Devin, pinched and sour, cussed and went outside. He slammed the sliding glass door behind him.
“How bad is he?”
“Since he fell, he’s sober. Near as anyone can tell.”
“Thank god.”
Millie, Chelsea thought, sounded like someone with an investment in hearing a sober Devin say ‘howdy.’ But she couldn’t make him. No one could make Devin do anything. No one ever could. Except Libby. No help there.
“I’m thankful to hear this.” Millie, searching. “We were both in the same boat, once. Together.”
“So you knew him like he was before.”
“Yes,” definitive.
“I’m real sorry.”
Millie, a laugh, a release of tension. “Me too—but you know what?”
“Say.”
“After we got straight? He was okay, for the longest time.”
“How do you mean?”
“Ruck seemed happy. Like he had managed to forget what had been troubling him. But, that could also be a function of my own disease and recovery. What they call ‘euphoric recall’. He was dry for a time back then, to be honest.”
“But he was never sober. He told me.”
“He told you?”
“Yeah—but he never mentioned your name, either.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m salty. I got a marriage gone messy.”
“I went through a couple, girl. Ain’t showed the best judgement at times.”
A bonding moment.
Chelsea, relaxing.
“That butthole never told us back then he had gotten straight for a year or two. When he come home after Daddy and all—Daddy’s funeral—we hadn’t seen him in ten years. Longer.”
Millie went on to describe her life with Devin. How much he loved watching movies on the couch with her at night, discussing them afterwards. He read books about movies and how they were made, always poring over the boxes of used paperbacks that came through the thrift store in which they had both worked together. Worked, and loved, and drank, but only at first, before getting straight. Drove up into the mountain passes west of Boulder. The winding roads.
“I remember trying to kiss him one time when we stopped at one of those scenic turn-outs. He got so sad, so sudden, on me. He started drinking again not long after. And yeah—after he came home for the funeral, he returned like a different guy.”
“Bless you for putting up with him.”
“He’s got his sweet side. Even when he’s drunk.”
Chelsea, watching her brother outside smoking at the patio table and rubbing his temples, understood what she meant. She had seen that old self again, here and there. Mostly there.
Millie coughed and blew her nose. “Ruck kept talking about how he was waiting for his lucky day to come along. He’d never explain what he meant by that.”
“Why did he go out there to Colorado away?”
“Said he’d started driving one day and that’s where he ended up—said he stopped when he got to the mountains. Which didn’t make any sense to me, not really. In road movies, they’re supposed to end up at the sea, aren’t they?”
“Yeah. The ocean.”
Millie’s voice now came small. “I want you to know I tried to help him. It didn’t take—but I tried.”
“Did he ever tell you what happened? About the car wreck? About Libby?”
“Car wreck? Not a word.”
“That scar on his forehead. You can’t hardly see it.”
“He said it’s from some bar fight.”
“No, not a bar fight.”
“Was it bad, the wreck?”
“Real bad. The only two who wa’n’t hurt bad was him and his cat.”
Chelsea could hear Millie crying. “Prudy.”
“That’s right.”
Now they both had had mysteries solved.
“Anything you want me to tell him? A phone number?”
Millie, rattling off digits, sent Chelsea scrambling and fumbling for a pen. She chicken-scratched a smeary number on the back of a thermal receipt from the Piggly Wiggly.
“Please tell him I’m eager to talk. When he’s ready.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Chelsea caught her brother’s aggrieved gaze from on the deck outside. He made a hard, slashing gesture across his throat. Mouthing the words hang the fuck up now.
Devin was stubborn. His old girlfriend would have to wait. If she counted the days like Devin, and it sounded like she did, at least she’d learned patience.
Sixty-Seven
Devin
Devin, pitching his butt and cruising up the long ramp constructed along the front porch of the manufactured house, set back from the road on a weedy and sandy lot in a downmarket part of Edgewater County, had got up his nut. Had checkmarks to make on various lists of tasks, like making amends.
