Thinking hard about a new idea he’d had: a real haunted-house movie, a corker, scary and action-packed as shit. The pitch was Blair Witch meets The Exorcist meets Alien meets Jurassic Park meets The Seventh Seal, in which something ancient—That Which Was Forgotten—comes back to remind everyone of the real deal, in the process kicking major ass both onscreen and off; with CGI advances, to be made on an unlimited budget with a cast of superstars like one of those 70s disaster epics, the end result could be the biggest movie ever. Implausible, his dreams, but like in the movies, miracles sometimes happened—unexpected, wondrous dreams came true.
Like how he’d finally had the rare and different privilege of almost boinking Libby the second time in his life just now! And how shitty it’d turned out, and so this dream arrives as it had at the beginning, as a tarnished and sordid disappointment.
But still. Libby. Yo. Putting him in his place. Poetic, almost. Helluva day. He couldn’t wait to tell Ruck, who would no doubt be pleased. They’d drink to it. Yes, they would.
Feeling lightheaded, like when he was really hard—it took so much blood to get that thing inflated it didn’t leave much for thinking—he felt cold all over, a wave sweeping through him.
“Yo,” he called out to no one. “I’m dizzy.”
Taking the first toot of nitrous, expelling the gas in a satisfied, slow trickle, Billy saw images fluttering at the corners of his eyes; the anesthetic working into his blood. Feeling nothing.
Happy at this sense of nothing; acknowledging that happiness existed, hence, could not be nothing.
Confused. A weird feedback loop.
But his replacement cell phone, bonging with an annoying, generic ringtone and shattering the mood, irritated him.
He floated over to the balcony, by the railing. His legs were weak. A hot throbbing in his pelvis—his hard-on, he hoped, but he couldn’t bring himself to look—felt bothersome.
Eyeballing the display: MEL, backlit in cool electronic blue.
“Like a fucking Swiss watch,” in sniffling, sad disgust. “I was hoping it might have been the ambulance guys, wanting to be buzzed in—but, oh well. Hi, angel.”
She said sheesh, you sound terrible. “You better not be drunk.”
“Cool it, cool it—I’ll get straight. Time you get up here. Yep.”
“You’re gonna sober up in five minutes? That I’d like to see.”
“We got all the time in the world.”
“Billy—are you more than drunk?”
“Nah, not at all.”
“Okay, good,” sounding cautious but relieved. “Cause we got a lot to decide, mister. And do.”
“Righteous. I’ll go buzz-buzz-buzz you in.”
“No, I need you to come down here and help me carry in groceries. Nowhere to park.”
“Ah—be right there.”
He leaned over the balcony and squinted to see her down there amidst the distinctive shrubs cut into pyramids and the parking spaces and the red pavers of the walkway from the street: Melanie (Libby), waving up to him, pointed to her car in the fire lane with the hazards flashing.
Taking a huge draw on the cream canister and waving back, Billy, feeling, for once, glad to see her. She’d help clean up the mess.
Overcome by the gas—by the sillies—he heard sirens going wah-wah, saw color-splashes of red and blue on the street below from not one, but two arriving police cars, along with an ambulance. Giggled.
Leaning over, croaking, weeping, laughing, howling, stomping his feet, he went to call to Melanie, but felt instead only his center of gravity pitching forward and his mouth gaping open and fifteen-floor December night air rushing into it. As well an ebbing upward of PAIN from his groin, unbelievable pain. Passing a kidney stone, he speculated. Sucked on the gas.
“Billy,” he heard Mel scream, faraway. He seemed to be going into nitrous-oxide warp drive. Cool.
