“Kiss my ass,” Devin growled. He hurled the N-word and told them both to suck his dick dry.
McWhorter, yanking Ruck to his feet, slammed him onto the trunk of the cruiser. “Sorry, folks,” he said as though telling Clark Griswalk that Wallyworld was closed today. “But I feel certain we taking him on downtown.”
Billy, snorting with dissatisfaction. “Bullshit, this is.”
“Hold on, there.” Boykin, frowning at Billy’s profanity. “Watch that potty mouth, or we gonna put two guests in the back seat.”
Billy snorted and scoffed. “Uh-huh.”
A standoff. While Devin drooled on the police car, the cops stood now watching Billy with suspicion.
Fools. They had no idea the snakes in his gut and head that threatened to uncoil at a second’s notice. Billy’s greatest fear through the years? A public hulk-out one day like he’d always managed to avoid. Thank god he had gotten completely baked on sixteen hits of a hybrid strain of Sour Diesel before they left.
“Up the hill,” Billy reminded them of his higher social status, “we don’t take verbal breaches of decorum lightly. But, an arrest for what?” Steady and stentorian. “Even here in 2004, somebody verbalizing such a racial epithet can hardly be held actionable in any legal environment of which I’m aware.”
“He’s got a point,” Boykin said, snickering. He probably used the word himself with frequency, Billy suspected.
Roy Earl, enough of this. “He’s drunk. Needs a shower and coffee, not a jail cell. Let him go, fellas.”
Billy, maintaining enough control to seem as unhinged as he’d begun to feel: “Gentleman? All perfectly goddamned delightful, to be sure, out here before God and country. But as you can plainly see, my friend’s in a high degree of distress, and so I must insist that you allow us to take care of him. He—it—” Putting half his fist into his mouth, he composed himself. “He’s suffered an absolutely terrific loss. Needs the kind of help. That a night in the lockup can’t possibly afford him.”
“Oh,” McWhorter said. “We can sober him up.”
“You have counselors on staff? Who handle such cases?” Clutching his torso with arms that strained and vibrated with the desire to beat them all to death, Billy managed at last to smile. “Or, we could go ahead and get actual attorneys involved. Wouldn’t that be fun.”
“God help us,” Roy chimed in. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“Sir, this man is a danger.” McWhorter, sad and tired. “To himself. To all of you.”
Billy brandished his phone like a weapon. “Dude: my lawyers squat in one of those tall shiny buildings downtown. Think about it.”
“Mine as well,” Roy added, his eyes cold, all hint of conviviality with the cop now vanished. “This has gone on too long already.”
McWhorter, sighing and weary. “Ain’t no arrest, ain’t no need for no downtown attorneys. Sure enough.”
Billy, murderously relieved. “Expect to see a letter to the editor soon in the Columbia Record praising the CPD for sound judgement of its fine, working-class beat cops.”
McWhorter, unlocking Devin’s wrists, offered only pointed and sarcastic cynicism. “Don’t do us no favors.”
As the cops drove away, Ruck, unsteady, wiped snot onto the sleeve of his jean jacket and regarded the three people watching him like a hawk.
“Well, I be dog—Roy Earl. I seen you earlier, but you didn’t act like you knowed me.”
Roy, shamefaced as could be. “You all right?”
“I ain’t doing too good these days.” But he sounded cheerful about it. “Not at all.”
“Ruck, let’s get you cleaned up. Get some decent food in us. I’ve got seven-grain bread—we’ll make all the toast you want.” Ruck, ambulatory but buckle-kneed, his face slack, held tight to Billy for support as he led him down the sidewalk.
Glancing back to see Melanie lagging behind, the dragging of pedicured feet; Roy Earl, tagging along off to the side of the cool kids, trying to keep up. Probably the story of his life.
Next steps, other than getting off the street?
“Do me a solid,” Billy called back to Roy Earl. “Call Creedence for me. Let her know Ruck’s coming home.”
His pained face split into a grin. The phone was already in his hand. “Now that I can do.”
