by Owen King
If the day had proved that his father was different somehow—worthier somehow—then what was he supposed to do with Booth now? He couldn’t exactly see himself calling Booth for advice. Sam tried his tea; he had added a lot of honey, and it was delicious.
“How’s the movie?”
The springs of the neighboring seat twanged as a girl dropped down beside him. Sam recognized her from that afternoon—she was the one with the spiderweb on her face.
In the gloom, her swan neck was particularly white and sinuous. The way the web carved up her face produced a multifarious effect that made it hard to meet her gaze straight on for longer than a second or two. It was like she was looking back from all her different sections; not that it was ugly or scary or threatening, but it was somehow insistent, strongly insistent. Immediately, Sam wanted her to like him.
“I’m not sure I get it. I keep waiting for something to happen, but so far, it’s all parking lot. I do like the plastic drape—it gives the scene a cool little blur.”
She had a careless grin that tiptoed right up to the edge of a smirk. “Oh, it’s an arty film?”
“That’s right. We should be seeing Europeans having sex any second now.”
This earned him a throaty smoker’s chuckle. She patted her stomach; there was a small bulge. “I hope you don’t have any ideas. I’m taken.”
“I’m Sam.” Since he didn’t know precisely how the so-called local children viewed Booth, Sam thought it safest not to mention their relation.
“Bea.” They shook. “I hope you don’t mind the company. My friends are communing with the spirits. It freaks me out. I’m afraid a ghost will get offended and I’ll end up giving birth to a Satan baby.”
Sam scratched his head.
“Ouija board,” Bea added.
“Oh, that’s dumb,” said Sam, and she said, “I know, I know.”
The new acquaintances sat in silence and stared at the parking lot. A skunk stalked onto the little stage of street between the buildings but didn’t break pace, just continued off left.
“So that’s it,” she said. “The skunk survived. The end. Lame, dude.”
Sam said that for some reason, the skunk had him thinking of the end of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. She asked what happened at the end of Blow-Up. He asked if she was sure she wanted to know, and Bea said yeah, go ahead, and Sam said it was a classic, and she said, “Don’t be a tease.”
“Okay.” He leaned forward, rubbed his hands together. “The protagonist of the film, he’s been wrapped up in this kind of—I don’t know, there’s been a mystery, right? Let me see if I can remember. It’s been a while. Right: so there’s this guy—”
“Amazing so far. No way I’m getting up to pee—”
“Shut up. This guy, he may have witnessed a murder. He’s a photographer, a very slick operator. He’s the main character, and it definitely seems like there was a murder that he saw in this park. Seems that way, but it’s actually not definite. And this is the sixties, the swinging sixties, London. But someone breaks in to the photographer’s place and steals the photos that might be evidence of the murder. Also, there’s a woman, Vanessa Redgrave, who has been on his case, and she’s a big mystery, too. But still. It’s not clear. He never figures it out one way or another what’s truly happened, if maybe nothing’s happened.”
“And that’s the end?” Bea grimaced. “Thumbs-down.”
“No, no,” said Sam. “Hold the fuck on. The end is that the photographer, he finds himself by these tennis courts. A group of mimes happens along. And they all start playing mime tennis.”
“That’s it? Mimes playing tennis?” Bea rubbed her webbed forehead as if it ached. “Mega-thumbs-down.”
Sam shook his head. “That’s still not quite it. There’s one more thing: he hears the tennis balls. He hears the balls bouncing, hitting rackets. That unmistakable tennis sound. And so the guy, our hero, he joins in.”
“It’s meta-tennis,” said Bea.
“It’s an acquiescence to the unknown.”
The girl with the tattooed face sprawled back in her chair. “So deep.” She pretended to make herself barf.
Sam couldn’t restrain a smile. “You haven’t even seen it!”
“I don’t mean to sound like a philistine, but it’s a cop-out. ‘Oh, I can’t figure out an ending! Mimes playing tennis! Life’s a big old mystery!’ You could quit on any story at any time and use that ending. Seriously, what’s the point? Mimes? Mimes are everything that is wrong with everything.”
