Also by James D McCallister
NOVELS
King’s Highway
Fellow Traveler
Let the Glory Pass Away
Dogs of Parsons Hollow
Dixiana
Down in Dixiana
Dixiana Darling
Reconstruction of the Fables
(2022)
* * *
STORIES
The Year They Canceled Christmas
Fables of the Reconstruction
(2022)
The Night I Prayed to Elvis:
The Edgewater County Stories
(2023)
Copyright © 2021 by James McCallister/Mind Harvest Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
No characters in this book are intended to portray actual persons, living or dead.
ISBN: 978-1-946052-41-4
For Allyson and Andria,
Jason and Jack,
Alvy and Max, too
Contents
I. A MAN IN THE GRIP OF A THEORY
1. Devin
2. Billy
3. Devin
4. Creedence
5. Devin
6. Billy
7. Creedence
8. Devin
9. Creedence
10. Billy
11. Devin
12. Creedence
13. Devin
14. Creedence
15. Devin
16. Creedence
17. Billy
18. Devin
II. FACING COLLEGE STREET
19. Billy
20. Devin
21. Creedence
22. Billy
23. Devin
24. Billy
25. Devin
26. Creedence
27. Billy
28. Creedence
29. Devin
30. Billy
III. A BAR CALLED HEAVEN
31. Devin
32. Billy
33. Creedence
34. Devin
35. Billy
36. Creedence
37. Billy
38. Creedence
39. Billy
40. Devin
IV. ARCADIA
41. Devin
42. Billy
43. Creedence
44. Devin
45. Billy
46. Devin
47. Creedence
48. Devin
49. Billy
50. Devin
51. Billy
52. Devin
53. Billy
54. Devin
55. Creedence
56. Devin
V. THE PRETENDERS
57. Billy
58. Creedence
59. Devin
60. Billy
61. Devin
62. Billy
63. Creedence
64. Billy
65. Devin
66. Creedence
67. Devin
68. Creedence
69. Devin
70. Creedence
71. Devin
72. Creedence
73. Billy
74. Creedence
75. Billy
76. Devin
77. Creedence
78. Devin
79. Creedence
80. Devin
81. Creedence
82. Devin
83. Billy
84. Creedence
85. Devin
86. Billy
87. Devin
VI. Epilogue
88. Devin
TEASER
Teaser
About the Author
I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk.
Philip K. Dick
One
Devin
The crash of the vehicles in the intersection, an everyday light-running near tragedy, came to the drunk’s attention through his gauzy, fermented scrim of consciousness only as a muffled thud. Had a chunk of headlight not glinted across his field of vision after glancing off a municipal wastebasket, Devin Rucker, be-bopping along the cracked sidewalk with a decent AM buzz, mightn’t have noticed the accident at all.
Once he did notice—a hard knock between vehicles, smoke, a woman crying, nobody even out of the cars yet—he perambulated into the intersection without missing a beat or increasing his pace, waving lazy cig-stained fingers in the four cardinal directions to discourage approaching vehicles.
At the cracked side window of the car with the crying woman Devin grunted, spat and asked if she could get her door open.
“Smoke’ll kill you faster than fire, usually,” Devin’s wisdom, delivered through a cloud of his own. “Better get on out, now.”
“It’s stuck.” The woman, flustered, held her hands a-flutter. “I can’t find my purse.”
“Make sure it’s unlocked.”
Once she diddled the knob Devin heard a faint clunk inside the door. He pulled. The door hung. A frame issue. They’d total it for a bent frame. Devin’s Uncle Hill, a car dealer, was among numerous voices from back home offering advice on a daily basis. The ones he couldn’t drink quiet, anyway.
Devin pushed his yellowed fingertips along the top of the door frame until finding gap. He might have been close to dying, and with nary an ounce of fat nor much muscle, but this drunk knew when he needed to get a woman out of a busted-up car. And how to do it.
He panted his left leg and found the most leverage he’d experienced in ages, yanked. The door all but peeled back like aluminum foil. He hollered, primal, and finished ripping it off the hinges. Tossed the door aside like the Hulk.
By now others had gathered to gawk. “Damn, bro,” a stout Latino man in dusty work clothes said as he went to help the woman get out of the car. The sound of a first responder’s siren came from a point increasingly less distant. “How you did that?”
“The Lord helps those who help themselves. S’all I can tell you.”
The workingman crossed himself, praised God.