Thirty-Six
Creedence
Appearing at the back deck stairs, the intruder startled her out of a reverie, times playing frisbee in the backyard with Devin. Having sneaked around through the woods, her erstwhile life-partner had crept into the backyard like a dad-blamed burglar.
Dusty.
Who done it with a high school girl.
Had kicked at her cats.
Who’d beaten her.
Chelsea had been sitting outside trying to clear her head by reading an article in Entertainment Weekly about how lovely and smart and talented and rich some teenage girl already was, and there, Dusty. Trying to act all jokey and smiling and saying hey, now, Creedence.
This, all she needed right now—more of Dusty’s whining bullshit. Him and Britney Spears both needing to take a chill pill. To get over themselves.
“Get out of this yard, boy. My daddy’s dead, but his shotgun is still loaded.”
Dusty’s cheeks were inflamed as though he had rouge smeared upon his face. “I ain’t done nothing and this is silly and you coming home with me. We—we got this durn baby to think of, now.”
“Will you stop? Those ain’t nothing but words Mama’s put in your mouth.”
“It’s my baby. I got say in this.”
“I don’t need you and my baby don’t need you neither. I ain’t never been so sure of nothing in my life.”
Cramp.
“You need to go to the doctor. Get some of them antidepressants or whatevers. Mama Eileen says they give them out to pregnant women like candy-corn now-days.”
Cramp, cramp.
“I’m not the one who’s acting crazy and needs pills. Screwing some teenager. Beating on me like you done.”
Dusty, an edge creeping into his voice. “You can’t prove nothing.”
“I can’t ‘prove’ nothing? You just admitted it all, you big dummy.”
“No, I didn’t. Quit trying to confuse me.” Coming up the steps and grabbing her fleshy upper arm, he warned, “We married, and that means you do what I tell you.”
“That what Mama says, too?”
He grabbed her face and mushed it in. “It’s what I say.”
Chelsea, now scared, yanked away from him.
Circling each other on the deck like wrestlers, she feinted toward the sliding glass doors; Dusty, blocking her way, grabbed at her and knocked over one of the heavy iron chairs around the patio table.
Moving back toward the steep steps down to the sloping back yard, she felt dizzy, losing her breath. Cramp cramp cramp. “You just admitted it. You told me everything.”
“You ain’t scaring me. Ain’t admitted nothing.”
“Your little—teenage—honeypot.” Getting the spins, grabbing for the railing. Reduced to monosyllables. “Done. Go. Now.”
Lunging for her again. “I didn’t do nothing and you can’t prove it no way.”
Chelsea, hissing and striking back, but before she was able to right herself, her head swam anew and she tumbled backward—that feeling, the chair tipping over.
Down the hard wooden steps, a tangle of legs and arms and onto her hip and elbow; her head, bonking the patio concrete hard, a flash of red—and Chelsea, all grayed out.
He had killed her. Dusty had killed her. She couldn’t believe it.
Her senses returned. Their voices came to her as though she were inside an enormous, empty auditorium. Dusty and Eileen seemed at odds with one another.
Vision doubling, Chelsea found herself lying halfway on the rough patio pavers and the dry, scratchy grass of a yard that needed the tending it no longer received since Daddy had died.
Eileen’s voice came hard and urgent, a kind of vitreo
us scorn notable even for her: “If you don’t get back, I’m going to tell them what all you done, god-durn-it.”
“But she tripped over her own big feet, Mama. I swear.”
“Dusty, go take your redneck Wallis ass around front and wait like I told you. Do it. Do it do it do it.” Eileen, offering a further string of epithets. “You asking us to forgive so much, son. So much. Lord have mercy on my soul.”
Dusty, blubbering, went with his gut jiggling around the corner of the house. “But I swear I didn’t do nothing—she just fell over.”
Chelsea, the cramps; flaring like electric eels buzzing in her lower body. She held herself.
Moaning: “Mama, my stomach—it hurts so bad.”
“Oh, sugar. He didn’t mean it. We gonna get you fixed up. Hush, now.”
Her baby, dying. She didn’t need a doctor. Her heart knew it.
