Fifty-seven
Doug wanted to look in the urn but then his mother would ask him why he was looking in the urn. Maybe he should just do it. Maybe then they could finally have it out. But there seemed to be something so disrespectful about it. If it didn’t involve his dead father...
He looked toward the urn.
It wasn’t there.
Now he felt like he should be the one confronting his mother.
She trundled up behind him.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Huh?” She already had another cigarette in her mouth.
“The urn? Where is it?”
“I took it into the kitchen to clean it. You know you gotta use that stainless steel junk on...”
Doug turned toward the kitchen.
“You don’t need to go in there.”
“I want to see it.”
She grabbed his arm. He shook it off, went to the kitchen, opened the door, didn’t see any sign of the urn.
“Where is it again?”
“I...”
“Why are you lying to me?”
“Well, I had an... accident while I was cleaning it.”
“An accident.”
“I dropped it.”
“And?”
“All the ashes fell out.”
“All of them!”
“Well, you know, the ones that weren’t scattered over the baseball field.”
“Okay. Show them to me.”
“Show them to you?”
“Yeah. If you spilled them then either you left them lie there or you cleaned them up. If you cleaned them up then they must be in the garbage can or something.”
“I... I put them in the ashtray.”
“Show me.”
She began leading him into the living room before stopping.
“Okay. Okay,” she said. “It wasn’t today that it happened. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Doug didn’t really know how to answer her. He didn’t know what he wanted to hear. His head began spinning. “I...” He stumbled to the couch and sat down heavily. “I just want to hear that I had a dad.”
The weight of that truth struck him.
“Will you please let me see the urn?”
His mother left the room. Not in the direction of the kitchen. In the direction of the garage. So it was either in the garage or in the attic. Definitely well out of sight. Maybe she was hoping someone would steal it.
But why today?
Was it because they had been fighting so much? Was it her passive aggressive way of sending a signal to him?
Something else occurred to him.
She was finally going to come clean. Doug felt the dreaded truth was that she didn’t know who the father was. Or knew who the father was but didn’t know where he was.
It made perfect sense.
Died before Doug was actually born? Who does that actually happen to?
Maybe she got pregnant and never even told the father. Maybe she just wanted a child and didn’t really care who the father was.
Doug didn’t know how he felt about the thought of his father being out there.
Would he try to find him if he was? Probably not.
But wasn’t it more uplifting to think the person who contributed to his life was still alive and not dead, not lying half-scattered over some high school baseball field and half-scattered in one of his mom’s ashtrays? Both of those places seemed depressing.
And that was another thing... If his father had been such a great athlete, why hadn’t Doug inherited any of those traits?
His mother fatted down on the couch next to him, holding the urn in the lap of her dress.
Doug lifted off the top of it and looked inside. It was too dark to see anything. He stuck his finger in and rubbed the residue. Smelled it. Cigarette ash.
He nearly shook with anger.
“This is cigarette ash.”
His mother nearly laughed. Doug stood quickly from the couch. “How dare you laugh at me! After lying to me all these years!”
“I don’t know what you mean. You can’t tell the difference between ashes. That’s ridiculous.”
“Stop calling me ridiculous!”
Doug grabbed the heavy urn. It was like something else flooded into his body. Some emptiness like the inside of the urn. The metal was cool in his palms. He lifted it above his head. A brief look of fear flickered in his mother’s eyes but she still had that stupid chuckling smile on her lips.
“Stop laughing at me!”
He brought the urn down on one of her beefy shoulders. Hard, but not hard enough to justify her response.
She screamed. She threw herself onto the floor, knocking the coffee table over onto its side. She flopped around and then lay very still like Doug had killed her or something.
And though he was absolutely sure that wasn’t the case, he still felt nervous. Nervous enough to want to get out and nervous enough to want to make sure she was okay. He bent down and checked the pulse on her wrist. He had to dig hard to find it but it was there, thudding away as much as the heart of a morbidly obese smoker who never moves ever does.
Doug rested the cross-shaped urn on his shoulder and made his way to the front door.
Fifty-eight
Whitney didn’t know what else to do so she walked to the Ark Sakura. This walking everywhere bullshit was getting exhausting. The bank people had come to repossess her mother’s car the day after Whitney had taken Doug home from Crank’s. It took nearly two hours and she was covered in sweat. She wasn’t even wearing her cardigan. She really needed a car. As soon as she got out of Clover, that would be her first priority. Well, her first priority would be finding a place to stay. And then probably a job. But a car was definitely up there. Or maybe just finding a friend with a car. Or just a friend who wasn’t either a Bible thumping juvenile or a sex obsessed retard.
The sun was low by the time she got there. She expected to see people milling about but she didn’t see anything except the dark mouth of the cave.
