Killer Nashville Noir

by Clay Stafford

  “Guess it’s pretty pathetic, hmm? My whining?”

  “Not at all. Sometimes the emotional and psychic pain we feel is worse when there’s no obvious reason for it. But there is a reason. There always is.”

  Which made him feel slightly better.

  Then he grew impatient—she was charging $250 an hour—and he got to the meat of it: the anxiety, the depression, the sense of hopelessness that had been growing since the family had moved here.

  “Oh, and I’m an insufferable prick.”

  Another smile. “That’s a very subjective assessment.”

  “No, it’s not.” Sam gave her details of his eroding spirits at home. How Janie and the children were losing patience with him. And for good reason.

  “So what was the event?” she asked.

  “Event?”

  “What inspired you to come see me? You don’t seem like the person who would take this drastic step…” She smiled at the adjective, and he did too, briefly. “…who would take this drastic step unless an event moved you to do so. Hitting your wife? Your child? Considering cheating on her? Actually cheating on her?” Dr. Brenda seemed to think these were as minor as a parking infraction.

  But Sam looked horrified. “No, no, of course not.”

  “Something happened, though,” she said inquiringly.

  And so they came to the yellow Buick.

  • • •

  “At the car show, it was like stepping into cold water. Or seeing a…”

  She filled in. “Seeing a ghost?”

  “Yes,” Sam agreed.

  “And it triggered feelings within you?”

  “It did.”

  “What sort?”

  “Bad ones. Incredibly intense. I had a sense that I had to understand what it meant. There was an urgency. But as I thought back to what it might mean, all I could see was a blank.”

  “And you googled ‘repressed memory’?”

  He didn’t want to like her, but it was hard not to, with comments like that. He offered a brief smile. “I…Yes, I did, after my wife suggested I see a shri—a therapist.”

  “Well, the mind certainly has elaborate self-protection mechanisms. And repressing memories is one of them. So much of our behavior is doing whatever we can to avoid confronting the hard facts of our past. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Drug and alcohol use. There are a thousand ways we avoid the tough job of looking at how we were injured when young. Now, I’m skeptical of repressed memory. It’s a very rare condition, but we can’t rule it out. And this car, I think, is a good place to start. You mentioned that you felt seeing the car triggered a dream.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Describe the dream to me.”

  He recounted it, fell silent, and finally said, “I have no idea who the driver was. I could see him. But he was in shadows.”

  “A man?”

  “Definitely.”

  “And you didn’t feel threatened by him?”

  “No. I was…I don’t know, he was okay. I can’t tell you why, but I just knew it.”

  “And there was some misunderstanding?” she prompted.

  “That’s right. He was taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go, to get away from the invisible monster. I wanted to stay where we’d just left—wherever that was. But it turned out the monster was in front of us and we were driving right toward it.”

  “You’ve had the dream again?”

  “Once more. Pretty much the same.”

  “How old were you in the dream?”

  “Twelve, I’d guess.”

  She asked, “Tell me about your life, your family when you were that age.”

  Sam shrugged. He knew this was coming, of course, but he wasn’t looking forward to talking about the past. He explained about his do-gooding father who—in Sam’s opinion—sold the family out by keeping a poor-paying job as a high-school teacher in the “shithole Georgia town of Gilbert Falls”. Sam grimaced. “He was smart. He could’ve gotten a job anywhere. But he wanted to stay and do some quote ‘good’, whatever the hell that is,” he muttered to Dr. Brenda.

  He described the other close family members. His mother, a decent woman, though quiet as fog, volunteered for good causes herself until she had to take a job at a grocery store to make money. His uncle Seth, his father’s younger brother, worked as a printing salesman. He was the opposite of his brother, always in good humor. He lived nearby, but in a much nicer town than Gilbert Falls. He would visit often. He was a young bachelor who dated beautiful girls and was an outdoorsman, which Sam’s father definitely wasn’t. “Dad was contemptuous of people who, he said, ‘wasted their time on anything that wasn’t related to education and improving society’.” Sam remembered with great pleasure his uncle taking him fishing and hiking.

  Dr. Brenda took all this in, and he gave her credit for being very attentive. She wasn’t bored or distracted, or didn’t seem to be.

  After he described his mother’s death and his father’s mental decline, he sat back, feeling nearly as drained as following the dream.

  The doctor asked, “The first question, of course, is did you have a car like the Buick in your past? Growing up?”

  “No. I’m sure. It would have been unusual even when I was a kid, a car like that.”

  “Any cars in ugly yellow or with brown roofs?”

  He was impressed she remembered.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did you and your family take road trips?”

  “No, never,” Sam muttered. “I wanted to—I always wanted to get the hell out of that lousy town we lived in, but my father said we couldn’t afford to take vacations. Even just taking a drive someplace nearby for a day or two.”

  She asked, “Did anyone drive you to and from school?”

  “I took the bus mostly.”

  “Those outings with your uncle? Did you two drive?”

  “Sure. When we went fishing or hiking, sometimes we’d drive for hours.”

  “Did you enjoy those trips?”

  “Oh, yeah. They were fun.”