Dobbs and his mom lived outside the city limits of Tillman Falls, on the highway going to the airfield out past the high school. After all this time, the wood of the ramp had begun to look as weathered as the gray decking on the rear of the Rucker house. His daddy, if he were still around, would have long ago paid someone to pressure-wash it fresh again. Or done himself, more than likely. Devin would look into it.
Miriam Vandegrift opened the door with a sad smile. "There you are."
"Here I is.”
“We were starting to wonder if you'd come calling. At all.”
Two choices—shame, or in his case, self-deprecation. “Hey, I’m only fifteen years overdue.”
The silence between them lengthy, her glare accusatory.
But she softened. “Get on in here, now. He’s waiting.”
Dobbs's mother, so stooped and old; he had only been able to picture the version he knew from childhood—dark-haired, slender. Musing how years of caring for a physically-challenged adult son had aged her, especially as she'd done it alone: Mr. Vandegrift, splitting the scene when Dobbs still young. Long before the tragedy. Their family, in his memory, always scraping by back when they were kids. Dobbs, eating over all the time. Always seeming so grateful. Their friendship had been an early window into class distinctions. Devin’s daddy owned his own business, ran with the big wheels. Dobbs’s daddy had fixed cars.
His heart fluttered and reflux fluxed. She led him inside by the elbow of the jean jacket, which his Mama had stain-treated and cleaned and stitched. He'd had Creedence sew one of those colorful dancing bears you see on bumper stickers, a Deadhead icon, over a gash in the side of the denim, one Devin claimed had come from another drunk’s knife; over what issue, however, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. His stories, no matter which ones told, were usually half made-up anyway.
Pausing, Dobbs’s mother confided in a tight, hushed exhortation: “I’ve prayed and prayed, Devin; we prayed together over it, all these years. And tried to get him to see the truth. But he needs to hear it from you.”
“Truth?” Yet knowing.
“He needs you to help him understand why.”
“Why what? That a drunk passed on a double yellow line?”
Mrs. Vandegrift, hands wrinkled and gnarled by arthritis, working her fingers together in desperate supplication. “He thinks you’ve stayed away all this time because you’ve been mad at him. Because you blamed him.”
Devin, writhing and hot all over. Cussing under his breath. Sweating. “I was ashamed. Not mad.”
“I try to remind him about that drunk driver. How he run into y’all.”
“Incontrovertibly so, ma’am.”
“It is the truth, isn’t it?”
Devin held out his meathooks. “I’m the jackleg who didn’t see the truck in time. I been eat up with all that. Enough for both of us.”
“No, son—we all know what happened. Those of us who choose to remember. Bless all your hearts.”
Sober, unable to deny the truth, the facts unassailable in their fact-ness: No more fantasy, no more bullshit.
What happened, happe
ned. The drunk ran into them.
So—what could have been done?
By Devin, Libby or Dobbs? Or Prudy, for that matter?
Everything.
Anything.
Another trip on another day, a traffic backup on I-26, a breakdown, a cop pulling over a big rig before the Tillman Falls/Chilton exit, a cop pulling them over, Prudy crawling into his lap, a flash of light, road construction, a dead dog, a rock hitting the windshield, a bug hitting the windshield, a stop for sodas or to pee out the beer they themselves had quaffed before getting behind the wheel—if not having a second one; it would have added another few minutes, no question—a sudden rain shower, another car accident, a leaf, a stone, a doorway in the sky opening up so the aliens could land at Jack Van Loan airfield over near campus in Columbia; how they had watched all through their time as students as small planes took off and landed, with Roy Earl commenting about one day purchasing his own aircraft.
Anything at all would have changed the timeline to place the tragic trio on a trajectory toward a different moment in a different space in a different universe from the one in which a drunk redneck going full-out down the two-lane blacktop, on the wrong side of the lines, obliterated the Mustang and everyone in it. Any little decision, it all goes another way. This mind-game had long driven Devin to have another forty drinks. Enough to stop saying what-if.