Here now, the dream: Spinning around, breathing the nitrous out, the wah-wah-wah sounds starting again, different from what he’d heard before, less real, more real, he couldn’t tell, the music sounding distorted, a clanging cymbal, shoop shoop SHOOP; and so dizzy, getting the spins like after those all-night draught beer-drinking parties in college, when you stagger back to your little bed and collapse and the bed, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning and you say oh please don’t let me puke and you grasp clutching onto the sheets, grabbing at the fabric trying to get the whirl to stop, Billy reaching out but finding only the air rushing against his skin he thought I’m passing out I’m passing out I’m passing out, but the blood, rushing back into his head, and opening his eyes to hear a voice ringing out hollow and raw and there’s Melanie (Libby), running, long arms flailing and policemen yelling toward him as though he were God, beneficent above the worshipful adherents gathering below, all of it happening in a rush of only seconds but stretched out to infinity and looping back around again, the ground rushing up toward him reaching out flailing and WAKING UP FOR REAL AND SCREAMING and finally grabbing hold of the bed sheet to stop the spinning, holding onto it, heavy, thick, red, white and blue; a loud POP, and the world flashing bright white, and all possible colors together as one, bubbling and melting into infinity.
The film, stopped in its tracks.
The print, ruined.
Billy’s movie, unfinished.
No satisfactions, no permanence.
And then?
Endless.
Black.
Nothing.
Eighty-Seven
Devin
As if the mind-bending news about Billy Steeple planting it beak-first into the sidewalk hadn’t been bad enough:
Devin, holding his mother’s head as she vomited black sputum, a thick ropy strand which more dangled than erupted from her mouth into the pink plastic hospital tray the hospice care folks had provided. Oxygen pump, supplies, a subcutaneous pain pump had been installed. The nausea, they said, was coming from the fact the cancer had spread to her brain. Far as the rural county doctors at Edgewater Memorial could guess, anyway.
Once stable, time to return home to hospice care. As before, she pretended to not know what hospice portended.
The nausea, incessant. Still she smoked. Bedridden, delusional from the drug cocktail, howling with existential rage at dying before the light.
At least she had made it through Christmas. She had that going for her. And she was at home, and not among strangers. All Devin could tell anyone. Creedence mostly stayed to herself, letting her brother care for their mother.
He didn’t mind. It was for her own good. Devin already had a head full of snakes. A few more wouldn’t matter—like watching his mom suffer and die. No big whoop. It couldn’t be as bad as what had happened with Libby.
No—but it could be bad all on its own.
Eileen had only made it through three of the radiation treatments Devin had dreaded, him driving her back and forth to the same oncology center in Columbia where she had driven herself so many times in secret, time and again, to take a mild enough form of chemo allowing her to keep Creedence in ignorance for the first months after her diagnosis.
Amazing, Devin thought, sitting in the sunlight lobby and waiting for her to come out from her doctor’s office, upstairs from the radiation treatment wing. Mama’s always been real good at making her reality. You got to give it to her.
She’d been retaining fluid, and wanted her regular oncologist to render an opinion. The radiologist had shrugged, said it seemed to him from her reports of constant nausea and diarrhea from the chemo how she’d been dehydrated, should have fluids.
His mother came shuffling out from the consult with a prescription for a diuretic. She had refused a wheelchair.
“Oh, darling—I’m so confused.”
“Now what did those croakers say now?”
“Hush your mouth. They said I was dehydrated earlier, and gave me fluids. Then I complained about all this bloat, and Dr. Ackerman said, she said, to take these pills—more pills.”
“Oh, lord. I can’t take no more pills than I already do.”
Devin, furious.
But later, he got the prescription filled at the pharmacy in the plaza next to the Piggly Wiggly. That’s when she started going downhill, after that radiation treatment, the last she’d be able to take. Sick as a dog for the rest of the night.
For the rest of her life.
Maybe one day he’d return to the oncology center and burn it to the ground. A drunk like him, who had stories which ended with jail, with the hospital, and even a few with death, might be capable of anything.
After two days of Eileen Rucker doing her best not to vomit out her entire GI tract, followed by frenzied cleaning and laundry and Devin’s own mortal exhaustion, circumstances had become dire enough he could tell his Mama he had to call in help. That’s how they’d found out about the brain cancer.