“I guess the point is that we can’t ever be sure that something is exactly what it seems, and—mimes. Huh. I might not have done it justice. I haven’t seen it since college.” The ambiguity once appealed to Sam, the unsettled quality, the lingering question of what was real and what wasn’t real and whether there were invisible forces at work. Now, through her eyes, it was, well, a bunch of mimes playing tennis.
“So what was the connection with the skunk, Mr. Movie?” Bea laughed. And how long ago was he in college—a hundred years?
■ ■ ■
The amiable tattoo-faced girl asked Sam to come down and meet her friends. “I need some backup in case they got possessed while they were fucking around with the Ouija. It’s always the pregnant woman that the ghosts most want to get their hands on.”
Sam agreed; he was curious to meet her friends, and he wasn’t afraid of spectors. If, to take an example, ghosts were real, that meant Brooks Hartwig, Jr., was the sanest person he had ever known; and to take another, if there was a way for the dead to communicate with the living, Sam had no doubt that he would have heard from Allie by now, to offer her opinion on a whole range of issues from his grooming habits to his brooding to, most recently, his shoddy treatment of Tess Auerbach. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll come say hello to these spiritualists.”
Downstairs, the boy in the checkered pants, the girl who had been strumming the guitar, and a couple of others were gathered around a coffee table covered in a drape of silky yellow fabric and situated in a small alcove at one side of the lounge’s main room. The Ouija board had been set aside, and they were sipping from steaming, widemouthed ceramic cups. Sam and Bea brought over a couple of pillows to sit on.
Bea introduced him to the group, and everyone said hello. He noted right away that the boy in the checkered pants was wearing what must have been one of the T-shirts that Booth had given away: it bore a reproduction of the poster for Buffalo Roam, showing a white buffalo standing in a line at a hot dog stand along with a Native American in a feathered headdress, a hippie girl in fringe, and a boy holding a red, white, and blue balloon. A teaser read, “A Legend of America!” Sam knew if you looked closely at the credit block at the bottom that Booth was the last listed actor: “and Booth Dolan as ‘Dog the Cloud.’” It almost made Sam laugh, not because of the movie—an inarguably tedious stoner epic that made the overrated Easy Rider look like The Rules of the Game—but because he was imagining all the street kids uniformly dressed in Booth’s T-shirts. It was as if Booth had adopted his own fucked-up Little League team. The girl, who had been strumming the guitar, Elsie, had the Devil of the Acropolis poster on her shirt.
“I thought you were communing with the dead,” said Bea.
The boy in the checkered pants rolled his eyes. “Elsie kept screwing around.”
“I did not!” Elsie objected.
The boy, whose name was Josh, explained that they had been contacted by a ghost named Sarah. Sarah had said she was waiting for the bingo to start, and it was sweet of them to say hello, but she hoped they understood that she would rather just sit quietly and read her James Michener novel. After that the pointer had gone still. “And by still,” said Josh, “I mean that was when Elsie stopped making up random stuff.”
Elsie protested. “Don’t be a shitnose! I didn’t make up anything!”
Everyone at the table offered an opinion on the legitimacy of the Sarah ghost. The general consensus was that it was awfully mundane; haunts w
ere supposed to be, well, haunted, not waiting for bingo. Bea asked Sam where he stood.
He had been thinking the opposite, that it made more sense that a soul might get stuck in a habit as opposed to turning into some window-rattling, mirror-breaking poltergeist out for vengeance. If he imagined himself as a ghost, Sam couldn’t picture himself doing anything except what he usually did—eat, watch television, fantasize about women. “I guess if I believed in ghosts, yeah, I could believe that they were hung up on bingo,” said Sam. “People get in ruts, right? They get stuck.”