“Crank?” she called. She didn’t remember the other guys’ names and didn’t really think they were functional enough to answer her anyway. Normally going into the cave wouldn’t have frightened her but, given the two beatings she had received lately and the overall psychotic atmosphere of the town, she wasn’t about to go into a dark, probably claustrophobic area with no rear exit.
She turned and left, guessing she would just go back home and wait for Doug. Maybe he’d done what she told him to do and checked the urn. She hoped he had come to some conclusions. She hoped she would be able to get him alone for a minute or two. She hoped she could make him believe her but wasn’t sure that was possible.
Whitney figured all men were governed by the vagina. Whatever the man’s actual beliefs were, if he was heterosexual, the vagina was his one true god. He either wanted a lot of it or one secure vagina. Like investments. When you went for one vagina, made yourself stable and righteous, that was security. Each man could take his pick. Few opted out by choice and she figured those guys were just confused.
She pegged Doug as a secure investment type of guy. Forty-eight hours ago, she would have had more of a chance of getting him to listen to her. Now she was tainted. Worse, he had seen her become tainted. Even worse, it was with Crank. Not only his best friend, but perhaps the sleaziest, dirtiest guy in Clover.
If he only knew the truth about Mindy...
If he only knew the truth about anything...
Fifty-nine
Once outside and not sure what to do, Doug walked to Whitney’s house. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her and he wasn’t sure he was going to listen to her but... she had been right about the urn. But maybe that was just a guess. Maybe she had broken into his house and done something with the remaining ashes. But why would his mom have lied about that? Why wouldn’t she have just said the ashes had been stolen for whatever reason?
There were a lot of questions that needed asking and Whit
ney seemed to be the only person eager to talk to him.
He approached her door, surprised he’d had to come this far. She had been so feverish in her attempts to contact him that he half-expected her to meet him outside.
He knocked on the door.
No answer.
Where could she be?
Probably out fucking Crank. Probably with every other slut in Clover.
Except Mindy.
Doug turned and looked around the quiet, empty neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before his mother made it out of the house or Deacon Pork came along and spotted him.
There was no answer at Whitney’s house.
That meant there wasn’t anyone inside.
Already he felt like he was backsliding, standing here and entertaining thoughts of breaking and entering, the only thing stopping him was what he remembered about Whitney’s mom being a shut-in...
She also wasn’t entirely well.
Maybe she was at a doctor’s appointment or the hospital. Maybe that was where Whitney was, too.
Doug turned the knob. The door clicked. He wiped the knob with his shirt tail and pushed the door open with the cross.
The design of this house was the same as his. He walked through the small darkened foyer and came into the living room.
Whitney’s mother was on the couch.
She wasn’t alive.
It didn’t look like she had been alive for a very long time.
A feeling of sadness for Whitney wriggled through Doug. Beneath that feeling was something more creeping and insidious.
Fear.
What the hell was going on?
He wanted to run out of the house screaming. He wanted to run out of Clover.
Instead, he went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, gently laying the metal cross on the dusty wood surface. The blinds were up and he could see his house from here.
Mindy said she would pick him up.
He waited for Mindy and tried to keep his nerves from rubberbanding around in his body.
He wondered if Whitney had any beer in her refrigerator.
Sixty
If there was a stage, Crank couldn’t find it. They would have to use the truck. They had backed it in to unload all of the Duraflames and there wasn’t any room to turn it around without driving it out of the cave. Crank felt too lazy to do that. He decided Patrick Crayze could set up his drums in the bed of the truck. Since it would be completely dark, exposure wasn’t really an issue anyway. Lurk was already passed out in the cab, his head resting on the silent keyboard and Crank figured he could just stay there. Crank would play on the hood of the truck. Maybe he would sit down and rest his feet on the front bumper. Make it like a real acoustic, unplugged show. The impact of seeing them in this arrangement when the pyrotechnics went off would be awe inspiring.
Since Patrick Crayze would be closest to the logs, Crank gave him directions on lighting them. He set him up with a plastic jug of gas and a couple boxes of kitchen matches. After dousing the logs in gas, he was to light the matches and throw both boxes on the logs. Crank decided they should do this right before their final number, “Grandma Fisting.”
As the last of the light faded from the mouth of the cave, Crank and Patrick Crayze went about their pre-show ritual of slapping each other in the ears. They were so drunk and high they couldn’t feel anything. They kept smacking until the only thing they could hear was a high ringing. Crank thought this made their performance more real. Less reliant on fidelity and crowd approval.
He was a little nervous no one had come yet. But that wasn’t a big deal. Sometimes they only played to the two or three people who’d heard about their show from the Internet and managed to crawl out of their parents’ house long enough to check it out.
They finished setting up quickly and launched into their opener, “3 Balls Deep.”
Crank couldn’t hear if the crowd went wild or not.
He couldn’t even tell if anyone was there.
He could barely hear his guitar.
