by Ron Rash
“Yes,” I said.
I walked with her to the creek, though I was the one barefoot.
“Next week, then,” Ligeia said, and waded into the water.
MY BROTHER WAS TRUE to his word. After Leslie visited, Bill never joined Ligeia in the woods. Besides paying for the wine, I bought her presents with my allowance, trinkets really, a copper bracelet with LUV stamped on it, a ring with a yellow smiley face. My girlfriend, that was how I thought of her. Sometimes in front of the mirror I’d say it out loud, and when I listened to the radio the love songs made me think that maybe I was in love. “That’s sweet of you,” she’d say with each gift, but except for the beads she never wore them afterward. Ligeia said she hid them in her suitcase so her uncle and aunt wouldn’t wonder where they came from.
Bill kept working at my grandfather’s office, but the strain between them was palpable. If Grandfather wouldn’t have stopped anyone else in Sylva from hiring him, Bill probably would have quit. For two more Sundays, my brother went with me to Panther Creek, but he clearly didn’t enjoy himself. As soon as we arrived, Bill sat on the bank with a beer in his hand. He didn’t swim or fish and stopped at two beers. That was fine since it gave me one more, which I drank though he said I should stop at three, not knowing I drank half the wine too. Acting like a babysitter, thinking he was my babysitter.
One night, unbidden, Bill explained what had changed. Seeing Leslie again, I realized how wrong being with Ligeia was. It’s disrespectful and it would hurt her if she ever found out. I want to marry her. Less than a year later my brother did. As Bill and I waited in an anteroom for the wedding to begin, he’d told me why. She makes me a better person than I really am, my brother said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An hour after Sheriff Loudermilk leaves, my brother hasn’t called. I’ve resisted another drink but knowing the bottle is an arm’s length away is too tempting so I get my keys and drive to Bill’s office. All the while, memories flip like calendars in old movies, blurring events, blurring time. I try to center on a single thought, confirm its solidity, the way I’d test boards on a rickety porch. My brother has lied to me. This is true, because Ligeia died from a slashed throat, not drowning. But why would my brother lie to me? The obvious answer: Because my brother is a murderer. But I don’t know how to believe such a thing. The man I know now could not have done that. But he’s not now who he was then. And to bury her there, the cruelty of that, especially for Ligeia’s family. Bill had bruised my feelings at times, but how many times deliberately? Even the teasing stopped when he saw I was truly upset. We never fought and rarely engaged in the rough horseplay brothers so often get into. His anger at Grandfather and at the player who’d cleated him were instinctive responses to provocations. Didn’t any act of cruelty require a degree of calculation?
But then a memory of another baseball game. Bill was pitching and in the first inning a batter hit a home run, the first he had given up all season. Bill looked stunned as the batter trotted the bases, as if thinking: How dare you. Don’t you know who I am and who I’m going to be? Maybe the batter did something more, a smirk as he tapped the plate, an under-the-breath taunt. I don’t know. What I do know is when the batter came up again, Bill threw right at his head, forcing him to dive to the dirt. The umpire and Bill’s coach rushed to the mound. The coach threatened to send Bill to the dugout, and the umpire vowed the same if he did it again. Grandfather was in the stands with my mother and me. That’s the way to do it, son, the old man had shouted. Show them we Matneys don’t back down.
Volatility, calculation, and a sense of superiority, and yet another element—desperation. What might my brother do at twenty-one if he believed Ligeia threatened the future he’d planned, especially the one with Leslie. I think of the slit hose on the gas mask. A slit hose and a slit throat, the same in their effect. The Ka-Bar knife, which had weighted his right pocket since childhood, could have done it easily. But to imagine Bill’s hand on the knife cutting Ligeia’s throat, his face close to hers, as it would have to be, that intimacy, and then to watch her bleed out and after that bury her.
