“I did this. I did this.” Devin’s mantra.
“She’s not gone,” declaring with Steeple certitude on display like plumage, a pulsating, tie-dyed superpositive vibe of energetic can-do optimism: “Here’s what’s happened—she just went on up ahead a bit. She’s doing some re-con work for us all, making sure it’s safe to follow. That’s all.” Laughing, high and strange. “Sacrifice, this is. To light the path.” Billy, his half-full spin on matters devolving into wind-sucking tears. “Our guiding light. Libby.”
Devin, thinking his friend gone mad, believing Billy’s eyes might start spinning around like a cartoon character’s. But only saying, I hear you, beau. I hear you. She’s right here with us, still.
But Devin, his arms breaking out in gooseflesh—Billy, giving him the idea, the impetus, the method: Devin, following Libby. Drinking himself to her.
Yep. Drinking, in some ways, was what he did best; what gave him reasonable peace. What banished the man in the pool from his dreams.
Whom Libby would now accompany.
The last mystery, perhaps, he’d ever need to solve: “Bill—at the funeral.”
Billy’s jaw tightened. “A lovely service. Well attended.”
“Did she look like herself?”
Billy, cutting eyes over his shoulder. He pressed his lips together.
“In the casket,” Devin added.
“I knew what you meant.”
Sweat popping out on his face, Billy yanked at his colorful tie. Unable to get the knot undone, he cried out in frustration and began ripping at his shirt, popping buttons, pulling it off over his head—underneath, one of his black T-shirts.
“She looked like an angel, Ruck. An angel, an angel, an angel—”
Devin reached out to Billy, pulling him over.
Billy: collapsing, heaving, begging.
Whispering. “Bill: we weren’t drunk. But we—all of us—pounded ourselves a brewski before leaving. Before we drove over. The three of us. We didn’t want to go, not really. We wanted to stay in Arcadia. Dobbie, he said he didn’t care if he ever went back—ah!”
Billy had a sea-change of mood. Purring like Prudy, whom Devin now knew was all right and waiting for him at home, he began stroking Devin’s arm:
“So you drank a beer. What is one beer supposed to do to Devin fucking Rucker? Tell me. Tell me what a single beer would do.”
“Not much.”
“Not much,” repeating and beating his fist against a khaki-clad thigh. “Not to a motherfucker with a hollow leg like yours.”
“There you go.” Devin, patting Billy on the back. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”
“You keep on doing that.”
The patient lay back against the pillows. The leg would be filled, and for all time. His ass would show everyone what a single beer could do.
The door opened and the others filed in to gather around the hospital bed, all reeking of booze. Roy Earl looked as though suffering a grievous stomachache; Creedence, the last through the door, seemed a shellshocked mess in a black dress. She carried her chunky high heels, shuffling around the hospital in hose-feet, her face streaked with mascara.
Devin, motioning for them all to stand down, stand back. Clutching the disconsolate Billy he whispered quiet words of comfort, a sagacity of cynicism he’d already begun to embrace and embody even before all this horseshit came raining down.
In conclusion he took another track, another tidbit of grave importance. “Bill? A favor.”
“Talk to me.”
“You got to do me a solid.”
“Anything on God’s green earth.”
Devin, gathering the courage. “In the car—when it happened? We were listening to the tape.”
“What tape—?”
“The Dead tape. From the show. We were listening to ‘Dark Star’.”
A ripple of fresh unease and averted eyes. Billy, his teeth gritted. “The tape.”
“You got to go and get it. It’s still in the car.”
“I will, I will.” Billy, swearing this. A mission. “I’ll retrieve it. It’s already done.”
Devin, holding out his arms, accepting the succor of the friendship at hand. Handed a flask, he nipped at a fiery taste of Crown Roy Earl offered. With each sip, Devin started feeling better.
More like himself.
Rock on.
Fifty-One
Billy
Riding with Dwight to the junkyard to retrieve the cassette, Billy played get-to-know-you with the elder Rucker.
