Sitting on the deck at home by himself, smoking and eating a sandwich, a pair of fighter jets from Shaw AFB screamed overhead on one of their training flight patterns. Or maybe they had been deployed on a mission—who knew, anymore. Time to roll another war out for the new TV season? Cheney and Rumsfeld were pushing hard to expand the GWOT to Syria and Iran, if they didn’t fall in line with the new world order. Good business was where you found it.
Devin, with nothing better to do but look at the accruing interest on his late father’s investments, had become a news junkie. Had gotten cynical, already, about the leaders and their plans and their wars on other countries, on the civil rights of the people they were elected to serve.
A mess. Enough to drive a man to drink.
But no. None of that.
Close, a couple of times. The last week or two of Mama dying. But strong. Hanging tough.
A peal of birdsong, high and sweet. It rang out in emphatic, apparent happiness over Devin’s sobriety.
Dobbs, following in Creedence’s footsteps: his spirit reawakened by Devin’s absolution, the former housebound, depressed homeboy applied to go back and finish the journalism degree he’d pursued before the car accident. That he could have finished afterwards, he said, if only he’d had the courage to stand up to his injuries. To stand up to the past, and to what fate had decreed would complicate his fortune, but not necessarily derail it.
“You don’t have to lay down and take what life gives,” Dobbs said.
“I thought I was standing up to it. Telling it to go fuck itself. Nope. In hiding from the truth.”
“Same. I wish I’d have figured it out sooner.”
“You and me both, spud.”
And Creedence, beautiful Creedence, happy and excited and falling in love, if not falling far from the family tree once again; Creedence, living in the apartment only until, sudden and shocking to her, Eileen had died.
Afterwards, she started staying at Roy Earl’s every night, using the groundwork her mother laid to get out of her lease after all.
Marrying him soon, she said; soon as the Dusty divorce was final, another month.
Creedence, Roy Earl, making a success out of their lives. Building his businesses. Making America great. How it all worked out for him; and now, for her.
Fine.
Which left Devin.
Sorting out his shit.
Or sifting, at this point.
Granular. That’s right. The grains were now fine. And almost sifted.
Devin, cruising up the hill from his parents’ graves, moved toward Libby’s stone, a last sift here before taking a break from all this remembering. He’d been out here already by now, of course. The day of Eileen’s funeral and today, when they all came for Devin to place Prudy’s mini-headstone in the ground next to Libby’s.
Dobbs, Roy Earl, Creedence, all gathered behind him. Propping him up, literally, as he’d wept for his cat.
For Libby.
For his Mama.
At least he’d forgiven her. Before it was too late.
“Thank you for this.” Creedence, holding Devin from behind, arms draped around his neck and pointy freckled chin jutting into his collar bone. “For giving me Prudy back.”
“Least I could do for my big brother.”
But now he was here alone, moving across the rows of gravestones, finding himself at last standing over Libby’s simple, flat monument, only a yard or so away from where her own father Frank had been interred. He’d told the rest of them to go on back to the house, to stop and get fried chicken from the deli for supper. Told them he’d be right along.
Hanging for a spell at the marker:
Frances Elizabeth Meade
December 30 1970 — May 10 1990
But Libby, not there. Only a stone above a hole in the ground.
A box in the hole.
Nothing in the box but dust.
Devin, forced to bid a sudden and wretched farewell to her on the road in the hot sun, peering horrorstruck through the veil of blood and glass, had often felt no one could possibly have experienced grief in the manner in which God had forced him in those wrenching moments while waiting to be pulled out from the wreckage. Waiting alongside her. Forced to gaze into her dead eyes, hold her cold hand, and get used to the idea. And for all the years afterwards to come, Devin, kept alive by a nefarious, chuckling, scheming, sickly perverted wastrel, the God of Abraham, torturing humanity like ants under a magnifying glass.
And, oh, Devin? Devin ‘Ruck’ Rucker?
The center of grief’s universe.
Epic.
Total.
Yeah.
No.
