Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  “Hi,” she said.

  He knew then.

  He knew the way you know that things will work out, or won’t work out.

  He knew the way he could tell when something felt comfortable. He knew, but he wasn’t sure. What if he let this pass by? What if they would never run into each other again? What if she knew right then that it was love at first sight, but because he didn’t pick up the signals, it would be another Great Lost Love and he would end up in one of those awful marriages like his folks had and he’d be a drinker and a wife beater and a creep?

  He couldn’t let it pass.

  “Hey, Alison. I thought you’d be at your dad’s garage.”

  Alison shook her head slightly. “Not this summer. Mom thinks it’s unladylike for me to be a grease monkey, so I’m stuck slinging hash in this dive. Who has the Coke?”

  Peter grinned. She set it down. She set the ice water in front of Than.

  “So how’s Charlie?” Than asked, picking up the glass and sipping the water.

  Alison didn’t take her eyes off Peter; her look wasn’t dreamy, it was curious. She said, “I guess he’s fine. After last night, I don’t think I’ll be seeing much of him.”

  “You two broke up?” Peter asked.

  “A long time ago. Almost a month.”

  Peter didn’t hesitate. “You want to go out sometime?”

  “I don’t know.”

  For a moment, he was plunged into the despair of human existence, and his heart sank.

  Then she said, “Okay. Maybe to the movies. Sometime before the weekend. My shift on Monday to Thursday is ten to four. I can drive—I got my license in April, and I’ve got the car. The rest is up to you. But I want a real date—you call me, you take me out, and don’t expect me to do anything on a date your sister wouldn’t do.”

  “My sister’s nine.”

  She grinned. “Well, you know what I mean. You call me tonight, okay? If you don’t call, forget it. I don’t wait by the phone.” Then she walked off to take the bald man’s order.

  Peter closed his eyes; opened them; tasted his Coke.

  “You look like Polly-fucking-Anna,” Than said. “Hullo, Peter, hullo in there.” He waved his right hand in front of Peter’s face. “She seems pretty nice. I’ve never really spoken to her before.”

  “There’s a lot of stories about her, but nice isn’t one of them. She’s a slut. She’s Urqu’s girl.”

  “Shut up. Don’t talk about her like that,” Peter snapped. “You heard her. They broke up.” He scratched the back of his scalp and wiped his hands across his face as if trying to take the silly idiotic feeling of a crush off his skin.

  “Maybe according to her. You don’t know Charlie Urquart all that well, do you?”

  “Well enough to know he’s a jerk. Who cares about him? Did you see her smile? She’s got a great smile. She’s supposed to be smart too—I mean, she seems smart. I sound like a two year old,” he said, finally relenting. “It’s only a date. Maybe she wants me to call her just so she can laugh at me.” But he didn’t believe it even when he said it.

  “All I’m saying is, you go out with her, you’re asking for trouble. But”—Than arched his eyebrows—”she does have her driver’s license—I see that as a major plus in her favor.”

  Peter flicked the top of Than’s forehead with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m beginning to think that you’re the one who fell into the beehive, Campusky.” He looked at his watch. “Damn it, my dad’s gonna be pissed off. I’m supposed to be home for supper by now.”

  2

  It took almost a half-hour for Peter to make it home, limping most of the way, and he knew he was in for it.

  “Peter!” Joe Chandler bellowed from the back bedroom. “God damn it, Peter!”

  Peter had barely just gotten inside the house; the door shut behind him. His little sister was staring, transfixed, at the television, although it wasn’t even turned on. He saw the back of her head, the light brown curls going down her neck, the white dress she always wore to church on Sundays. He knew his mother would be sleeping—she was either in church or asleep or reading in order to avoid confrontations. If she were asleep, she would’ve taken some sleeping pills and would be dead to the world.

  He heard the kitchen clock ticking, and somebody’s dog, out in the trash dump that was a quarter-mile behind the house, howling and barking, maybe chasing a jackrabbit.

  His sister was moving her head slightly, back and forth, back and forth, the way she had when she was three and they’d called her autistic, even though he knew she wasn’t. She was just doing what his mom did, too: avoiding.

  She was crying, only she didn’t have tears in her, just the dry heaves of weeping.

  “Damn it to hell!” his father roared, and then Peter knew he was coming, because he could hear the clomp of the heavy feet, like bull’s hooves on the carpet, and the scraping of his hands down the narrow hallway. Joe Chandler was a big man, six-four, and nearly as broad. When he was angry he looked just like a mad bull with his nostrils flaring, and his eyes going all red and fiery, and his skin, too, turning color, almost blue as if he were so angry that he had to hold his breath so as not to let all the rage out at once. “Damn God damn!” he shouted, coming around the corner.

  Peter just stood there.

  The late afternoon light, through the curtains, was orange and white, spilling across his father’s features. The Mad Bull was out of the pen. His hands were curled.

  “You missed supper, your mother was worried, we don’t know what kind of people live around here. And just where the hell have you been?” his father demanded. When his father spoke, Peter smelled the whiskey. Brown liquor always seemed to change his father from an ordinary jerk into the mad bull from Hell.

