One at a time, as if the effort were too great to bear, she leveraged her feet up on the desk. Jessie was wearing her comfort shoes, the favorite yellow chucks. She mobilized her feet and hands to roll the big leather chair in closer so that she could wrap up inside herself. She pulled the sleeves of her grey hoodie down low over trembling hands, zipped it all the way up, and yanked the hood over her downcast face. Jessie was still in the mood to hide.
Moments later, Magda nipped in with some ice and a damp facecloth and then hastily removed herself. She wanted to kill Josh.
“So,” Charles sizzled. “Am I to assume this is Josh’s payback for your freedom Friday night?”
She looked up. It sucked that she had to hurt Charles too. Dee. Oh no. Yeah, this sucked, all right.
What to say? She chose nothing. If they wanted to think it was Josh who hurt her, then fine. At least that way they’d stay off Deuce’s trail until she could figure out how to destroy the evil bastard. At the same time, she wasn’t going to lie and say that it had been Josh, either.
The papers did that for her.
The next day, the headlines in entertainment sections around the world read that it was assumed that Josh Sawyer beat up Jessie Wheeler after their break-up.
Josh, nor Steve nor Carter nor Maggie nor Sue-Lyn even tried to contact Jessie when they spotted the headlines. On Sunday Josh flew out to Arizona to shoot his latest feature. Not surprisingly mostly everybody treated him with hostility. The only exceptions were newbies to the entertainment business who wanted to impress the Drifters star. Josh and Jessie’s friends rushed off to their summer projects and holidays, occasionally communicating between themselves and wondering if indeed Josh had hurt Jessie. After all, he had a temper and he had a right to be very, very angry with her. They were his friends but, at the same time, malevolent secrets were sometimes found behind the closed doors of many people’s homes. Jessie had ended their relationship rather abruptly. Even though in their hearts their friends once truly believed that Josh wouldn’t lift a finger towards Jessie, there was now a shadow of doubt. To the Drifters group, there weren’t any real clues that someone else was to blame so, apart from Josh’s own testimony, as far as they knew there was no reason to suspect anyone else.
During the hot, sticky west coast days of July and August, Jessie continued to meet up with Deuce, and she was grateful for the times she had to travel to visit the new shelters or perform somewhere, for those occasions were her only grace away from the madman who stalked her. Deuce himself travelled home then as well. After all, he had businesses to run. Matt reached a dead end, in more ways than one. He and his police officer friend came to no concrete conclusions about either the ownership of the knife or about the man they were investigating with the help of Interpol, in South Carolina. Also, Jessie made it perfectly clear that her life was her own, and that she was angry about being followed all the time. Charles, against Charlie’s protestations, agreed to let Matt and his team stand down as long as Jessie didn’t seem to be in any apparent danger. Josh was away, and Jessie wasn’t sporting any new bruises. The men couldn’t help wondering whether the stalking idea was Josh’s own ruse. Perhaps he initiated the tire slashing himself. At any rate, he was away, Jessie was distant but functional, and they could find no dirt on McCall or anyone else who may have been stalking their girl. They sat back and let her be.
As the summer wore on, Jessie began to realize a few things about her aggressor. One, he was less abusive to her if she simply pretended that she was in some kind of a mutual relationship with him. As long as she played his game, he was even somewhat congenial. As an actor, she began to find the power within herself to block out his real identity. She had to, for self-preservation, because otherwise she would have lost her mind entirely, if based only on what he did to Rachel, Sandy and likely Terri, and not based on what he was doing to her now. Two, although she tried to avoid the pitfalls of self-medication through alcohol and drugs, occasionally she found use of these substances did help take away the pain. She tried to control her usage but as the summer went on she escaped more and more into Jim Beam and weed. She avoided hard drugs at all costs. That was another evil road, one she was not willing to go down. Three, the more she was around Deuce, the more she became aware of his own pain and torment. And Jessie being Jessie, as evil as she once thought him, she began to see Deuce in a different light.