Another burial, not imagined but recalled. Nebo had not come to Grandfather’s funeral, but he’d been at the cemetery, standing alone, dressed in the same mismatched work clothes he always wore. Perhaps like many of us there, he could believe Grandfather was truly dead only when dirt clods began thumping onto the coffin. Afterward, Nebo boarded the bus, no suitcase, nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever was in his pockets. He was never seen again. Months later when my mother and I were selling Grandfather’s house and grounds, I ventured into the guesthouse where Nebo had lived for fifty-six years. It was as spartan as I’d expected, almost everything utilitarian. The only surprise was a heart-shaped locket left on a nightstand. Inside the locket was a black-and-white photograph of a young woman. Engraved on the back: For my beloved Nebuchadnezzar. Mother, girlfriend, sister?
Beloved.
So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth.
That July I bought an AM/FM radio at Pike’s Drugstore. Before, I’d spent the last hour awake reading or attempting poems and stories in a Blue Horse notebook, but now I spent much of that time with a finger and thumb on the dial, searching for stations playing the music Ligeia told me about. The signals drifted in and out between gulfs of static. After a while I knew where they’d be if they did break through. I’d imagine the pulsing antennas of Fort Wayne and Chicago, New Orleans and Kansas City. Even on the best stations, like WLS in Chicago or WKDA in Nashville, there would be top-forty fluff, but then I’d hear something by the Doors, or Jefferson Airplane, or Big Brother and the Holding Company, even an occasional single by the Dead or Jethro Tull. I learned to recognize bands by voices, Morrison or Joplin, or by guitar, Clapton or Hendrix.
I was already telling my mother I wanted a turntable with stereo speakers for Christmas. I made lists of albums to buy, groups I’d never heard of before Ligeia came. But in late July I’d found an even better station, not thousands of miles away but in the next county. Waynesville had a small FM station that played gospel and country all day and bubble-gum pop from seven to ten in the evenings. Except on Wednesday nights. Perhaps the station manager assumed that those who’d object were busy beneath the steeples dotting our region’s every nook and cranny. But for whatever reason, it was as if someone had hijacked a minibus filled with albums bought in Haight-Ashbury, because the DJ had a penchant for album cuts from West Coast bands.
It was here I first heard the Grateful Dead’s “China Cat Sunflower,” and Quicksilver Messenger Service’s “Light Your Windows,” and the Steve Miller Band’s “Children of the Future.” But also darker tunes, including the darkest of them all, the Doors’ “The End,” with its premonition of what would soon come about in Brentwood and Altamont. Reflecting now on that summer, I realize the Doors were the group I should have listened to most intently.
IN MY FRESHMAN COMP CLASS at Wake Forest, I wrote an essay about listening to these stations and imagining the restless cities below their stilt-like towers, and how one day I would visit those cities, perhaps write about them. I remember my search for the right extended simile: the static like sand I sifted through to find gold nuggets, the radio towers like lighthouse beacons showing me the way to where, like Wolfe, I could escape the “imprisoning” mountains. The one I settled on was of bottles swept onto a deserted island by waves of sound, and in each one the same message: Swim away from the island and we’ll be out here to rescue you. B+, my instructor wrote, forgiving my purple prose and Shelleyan angst, but not two misspelled words and a misplaced modifier. He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say ‘The town is near,’ but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges, Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of Look Homeward, Angel, and those words I spoke a
loud to the bathroom mirror that summer, and thought of Wolfe in New York, writing between journeys to the West, and of Hemingway traveling from Paris cafés to African veldts.
“YOU’RE THE SWEETEST GUY I’ve ever hung out with,” Ligeia said two Sundays after Leslie’s visit.
In her hands was the chain and small silver sea horse I’d bought at Brock’s Jewelry the day before. When I asked if I could put it on her, she gathered her hair and bared her neck. I kissed the pale white skin before hooking the clasp.
“You’re raring to go, aren’t you?” she said, opening one of the three Quaalude packets I’d brought. “Soon as I eat my candy, I’ll be ready too.”
