“We did.”
Considering the veracity of his statement; knowing he meant a misty February day walking in the woods near Big Rock when they’d kissed, the moment they considered their anniversary. “So we’re the exception.”
Parting on the bricks that night, both agreed to talk on the phone later. Libby, off to finish up classwork.
Devin, on the pedestrian bridge connecting the old campus to the newer buildings closer to the Old Market, pressed for additional details about the next day’s activities. “Is he, what—picking you up on this magnificent date of yours in his Mercedes?”
“He offered, but I said ‘I’ll see you at Devin’s.’ Good enough?”
“That’s better.”
“Relax. Billy’s as chivalrous a gentleman as I’ve met.”
Devin, trying not to choke, spun on his heel and headed toward the dining hall—Billy Steeple, a poon-hound of a most egregious order. Snowing them the way he’d snowed Libby.
Devin would keep tabs on the situation. Cock-block the fucker, but good. It would be easy enough. Libby was his girl. All was right. And yeah. Maybe he would give up the juice for her. Dial it back. Have a couple of light beers with dinner instead of hitting the hard stuff. Drink it over. It was a plan.
Twenty-Four
Billy
After a hot shower Billy shaved for the first time in a week; rubbed one out; paced around the condo almost literally bouncing off the walls with anticipation.
Tonight, tonight.
But damn, son. An accident this time would be spectacular. I mean, terrible.
“Get out of my head,” he said to the walls of his room, papered in rock and movie posters. “I’m in control, now. Understood?”
Sure, the voice answered. You got it. Anytime. Et cetera.
He sought the cleanest T-shirt he could find, a plain black pocket T by Hanes. Meat Mallet wore them onstage, their signature, a three-pack available in any store rack in any town in the country. A band shirt that said it all, showed how punk they were. Black—endless, black, nothing. Billy, showing loyalty to his mates and not this hippie crap by sporting a tie-dye.
All of it was incidental to nailing Libby Meade. The exclamation point that would appear over her head the second she got a look at it.
Billy, for reasons obvious now considered ditching the punk persona altogether, a reinvention not unlike when he’d switched from shaggy-haired outdoorsy dude into paddling and rock-climbing to a straight-edge, thrash music and hardcore anarchic punk rock bad-ass slapping a bass as hard as he jacked his red, crooked vein-fed meat bollard, pulsing and hot-cold, all glowing and humming with purple neon like this one bass he’d asked his grandparents to buy for him back in prep school, on the afternoon he’d decided to become a rock god.
Besides—the punk band was going nowhere, the music scene in Columbia was TOTAL MOTHERFUCKING BULLSHIT, and he flat-out did not have his heart in thrash anymore like, at all—if he’d ever. His dad, not seeming to give two shits anyhow what Billy looked like, so the shock value the punk-guise once held now diluted and thus useless.
But if Libby and her circle of friends were going hippie after tonight, Billy, ready to jam. He’d already snooped around at The Happy Accident, the last head shop from the 60s still in business, now mostly clothing instead of bongs. He’d fingered the bright Dead T-shirts on a rack, a woven beret called a tam designed to corral dreadlocks, the basket of hacky-sacks on the counter by the register, the jars of incense, the spinning rack of leather ‘Jesus’ sandals ‘Road-tested on the streets of Damascus’ as a dangle-tag promised. As long as they carried his size—big boats down there, don’t you know—he’d be in business.
And if Libby didn’t work out—not an option in his world of occasional sex murders—accidents, rather—Billy’d noticed a slew of cute hippy chicks dotting the campus and the Old Market; a veritable fashion trend. Who knew how hot granola slit might be? Hairy and earthy, he surmised, such as the unshaven European girls he’d diddled on vacations with his father, with only one accident of record barely noticed there in a high-crime area of Rome? Yeah, boy.
Long as they were tough. Had stamina. Weren’t fucking virgins. Could take a serious Steep’ling.
Crucial—no V-cards. Or, never again. Too easily frightened. Too fragile. Too much blood.
