“Get out of here with that shit. You got a long time to live. Or, you don’t. That’s the game. That’s the rub. So, yeah—you might die in this house. But not tonight. And not anytime soon. So give it a rest, drama queen.”
Dobbs, deep in introspection, chin resting on his chest, rocked back and forth in the chair. “Thank god for my books, at least. Especially the Good one. That’s one you ought to get more familiar with.”
Devin, ignoring the bible reference. “Reading something good, are you? That’s about all I do anymore. Like when I was a kid.”
“Reading helps me forget.”
“Word to that.”
“But forgetting—that’s been your biggest problem, hasn’t it?”
“More to it than the forgetting. But, sure.”
“You got to let me witness to you.”
An ambush. Devin, waving him away. “Might as well save your breath.”
“But I have to. You don’t know how long I’ve waited.” Desperate and beseeching, his bug-eyes reminded Devin of Eileen at her most shrill and demonstrative. “I must.”
Devin’s instincts suggested flight, but the stark fact remained: he indeed owed his friend much, beginning with the courtesy of a listen.
And so, sitting with quiet patience, Devin nodded and mm-hm’d as Dobbs discoursed about Jesus and angels and light and a happiness beyond reason, an assurance beyond emotion, and how he knew in his heart that one day he’d walk again—upon streets of gold. How this answer, the answer of answers, lay hidden in all hearts, with only the search necessary to reveal the treasure. “‘Ask and ye shall receive’ is more than words.”
Devin, nodding and counting the seconds until release. “Sounds good.”
Noting with a degree of quizzical interest that his pious friend, once as irreligious as they’d come, seemed unable to look him in the eye. Dobbs, speaking with a stammering and quavering lack of a certain certitude one ought to expect from a person of such considerable and demonstrable faith. Devin, starting to wonder who between them needed convincing the most.
“Tell me: Can you feel what it’s like to be alive anymore? Sitting here feeling sorry for yourself all this time? Can you?”
Dobbs, shocked by the impertinence, snapped his head around. “Edward Devin Rucker. Hush your mouth.”
“Well?”
Dobbs, his ire deflating, gestured from the middle of his abdomen up to his face. “From about here up. You butthole.”
“The part that works includes that big-old heart of yours, don’t it?”
“I reckon.”
“And what does your heart tell you about me? That I can be saved? That any of us can truly be saved in some fashion that makes all this crap add up to something? Saved like leftovers after Thanksgiving? Turkey sandwiches, for all eternity? Never running out, always tasting yummy and good and not all dried out?”
Ignoring the silly Thanksgiving metaphor. “You don’t understand—my faith has made this bearable. After I took the Lord into my heart, it all made sense. You need to get you some of what I got going, son.”
Devin, his skepticism a manifest, living organism all its own there on the crummy, cluttered back porch, dragged his gaze across the stand of longleaf pines, the fallen needles a carpet of rust, the trees autumnal brown and looking dry and thirsty. “I don’t believe you. It’s all an act.”
“Oh, you little recalcitrant turd.”
“I didn’t come to listen to this. I came to see Dobbs.”
Moist eyes unable to meet those of his friend. “‘Dobbs died in the car that day. I’m nothing.”
“That what being saved gets you? ‘Nothing’?”
“Oh—p’shaw, Devin. Kiss my ass.” He stuck out his tongue.
Now there, the old Dobbs. Devin smiled.
Yuck-yucking, the good old boy persona back in force: “Looky here, I’ll tell you what’s ‘nothing’—this sky-pilot act you been putting on like it’s some kinda durn Easter pageant. Them legs a your’n might not work, but up here?” He tapped his temple with the corner of his faithful Zippo. “You’re so full of shit them blue eyes is a-turning brown. I swear to god-all-mighty if they ain’t.”
“Maybe you should go.” Dobbs, verging on squirting a few. “You little pissant.”
