“I wouldn’t dream of staying longer than a New York minute, oh my brother. You can depend on me, sir.”
“What did y’all think about him?”
Libby, sleepy, padded barefoot into the hallway wearing one of Devin’s T-shirts, The Who bullseye logo: “He’s a cutie-patootie.”
Dobbs smiled; at last he could be true to himself.
For this, Devin felt glad. Golf-clapping. “Dobbs finds love. I’ll alert the media.”
Libby, pranced through the hall in her threadbare cotton panties. Hugging Dobbs’s neck. “Yay for you.”
“This all isn’t some wonderful dream, is it?”
“No.” Libby, beaming back up at Devin. “This is real life.”
In bed Libby nestled close against Devin, silvery moonlight pouring in through the slatted blinds across the young lovers; Prudy, purring herself to sleep, had curled up on Devin’s pillow beside his head. The twinned limbs and spooned bodies of lovers, a family portrait; a night like forever.
Forty-Nine
Billy
Roy Earl on the phone. Grim news. “Some kind of car wreck. Dobbs, and Devin—and Libby.” He had caught Billy at home, beeping in on a dreadful Mother’s Day call to the Harridan of Park Avenue, an interruption Billy grateful to suffer.
Not anymore.
“Which one’s dead?” The question popped out. That drunk Rucker, who had no fear of driving pissed as a skunk, finally killed someone. “Tell me.”
Roy, saying he didn’t know that anyone was dead. But that it was bad.
Billy, feeling faint, collapsed against the wall of his condo. Bright sunshine streamed in through the vertical blinds leading to the balcony. A beautiful, almost too-warm Sunday afternoon in May. The sky was blue.
“All of them taken to the hospital?”
“Far as I can tell. Palmetto General,” he said in clarification.
Only a mile from campus; Billy, shouting in recognition of his proximity to whichever of his intimates lay clinging to life. “I’m out the door.”
“Pick me up, dude. Please.”
Billy, saying he’d be at UT in two minutes, blasted out of his door and shoved by a startled neighbor, a fetching cinnamon girl in tight terrycloth shorts and tube-top carrying a basket of laundry—Marcy somebody. He’d normally have groped and pinched her, but no time, sweetie.
“Billy, watch the fuck out, dude.”
Racing for the stairwell, he called over his shoulder, contrite: “Apologies; but a friend’s been in an accident.”
“Oh–so sorry, sweetie.”
Billy left black streaks after roaring into the fire lane at University Terrace, where Roy said he had been moving out the last of his belongings.
Billy, greeted by the sight of Devin’s old bedroom window, felt like puking.
Feeling a flare of bothersomeness.
Beating his thighs with clenched fists.
A voice, telling him that what was to come would be bad.
Sounding the horn.
If Devin, or Dobbs, or more crucially, Libby Meade, were hurt?
He’d tear his teeth out.
He’d shit himself.
He didn’t know what he would do—accidentally kill every motherfucker in the room?
Himself, too?
Take them all with him?
Libby. It couldn’t be her.
But Devin, Dobbs, they were all important to him now; all crucial pieces of the Billy puzzle, illuminating and healing and making him whole in ways he’d never known. He could not lose any one of them, now, no; not even well-meaning doofus Roy Earl Pettus. He needed them like he needed the air—besides, he’d alienated every other person here in South Carolina he could’ve counted as friends.
Every.
Last.
One.
Roy Earl, bounding down the concrete steps, the chubby good-old-boy moving quick and agile as Billy’d ever seen.
“Okay,” jumping in and slamming the door. “Go.”
Under other circumstances Billy would have driven fast and fantasized about being in one of his silly Hollywood movies, a buddy cop action extravaganza shot through with witty rejoinders and sly asides and references and in-jokes, images of ’splosions and stunts and mayhem, action and movement and humor, beast brain stuff. Instead, he clutched his aching side, a stress reaction, with one hand as both of them sat in silence. Racing through the city in his fine Mercedes with the top down, the breeze whipping his lengthening brown hair, Billy felt no joy or fun in his heart; Roy Earl, holding onto to a beloved Redtails ball cap with one plump hand, held no color in his cheeks.