  “Looking for a job.”

  “I mean last night, you pussy.”

  “I went to see Than.”

  “Where? Where’d you go?”

  “No place. Around.”

  “I was down at the cantina, boy, and I heard from some goddamn barflies that you been down to the dogfights. Hanging out with rednecks, Christ, Peter, you’re just like your mother’s family, all trash. You don’t hang around with these people. They’re common, and I won’t have a son of mine becoming some trash hound, you hear me? You hear me?” His father came closer, and seemed to calm down the more he spoke. He had small eyes, no longer fiery, now dark and beady. He hadn’t shaved, and the stubble looked like mold along his chin.

  Peter hung his head. He was furious, but he knew better than to show it. He’d spent most of his life learning how to hide his true feelings from the one person who knew how to stomp on them the hardest. “Yes, sir.”

  “I am not gonna have a son of mine become some common white trash fuckup, Christ Almighty, some candy-ass hick. You’re gonna end up some goddamned feebleminded—you don’t mix with these people, boy, you’re just gonna mess things up for me again, aren’t you, just like you did in San Diego, you goddamn...” And his father came at him, and knocked him back against the door. “You’re gonna tell the whole goddamn world a pack of lies because you want everyone to feel sorry for you, don’t you? Don’t you? Open your mouth, goddamn it, and say something!”

  Peter crumpled down and stayed still. He knew how to play this. His father would take a few more hits at him, and then stop.

  “C’mon, pussy, c’mon, fight back, you damn weak—” But his father only gave him one swat on his head, and then stopped. “Jesus, you’re not even worth fighting, are you? I wish I’d never had a son.”

  What happened next, Peter thought only happened in his head.

  He didn’t realize that he was actually saying the words.

  “Up yours, asshole,” he muttered.

  “What? What the hell did you just say to me?”

  Peter knew it was too late.

  So he repeated it. “I said, ‘Up yours, asshole.’” It was suicide, he knew, but he was getting sick of sitting back and taking it all the t
ime. His dad was just like Charlie Urquart, only grown up, and he was sick and tired of putting up with it, of his mother for putting up with it, of just about everything. He thought: You come near me again, and I kill you, Dad.

  Joe Chandler looked at his son, as if he could not believe the words. For Peter, those words—Up yours, asshole—seemed to hang in the air like a fine mist. He smelled his father’s breath. His father’s nostrils weren’t flaring. His father’s hands unclenched.

  His father wasn’t going to hit him after all.

  Joe wore a grin on half of his face like the other half was dead. “Well, you’re not totally spineless, are you? Come on, get up, son.” His father reached a hand out to him.

  Peter hesitated. He looked at his father’s hand. It was smooth, uncallused. His father would never condescend to do any common labor. It was Peter and his mother who had always had to do the house and lawn and garage work. Joe Chandler had been raised in a good family, not like his mother’s, but a good upper-middle-class home, and he had been sent to the best schools, and should’ve been a doctor or a lawyer. His hands, Peter’s grandmother used to say, were the hands of a surgeon, or a writer. Nothing as common as the working-class jobs of towns like Palmetto. The only things that even approached common labor that his father knew about were hunting and fishing, and Peter was convinced it was because his father liked to shoot and kill things.

  Remember Jasper? Tail wagging, happy to see just about anyone, and within six months with his father, the dog was turned into a snapping, sniveling basket case, until finally the dog got kicked one too many times by Dad, and then went berserk and ran. Peter knew about running. He had run away from home five times since he was ten, but each time he came back because he didn’t know how to survive, and he was tied, somehow, to his hatred for his father.

  His father’s smooth, white hand.

  Peter took it, and his father grabbed Peter and yanked him hard to a standing position. “You idiot,” Joe Chandler said. “Did you really think you were gonna get away with calling me that? What do you think your old man is, boy, a horse’s ass? You kids, you goddamn kids, think you know everything, don’t you?”

  And his father threw him across the room.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Come Sundown

  1

  Here’s what happened in town before sundown:

  Trudy Virtue bawled out Alison Hunt for not wiping the tables thoroughly enough. She took Alison table by table and showed her the proper way to do it. Then Trudy told Alison that if she didn’t shape up, she would be looking for work: “Because I can’t take none of that teenage laziness in my diner, missy; I have a reputation to protect.” Afterward, Trudy went home to her trailer at the Ed and Inez Trailer Park, and put her feet in a bucket of warm water with Palmolive and Epsom salts, and watched 60 Minutes.

  Alison waited outside the Magnificent Diner for her brother Harv to come pick her up. She didn’t like the wait, because Charlie sometimes came by—he worked at the All-Nite Rx and Sundries, which his dad owned. She was hoping that she wouldn’t ever have to see him again, although she knew that in a town the size of Palmetto, it was inevitable. Can’t fight fate or it fights back.

  2

  Than got home in time for supper and played his older sister’s cassette stereo—she only had an old Jackson Browne tape called Late For The Sky, and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” She owned about twenty others, but they were in her car, and she was in Yucca Valley seeing her boyfriend. So he played them both, and ate beanie-weenies with brown bread. He listened to the noise outside his sister’s bedroom—there was always noise at the Campusky Compound, and he was fairly used to it, although he never tired of family sounds. He was pretty happy at the moment, too, because he had Peter Chandler as a best friend, he had a pretty nice family, and even if the Bone had scared him a little and that house, that awful house, had scared him a lot, life was okay sometimes.