As additionally promised to the revelers for whom he’d purchased the tickets, Billy also procured through one of his Meat Mallet bandmates a quarter ounce of what appeared to his untrained eye as decent, smelly buds of marijuana, a package of Joker brand rolling papers, and most importantly, a ten-strip of allegedly heady blotter acid. Friend of a friend selling the doses got them from a West Coast brother at the Hampton Dead shows a couple weeks before, he said, back at the start of tour that’d hit various cities along the Eastern seaboard.
“You will walk upon beams of light,” Mucky Turnbull said his friend had promised. “Participants in the ritual will become the light.”
Billy understood from chatting up obvious Deadheads on campus that many fans would attend the two Atlanta dates right before the tour finale in Columbia, and he wondered if the real attraction had to be the drugs or hedonism rather than the music. Why else would people pay to see the same act night after night?
But Mucky, troubled by Billy’s plan: “You’r losing a metric ton of cred for even thinking about getting near any of that hippy shit, Steeple.”
“It’s the pussy,” Billy reassured him. “That’s all. I swear.”
“Good. I’ll dance a jig the day Jerry Garcia finally croaks.”
“Dude.”
“Well—I will. It’s stoner bullshit, dude. The whole hippie movement came out of MK-Ultra—the fucking CIA, dude.”
Billy, calling balderdash, had grabbed Mucky in a headlock. A coffee table had been broken in the ensuing melee, and lucky no instruments damaged. The rehearsal after their spasm of violence had been their most vital music ever, raw and primal. Peak punk. No one would ever hear it but them.
Libby told Billy she’d done acid once or twice, back during freshman year at McKean High when she still lived in Delaware. She’d been running around for a while with this senior guy named Todd, a small time dealer, but that relationship didn’t last because, she said, what he really wanted from her, she wasn’t ready to give. She recalled those doses more as an amped-up drug experience than a psychedelic, transformative one.
“I might smoke some pot, but that’s all.” Libby, setting parameters, never a welcome development with one of these skirts. “I have class in the morning. And so do the rest of you.”
“How can you say you want to be a filmmaker—a visual artist—and not trip out?” Billy had challenged.
“I told you I’d done it. My body, my choice.”
“Killjoy.”
“I’m quite serious. Cool it with the peer pressure.”
“As you wish, m’lady.”
Libby, so together and confident. Deserving of a more exciting partner than dumpy doofus Devin. And after the Dead show, she’d have one.
Jacked on Jolt Cola and anxious beyond measure, Billy got real and called the UT dorm. The soft-voiced redneck boy Roy Earl answered on the second bounce.
“Y’all about ready, Freddie?”
Roy Earl, a party hound, sounded stoked. “Just back from the last class. I got to run home in a little while to pick up Devin’s sister, but the Edgewater County turnaround won’t take but an hour.”
“Plenty of time. A high school girl, eh?”
“Well—?”
“No judgement here, bro. I say initiate her. She’ll thank you later. Trust me.”
Roy Earl sounded embarrassed, mumbled a sort of faux-macho assent.
“But if you’ve cracked the first of the day, I’m getting my shit together and heading on over.”
“Sweet. But Bill, look here now: grab another case of Bud on the way. I’ll pay you back. For my ticket, too.”
“Money is meaningless tonight. We’ll se
ttle accounts another time. One day when we’re old, and we’ve forgotten the details.”
“Righteous.”
The night of nights, Billy realized, now upon him.
Libby.
In this bed.
It would fix what ailed him.
But a last-minute issue: his bedsheets, stiff with dried semen from sexual encounters as well as incessant, tortuous self-abuse often leaving him so raw the last sensation he wished to experience was the touch of another’s skin upon his. He threw the bedclothes into the small apartment-style washer and dryer in a hallway alcove, put a fresh set on the bed. At last he hauled ass, ran his errands. Big man on campus, coming through.
Twenty-Five
Devin
Six o’clock in the dorm suite, the air thick with smoke and laughter. A half dozen people drinking beer, passing joints, bubbling the two-foot purple, plastic U. S. Waterpipe-brand bong, laughing, screaming, having a blast. Music, thumping on the stereo—not the Dead, instead the Led Zep, side three of Physical Graffiti, Devin’s choice.
