When Ruck enjoyed his moments of coherency—Billy’d discovered that during the daily cycle one could expect a number of such periods, alternating with gurgling mad silly nonsensical drunken babble—he enjoyed chatting with his old buddy, much as Billy dared; Ruck, cynical, cannily observant, ironic and subtle, at times flat-out uproarious. Only when the discourse veered in the direction of intimations regarding subjects Billy wished to avoid did his voice take on a gnarly, coarse edge, Gen X sarcasm marinated in soul-sick brine for fifteen years.
But forget all that. In Ruck’s presence, the grief over her, voracious. Billy, maybe finally getting it. Why the boy-o drank so much—Ruck hadn’t even mentioned Libby the whole time. Didn’t obsess over her. The motherfucker was free.
After the long slog across Texas, measured not so much by time as the consumption on Ruck’s part of a half-case of tallboys, they’d arrived at the hotel at which they were to stay in New Orleans, a Renaissance-branded Marriott property located right across Canal from the Quarter and pre-arranged via cellphone. Billy, he explained, enjoyed gold elite status, comp upgrades, concierge level, all please and thank-you and sucking his royal and prodigious dick. Literally those words.
Ruck had remarked at that point: “Nothing changes with you.”
Billy had feigned innocence. No, really. He was like, what?
Once checked in, Ruck, acting as though he’d died and entered the gates of the promised land, had dragged Billy down to Bourbon Street. Five minutes later they strolled by Larry Flynt’s Barely Legal Club drinking Hurricanes and subsumed within a parade of like-minded hedonists clothed in various stages of dress, undress, inebriation. Sloppy, wild-ass, whooping it up—and this on a non-Mardi Gras weeknight. From the youthful demographic on display, Billy suspected college spring break accounted for many of them.
Ruck, declaring with remorse how, in all his years of sodden foolishness, he’d somehow never made his way to New Orleans; ruing how shortsighted this omission. “Get a load of this place.”
“It’s extraordinary.” Billy had shuddered, a weird vibe to it all. “You can feel the ghosts lurking up on those balconies. Watching us.”
“Ghosts? Fuck that noise—it’s the drunk’s Disneyland. That’s what this play is. And we ain’t going there. We are there.”
“So we are.”
Ruck had moved over, a sudden close-talker. “You got us this far. But this is my world, now. And you’ll defer to me. Understood, old buddy?”
Playing along. Billy could snap Ruck’s neck and dump him in the Mississippi. “Commodore, the bridge is yours.”
Contemplative. Three grunts’ worth. “You want to go and fuck some nasty Cajun slit? Bet it tastes like seafood gumbo, extra spicy and shit.”
Billy, mumbling how, if given the choice, he’d pay for pedigreed poon before slumming it. If it were all the same to Ruck. “If we’re that hard-up, I belong to a network of reputable escort services available in all major American cities.”
“Nah. Pussy can always be had for nothing.”
“True; semicolon. But thank you, no.” Billy, unsettled by Ruck’s veer into sex talk. “I have a girlfriend back home.”
“Do you, now.” Ruck, amused. “Serious?”
“Afraid so. Unless—I do something about it.”
“That’s more like it. You get tied down, it’s over. Right, Bill?”
He could but nod. When Ruck was right, he was right. That part hadn’t changed.
Acknowledging this stung Billy. An end-stage alcoholic had more sense than he did. No wonder he was still being trolled along by his father with that pitiful trust payout every month.
It’s because they all think you a retard. And you are.
Leading Billy along, Ruck orchestrated a wild scene indeed: The Quarter, and with it, unbridled abandon. Billy, however, sipping and nursing this time. But Ruck, oh, mercy, without a care. Not like the previous night in San Antonio, when he’d been a drink-pusher. And had pushed Billy over his limits. New Orleans or not, it wouldn’t happen a second time.
After getting a decent buzz going they stood by the open front of the Maison Bourbon, listening to a Dixieland combo inside tearing it up. Ruck, ordering and chugging a Maker’s Mark, triple, rocks.