  “Ever have an accident or see a bad accident?”

  “No, not that I can remember.”

  For nearly a half hour they kept at it, but he could find no connection between the old yellow Buick and his past.

  Sam grimaced. “When I think about the car and try to find a memory, I have a feeling there is one, but all I see is a big black cloud. There’s something inside. I just can’t make it out.”

  She jotted a note. “That does tell me you could be repressing something. That’s a common image people have when they’ve blocked out something: clouds, smoke.”

  He felt encouraged and wanted to ask more, but her eyes slid to the clock on her wall. “I see our time is about up.”

  The fifty minutes—and $250—went by that fast? Sam didn’t see why they couldn’t continue talking for a bit. But it was clear: she wanted him to leave. He rose.

  Dr. Brenda said, “I want you to do some homework.”

  “Think some more about the Buick?”

  “No. Think about that black cloud. That’s what you need to consider.”

  “The cloud.”

  “There are answers inside it, Sam. You can find them. Consider it a scavenger hunt.”

  As he left her office and closed the door, Sam noted the next patient in the waiting room. She was in her thirties, with a pretty face, but her short blonde hair was uncombed and she wore stained jeans and a sweatshirt. Sam’s initial reaction was that he himself wouldn’t have gone to see a shrink—excuse me, therapist—like that. But, of course, maybe this sullen-faced young woman was seeing Dr. Brenda precisely because depression made it hard for her to be more presentable.

  He had an urge to ask her what she thought about the doctor, but supposed this was a no-no. In any event, the patient seemed sullen and withdrawn, and Sam said nothing. He nodded. She stared through him and returned to a month-old magazine.

  I guess my own problems cou
ld be worse, he reflected and left the office. He tried to assess his feelings and was more confused than anything.

  The black cloud. What was hiding inside? Did the invisible monster have a face?

  • • •

  That night Sam had the dream again.

  The mysterious driver, the disagreement between him and Sam, the invisible force going to suffocate him.

  He woke up in a sweat and lay back—finding himself alone in bed once again—feeling his heart slam and thinking about the yellow Buick. Then he reminded himself: No. Per Dr. Brenda’s instructions, he tried to focus only on the black cloud, the missing memories from that time of his youth.

  Sam went back there, digging deeply, looking for trauma. Sure, there were some things: the family never doing anything together, his father ignoring him, his mother passing out at a restaurant from drinking too much, a bully or two roughing him up, failing a course (English, no less), an older babysitter had shown him hers and he’d reciprocated, an incident that was both exciting and irritating since he was missing a good Magnum P.I. episode.

  But he found nothing serious enough to hide in the black cloud.

  What’s more, he remembered all of these. Nothing was repressed.

  And, as for abuse—the gold standard of repressed memories, according to the Internet and bad fiction—well, he supposed it could have happened. But he had no reactions at all when considering adults in his life that might’ve been potential molesters back then. Besides, Sam Fogel didn’t have any of the sexual angst that seemed to be an adult symptom of abuse. Sex had always been an important and comfortable part of his life (it certainly had been with Janie, at least until his libido, along with his peace of mind, had begun to disappear not long after the move to Meadow Hills).

  Nonetheless, feeling the easy breeze flutter over him, aware of the wafting curtains, he kept at it.

  Scavenger hunt…

  Back to the black cloud again and again.

  And then: Ping…

  Yes, yes! Something was there!

  A memory. Not clear, but he was sure it was an actual memory.

  Sam was standing by himself, on the other side of a hedgerow from a car, though not yellow and not a Buick. There were a lot of trees around. One in particular he remembered; it had fallen over, a thick one.

  Sam was looking down a hill. And he was frightened.

  But of what?

  Heart pounding hard then. Heart pounding hard now.

  And he seemed to remember that he wasn’t alone. There was somebody else not far away. He tried to remember who it was. He could almost see—

  “Honey, you okay?”

  He jerked at the sound of his wife’s voice. Janie stood in the doorway.

  “Quiet!” he snapped.

  She blinked. It seemed to him that she reared back.

  “I was…I was just thinking about some things the doctor told me were important.”

  Janie said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he tried. “I was just…”

  Too late.

  He wondered if she’d head to the guest room.

  No, his transgression wasn’t quite at that level, though when she finished her hand cream ritual, she slipped into bed and turned away from him.

  “Sorry,” he muttered again to her back.

  But dammit. Hadn’t she wanted him to go to the fucking therapist? It was her fault.

  He tried to remember more. But the scavenger hunt for lost memories was over for the night.

  • • •

  At his next session with Dr. Brenda, Sam told her about the ping he’d had after the dream, the memories of the clearing, the car, the road, the hedge, the moonlight, the fallen tree.

  She noted his words with interest, but didn’t pounce on the clues as he’d expected. Sam was irritated. He felt he should be rewarded for all the work he was doing. Instead, she had a new topic.

  “I want to explore why you grew depressed and anxious when you moved here. It sounds like you’ve been fighting a losing battle. At first it was all right, but now the place just upsets you in a lot of ways. Why do you think that is?”