The genial, gentle-eyed insurance man seemed stunned to learn of the Steeple family heritage, the vibrant industry of plastics, grocery sacks, blister packs and polymer foam-formed packaging materials of which Billy would be heir; his father’s role as family consigliere, ensconced on K Street in Washington to advance the interests of the family’s various business concerns and investments, which with tech advances diversifying the uses of fossil-fuel based polymers inspired continued expansion and growth.
“It makes for a complex corporate structure.”
“A business you’ll be learning.”
A cold rush of panic. If Mr. Rucker meant sucking at the teat, certainly; having responsibility for any of it, nah. Beneath Billy’s station as a budding artist. “Certainly. One day, all mine.”
Full of questions. “Why, Devin never said a word.”
Billy laughed. “It’s because he didn’t know. I just said I came from ‘upstate money.’ It’s true that one of the plants is near Greenville. I may have left out the part about the New York townhouse and the Connecticut mansion.”
“Well now, I’m working below my pay-grade, today.” But winking. Billy could tell Dwight was a king in his own little world.
“It’s an empire, but grandpa’s no Rockefeller.” Billy went on to Mr. Rucker in self-effacing, quiet dismissal of his family’s wealth and lineage, which, he joked, stretched back in royal splendor all the way to a pair of oppressed, hungry Poles bobbing across the pond on a leaky Holland-America line steamship. They had disembarked at Ellis Island and gotten their immigration inspection cards with instructions on the back in seven languages including their own; stamped and cleared that they were relatively disease-free, allowed to set foot on the shores and make their way into the new world; and a new name, one with fewer letters.
“Self-made money,” Dwight said with a glowing admiration which filled the car like the scent of his Old Spice. “Not an old world family line.”
“Best kind—right?”
“No question about it.”
Billy, musing upon the possible past: “Granddad says, if his people, certainly working class and of the wrong religion, had stayed? They’d have ended up in Hitler’s ovens. Or so goes the family lore.”
“Dang. Well, son—I’m sure he’s glad they didn’t.”
Billy, a distillation of these pioneers, smiled and nodded; a purity of essence, the American dream turned living walking godhead of a whiteboy, y’all. They couldn’t have guessed. Not in a thousand steamship journeys across the brackish and forbidding storm-swept Atlantic. Nope.
Raw confession: He despised the Jewishness angle, however, the adherence to holidays and rituals, the seders and candle-lighting and worst of all, the enormous family rift over Billy’s refusal to participate in his bar mitzvah, though this antipathy toward faith would have been the case for him no matter the specifics or dogmas. All fairytales, to him. You talk about old-world thinking.
Billy: he’d make those immigrants proud. Except that they were dead already, those great-grandparents.
Ah, well. Perhaps they observed from on high.
Along with Libby—maybe she watched, now, from high heaven. Who now could see and know, into the past, forward to the future, eternity like a rolodex file at her angelic fingertips.
Which meant she had now seen the accidents.
Yikes. Gooseflesh, and a tight scrotum. The wrong kind. The thought of Libby seeing one of his accidents go down chille
d him far more than being discovered by terrestrial authorities.
Waiting for the chain-link gate to allow entrance he scanned piles upon piles of automobiles, a landscape apocalyptic and rusted out, a wee patch of countryside dystopia near the reeking county dump. The place reminded him of the junkyard set in Superman III, the interesting scene where he must battle another version of himself. The combat with a darker self had seemed resonant alongside the Richard Pryor co-starring comedy schtick. Billy couldn’t articulate how, exactly.
“Have you seen the car, Mr. Rucker?”
“Not yet.”
“Better prepare ourselves.”
He stopped his luxury vehicle. It sat idling like a single shining white knight having survived among piles of crusade corpses.
A grungy redneck in grimy coveralls, a pistol in a holster hanging on his hip like a Western gunslinger, shuffled out of a shack of an office near the gate. “Y’all hunting parts today?”
Dwight, explaining their mission that of retrieving personal effects from a recent total that had come in, a blue Mustang.
Pinched and weathered, the junkyard attendant, Billy noted, looked like a character actor who had stepped out of a Peckinpah widescreen oater. “That mess is back yonder.”