The band finished. The small crowd—in addition to buskers on every corner, seemingly dozens of joints had bands playing—applauded and called for more. Ruck whoop-whooped and tried to clap but dropped and broke his glass. He made a fuss about ‘sweeping it up himself,’ which had not gone over with the staff. The drinkers moved on.
Hereafter they strolled and stopped in for quick drinks whenever Ruck raised his hand; he settled into a reflective and confessional state—a place of honesty—in which he told Billy a strange, personal story:
Speaking at length of catching his mother doing the nasty with a family friend, like a scene out of some redneck soap opera. From the sound of it, nothing more than a case of typical, old-fashioned adultery among small-town intimates, naughty but banal and commonplace. Shocking, sure, at that moment—he was only a kid. But these things happened. Any atavistic humps still hung up on sex or pussy or nontraditional relationships here in the modern age might as well hang it up.
The next bit of Rucker lore, however, piqued Billy’s interest much more than his mom schtupping an uncle, or whatever the relationship was: “And around that time, I went to work one day at that piss-ant country club back home. And damn if I didn’t find this here dead mo-fo floating in the goddurn pool.”
“You found a dead body?”
“Deader than dogshit.”
Billy felt icy inside. He’d seen much worse than a drowning victim. “Ghastly.”
“Finding that old feller floating there, it just fucked me up beyond all reason, beau. On a fundamental level type-deal.” Ruck snorted and shook his head in frustration. “Nothing was the same after that. Like his ghost is following me around and stirring up shit. Like I pushed him into that shallow end head-first.”
Billy felt nothing. Less than nothing. “Death be not proud. Sounds like the fellow had some tough luck.”
“Along those lines.” Ruck, shrugging and smoking, enshrouded vaporous and blue in the glowing light from a bar’s brilliantly beckoning neon signage. “He done it to himself.”
“You wouldn’t call it an accident?”
“There ain’t no accidents.”
“Nonsense. It’s all accidents.”
“Now there’s a debate for your black robes back on campus.”
“Those philistines at Southeastern? Philosophers they are not. They don’t even know art movies.”
Ruck, uninterested in movies. “But this pool-fucker, he told me shit no little boy’s supposed to know.”
“He ‘told’ you? I thought he was dead.”
Ruck, shrugging, eased into a joint to get his liquor topped off. “Three of us in the pool. Me, his body, and his ghost.”
So melodramatic! Billy scoffed. Finding a body at fourteen? By that age he had killed his first classmate and concealed the corpse in a storm culvert; it wasn’t found for months. The locals in the town near the boarding school blamed it on a pedophile who had been apprehended on a morals charge; his apartment yielded a cache of death- and child-porn. Case closed.
Dead guy in a pool? That Ruck had not killed himself? No big whoop-whoop. Billy, again, t’was a pity. He could ill understand Ruck’s longstanding guilt over the death of a stranger in which he had no hand.
His boy had come back slurping bourbon and belching with wincing, strangulated aplomb.
“Let’s banish all talk of death and pools,” Billy suggesting with good cheer and an arm around Ruck’s shoulders.
Ruck, who tensed up at first, relaxed and agreed. “Let us banish ourselves. If we can.”
“Yes,” Billy said. Chicken-skin. If only.
The moment, broken: a stumble-bumming group of preppy college frat-boy types brushed through. One elbowed Billy, who sloshed tepid draught beer onto expensive s
hoe leather.
Ruck, hard-eyed and serious, knocked back his drink and flung the glass against the wall with a burst and a tinkle. Gurgling with menace: “You little son of a whore. Get back here and lick this boy’s penny loafers clean.”
The college guys, laughing and hooting, flipped them off without breaking stride.
Billy, snorting high-voiced with frustration. “Look at the cuffs of these trousers—at my Weejuns.”
Ruck spat and cracked his knuckles. “When we see that boy again, he’ll apologize, Bill. Finally. I can promise you that.”
A chill fell in Billy’s gut. “Who’ll apologize?”
“You know who.”
Sudden, Ruck ditched the darkness. Happy and gregarious, he hauled Billy through every bar left in the Quarter. For hours he spun filthy stories and leered at every shocked and chagrined woman whose misfortune it was to run into him, ultimately becoming so shit-faced that, at last, into the hotel bed he went to pass out.