  He considered: “Culture shock. Coming from Manhattan. You know what it’s like here. Stepford. The cocktail dresses from the 1960s, the men in plaid jackets or navy blazers and tan slacks and those square handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. Church and golf…and, well, let’s just say, not much NPR.”

  “I’m sure that’s some of it,” Dr. Brenda agreed, “but acclimating to new areas when you have a job—a good job, to hear you describe it—and having a support group like a family makes transitions much easier. No, I think there’s more.”

  “What?”

  “It’s possible that two things happened. First, there’re fewer distractions here than in New York. After you moved, you were free to think about what was troubling you. What do you think about that?”

  He was going to deny it—a reflex—but decided there was something to her theory. “True.”

  “And the other thing is that Meadow Hills reminds you of your hometown, Gilbert Falls.”

  “They’re different, day and night,” Sam disagreed. He described the impoverished town of his childhood, a world away from where he lived now. “There was meth, moonshiners, rednecks—it was awful.”

  “Still, they were both small, Southern towns. A lot going on under the surface.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And so possibly coming back here nudged the memories—whatever they are—out of hiding a bit.”

  “If I’d stayed in New York, that wouldn’t have happened, you mean? I’d have been happy?”

  “I’d say you weren’t happy in New York,” Dr. Brenda said. “You thought you were, but not really. Something was missing from your life. Eventually you’d have seen a yellow Buick there too, or some other trigger, and the nightmares would have started anyway.”

  Sam nodded. This seemed to make sense. He wanted to keep pursuing the idea, but he followed her eyes to the clock, startled that another fifty minutes had sped by like ten.

  • • •

  The recent revelations, though, didn’t cure him. In fact, the more scavenger hunting, the worse his mood and the worse life at home became for him and his family.

  He was perpetually angry and irritated. When Janie asked about his session, he decided she was cross-examining him and was frustrated he wasn’t making better progress. The kids were regularly pissing him off too. Jake asked his father to come to a tennis orientation for camp, which he didn’t want to do, but went anyway. He was distracted, and he embarrassed his son when the coach asked all the parents how they themselves enjoyed sports and he muttered that he didn’t really have time for “stuff like that”.

  And when Alissa approached him about a ride to a concert next week, he said bluntly, “You’re not asking me for a ride. What you mean is you want me to buy your ticket. When I was your age I was working.”

  “I’ll get the fucking ticket out of my savings! And I’ll hitchhike.”

  “You’re grounded. Go to your room.”

  “Oh, please,” she said with a sneer. “Grounded? Jesus, Dad, it’s not the nineties anymore.” She walked out the front door.

  For the next several nights, he decided it was better to avoid the family as much as he could.

  One night he’d lain in bed, wrestling with the memories—or lack of memories—until 2 A.M., then he gave up. He used the bathroom and went to the den to prepare for tomorrow’s class, which was about themes in Macbeth. In the den, he flipped through his notes from last year’s lecture on the same topic.

  And once again: Ping…

  Sam believed that he knew the source of the anxiety he’d felt in his memory of standing on a hill near the fallen tree, looking down.

  Guilt.

  Reading his notes had brought the memory back: Macbeth was infected with guilt, which was represented in Shakespeare’s play by the ghost of one of the men he’d killed, Banquo.

  But
what Sam felt guilty for, he didn’t know.

  He fell asleep at 6 A.M.

  Just after class later that day, he got a call on his mobile. The chancellor of the college asked if he could stop by. Sam pulled on his tweed jacket and walked leisurely through the pollen-dusted campus to the redbrick administration building.

  “Hi, Jonah,” he said to the distinguished, white-haired educator, who was wearing anachronistic round glasses and a three-piece suit.

  “Sam. Take a pew.”

  He perched on the butt-molded wooden chair and with pleasure looked over the other man’s office, rich with the indicia of academia. Southern academia, that was. Photos, autographs, and book jackets covered the walls. Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Faulkner, Shelby Foote, and that difficult genius Thomas Wolfe, inescapable in North Carolina, of course. A few African-American writers. Not many.

  “How’s Janie?” the chancellor asked, averting his spectacled eyes.

  “She’s doing great.”

  “And your boy’s quite the athlete, I understand.”

  “That he is.”

  “And what’s this about Alissa going to cotillion?” Jonah was beaming. “Your girl about to take on Southern Society. Oh, she’ll make some boy a fine wife.”

  Or a good attorney or doctor.

  “That’s right,” Sam said, observing that the chancellor had met his daughter only once—when they’d moved to Meadow Hills two years ago. It wasn’t as if this Robert Penn Warren scholar was Alissa’s godfather.

  Superficial…

  There followed questions and comments about class load, some new testing techniques, some state aid to the college.

  Then the substance of the conversation got plucked from the shallow talk like cotton in a gin. “Everything okay with you?”

  “Sure is,” Sam said quickly. He doubted that the chancellor would know about his seeing the therapist—he’d kept that as secret as possible and was paying for Dr. Brenda himself, not through the college’s medical insurance program. But Sam guessed his behavior in class and in faculty meetings was similar to his behavior at home—the irritation and anxiety—and colleagues had commented on it.