Trying to remind himself.
Not trying too hard.
C’mon—fruit was there to be picked. Guys traded them back and forth sometimes. Billy, from money, from up north, way too evolved to suffer such base emotions as jealousy. Nor would Ruck, sophisticated beyond his years.
On another level, Billy needed to talk to Libby about schoolwork: to get the tickets he’d had to blow off the scriptwriting class they shared. But the assignment, far from his mind.
She doesn’t really love that guy she makes it with. Now does she.
“I am Superman,” Billy declared to a passing ROTC shavetail with a bulging book bag. “And I know what’s happening.”
“Congratulations,” the budding soldier said.
Billy walked on, contemplating the compliment, but said, hey: save it for the real victory. Hurrying, he strove to catch up to Libby. Soon, she’d never be far from him again.
Twenty
Devin
Dobbs, knocking, insistent, calling from outside Devin’s locked bedroom door:
“I’ve come to draw master’s drapes and change out the chamber pots!”
Devin, groaning and sweating upon fetid, yellowed bedsheets; a hangover for the ages. A death rattle. Epic night down in the Old Market. Far as he could remember. Wednesday morning hangovers the worst, somehow.
No—Thursday. It had been Hump Day Happy Hour all night.
Terrible sleep, even with all the booze. Nightmares of the dead body in the country club pool, the one he’d found five years ago at his dumb summer job. Nothing new. Dreams, ever since.
His narrow, iron-framed bed offered little more than a glorified prisoner’s cot; it creaked in tandem with his moans. “Leave me to finish cooking in here,” he pleaded with his best pal from home in Edgewater County. “The sunlight is roasting me.”
“Open up and I’ll fan you, princess.”
“Takes one to know one.”
But Ruck wasn’t in prison, only in college, pursuing the life of the higher mind; his dorm room, sterile and austere, a grungy room in need of painting and curiously denuded of the posters and personalizing totems typical of college men like him, as though Devin a transient prisoner awaiting sentencing to a more permanent holding cell.
A corner room, he had lucked into windows affording two views—of the huge oak tree with boards nailed onto it for roof access, a prime sunbathing spot, and also the grassy yard two stories below where in the evenings the roommates, four in all, would grill hamburgers and hot dogs, or barbecue chicken and marinated steaks on Sundays, as though they were all still living in Edgewater County and going to Roy Earl’s granddaddy’s cookouts, or at Devin’s own grandparents, when they were still alive.
University Terrace, near-decrepit student housing, was part of a block-long complex of 1940s era, two-story buildings comprising sets of over-and-under flats in the middle, multi-level suites on each end, with a mirror structure across a concrete fire lane. All of it sloped down a steep hill toward Blossom Street. Cruddy or not, unlike normal dorm rooms the abodes more small apartments, with full kitchens and bathrooms, than dorm rooms; it made for an on-campus luxury only a hundred yards from the student union and five minutes to any class. Devin and Dobbs, lucky to get in together from year one: Hill Hampton and Dwight Rucker, both football donors, pulled strings.
Best friends, familiarity making the transition to college life an easy one; another Edgewater County native Roy E. Pettus, good old boy, sensitive English major, and fellow pothead to complement Dobbs; another roommate named Mike Cassidy, from Ohio, an outsider—okay guy, but when drunk a thug, a lout who got off on vandalizing property on their drunken walks back from the Old Market after last call. Mike, barely there most of the time.
Inspired, Roy had written a short story for one of his English classes called ‘Eye of the Vandal’ but: “Too close to real life,” had been Devin’s review.
“I tried to make the Cass Mickle character seem like it wasn’t him.”
“Not enough. Make him have blonde hair instead of brown. That way Mike won’t realize.”
Libby, an observer and good judge of people, had called Cassidy a minor character in the ongoing story of the dorm-suite, Fall 1989 semester. “I predict his role will be small.”
“Like an extra in the background?”
“No—some minor detail in a subplot. Mike will have one decent scene where he says something that matters, but on which the overall story doesn’t turn in any huge way. Again, a subplot,” she’d explained, half serious.