Ruck, snoring like a drugged ogre, twitching and spastic but unconscious, a condition for which Billy, exhausted, felt duly thankful. Billy, cracking the seal on a brandy from the mini-bar, sipping it like a gentleman, shaking his head at his old friend.
Wanting to go find the fratboy. Make him sorry for his disrespect. Such fine clothing as Billy’s, none of this comes cheap. Someone always must pay in stories of wrongdoing, injustice. Payment for sin offers the only path to redemption. If such themes weren’t true, they wouldn’t make movies about them.
Ruck, as though still coasting on the previous night’s glorious, besotted pinnacle of intoxication, greeted the morning lucid and upbeat, receiving the startling room service knock with a stretch and a smile and nary a cross word. He ate dry toast with relish and aplomb, going so far as to enjoy a smear of orange marmalade, the sweet taste of which appeared to have a profound effect on him. Instead of guzzling vodka first thing as he insisted ought to be the plan for day two of driving home, Ruck, instead only a pitcher of mimosas, chasing the champagne with ice water and going “Now this is real class, here, boys.”
Good, Billy thought. A baby step.
“Hell of a town.” Ruck, crunching through a mouthful of sourdough and draining a slender glass of orange juice and champagne. “Might ought to just stay here. You and me. What you think about that?”
A bemused Billy, with an acid stomach, demurred on the notion.
Hours later, a proper piss and lunch break at a Georgia rest stop. Ruck, munching crackers and petting an elderly couple’s small dog; the couple, but not the animal, regarded him skittish and wary. Sidelong glances from faces pale and pasty and liver-spotted. Billy thought them prudent.
Billy, slumming, procured a vending machine sandwich, his mostly vegetarian diet already perverted and debased by the charred pigflesh he’d apparently eaten while drunk in San Antonio, or so Devin had reported. This explained the gurgling and rancid bowels, which since leaving Texas had continued in mild distress.
Back on the road. Billy, the whole trip making his way through a stack of discs he’d stopped and bought at a suburban big box retailer outside San Antonio. One after another the silver discs, a format rendered obsolete by hard-disk storage on small devices capable of holding a hundred albums, a thousand, slipped in and out of Ruck’s VW factory combo stereo with clunky 20th century energy, digital but still antiquated: live Dead releases, Lou Reed’s apocalyptic New York, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Minutemen, the Pixies, Dead Kennedys, Television’s seminal Marquee Moon, but most poignant, Billy, every fourth disc or so spinning up Making Movies. Dying inside, track by track. Note by note. Guys like Garcia and Knopfler, pouring out his soul merely with the touch of flesh to a vibrating metal string. Billy, trapped in his own skin, forever struggling to get across via music, screenplays, human interaction.
Ruck, into a fresh beer, upbeat. “So when you want to listen to that tape, bub?”
Swallowing hard. “Tape?”
“The show. Our big Dead show.”
“I’ve heard it so many times. Not just now.”
“Don’t it mean nothing to you?”
“You know it does—I gave it to you.”
“Not the tape.” Ruck, eyes moistening behind the aviators. “Us being together again.”
“I wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.”
“Cool. Forget it. The tape.”
Billy, with immense relief. “Maybe another time.”
For the next couple of hours, Ruck, regaling Billy of further misadventures both depraved and humorous, self-inflicted depredations of the spirit, horrendous and painful sexual encounters, beatings, muggings, fights, but above it all, drunk, drunk, and more drunk: Ruck’s, a soul-sick existence, blackout nightmares of degradation too sordid to recount in decent company. Waking up having performed oral sex on a fellow drunk, discovering that she had received her monthly visitor, and finding in his teeth and in his mustache a surfeit of sanguineous, clotted evidence.
Billy, mopping at his brow with a monogrammed silk handkerchief produced out of a pocket with a flourish. A metallic taste at the back of his teeth. Apart from being vehicles for his own orgasm, women’s bodies disgusted him. “God help me. I’d—I’d have killed her.”
“Wasn’t like she done it on purpose. The sheets, they was embarrassing enough. Worst part came when I tried to pay her.”
“Were you light?”
“Nah, she started boohooing.”
“Did she consider having her period a lapse of professionalism?”
