Lawler closed the browser. “You quit? Or get fired?”
“I don’t feel good, if it’s any of your business.”
“See you tomorrow, Susie Q. Freckleface.” He dropped his voice. “Unless you want to see me sooner. I got something so’s I can keep going. You know.” He showed her a pair of blue Viagra in his sweating palm.
Buddy, a lout, unchanged since school days. What had been she thinking? “They’re melting.”
“I got more.” He threw them into her trash can, wiped his hand with one of her crying tissues. “I still want to talk to you some more, sweet girl.”
“Not happening.”
“Since last time, I ain’t quit thinking about you for a minute.”
She felt a flash of anger—at him, at herself. Hissing. “What I got from you I can get at home, and just as shitty. You little-dicked redneck nincompoop.”
Chelsea, striding away and leaving him gape-mouthed. Mean as shit, and for no good reason than to hurt his feelings.
Confused about what’d happened with Buddy, with Uncle Hill, and at wit’s end regarding Dusty, she thought, if Dusty admits the truth and shows repentance, what then?
Do I even want him, now?
Had she ever?
More complicated than she’d let herself believe. And perhaps not entirely a bad thing—except for the baby.
The baby.
The baby.
She drove home a cold statue, ready to see what her husband had to say for himself. Her life was going to change tonight. She didn’t know how, yet. But it would. Her heart spoke the truth even when her head didn’t. This time she would listen.
Composing herself by drinking a Zima, she hit 1 on the speed-dial and waited for Mama to pick up.
Eileen answered, weak-voiced. Her daughter found herself sobbing and sucking in breath, words half-formed and thoughts unclear. When finally managing to make sense—Dusty, a lying little cheat; her, having the proof—Eileen’s response was only to scold for scaring her poor mother half to death.
“Don’t do that to Mama, now. I thought someone had died.”
“It feels that way.”
“Nonsense. You come right over and we’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“I can’t. I got to wait for him to get home.”
“To do what, exactly? Pray tell?”
She didn’t know. Dusty, still keeping that old .22 rifle, loaded, in the closet. He might be greeted by her, shot dead in his unfaithful head and laid to rest on a bed of pine needles out front. Crying again. “I’m-a kill his ass, Mama.”
“You need to cool your jets.”
“He should—he should have his thing cut off. He should die.”
“Colette,” admonishing and shocked and disapproving. “Don’t be so damn hateful. You act like he’s done hurt somebody.”
“I’m serious.”
Last straw. Furious. “Have mercy. I swear.”
Wait. Mama was right. Did Chelsea wish to go to prison over Dusty? After being in prison all this time already?
A jailhouse of your own making, dearheart.
Devin’s voice, coming out of nowhere. A subtle whispery nagging hint of his nasty, mocking, drunken laugh.
A cosmic answer, now revealed, for her zeal at getting Devin home: Chelsea, persuading her brother to kill Dusty.
Yes—Devin, acting like he didn’t want to live anyway. So what difference would going to jail make, or getting the gas chamber?
What difference between yes and no for him? Nothing to lose.
She got all tingly inside. Chicken-skin.
Once Devin got home, Creedence, his sweet little sister, telling him this was the real reason she needed him back. Getting him all drunk and mad, at last taking out all his pain and grief over Libby by ripping Dusty apart and dumping the leftovers into the Sugeree; Dusty, his bloated pieces-parts bobbing up in Lake Hollings downriver where the catfish would eat his fat, cheating ass.
Oh! Chelsea thought. It’s like a plan in a movie.
And as for Devin, wait wait, she had that figured out: he didn’t have to be a sacrifice; he’d get off scot free. They’d call it a fishing accident. Dusty, only an occasional fisherman, with evidence in the form of a tackle box and a jon boat sitting out back filled with last autumn’s leaves and straw.
Oh, but Dusty, on the water, always frightened, always a clumsy oaf. How sad, poor Dusty. Drownded whilst fishing for his supper. Dusty, who could not swim.
I tried to save him, as she would coach Devin on what to say. But he panicked and went under. Sorry.