“You and those movie classes.”
“It’ll pay off.”
Devin, knowing he needed to spend more time with her. Happier getting drunk enough to pass out and forget all the weird crap that wouldn’t leave him be. Dead black dudes in the pool. His mother and her rank disloyalty to the family. Buncha dumb shit. You had to drink to not think about it all.
“Are you going to let me in? Or not?”
“It’s, what do you call it—under advisement.”
Dobbs, refusing to relent, continued rattling the tarnished, ancient brass doorknob until it fell off onto the hardwood floor. The door creaked open to reveal him standing with judgmentally folded arms.
“And I advise you to pull yourself together.”
“I already got a mother back home, chief.”
Slight and stooped, a shock of unruly blonde curls like a small helmet atop his head, Dobbs; the one time he and Devin let their hair grow all summer, before senior year at James F. Byrnes, he ended up looking like Harpo Marx; the high school back home, known colloquially as Byrnes Hell, actually a top high school in the state, serving central Edgewater County to include Tillman Falls, Chilton, Red Mound, Parson’s Hollow. Strong school for such a rural county.
Dobbs, his voice, soft, slight and high-pitched, a manner gentle but sarcastic. His eyes, drooping—by now, he and Roy Earl had had pre-class AM bong hits.
“Enough with the repartee. I bring news.”
“So dish, Cronkite.”
“You may not have realized it, but in your convalescence, the outside world has continued to endure.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s almost lunchtime.”
So it was. “Explains the light and the heat.”
“More to the point: that’s three classes missed.”
Devin stretched. The spare tire around his midsection rumbled, his hangover turning to hungries. “Don’t sweat it.”
Dobbs, giggling. “Look, y’all—it jiggles like a great big bowlful of jelly.”
“Fuck your mother.”
Clapping his hands together. “What’d you bring me this year, Santa? A twelve-pack? A beer-bong?”
“Why don’t you eat the fucking dingleberries out of my ass?”
“With sugar and cream? Yay, Santa, yay!”
Devin’s cheeks, flaming; and, yes, feeling self-conscious about burgeoning weight, but the point of being in shape was, what? His end was nigh.
Yeah, no; the dead guy in the pool had told him. Not with words. You couldn’t explain it.
But, still, Devin certain: Aches and pains. Award-winning benders, shots of straight liquor chased by cases of cheap beer, PJ parties, drinking games, a universe of possibility when matters turning to those of incipient mortality. Taking chances. Hopping the slow moving freight cutting through the southern end of campus, riding until crossing the Old Market trestle. Jumping off, drunk, stumbling and rolling down the steep incline of the trestle hill. Only last year, a kid got killed pulling that stunt. Legs cut off. Bled out there waiting for help. REMEMBER JEREMY, screaming caution-yellow billboards read. DON’T HOP THE TRAINS.
“Are you planning to go to classes again anytime soon?”
“Will you get out of here?”
“But seriously, son—you have got to do better. With Libby, too.”
Libby had been distant lately. Asking what she had to do with anything.
“If you care about her, you’ll ask her yourself.”
<
br /> Devin pulled on a gray Redtails gym shirt that stunk of armpit and beer. “What’d she say?”
Dobbs, an air of supercilious disdain. “You’re as dense as an ever-loving block of cement. Did the doctor squeeze the forceps too tight when you was birthed from your Mama’s belly?” He flopped down on the bed, skinny legs in the air as though in the stirrups. “Push, Mrs. Rucker.”
“I may puke.”
He made a fart-sound. “There he is. Oh, my—this may be the fattest baby we’ve ever seen here at Edgewater County General Hospital.”
“I get it; I get it. I’ll take care of Libby. I’ll hit the gym. And the books.”
“Be serious, if you’re serious.”
“What’s the rumpus?”
“I hate to see her treated like an afterthought.”
“Who is doing that to her?”
Dobbs, punching Devin in the arm. “She deserves better.”
“Leave Libby to me.”
“Do you still care about her?”
Somehow neither surprised nor caught off guard. Knowing now that Dobbs a true surrogate. Asking Libby’s question for her. Fraught with portent, but not unexpected.
