On Halloween, eight days after John Doe, the power went out.
Chuck Corso, still the nation’s lone maître d’ for this feast, had been on a roll. The Chicago River’s unattended sluice gates flooded the Second City’s downtown. Sea life drowned in oil pouring from captainless tankers. Livestock perished by the millions as farmers died or fled. Corso was reading a report on abandoned homes exploding from natural gas leaks when WWN, the lamp she and Luis dared burn at night, and the refrigerator’s hum all winked out. In the shocked first seconds of silent darkness, Charlie’s old nightmare came crawling back, cadaverous Fred Astaire holding out his withered hand.
Shall we dance, Charlie? Shall we?
Luis’s voice had a dozen new facets: split octaves from a sore throat, the bass purr of phlegmy lungs. “Chet Musgrave. He’s got a diesel generator.”
Charlie gathered herself before replying, unwilling to hear her own fear.
“How far away does this Mr. Musgrave live?”
“Across the street.”
“Won’t he fight you for it?”
“He’s gone. Visiting his daughter in Oakland.”
The only other time they’d taken down boards and gone outside was to bury Mamá Acocella in a grave so shallow both of them, too familiar with corpses, suspected would be raided by scavengers. They’d used the back door and done it in the middle of the night, and Charlie had been terrified the whole time. Now she tried to build up some courage, but it blew away in one exhale.
“Shit, Acocella! I wouldn’t know a generator if it tried to bite me! Going out there, in the dark, rooting around for some mystery gadget? I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Oh, perfect. Guilt me into it, You can hardly walk to the bathroom.”
Luis bolted to his feet, an attempt to prove Charlie wrong that sent him swaying. But the steadiness of the hand with which he braced himself against the wall showed his resolve. Luis blinked until he seemed solid.
“We’ll go together,” he said. “If our power went out, so did the other houses’, You want to wait until Felix McKirdy down the block remembers Chet’s generator? We might have the .38, but Felix owns rifles. With bump stocks. We need that generator, now.”
“My fucking hero.” She piled on the sarcasm, but she was standing, wasn’t she?
It was night; they dashed. Luis got Musgrave’s generator and all his fuel into a child’s red wagon while Charlie loaded bags with food and jars of water. They kept as quiet as possible, yet five ghouls amassed in fifteen minutes. In Musgrave’s house, Charlie broke dishes in the sink to draw Them from the attached garage, out of which she and Luis then fled.
The details of the adventure were unimportant. What was important were the in-between moments. How they found ways to joke at the most frightening moments. How they worked together without having to share a word. How they grumped at each other’s failings. How they flat-out argued about how to distract the ghouls, their first fight, one they got over the instant they were safe, and if that didn’t mean they were de facto married, what did?
Mae Rutkowski would have hardly believed it: her wild child settling down at last.
Charlie and Luis nailed the front door shut again and then clutched each other on the sofa, watching the window boards rattle under assaults from what had to be six or seven ghouls. Each time they jumped, they laughed like they were watching a horror movie, Charlie knew what teens liked to do while watching horror movies. She ran Luis’s hand up under her shirt, and he, stimulated by defeated frights, starting peeling off her sweaty clothes.
The ghouls banged and moaned; Charlie and Luis banged and moaned. It was like sex in a thunderstorm, or on a beach near shattering waves, an erotic near death. When Charlie came, she thought of the French term for orgasm, le petite mort, “the little death,” because that’s how she felt, like she’d died and come back as a ghoul, starved for Luis’s flesh. She only regretted the climactic doggy style. She would have liked to have seen his face on this wedding-night milestone: first sex as husband and wife.
The next day, the honeymoon was over.
The whistling wheeze from Luis’s chest woke her up, As long as she kept her eyes closed, she could convince herself it was due to the exertion of the retrieval job and celebratory sex. But she had to open her eyes eventually. Luis’s skin had gone a putty gray, and the lines of his cheeks were deeper, darker. His mouth, maybe only by contrast, was bloodred, and when she felt his forehead, she withdrew her hand with a gasp—the skin was cold, the sweat hot.
