Dusty.
Devin, noting a new pink Izod polo shirt and charcoal slacks; betting dollars to doughnuts Eileen herself had bought the clothes for the erstwhile son-in-law, missed as he was so terribly. How ghastly this divorce business, she kept saying, which always made him chuckle. “Better to sweep things under the rug and soldier on.”
Creedence, in shock, looked like Cool Hand Luke after eating the boiled eggs: bloated, eyes puffy, cheeks shot through with spidery thin veins. Otherwise, though, her face remained impassive. In control, other than the stainless steel pie server she clutched, a weapon at the ready; her hand, quivering.
“Well, Dusty—ain’t this a surprise.” Dobbs, dry and sarcastic. He picked at a piece of Eileen’s hummingbird cake served on one of the Christmas dishes, of which Eileen had several generations’ worth stored in the attic. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“No.” Creedence, an icy winter queen. “We certainly didn’t.”
A palpable murmur of discomfort, a rash of throat-clearing, a hubbub of business-as-usual pleasantries. Dusty, doing well, he said in response to Hill Hampton, who occupied the far end of the table from Devin. Well as he could be, he said, under the circumstances.
Eileen, talking and talking, yappity-yap, to one of the aunts, Rosalee, Devin barely remember them all on his mother’s side. Shaking her head, gazing up to the heavens with hands together.
Devin, reading her lips; his Mama, saying, I’m hoping, I’m hoping for the best. Literal fingers crossed.
Creedence, her head down, shoulders shaking; Dusty, coming over and trying to give her a buss on the cheek.
Cringing away from him.
A grimace.
A volcano.
A red veil, falling over his vision. Not the metallic boiling spots of old, but a different level of ire stoked by his mother’s tendentiously disrespectful and flat-out wrongheaded behavior. When it came to Creedence’s feelings, he didn’t care how sick his mother might be.
A flash went through his spinal column like an electric shock. Some of the bar fights had been real. Devin had been trying to get killed, for a while, by goading biker and bangers into whipping his ass. Had learned to do some damage right back. Thought he was gonna have to do it that night on the street with Steeple, and all his drunken-ass, dick-sucking crazy-talk.
Devin, pissed about this stress. All day, he’d felt so centered and relaxed—an afternoon spent riding around alone in Columbia. Taking some boxes to the new apartment Creedence had leased over in Herndon Hill, walking distance to the Old Market and campus beyond. Holiday shopping at the sprawling Town Centre over in the sand hills of north Richland County. With all the stores, restaurants, and bars.
All afternoon.
By himself.
Dealing with what’d been ailing him.
Or rather, thinking about doing it. That’s all he’d done. His memory on this came clear. Clear as it did on anything. He went into the bar, sat, didn’t order a vodka.
Yep.
Going over and draping an arm around Dusty. He yelped, gaping at his soon-to-be former brother-in-law.
A hush descended. All eyes upon them.
“Looky here, son,” Devin called out in the biggest and most expansive and generous of mellifluous South Carolina brogues, like the cultured and charming southern gentleman of means for whom his mother had hoped, “why don’t we menfolk walk out on the deck so I can smoke one of these here coffin-nails?” The request, an absurdity. No fewer than five people including Eileen already sat puffing away, a wafting, blue pall blown around by the heating vents. “What say you, my boy?”
Dusty, hiking up the waistline of his Duckheads, looked doubtful. “I need to pee first.”
“You can wee-wee on Mama’s rosebushes. Make ’em all pretty and shit for next spring.”
“But, Devin.”
“Move it, dicknut,” he whispered with a smile, pointing to the sliding glass doors. “Before somebody carries you out of here.”
Outside, slamming the door shut, a thump. Background noise cut off clean, the two men on the deck. Dry, cold, bracing. Stars, twinkling in the clear winter night, wind whistling through a bad seam in the gutter by the garage. Devin, a withering glance back over his shoulder at his mother who watched them from inside, her hands still clasped together, nodding, a mad hollow grin splitting her withered and pancaked face.
The face of a dying woman, Devin allowed himself to realize. A pang of loss, welling in his thin-walled heart, made him want a snort.