One last weak, gurgling round of protestation from her, but undeterred he called the ambulance and his sister, in that order, who was already on her way back over to check on the kitties and Mama.
They sat looking at one another, waiting for the EMTs. Eileen moaned in pain and sickness. Creedence boo-hooed in silence.
The drivers had taken them to Edgewater County Memorial instead of one of the nicer hospitals in Columbia. Fury. Eileen said she was not going to die in that po-folks’s hospital. And this, coming from a community leader, one of the mighty and powerful ELMS who secretly—or not so secretly—ran everything in Edgewater County, carried weight, she threatened.
Mama, no longer in her right mind.
The doctor in the ER, a smart guy from up north somewhere, had the sense to do the brain scan and find the lesions there. He delivered the news, shaking his head with a grim finality that made Devin want a good, stiff drink. His mother was dying for real, and soon.
Feeling as though the floor had dropped out from beneath the sneakers his mother had bought him for Christmas, the last shoes—the last anything—she’d ever get him, he had met with the folks from hospice. Had had to go tell her the news. He now had this, that, and the other thing to get handled.
Thank god he hadn’t been drunk.
As for his mom’s condition, now it reached the stage of all-but catatonia, morphine induced. Now all he had to do was walk back to her room to see if she was awake and lucid, which wasn’t often.
Devin, trying to figure out how to tell her that the doctors had no plan for keeping her alive any longer; now nothing left to try.
Sorrowful, in one of her moments, she had said to him, “Maybe it’s all a bad dream, and I’ll wake up tomorrow. And none of this mess will have been real.”
A gut punch. “I been thinking the same thing. For some time now.”
“I’m sick to my stomach again.”
“Okay.”
“Get me the pan—where’s my pan.”
“Hold tight, Mama. Hold steady.”
“Them damn doctors—they don’t know their butts from holes in the ground.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
She moaned and begged for release from her agony. “Once I feel better from this bout,” she said, gasping, “you must make me a promise.”
“What, Mama?”
“You can’t let me get like this again.”
He promised her he wouldn’t. Devin, realizing none of that old crap mattered now—it was over.
Her life was over.
And even before she passed, finally, a week later, he had begun missing her already. He had dealt with death before. Sure. But you only get one mother, now, don’t you?
Eighty-Eight
Devin
Devin’s Jetta, the good-old trusty fart-knocker of a road machine, retired. Cruising around Edgewater County instead in his mother’s Oldsmobile.
The one she’d never need again.
The Olds, parked on a dusty track winding through the perpetual care cemetery, the rutted dirt road affording vehicles and their passengers ready access to the grave sites arrayed on the slight grade of the hillside: grassy, serene, color-dotted by blossoms real and otherwise. Dobbs, Creedence, Roy Earl, and Devin had come out here together, on a sunny late February Sunday to lay Eileen to rest beside Dwight, and now they all returned again.
Devin, dealing with Eileen’s passing in a reasoned and calm manner, with no unfinished business left to haunt, had remained dry. Already coming to the conclusion that his mother, whatever her flaws, wasn’t only a ‘mother,’ but first a human being no different from her baby boy, he did they thing they tell you about the past: he let it go.
Devin, moving on.
This is how he should’ve rolled ages ago, yo. But better late than never.
Except when it’s too late.
Eileen, eulogized and lionized in an elegant obituary written by Bill Wimmel, the editor and publisher of the Edgewater Advocate. Wimmil, a man Devin didn’t know other than from the day of Albert Nixon’s death in the pool, but one who’d obviously known his mother well. His piece described how much Eileen had done through the ELMS, and otherwise; projects and causes he’d never bothered to learn about. The good she’d done—for people and pets, especially, in her support of rescue organizations, shelters and spay & neuter programs. The kind of good a Gen-X wastrel like Devin could only imagine having accomplished. At least, that’s what the mirror had said after he read the paper on the day of her funeral.