Billy, unable to quell his curiosity. “What’s that heater for, sir? High-crime neighborhood?”
“Heater?”
Dwight, who had served in the peacetime service, as he had told Billy, clarified in soldier-speak. “He means your sidearm.”
“Oh. We got rats come over through the woods from the dump.”
“Four-legged, or two?”
The junkman spat and chuckled, wiped his nose on a grimy overall sleeve. “Hard to know the difference, sometimes. Ain’t it?”
The attendant cracked a cynical laugh; a bark of assent escaped Billy’s dry lips.
The Oldsmobile rolled through the mountains of wrecked, abandoned cars until stopped around the corner behind a cinderblock garage.
Billy gasped—there sat the remains of the blue Mustang, a smashed, crumpled figment of its former self:
Every window shattered.
The roof peeled back.
The doors pulled off.
The engine block, sitting where the passenger seat should have been.
Billy, his entire body trembling, swallowed again and again, compulsive.
Cracking his knuckles. “I can’t do it.”
“You want to forget about this durn tape, or whatever it is?”
You’re the biggest piece of shit who ever lived. As faithless a friend as your mother was to you and your father. Billy wished for a penknife to jab into his thigh, over and over. “He asked. I have to.”
“Then hurry on, now.” Mr. Rucker sat immobile, eyes straight ahead. He had yet to fully look upon the pile of metal which had been his son’s automobile. “I’ll wait.”
Billy, dizzy, stood peering into the twisted wreckage, a shredded metal nightmare still stinking of antifreeze and gasoline, along with other acrid odors of which he dared not imagine their source.
The dashboard, shattered beyond recognition… but there, dangling by a pair of wires, the tape deck.
Gathering himself—Libby had died somewhere in this hell of jagged metal and shattered glass—he reached down with care not to cut himself. With a weak, shaking index finger, he managed to push the eject tab. The cassette, a heavy-shelled Maxell XL-IIS, popped right out into his hand, ka-chunk. He caught it before losing it down into the wreckage.
Billy, walking back, witnessed the scrawl of the label he’d stuck on before gifting the cassette to Devin, which in reality he’d been giving to Libby:
GRATEFUL DEAD Collegiate Coliseum 10-27-89 Set II
Billy. A bothersomeness like never before, sweeping through him, a flash-fire. All he could do not to destroy the tape. It felt like Exhibit A in some capital crime for which he would be served justice.
He staggered forward and fell down onto his knees, blowing the chicken salad Mrs. Rucker had served him earlier all over the penny loafers and slacks he’d worn on this latest, now sacred visit to Edgewater County.
It was fine. He had the tape. Ruck had asked. And for what his friend had gone through, the boy would get what he wanted. What he needed, Billy would make happen.
Climbing into the car, he showed Rucker the tape and signaled for him to haul ass. Billy reasoned Libby would want it this way—that he and Devin reunite, now, in grief. They would again become the best friends they were becoming before the sad foolishness over Libby. That’s what this tape represented.
Billy and Ruck and most of all Libby, three of a perfect pair. So long as the survivors stayed together, they’d never have to be apart from her.
“That sucked. But I’m glad we did it.”
“I don’t understand what’s so important about it.”
“It’s symbolic.”
“Some of your college-boy stuff.”
Billy, rueful, remembered the scriptwriting class with Libby in which Max had discussed symbolism, metaphor, other literary conceits. “Here’s the way I see it. Showing your son that this cassette survived intact, like his precious cat, will represent the first step in his salvation from all this horror,” Billy announced as they pulled back onto the highway.
“But if nothing else, his mama and me’s been praying that if one good thing comes out of this mess, it’ll be Devin putting down the bottle once and for all.”
“Our boy can drink us all under the table. No question.”
“Any help you can give us on that, Bill, well—we sure would appreciate it.”
Billy grinned like Alexander deLarge. “He’ll be cured, all right. Sir, you can depend on me.”