Still mad at Dusty, Mama claimed. But understanding; how she kept talking about Creedence’s lost baby; how, if only there could be another chance. How there wasn’t much time left.
For Creedence, he thought she’d meant.
Now he understood. Not enough time for her daughter to meet somebody new. Get it on. Pop out the young’un. Before Eileen caught up with Daddy.
Dusty, pouting and hugging himself, paced around. “Coldest December I ever felt in my whole durn life.”
Devin agreed, but this, a baldfaced lie: having slogged through Colorado winters, hoping against hope to be found one morning outside some watering hole beak-first in a snow bank, blue and stiff, Carolina Rucker, they called him out there, knew him some cold.
A Colorado public health department counselor, whom Devin visited for all of three sessions before declaring himself cured of alcoholism, had noted with interest how often he used words like cold or freezing or numb.
Devin, astute, remarked, “The cold, it’s like the booze: another attempt not to feeling anything. I thought if I got cold enough I’d turn all the way to stone. It’s the way I was already feeling inside. The rest of me hadn’t caught up yet.”
The therapist, an earnest young woman starting out on her career, seemed disturbed and concerned by some of his statements. Begged him to keep talking.
Nah, he’d told her. Ain’t no thang. “I got this.”
“I can’t believe you getting around as good as you are. After all your shit, beau.”
Devin, backlit by the deck floodlight, a paternal hand on a rounded shoulder. Tendrils of smoke, flowing out of nostrils. A dragon. “Let me axe you something—what the hell you doing here?”
Dusty’s teeth, chattering. “It’s Christmas.”
A dark voice, scratchy, another Devin—a demon, Dirty Harry after gargling rusty bottle caps. “I don’t give a damn if it’s the end of days, the hour of the time, and Jesus comes riding up on a white magic unicorn, or, maybe a golden ark comes floating up the middle of the mighty Sugeree River running swift and hard and muddy over there down the ridge. No matter what, you ain’t got no business here, son. Not anymore.”
“That’s what you say?”
“That’s what your ex-wife says, son.”
“She ain’t my ex yet. And besides, Mama Eileen invited me. And don’t call me ‘son’. You ain’t my Daddy. You ain’t even been here in ten years.”
Peering beyond Dusty’s shoulder at the steps down which Devin’s beloved sister had once tumbled, he imagined snapping Dusty’s neck and running inside, screaming into his mother’s face, Oh, Mama—he was carrying a bag of groceries, and he tripped over his own two stupid feet and boo-hoo-hoo, now Dusty’s dead…
“Mama knew better than to invite you. But done it anyway.”
“Mama Eileen said Creedence was the one who wanted me here. Since it was Christmas, and all.”
“Dusty—?”
“What,” petulant.
Devin, feeling silly. Relaxed. Thinking about sneaking away after dispatching Dusty. Some more private time. Christmas, after all. The warmth still in his belly from his earlier secret naughtiness that didn’t really happen at the bar. Not if he’d convinced himself it didn’t, that drink he’d coveted but spurned, especially as no one else knew.
No one must know.
Not even you.
A grim mantra. Devin, wishing for that therapist chick. Maybe finding another one.
And if he
wanted to go whole hog and have some real fun? Which the voice in his head definitely said he should Go For with all due haste and speed? He’d kill this simpering little fuck—Creedence had confessed that she thought about asking him to do it—and run over to The Dixiana, call Shelby, get shitfaced and laid. Rock it out. Then go to prison. Die there in peace.
Bile, gurgling in his throat at this weak-ass sauce for reasoning. It sounded like the equivalent of pulling a FEAR—Fuck Everything And Run.
Devin, rubbing his eyes, pitched his butt into the yard. “My sister told me what happened.”
“Ain’t true. I don’t hardly even know that girl.”
“No—not the side-meat.”
Dusty, dumbfounded. “—”
Devin jerked a theatrical thumb over toward the deck steps. “About her falling down that night.”
“What you mean, son.”
Working his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. “How she dropped the groceries? Because they were so heavy?”
“Oh—right.”