His father’s obit had looked much the same. Back when Dwight had died, his tired old workingman’s heart giving out on him five years shy of retirement, the paper had run as elaborate an obituary for him, too, but his son had only recently read it. During the funeral, Devin had been so far inside his own head he hadn’t bothered to read his own dad’s obituary. He hadn’t had the courage to face up to what kind of man his father had been.
Or, who his mother was, either.
In any case, future generations would have a chance to remember, and judge the contributions of, Devin’s late parents: one of the stately old oaks down on the town green, after a push by the ELMS and Hill Hampton, would be memorialized with a plaque as the Rucker Oak. Would remain there, he surmised, long after he and the remaining Ruckers were gone. Without a further lineage courtesy their children, however, the memory of Dwight and Eileen would have to be carried, if they cared, by nieces, nephews, cousins.
The day after Billy’s death Devin had run himself down to the Old Market to find Officer McWhorter. He asked him what he knew about the incident. Upon hearing the circumstances—a young girl had been assaulted by a madman, the cop said—Devin offered to talk to the detectives working the case to inform them of Billy’s past. That what had happened wasn’t an aberration. That the boy had himself a history of aberrant sexual behavior. Only one incident he could vouch for, however; that Devin had witnessed. But still.
The plainclothes cops, who from the sound of them were ordinary South Carolina good-old-boys, thanked him for his information, albeit in the manner of men suspicious of stories from folks who looked like Devin; who never knew who might be stretching the truth.
“Might be useful for the victim to know that about Mr. Steeple, in the sense of healing and understanding the nature of victimhood. But the case is closed.”
The other cop, also thoughtful, scratched at a thatch of black stubble on his chin. “But, of course, it’s not your place to tell her of his history, Mr. Rucker.”
“No—she’s traumatized enough, I’m sure.”
“The main thing I’m concerned about? How many more. Big-old longhaired boy like to killed her, he did. Like he was possessed, she said.”
Damn, Devin heard himself whisper. “I can’t explain it.”
“Steeple kept calling her some other girl’s name—what was it, Carl?”
“I don’t need to know. It’s okay.”
“No, we got it in the report.”
“Seriously, bro. I don’t wanna know.”
/>
“No? Maybe it means something.”
“Case closed, right?”
“You tell us.”
What could he say to that? Billy, in the ground. “Reckon so.”
“You say that like it’s not a good thing.”
“A complicated past with that old boy. He was a friend.”
“Seems simple enough to me.”
“Nothing ever is, beau.”
“It is when you’re a cop.”
“Y’all often iron things out in such a straightforward fashion. I’ll give you that much.”
“It’s a mindset.”
“Understood.” Devin, fishing for his smokes, beat it out of the cop station with the wind at his back.
No funeral for Billy in South Carolina; Devin, offering to accompany his body to Virginia, but Billy’s father—or rather, an aide who called Devin back on behalf of Mr. Steeple—declining the offer. The father wanted desperately, Devin suspected, for it all to go away—Steeple Senior’s run for the House would be undone by such an incident.
Devin hadn’t known about Billy’s father running for congress, or much of anything about his family other than the plastic-sack business.
Devin, he realized, hadn’t known much about Billy.
Nothing, really.
Melanie Pinckney, understandably distressed at witnessing Billy’s descent and impact on the sidewalk, now left a wan, quivering mess of her former energetic self, ran into Devin on the street outside Roy Earl’s coffee shop one day. He went to hug her, but Melanie remained as stiff and unyielding as a mannequin.
Small talk. Her words, slurry and slow and stunned. She was in therapy; on medication. Moving back to Charleston. She’d see him around.
A woman destroyed by trauma; his mother, dead; Billy, dead; what destruction Devin had wrought by coming back. Everyone would have been better off if he’d stayed drunk and gone.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 55