“God knows I probably should. But I just got here.” Devin, slapping his knee with a sound that came sharp and sudden like a Snap’n Pop thrown in a quiet hollow school corridor during the middle of classes. “There, see? I got religion. Unbidden, I invoked the name of the Lord.”
“Oh, hell.” Dobbs, throwing hands into the air. “A body could go funny in the head thinking about all this mess. If only there was some kind of sign. To help explain.”
“Wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“I believe, Ruck. But it’s hard. It’s a narrow way, as the book says.”
Devin dropped his cornpone routine. “You want to know what I was up to for the last fifteen years? Looking for a sign, too. Or so I thought. An explanation I could buy—about Libby, about other stuff. But you know, funniest thing is that I thought I had it. I sure did. For the longest time, I thought I had been told secrets by someone, and damn if it didn’t turn out… that it was true.”
Rueful. Dobbs said, “Secrets. Now, that’s something I know all about.”
Devin, cursing himself, embittered with self-reproach, continued, “The only real secret I got told, though, was by Libby that day on the side of the road, with that lucky old sun beating down on us. I didn’t realize it, but I had my answer. When the light went out of her eyes—? In her last breath came the big reveal. I couldn’t see it then for what it was.”
Anticipatory, Dobbs begged to know.
“That whatever we are right now—how much we love and live, sing and dance and drink and fuck and all that shit—in the end this body of ours ain’t nothing but wormfood, and what we really are?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know that ‘we’ don’t go somewhere different once ‘this’ is over. Someplace better. So maybe we’re closer on metaphysics than farther apart.”
Dobbs, sighing. “‘This’ can’t be the end of everything.”
“You don’t want to live forever.” A statement.
“Not live-live. But in a way, I mean.”
“Like this?” Pointing to the wheel chair.
“No.”
Devin, ruminative. “Maybe the answers and the questions are the same damn thing all going in a circle, with us stuck in the middle watching it all go around. Thinking we got a handle on what it is that’s happening here. And so that’s where I reckon I’ll stay for now. Somewhere in the middle, watching it all spin around like my skivvies in Mama’s dryer. I can live with that—I think.”
“Maybe we could work on these questions. Together.”
Devin, contemplative and melancholy with nostalgic awe. “We used to have this same damn conversation back when you and Roy Earl were getting all high-minded, so to speak. Didn’t we.”
“When you were Devin instead of Ruck. Yes. I miss those days. But, listen.” Dobbs, hesitant and quiet: “Could you find me some?”
“Some what?”
“You know.”
His gears ground. It took him a minute. “Wait—weed?”
Dobbs, hands up. “That used to be my happy place.”
“I’ll talk to Billy. If you think it might help.”
“What do I have to lose?”
Afternoon into evening, sun gone down and the birds quieting, Devin arranged with Miriam to take Dobbs back over to the house for dinner. Calling home and hearing Eileen and Creedence both squealing and joyous.
Miriam, as well, delighted beyond measure. Now seeming not so much left out as gratified and thankful to Devin for his attention, his care of her son and his feelings.
And Devin, happy to drive Dobbs in his mom’s customized van with its wheelchair lift. At Dobbs’s behest Devin cranked up Led Zeppelin on the classic rock station; they cackled at the DJ, Doobe
r Dougie, who’d been on Columbia radio for thirty years doing his rush hour drive-time routine. Devin, the Edgewater County wind on his face, felt the years melt away; they were the same best friends again, like back in the day when they would cruise around, sometimes with Roy Earl, listening to heavy rock and contemplating the geologic time of their lives that lay ahead in misty, inscrutable mystery.
Devin, pleased—if not yet enjoying complete and total closure, then at least approximating a feeling long foreign in his enduring march of emptiness and pain: now that they’d reconnected, he felt an unfamiliar sensation, something in the ballpark of relief. As with the eternal question of how to make love stay, would that the quiescence of his inner turmoil fraught with circular snake-eaten tails deign to persist.