“Feel like shit,” he mumbled.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said, standing up. In the bathroom, the door shut, Charlie wrapped her arms around her face to muffle the sound, and cried, and cried, and cried, until her eyes were swollen shut and her shirt was translucent with tears. Finally, she was with the man she loved, and he was dying. She could no longer pretend otherwise. He’d aged five years overnight. Another night would be ten years. A week would be thirty-five more. By then, he’d be seventy years old, barely holding on, and they’d have hardly begun.
Meanwhile, Lindof and every power-mad fuck like him were stashed away somewhere safe, fat, and happy, Charlie knew it.
It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fucking fair.
Carrying a filled glass, she went back to the bed. She held the glass so he could sip from it, though most of the water pooled in the hollow of his neck, He looked up at her with yellowed, red-veined eyes.
“Sorry,” he rasped.
“It’s not your fault, shithead.” She slashed at tears with her hand.
“You’ll be all right.”
“Don’t give me goody-goody bullshit! We don’t have time for that! Say what you mean, asshole.”
“I do mean it.” He smiled weakly. “You’re the baddest bitch I know.”
She slid onto the bed, locking his shivering legs in hers and cradling his cold head against her warm, wet neck.
“Don’t leave me, Acocella, I’m not done with you yet. Not even close.”
“Just bodies,” he said. “You know that.”
“We met too late.”
“Billion-to-one odds anyone meets anyone. We did all right.”
Charlie pulled away to look into his discolored eyes.
“We’ll just have to go faster. Squeeze forty years into whatever we have left.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Instead of a shotgun wedding, we’ll have a shotgun marriage. We’ll do the whole thing, but double-time.”
“Okay. Sounds nice, Tiring, but nice.”
What made up a marriage? Mae and Maury Rutkowski were Charlie’s only reference, married until Maury’s death when Charlie was twenty-two. Mostly what Charlie recalled were her parents’ grudging silences, their close-quarters elbow boxing, their weary concord of looking past the other’s detritus.
There had been flashes of tenderness. Charlie got her notepad and wrote down what she could recall. Holiday vacations: pinwheeling about Gettysburg with her sisters and looking back to see her folks arm in arm in the spectacular dusk. Anniversary celebrations: clichés of pink-ribboned chocolates or rose bouquets, Mae nonetheless grateful for the duly-marked checkbox.
Fine, that was a start. Operation Shotgun Marriage initiated. Charlie found a Christmas tree in the basement, set it up in the living room, and rooted around the house for silly objects to wrap in holiday paper. Luis’s body kept seizing up while she helped him downstairs, but when he saw the twinkling lights and It’s a Wonderful Life playing on TV via DVD, and heard Bing Crosby from the old CD player, audible above the generator’s chug, she felt his whole body relax. Blammo: a Christmas memory, just like that, and the next day they had Valentine’s Day, and the day after that, New Year’s Eve.
Holidays were for mornings. Dinners were reserved for anniversaries, which they celebrated every day. Shotgun marriages, Charlie decided, got to skip the early crap like paper, cotton, and leather and jump right to the good stuff. F
ive years: wood. Twelfth year: silk. Twenty-fifth year: silver. She always rustled up something: a wooden Día de los Muertos skull, a hilarious silk nightclub shirt from the early 1990s, a silver-painted Transformers toy, likely from Luis’s youth. The dinners themselves didn’t go well; Luis had no appetite and found swallowing difficult. He seemed to like seeing her eat, though, so she pretended to savor the stale Oreo Double Stuf with five candles, or the Jell-O pudding cup she’d dressed up with a 12 made from white chocolate chips.
It was a sign of love, she told herself, that Luis held it together for each celebration. It was only after she helped him back to bed that he pulled the sheets into sweaty cords as he writhed with pain he couldn’t describe. “My blood’s thick” was the best he could manage. Charlie pictured maggots clogging up Luis’s veins. She’d need to work faster. It was for her well-being now, not Luis’s.
Children were a cornerstone of many married couples’ worlds, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. Not pets either; the dogs she spotted looked too voracious, the cats too deranged. Another brainstorm hit. Music and movies! She and Luis had been Shotgun Married for twenty or thirty years now and still didn’t have “their song” or “their movie.” She collected every last CD, LP, MP3 player, Blu-ray, and DVD in a laundry basket and carried them to Luis’s bedside to audition each piece of media for the honor.