Ugly thoughts.
Too much TV.
“You must give Dusty a chance to explain.”
“Mama—you don’t know what this feels like.”
Eileen, quiet for a heartbeat or three. A small cough: “No, I don’t.”
Chelsea slammed down the phone. A pang, a cramp. Resentment flooding in like nausea.
But the child, undeserving of such animas for having been put inside her by a stupid boy she’d allowed herself, ruinous, to believe her one and true great love, mainly because he’d been the only one standing there. Believed it enough to get tied down to, and talked down to, for eternity, by Dusty—or whichever doofus to whom the damn stupid baby belonged. Mercy on her soul.
“I got a bone to pick with you.” Dusty at the kitchen table, waiting for Chelsea to serve him his supper, leaned back and looked smug. “Let’s have us a talk.”
Shaking inside, she hoped to betray no hint of her tension. It wasn’t easy. “Gladly.”
Chelsea, eyes red-rimmed and puffy and in blue and yellow Blockbuster Video T-shirt color-splattered with food stains, plaid pajama bottoms hanging low, her grungy awful oldest slippers, back hurting, head hurting, waddled into the kitchen holding kitty Arthur, who after a complete and total scouring and frustrating search of their entire eighteen hundred square-foot manufactured home she’d found cowering under the living room sofa.
“Why’s my Arthur so scared? Why’s he acting like this?”
“I’ve about had it with that durn cat of your’n.”
“Too bad.”
“All these cats.”
“This I got to hear.” Arthur jumped down and leaned against her freckled legs, purring—his little motor, the loudest and sweetest!—and beaming undying kitty love up to her. “What exactly about my precious little one seems to be troubling you?”
“I can’t keep on with this mess.”
“I keep this house neat enough.”
“Work all day and come home to this mess every night. He keeps peeing outside the litter box.”
“I keep that clean.”
“Cats cats cats, that’s all I hear out of your mouth lately. That, and the baby the baby the baby.”
Here was the opening. “You’ve been working hard all day every day, have you?”
“Yes.”
“At Mr. Vincent’s?”
“Where else?” Eyes darting, lips pursed. “Why?”
“Three times, eh? Is that how many?”
“Three times what?”
“Days this week you’ve worked.”
“Yeah,” Dusty mumbled, frowning. “At least. Wait—it’s Thursday. So, four.”
“How many, again?”
His voice tight, strained, cheeks burning. “Four, like I said.”
“Which one was the best one? The first time? Or maybe the one today? Does it keep getting better?”
“What the hell you talking about?” Panicking. Dusty couldn’t act worth a durn. “Do what, now?”
She explained that she meant not his working days, rather the cat-messes. Arthur’s accidents. What had happened; how many times. “The details.”
“Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about. The one today was the worst yet. It had splattered on the wallpaper and baseboard. He ain’t pee-peeing, girl; he’s spraying.”
“I got him fixed. He is not ‘spraying’.”
“Told you a durn tomcat was gonna spray. That it would s
tink up the whole house.”
“And so what do you suggest I do about Arthur and his dreadful peeing?”
Folding his fat arms. “I reckon he’s got to go to the pound, is all.”
Enough. This was getting ridiculous. “Shut up about my cat. I seen you. At the Pecan Market.”
“When? I told you I would bring you hot dogs, but you didn’t call back.”
Sad. “I saw you with her.”
“At the where, now? Who? What you talking, talking about. You better not—you better not have found another cat. At the Pecan Market.”
“Wasn’t no cat I found.”
“Better not be.”
She could barely breathe. Felt all floaty and weird, like that time she smoked dope with Billy Steeple and he almost screwed her, but didn’t.
Chelsea, Colette, Creedence; rage, volcanic, that threatened to cook her guts like a forgotten crock-pot left on high for hours too long—a crust, forming around the rim of her heart. Hard inedible black char. What the devil served up on Thanksgiving. “We ain’t talking about that kind of pussy no more. Boy.”
Now Dusty looked scared. His eyes bulged. But his voice remained steady. She had to give him that. “That’s exactly what we ain’t talking about.”