At last realizing such centrality wasn’t and couldn’t be so: Devin decided to begin cultivating a superb and perspicacious skepticism of all that lay outside of himself, of the greater world, huge and ancient, and of people, dying—and killing one another, and watching the killing, either reveling or else being driven mad, oftentimes both, by the relentless and pervasive and wholesale slaughter that’s so far defined and shaped and driven human civilization—for as long as people had existed in these wretched and pernicious states of self-reflection. Which added up, all right. You bet it did. And yet didn’t add up, not in the philosophical sense.
He had time to work on it all. Nothing but time.
The wind, shushing through the pines. A Sunday afternoon. Not much traffic on the highway. Quiet.
Devin. Examining the headstone for the ten-thousandth time—Prudy’s.
Was it enough? Was he finished, now?
No. Something he left behind. In Colorado. To be retrieved.
Sure. They’d talked a few times since he’d finally called, her cold the whole time. Millie, wary. He’d need to go to her. To show her he was okay, now. To persuade her.
Hurrying and climbing into his mother’s car, which purred into life, but needed an oil change, Devin, feeling filled with purpose. A puff of exhaust exploded from the muffler, hot, blue vapor set a-loose like a wraith drifting diaphanous and dissipating across the rolling slope dotted with gravestones and colorful silk flowers; Devin, cutting the midnight blue sedan, a dark shark of a cruiser, in a three-point turn on the dirt track.
Pausing, looking both ways before turning out onto SC State Highway 79, Devin, starting to fire up a smoke. Thinking better of doing so—he only had a few left, and a long night ahead.
Libby, sitting in the passenger seat; smiling, insouciant, her hair pulled back by a wide white ribbon. Libby, fresh and lovely as the day they’d moved into the Arcadia house together. Libby.
But it was no good.
“I’m not sure you should come on this trip.”
“I’ve been on all the others.”
He pressed his lips together. Shook his head. “Yeah.”
“Aw—you want to be free of me. Don’t you.”
“Inarguably. But, never, angel.”
“You never were any fun.”
Libby Libby Libby; gone gone gone.
The empty seat, a signpost: the land-end into heaven. Responsible for no one’s death, now, but his own.
Pulling out and cruising. A band of lavender horizon. The empty two-lane. Sweet highway air on his cheeks.
Devin Rucker’s moment: Passing Pine Haven and the cavernous Rucker house therein, the family who awaited him. Eileen’s cats, divided up between Creedence and the surviving aunts. Most of the time no one living there, now, but Devin.
Which wasn’t living.
Not alone.
He could kid himself all day long—he was heading to get Millie, who waited for him in Colorado. But she wasn’t waiting. She didn’t need ‘getting.’ It was only another story he told himself.
Passing the entrance to the subdivision where he’d had his latchkey childhood of beholding dead bodies, he chose.
Signaling and merging onto the freeway.
The big rigs and SUVs roaring past; Devin, up to speed, slipstreaming. Last of the sun, glinting off th
e aviators. His hands, steady.
In the glovebox, the tape of the Dead, but not playing it. Leaving it put away.
Driving.
Into the west.
Chasing the sunset.
But not drunk. This time, he had his wits about him. This time he would not only succeed at quelling what ailed him, he’d do it the right way—for keeps.
Hauling holy, ever-loving ass out of South Carolina. Again. Devin, ever after.
RETURN TO
James D. McCallister’s
“EDGEWATER COUNTY, SC”
* * *
in
* * *
King’s Highway
Fellow Traveler
Let the Glory Pass Away
The Year They Canceled Christmas
Dogs of Parsons Hollow
Dixiana
Down in Dixiana
Dixiana Darling
Reconstruction of the Fables (2022)
About the Author
James D. McCallister is the author of novels, a short story collection and numerous other shorter pieces of fiction and creative nonfiction. A lifelong South Carolinian, he lives in West Columbia with his wife and beloved brood of cats, muses all.
* * *
CONTACT JAMES D McCALLISTER:
www.jamesdmccallister.com
[email protected]
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 56
