp.

  As I turn to address them, the white truck I saw on the mountain road roars up, and a prison guard wearing a white peaked cap leans out his window and speaks to the newsmen. Most of the reporters jump back into their vehicles and drive away. Only one man stays behind to talk to the prison guard. It takes me a moment to recognize Tim Nugent. How typical of my dogged school chum.

  I am too far away to hear what he is saying. Looking disappointed, he leaps back into his car and waves frantically at me through the open window. Then he, too, is gone, and we get back into my sedan.

  Nice wheels, the guard calls as he waves us in. He has on navy pants and a sky-blue shirt. He says he is a correctional officer. A C.O., he adds proudly. A plastic pen set has been hinged onto his shirt pocket, while from his belt dangles a baton ring, a radio holder, and one too many metal keys. Craning his neck, he leers at me. How’s the weather up there, big guy?

  I shrug. Strangers always ask me about the weather, assuming, wrongly, that they’re the first person to joke about my height.

  By the way, a writer named Nugent says he knows you, the guard says.

  True enough, I answer.

  I told him to get the warden’s permission if he wants to speak to you. She your wife? He points at Caroline.

  My girlfriend. And the other woman is my kister. I smile crookedly.

  Well, whoever they are, they can’t accompany you past this point.

  I kiss the women, tell Meredith to keep a close eye on Davie, and climb into the prison truck. The guard floors the accelerator, and we drive rattling and bumping all the way up the ridge to the low-security prison. In the rear-view mirror, I watch my po-faced girls grow smaller and smaller.

  7

  Tim Nugent

  The stillness of these pines lining this damp yellow road along which they were traveling; the cool and the silence, the dark shadows and purple and gray depths and nooks in them, even at high noon. If one were slipping away at night or by day, who would encounter one here?

  — THEODORE DREISER, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, 1925

  DEAR ALEXIS, TIM writes in an email to his editor. Dale Paul has no interest in rehashing his trial and conviction, and a ghostwriter can’t do much if his subject won’t answer pertinent questions.

  But we’ve agreed on our process. Dale Paul will draft a version of what he wants in the book and I will rework it or tell Dale Paul if it is unusable.

  By the way, I have no real answer to your question about why he picked me to ghost except that we roomed together at an exclusive boarding school for boys in Toronto. Was it about choosing the devil he knows?

  Tim sends off the email and opens a new file. He needs to fill in some of Dale Paul’s background, and he isn’t sure where to start. Maybe he’ll write his own journal about the project and call it “Not in the Book.” Well, why not? He needs to let off steam somewhere. It’s not as if he hasn’t ghostwritten memoirs before, but this assignment could prove difficult. For one thing, Dale Paul is an old friend. For another, Dale Paul is what his father used to call “a handful.” Aaron Nugent was referring to the way Dale Paul’s confidence creates a force field that sucks people in. Unfortunately, Tim is almost half Dale Paul’s size: five foot nine to his friend’s six foot six. The height difference bugs the hell out of Tim, along with the fact that Dale Paul sometimes calls him by his boarding school nickname, a moniker for the parasite fish that attach themselves to sharks.

  One of these days Tim intends to make a public declaration to his former pals: I’m a different person than the kid you knew at boarding school, although Ti
m doubts they would pay attention.

  How tough can it be for an old pro like him to ghost a new book? He’s heard Dale Paul talk for hours on end, decades of it, and his friend’s voice has found its way inside Tim’s head. Besides, he has monthly alimony to pay, and freelance work is getting scarce. Too many amateurs are willing to write online for free.

  Meanwhile, the prison hasn’t answered his calls even though he’s sent several letters outlining his project to the Bureau of Prisons.

  The prison is a fortress and he can’t get in, so he’s distracting himself with the musty copy of a Theodore Dreiser novel he picked up at the library in the village of Strawberry Lake. Maybe Dale Paul has read it. Or maybe he has seen A Place in the Sun, the movie adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor. Dreiser based his eerie tale on a real murder in the Adirondacks. It’s the sort of bookish lore he wouldn’t expect his old school friend to know, although Dale Paul can still surprise Tim. He seems to remember Dale Paul studying English literature at college.

  He picks up the Dreiser and starts to read. Through the window, the aluminum roofs of the boat sheds glint in the sun. Occasionally, there’s the noise of an outboard and the sound of its wash hitting the dock. Beyond lie the gentle hills of the Adirondacks. It’s late May and the trees have just come out in leaf and Dale Paul’s prison is somewhere in that mass of spring green, which isn’t a solid colour as might be expected but a collage of shades — from light mint and dark jade to a green so yellow it glows like gold.

  He’s been in the village for three days, visiting the library and reading up on when the region was filled with TB sanitariums and most of the homes with glassed-in verandas were cure cottages. A sanitarium close to his motel is now a seniors’ home; it’s a natural segue, from invalids to old people.

  At the library, Tim discovered that the prison had also been a sanitarium before it was turned into a camp for recovering addicts. They constructed snowmobile trails and logged the wilderness. Later, some of the buildings were used to host staff for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. It became a prison in 1983. The maximum-security down the road holds two thousand inmates, while Dale Paul’s compound houses nine hundred and twenty men.