Whatever worked. “Sure we could, baby. More movies.”
“And games.”
Every time he had extra money it went to a new game for the console. She wanted a computer for the house, finally. He hated them, computers. The game controller, those he could handle. Little raised callouses on his thumbs from shooting all the lasers or whatever it was. If only he used those fingers on her occasionally, she might have felt more relaxed and less pushy. “Sure.”
But her smile, forced, hurt. Felt hard around the edges. Felt fake.
Sliding around sock-footed, she brought in Dusty’s dinner of breaded chicken-patty sandwiches and mac’n cheese for him to eat in front of the television. At the sight of Elaine Benes doing her silly, awkward, white-girl dance, Dusty snorted with mirth.
At times, Creedence danced around all crazy like that. But in her case it made her look like a lunatic, he said. Wasn’t funny.
“Shit. I feel like we seen this one four times in the last month.”
“That might not be a bad idea, me going to school. One of us has got to start thinking bigger.”
“Enough about school for tonight. It’ll all work out.”
Dusty pulled the Ace Hardware polo shirt over his head, threw it on the couch like Chelsea had begged begged begged him not to do. Yanked down the white V-neck T-shirt underneath to cover, best it could, his hairy muffin top. Turned up the TV too loud, in case she started talking again, she reckoned. He squirted condiments and crunched into his sandwich. Thursday night. Yay.
After he finished eating, his attitude softened.
“I know you’s worried with the little one coming and all. It’s fine. But, we worked hard all day.”
“It was busy?”
“We was real busy with all them contractors building houses over in that subdivision off River Ridge Road, over by Pike’s Bait & Pawn? Them gonna be some choice houses they got going. Maybe we’ll get ourselves one, after I’m manager.”
“That would be something. Now wouldn’t it.”
Back to mean as a snake. “But for now? I wanna relax and play my game.”
“Sure. Far be it from me. To give a durn.”
“There we go.”
Dusty, an X-Box aficionado, sat in fond embrace of the car-racing games, currently fixated on one involving sordid activity: driving around committing crimes, beating up prostitutes, shooting people, all manner of distasteful acts. Chelsea, getting the creeps whenever she watched him play, face red and eyes glassy; afterwards, for some strange reason, Dusty often wanted to mess around—yuck. The only thing nastier was walking in and catching him biting his own toenails, most often on Sunday afternoons while absorbed by NASCAR.
Shaking her head, poking at her salad greasy with oil and sharp vinegar, she spied one of her own hairs wrapped around the tines of the fork. Feeling her gorge rise. She dumped the salad, uneaten, into the trash.
Chelsea cleaned the kitchen and put Dusty out of her mind. The house would now be quiet but for his small grunts and sighs as he jerked his controller around—she’d made him buy a pair of headphones to wear when ‘jacked-in,’ as he called his game-time. Those sound effects. That music. It had driven her to distraction. Out of her skull. Her numbskull, like he called her sometimes. Ironic.
Done tidying up, Chelsea yawned and reached down to pet her big boy kitty Mr. Bubbie, an orange barrel-stomached tomcat who ate and ate and ate. A pitiful stray she’d found in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, so skinny the vet said he was only a day or two away from death, he had what they called starving cat syndrome. Mr. Bubbie, her special rescued angel, rubbing up and down, back and forth on her lower legs, a graceful, feline dance of gratitude.
But getting so old. Hadn’t a clue how long he’d been on the street before coming to her for rescue and salvation. He had stopped washing himself, his fur greasy. He could be fifteen, for all she knew. Older.
The other cats made their way into the kitchen, mewling and stretching and yawning from the deep slumber of their early evening naps: Pickles, a midnight jet-black female Chelsea’d also found as a stray; a spry, undersized, affectionate calico girl named Bootsy she’d had since kitten-hood, bought from a flea market for two dollars; and a newcomer male, a gray-striped, nervous fellow christened Arthur because something about his face reminded her of the large-eyed cartoon rodent of the same name.