Hurrying into the hospital lobby, Billy, all-but lunging over the information desk at a startled old lady; directed to a waiting area.
A few Rucker relatives already, faces Billy didn’t know.
“Head-on,” he heard someone saying, a man sputtering and angry, a ruddy, frecklefaced ginger chap in cowboy boots. “I should go call Whardell Truluck and get to the bottom of all this mess.”
Roy Earl, nudging Billy, whispered, “That’s Devin’s dad.”
“Who? Cowboy Bob?”
“No—there. With Creedence. The redhead.”
Dwight Rucker, a crumpled, broken, balding and dumpy man in his fifties, sat slumped in casual Sunday attire. Holding his gangly teen daughter in shorts and T-shirt, both were quietly weeping.
Devin, gone.
Defunct.
We’d lost him.
A flash through Billy’s mind: fantasy, made real—Devin, out of the way.
Yes, dummy. It worked out just that easily.
Oh, shit. Not that voice. His gut turned solid as granite.
Manning up. Getting ready to be strong—for himself, for the survivors.
He approached Mr. Rucker and the girl, Devin’s sister Creedence, he halfway remembered from that cookout they had way back when. Glancing up to him through puffy eyes, boohooing and hiding her face again, she didn’t want to talk to a stranger.
“I’m Ruck’s—Devin’s—friend from school.”
Dwight, choked. “We can’t believe this. We just can’t believe it.”
It was true, then. Ruck. Gone.
The competition over Libby or not, Billy felt a gaping, yawning maw open up inside him. Imagined his guts twisting into one of those David Lynch sand worms, eating himself from the inside: grief. He felt grief.
Oh, Ruck.
RUCK.
“You can’t see him yet.” Creedence, a harsh whisper. “But they think he’s okay.”
“Dobbs—oh, thank god.”
“Devin. They still have him in the emergency room downstairs. Stitching up a cut on his forehead.”
“Dobbs? Libby?”
Creedence, breaking down, sobbing. Mr. Rucker, shushing his daughter. “Libby’s gone, son.”
Roy Earl, understanding and yet not. “Wait—hold on.”
“I’m afraid so. Now, please—my daughter’s upset.”
Billy, nodding, announced in a voice loud and cheerful to the others gathered in the waiting room:
“Excuse me, everyone.”
The hubbub quieted down.
“Anyone know where there’s a nearby restroom?” he asked as hot piss ran down his legs. “It’s kind-of an emergency.”
Fifty
Devin
Devin.
On the ER examining table.
Still alive.
His body covered by a rough hospital sheet, he noticed the dried blood all over his arms—from his own wounds.
That’s right—but for a blot at the corner of her mouth, Libby had not bled. Had looked peaceful, hanging next to him in the wreckage of the Mustang. Her face, in an inarguable state of peace if not demonstrable grace, held a final expression which could only be described as serene.
Her face.
The blood draining out of it.
Floating there next to him.
Devin: Unsure whether alive or dead, whether all that had happened in the last two h
ours had been real.
Alone for the first time since being transported here alongside Dobbs, the emergency room staff now off attending to the day’s various other grievously injured from their own tragedies and illnesses and mishaps, he found his vision unfocused, suffering afterimages and light flashes—the sun, harsh as it beat down in his eyes for so long as he’d awaited rescue.
Until his vision blurred in the vehicle.
Ah, here was death, at last.
But no, only blood, his own, running into his eyes, thick and warm. As the jaws of life had cut away at the metal to get him out—and afterwards, Libby’s body, which of course he hadn’t witnessed—he had leaned back into the seat and held onto the kitten, who hissed and clawed.
“You’re a lucky man, son.” One of the ER doctors, sucking his teeth and scrutinizing the X-rays. “Except for that head wound, you’re in one piece.”
“Why don’t you go and fuck yourself.” Devin, all but screaming.
“You’ve been drinking.”