Eileen, standing back up, held her side and groaned with pain. She went over and sat down heavy, but only after righting the chair Dusty had overturned. She lit a cigarette and put her forehead in her hand. “Now every neighbor’s gonna be on the phone to each other, yap yapping—I hope you young’uns are happy. Finally embarrassing me to death like this.”
She heard the ambulance siren on the highway, turning into the subdivision, approaching. “I’m glad Daddy ain’t here to see it.”
“You hush your smart mouth,” Mama said.
Thirty-Seven
Billy
Billy, in the kitchen with the other participants in the ongoing drama, came up with a take-out meal plan. He wished for death rather than spend another second with any of these wretched nitwits. But here it was.
One issue: he couldn’t drop off Devin at his family home, not in this condition, not tonight. Tomorrow. Sober, cleaned up. Billy, not going to Edgewater County looking half-assed, not in front of Creedence.
Besides, he hadn’t been able to raise anyone in the Rucker clan.
Tomorrow.
Yes: they’d get a couple of those morning beers into Ruck, even himself out enough so Billy able to present him in a reasonable state before punting and hightailing it with the wind at his back. Despite his fantasies and lust for Creedence—or because of them, rather—he held no desire to spend any undue amount of time with her. More he thought about it, too dangerous. Too much pent up desire. Hard enough not to break Melanie in half these days.
Ruck, sneakers off and ensconced in the media hub—his feet smelled like the effluvium from the chicken processing plant across the Congaree River; like death itself—had quieted down since Billy presented a dusty, half-full liter of Crown Royal kept on hand for his father’s infrequent visits, a libation otherwise untouched by the younger Steeple.
Billy, figuring: in Ruck’s condition, what could another few drinks hurt? He’d chug that brown liquor, pass out—God willing—awake to puke his guts out, and next into the Mercedes for a quick jaunt past the lake country up to Chilton.
Seeing Creedence; maybe making time for Dobbs Vandegrift, too, another sad case. Visiting the lot of them, all reunited. Fly the missing man formation out to the memorial garden of grave sites. No reunion of this crowd complete without Libby.
Wait—what? No way.
He hadn’t been to the memorial garden in almost ten years, not since Jerry Garcia died back in 1995. Oh, how Billy had wept for Garcia, grief that dredged up a fresh round for Libby. Not that it ever truly went away.
Drunk for the first time in ages on the night of Garcia’s death, Billy had howled and wept alongside a dozen fellow Deadheads gathered for a candlelight vigil in Mojeska Simpkins Park, on the other side of the Old Market from campus. Chugging vodka. Cursing and crying until deep in the night, not realizing everyone had left except him and the crackhead denizens of the park who were shuffling around the small circle of melted candles, wilting flowers and other sentimental totems left to the entertainer’s memory.
“Yo, bro,” one dude in a grimy Army jacket said. “Gimme a slug of that white lightning.”
“White lightning?” Billy, shitfaced, had been incensed. “Why is it always racial with you people?”
The memories hazy, all Billy recalled was that a scuffle had broken out, a knife pulled. Hollering and bolting across the dewy damp grass of the inner-city park, deep in the humid August night, Billy had run awkward and heavy-footed, the crazy whiteboy freak crying over the dead fatman, Billy’s unbuttoned Oxford shirt flapped behind him like the limp wrinkled cape of a half-assed superhero, one about to shit himself from fear.
The assailant caught up, grabbed for the bottle. Another brief struggle. Billy, huge, drunk, and terrified, struck the thin black man with the heavy vessel hard as he could, a considerable amount of foot-pounds per square inch of force.
As such, the man’s head had cracked open in a spray of brains squirting out of his mouth and nose, viscous splatter later found lodged in the crevices and tassels of a pair of loafers. He had thrown them into a campus incinerator often used in vanquishing accident remains.