Dusty hated Arthur—he had prohibited his wife from adopting yet another cat. Scoffing and unmindful of his concerns she’d taken in this latest newcomer anyway, who didn’t seem undernourished or in any particular distress. After petting him and falling in love with his funny face, she’d removed the collar he been wearing, including a tag with a phone number and a name she didn’t like—TYGER—and had thrown it in the trash. Taken him for herself. Once coming inside to live he’d been a tad stressed and had indeed marked a few spots, but had now settled in nicely and was using his boxes. Happy as a kitty-clam. He stuck his kitty-butt up and peed against the wall instead of down in the litter, so she had started taping up newspapers all around the boxes full of gray dusty sand. Who cared? He was so cute. He had needed her. She had needed him. The extra trouble and odor was all worth it.
Chelsea bent down to stroke each of the cats in turn and when possible in tandem, so none of them would feel diminished or left out. Her cats looked up to her; she was their god, the fount of their existence. On most days taking care of her pets was the one skill that Chelsea thought she’d mastered, one thing she could do well—modest, perhaps, but at least something. And everybody needed something. Didn’t they?
Cooing, a gentle lullaby. “Arthur didn’t break us. Nor will one more in the house. Tell me. Tell me the truth. Yes yes yes. Mama’s precious babies. One more to come. My baby girl this time. Mine this time. Not a kitty-cat baby. One just like me. A little angel.”
Lord, she thought in sudden detachment sliding into revulsion, but, sometimes? She simply could not stand herself. Truth be told, the last thing she probably needed was another little smart-mouthed ‘her’ running around. Too late now, though. Wasn’t it?
Ten
Billy
Deciding on the walk home to make a pit stop down in the Old Market neighborhood to look up a mutual chum of Ruck’s from Edgewater County, good-old Roy Earl Pettus, for a consultation, Billy strode with purpose up the hill from his office. His boy Roy, a homey to all the principals in this sordid tale, understood the history. He’d know what to do about Ruck.
Now a successful small business man, Billy, admiring the dude like hell for Roy’s normalcy and kindness. Sounded like he never got laid, though.
Hell. Maybe that’s the answer. Get beyond sex, once and for all. Be done with it. Less trouble in his life, that much for certain.
High-stepping his way up the steep hill of South Main Street and drinking in the springtime air, angling out of his to avoid the spot were he’d first asked Libby to have coffee, where their romantic relationship began. Billy, saluting the oak tree upon which she’d leaned and smiled at him. Quelling the urge to head-butt the stately tree.
The campus, alive with flip-flopping girls that, thanks to springtime, had been peeled and stripped down to shorts and T-shirts—a cornucopia, overwhelming, awing, tempting him; Billy, in the spirit of the mating season, all but getting the heebie-jeebies and embarking upon a killcrazy rampage of bloodily unbridled, rapine carnage. God, but the women around here were glorious, fecund flowers into whose pink squishy pistils he so wished to insert his one and true special purpose and thing. Yo. Like repeatedly.
Trying not to follow one of them back to their home. Off-campus best, but Billy’s ID, getting him into all sorts of campus buildings.
Billy: being silly. No accidents, not for a long long time now.
Alcohol, when he drank, which he did for a few years after Libby’s death, a serious factor in perpetuating accidents. The weed, however, keeping bothersomeness at bay. Better for everybody. Weed weed weed. He went through an ounce a week. He a
ttributed his runny eyes and dazed countenance to ‘allergies.’ In a place like South Carolina, covered in springtime pollen, no one doubted his alibi.
Billy exited campus and tromped past the magnificent Victorians on University Hill near his condo building until finding himself on the streets of the college ghetto, the commercial district next door to the enormous state university, a neighborhood of bars and funky little shops for which generations of South Carolina college students and folks from all over held great affection. A cosmopolitan few blocks in an otherwise sleepy Southern city, albeit one with a big swinging dick of a school attracting students from across the region and the country and the world, the Old Market had attracted Billy back when he matriculated to college from prep school. Thank god Columbia could support at least one hipster neighborhood.
Angling down toward the main drag he eagle-eyed his destination: the South Beach-pastel cube of The Spotted Banana, a smoothie stand owned by Roy. A good man, maybe the nicest human being Billy had ever come across. He admired the man’s decent, dutiful soul.