Fifty-Two
Devin
Devin, on the couch in the living room of his family's home, held Prudy, her back leg in a cast. He puffed on a Marlboro from a carton his mother had bought for him. This precious creature, like Devin, having made it through the tragedy relatively unscathed, all things considered, represented another of the small miracles associated with his own unlikely survival. Or so Mama kept insisting.
He had clutched the mewling, struggling kitten as he slumped bleeding in the wreckage waiting for assistance. In the few moments before the first responders arrived, faces of gawkers and rubberneckers had peered into the wreckage to glimpse the carnage.
"Help us,” Devin had begged, but the car, a smashed disaster. No one able to extract victims until the trained paramedics and rescue equipment arrived.
But for one: "Give me your cat, son," a stout, lumbering black man with familiar nightmare eyes said to Devin, speaking in incongruously loving and gentle tones, reaching in through the space where only moments before had been the driver's-side window. "I'll make sure she's all right. I'll take care of her for you. I promise—I would not lie to you."
Devin, horrified. The floating man, come to collect his due.
It had to be him.
The eyes.
Wait—it meant Devin was dead, too. Libby, Prudy, all of them. Here, the Floating Man waiting to bear him heavenward.
It was fine. So long as he would be with Libby again.
Lifting Prudy up, handing her over, Devin offered a weak soliloquy of protestation. "Please don't take her. You bastard. Why are you doing this? Why are you following me?" Those eyes. It was him. “Who are you?”
"Don't worry, son. I'm going to help her."
"Are you coming back for me, too?"
“They’re here.” The sound of sirens, growing louder. “They’re coming to help you.”
“Who are you?”
Taking the cat, moving away out of Devin’s line of sight. That’s when the blood had run fully into Devin’s eyes, and his vision had blurred.
Devin, shouting up out of the steaming wreck: “Don’t you go and leave me here! Don’t you go and take Libby and Prudy and leave me here! You son of a bitch! You goddurn shiteating son of a bitch! I knew you were coming back for me!
I knew it in the pool that day! Knew sure as I sitting here! What else do I have to do?”
Onlookers in their Sunday clothes rushed over, shushing and quieting.
At last, the EMTs.
A frecklefaced boy Devin’s age, looking in the window. His eyes bugging out. He put two fingers on Libby’s neck.
“I’m sorry, pardner.”
The sound of the saw, cutting away at the blue metal.
Devin didn’t feel dead, suddenly. He felt all too alive.
The man who’d taken Prudy, Devin later understood, had not been the floating dude at all. Nah.
Being told that Prudy’s savior was in fact a relative of that floating man, hence resembling him, however, still blew Devin’s fractured mind all the further: the Reverend Roosevelt Nixon, of Calvary Full Gospel Church of the Holy Redeemer, a few miles across the Sugeree River from Tillman Falls, was indeed Albert Nixon’s cousin.
Not a spirit; not Albert. Just a man.
Well, knock me over, Devin thought.
The Reverend Nixon had left his name and number with the police, who passed on the information to Devin’s parents. Prudy, taken to Dr. Foy over in Tillman Falls, her leg set, and later retrieved by Eileen; on the mend.
Devin, thinking he’d have to apologize for all the shouting, which couldn’t have made sense anyway. Another aspect of the accident he’d like to forget.
Hell—he smelled like beer from the one they’d chugged back at the Arcadia duplex. Everyone probably thought he was as drunk as the other guy. Untrue.
However: Might as well have been. For all the good I did Libby and Dobbs.
“I should go and thank that pastor.”
“We already sent Reverend Nixon a lovely bouquet of flowers, as well a donation to his church from both our family as well as the ELMS,” Eileen said from across the room. “No need for my son to have to go slumming in some black church across the river.”
Devin put his cat down on a pallet Eileen had prepared there in the Rucker family room, with its high ceiling and fireplace and photos on the wall, a projection big-screen TV in the corner, a set wider and thicker than a refrigerator; the first in the neighborhood to acquire one. Devin hadn’t so much as considered turning it on, preferring instead to sit reading in the dim, air-conditioned quiet.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 36