“C’ain’t nobody figure out why she was toting a sack of Piggly Wiggly cornpone and chitlins up the back deck steps, but—well. That’s the story. And we’re sticking with it. Ain’t we.”
A literal gulp. “Yeah, sure was awful. And you’s in the hospital too, which beat all I ever seen.”
Savage, he whirled on Dusty, grabbing a handful of pink Izod. Dragon breath again, steam. “I’m saying that I know what happened for real.”
“Quit it. I’ll leave.”
He released Dusty with a shove. “I ought to beat the ever-loving mud out of you. I’ve put people in the hospital, motherfucker.”
Dusty, a stagger step back. “Don’t feel like freezing to death out here no way.”
Devin, offering a bromide about not letting the screen door whack him in the ass.
Thrusting a trembling finger. “Wanna know what I think? This is all your fault, somehow.”
“Da fuh?”
“Everything was fine until last spring, when Colette said you were coming home. I knew there wa’n’t gonna be no good come of it.”
Devin, fighting for his New Balance not to find its way into Dusty’s chubby ass rather than the screen door. A voice, exhorting—HIT HIM HIT HIM HIT HIM.
But another one, saying in more of a whisper:
Don’t.
The first voice, not the real him; a phantom Devin, one banished but here resurrected; the voice he’d tried to drink into submission.
Devin, listening to the whisper, not the shout.
Don’t.
“I didn’t hardly do nothing in the first place. With that girl.”
“Quit lying, dirtbag.”
“Oh, hell.” Dusty, spitting onto the weathered decking. “I didn’t do nothing that nobody else don’t do,” the quadruple-negative of his declaration hanging in the air like fart-stink.
“Go on, bro. Before you have to pay rent you can’t cover. If you know what I mean.”
“Bunch of high-minded Ruckers, with your butts up on your shoulders. Maybe it’s y’all’s shit that don’t stink. Ever consider that?”
Devin, calm, perhaps even warm and human inside, a sensation with which he’d found rare acquaintance over the course of his life, felt his heartsblood pulsing. Alive. “Buddy, it’s all I think about.”
Dusty, his hand on the sliding door handle. An accusation. “You’re drinking again—ain’t you.”
Devin, mirth gone, stood ramrod straight. “Fuck no, bro.”
“You sure?”
“I’m the one asking the questions here.”
Dusty, face puckered with skepticism, weeble-wobbled his way back inside. “Tell me another one.”
Lighting a new smoke, Devin took a stroll around the tombstones; a package of mouthwash strips appeared in his hand, furtive like a magician’s concealed magic coin. He slipped one of the teal, jellied tabs onto his tongue like fiery communion. He noticed the burning of the alcohol, but only a little.
Seventy-Nine
Creedence
Chelsea, shaking inside at seeing Dusty waltzing into the dining room, knew the instant he appeared what had gone on; an obvious Eileen special.
What does she think this is gonna do, make me change my mind?
Is that what this is? Trying to make me feel sorry for him at Christmas?
Lord love a duck.
Watching Devin take Dusty outside. Making eye contact with her brother. Thinking, don’t hurt him, just get rid of him.
Observing their body language: Dusty, cold and miserable, while Devin, leaning and bending and pointing, his cigarette cherry like a devil’s eye, glowing and floating. Concerned her brother capable of rash action. Feeling guilty about when she’d fantasized for it to happen.
Thinking, not to worry: Devin, probably only producing a stream of filthy, smart-aleck remarks. Mean-sounding threats on which likely to never follow through. No t now that he was sober.
Also watching Eileen, waiting. A bizarre, grinning visage, eyes dancing.
Moving over beside her daughter, she said, “I can’t believe he came, Colette.”
“You and me neither.”
“Maybe it’s a sign.”
“A sign?” Menacing and deep, mimicking an angry Devin: “Of what.”
“A sign he still loves us all.”
Chelsea, a fluttering in her gut like reflux. Noting that her mother had lipstick on her teeth, she said, “He don’t know what love is.”
“If y’all were to sit down and talk for a while—maybe y’all could make it like a date, a first date, all over again—who knows what you could figure out.”