Devin and Libby, sharing glances fraught with gravity and portent. Psyching each other up for the trip ahead. After finished a big class project that day, she’d decided to party-hearty with the rest.
To this end, Billy, busying himself in the kitchen with a razor blade. He cut apart the hits of blotter acid, same blade they used to cut up lines of Bolivian marching powder he’d scored last week, which Devin had declined.
A couple of weirdo Mike’s friends, all three high and watching Danger Mouse with the audio turned off, their eyes giving off a sheen like the glaze on an Easter ham back in Edgewater County. Roy Earl, a jabbering idiot, seemed spun in advance of his upcoming drive—too spun; Billy had persuaded him to eat his dose at about five o’clock. That it wouldn’t come on for a good long time.
Billy, articulate and emphatic about the necessity of experimenting with the substance in the presence of the Dead, while having less than no experience with the substance in question. “Worry not. You can drive like a champ on acid.”
“But—I need to go all the way home and back—”
“Need. That’s a strong word. You want to go. Big diff.”
Roy, tabbing the dose on his tongue. Cracking a beer. “I’ve driven it a thousand times. I’ll be fine. Plenty of time.”
“There we go.”
Devin, thinking, Don’t go now, pardner. You’ll get in an accident.
Roy made eye contact, sipped his beer, wandered upstairs to his room. Devin, hoping he’d gone to call Creedence and tell her it was off. The fallout would be brutal. He should never have gotten her hopes up—neither one of them. Awesome.
Dobbs, the missing element at the party, who at the last moment had begged off. Devin, speculating the reason might have been the acid-talk.
Indeed, Dobbs had fretted, “I’m afraid of what might come out of me on that mess.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“But, I don’t want to be the only one not doing it.”
“Nobody’s keeping score, bro. Relax.”
Devin, not giving him a hard time, but also decrying his journalism-major friend’s lack of curiosity. But, whether to party down or not, a personal decision: America, a free country, its proud citizens the possessors of will, drive and individualistic God-given thinking brains. Look at him—here, choosing to smoke dope with them all. Passing a joint heavy with resin. Tasted like sucking on a lavender sachet. Made him want to drink a beer.
Billy, offering half-doses to Libby and Devin. Noting Billy’s leering, fevered, glassy-eyed stare. Faraway. Weird. They nodded to each other and took them.
After Billy distributed the rest of the doses like a shaman, Devin and Libby went out onto the concrete steps leading down to the fire lane between the buildings. They gazed down the hill as concert traffic backed up along Blossom Street. With daylight savings time ending the weekend before, the light of day faded quickly into the gray of a low cloud deck building in the sky all afternoon.
“Look at all those cars,” Libby said. She sat close to Devin. He leaned into her.
Devin, head buzzing, felt the weed creeping on cat’s paws into his consciousness. He stayed girded to notice effects from the acid in his system. “Answering the call of the dead?”
“Isn’t that what we’re all doing?”
“How so?”
“Life—it leads to death.”
“Yes.” Devin, knowing this better than most.
The world, seeming real; Devin, feeling the opposite of intoxicated. Grounded.
“Pot puts you in the now-now,” Roy Earl had explained one night. “Like this guy used to hang around my granddaddy’s honkytonk said: you’re either remembering and processing the moment that just ended, or you’re anticipating the one that’s to come. Trying to get ready. When you smoke, see, it lets you be in the now. The moment you’re in right now. No past. No future. The moment is all, he told me. And that the moment was forever.”
“Whoa. What is time, anyway?” Billy had asked, blowing already stoned minds engaged in a late-night dormroom bull session. “Past and future are but constructs, but right now, is right now. See, there it is again. Now. Now. Now.” Devin, now feeling the sensation of which his friend had spoken.