Devin couldn’t deny it. They’d pounded a beer before leaving. A single beer. “I’m not drunk, dickhead.”
The doctor, scowling in his hospital blues, ordered a sedative for the patient and swished out of the curtain.
Devin, twisting around on the gurney, felt a sharp stick of pain in his stomach. Reaching under the sheet, running a hand across his belly. Horrified, he discovered a tiny cluster of shattered windshield dust had collected in his navel.
A strident voice came echoing from another part of the ER, followed by a staccato conversation in more muted tones. At first, Devin, thinking more accident victims being brought in—what was going on out there today?—before realizing the voice that of his own mother:
“Now let me back there to see my son, you god-durn quacks, before I kick your recalcitrant butts over yonder onto sissy street! Now! Now! Now!”
A flurry of brisk footsteps and voices, and his Mama, looking older and frailer than he’d ever seen, burst through the curtain trailed by a blustery ER nurse.
“Ma’am—”
Eileen Rucker, hard as nails. “Woman, let me see my son before I knock your black ass all the way into next Wednesday.”
The nurse, sighing, closed her eyes and counted to ten. Taking the rancor in stride, she withdrew.
Clearly horrified by his bloody appearance, drawing in sudden breath but trying to smile, Mama patted him on the arm, gentle.
“Oh, my poor sweet darling—there you are. There you are, now. All fine. All better. Mama’s here.”
All the animus and pain toward his mother, the confusion over Uncle Hill, melting away—Mama. The first face you see.
Trying to speak, but choking off before getting out a single intelligible word.
“Hush, now.”
Breathing, controlling, suppressing the tears, his throat raw and scalded, but damned if unable to say what needed to be said. The truth of the matter? That in the seconds after the car had come to rest, Devin, seeing the light go out of Libby’s eyes?
Hearing her last breath?
“She was still alive. For a few seconds. Oh, Mama—she was still alive. But then—but then.”
“Hush, sweetheart.”
They held one another. He smelled the scent of her cigarette smoke. For a second or two, everything felt okay again.
Later, upon further examination, Devin’s head wound was stitched up by a plastic surgeon who blew in dressed as though coming straight from the golf course—which, of course, he had: it was Sunday afternoon.
Another doctor, young, wandered in amidst the procedure. He leaned in alongside the middle-aged surgeon. Devin could see a frosting of dandruff in the man’s curly black hair.
The younger doc pointed with curiosity at the gash on Devin’s head. “How’re we gonna fix that little bit there?” Devin could smell the man’s lunch on his breath, onions and meat and vinegar—a sub sandwich.
“You’re gonna watch the fanciest stitching you ever did see,” the plastic surgeon said, tugging and pulling above Devin’s eye. “Like you ER residents ain’t never seen.”
“Not bad.” The younger physician, who shot a wink at Devin, wandered away in a cloud of Subway.
After the procedure Devin found himself moved to a private room. A nurse, young, cheerful, came by in her colorful scrubs to finish cleaning him up.
Informing her: “Think there’s glass in my belly button.”
Laughing and canting her head.
“I was in a car wreck.”
“Oh—okay. I’m sorry.”
Devin, glaring as the nurse went about her business, quiet and officious, sponged him off with deliberation and care. Many small wounds, tender flesh where he’d struck the steering wheel. This nurse, whose name he did not know and whom he would not see again, gently washed his contused body. She would become the first woman besides Libby Meade to touch his genitals.
Over the next day, the facts, trickling in. The man, a poor Edgewater County fella wrapped up a weekend bender which had dragged on into Sunday morning, decided to pass another car on a hilltop; on a double yellow line.
But as it turned out, the asshole wasn’t a local—a transient. Not even a resident of Chilton, nor South Carolina at all, the perp had been passing through while moving from Kentucky to Florida.
After interviewing family members he’d visited, it seemed Maurice Reginald King had gotten off the freeway, dropping in on a cousin; the cousins had themselves one big Saturday night together, an apparently bacchanalian reunion which began at The Dixiana in downtown Tillman Falls before moving on to a number of other establishments. Drinking all night and on into the morning, when Mr. King took a notion to continue his journey to Florida. His cousin had tried to talk him out of doing so, he said, but failed.