“Garden State?” she asked, modeling the DVD.
“I’d rather be bit by a hundred ghouls,” he groaned. “A thousand.”
“The Wedding Planner, starring Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey? Aw, Luis, we never got a proper wedding. This might be instructive.”
“Bleak,” he said. “That’s what this is.”
“Hey, it’s your collection. How about Hitch?”
Luis squinted, “Will Ferrell?”
“Will Smith, ‘Meet Hitch, New York City’s greatest matchmaker. Love is his job and he’ll get you the girl of your dreams in just three easy dates, guaranteed!’”
“Now I’m sick and humiliated.”
“Oh, here we go. This one has ‘our movie’ written all over it. ‘Adam Sandler is a devoted dad with a breathtaking new housekeeper in … Spanglish.’”
“Kill me. Just do it.”
“Includes twelve deleted scenes, Acocella! Twelve!”
“Bring me the gun. Bring me the fucking gun.”
It was wildly funny and crushingly sad. Luis laughed, which turned into a cough, and he managed to shrug through it—What are you going to do?—even as blood speckled his chin and, under the covers, his legs kicked in paroxysms of sarcophagal pain. He didn’t want her to see it, so Charlie pretended not to see, and laughed until she cried, and then, after hiding her face with tissue paper, just plain cried, which she found, given a little practice, she could pass off as more laughter.
Walk Away
If one were to recount the occasions of hard work and good luck that had thrust WWN into the sphere of the cable-news big boys, the July 15, 2015, events at Jo-Jo’s Hog, a dimly lit cellar nightclub in New Orleans, had to be in the top five. On that night, one of the station’s first stars, Octavia Gloucester, a bulldog reporter drafted from a Charlotte NBC affiliate, was in the French Quarter, finishing a special report on the return of music venues fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina.
Muse King, a.k.a. King Kong, or KK to his friends, had been doing the Jo-Jo’s Hog version of a sound check when Gloucester, working without a field producer in those bare-bones days, ambled over to the band’s impossibly young leader to let him know she’d be shooting a scripted shot during his first set. The band ought to do an original.
“You never know,” Octavia Gloucester said. “National TV, Someone might dig it.”
Muse had been in awe of the beautiful, no-nonsense reporter. He was just seventeen, young enough to believe that some background noise on a thirty-second piece of video on a second-rate news network might actually catapult him to fame. He’d been playing dingy blues clubs for three years, forever the youngest cat in the joint. That was a serious chunk of his life. He was impatient for his break.
He’d acted cool, said something like, “Yeah, I might have something.”
When it was time to play, he let the band settle first, then strolled onto the stage. The city’s smoking ban was brand-new and, in pits like this, being flouted. He tilted his head into the smoke-filled beam of a tinny, red-gelled spot, pressed his mouth against the standing mic, and growled out the opening a cappella eight-count to “If the Blues Wuz a Woman,” not his most unique song, but if the reporter lady wanted blues, here was an A-major, fifth-position, twelve-bar, blues-with-a-capital-B riff that ought to read no matter what the reporter was saying.
He was past the chorus, about to step back to grind on guitar, when a man who would later be identified as twenty-nine-year-old Preston Gourlay fought across the front of the smoky room, stage lights shimmering down his sweaty face, and lifted a long arm holding a .357. His target was Juniper Coulbeck, a girl he claimed had spurned him, but who insisted she only knew him as some guy who lived in her building.
Coulbeck was able to clarify this because Coulbeck didn’t get shot. Coulbeck didn’t get shot because King Kong, living up to the sobriquet—though it had originally been applied to the skinny kid ironically—continued drawing back his guitar into a full baseball backswing, leaned out over the stage, and crashed his best friend—the royal-blue, gloss-finished, hollow-bodied Gretsch Electromatic his uncle Marlon had given to him when he was five—into Preston Gourlay’s skull.
It had the makings of just one more New Orleans legend, except it was captured over Octavia Gloucester’s left shoulder. Muse watched it a hundred times on YouTube. Like the rest of the world enthralled by the viral video (244,323,881 views in the first two weeks), he was in disbelief over his quick instinct. It was as if he’d trained his arms for attack the same way he’d trained his fingers for a six-string.
