Billy, pondering the unnatural incongruities, the buildings housing the student body. One far day ahead they’d be excavated, studied. He pictured a group of intrepid archaeologists, serious and driven, wearing hazmat suits while sifting through layers of beer cans, used rubbers, Madonna CDs and textbooks, those mostly left pristine, untouched. Wrinkling their noses and snorting with condescending disgust, if not outright bewilderment, at the degeneracy of the ancients on display; a vision of empire’s end.
Billy, in the throes of one of his fixations, cared little for what the future might think of him. Not with Libby in one of those buildings. The thought of her, along with the breeze flowing across the balcony, threaten to provoke another dizzying, persistent erection; Libby Meade, star of Compulsion, A Film By Roman Polanski.
Soon, he would have to act. A successfully nonlethal seduction of her, and eventual real human relationship between them, would put to bed once and for all any hint of the bothersome, murderous rage often sweeping through him during the physical act of love. A healing angel, Libby. He just knew it.
But not always compulsive about screwing another human being to death. Sometimes Billy went ballistic over the collecting of objects—high-end audio equipment, albums, VHS tapes. So far, the desire for Libby like how the ravenous need for a spike of heroin must feel to a junkie.
How he’d watched Mucky Turnbull shoot up one night, he said, in honor of GG Allin, who’d died not shitting on stage but with a needle in his arm. And how Billy’d told Mucky he was a real douchebag poseur, and drugs weren’t that cool and how straight edge was what their band should emulate; this attitude needled the lead singer, with his drooping eyes and drooling mouth, of what they’d decided that night to call Choking Hazard.
Billy, believing Mucky to have now gotten hooked, keeping it from everyone else in the band. Wasn’t hard to conceal. They barely practiced, much less gigged. Needed to get motivated—the band was Billy’s only serious side-artistic outlet, next to his burgeoning scriptwriting career, of course, with music fame and fortune now only the backup, but still important.
They needed to try harder. Not party so much.
Needling.
Need.
Needing to acquire.
Now.
In Billy’s case, love being the drug. Forget the band, Mucky, music, movies.
Libby.
The spark, ignited, whether she knew it or not.
The best part?
Billy wasn’t a complete and total snake—a foundation had been laid: Libby, confessing to him a week earlier over an impromptu coffee chat outside the Humanities building that, as much as she might still love Devin? Wondering how much he cared for her anymore? If theirs was a high school romance now running out the clock?
“These things happen.”
“Yes,” Libby said. “You’d tell me if he was seeing someone else?”
“How would I know?”
“Because he hangs out with you more than me lately.”
“Can you blame him? I’m a super-friend.” And sharing a warm chuckle. “He’d be a fool to let you go.”
“I’m more trouble than I’m probably worth. I’m as moody as he is.”
With most women, they made their intent known within ten seconds, like the au pair who’d deflowered him at eleven. She’d seen what he had. Wanted a taste.
But Libby, not as clear-cut in her desires. Cutting her eyes under wavy short hair, a perm. Tasteful makeup. Demure. An arts goddess. “Thanks for the coffee. I think I’ll go and check on Devin.”
“Ruck’s a rock. But, I’ll go with you.” They didn’t find him.
The au pair—the first accident.
Renee, how she’d walked in on him beating off. A French girl.
Had laughed, at first, at the hung horsemeat he wielded even at that age. Her giggle, it made him freak. Laid a kernel of anger that he still rolled around in his head to this day.
He stood frozen. It glistened in the half-light of his room, a rainy morning. She came over. Started tickling it.
Playing.
He’d erupted within seconds, ropy and thick, with a roar—and from her, another gale of laughter.
He had picked her off the floor by the throat. How the girl kicked and fought him off, fell to the ground choking, skittered out and bolted.
She quit later that day, tending her resignation to his father’s secretary. Offered no reason other than unhappy.
Her loss.
Women were all the same. Except for Libby. She had her own music. He had to have her.
Afternoons.
Throughout October Billy made sure he met Libby at least twice a week; for coffee at one of the downtown lunch-counter places on the other side of the Capitol Complex, or to study together. This allowed ample and expansive time for her to kvetch about Devin, or the scriptwriting class, or her dreams, which included standing on the AMPAS award stage one day, clutching the gold man near the base and trying to remember everyone deserving of thanks.
He finally broached: “Does Ruck know about our coffee talks?”
She colored. “He doesn’t mind.”
“C’mon. That’s why it’s always all the way over on this side of campus—so we won’t run into him.”
“Yes,” clear in her discomfort at his blunt incursion into the truth. “I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“Talking is not doing anything wrong.”
“Here’s the thing.” She snapped into focus, taking charge, chopping at the air as she spoke with a trio of petite fingers like a Boy Scout salute, digits Billy wanted to lick and suckle like teats. “Devin’s in a funk. It’s a bring-down.”
“I’ve noticed this tendency.”
“I keep wishing it were time for him to think about growing out of old routines. What the future holds. What he really wants to do with his life, which he still doesn’t know. My poor baby.”
“What you need to do—as I see it—is date other dudes. People, I mean.”