Ruinously so—Mr. King, dead like Libby; decapitated in the collision.
Devin, thinking, nice work there, God: transgression and retribution wrapped neat and clean into one package, King’s misdeed punished well and true and final, like. No need for a jury or judge; justice served.
Case closed.
But no sense of actual justice—no bringing her back. Getting used to the idea already. Or so he made himself believe.
Devin, overhearing a highway patrolman outside the cracked hospital room door quietly going through the details with Dwight and Eileen:
“Are you saying he was drunk?” Devin’s father, aghast. “On a Sunday morning?”
“The circumstantial evidence, open containers in the vehicle, says yes. Toxicology’ll tell us for certain. Now—your son had been drinking as well, it seems.”
“I know,” Dwight said. “I know.”
Devin’s own blood drawn as well, the extraction in the ER overseen by a stony-faced, plainclothes law enforcement officer who’d presented a release for him to sign, which he did with trembling, bloody fingers.
“Honestly?” The patrolmen went on in a more conversational tone. “I don’t see how anyone survived. Apparently, when your boy seen the other vehicle coming over the rise he had a split-second to react, and it appears that he turned the steering wheel,” Devin seeing the shadow of the cop’s arm pantomiming the action, “which is what saved him.”
Devin could hear his mother sniffling.
His father: “He came so close. He came so close. Oh, thank god.”
Devin, hearing every word.
Understanding.
Turning the wheel.
Enough to save himself.
But not her.
He didn’t remember; all he knew was Libby yelling his name, and a flash of the truck and the roar and the sunlight, beating down. And then her face, turning blue.
Screaming, Devin began thrashing and yanking out his IV. Another sedative. Sleep, blessed and dreamless.
Libby’s funeral was held two days later, but Devin, not there, instead still in the hospital room, alone with his mother. The docs, keeping an eye on his heart, which they said might have suffered a contusion from
the impact of the steering wheel on his breastbone. Tests to be run. And so on.
Devin, wondering if he oughtn’t pull himself together and attend the service. Feeling so empty inside, he thought he’d do fine. Kind of wanted to see her again.
Nah. Nah.
However: “Mama, you ought to be there.”
“No—I want to remember her like she was.” She snapped her fingers. “You know what we’re going to do, darling? Here’s what we do. Let’s remember her like she was. Not how she is.”
Later, a small knock at the door—Billy.
Their eyes locked. Devin’s friend stood trembling in a blue oxford shirt and a conservative tie, awfully formal attire for a punk rocker. Devin, thinking, he attended in my stead.
For me.
Billy, there for me.
Indeed—Billy, explaining that he, Roy Earl and others had been to Libby’s service. Billy, smelling of whiskey. Smiling, trying to keep himself together.
Devin, scratching at the bandage on his forehead, spoke in his silly redneck brogue. “Ah ain’t never seen you in a tie, beau.”
“And you probably won’t again soon.”
“Means a lot that you went.” Devin, blinking, struggling not to crumble. Hardening inside. Wanting the source of the whiskey breath. “That you’re here now.”
Billy, without words, hung his head and sat down heavy on the bed beside Devin.
Shooting a look at his mother—Eileen, understanding, got up to leave.
“I’ll let y’all visit while I go get us all Co-colas.” Taking her purse, checking her appearance in the bathroom mirror, she gave Billy a big, happy eye-squeezing fake smile. “And some breath mints for you, young man. If I may suggest.”
Billy, his face pink, said yes-ma’am. “I prefer Certs to Tic-tacs, if they have them.”
She shut the door and left them alone.
“Ruck, I don’t know what to say.”
Devin wrenched his face away. “I let him run into us. I seen the truck. But it didn’t compute. I killed her.”
Billy laid out the case—the other driver was drunk. Not Devin. “He hit you. Not the other way around.”
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 35