Sixty-Eight
Creedence
Sketching and concentrating, Chelsea sat in the bright light at the front door with Bootsy, a petite, chubby tortie-girl who lolled in the sun and stretched out the black pads of her paws. A peaceful easy, feeling, like the soft classic rock on the radio.
She had been sitting in this spot with kitty-cats her whole life.
Here, she was safe—Bootsy, as well as her cat-mommy.
The thick drafting pencil felt good in her hand. Her expertise growing, Creedence, acquiring chops like she’d never had—as a girl she’d never worked hard enough, this she knew.
If she had? Maybe she wouldn’t be sitting here trying to get said chops back.
But who’d encouraged her, other than her late father?
No one—and in the case of her mother, an active discouragement of anything resembling dreams, any course of action that would allow the child to go off and become an adult with its own sense of itself. Difficulty in understanding this condition, still, but as with an alcoholic, acknowledging the reality of a given problem the first and most crucial step to fixing it.
Mama, hanging in there. But so tired these days. She’s handing off some of her bookkeeping work with the ELMS to a younger member, Rebecca LaFreniere—ugh. Yeah, pretty, tall, talented Becky LaFreniere, who had been one of the snooty rich bitches back in high school, way smart too, who went off to New York to be an actress for a while, which obviously didn’t work out, but still. Who had never so much as looked at gawky Colette Rucker back then, and now only out of the corner of her eyes as she came to visit her mentor Eileen to have coffee and be trained in keeping the books.
What a doofus Chelsea had been, then as now. Who could blame Becky for ignoring her?
But Chelsea, time at last to catch up—the news had come that she’d been accepted into Southeastern, another milestone in her massive do-over that unfolded over the course of the tumultuous year. A year that’d been as full of change as any she could remember since Devin’s car wreck. That had ended up causing the loss of both him and Libby, despite the fact that he had lived.
College. She prayed the young kids wouldn’t make fun of her.
The idea hadn’t sunk in, perhaps because when she thought of leaving—of moving only as far as Columbia, for heaven’s sake—her stomach fell. Fear crawled all over her skin like the imaginary bugs Devin had described squiggling on his skin whenever he would try to detox himself from one of his epic benders, back when he’d been lost in what he kept calling ‘the wasteland.’ “Just give us the gasoline,” he’d always growl right afterwards, “and we’ll spare your lives.”
Her brother, a grade-A nut job.
Chelsea, worrying and fretting about how to help him. His ability to stay sober. His plan for the future. At least he had gone earlier to see Dobbs. She wondered how it was going.
Toying with a suggestion—that after Christmas, they share an apartment together in Columbia. Not only to share expenses, but also for reasons of feeling maternal toward her long-lost, prodigal brother. Saying, he has returned as I’d desired, so I must keep and help him.
I will protect him.
In many ways, Creedence, in awe again of her brother—not exactly as two decades before when he’d been her teenage boy hero, hurtling toward manhood and freedom, no; instead, now incredulous at his having made his way back from the Purgatory of the wretched life carved out for himself after the accident. When, as he’d explained, his only goal had been a lonesome, drunken death, “On the side of the road somewhere—like Libby. But hard as I tried, it wouldn’t never come. I always arrived alive. It beat all you ever seen.”
Her blood had run cold. “I’m just glad you didn’t hurt nobody else.”
Devin, bitter, unrepentant. “Didn’t I, though?”
He seemed most brokenhearted, in a way, whenever Prudy came up, the memory of whom haunted him like all the rest. She finally asked why.
“It’s because I left her out west. Buried her in the woods, a real nice spot by a stream, and that’s where she lays still.” His face, a ghostly, pale shrunken skull. His hands, shaking. He licked his lips, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But now I ain’t got a place to go and remember her.”
“You laid her to rest. She’s with Libby again.”
“The cat was the only thing what kept me going all that time. If you can believe it.”
“My fur-babies? They’re everything to me.”
“Then you get it.”