“Billy.” Understanding what he meant. Shaking her head, no. “We can’t. We’re all friends.”
Billy calculated, resisting the urge to force his impatient hand: Pooh-poohing, saying of course of course of course, no no no that’s not what I meant. “What kind of cad do you think I am? There’s a code among gentlemen. The thought of betraying a brother officer of the lodge shakes me to the core.”
“Oh, please.”
Asking her, finally, if she would be his date for the concert, yes; but only in the sense of accompanying one another in platonic friendship and collegiality: as fellow writers.
“I want my mind blown alongside you. It’s the Dead.”
She nodded. “Legends of psychedelic rock.”
“Chance of a lifetime.”
“Sure, sure. I get it.” Libby, reminding him she was more of a movie gal.
“We’re kindred spirits.”
Giving him a forearm slap. “It’s a deal.”
“If I get out of hand—”
“—like breaking some code?—”
“—yeah; I’m sure your Ruck will set me straight.”
The slap, her energy, lingering along his skin like a trail of ants. Her smile. The eyes, holding his; darting away in recognition of the undeniable heat.
Billy had her. Almost too easy.
They parted with a chaste, quick hug that caused tingling deep inside. He brainstormed the rest of the day about an appropriate gift for her, something cool, not ordinary; no flowers, not stupid, not clichéd. Layered with meaning and metaphor. He’d work on it.
After jerking off a couple of times back home the idea of a CD came to him as apropos, counterintuitive considering what she’d said earlier about preferring movies over music, but whatever. It was his idea, it was his and no one alive could stop him from executing this plan.
Billy rinsed off his horsedick and bolted up the hill, three stairs at a time, to the record store in the student union mini-mall.
He scanned the rac
ks—no punk for her; no bombastic classic rock crud; no bubblegum pop; no fucking Beatles. Not even the Grateful Dead, about whom Billy knew less than nothing. His next conquest deserved tunes with class and style, an album of music befitting a luminous and sophisticated specimen like Libby Meade.
Browsing, his fingers dancing across the rows of CDs. Coming upon a Dire Straits called Making Movies, a semi-recent critical and artistic smash. From the title alone he knew he’d found the right present for his newest and best girl:
Making movies.
One day, he and Libby would be making them together.
Steeple-Meade Productions Presents.
Making movies and fucking with joyful abandon. No more accidents once kismet and love joined hands. Heavenly.
No more bothersomeness.
And as for Libby Meade, soon reveling in the eventuality of their union. Whether she wanted to, or not.
Twenty-Three
Devin
Every night in which he failed to drink himself into unconscious oblivion, Devin, re-encountering the dead fucker floating along, peaceful, easy and asleep. Forever. Could rarely drink enough, it seemed, to avoid these stupid dreams.
The flash of sunlit glass off the liquor bottle left by the gate.
The man turning toward him with those dark, dead eyes.
The blood in the water.
What a day it’d been already, but after Devin and Mr. Raymond found the dead dude, all heck broke loose at the country club.
The police and ambulance arrived. Bill Wimmel, editor-in-chief of the Edgewater Advocate, drove over to personally report the story. Men in suits and uniforms alike, huddling, pointing, nodding. Yellow incident tape across the pool area gate.
Devin, made to describe what he had seen, where and how, what he had done.
At last Devin’s dad showed up, sliding the Oldsmobile into the country club parking lot in a spray of grit and small stones like one of those 70s car chase movies the family enjoyed. Running over to the pool area, wild-eyed, desperate to find his son.
Once he did Dwight hugged Devin close, a gesture more intimate than most the teen and his father shared.
“My boy—are you okay?”
“Of course.” Devin, lying. Inside, he couldn’t stop trembling. “It just—surprised me.”
“Shook you up, I’ll bet.”
“Nah.”
The Sheriff, a fat Southern redneck named Whardell Truluck, his gut as big and hard as a bowling ball, greeted Dwight Rucker with one of their grown-man special handshakes.
“Sorry you had to go through that, young man. This here boy didn’t do nothing his whole sorry life but cause trouble. Drowning in that pool and scaring y’all half to death this morning ain’t nothing but one last time.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Hush, son. You don’t ask the Sheriff questions—he asks you.” The men winked at one another.
“Young Mr. Rucker?”
Devin said ‘yessir?’ to the Sheriff, whose breath stunk of onions and nicotine.
“You ever seen a body before?”
“When they showed us the traffic safety movie at school.”
“That don’t count. That’s in a movie.”
“Then I reckon it was.”
“Best advice I can give you is to forget it.” To Dwight: “Y’all get on out of here. Your son can’t tell us nothing we don’t already know about what happened here.”
“Who is the man?” Devin, a squeeze from his father’s arm suggesting impertinence.
Sheriff Truluck, a blank face and a snort that seemed to say what difference do it make? “Albert Nixon. Worked on Bledsoe’s landscaping crew. That’s when he seen the pool— when they’s working around here. Reckon he come back wanting to take himself a dip. Hot night last night.”
“Nixon? He related to that Reverend Nixon across the river?”
