Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Tad said, "There're things I don't believe in, but I have a weird feeling that they believe in me, and that's the scary part."

  The action in the movie didn't seem half as terrifying to Tad as the memory of that strange face in the window of the old Feely farmhouse.

  Tad wanted to ask his father if he knew about Billy Hoskins. There was a kids' network, an informal grapevine, no less powerful than television news, through which dirty jokes from ages past were filtered (about men named Bowels No Move and girls named Sue Pee), and songs about Comet which had never been on television in Tad's lifetime were sung, and the ancient ritual dance of bullies and wimps was observed. Local news, too, made it from grades one to seven, the mythology about the white trash family out in the shanty, which drank their own spit from a Maxwell House coffee can, about the rich old widow who drank the blood of children, and now, about what the other kids were already saying about Billy, only a few hours after he'd disappeared: about how something leftover from Halloween got Billy and ate him up just like candy corn.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  1

  "I thought you looked familiar, in some high-school-flashback way," Becky O'Keefe said.

  She brushed her hair back from her eyes, and gave him a warm smile and a frozen glance. She smelled good. Joe could smell her perfume across the bar. It was Yardley's English Lavender. He knew because when he'd been a kid she'd worn it. She still wore it, and she still smelled good. Her face, while not set in stone, was sketched with an expression of modified anger. He knew she had hated him for what had happened when they were teenagers, but he did not anticipate that she would feel the same so many years later. She looked great, kept her figure, seemed more attractive than she had in high school—they had a mutual lack-of-admiration society between them, and it had come as a surprise when his best old friend Hopfrog announced at nineteen that he and Becky were going to marry, since Becky had never been part of their inner circle of friends. That was just about the moment that Joe had taken off like a bat out of hell and had not looked back, until now.

  "Good to see you, Becky," he said, but it was a lie. It was terrible to see her. It was like running into the last person in the universe that he would ever want to see, although Becky was only a close second to dear old mom.

  "It's you, Joe, then. Can't believe it. You been okay?"

  "Sure."

  "You see Hopfrog yet?"

  Joe shook his head.

  Becky said nothing. One of the customers called her down to the end of the bar. She went and got the order. He watched her. She hadn't changed much since high school; her hips had widened slightly, and she seemed taller and more confident. She was smoking now, which she had not been doing when he had known her. Back then, she'd been a drinker. After serving the customer, he watched as she lit a cigarette, took a long, slow drag, and then set it down in an ashtray. "I traded one addiction for another," she said, noticing how carefully he watched her blow the smoke out through her nostrils. "We all take our drugs in life, Joe."

  "I get the feeling I'm an unwanted visitor."

  She ignored this comment. "Your wife here?"

  "She and the kids are downstairs. We just had dinner. Lou told me you were up here."

  "You got what, two, three kids by now?"

  "Two. A boy and a girl."

  "I thought you had two boys. Somebody told me..."

  He cut her off. "We had a son who died."

  She took the cigarette up again. Another smoke. "Sorry to hear that, Joe."

  "Well," he said, and then realized that he had nothing really to say to her.

  "Well, good to see you again, Joe," she said, and walked back to ring up a tab.

  He got off the bar stool and looked at the floor, as if thinking of something further to say. He caught her attention again, and leaned against the bar. "How's Hopfrog doing?"

  She looked right past him. "Maybe you should ask him that. We got divorced a while back. Look him up, Joe, I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

  "But you're not."

  "Right as usual," she said, and turned away.

  2

  When he returned downstairs to the restaurant, Jenny was sipping decaf while Aaron stared, transfixed, at the long aquarium with the multi-colored tropical fish that was built into the wall. The plates had been cleared; Lou Harper, the manager who had been senior class most-likely-to-succeed, was busing tables because one of his employees had quit earlier in the evening. Hillary was nodding off in her high chair, a jewel of drool at the edge of her lips.