Devin, the same answer he’d probably offer his girl: “C’mon. What do you think?”
“Never answer a question with another question, Ruck—you might as well be saying ‘no’.”
“When’d you get so wise?”
“Since you decided to get your ears flushed.”
“You wish.”
Dobbs, leaving with a sharp glance, slammed the door shut behind him.
Serious shit. Devin, on notice.
But a part of him already found acceptance. Devin’s clock, ticking fast. A concept already having taken hold, now reinforced. That’s what Libby deserves. Someone with a future. Someone alive.
Libby: coming alive at Southeastern and out from under the yoke of home life—taking to her scriptwriting, fluorescing into young adulthood as a mature and self confident survivor of a sometimes unsettled home life, a drinker for a father, a mousy, nervous mother, cowed, fearful, and kids suffering unpredictable verbal and mental abuse. But Libby, strong, seemingly unscarred by grim experiences of her youth, more implied to Devin than depicted in detail. Libby, healthy and smart, telling Devin, “it’s all material, my family’s foolishness. That’s all it is. Fodder for fiction.”
“Fodder.” Devin, with a nod. Understanding. Been there.
“Yes. Nothing more.”
Libby, already working on the final assignment in her screenwriting class, one not due for two months, a twenty-five to thirty page five-scene epic. Devin, sitting in her room one night, watched her with a small stack of three by five note cards: a project to be later expanded, she hoped, into a first feature length script, a special section taught by Max de Lisle for upper level Mass Comm students. Facing College Street, the title of the piece; plot, the trials and tribulations of a young woman from a dysfunctional home who, after going off together with her longtime boyfriend to a fictionalized ‘Mid Carolina State,’ enjoys a crisis of faith—but only after her lover begins to take their relationship for granted.
Where she got this stuff, he had no idea.
Devin, that afternoon, telling her how much he liked her story idea, took Libby off-campus for dinner and a movie. Holding her hand. His girl, back to beaming and happy.
Weeks ago, now. Back to feeling isolated, though by his own volition. For whatever reason. Entire days would go by with only a phone call.
Devin and Libby.
An acknowledgement: drifting apart. It was fine. She would be better off without him.
Devin, soaping his body in the shower, the steaming water blasting against his forehead; trying to beat back the headache now getting a foothold. These lasted until first of the day—beer, not class.
A vague recollection of gripping the sheets as the spins overtook him, as though bed and room and building all twirling counter to one another—and perhaps to the earth itself—in a nauseating maelstrom of severe intoxication. Hot water, pores opening, cleansing.
After getting out he felt better, almost like a normal human being. Fleeting—an unusual sensation.
Remembering the floating man. That crazy morning. Devin’s first dead body.
Pedaling his ten-speed through the woods cut-through, a sandy path meandering through rows of skinny loblolly pines, a shortcut from the highway to the eighteenth green, the country club beyond; the Ruckers, longtime members, his father a businessperson of respect and relative good fortune, a man of means. Chilton, while still unincorporated, had become the most outlying of the bedroom communities serving Columbia down past the lake country. That’s how Devin’s daddy described where they lived. Devin told people Tillman Falls instead, when they asked. Nobody had heard of Chilton, but Tillman Falls had famous steeplechase events and history going back to the revolutionary war. Chilton, whatever it was, had an Piggly Wiggly, two gas stations, a McDonald’s and a flashing light.
Devin’s daddy, a Nationwide man, was lifelong best friends with the guy who’d become the millionaire car dealer in the county, or rather, whose daddy had back in the fifties and sixties. They ran in town with others like them, men and women who lolled around the country club and together in other fraternal organizations. This particular club counted upon its rolls member of both the bourgeois Old South town of Tillman Falls as well as the exurban areas like unincorporated Chilton, where the Ruckers lived in the real nice Pine Haven subdivision right off the interstate, though certain characteristics like race and social standing played a part in determining membership eligibility.