One muggy weekend in early August, she met her tormentor at the East Van sixth floor apartment. Inside she was surprised to find a rickety little table set with a snow-white linen tablecloth and a flickering candle. Deuce was grinning like a small boy on his mother’s birthday. The stale musty smell of the dingy place was masked with the lingering aroma of Italian herbs and spices. Jessie inhaled deeply.
“You learn to cook, Deuce?”
“Haven’t y’all ever heard of take-out, my dear girl?” The thickset man whisked open the oven door and, with a grimy potholder, grabbed two covered foil dishes and set them on the counter. He scooped their steamy contents onto plates and gestured for Jessie to sit herself down at the table. She leaned forward and eyed her pasta hungrily as he set it before her. After dancing all afternoon as she prepared for a huge concert scheduled for the end of the month at the Rogers Arena, she was famished.
“Umm, ravioli,” she said agreeably. Then she looked up at him as he sat down opposite her, a bottle of Australian Shiraz in hand. Sometimes the man appeared almost human.
They toasted the survival of another day, and Jessie ate with gusto. She also drank most of the wine herself. Deuce got up and opened another bottle.
“Deuce,” she asked warily, always on alert around him, her mouth full of the last of the ravioli. “Did your family always live in Charleston?”
“Hmm, yes,” he said, thinking about his childhood home in Mount Pleasant. “My ancestors owned plantations. My mother’s family had a tea plantation, and my father’s owned a rice plantation.”
“There were slaves in your family, then.”
“Yes, sweet pea.” He savored the wine. “Many.”
“Are there any letters surviving, or any documentation that tells you about what life was like in those days?”
“Pre-War of Yankee Aggression or post?”
She shrugged. “Whatever. Either. Both.”
He rocked tenuously on the back two chair legs, his burly frame urging a rhythmic creak as it moved. Jessie found the sound soothing, somehow. She felt a wave of ennui wash through her as she recalled the night Terri died, when Josh rocked her so lovingly in the little hospital room. She fortified herself against getting too friendly with Deuce the fuck McCall. Yet maybe that was the key to gaining an advantage over him someday.
Deuce spoke up. “The only clues we have to what life was like came down over the years through oral storytelling.” He glanced over at Jessie, who was looking at him expectantly, her chin raised stubbornly. She is always on her guard, that one, he thought. “My father’s family owned one of the largest plantations in the state,” he said. “They lost everything after the war. It took a while, because they paid the slaves to stay put and work the rice fields. Most of them would have been homeless, they would have starved if they hadn’t stayed. The only life they knew was on the plantation. The only work they knew was rice. But then they started to leave, one family at a time, and economics got tougher. By 1900, my ancestors were broke. They subdivided the plantation into smaller farms. Any papers were either destroyed or simply lost.”
He eyed Jessie, but his mind was elsewhere. The creaking continued, and Jessie had to focus on what Deuce was saying so that she could put the agony of missing Josh out of her head.
“The only thing that remained was the pride. The pride of having once been an economic and social power. Oh, the boats would be filled with rice and sailed down the Ashley River with the tides and the alligators in the old glory days, and they would come back laden with fine silks and glorious German cavalry sabers engraved with flowers and birds…there
would be balls and lavish weddings, and my family would be invited to every party in Charleston during the social season. In the summers, the families usually travelled north to escape the humidity and pestilence of the Low Country.” He chortled, thinking how grand life must have been before the Civil War that split the country in two.
Jessie piped up, fueled by the heady Shiraz. “So your family somehow remained prosperous, though? You’re obviously a wealthy man.”
The front two chair legs fell back to the floor with a crash underneath his bulk as Deuce snorted disdainfully. “Ha. Only because I built up my wealth. No, my father and his father before him drank themselves into a stupor every day, lost in memories of who the old Irish McCalls were, once upon a time. In a time before the reckless emotions of a bunch of secessionists destroyed everything our family had. My father whipped it into me every day as a child. You are a McCall, you are a McCall, you are a McCall, he would say as he hit me.” His voice was coming out tiny now, high-pitched, as if he were once again the little boy who got beaten because his country had separated more than a century earlier. Jessie couldn’t help herself. She felt sorry for him as a child.