  Joe wanted a smoke very badly, but knew that he couldn't keep sneaking them like a teenager. He decided to fidget instead; he sat down in the chair beside Jenny and drummed his fingers on the red tablecloth.

  "I don't get it," Aaron said. "How do they feed the fish, Dad? Look"—he rapped on the wall surrounding the aquarium—"how can they do it?"

  Joe grinned. "Those fish don't look like they're exactly starving. In fact, they look like fat fish."

  "I still don't get it," Aaron said, looking all around the edges of the tank. "Everything eats something. Do they just eat each other?"

  Joe reached over and touched his wife's shoulder. Sometimes it was good just to make sure she was there. Sometimes he was afraid she wouldn't be. Jenny didn't smell like perfume, she smelled like Ivory Soap and Pantene shampoo. She smelled very Jenny. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  "What's that for?" she asked.

  "For not hating me the way everyone else on the planet seems to."

  "Oh, don't assume anything. So, did you see her?"

  Joe nodded. "She wasn't exactly thrilled to see me."

  "Joe, is this the part where I find out that I married a psycho-killer or something?"

  He lost his grin. It was getting harder to pretend that he could handle being home again. He looked at his nervous hands as they fiddled with the buttons of his jacket. "Aw, Jenny, maybe this is the worst idea, coming here. Maybe I should've just waited."

  "Meanwhile, your mother dies, and I'm left with your guilt and anger about not seeing her. I watched my parents play that one out, no thank you, Joe. So what's the big secret? Why is it that you don't want to be here, and even your old friends don't want you here?"

  "I don't know."

  "You lie like a rug. Tell me."

  "Remember what I told you before?"

  Jenny nodded. He realized right then that she was too good for him, that he didn't deserve such a compassionate wife. She had supported him emotionally, through the ups and downs of his life, and he had sometimes dragged her through the mud without intending to. And here she was, still Jenny.

  He began, "Well, it wasn't just about that, about the accident. Something happened afterwards. Maybe a week later, after I got out of the hospital in Stone Valley. I heard her."

  "Who?"

  "Melissa Welles. And then, not just her."

  "Joe, I don't understand."

  "Not just her," he continued, "but everyone who had ever died in this town."

  Joe Gardner didn't want to, but he felt them coming, the tears; not in his eyes, but somewhere at the back of his head, like a doorway that was greasing open, like the geometry of his brain was expanding and letting something out, this emotion, this thing he'd kept locked away. This memory. This town of the mind, where he had thought he was once somebody, but had found out that an entire town could turn against him. Somewhere between the first tear, as it reached his lower eyelid, and the love he felt from Jenny, it stopped, and he was able to put the teenage part of himself back into the compartment from which it had been loosed. He scruffed his son's hair up. He swung his now-waking daughter through the air as they left the Angel Wing, and went out into the yellow lamp-lit streets with the cars, with the shouts of teenagers, with the laughter of young love in bloom and the cries of cats down windy alleys, and above all these, he could hear the rush of water from the Paramount River as if it were all around him.


  As they walked back to the car, Joe finished telling his wife the story of the voices.

  3

  From the Journals of Joe Gardner, when he was nineteen:

  I was at the old soda fountain having a root beer when I thought I heard her for the first time. Just like she was sitting next to me. Only I couldn't see her. All she said was something like "Joe." Not much else. I just knew it was her. So I didn't mention it to anyone. And then, I woke up on Tuesday and I hear her say, "You've got to go tell John Feely to let me out." I figure it's a dream, so I go to work and I'm in the middle of The Crying of Lot 49 when I hear her say it again, only this time it's like a command, "Tell John Feely to let me out."

  Very weird. So last night I go see Hopfrog, and he's staring out his window. His mom says he doesn't seem to care about anything anymore. So, I sit down across from him, he doesn't look at me, and I ask him if he believes in an afterlife. He pretends I'm not there. I kind of hedge some more, and finally come out and tell him about hearing Melissa.

  He waits a minute, and then turns and stares at me, kind of angry. He tells me I need to see a doctor, the mental kind. I pretty much agree.