Two ideas, hitting her like near-simultaneous thunderclaps. Devin’s Christmas presents would be covered by what the commercials called unique holiday gift ideas.
That only she could give him.
First, one designed to help him see through the tears and the pain, to remember the good times for once instead of the hurt, and this piece she could produce herself; a new test of her artistic and creative abilities.
The other, a final bit of closure for him and Prudy. That one she’d need help in procuring. She knew a place.
Christmas, important this year—with Devin the way he was, and Mama with her illness? Who knew when they would all be together again.
Sixty-Nine
Devin
The family dinner where it all came to a head.
The scene deserved a title card, Devin later thought, like in a 1980s Woody Allen feature Libby had thought so profound, that they had seen early in their relationship; the one about the three sisters.
In any case, lousy timing for tensions to bubble—a day at the oncologist with his mom. No good news to be had.
But the biggest issue, bigger than her own death, was keeping her prognosis a secret from little ‘Colette.’
What a crock.
Creedence wasn’t oblivious.
Everyone was pretending.
He didn’t make a fuss. Eileen’s spirit and drive for control too strong. She projected an energy field like Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl. You could smell her will in the air, like ozone.
Eileen, thin as a stick and picking fussily at a pile of lima beans, told one of her fibs about how she and Devin had gone furniture shopping in Columbia that morning. Not to the doctor.
“I didn’t like the prices I saw, though. Mercy, me. And driving in Columbia? Shut the door. I was terrified the whole time I was in that damn city. I tell you—I just don’t know.”
Creedence, her face as though carved out of stone, knew where it was headed. Loaded for bear. “You don’t know what, mother?”
“About all your little—your little plans for the new year.”
“My ‘little’ plans? Do tell.”
“Oh, it’s so much to think about—you moving out. This whole mess.”
Devin, slurping up Mama-slop into his beak, reeled at the surreal nature of it all. Smacking and talking through his food like Brad Pitt, he knew not what to do except pretend right along with them:
“Mama, what’s done is done.” He gestured with a forkful of taters and gravy at his sister. “That’s your daughter sitting there, ain’t she?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” They almost said it unison.
“She’s stubborn. There’s nothing nobody can do.”
Creed, whose eyes wer
e red from drawing all day, said, “What mother wouldn’t be happy about her daughter going to college?”
His fork against iced tea glass, tink tink tink. “Now, ladies.” With their full attention: “Mama, this’s your last chance to give her your blessing.”
“Last chance? What on earth?”
Devin’s face flushed hot. “Before she moves on with her life.”
“‘Moves on’. How melodramatic.” Coughing.
“Mama, it ain’t like I’m moving on from you. He means from Dusty and his mess.”
“Say the words. Say the words to her, or I’ll be damned if I won’t stab you with this fork in that black heart of your’n.”
It had turned into a prison yard brawl. Eileen barked with mocking laughter at her own son. “Devin, you ain’t got the nerve to stick a fork in me.”
Now he sounded like a TV newsreader: “In other news, a drunken Edgewater County redneck drown-ded his Mama in a pot of chicken necks she had been boiling. Bystanders reported that the argument seemed to over the last packet of cigarettes in the house. As the facts emerge, we’ll feature even more details on this horrific crime of passion.” He busted out laughing. “What’ll Rebecca LaFreniere and Ruth DeKalb and them think when they see us on TV, huh? Hoo-boy.”
His jester act worked. They both sat waiting, neither looking at the other.
“What words, son. Tell me what you want me to say.”
“You know what, you goddamn hardheaded Edgewater County pack-mule.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Tell her how proud you are of her taking charge of her life.” Raising his iced tea to Creedence, a salutation that, coming from him, might have been taken for sarcasm. But not this time. “Finally.”
“My own daughter knows how I feel about her.”
“Do it, woman.”
Eileen made a show of lighting up, grumbled about being addressed with such impertinence and high-minded, confusing drivel at her own damned supper table, at last coughed and began:
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 45