After the first song, he’d have to tell Patrick Crayze to play a little softer.
Sixty-one
Doug sat at Whitney’s kitchen table contemplating the web of lies woven around him. It seemed like anyone he’d ever been close to had done nothing but lie to him. How could he trust anyone anymore? Did every adult do this to everyone else? Were people just okay with it? Functioning in their own fabricated reality?
Even his own mother. He knew parents had to occasionally tell harmless lies to their children in order to shield them from the occasionally inevitable and ugly truth. But he thought there came a time in people’s lives when they got to stop hearing those lies. How long would his mother have continued to lie to him about his father? And she still hadn’t told him the truth. Even after confronting her.
Looking toward his house of lies now, he saw his mother exit. Maybe he should run out of the house, across the yard, and confront her again. But maybe he had scared her. Maybe she would call the police. Maybe he should take the cross and beat the truth out of her. It was a good metaphor.
He laughed quietly.
The cross.
Until only a few minutes ago, it had always been his father’s urn.
He decided not to go over there.
He was going to sit where he was and wait for Mindy.
His mother got in the car and backed out of the driveway. Probably on her way to the Church.
Mindy.
Maybe she and Pastor Don were the only people who hadn’t lied to him.
Since his mother had left, he probably didn’t need to stay at Whitney’s anyway.
She probably wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. Probably at Crank’s show. And then after the show they’d probably do God knew what. Doug had seen a couple of Crank’s shows. He tried to look beyond the absence of God or Jesus in the lyrics and see how anyone could find it entertaining, but he thought it was all just an excuse for people to get together and party. He had tried to suspend judgment because he thought Crank had been his friend. But Crank wasn’t his friend anymore and he didn’t have to suspend judgment.
God’s word was the only thing he believed in.
Crank’s music was crap. He didn’t even think that was a subjective critique. He just didn’t think they were very talented, passionate, or knowledgeable.
If Doug were going to further his relationship with God, he needed to start being truthful with himself about these things. If there was one lesson he had learned from everyone’s betrayal, it was that he was as much a part of this web of lies as they were.
He stood up from the table to go home, not even bothering to take the cross with him.
Once home, he sat in the darkened living room and waited for Mindy’s horn.
Sixty-two
Whitney came out of the woods behind her house and went in through the back door. She went to the phone in the kitchen to call Doug at America Pantry again even though she was pretty sure he’d probably left.
The silver cross lay gleaming on the kitchen table.
Shit.
Doug or, even worse, his mother, had been here. That meant they knew about her mother.
Did it even matter?
In a few hours, would anything really matter ever again?
She put her hand on the cross and wondered if it had been left there as some kind of sign.
If Doug’s mother had left it there, then it could be as some kind of threat. Like she knew what Whitney had told Doug about the urn. If that were the case, Whitney would probably be lucky to even be alive until midnight. It could still be an okay thing. If Doug had confronted his mother about the urn then it meant he still trusted Whitney a little. Maybe.
If Doug had left the urn there, then maybe it was as some kind of peace offering. Maybe he would listen to her now. Maybe he would believe her. Or maybe he’d come over to beat her to death with it.
Whitney picked up the cross and left through the front door.
/>
As she stepped outside and turned to look toward Doug’s house, she saw him getting into Mindy’s car.
“Doug!” Whitney called.
He glanced at her, made a sour face, and flashed her a thumbs down.
Juvenile, she thought.
Something else. Just as Doug sat in the passenger seat and closed the door, she noticed Deacon Pork slide from the side of the house toward the car.
“Doug! Stop!”
But it was too late. Pork was in the car, quick and agile as a cat, and they were backing too fast into the street.
Whitney opened her garage door and pulled her bike down from the rack. She was finished with walking. She checked the bike’s tires. Not perfect but she thought it would be okay to ride for a little while. She hopped on, wished she owned something besides dresses, put the long side of the cross between her legs so the cross bar rested on her thighs, and began pumping toward the Ark Sakura.
If she were lucky, they would all be so wasted when she got there that they would be ready to answer her call to arms and go fuck shit up. If she were even luckier, more than a couple people had turned out to watch them and they would be more than eager to join in.
It made her sad that Doug hadn’t believed her. It meant she would have to be there and witness his face as all of his illusions were shattered. She had known the truth about the Church from an early age. But Doug had believed. It had been his passion for eighteen years. His entire life.
But it had to be done. She hoped there was some essential core to Doug’s being that would realize this after the fact.
Sixty-three
Doug opened the passenger door and, despite Mindy’s appearance, slid into the passenger seat.
Her head was shaved, her scalp gleaming white against the tan of her face. She wore a white robe that filled her half of the car. She looked like she had gained at least thirty pounds since the last time he had seen her and, even though she looked clean, a rank scent emanated from her.
Satanic Summer Page 15