A go-getter, an early riser like dad, an insurance man who owned his own firm and now had locations in three towns, nearby Union and Chester a little farther—futha, as Dwight Rucker would say—to the west; a work ethic, instilled. Believing his father’s wisdom about idle hands and evil hearts, seeing with his own eyes that the man worked hard, lived to work, long hours.
Peddling with strength and purpose along the best part of the trail, Devin, sweating already despite the hour. He had skirted Jensen’s Pond to pass through a copse of hardwoods and down an ancient creek bed dried hard and flat by years of South Carolina sun, wiping his forehead and wishing he had put on the terrycloth sweatband stuffed down into a new, neoprene waterproof book-bag slung and hung on his back. Inside, his lunch, a change of clothes, a paperback or two. Always.
Devin; the books. More than people.
He couldn’t account for it. Didn’t fit there in Edgewater County. Felt hatched instead of born’d.
He had approached the golf shack and the pool house, the club patio, outdoor bar, the upstairs dining deck; his domain as lifeguard (Boy Scout certified), cabana boy and sometimes busboy for the restaurant. His first job-job. It paid well. Again—Old Money, and some new, among the swells in Edgewater County. Enough to demand a top-flight club, anyway.
Devin, frowning at an anomaly—he froze and felt a chill: the heavy wrought iron pool gate, gaping and open. Unusual, unless an earlier bird than he already at the club. “You don’t never leave that gate open, or even unlocked, at the end the day,” as he had been trained by Mr. Raymond. “It’s an in-surance liability for the club.”
“Oh, I understand, sir. My dad’s Mr. Rucker.”
“I know who he is, son. Why you think you got this job?” Mr. Raymond, burned brown and wrinkled from a lifetime of toil in the sun, looked seventy from smoking but was only in his 50s. He cut through the guff, as he put it. Told it like it was. Devin could get down with it, so long as it jibed with his worldview.
The sun, cresting the top of the tree line, a reflective bright twinkling streaking across his vision. A glass vessel—a liquor bottle—lay label-down in the grass by the hard concrete of the pathway leading to the narrow gate.
He turned it over with the toe of his sneaker stained amber by the clay around the pond. Henry McKenna, a bourbon. All but consumed. A trickle in the bottle. Devin had found out wh
at liquor was like while away at Scout camp last summer. He had thrown up, but also liked the way it made him feel.
A lot.
Better than this:
Devin, heart flopping in his chest, glancing around, pushed the heavy iron gate all the way open. Creeping toward the pool, head on a swivel, he saw a man in the water.
“Hello?” all too soft. “Hey, who is that?”
Not a swimmer. Devin, seeing a dark shadow floating down in the shimmering deep end—a body.
A real body, arms outstretched.
A man.
Floating.
A pink cloud.
Blood.
Hurrying over, stiff-legged and uncertain, Devin’s Scout training kicked in. He leapt into the water, thrashing over to the man. Devin, gasping a lungful of air and diving under.
Devin, grabbing at the rough sleeve of a black man with dark skin, work clothes, a billion tiny bubbles clinging to his body. Hanging upside down, turning now in the turbulence caused by Devin’s presence.
Devin, panicking, ridiculous, his lungs exploding, screamed under the water: Are you all right?
The man, eyes lidded but open, turned to look. His wrinkly, swollen fingers brushed against Devin’s stomach. A flash of morning sunlight from a silver necklace floating out from around his neck. His other calloused, dead fingers tickling against Devin’s leg. All in an instant.
A gurgling sound, air escaping from the dead lungs.
A voice from beyond: HUH.
Devin kicked back and away, catapulting himself up out of the pool onto the night-cooled concrete of the decking. Hacking and gasping and spitting out chlorinated pool water, his chest tight, throat ragged, he cried out HELP HELP HELP but it was choked, aggrieved. He puked—pool water, milk, soggy breakfast cereal.
“Devin Rucker—is this yours?” Mr. Raymond, standing in the gate with the McKenna, looked horrorstruck. “Boy, what ails you?”
He couldn’t get the words out, like a recurring dream of smothering under a great amorphous dark weight—of trying to yell for help, but having no wind. Devin, croaking: “In the pool.”
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