Roy Earl had characterized his stewardship of the Banana, as well as an iconic, college-hipster coffee shop around the corner called the Carolina Beanery Café, as a kind of manifest destiny: back home in Tillman Falls his grandfather had run a notorious tavern and music hall called The Dixiana, so in the Pettus family the hospitality trade, as such, had been in the genes. He’d been halfway toying with the idea of franchising out the coffee brand, if not the smoothie joint, too. Already had other locations—in one of the suburban malls, another up in Charlotte, too. Billy bet Roy had a million bucks stuffed into a pillowcase under the bed.
And hating him for it.
Harsh. But Billy, unable to get at his family money. Not yet.
A trust fund, sure, but only a couple grand a month. Coupled with his proletarian Southeastern University salary, he had sufficient funds to keep himself in Criterion DVDs, weed and pussy. And, he could get more, occasionally. His father, a Washington power-attorney and prick who danced up and down K Street in various guises, still whipped out the checkbook whenever Billy—pushing forty, as he tried to forget—whined hard and long enough.
The Spotted Banana, a small, self-contained building of a thousand square feet on the corner of a busy intersection with a few small tables scattered around inside and on the sidewalk; inside, golden afternoon sunlight streamed into the serving area, the countertops and floors impeccable—spotless stainless steel, waxed and shiny checkerboard tile flooring, bright colored menu boards and walls, the smell of strawberries and other fruit coming high, cold and sweet like in an ice cream shop.
Billy smiled at the iconic mural of anthropomorphic bananas with oversized cartoon eyes and toothy grins, giving thumb’s ups and flashing peace signs with one hand while clutching disproportionately-sized smoothie cups in the other, nattily-gloved cartoon hands like those of Mr. Peanut. Roy Earl said he drew the icons himself.
Talented little redneck, Billy thought. It didn’t seem fair.
A roar came from one of the industrial blenders operated by a smiling, natural beauty of a college girlie wearing a pink Spotted Banana T-shirt one size too small. He noted a pooching belly—the freshman fifteen—that featured a fake-gem encrusted fairy dangling from a pierced navel, but still a beauty.
Billy zoomed in, racked focus. Convinced himself he could see the light tuft of fine blonde hair lying against the tender skin behind the jewelry. Yearning to trace his fingertip under that dangling fairy, tearing the jewelry out with his teeth, ripping those white shorts off, seeing that ass pop out like a ripe peach, shoving his tongue into the back of her throat, filling her up and make her hole whole.
Billy, the bearer of answers to what ails ya, ladies. The answer man.
But: what would be the answer to the answer, man?
Like a head-rush—a flash of blood splatter on the checkered floor, white and black, a pattern for the world like on the floor in the Masonic temple to which his father and grandfather belonged, the big one in DC. The main one. Billy, having none of their fraternal foolishness. Decrying their sad attempts to initiate him.
Blinking his eyes. Losing the urge to rip the girl’s head off. Seeing the young woman for what she was: Nineteen, smiling, innocent in attending to her part-time college job. He wasn’t a monster. C’mon. He could be satisfied with holding her down until she only almost suffocated. Not all the way dead.
The blender stopped and the counter girl dumped a viscous, oozing tendril of purple smoothie into a Styrofoam cup the size of a small bucket. She handed it to an ethnic type, as Billy thought of the bespectacled Indian gentleman waiting with graceful and studied patience.
The studious-looking young man gurgled his beverage and thanked the girl in precise, elegantly accented English. “Remarkably delicious,” he noted to Billy in passing.
“Hey now, sweetheart,” Billy purred as he bellied-up. “What’s shakin’?”
Fake smile. “I’ll be right with you, sir.”
She took the blender to the cleaning area and immersed it in a foamy tub. The rhythmic motion of her elbow, enchanting, allayed his annoyance at being made to wait like some regular Joe.
“Wondering if the boss-man’s around.”
Hollering over her shoulder: “Mr. Roy—there’s a man for you.”
Roy Earl Pettus, beaming like the sun, popped his rounded, shorn noggin from behind a door. “My boy Billy—now it’s on, y’all.”
