Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  Billy, thinking about a bumper sticker seen during the drive:

  NO MATTER HOW HOT SHE LOOKS, SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE IS SICK OF HER SHIT!

  Billy, wanting to get T-shirts and ball caps made, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, Beanie Babies, children’s picture, chapter and middle-grade books in which to indoctrinate and initiate the next generation in this wisdom. Billy, pledging to buy billboards around town. He wasn’t sure there was a single one of these women worth the trouble they put a man like him through. The stresses and accidents their pheromones and pulchritude caused, false markers of attractiveness masking a black widow’s nest. Except for Libby Meade, whose rejection of him had been merely shortsighted and not foolish enough to warrant killing her over it.

  Once inside his condo, he tossed his crap down in the foyer and headed straight for the bong; thankfully, neither Melanie nor anyone else expected him home until the next day. Four massive hits of the put-back ‘secret’ stash of Mendocino County’s finest left Billy with heart palpitations, panic. He fought off wave after wave of terror, at last subjecting himself to a brutal, dry wank with a rough cleaning cloth, harsh friction lasting until getting a decent pop. Then, only then, did he doze off into a dreamless, fitful, comfortable sleep.

  Bliss, this unconsciousness. Like the other night in San Antonio. When he had been drunk.

  Other than awakening the next morning without his customary flagpole of rigid morning wood—unusual by any standard—he felt rested and even-keeled. Thinking, whether with Ruck or Melanie or Libby, a silly voice insisted on adding, if it all doesn’t simply work itself out, he’d be surprised and perhaps a touch disappointed.

  Billy, working his magic, in control. Accidents, from now on, happening only if absolutely necessary; only by choice. Starting with Creedence Rucker, he’d never lose control again.

  Thirty-Three

  Creedence

  When not fending off desperate phone calls from Dusty, to whom, adamant, she refused to speak, Chelsea’s head had been set spinning by her mother with a series of rationalizations and explanations for his behavior. Eileen, in one of her shiny wind suits and matching lime-green Espadrilles, tried to make Chelsea think all the beating and whipping had been imagined.

  Reclining in the La-Z-Boy and feeling the pain from the rising welts on her back, she considered the reality beyond dispute, beyond spin. And yet Mama, emaciated and coughing and fussing about in the kitchen, spun and took up for him.

  Amazing. But, she’d been pretending so long about her illness that she could pretend about Dusty, too.

  About anything.

  Changing the subject, Chelsea brought up the subject of Devin’s imminent. Eileen reacted with surprise and anger at this sudden news; Chelsea play-acted at forgetting, said she was sure she’d mentioned it. That when his bus got here, Devin would set matters straight with Dusty, if it came to down to it.

  Eileen laser-beamed a daughter who swore she could feel her mother’s ire like a shaft of warm sunlight. “I would’ve paid for him to fly home. I would’ve paid any amount of money. I swear, but y’all don’t have the sense that God give a damn turnip. You put him on a bus?”

  “You don’t want him driving, do you?”

  Eileen’s anger turned on a dime to grief-stricken, brokenhearted despair. “Please watch over my poor baby and get him back to me soon, Lord.”

  Creedence, disgusted. Her mother had never been a churchgoer. In any case, thinking how a bus trip sounded like a romantic, mad adventure; further, that all of them might soon regret wishing Devin back. Who knew how he’d show his ass this time.

  Wishing, with horrible stone-cold guilt, she didn’t have the baby in her stomach. How she could take whatever money they had in the savings account—not that much, of course—and hit the road. Like Devin had done all those years ago.

  Fuck everything and run.

  Was it too late to not have the baby?

  Women did it every day.

  Flushed unwanted children from their bodies.

  The law of the land.

  Getting a cramp, sudden and sharp.

  “Do the two of you overgrown children realize what kind of people ride those buses? He’s probably the only white face on it.”

  Chelsea, thinking her mother sounded like some hood-wearing Klansman like they had in Edgewater County back before integration and civil rights got settled. But furthermore, Eileen probably hadn’t been on a bus since the yellow one she rode to school nearly fifty years ago.