One bright interpretation? He’d read an article about some egghead’s multiverse theory—all the timelines ran simultaneously in parallel. That meant lots of Libbys didn’t die. They went their myriad ways. They were nearby now.
They lived.
But absent variables coming into play, the three friends and the cat were in this timeline placed where they were at that moment in the great unfolding of their personal history, fated, and nothing then or now to change the outcome… except in the imagination.
But real was real.
No movie magic to save the damsel.
No rewriting the screenplay now.
Change the title to Forever Facing College Street, maybe? That’s the only revision they needed.
Hell—he’d sort it out, finally, by talking it through with the man in the wheelchair, endless in his patience, who waited for his old friend in the Southern sunshine pouring onto the screened-in porch.
Devin stood on a patch of worn outdoor Astroturf behind the wheelchair. “All right now, Dobbie—whatcha know good?”
Dobbs’s body jerked, spasmodic, at the sound. He twisted around.
No words at first.
“Well.”
“Yep.”
Staring, speaking, saying simply:
“It’s been a long time.”
Devin, no courage to display, no sense of propriety needed; took two shambling steps forward and fell to his knees at Dobbs’s feet. He mewled in quiet, aggrieved sibilance for absolution.
A string of gobbledygook, snot running out of his nose.
As though he’d been drinking.
Yet not.
Not this time.
Dobbs, stroking Devin’s head, patted him on the back. Sniffling and drawing his own shaky breaths, he said, “Hush, son. Get up, now.”
Devin, doing so far too quickly, became dizzy. He stabilized himself with the cane. He not only saw stars but suffered one of the awful flashes, too, of Dobbs’s twisted body by the roadside. This symptom of PTSD, the disease Devin had been self-medicating for so many years, still flared up all the time. Banishing this phantom, seen here in the face of the real man, and most assuredly not in the form of an alcohol-induced hallucination, would push the one-day program to its limits.
His friend.
Real as the day was long.
Despite him being the one who’d squalled and collapsed like one of them old busted twin towers up in New York, Devin asked, “You all right?”
“The world outside endures—Eudora Welty wrote that.”
“How about the inside world?”
Dobbs, shifting again in his chair, grimaced and lifting his arms, heavy, in a shrug.
He had other things on his mind: “I reckon you been resting all summer. Taking it easy around the house.”
“Yeah. I been recovering from multiple mishaps, you could say.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to walk. Like me. When I heard how you fell.”
Self-loathing filled him up the way a fried chicken supper did, with a dollop of guilt like fluffy mashed potatoes awaiting gravy—real potatoes, not flakes out of a packet. “Mama says I’m way too young for a cane.”
“Took the words,” he said, rolling his chair back and making room for Devin to sit on the white patio chair by a small glass coffee table on which lay stacks of books, magazines, the last few editions of the Edgewater Advocate and the Columbia Record. “Sit.”
Devin had gotten around the county, all right, but not to see Dobbs. Had seen Libby’s mother, in a nursing home up in Greenville; she had not recognized him, which made the visit short, merciful and pointless. Calling Libby’s older brothers, both of whom he supposed, had turned into thick, graying middle-aged men rather than the thirty year-old lanky young bucks he remembered. Shelby Fordham, lots of phone calls and visits—she had the sweets for him, bless her heart. Yeah—since he’d been back, Devin had avoided no one, really, except Dobbs.
And the cemetery.
Devin? A goddamned selfish sonofabitch if he’d ever seen one.
“I been laying low, buddy-row. Sure enough.”
A wan smile. “I heard you took a hard knock.”
“One in a series.” He had some weird vision issues, headaches and assorted shit, but what was new. “But I’m all right now.”