He continued. “It didn’t matter that we were poor, that my father only worked off and on as a laborer between bouts of the drink. He still saw himself, and us, as mighty McCalls, as people who got invited to all the best parties and who everybody respected. Because it was drilled into him by his father. I gather that’s how he won over my Momma, too, by telling her who our family wasn’t. Boy, did she get fooled. He used to hit her, too.” He recoiled then as he looked at Jessie, sitting there all small and curled up into herself across from him, tired and pale. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
But Jessie comprehended then where Deuce was coming from. He was a man who lost everything long before he was ever born. He was a man of uncertain pride. He wanted to be proud, but he was never allowed that dignity. Only his ancestors truly deserved it. To him, any dignity and pride he possessed was fake, lost with the slaves who deserted the family plantation after 1865.
It was interesting being Jessie Wheeler then, because she played a character from the late 1860’s in Drifters. Although it was television, Jonathon made sure that his stories were well researched. Josh’s character, Billy, was a Union soldier who made his way north after the Civil War in search of gold. He would have fought opposite Deuce McCall’s people in the South. How apropos.
That raised another question. “Deuce, did any of your people fight in the war?”
“Sweet pea, we’re still fightin’ it,” was his quick response. “Every single fuckin’ day.” He got up then, swayed once, and then roughly grabbed Jessie’s arm and pulled her towards the small bedroom. “Come on, honey. Enough with the sodden memories. There’s enough self-loathing in my family to last me a thousand lifetimes.”
This time, as Jessie let Deuce do his thing, she found her mind drifting back to the old city that she, Rachel and Sandy had loved so well, with its age-old graceful wrought iron filigree, rows of majestic live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and dolphins playfully cutting through the Cooper River. Lovely old Charleston, she thought. Oh how I did love you, you poor old city with your old traditions and your old balls and all those people who just wanted to hang onto their olds a little longer. You brave old city, she thought. You fought bravely, and you could have perished. But there you are now, hanging on a little longer, growing anew, your old homespun Confederate uniforms disintegrating in dank dark attics. She pondered how a war that was fought in part to save an antiquated agricultural system, in opposition to the industrial advances of the North, could still have such a damaging effect on a man today. For Deuce was a casualty of the war between the states as much as any man ever was, and Jessie was testament to that indisputable fact as she lay beneath him this night.
Yet, Charleston’s troubled and storied history somehow revived her. She thought of the city now with renewed vigor, when once she feared to call it to mind at all. For she was fighting her own war that on some days seemed surely lost. But if the holy city could survive, if Charleston itself could survive and then thrive, then perhaps so could she. Perhaps Jessie Wheeler could live once again. Perhaps she, too, could thrive.
She thought about the pistol and wondered whether she could use it now on this man, someone she was starting to see as human and flawed as everyone else. Could she point it into his heart and fire? She wasn’t sure. But summer was more than half over, and she was no closer to resolving the problem of her stalker than she’d ever been. Her friends were gone; Josh was gone. Perhaps it was already too late to win him back. She had to figure something out. But what? How? It was frustrating beyond belief, but Charleston’s example was tangible, something she could hold on to. What was it she had once said to Josh? There is always hope. Perhaps Jessie should listen to her own advice.
She felt a little light come back into her soul as she recalled the pretty, colorful Charleston houses often referred to as Rainbow Row, or playing guitar with pensive Sandy and spritely Rachel on Folly Beach. She closed her eyes as an orgasm built inside her - contrary to her wishes but generally a necessary part of this exercise. Deuce wanted her well satisfied by his lovemaking. Despite all, he thought he loved Jessie, and he wanted desperately to please her.
He was more thrilled than usual when he turned his wary glance to her afterwards, and saw that Jessie Wheeler had a small smile on her face for once.
Ya done good, Deuce McCall, he conveyed to himself. He squeezed his eyes shut as the counterpoint to that also echoed in his brain, a disconcerting memory from his boyhood brought forth tonight by cheap wine, not to mention by encouragement from a quiet little audience. Ya lousy failure, Booth McCall!