  The cordless sitting on the glass of the coffee table rang with jarring suddenness. A look shot between the women. Again.

  “Mama, I ain’t talking to his ass.”

  “You’re just heartless to poor Dusty.”

  Eileen, scurrying into the kitchen, picked up the cordless. Chelsea heard the sliding doors outside the backyard shut as Mama went uh-huh, uh-huh.

  Five minutes later Eileen came busting back in from the deck humming and smiling.

  “First of all: I’m relieved.”

  “Oh, lord.” Creedence, a mocking singsong, chin aquiver. “Let’s hear his story.”

  Eileen’s demeanor now fell reserved and careful, like conducting the treasurer’s meeting around the heavy oak table in the red-draped ELMS inner chamber downtown. Enumerating bullet points: “He says the girl is nothing to him. That she’s been the one calling and pestering him for it.” She cussed the girl, lit a cigarette, said, I swear to goodness. “That she started the whole mess with him down at that durn hardware store.”

  “Mama—how can you excuse him?”

  “He’s sorry, darling. That’s why.”

  Stupefied with confusion. “Did you ever have to forgive Daddy? Is that what this is?

  She p’shaw’d at that. “Dwight didn’t have the guts to screw around on me. Not that it’s any of your business how your Daddy and me conducted our lives.” Another Virginia Slims, lit off the butt of the last. “Now. It takes two to tango…”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “…and Dusty explained how you were confused and worried about the baby you’ve been. How cold you’ve been.” Eileen pursed her lips at the salaciousness.

  “Confused’? About how many times they done it? Or which way they done it? On my bed? In my house? Or Mama, how many times he whipped me?”

  “Colette—hush your filthy mouth.”

  “I’ll be damned if I will.”

  Now her fury burbled over like hot oil. A viciousness like no mother should ever show a child. Or a daughter, rather. “He told me you hit him first. That you damn near bashed in his head with a skillet full of hot grease.”

  “Yeah—so what. I’m just sorry I missed.”

  Eileen had begun coughing into a pink hanky. It had once been white. “We can’t have y’all carrying on like this. Not with you pregnant.”

  Hating herself for sitting and listening to this nonsense. “You’re letting him sweet-talk you. ‘Poor Dusty, poor Dusty.’ It ain’t normal. The way you’re defending him.”

  Aghast with indignation. “Who are you to tell me what normal is? You haven’t half-lived yet, girl.”

  “I’m gonna be thirty-two this summer.”

  “Age is a number. Experience is the gold standard. All this you’re going through?” She chortled. “This is only the beginning.”

  Chelsea muted the television set, a ridiculous program about how many assistants Donald Trump goes through—bottom of the barrel, all these reality shows. She missed the old detective shows and comedies from when she was little. It was like they just didn’t want to pay nobody to make up stories anymore. Cameras following folks around doing shit. Devin should have a show like it for drunks. Dusty, for fucking high school girls. “What are you talking about?”

  “The beginning of doing what you have to do. To be happy. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “To get by.”

  She barked at her mother to just say what she meant.

  “Dusty unders
tands. And you better, too. If you know what’s good for you—for all of you.”

  Chelsea hadn’t a clue what the old woman, addled from disease and nicotine and old Southern lady foolishness, meant by her opaque statements.

  Enough. She stood and pulled the T-shirt over her head, revealing the welts across her back. “So this is what Dusty has to do to get by?”

  Eileen cried in alarm, made her pull the shirt down.

  “No, damn you—he don’t get away with that part. Don’t you think I already explained that much to him outside?”

  “Did you, now.”

  “There are lines, Colette.” Eileen, face puckering and a shadow across her eyes. You did not want to see this face coming. Not from Mama. “I spelled out consequences.”

  “Such as what.”

  Offhand. “That he’d never put that pee-pee of his in another little strumpet ever again. Nor my daughter. Because he wouldn’t have it anymore.”