The raw video was nearly three minutes long. As a result, “If the Blues Wuz a Woman” had been heard 244 million times. Within five days, Muse had performed the song on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and had been fawned over by the hosts of The View and Live with Kelly and Michael. He received offers from three music labels, all front-loaded with nonrefundable advances.
By the start of the next week, when the cover of Time featured the blood-spattered remains of his shattered Gretsch along with the words MUSIC STILL MATTERS, Muse’s new agent had lined up a full Japanese tour, and Muse was a wealthy young hero. He drummed up more good press by donating seventy-three guitars to inner-city community centers.
Why seventy-three? Because in the month following the noble annihilation of his Gretsch, people had sent him seventy-four guitars to replace the Gretsch—fourteen used, the rest new. He’d unpacked each one with reverence. After days of consideration, he selected one to keep, a 1978 maple-necked, mahogany-bodied, custom Alpine White Gibson Les Paul with just enough paint worn off to make it seem honest. It was only then that he perched upon a high kitchen stool, one of the few pieces of furniture in his brand-new Garden District home, and dared to strum the meat string lightly, just enough to tune. Within the next few minutes, he’d gotten the strings in sync. A promising sound but, like Uncle Phil said, “You never know what a lady’s got in her till she starts screaming at you.”
So early that Sunday, alone for the first time in weeks, in an empty, reverberating, sawdust-coated kitchen, Muse King made that old Gibson scream. After twenty minutes of tough love, the ax had proven itself so righteous Muse had let his falling tears darken the circle of sawdust at his feet. The coterie of handlers who’d mushroomed around him might or might not have his best interests in mind, but it didn’t really matter, He’d found himself a new best friend.
Tucked inside the Gibson’s scuffed, red-velveted hard-shell case was a letter from the givers. Despite the train wreck of its spelling, it was written in a neat, steady hand.
SINS YOU LOVE B
LEUS MUSIC AND SINS WE SAW YOU ON TV STOP A MAN HOSE GETING REDDY TO SHOOT A GUN WE WANT YOU TO HAEV THIS GITTAR THAT BALONG TO OUR SON HEWITT WHO LOVE BLEUS MUSIC. HEWITT USED THAT GITTAR NINE YAERS. HE WAS ATEEN YAERS OLD. HE GOT SHOT AND DIED. WE AR PRAYING EVER TIME YOU PLAY IT MAKES HEWITT SMIL UP THERE IN HEAVEN WAER HE IS NOW.
—YUOR FRENDS WILL AND DARLENE LUCAS
Muse’s father bolted before Muse was born, and his mother did likewise around the time he’d started walking. None of the aunts, uncles, and grandmothers who’d let him grow up in their living rooms and basements had partners. Reading a note from a married couple, who signed their names as a unit, plucked a string deep inside him. So he wrote the first personal letter of his life, confirming to the Lucas family of Cranston, Rhode Island, he would not only play their son’s guitar but had already named it Hewitt. Ten days later came a reply.
WE AR GLAD YOU GOT THE GITTAR. WE AR HAPPY THAT YUOR GOIN TO USE IT.
—YUOR FRENDS WILL AND DARLENE LUCAS
Over the next five years, right up until the day the whole world shit the bed, Muse wrote dozens of letters to Will and Darlene Lucas and received dozens of replies, each one a respite from a life of increasing bullshit, Muse’s overnight fame had carved up his extended family like a pie, each slice insisting they enjoyed Muse’s favor. None had much cared about his welfare before. The Lucases, who wanted nothing but to see their son live on in Muse’s music, were the reliable ones, and Muse clung to them.
Muse knew plenty of undereducated folk, but the Lucases were a step beyond, illiterate to a degree he hadn’t believed existed except in backwoods stereotypes. Unlike cinema’s inbred banjo pickers, Will and Darlene were people of breathtaking tranquility, as if living apart from the world’s technological progress had somehow preserved them. Their lives, from what little they shared, had been brutal. Most of the Lucas family was in the cemetery, and a few years back, Will and Darlene had driven their self-rehabbed 1962 Plymouth from Mississippi to a shack they’d inherited on the distant planet of Rhode Island.
The Living Dead Page 36