  And then I kind of get it, not about Melissa's voice—I figure I'm kind of losing it to hear voices—but about Hopfrog, why he's not talking to me, why he's so down. And I come right out and say it.

  "You loved her, too," I say. And for once in all the six months since it happened, he started bawling his eyes out. And I go over, and he hugs me, and I tell him that it's okay that we both loved her. That I'm glad that he loved her, too. That it makes me feel less alone.

  And then he says, "You know, Joey, I sometimes think I can feel my legs moving, or that maybe I can get up and walk again. But it doesn't mean that I can. They still won't move. I just believe I can. It doesn't make it true."

  "What's your point?" I want to know.

  He says, "She's dead. She's dead. You were there, too. She's gone, Joey. It's not her talking, it's you."

  But then she tells me something, and I look at him. And I repeat what she says, word for word.

  "I didn't drown," I say, "I didn't drown. You buried me alive. I'm not dead, why won't somebody help me?"

  He looks at me funny.

  And then I hear this guy tell me to tell Homer to listen up and listen good.

  "Christ," Hopfrog says when I deliver that message. "It's Gramps. Christ, Joe, you crack your head open and got something inside it? They put a metal plate in or something?"

  It scares me now, because Hopfrog is looking at me with wide eyes and goose bumps all along his arms, and he starts screaming for his mother because I can't help it, I can't help the fact that his grandfather starts talking through me and I'm beginning to think that maybe they did put something in my head when they sewed it up after the accident, that it wasn't a metal plate but some kind of receiver, some kind of copper wire and crystal, because I'm beginning to feel like the radio of the dead.

  And then, just like last night, I hear them today. All day long.

  All of them, talking at once, kids and old folks, most I don't even know, but I know they're out in the graveyard on Watch Hill, out there at what we used to call the Flesh Farm, and I don't know if I'm crazy or if I'm sane, all I know is I can't stop them from talking through my lips, and Melissa keeps telling me that we buried her alive... and I can't sleep now, I can't sleep, I have to know, I have to know...

  4

  "You were under a lot of stress then," Jenny said. She was just buckling Hillary into her seat. Joe leaned against the Buick and dreamed of smoking. "You had just lost someone very close to you, you were young, you had all the problems at home, and you had seventeen stitches in your head. Anyone would hear voices if that happened."

  "Yeah, I know. Sounds logical now, doesn't it? Back then I thought I was either a prophet or loony."

  Aaron, who had been pretending not to listen, as he so often did, chimed in, "Wow, Dad, did you go dig her up?"

  "Aaron Gardner," his mother snapped.

  Joe didn't answer. He got behind the wheel of the car, and when his family was safe inside it, he turned the key in the ignition. "It's almost eight," he said. "I guess we should go to Gramma's."

  Jenny said, "I can see this is going to be a tense few days."

  "You've only just come to that conclusion?"

  "Might as well make the best of it. Tell you what, the kids and I'll check into a motel, and you go stay with your mom—" As she said this, his jaw seemed to go noticeably slack. "Joe, it's a joke, lighten up a little, will you? You're thirty-five, you're a successful writer, she's a little old lady with asthma."

  "My mother," Joe whispered so Aaron wouldn't hear him, "is a bloodsucker."

  5

  Anna Gardner continued to live in the decaying colonial that had been her parents' home. It had seen her through her marriage to Joe's father, with all its labyrinthine intrigues and infidelities. Now it would be her final resting place. The house was a large three bedroom with a wide wraparound porch and a screened-in gazebo in the backyard. Its brick was clay red, and its windows were small and perfectly square. It was originally the only lot on River Road, in 1911, when Anna's father had bought up most of the property along the river and had decided to settle there. The old house rested on two acres that overlooked the river from one of its steepest banks. Other houses had risen up during the sixty-seven years of her existence, and so the Northside, as it was called, consisted of a long thin row of homes, a few nearly as old as Anna's house, most newer and smaller, all with a view of the river. Although Joe's father had made a decent, even fat, income by Colony standards, the house had fallen into beloved disrepair when Joe was still in school—both drinkers, Anna and her husband preferred to maintain their pleasant levels of inebriation rather than maintain the house.