  “Don’t give me no ideas.” Draping the shirt back over herself, Chelsea winced at the touch of the fabric against her back. Another cramp down below, a depth charge. “Lord help me, I got to go lay down. My stomach hurts.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “If he calls again, tell him he’s lucky I didn’t put the Sheriff onto him.” They didn’t have no old redneck like Truluck anymore. Sheriff Oakley was not only a younger black man, whose election had given the ELMS set the flutters, but an ex-Marine and straight-arrow. He had exposed dog fighting and cleaned up a few of the worst honkytonks and juke joints, had instituted a DUI campaign, and best of all, had spoken out about the high rate of domestic violence in Edgewater County. He’d lock up a punk like Dusty Wallace. “Tell him, one phone call to Garen Oakley, and he’ll be sleeping on a hard cot tonight.”

  Eileen said she’d hate to think her savior a smooth-talking black like Oakley. “He’s gotten too big for his britches, too fast.”

  “Save that talk for your girls downtown.”

  Upstairs Chelsea caught Arthur, terrified at being in a new house, urinating against the door to her room. Not unlike her own decision about what to do about Dusty, and Devin, and with any luck, Billy Steeple as well, she put off the detailed attention such a mess would require. But she couldn’t put it off long.

  She wouldn’t. Dusty’s whipping had beaten sense into her—the Billy plan. His attention and resources would release her from this bondage. A warm glow inside—she recalled how excited he’d been with her all those years ago, before acting freaked out and pulling back, telling her no. At last she’d show him what he missed; that it wasn’t too late to make up for lost time. And her baby would then be theirs.

  Thirty-Four

  Devin

  Devin, heartbroken by Roy Earl having sent him packing, as though his old pal only another drunken reprobate panhandling asshole, saying fuck you, Roy E. Pettus. This kind of shit? The reason he hadn’t wanted to ever set foot in this pissant burg again. Disrespectful, ungrateful asswipes, the lot of them. Where was General Sherman when you needed him.

  Needing a cocktail, a proper libation served in a decent watering hole, where a gentleman could go and get some thinking and drinking done—wiping the mind clean—Devin had not far to go. Bar-shopping and killing the last of his vodka unmindful of passersby with shopping bags who glared, he slipped the empty into his jacket pocket and belched fire.

  The elegant, half-lit room he chose—The Parlor, a classy joint unfamiliar to him—found Devin the lone Saturday happy-hour patron. Dark, peaceful, soothing, but for the incongruity of the modern rock playing at a reduced volume through the sound system. A comfortable, pliant, amber womb from which only a fool would wish birth into the harsh lucidity of sobriety.

  Devin, considering a celebration with all due pomp and circumstance of this glorious return to the land of his youth; demonstrating the appropriate reverence and acknowledgement of this momentous occasion’s arrival. A fat cigar; getting shitfaced shit-ass drunk as a coot; killing Dobbs Vandegrift.

  And now Roy Earl, too. The disloyal fuck.

  How after catching them together? He’d beaten Roy Earl. Yeah, he did.

  No—it was Dobbs, you nitwit.

  Dobbs.

  Billy.

  Bullshit.

  Everyone was fucked up that night: Roy on acid, Devin and Libby and Billy too, none of them knowing what they were doing.

  But Dobbs, he had been the one.

  Dobbs, his thick dick jutting out like a purple veiny viper. Dobbs, waving the damn thing around right in front of Libby’s face.

  Her yelling at him NO, unheeded.

  Dobbs, determined and depraved, pushing her down on to the bed—Devin’s bed. Devin, faraway, unable to stop them, yet unable to look away.

  Cold vodka sluicing down Devin’s throat, sharp elixir; ice clinking against teeth white-hot with cold pain. Ordering another.

  Wasn’t Dobbs gay?

  And he and Libby best friends?

  And the last time Devin saw him, wasn’t Dobbs in a wheelchair?

  At the funeral?

  Which funeral? What funeral? Whose funeral?

  Well, it wasn’t Libby’s, that’s for sure. Because…she’s not dead. She’s with him.

  His father’s funeral. A couple of years ago; lost years since.

  Devin, downing his fresh drink and ordering yet another, calling out as though the bar crowded and noisy. The bartender, a kid not looking old enough to drink much less serve, his face a pale and impassive oval in the dim light, a glow from the far glass of the door, the only window into The Parlor, sighed and ambled over.