Mrs. Vandegrift, fussing around, said, “Now that my boys are both here together—finally—what do we want to eat or drink?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Do y’all want some sandwiches and Cokes? Or Devin, do you drink coffee? I can make some real quick now—it’s probably not as good as what you’re used to: it’s just Folger’s, but we like it right good.”
“Nothing, Mama.”
“So—what can I get y’all?”
Dobbs, half-shouting. “We don’t need nothing right now. If Devin wanted something, he’d say so.” Turning to Devin. “You need anything?”
A reassuring head-shake. “I don’t want for much, ma’am. All set.”
Glaring. “See? See? Lord have mercy, but I wish you’d get out from under me today.”
Chastened, hesitating, wanting to be included. “I’ll just go look at my stories. Maybe I can fix y’all a snack later.”
Dobbs and Devin sipped sweet tea that, despite their protestations, his doting mother served them anyway.
A fan with filthy blades turning and squeaking. The dog dishes, a poodle who skittered around inside on tiny claws and looked freshly groomed, and that had growled at him. Old junk out here, a rusty washer and dryer Devin remembered them buying at Sears back in 1983.
“Y’all ought to haul this old crap off to the dump. I’ll help, if you want.”
“What are supposed to use for a washer and dryer?”
Not-junk. “Oh.”
Dobbs, at last posing a question, one loaded like no other—much of their time thus far had been spent with Devin spinning tales of ribald debauchery from his days lost in the funhouse, as he termed the period. Avoiding, for the longest time, any talk about that day on the road. Until, out of the blue:
“How much you remember?”
“More than I care to admit,” Devin said. “You?”
Dobbs, squinting into the middle distance. “Not even the last couple of days before. All a big old blur, like a hole in there.”
“Sounds familiar. Lost about a week leading up to me falling down them stairs like a dumb-ass. Last thing I remember is sitting in a bar called Chubby’s out in Colorado, yapping on the phone with Billy about driving down to Texas.” Chortling. “Billy says we had us a time there, and in N’awlins, too.”
&n
bsp; “It ended up saving you, in a way.”
“What did?”
“Your fall.”
“Least I got to sleep through detox.”
Dobbs, hm-hming and tsk-tsking, occasionally swatted at gnats sneaking in through a rip in the screen. Devin thought he should fix it for them.
“May I tell you something?”
“Shoot, pard.”
Dobbs—furtive, fidgety, hesitant—struggled to find the words.
Devin picked at his mustache, which unlike his still-stubby haircut he had let grow out to handlebar territory, asked, “What is it, hombre?”
“I hold onto this stupid fantasy.” Dobbs, looking everywhere but Devin’s eyes. “This ridiculous, dumb fantasy.”
“It’s me. You can tell old Ruck anything.”
“I used to think about you coming back. And doing what we were talking about. Before the accident.”
“What were we talking about? Before the accident?”
“What Libby suggested.”
Feeling obtuse. “Spill it.”
“About us all being roommates.”
Devin’s breath catching—of course. “You were going to move in with us in Arcadia.” That fall, Dobbs, planning to live in the other bedroom where Billy’d ended up. A detail, not so much misremembered as lost in the maelstrom. “Weren’t you.”
His chin quivered. “If only.”
Grabbing one of Dobbs’s hands. “Might’ve-beens are for losers. And drunks.”
Fighting off tears, haughty to the point of anger. “But it isn’t mere nostalgia, Devin. I can’t live with my Mama the rest of my life, now can I? Who’s going to take care of me when—damn, son, she’s old, now,” lowering his voice. “I’m gonna die alone.”
“Beau.” Devin, panicked but concealing this through his usual sardonic sanguinity. “We’ll get your ass squared away. I’m right around the freaking corner.” Patting his knee. “Relax, chief. I’m not staying away like before.”
Skeptical, Dobbs squinted against the blazing western sun now dipping toward the tops of the pine trees. “It’ll be for the best. I’ll die here alone, go home to Jesus and be done with it.”
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 44