Well. The good things in life were never really free. But his treasure here, well she came with a little thing called redemption - redemption for his family’s past. Because Deuce-Booth-McCall was not a failure. He turned things around, undoing the wrongs of his family’s collective history. His control of Jessie Wheeler, one of the world’s biggest stars, put the McCalls back on top.
Literally, he chortled to himself as he grunted his way off Jessie so that he could go take a piss. He laughed all the way to the filthy urine stained toilet, as Jessie stared after him in wonder.
***
Chapter Sixteen
The hazy sublime summer days grew shorter, calling boaters and hikers back to safe haven earlier and earlier each day before inevitable darkness overtook them. Jessie was scheduled to present a larger, more elaborate version of the fundraising show she toured the previous fall. This time she was booked into the Rogers Arena in Vancouver where ten thousand thrilled fans could attend a single performance. She had two creative, intensive spectacles on the program, one Friday night and the other on Saturday afternoon. It was late August, a few weeks before she would be leaving the city to shoot a feature film in New York.
These shows were a sort of finale to the second fundraising series for the women’s shelters. They were highly anticipated, but Jessie was dead tired, hurting from Deuce’s increasingly rough aberrant ministrations, and low in spirit. She had yet to bring out her gun. She was terrified that she would miss or that she would kill him and some invisible henchman would bounce into action like a yoyo on a string, scheduled to pounce the second Deuce reached his maximum impact. So she endured her aggressor, but barely.
Jessie had taken to self-medicating with liquor and weed more and more. It was the only way she knew to deal with the deepening pain and loneliness, as well as Dee’s constant frustration over Jessie’s increasingly missed rehearsals and disregard for schedules. At the same time, she was more diligent than ever about not utilizing Matt and his security crew. She knew the tenacious Matt followed her a few times and watched her sidle nervously into Deuce’s building, but she lit into him angrily one rare evening at Charles’ and Dee’s home - she included the confused Keatings in her tirade - and he backed off.
She told them she wa
s visiting a friend. Matt staked out the building and saw Deuce come and go, but McCall was smart enough to register his apartment in another name, to pay in cash and to wear a wig outdoors over his balding head. Matt didn’t recognize him from the Charleston visit a year earlier. There were other tenants as well. Matt ran all of them through his computer. Apart from one sixty-year old with a forty-year old record for petty theft, and a grandmother whose sixteen-year old grandson had been arrested for vandalism, there was no indication of any serious shenanigans going on in the building. Still, it didn’t sit right with Matt, or with Charlie and the Keatings. But Jessie had just turned twenty-nine in July, with a rather low-key birthday celebration, as was her custom. She was a grown woman with a mind of her own, and she asked them to leave her be. What choice did they have?
The night of the first big concert, Deuce had Jessie arrange a ticket and backstage pass for him. He dressed for it not as a businessman, but as a member of a motorcycle gang, complete with leather jacket and tight jeans. He also got her to dye his hair a deep black a few days before the show. His nerves were starting to fray. It was important not to be recognized by Matt and Charles, who met him only briefly, but still…he was, after all, a good-looking man. Memorable, in his opinion. Jessie always got tickets for her Downtown Eastside friends, so adding one fictional “Mike Doucet” to the roster was a breeze.
The concert went well. Josh thought about not going but it was a chance to see Jessie, even if from a distance. He couldn’t stay away. His friends stood around him and offered a sort of protection from whatever invisible wall he needed to hide inside. They were all quiet during the show. As much as they adored Jessie, even Maggie and Sue-Lyn felt betrayed by her for the way she dumped Josh as well as them. Still, they were mesmerized by her music.
Despite the difficult last few months, Jessie’s music was better than ever. Songwriting and steadfast old Jim Beam were good places to hide. Many lonely nights over the hot summer were spent bent over her grand piano or the cherished Gibson, channeling the utter futility of Deuce’s reappearance in her life out of Jessie’s shattered spirit and into her music. Almost always her constant companion was a few shots of the dependable loyal Kentucky bourbon. After all, it was enduring. Since 1795, seven generations of the Beam family produced the whiskey, and the company even survived the unrelenting and oftentimes dangerous darkness of prohibition. Her choice of deadening confidante was a survivor, just like Jessie.
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