He charged around the counter in what Billy’d termed the Standard Roy Earl uniform, sported by him since college: a fresh, black pocket T-shirt stretching taut across a substantial belly, a pair of ragged, aged cargo shorts scarred by rips and frayed edges and stains of all origin and hue, wide feet shod by rubber sport sandals that Billy suspected could only have provided modest support. Self-described on a dating service posting he’d shared with Billy as Possessing a genuine curiosity about other people’s lives, a better listener than a conversationalist, loves sports and music and sunsets and beauty and life, whenever he spoke about matters over which his passion stirred, spots of color rose in Roy’s cheeks: Southeastern Redtails football, the price of fair-trade Nicaraguan coffee beans, the perfect ripe banana for the perfect smoothie. Meeting the girl of his dreams. He dated—hell, he had money, so you know plenty sniffed around. Said they were too serious too fast for him. Waiting for the right one.
Roy Earl. A doofus compared to god-Billy. And yet seeming to trump Billy’s own sorry life in every respect. So what if he didn’t get much pussy.
Jesus—if he’d never gotten a whiff, wouldn’t Billy’s life have been simpler? Less bothersome, no doubt. Yeah. Made him roll his eyes with all the subtlety of Jim Carrey.
Requesting an audience. “Got some back-home news for ya.”
“Back home?”
“Well—your home. Edgewater County.”
A shadow fell across Roy’s eyes. He already knew. “Devin?”
Billy, nodding. “Ruck.”
“How bad?”
“Bad. But not like you’re thinking.”
Roy Earl hustled Billy out on the sidewalk, directed him to plop down onto one of the wire-mesh outdoor chairs, the aluminum tabletops reflecting afternoon light back into their faces. Billy, rueful, wondering what the hell he had in mind by burdening innocent, happy Roy Earl with news of Devin’s incipient return, but here he was spreading the joy.
“What happened to him this time?”
“Nothing—yet. But, later in the week I’m to spend some time with our old Ruck,” as Billy explained the call from Creedence, the nonsense leading to the ridiculous San Antonio meet-up.
The soft Pettus countenance fell troubled, cautious. He asked about Ruck’s condition. “On the sauce, I assume.”
Grim: “The endless, epic bender. Epochal. Whatever.”
“Did he call?”
“Are you kidding? His sister rang me up to complain. Ask if I’d reach out.”
Roy Earl, coloring at the mention
of Chelsea Colette Rucker, clutched his ample stomach. He grimaced. “How’s that lovely Creedence doing?”
“What’s the matter down there?”
“Think I got ahold of some bad barbecue tailgating at the spring scrimmage last night.”
Billy, going all Leonard Zelig: “Say, how’s the team looking, bro?”
“Hale and hearty.” Roy described the physical characteristics and statistical achievements of the standout returning players. “Wouldn’t be surprised if they do real good this year.”
“The Roy I remember didn’t care much about sports.”
“Well,” sounding shamefaced, “in this neighborhood, you almost got to love Redtails football.” A belch behind a pink fist. “So anyway, Creedence—? Maybe I should call and check on her.”
Billy could see Roy’s attraction for Ruck’s sister. He had no memory of them being an item, however. Not to mention how it was he who had gotten close to busting a nut with Creedence, more than Roy could dream.
Time for misdirection. “The point is that she wants to make some last-ditch effort to bring Ruck back down to earth. No easy road, but I can’t blame her for wanting to try.”
“I always wondered what it would be like to have a brother or sister. I guess it would be hard to give up on them.”
“Hell of a thing, watching someone you love do the slow, drunk fade out.” Suddenly hot all over, Billy wrenched loose his color-drenched J. Garcia tie. “You should have heard him. Makes sense for a while, then doesn’t.”
Headshaking pity. “I grew up around a bar, and not any old bar. The Dixiana’s a place that—well. Sat there with my granddaddy my whole childhood, both of us watching drunks of various pedigree come and go, until one day they didn’t come no more. Because they were were dead,” he added to make sure Billy got it. “Started serving them myself, after I turned fifteen. But it’s different when it’s someone you care about.”
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 9