Chelsea, no longer any energy to cry. Only wanting Christmas, and the whole year, to end with a whimper. Or, for the sake of expediency, willing to accept an asteroid strike; a meltdown at the Sugeree River Station; a plague of locusts, or of virulent disease. Armageddon. The Rapture.
“You are such a fool. An old fool.”
Furious. “Just like y’all to treat me this way. When I got so much going on.”
Mocking. “P’shaw. You ain’t got nothing going on.”
Eileen, ignoring her daughter, pressing ahead, trancelike: “So when Dusty said he wanted to come over for Christmas, I told him, Dusty, I think that’s grand. We all miss you so much, me and Daddy and Big Ma-maw and Papaw and the babies. And you know, I said to myself, I says, Eileen Rucker, you ought to go ahead and make plans. Just in case something special happens. What I’d like to think of as a Christmas miracle, Colette.”
Chelsea, bursting out laughing. “Plans?”
“And so I says, Eileen Rucker, you better not get caught with your pants down, in case something wonderful happens. So, I went in your room and found your papers, and I called that man over there in Columbia who’s leasing you that apartment? And I talked to him and tried to explain what all had gone on, and he was real sympathetic. He even said if we wanted to, we could take and go and just tear up that durn lease you and Devin signed.”
Chelsea’s stomach, dropping into the vicinity of her knees, like at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion riding the rocking pirate ship, which teenage Devin Rucker always referred to as the Vomit Comet. “Now I know you’re kidding with me.”
“It was a prudent action on my part, in case tonight you and Dusty got along again, and y’all decided to get back together. There wouldn’t be no need for no apartment in Columbia. See?” She grinned, squeezing her grandmama eyes, a grandmama without any grandbabies to spoil, as she kept reminding her daughter. “I know y’all have done gone and put your house on the market, but—but I thought y’all could live here. Like when you first got married.”
Chelsea, a hand drawn back. Lightning, slapping Eileen across the mouth. Hard.
Eileen, blinking and shaking her head. Beginning to speak.
Another slap, this time the daughter pulling her strength, but only somewhat.
Eileen, her cheek bright red, a look of horror. She sat down heavy in a chair at the
children’s dinner table, a metal folding chair the hard back of which seemed to hurt her Mama.
Coughing blood into her hanky: “Lord have mercy. Don’t you realize how sick I am?”
Chelsea, staring, nothing further needing be said. “Oh, Mama—I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t never have good sense. Sick as I am. You hitting me like that. God help me.”
Shame, a warm bath. ‘Sick’—she said the word. It was the biggest shock of Chelsea’s life. The rocking pirate ship, a pendulum swing to the same awful gut-sickness, returned.
Before she could apologize further, the two of them, jumping—Dusty, charging in through the sliding glass doors.
“Lord, but it’s cold out there. And Devin’s got a bug up his butt sideways.”
“Come on now, Dusty,” Eileen, struggling to her feet. “Let’s go and get the ham on the table.”
Chelsea, staring daggers at the two of them—co-conspirators.
Let me go, she thought. Both of you.
“No, I got to get on, Mama Eileen.”
“Oh, Dusty.” Emotionless. “Why.”
Thin, whining, defeated. “I reckon I got some last-minute shopping to do.”
“Come back and see us when you can.” Drifting into the kitchen, touching the side of her face. “I’m sorry, Dusty. I tried.”
Dusty and Chelsea, left alone. Starting to speak, but Chelsea, turning her back, a wall of NO.
Hesitant, he shuffled through the dining room toward the front door, making a big show of sighing and sniffling, which only made her hate him more. Dusty had made Chelsea hit her own mother.
Her dying mother.
Panic. A panic attack.
But not saying a word to Devin. When he came back in, she wept, hard, and collapsed into loving arms that held her tight. She let him think it was all about Dusty. But it wasn’t. It was Mama being sick.
It was herself.
All about herself.
Maybe that had been the problem all along.
How could she move to Columbia and leave her mother to die alone?
Devin, reading her thoughts, took her upstairs to his room for one of their oldschool chats. “I got to talk to you about something.”
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 50