They drank tea and joked about their hang-ups. Josh said he couldn’t sleep without a fan; he was a slave to his fan. Elsie said she was addicted—no, seriously, addicted like a crackhead is addicted—to ChapStick. For Bea, the problem was her boyfriend’s butt: “I just have to pinch his ass. It’s so lowbrow.” When it was Sam’s turn, he said it was difficult to pick a single hang-up, he had a whole bunch: he found it difficult to think of his sister as a young adult; he was hung up on an accident that had happened years ago, still felt it almost every day, like fingers on the back of his neck; there was a friend he had a hard time saying no to; his father drove him so nuts that when he actually didn’t drive him nuts, it was confusing; and there was this girl, Sam wasn’t sure what that was about, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her.
10.
In Tom’s driveway, he listened to 1010 WINS—“Give us ten minutes, and we’ll give you the world”—until the news wrapped around. The economy was teetering, the polls were negative, football players were injured, the weatherperson hoped they had enjoyed the official last day of summer because real fall weather was on the horizon, and after that the economy again. Wesley had said to him once that when 1010 WINS flipped over, he suffered a pang of existential sadness. “Like, that’s everything. I’m abreast of everything of significance. I can fit the whole planet in my pocket.”
Sam found reassurance from the compaction and aggregation—here was all the important stuff, nothing but important stuff, selected and pruned by professionals. And the news could be worse; the economy wasn’t definitely sunk, and fall weather was better than summer weather. He would take it.
His own uncertainties—whether Tess was going to give him one more shot, or when it would be safe to go back to his apartment, what he might do tomorrow—remained uncertain. But just admitting out loud that he wasn’t doing so wonderfully made him feel like maybe he was already doing better, or about to. The urge to call Tess to share the feeling was not easy to resist. Had she remembered the answer to his question yet, the reason why it was okay for Kenneth Novey to die again and again, and for viewers to take pleasure from it? Sam really wanted to know, wanted to “really talk” about it. She had to give him another chance, didn’t she?
The only lights he saw on in the house were from the second-floor hall. Somewhere behind the rental, out in the street, a car rolled past making those growling, popping, barely restrained sounds that racing-type engines make.
■ ■ ■
Inside, he removed his shoes and started up the dark stairs. He assumed everyone was in bed. A few steps up, however, Sam heard a thumping. There followed a terrible hacking, as if some animal were fighting to regurgitate a large chunk of meat. Sam went back down the stairs. It was a busted-dishwasher sound; he wanted to be sure that nothing was running broken and making a mess.
The kitchen was empty, the lights off, nothing running. The noises grew closer, wetter, and more disturbing. “So wrong,” someone half-spoke, half-moaned. Sam identified the voice: Mina.
Off the kitchen, a wide hall ran the right wing of the house: first there was a room with nothing in it but an armchair and a dead fern, then a room with some boxes and a pretty window seat, then Tom’s bedroom, then Tom’s study, and finally, a door that led out to the redwood deck. Sam poked his head around the doorway of the first room. The fern’s withered leaves were briefly electrified by a splash of headlights from out in the street, but there was nothing living in the room.
His sister said, “So, so wrong.” The sounds were coming from the study.
“Hm-hm-hm.” This noise of assent belonged to Tom.
Several quiet paces carried Sam by the next two rooms and to the entryway of the study. The door was half open. Sam spied his sister, his godfather, and his father seated side by side on the leather couch. Because they were facing the plasma screen in the entertainment center, his view was of the back of their heads: on the left, Mina’s jagged, glossy shoulder-length hair; in the center, the trim yellow-gray reverse beard at the bottom of Tom’s skull; and at the right, Booth’s bushy white curls.
Who We Are was playing on the television.
Roger is on the footpath to the parking lot. He is talking to his father on a cell phone. “What are you talking about?”
“Your mother. There was an accident.” The voice-over takes a harsh breath. “She is . . . She’s gone.”
Roger lowers the phone and scratches his temple, considering. When he raises it, the cell is a newer, smaller model. “Nice try, fatso. You nearly had me.” He hangs up before his father can reply.
“Who was that?” asks Claire, catching up to him.
There is a cut to the forest.