  The approach on River Road was unspectacular. Colony was dying now and the houses seemed to have lost their shine. Yards were overgrown. Old cars sat up on blocks. For Sale signs were posted in front of five houses. Only occasionally was there a perfectly manicured lawn, but even these were marred by the fake jockeys standing at the edge of the garden path or the flamingos and stone elves squatting alongside an azalea hedge.

  "We used to have a tree down the bank," Joe said, as he parked alongside the river. "Me and Hopfrog, we tied a tire to it and used to swing out on the river all the time. That was before the big chemical companies upriver started dumping all toxic junk into it. Back then," he said to his son, "you could swim in rivers."

  Aaron shook his head and grinned. "Jeez, you can still do that."

  "At your own risk." His father shrugged.

  He looked at the house.

  His mother had left no light on.

  "Maybe she's asleep," he said. "Maybe we should just get a room in town and come by tomorrow."

  Jenny nudged him. "She's half blind. She probably doesn't even know the lights are off. Come on, let's go, onward, onward." She mock-shoved him forward.

  "Oh, God, I don't want to."

  "You sound like a baby."

  I don't want to I don't want to, he thought, but his feet disobeyed him, and he walked up to the front porch, carrying Hillary. When he got to the screen door he rapped on it three times and realized that his mother, Anna Gardner, was already there, sitting on one of the Moroccan wicker chairs in a corner of the porch. She was lit by the orange light from a citronella candle, and he saw smoke from her cigarette drift upwards in the flickering shadows. He smelled the mint julep of her breath and heard her raspy cough. A radio was on, reporting the news of the region, and his mother reached across the small glass table before her and switched it off.

  "Joseph," she said. "It's about time, Goddamn mosquitoes been eating me alive out here." She laughed. "It's November and the buggers're still breeding in the river." She rose on uncertain feet. She tossed the cigarette over the edge of the post and extended her arms to Jenny. "You must be Jenny, I am so, so happy to finally meet you."

  J
oe looked at his mother, and then at Jenny. Jenny stepped forward and hugged Anna. Then, Aaron went to hug her.

  Finally, she approached Joe.

  All he could think to say was, "You don't seem all that sick, Mom."

  She smiled. "Well, I have my good days. But, hell, Joseph, I knew you'd never come see me again unless I was at death's door. And I was right, wasn't I? Now, give your old nasty mother a hug and a kiss, and, oh, this is Hillary, my God, she looks like me." But Joe knew that his mother couldn't tell who Hillary resembled in the feeble light from the orange candle.

  Anna Gardner went and flicked on the porch light. "Let's get inside and have some cookies," she told Aaron.

  She tricked me. Jesus, I should've known she would do that. Joe glanced at Jenny and realized that she was completely and utterly charmed by his mother. You're not taken in by this, are you, Jen? By the bourbon-soaked southern accent, by the vulgar language heavily weighed down with syrup, by her seeming niceness? Jesus, this woman destroyed my father. This woman came close to destroying me.

  He felt like a doomed man.

  He watched as Aaron slipped his arm around his grandmother's, and how Aaron's face lit up as he went past his father. He wanted to tug his son free from the old woman's grasp, but it hit him that his mother was grasping no one. It was Aaron who was clinging to her. Jenny was opening the door for her to pass through.

  She won. She finally won. She's going to take everything I have away from me.

  But there was the tiniest shred of a voice in his head which told him:

  Maybe she's not the monster you've made her out to be all these years, bud. Maybe she's only human.

  6

  Sheriff Dale Chambers picked up the phone. "Hello?"

  "I need to see you." It was Lannie Barnes.

  Christ, what if Nelda picked the phone up? Lannie was just fucking things up for everybody.