Chelsea’s anger, now reborn as mad laughter. “Tell me you’ve just gone crazy. Anything to explain why you’d do this to me.”
“It ain’t nothing but a stupid cat. Ain’t nothing stopping us from getting rid of it.”
“Well, it’s too late,” shrieking. “What are you saying, motherfucker?”
“The cat. You better watch your mouth.”
“You ain’t heard nothing yet.” Clutching her stomach. “I got this in here to think about now.”
“That’s what all this mess is. You having this baby.” His words, frustrated and caught and on the verge of piteous tears. “I didn’t know pregnant women got like you, which is half-crazy.”
“’Me’ having this baby? Who you think done it with me? The Easter bunny?”
“You let yourself get pregnant on purpose.”
Incredulous. “What?”
“I seen you spitting out your pill one night. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No I didn’t.” Chelsea howled and wept, high and dramatic the way she had learned from her mother when caught in the act. Leaning over the sink, hair hanging down into a pot with mac and cheese residue around the rim, wishing for her statement to be so but knowing otherwise, wishing and dreaming, now, she’d made any decision but the one that’d allowed Dusty Wallis, or Buddy Lawler, to impregnate her. The baby her mother’d pushed her to have. Pushed pushed pushed. In the last year, more than ever.
“You’re just making stuff up, now,” she sobbed. “To hurt me more.”
Arthur, purring and dancing against her leg, reaching with his cute paw up to check on his crying kitty-mom.
“Sweet angel,” she said.
The cat, sashaying back across the kitchen, bumped his gray striped head against Dusty’s shin.
“Get off me.” Dusty kicked at Arthur with one dirty work shoe, the steel-toed ones Mr. Vincent said they had to wear as though they were out on a job site. The cat, flinching and sliding crazily across the slippery floor, paws desperate for purchase, his kitty face, terrified. No howl or sound. That was only in the movies. Real cats suffered their pain in silence. He bolted out of the room
Creedence, a war cry; she lunged across the kitchen at her husband, hurling invective and slapping and clawing at Dusty’s fat, jiggling face. She beat him with her closed fists; a knuckle, landing hard and true and in collision with cheekbone. Putting her knee up into his groin. “Don’t you ever do that again to my baby.”
Dusty hollered, pinwheeled his arms, fell backwards across the table. He upended the lazy susan and the dinner plates, a rain of yellow spice tins that scattered and burst open.
Creedence grabbed at the warm tea kettle and flung it across the table at his face; he batted the ancient, heavy iron object away—it had been Big Ma-maw’s—with a forearm then clutched in pain.
Not done: She grabbed at the big skillet hanging behind the stove, yanking at it so hard she pulled the whole bar off the wall, the other pots and pans tumbling onto the stovetop and the floor in a shower of sheetrock and paint chips, the big heavy wok landing on her left big toe and causing her to collapse and miss Dusty’s roundhouse swing at her head that now went high. Creedence, collapsing and holding her foot, wailing in agony, calling him an SOB and every name in the book.
Down on one knee by the table, she looked up to see a caul of anger coloring Dusty’s normally soft round features. The brown doe-eyes Eileen so loved were now hooded and red and glazed. Teeth bared, snot hanging out of his nose. He loomed over her, yanking the belt from his pants. Doubling the leather strap.
“Oh, please,” scoffing and struggling up onto her knees. “You ain’t got the balls.”
Dusty, lightning fast, struck his wife across the face with the worn leather, stinging and hard.
Creedence, gasping and falling to the laminate kitchen floor, heart trip-hammering, hollered out for her mother. Thinking, this can’t be real, this can’t be happening to me.
As she cowered Dusty raged and cussed, beating her again, and again. He kicked at her. She rolled away. He whipped her across the back, three times, four times, one last brutal lash across her buttocks.
“Don’t you never call me no son of a bitch again,” he wept in anger, breathless, a demon. “Don’t you never do that. You hear me?”
Creedence, on her back, cowering and whimpering and holding up her hands. “I won’t. Please. I won’t.”