“Them SOBs all related, one way or another. Autopsy’ll tell if he was on drugs. Either way, this SOB wasn’t right in the head. A drunk and a layabout, dead in the decent folks’s pool. If that don’t make you shake your head, I don’t know what would.”
Devin, going to the Olds and getting inside. Dwight Rucker pulled the driver’s side door shut with force.
“You don’t dwell on none of this, son.”
Devin watched the ambulance carrying Albert’s body go down the long tree-lined drive of the country club, a median of flowers and shrubbery Albert had tended many times. “Daddy?”
Dwight, waiting.
“When I was in the water with him, I imagined what it felt like.”
“What what felt like?”
“To be dead.”
“Nothing more natural than feeling scared when you see another person like that.”
“I reckon.”
Dwight groped at first for words. Nodded until he had his thread of discourse figured out. Devin knew this look. Dwight could sell insurance all the livelong day but not always express himself on an emotional level with his family. Here, an exception:
“I’ll never forget when your great-grandmama passed on. I crept into that funeral home like I was being asked to go into a haunted house. I wasn’t but a year older than you are now, back before you wasn’t so much as a twinkle in me and your mama’s eyes.”
“Were you scared?”
“For a while I couldn’t stop thinking about her being gone, but later, the preacher took me aside. He told me how she was okay.” He’d leaned in, a teachable moment: “How she’d be waiting for me, son, once I got there. Smiling, and waiting. Like she’s still waiting for all of us. And then? I felt better.”
“You think all that’s true?”
Dwight, whom Devin knew considered himself saved despite the fact they never went to church, beamed an expression of self-satisfaction at having done the job required of him: imparting the selfsame assurance offered by the pastors of the world. “Never more sure of anything.”
Devin, processing. “Mr. Raymond said they had to drain the pool, now, so I could go for the day.”
“Well, let’s go, then.”
“I’d rather ride my bike back home.”
“Get on your way, then. Enjoy your summer. You’ll be fifteen soon. Time to get your learner’s permit and get old Uncle Hill to start looking for you a car. How’s that sound?”
It sounded great. He said, hell yeah, Daddy. And they slapped secret skin. Eileen would never approve of Devin having a learner’s permit, not with all the accidents people were having these days.
But Devin had not gone straight home. Instead, he lingered in the quiet woods by the place kids called Big Rock, a huge boulder jutting up from the ground with one jagged corner carved and chipped and spray-painted to look like an owl’s head staring out toward the placid, dark water of the forest pond. A few rich people had houses near the opposite end of the pond, an oxbow lake that had once been part of the Sugeree River, but on the whole Big Rock lay tucked away, private, where people came to party untroubled by cops or parents.
A carpeting of cigarette butts, condoms, beer cans attesting to its status as a place of leisure and revelry among Edgewater County youth covered the ground around the rock. Devin found this place lovely and peaceful, hated that it was defiled by all the detritus. Wishing he had a trash bag to clean it all up. Maybe one morning he would come early and do so, before it became too muggy, and try to redeem clean the Edgewater County cretins who’d defiled this otherwise lovely forest glen.
Devin. Consumed by the concept of the end, what being dead felt like. How one second a person could be filled with emotion and knowledge but in the next transform into an inert, floating hunk of meat. Doubts about salvation and eternity, of streets of gold and a place alongside the savior, or God himself, or whatever it was supposed to be. Doubts. Fears. The impossibility of the him inside him being gone.
God seemed over-there somewhere. Inaccessible.
Doubts doubts doubts.
But Devin, feeling safe in the woo
ds, away from everything and everyone that defined him as a person. Remembering a line from a science fiction book he’d read:
Fear is the mind killer.
Alone, Devin felt that he could not die, not here among the trees and the lichen-covered rock, birds singing and cicadas buzzing, warm, humid air hanging heavy and alive, worms beneath his feet and catfish in the pond. Wondering if death might sneak up on him the way It had the man in the pool. Cruelly and sudden.
A paradox, intellectual, spiritual: Knowledge of death, tomorrow or perhaps in another sixty or seventy years. Knowing, but not-knowing.
When.
How.
What awaited.
Now well past the lunch hour, at last his stomach growled. Heading home, he pressed ‘play’ on a cassette in his Walkman, turned up the dramatic music—The Who—and started forgetting about the man in the pool, except for the problem of seeing his dead face every time Devin closed his eyes.
His Mama, wild-eyed, greeted him at the front door in one of her states of agitation. Clearly she’d been informed by Dwight of the morning’s tumultuous and thrilling events, now beside herself with worry.
“You get your skinny ass in this house. Where have you been?”
“Just riding around, Mama. Out in the woods.”
Grabbing him by the upper arms, hard enough to leave oval fingertip bruises. “You can’t go off somewhere and not let someone know. Your Daddy called to say you were on your way home over an hour ago. He’s driving the roads looking for you right now.”
“I wouldn’t have been here till later anyway. So what difference—”
Releasing his arms, she slapped him across the mouth. “You better quit with this back-talking. I don’t care how many dead black boys you found in a swimming pool today.”
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 19