His part played, Devin went on loping his wobbly, untroubled yet disconsolate gait; not yet noon, he had already been ejected from his favorite daytime watering hole. It happened.
Before long, however, messages left by his sister slapped a bigger fish down on the sizzling grill than another soul’s minor traffic accident, or, for that matter, where to get another drink.
Getting booted so early in the day from the joint over in Silver City—cut off, and before the sun had gone down—represented a stinging rebuke. Amateur hour. Now he’d be drinking alone. Driving back to Commerce City on the other side of Denver, with the vehicular mishap written off as a hallucination brought on by encroaching sobriety, Devin pouted about getting the boot from one of his go-to joints. The sports bar a few towns over, where his shenanigans were not quite so notorious, would now be crossed off the list.
Yeah—a barroom badass, only two ways his best stories ended: jail, or the hospital. Felt like that kind of scene coming on later tonight, in fact. But the outer intention of the world in which he operated often frowned upon such misadventures.
One or the other—injury, or imprisonment. Sounded like a goal, though in lucid moments one he suspected already achieved. Neither outcome bound to conjure much emotional reaction, though. Not unless he failed to
drink enough to quell what ailed him.
Out of liquor at home in this shitty apartment, he cracked a microbrew. He’d need forty such libations to get right.
Wisdom, here gleaned from inside a clever bottle cap coexisting with itself also as a fortune cookie:
Moments only pass
to make room
for more Moments!
Devin, trembling, sat on his balcony and balanced the bottle cap between his thumb and forefinger. He had found it in the apartment complex parking lot. He tried snapping it between his fingers to make the smart-ass bottle cap, literal garbage, fly away into the air like a little frisbee, the way he and his friends in college once did in the dorm rooms with numerous bottle caps, or at one of the many bars they frequented in the Old Market entertainment district alongside campus.
He dropped the moment-cap three times. Cussed. Gave up.
Devin Rucker’s moment: His apartment, once fresh and clean but now a pigsty, lacked any semblance of stewardship. Long abandoned to forces of decay, an entropy had taken hold which featured garbage piled in the corners, food rotting in the refrigerator, and a general décor designed with the eye of a distillery rep.
The sheer volume of empty liquor vessels, Devin often thought in admiration, lent a pleasing aesthetic quality to the surroundings, a preponderance of objets d’art representing the scope and entirety of one man’s life’s-work project. Of many men’s lives; they who’d done the distilling and the bottling, the labeling and QC-ing and shipping and delivering and displaying and selling, and bless their hearts and pointed little heads for all they did to make the world a better place.
For Devin.
For everyone.
A-men.
To Devin, a drunk’s drunk, a pro—they called him Ruck, or his friends did, anyway—the bottles weren’t trash, rather trophies suitable for display in any All-American high school lobby: records of achievement, though for outstanding effort in his own peculiar, dyspeptic field of athleticism. This, no mere trash pile. Grad students would one day sift this find for clues to the essential nature of his philosophy.
A line of black ants, swarming, a bountiful day for the mound: a sack of dry cat food lay wounded and bleeding stale kibble onto the yellowed vinyl of the cheap and dirty kitchen flooring. A sack Devin had thrown against the wall and left lying there, split open. The pet food had been there fur-ever, it seemed.
For a year, now.
Longer.
From somewhere in the apartment complex came the thumping of a hip-hop tune that copped the hook from ‘Love is Alive,’ an old 70s pop number Devin remembered from listening to rock radio with his sister Creedence back home in South Cack-a-lack.
The beat, boring into his pickled brain.
Stoking his rage.
Pounding his palm against the wall, he gave a hoarse shout: “Turn that mess down, you goddurn college fucks.” A nearby state university satellite campus meant students lived in the complex, and often tunes could be heard thumping day and night. Devin, never nostalgic enough to join in with their parties.
The bass-beat, undeterred, thudded on.
Pacing.
Trapped.
Needing a drink.
But not alone.
And not here.
Making for the outside world. Relieved, as always, to push his way out.
But his apartment door, it wouldn’t close right. Like it no longer hung quite square. Swollen, like from the kind of tropical air Devin grew up breathing in the South.
No mystery. His door had acquired a big crack down the middle. One night he had needed to kick his way out. Or rather, in. Kick his way in. To get some shuteye. A golden threshold of inebriation existed which had to be met, during which sleep would come dreamless. A big project, becoming dreamless, but the long journey was always taken as a series of individual steps until arrival. Someday.