  “That firewater’s going down mighty quick, chief.”

  Devin leveled a grungy index finger but stopped himself, pulling back the rage. “Listen. Give a dude a break, kid. One more, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Skeptical. “One more’s okay.”

  “This’s oldschool, me being in this neighborhood. Good to be back. I’m celebrating.” Devin, relaxing, leaned back on his stool. “Place get busy later? All these kids from the college up yonder?”

  “Dude, you can’t get in here after ten o’clock, especially on jazz night. Line down the block.”

  Adjusting his colorful tie, tucking it into a vest out of which hung a pocket watch chain, the young man set down another vodka tonic, smooth, no clunk, a pro barkeep. They had their servers here dress all nice and shit. Devin noted a glimmering tie-tack that he thought looked like the compass-and-square Masonic symbol.

  “Notice you ain’t got no jazz playing now.” The satellite radio seemed set on an early 80s station, Talking Heads right now.

  “When it’s this early, the officer on deck takes liberties.”

  “Understood. You from around here?”

  “Went to school up the hill. Never seemed to leave.”

  “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was,” Devin sang-spoke with a wink. Talking Heads had been one of those CDs they listened to on the ride back home.

  Billy and his music.

  All those CDs he bought on the trip. Throwing money around. That had been so crazy, him stoping and buying CDs to play.

  After Devin said that all he had in the car was the Dead tape.

  The Dead tape.

  The Dead tape.

  The Dead tape of the show they’d gone to.

  Libby.

  Dead since that night.

  Wait. Or, not.

  Was Libby dead?

  C’mon, boy. The car wreck—who the fuck do you keep trying to blame?

  ‘Wharf Rat.’ There you go. Devin had wanted Billy to hear ‘Wharf Rat,’ the song about the drunk. But Devin, he’d missed it—it’d come late in the show, after horrified and claustrophobic he’d bolted from the arena, away from the gesticulating crowd of hippie acolytes reveling in their orgiastic frenzy of twirling and dancing. Hearing the recording of the second set a thousand times since, yeah, but missing the actual moment of performance of that song. Ruing.

&nbs
p; Regretting.

  A detail about Libby: that next day, her telling him how cool ‘Dark Star’ had been, how happy the fans had all seemed when the band played the psychedelic tune. But Devin, missing the moment. No ‘Dark Star’ for Devin; no ‘Whart Rat,’ either. By then back home. On the roof.

  Remembering the fine mist, the low cloud cover. The wailing of the fire truck. The color-splashes of the lights.

  Falling to the ground.

  The pain in his shoulder.

  Libby, screaming out his name.

  Twice. That night—and once again. Months later. Not at night. Not on the roof.

  In the hot sunshine.

  Dobbs and Libby. In the car. With Devin.

  Libby’s face.

  Libby’s face, kissing Billy. (Dobbs, you idiot, Dobbs!)

  Billy on top of Libby, holding her down.

  Billy!

  Libby’s face, drained of color but for her lips, turning blue.

  Billy, stop!

  Dobbs’s slight body, bloodied and broken on the side of the road.

  Billy, let her go!

  A flash of light, and an awful roar.

  Blood.

  Glass.

  Sunlight.

  Prudy, howling in pain—his cat, too. In the car.

  Libby. There beside him.

  In the wrecked Mustang.

  Devin, his skeletal frame wracked by tremors, saw silvery spots boiling. Images poked their way through the screen and scrim of his oblivion.

  Libby and Billy.

  Libby and Billy on the night of the Dead show.

  Billy, trying to rape her. On Devin’s bed. But yelling for him to stop.

  Libby’s savior.

  But that next spring, Libby calling his name again, Libby’s face, dead in the car, the steaming, hissing engine block sitting in her lap. Twin peaks of horror. The rape, the accident. Months apart, yet connected. The flash of the sunlight in his eyes shining down where moments before there’d been the roof of the car, the brilliant light reflecting off a thousand-thousand tiny shards of glass, off twisted metal and viscous leaking fluids. Devin’s seat—the driver’s seat—the only part of the car not obliterated; that he and his cat and Dobbs survived, a miracle. Or so they said.