“This was some chick I picked up all legit—she wasn’t a Jane. But, I didn’t remember.”
“Ouch.”
“Literally. Kicked me in the ribs, took off. Called me a worthless drunk. If you can believe the—” Ruck blinked and zoned out. Shook his head. “The temerity. I’m starting to lose all them words I learned as a kid. All them books.”
Billy, taking a risk: “Any actual girlfriends along the way?”
“For fifteen minutes at a time.”
“A real girlfriend,” choking on the words.
Ruck waved it away. “N-word like me gets tied down, he might as well be dead.”
Billy, saying, right with you except on the racial epithet.
The Dire Straits CD ended again. An interval of time, heavy with portent, passed in silence but for the chunka-chunka of Ruck’s weary VW engine, the maddening, whistling whine from a back window that wouldn’t roll up all the way. Tire rubber on varying grades of interstate highway.
Finally Ruck continued, as though the conversation had been ongoing. “There was this one old girl, back yonder in Colorado. Millie.” He cracked a beer, gulped, belch. “Yep. She was right sweet on me.”
“What happened?”
“I let her be my girl for a while. Yeah I did. Lanky, lucky old redheaded thing.” Ruck, relating the story of meeting Millie while she was working the checkout at this goodwill thrift store, smoked and nodded, an archness to his voice making him sound like a fabulist. Him getting a job there, normal friendship, taking her to lunch, all leading to courtship; movies; hand-holding; hooking up, moving in together, an actual couple.
“And getting dry,” he finally admitted.
“No kidding.”
Holding up his hands like Can you believe that shit?, Ruck said, “It didn’t last long enough to be memorable.”
Now, the way Ruck had said her name, Billy, he knew this a lie. “She was a juicer, too?”
Ruck, sparking up a smoke and shrugging, slit-eyes peeping over aviators. “We kicked. Got detoxed. Until I said, eff that noise.” Ruck, his voice coming now clearer and less affected. “We did it together, me and her. What a pip. What a lark it was. But ephemeral, alas.”
“So it didn’t work out.”
“You’re watching me drinking a god-durn beer, ain’t you?”
Billy, with sad resignation. “I guess I just meant with Millie in general.”
“No steady chicks. Not even her—it was all pretend. Call us ‘the pretend
ers’. That’s what we were.”
His gut tightened—did Ruck remember how much Libby had loved Chrissy Hynde? Was that a reference to her?
Unprompted, Ruck added in a pinched whisper, “There wasn’t no one but Libby for me, beau. She was the one.”
“I know, Ruck. If anyone does…”
“It’s you. It’s you, Bill.” Ruck, holding up his beer at Billy, a salutation. “It was always you. Wasn’t it?”
In response, his hackles stood end-wise. “That’s right, Ruck. Whom did you believe the protagonist of this sordid tale?”
“Not me. That much I know.”
“That’s right.”
Ruck, grinning, had yet to look this serene and gentle on their road trip. When he had taken off his glasses, Billy had seen in the rearview not the drunk, but the boy Devin Rucker had once been. “I get it. We’re all on pins and needles waiting to see what you’re gonna pull next, Big Bill. You bet we are.”
The closer to home, the more a grim torpor of fatigue and tension settled inside the Jetta, already reeking of flatus, stale beer and cigarettes even before this trying and odiferous journey.
Pulling into Columbia, a furious row ensued about taking the passenger up to Edgewater County, only another half-hour, but no; an adamant Ruck instead squared away at the hotel with another stocked mini-bar and few parting words. Billy, gratefully and at long last, stashed the Jetta in the hotel garage and left a note for Devin with his address, taking a cab home across downtown to his building.
Sure, first thing real soon, he’d be back to scoop him up. They’d go see Creedence together. Sure, sure.
Billy, finding a perfumed note from Melanie taped to his condo door. It read in part about how much she missed him, but also describing plans within plans, the salacious details of which made him tense with involuntary anticipation, and this despite the modest regard held for the so-called girlfriend he hadn’t missed and still wanted to dump into a blackwater swamp, the hallmark move of South Carolina’s homegrown serial murderer Pee-Wee Gaskins.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 24