He broke down, sobbing. He dropped the belt and slithered out the back door, slamming it so hard it bounced back open.
“You shut that door,” wheezing into her breath. “Before my kitties get out...”
Her stomach aching where he’d kicked her, she crawled over and pulled herself up by the doorknob, yanking the storm door shut and locking him out. Her back stinging, she got to her feet and went to find her scared babies to reassure them that they, and kitty-mom, were now safe.
A line had been crossed.
She wondered if she were lucky to be alive.
Shit—Dusty, not having the guts. What’d happened, an anomaly. Not forgivable, but not the Dusty she’d known. Chelsea had become another domestic violence statistic. Her mother would be horrified.
But for all the pain and disbelief, the upside? Now she had license to say and do as she pleased. Could get out of this thing with Dusty, which she already knew she wanted anyway. People thought she was a dummy, but it wasn’t so.
Still scared and stinging from the belt—a more visceral sensation than she’d ever gotten from screwing the little squirt—already the pain seemed to empower her. She’d get photos of the wounds. Rock solid evidence. It couldn’t have worked out better.
And then? Billy.
Billy, whom she wanted most.
Needed.
Old business, unfinished; the longest foreplay in history.
Still, she could wait a little longer. In due time. Dusty’d beaten her into the arms of a rich boy, as she’d show him.
She’d show Billy, too. Show him how sexy she could be—years of anticipation would erupt like a dam bursting.
Into the bedroom, fixing herself up best she could and putting essentials into a suitcase; next she assembled the cat-carriers in a neat row in the living room, an action causing the vet-phobic pets a new round of demonstrable, vocal distress. She called her mother, said she’d be home in ten minutes; how she had her proof of Dusty’s infidelity, and that she’d be checking into the Rucker Inn for an indefinite stay.
Eileen, sounding breathless and thrilled and tantalized, bade her daughter to come with all good but safe speed; to be careful; that home was waiting. That her mother stood at the ready, dutiful and eager, to care for her only daughter. That she could not wait to hear what had happened this time.
Billy
Awakening face down on the scratchy hotel bedspread, Billy found himself dressed only in boxer-briefs and sporting his customary morning redwood, jutting and painful. Throat sore. Vision blurry. Sour, sticky tongue.
Sticky. Checking his hands, fingernails, torso—no blood, but crusts of yellow between a couple of fingers and around his mouth.
He gagged—if some accident had happened with Devin, Billy must have cleaned it up.
Jesus—booze. What a moron. No control at all. Who knew what had happened. All he could remember was puking.
Devin, helping him with the puking. Being kind and jovial all night.
Okay. Other than a nostalgic raging bar crawl, no perfidy.
Rolling over, he saw through a blurry eye his boy Devin in the lounger, the television screen glowing with shimmery LCD unreality. Devin, at first appearing to be asleep, but as Billy’s own hungover, sleepyhead vision cleared he realized his old friend’s eyes were slitted open. A finger on the remote, moving, changing the channel from Headline News to ESPN, skipping over in favor of QVC, then AMC, then BET, a rap video with bootylicious women gyrating behind a gold-toothed wordsmith flashing bling and hip-hop bons mots at the camera.
All had gone well last night. Libby’s name hadn’t come up once.
As far as he remembered.
His rigid porkhammer ebbed and withdrew against his thigh.
“You been up all this time?” Billy asked as a hoarse good-morning. “No way.”
“Couldn’t nod off.” Pitiful, small and shaky. “Drunk everything but that shit Amaretto.”
At the sight of all the empty mini bottles, his tender stomach pulsed with a sharp and unpleasant sense-memory. “You can’t be serious.”
Devin winced, sudden, and put the heel of a hand to his forehead. “S’cuse me.” He went hobbling toward the bathroom—his leg, seeming to be asleep.
An epiphany felt through Billy’s hangover: no more conference. No more paper. He didn’t know what he was going to get up there and say, particularly in this wretched physical and mental shape.
And so: Ruck, flying back with him. Today.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 14