Afterward, we lay on our backs. The honeysuckle’s sweet blooms thickened my languor. There can be nothing better than this. That’s what I’d thought that afternoon, Calypso had come to Carolina. We sat up and finished the wine.
“That radio station I told you about,” I said as I filled my cup, “the DJ played the Jimi Hendrix Experience.”
“He’s a great guitarist,” Ligeia said. “Damn, I’ve got to at least get a transistor radio, because I’m marooned up here until October.”
“For certain?”
“Yeah. My old man is still telling Uncle Hiram this place has been so good for me that I should stay for my senior year. Which is bullshit. They’re just wanting to dump me off on someone else.”
“I’m glad you’ll still be around.”
“Well, at least I found someone to help me make some money,” Ligeia said. “Her name’s Angie Wellbeck. I met her in Sunday school. You know her?”
“I know who she is. She’ll be a senior like you, right?”
“Yeah. Uncle Hiram and Aunt Cazzie like her parents since they’re real churchy, so they’re letting me hang out a couple of hours with Angie on Saturday. They think she’s a good influence, but Angie’s a wild child too, and she has wheels, so at least I can go somewhere besides church and the Dairy Queen. But the best thing is, Angie digs getting high, and she knows who else does too, including some who’d use the harder stuff I can get from Florida. From what Angie says, I can even make enough to buy some straight-looking clothes to interview in. That way I’ll get on at a fancy restaurant where they tip big.”
She paused.
“What’s bumming you out?”
“I kind of hoped you’d want to stay here.”
“If I don’t return to the ocean I’ll just die,” Ligeia said. “But you can come visit and crash at my place. I bet you’d dig Miami. The ocean is right there, and they don’t let it get scuzzy like at Daytona Beach.”
“It sounds nice.”
“By the way, Tanya had the book Of Mice and Men. She left it when she moved out and I read it.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was good, except I didn’t like how it ended, but that other book I’ll skip,” she said, and smiled. “Angels don’t much interest me, if you haven’t already noticed?”
“It’s not really about angels. It’s more about growing up.”
“Then it’s too late to do me any good,” Ligeia said. “So writers make enough money to live on?”
“Some writers, but for others it’s hard.”
“I guess you don’t have to worry about that though. Your grandfather will leave you plenty of dough, I bet, and that big house. All my parents will leave me and my sister will be some junky furniture and a beat-up truck. We rent our house, and it’s so crummy I wouldn’t want it if it was ours.”
“I don’t want my grandfather’s house, and I don’t want to live in Sylva.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“A lot of writers live in Paris or New York; Thomas Wolfe did. I might for a little while, but after that some other place.”
“Like where?”
“Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West,” I said, trying not to blush, “maybe somewhere around there.”
“Like Miami,” Ligeia said, her smile widening. “That way you could hang out with your mermaid.”
“I’d like that,” I answered, “I’d like it a lot.”
“And the book you write could have me in it.”
“Definitely.”
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
“Well, promise me something else,” Ligeia said, “that you’ll leave out these freckles and give me eyes blue as the ocean, not the way it looks up close, but like in a photograph or painting. And change my first name into something that’s not so lame and ordinary as the one I’ve got.”
“Anything else?”
“And give me a happy ending,” Ligeia said, her smile vanishing, “because it’s not going to happen in real life.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“I don’t think it. I know it.”
We sat a few more minutes.
“I’d better go,” she said, but instead of getting up, she placed her hand flat on my stomach and then slid it inside my jeans. “Unless you’re ready to make it again. If you are, I can stay a bit longer. After all, last week you got all the attention.”
“I didn’t bring another, you know . . .”
“It should be safe,” Ligeia said and stilled her hand. “But of course if you don’t want to.”
No, not once, I lied when Bill asked me two months later.
But I had.