At last, the bolt clicked into place. Nothing worth taking inside anyway—locking up, a habit from the days of his cat Prudy. To keep her close and safe.
A brilliant light, flashing behind the aviators hiding Devin’s amber slits from the glare of the beer signs in the windows of Chubby’s Ale House: Not so much like a flashbulb, rather a glinting reflection of high midday sunlight off a surface of polished chrome. The image, coming accompanied as always by a disharmonious roar, a black-throated screech, an enormous out-of-tune instrument blown from on high: thus, the signal of his descent into abject, non-intoxicated despair. This condition loomed with nigh inevitability, but this a precursor, in his grand plan, to the blessed unconsciousness which awaited; else veering across the center line into wretched sobriety, as polarizing an intention as could be reckoned to a man like him.
Short version: He needed a drink. Before the shakes took hold.
Jim, his bartender at nearby Chubby’s, greeted him with a measured and cautious air. A softheaded idiot, Jim, but one who cared; who knew how to pour.
A small freestanding tavern on the other side of I-70 next to the pyramid-like Marriott hotel—on the weekends bikers congregated here, and recognizing his condition steeped in past trauma, treated Devin with dignity and patience—the bar lay only three safe minutes of flat highway cut from the prairie-dog scrubland near the big soccer stadium. That made Chubby’s homebase.
On the satellite radio—Jim liked oldschool authentic country, which they featured on one of the four or five channels devoted to the genre, the kind they’d have listened to back home at The Dixiana in Edgewater County—Devin enjoyed good-old Loretta Lynn warbling about ‘Somebody Somewhere,’ a plaintive number full of longing and loss and syrupy soothing steel guitar. This is music his father would have listened to, all of which reminded Devin of being back home. Which, as it happened, also made him annoyed enough to bite a nickel in half.
Grumbling, wincing, clutching his right side and settling onto the stool at the corner—his spot, near the cigarette machine—Devin sparked a smoke with his typical aplomb and hollered over to a couple of the neighborhood guys shooting a money game. Other Saturday drunks, sitting hunched over and nursing lonely libations, ignored him or otherwise glared. A familiar and comforting scene.
Jim, noting that Devin clutched his side, asked if he’d been injured.
“These barbecue ribs? Yeah. A bit tender.” Devin, probing and pressing under his armpit, sucked in his breath and cussed. “You could say so. Training for the ’04 Olympics chugging squad.”
Nyuck-nyuck. “What happened this time?”
Leaning over, shaggy hair hanging down, beak shot through with spider veins, nail-bitten fingers; aviators perched, hiding the eyes. Confidential: “This lot lizard, see, she took a notion to go and take a kick at me.”
“Kicked you?”
Dismissive, waving a hand. “Pretty standard stuff. I had passed out, and this party girl, she figures to roll me.”
“Not again.”
“But damn if I didn’t wake up to catch red hands rifling my jacket. Foiled, I says.”
“You kick that bitch’s ass?”
“She had a weight advantage. Clocked me in the kisser and knocked me onto my ass. And then kicked me square in the side, all punitive and shit. Had on one of them—what ya call them spikes they wear?”
Jim, blinking and rapt. “High heels?”
“The colloquial term for them slides they wear.”
Jim, confounded by this digression. “That who wears?”
A comment came from Darla, another regular sitting a few stools away, drinking and playing trivia. Dry: “Alex, I’ll take ‘Come Fuck Me’s’ for two hundred.”
“Right right right,” Jim said. “Like—high heels.”
“There we go,” Devin said.
“Was she a decent lay?”
Insulted. “Christ, Jimbo. Why you want to ask me a question like that?”
“Like what?”
“How the fuck would I remember? If she was a decent lay?”
Jim, ever more confused. “Me, I’d have those
ribs checked out.”
Devin, regarding ‘his’ bartender, as much as any bartender could be possessed, with renewed trust and pleasure, pronounced an alternative cure: “Ain’t nothing wrong a double J-D rocks, and a pack of Reds, won’t fix.”
“Pour it on top?”
“On top of what?”
“The round you already ordered.”
Devin, discovering a half-consumed cocktail sitting in front of him, broke into a grin. “Make it so.”
Jim gurgled the liquor, filling the drink to the rim. Colorful bar-light glimmered on the surface of the whiskey. Devin felt a shudder like reverence.
About that time the Man in Black came on—‘Can’t Go That Way.’ Devin, thinking, nah; he could and would go that way. In his own time; and biding his time. Waiting for the moment.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 1