He put his arm around Libby. She scrunched over next to him. Warm. Head on his shoulder. The two of them, watching a squirrel foraging in the grass underneath the oak at the end of the building, a big, ancient tree like the one in the front yard of Devin’s house back home. Libby, eyes droopy and relaxed from the weed, a slight smile playing about lips covered by a thin sheen of gloss. Precious and beautiful, a rare creature. Devin, eyes tearing at her beauty, so natural, so innocent.
Devin, leaning over to kiss her, pausing. Anxiety swept through him. Imagining a world—his world—without her.
Silly. From whence this foolish feeling?
Libby, looking at him with a familiar expression of affection.
“What is it?”
“Someone walked over my grave. Let’s be careful tonight.”
Laughing, eyes sparkling, she stuck out her tongue. The small piece of paper, melting. “Too late.”
Roy Earl came bounding out onto the landing wearing cargo shorts and filthy Adidas sneakers, a Blue Öyster Cult T-shirt pulled taut across a not insubstantial belly. He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Whoop-whoop-whoop! I’m a whooping crane.”
“Are you, now.”
Flapping his arms, laughing until tears streamed from the corners of his eyes with pupils swimming dark and huge. Sweating. Breathless, gazing around with wonder. His dose had kicked in.
“What did my sister say when you called to bail?”
Roy Earl, a shadow falling across his face. His mellow, harshed. “I didn’t.”
“Dude. What time were you supposed to get her?”
“Oh, y’all.” Libby pushed away from Devin. “She’s going to be crushed. Devin, you’ve got to at least call her.”
“Not me.”
“Then you have to do it, Roy.”
“Nuh-uh.”
Libby, her disapproval total. “You boys are awful.”
“All right, dag-nabbit.” Devin, grumbling his way inside. “Buzzkill, this is.”
Dwight Rucker, verbally pleased to hear from his son, picked up on the second ring. Curious about a request to speak with little Creedence, whom the father reported not now at home.
“What you need with your l’il baby sister?”
Devin, calling from the upstairs house phone, dragged it into his bedroom to muffle the peals of ribaldry from downstairs. “She wanted to hear all about this crazy concert scene over here. That’s all.”
“Son, I’ll be honest—I wish none of y’all was going. Now, I’ve always been frank about the drinking and drugs and all, but I’ll say it again: You a grown boy, and can do what you want. But should the day come when you’re standing in front of a judge over drugs—a judge who can
just as well ruin your life as sneeze at you—I might not be able to fix things as easy as I could here in Edgewater County. You understand?”
Devin, his scalp pulsing and the walls starting to breathe, tried to keep his voice steady. “So, Creed isn’t there?”
“She went to the Fordhams. They gonna work on some project together till late. Your mother had a fit, since it’s a school night,” dropping his voice, “but when don’t she.”
“How many rounds?”
“Colette put up such a fuss that Mama, well, she gave in. As for your music concert, you’ll have to tell your sister all about it tomorrow. If there’s anything worth telling.”
Devin, ringing off, burned with irritation at being dragged back into a situation he had already managed; out of his hands once Roy grabbed the baton. Colette—Chelsea, damn it—would have to understand.
When Roy Earl doesn’t show, she’ll get the message. And for once, it won’t be my fault. This case is closed.
Twenty-Six
Creedence
Chelsea, sequestered behind the elaborate landscaped gateway to Pine Haven where she’d instructed Devin to tell Roy Earl to pick her up, squatted under a huge magnolia tree that loomed above her head like a sentry keeping watch.
The damp wind chilled her; the slate sky looked as though about to weep. Time passed fast-slow. Checking her watch; after about forty-five seconds, checking again. Roy E. Pettus, now only five minutes late, but still.
After yet another stupid argument with her mother—about spending the night over at a friend’s house one neighborhood away, for heaven’s sake—Chelsea got so angry that on the way out, she swiped one of Daddy’s Budweiser tallboys out of ‘his’ fridge in the garage. Now drinking it, ice cold and yucky, yet good and bold. Of a piece with the whole enterprise.
She burped, and some of the beer came back up into her throat. She threw up the rest.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 21