  But that house.

  Hate that place.

  He knew he shouldn’t have lied when he had told the story of the house to Peter, but he just didn’t want Peter to go in there.

  He knew he should’ve told Peter the truth.

  After all, Peter was his best friend.

  After all, Peter had told him his deepest darkest secret. The one about how his dad hit him and his mom and sister all the time, felt pretty bad for Peter, if it was true. Than sometimes made up stories about things, so he was never sure if other kids didn’t do the same thing. But he was pretty sure that Peter was on the level.

  It was me, Peter, me.

  I was the one who fell into the bees and got stung.

  But somebody else was with me.

  Somebody who kinda changed afterward.

  We both know and hate him.

  Charlie the Irk Urquart.

  Only he didn’t just get stung, no, sir. He went down into the house, through the basement door.

  He saw something down there.

  Charlie used to be a nice kid, most of the time. Not that much different than you, Peter.

  But he changed after that.

  He changed like nobody’s business.

  3

  Bonyface got back into his tunnel with his cat Isaac and finished off a bottle of T-Bird, and then he got his flashlight out and flicked it on. He opened a book and began reading in the dark of his cylinder.

  It was a book on demonology, and he began reading.

  4

  The Daughters of the Western Star had just put up the Pioneer and Grubstake Days banner, strung from the one-room schoolhouse that was now the Palmetto Chamber of Commerce building, all the way across Highway 4—two lanes as it went through town—to the Golgotha Free Ordained Church. Actually, the Daughters themselves, composed, in Palmetto, of seven elderly ladies who were also quite good shots with a rifle, did not put the banner up. It was Than’s older brother Greg and a nineteen year old named Phil Philbrick. When they were done they went and looked at the banner, realized it was upside down and swore to high heaven because now Greg had to climb back up to the steeple to swing it around. Hy Griffin, the preacher who ran the church, looked out his small office window at the boys and wished to God the young men in town weren’t so damned attractive. The services that day had been long and painful, and there’d been much speaking in tongues and calling down the Holy Ghost, so he was ready for a big night out; maybe, just maybe he’d take a drive down the hill to Palm Springs, or maybe he’d brave the three hours to Los Angeles where nobody could possibly recognize him.

  5

  Kevin Sloan was out with his pit bull, Lammie, trying to get her to run, but something was wrong with her, and when he checked, kind of mad that the bitch wasn’t doing what he wanted, he felt her stomach and saw that her nipples were all puffed up, and he realized that she was going to have puppies and he hadn’t even known it. That’s why she run off, he thought.

  “Who the hell knocked you up, girl? Better not’ve been some poodle. Can’t make no money selling pit poodles, ‘cept maybe to some biddy ass.” But, for once, he actually showed the animal some tenderness, took her back to his truck, and set her up in the bed, covering her with blankets. He had a gun in the truck, and he went and got it. He sat with his dog, and pointed the gun at rocks and shot at birds and jackrabbits, but hit nothing.

  He couldn’t stand Wendy anymore, and had spent most of the day in the middle of nowhere, by the caves of No Man’s Land, the old mines, because he just wanted to be as far away from her as he could get.

  It was the feeling she gave him.

  In the dark.

  He had fallen for her because there was so much mystery to her, she was such a babe.

  But in the dark.

  Something else.

  Something had changed about her. Just in the past week or so. Something had come over her, but he didn’t know what.

  And when they’d played their games with the barbed wire and the handcuffs, and he had been at her mercy, he felt her skin
, and it wasn’t what he thought it should feel like.

  It was rough.

  It was like a snake’s.

  He was scared, but thought he might be going crazy like everyone else in his family had.

  ‘Cause he knew he was bound to go crazy someday. It was just like his ma had always said, “You’re just like your Pa, that lying, son of a bitch psycho from Hell.”

  As he watched the sun move westward, and the shadows lengthen, he didn’t know whether to keep shooting at the tweety birds or just put the gun to his own head and do what he’d been trying to do for the past three years.

  6

  What do dogs dream of? When their legs kick the dust, and they growl as they chase something down in the twisting avenues of their brains, what do they run after? The dark pit bull, Lammie, lay sleeping beneath Sloan’s trailer. The cries and the slapping sounds that had been coming from inside the trailer had not kept the dog up. The dog basically viewed her master’s life with a curious sniff, but did not appear surprised by any of it.

  But in the dog’s belly, something moved, something hit her in the gut, and this woke her. Her puppies. It was almost time. To pretend to know what an animal such as this dog was thinking would be foolish, but it would not be hard to guess her motivation as she began digging in the soft, dry earth beneath the trailer, not if you knew what had happened with her last litter, how they’d all been pulled away from her almost as they were born and sold to evil-looking men who had no love in their eyes.

  Lammie was going to dig herself a safe place in which to have her litter, a place that even her master would not easily be able to get to.