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tell my brother I need to talk to him right now,” I say, leaning close to the glass, “or I’m going back there myself.”
“I’ll tell him,” the receptionist whispers harshly, “but he’s with a patient.”
“Like you told him earlier today when I called?”
“I did tell him, Mr. Matney.”
“Let him know now,” I say, my voice rising.
She presses a button and I expect a security guard to appear. But it’s a nurse.
“Tell Dr. Matney his brother demands to see him,” the receptionist says tersely.
The nurse disappears. Soon an elderly patient, back encased in a hard plastic shell, comes out and Bill follows. As the patient steps to the receptionist’s window, my brother motions me to his office.
“Don’t bother sitting down,” Bill says and closes the door, “especially if this is about Ligeia Mosely.”
Bill stands next to me and I smell the Aqua Velva he still wears.
“You lied to me,” I say. “You don’t cut your own throat by accident.”
It’s not surprise, I think as I watch his face, but the resignation that something he’d hoped forgotten wasn’t after all.
“How do you know that?”
“Robbie Loudermilk came to the house this morning,” I answer. “He told me forensics found a cut on the front of Ligeia’s spine. Damn it, her head was nearly cut off.”
“Why would Robbie come and tell you that?”
“Angie Wellbeck, a girl at the high school, saw me give Ligeia money for the test.”
“I can’t talk about this now,” Bill says. “I’ve got to prep for surgery.”
“The hell you can’t,” I say, grabbing his arm. “This is more important.”
“No, it’s not,” Bill says, his hand slowly but firmly removing mine. “There was a car wreck an hour ago. She’s three years old and if I don’t stabilize her spine she’ll be paralyzed. So I can talk to you, or I can keep her from being in a wheelchair the rest of her life.”
“Robbie Loudermilk may have time to talk to me,” I say as Bill reaches for the doorknob.
“You’re not going to see him.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you have no idea what really happened.”
“I know enough.”
“No, you don’t,” Bill says softly. “You don’t know anything, Eugene. I was there.”
“Why should I believe you when you’ve already lied to me twice?”
“Because I lied for your sake, not my own.”
I stare into eyes the same
shape and color as mine, the one physical attribute we share. But would you murder for your own sake, Bill? I could ask, but shadowing that question is one for me: Who caused her to be there that morning?
“What if Loudermilk wants to talk to me again before you decide to unburden yourself?” I ask. “Angie gave him some names of guys who knew her. If they link her and us, he could be waiting for me at the house right now.”
“Then don’t go home. Robbie won’t know where you are. I should be back by five. That’s six hours I’m asking you for, Eugene. Six hours.” Bill takes out his billfold and hands me three twenties. “Go get something to eat or some coffee, or go to Malaprop’s and buy a book. But don’t go home.”
“I don’t need the money.”
“Just take it,” he says.
I stuff the twenties in my pocket and we walk out.
“Maybe get here a few minutes before five,” Bill says once we’re on the sidewalk. “That way you won’t be locked out if I’m late. I shouldn’t be, but complications arise.”
My brother strides across the archway that connects his office to the hospital. With six hours to kill, I’m in no hurry to get anywhere, so I leave my car in the office lot and walk down the sidewalk past the hospital, veer right, and enter the heart of Asheville’s downtown. I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe’s house. I’d planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved.
The yellow house comes into view. A tourist stands in the yard, a camera strapped around his neck. When he sees me he turns and walks up the street. I step onto the porch. My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I’d read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She’d loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book’s main character.
It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don’t get it. I’ve heard that said many times and it seems so. Like my mother, who’d read the book as a sophomore at Greensboro College, I discovered it at the right time. That day we walked through the house together, we’d discussed passages set in the different rooms, lastly in the upstairs bedroom where Wolfe’s favorite brother died: but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? “I never truly understood that passage until your father’s death,” my mother had told me as we stood there, her hand tightening on my arm as her eyes welled with tears.