The late Costas Mandell, in his hooves and leggings, is on his knees, in flagrante delicto; he is ramming a hollowed log. His ass is very pale and loose-skinned. It slops up and down in time to his thrusts. He huffs and snorts. Around him the greenery is verdant, punctured here and there by pipes of sunlight winding with motes. An oblivious sparrow perches on a birch branch and preens its wing.
When the satyr speaks, his delivery is full of foreboding, cracking with strain. “I am—your—darkest hour, my friends. I am—your—hardest feelings—come to flesh.”
God, he was good. It always startled Sam, momentarily made him forget and just marvel, Mandell was so damned good. He was otherworldly and brokenhearted, and his commitment was incontestable. He was fucking a dead tree.
There was another thump—Booth’s shoe pounding on the floor. His hands flailed upward, waving and flapping, like a sinner’s at some old-time tent revival, reveling in the glory. The breathless regurgitate sounds were coming from him; they were the sounds of laughter. The laughter was the kind that looked like agony: turning the face purple, accompanied by tears and kicking and thrashing. It was the kind of laughter that felt like agony, too—suffocating—and also felt wonderful, untethered, mad in a way, mad-happy. That was how Booth was laughing, like he was nearly choking on his mirth.
Sam edged away.
■ ■ ■
The sense of betrayal, the simple horror of the scene—of the three them watching it and Booth laughing that way—numbed him. He was angry, but somehow too angry to inhabit the feeling. He could see it, though, his anger, tall and burning and growing taller.
He retreated through the kitchen, continued on to Tom’s massive living room, and sat on the couch in the dark. His vague thought was that he could sit there, concealed, and bide his time. When Booth eventually came around the corner, he could jump out and confront him. Whether Sam was going to hit him, or yell at him, or simply stare at him without speaking—stare and stare and stare—he couldn’t know yet.
Framed photos hung on the walls: of Tom and Booth on a beach in California; of Booth dressed as a buccaneer; of adolescent Sam in an apron, playing baker at the Coffee Shop; of Mina wearing sunglasses; of Allie grimacing with her hands on her hips and a licorice string dangling from a nostril. Moonlight through the picture window spilled emulsion across the images and made ghosts of the figures.
The living room stretched the length of one side of the house, like a bowling alley. Another picture window spread the far wall, opening onto the deck and the woods. Darkened branches hatched across the view.
Sam had known better, or he ought to have. That was what he kept thinking, what his anger said. Hadn’t it happened over and over again? Why should tonight be unlike any other time? Why should it be
different than when he was ten and Booth had turned on him on the train? Why should it be different than when he was eleven and Booth said he was coming home and didn’t? Or when he was thirteen, or fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty-three? It dawned on Sam that Brooks had just been a stand-in for Booth. Brooks had wrecked the movie nearly as well as Booth wrecked everything else.
Sam sat on the long couch under the street-side picture window. The room smelled like vacuuming.
Headlights raked across the wall: Tom and Booth had sand in their chest hair, and the ocean in the background was indigo; there was a gold hoop in the buccaneer’s ear; frosting streaked the front of Sam’s apron; Mina’s movie-star sunglasses covered almost half her face; and what looked like a grimace before was, in the headlights’ beams, clearly a smile that Allie was trying to hold at bay until the shutter snapped.
■ ■ ■
Sam rose, raised a forearm to shield his eyes, and looked out the picture window. A GTO idled on the lawn, perhaps twenty feet away. The vehicle’s headlights insinuated the barrel of a shotgun. The combination of the glare and the dark reduced the driver, Jo-Jo Knecht, to a vague, blurry shape behind the windshield.
The headlights flickered high-low-high, causing Sam to jerk and twitch involuntarily. The GTO’s horn yelped and the engine revved.
He was telling Sam to come outside.
Sam thought about Jo-Jo, and about Jo-Jo’s thighs, and about the detailed description Jo-Jo had given of his “special trunk.” Sam thought, Certain death. He thought, There is no way I am dying until I tell Booth whatever it is I need to tell him. He thought, Tess.
High-low-high, the headlights flickered for a second time.
Sam shook his head slowly back and forth: No.