Leaving the body crumpled in an overgrown vacant lot and wiping clean the bottle of prints before carrying it to a back-bar dumpster full of the same, Billy had staggered home in a daze. When the body had been discovered the next morning by a resident, the death was blamed on neighborhood gang violence—the man had had drugs on his person, meth and crack and pills. Black on black crime. Nobody had given a shit. For some reason, this killing had haunted Billy. The dude had wanted a drink. That was all. He hadn’t deserved it.
In any case, deliriously hungover and freaked by the shocking incident of the brains in the nighttime—no accident, this; extreme ultra-violence, random and weird—Billy had called in sick. He drove up to the cemetery in Edgewater County, one to which he often traveled to pay respects and talk matters out with Libby, usually on Sunday mornings, his little church service.
Listening to the tape of the second set from the Dead show. Weeping like a little bitch over Garcia. And Libby. And yeah, even Ruck too, who by then had long vanished.
Trembling and nauseous, Billy had placed an elaborate spray of two-dozen red roses on Libby Meade’s grave, and lay there alongside the blooms for hours excoriating a God in whom he didn’t actually believe for having shown him the grail, but snatched it away again. Screaming useless and ridiculous threats until hoarse. Finally convulsing on the ground, dry heaving with multiple layers and iterations of blackest grief and alcohol sickness from his profligacy of the previous evening.
Seeing the brains splatter.
Remembering Libby’s sweet innocent face.
Seeing it contorted in terror as he had loomed over her in Devin’s room.
Begging forgiveness. But only the wind and the birds singing.
An Edgewater County sheriff’s deputy, called by a concerned groundskeeper, rolled into the cemetery on the small road nearest Libby’s grave. Billy, by now, had gotten back on his feet and pulled together his disheveled self.
The cop, strolling over, hands on belt, asked respectfully if all was well.
“It’s the anniversary of my wife’s death.” A lie, and yet not. Gesturing down to the grave. “Another few minutes is all I need.”
The cop’s demeanor changed in a flash. A young black dude, he took off his hat and seemed genuine in his concern. “So sorry, sir.”
“Car accident.” Billy, explaining unprompted. “A drunk took her from me.”
Anger flitted across the cop’s otherwise impassive face. His words, expressed with grim thin-lipped frustration: “We do what we can about that. But it’s never enough.”
“Bless you,” Billy said.
“You’re not drinking out here today, are you, sir?”
“No. But I admit to tying one on last night.”
Accepting this the cop split, after which Billy tried to weep some more, but inside now felt only dry and cold. Wanting to take it all out on someone. Anyone.
Devin Rucker. But no Ruck. Not then.
The next day Billy’d sent a
sizable donation to the Fraternal Order of Edgewater County Law Enforcement Officers, not that it would stop any rednecks from getting plastered and killing young women in horrific day-lit, head-on collisions. But, we do what we can.
Roy Earl and Melanie, dispatched to get takeout from Golden Chopstix over in West Columbia, thirty minutes round trip, gave Billy a chance to peek in on his friend.
Despite the plethora of content at his disposal, the wall of DVDs and CDs and a few old VHS tapes kept around for sentimental reasons, Ruck reposed in the dim gloom of the hub in silence. Billy, noting with curiosity how Devin sat sipping, not gulping, the whiskey, the open bottle sitting balanced on his knee, a tumbler clutched in his other claw.
“Going down smooth.”
“Told you I’d take care of you.”
Avoiding Billy’s eyes, cradling glass against chest. “You always were a class act.”
“Ruck?” He squatted down, held out an open hand. “Do you remember what happened now? Is that what this is? With Libby?” No harder words ever said. “All of it?”
Ruck’s flinty eyes shifted in Billy’s direction. He set the heavy liquor bottle down on the coffee table strewn with scriptwriting and movie magazines, issues of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter from the last few months. “You son of a biscuit eater.”
Billy, touching his own swollen cheek, hung his head. “We never did talk about that night again, did we? Not after—the accident.”
“Why are you making me think about this shit?”
Amending. “Because I want to help stop this madness. What would Libby say about all this? If she were here?”
“No telling.”
“She’d be so mad at you for acting this way. At both of us, probably,” a quiet addendum.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 27
