“Sorrow? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your hot lady friend. The one you been hangin’ around with.”
“What?” Had she told him, confided in this monster somehow? Impossible.
“Haven’t you heard?” His pimply face broke into a black grin. I wanted to drive my fist into his vacuous mouth.
“Heard what?” I said.
“She killed herself last night.”
Time stopped as his words hung in the air, words that dripped with glee. My heart stopped as well, caught between beats.
Brickman’s voice came from somewhere far away. “Slashed her wrists, man. Painted the town red. Fucked herself up but good.”
Even through the veil that was dropping between me and the real world, a gray gauze that both swaddled and bound, I understood what Brickman wanted. Not money. Money was all around, money could be taken. Brickman wanted what he and his ilk treasured above all else. The currency of pain.
I elbowed him in the stomach and broke through the crowd, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of my tears.
He shouted after me as I ran down the hall. “Hey, man, I fucked her twice.”
His greasy pack of jackals howled with laughter as I burst through the doors, the sound swelling to a roar that filled my ears and compressed my skull, crushed me to charcoal.
When awareness returned, I was in the Valiant, driving toward the horizon, racing into the sun. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and Ottaqua was shrinking, its decrepit and rundown buildings becoming golden stubble on the landscape. It had never looked so beautiful as it did while disappearing.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, looked at the person that had lived my life. I looked behind my glasses into the dirt-brown weeping eyes that looked then beyond themselves into invisible faces. Faces that laughed and cried and mocked and smirked and stared back with black determination. The ones inside my head who had no intention of being left behind.
The Bone House grew wheels and the Little People were along for the ride.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I thought only of Virginia as the states whirred past under my frantic tires. I had driven across the flat prairies of Illinois and Indiana, each mile of straight ribbon highway the same as the one before, with only the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to mark my progress. I slid through the soft hills of Kentucky while the sun set like a fat orange dime dropping into the slot of a broken pay phone. In the darkness, the Appalachian Mountains guided me up and on, as if in on some cosmic joke and anxious to see the punch line. Shady Valley, North Carolina, opened its crusty eyes in the morning to find that I had perched on its shoulder like a weary nightbird.
Under the new dawn, I drove through the narrow streets of Shady Valley, past the silent sleeping brick and the small dirt squares of garden. Tops of dormitories sparkled through the dewy oaks. I was too young to remember Westridge University from my first and only visit, but I had read of it. Old wooden houses with creekstone bases huddled near the road, their outbuildings camping under brown-blossomed apple trees. I wondered if one of those tired lonely houses had been Granddad’s.
My eyes were puffy from a night of peering at the sweeping broom-edge of the headlights. The Valiant groaned, its pistons sick of thin oil and its joints creaky with automotive arthritis. I pulled behind an abandoned gas station, wrapped my head in dirty shirts, and slept. No dreams or inner voices rang their tinny bells.
I lived there for weeks, sleeping in my car, with only an ashtray full of coins keeping me from starvation while I tried to figure out my next step. Suicide was an option, of course, but maybe I wanted to hang around to finish my life and start this book. Sometimes you don’t know the reason for things. Some clowns say you have to let God take control, but fuck that fucker. Any sonofabitch who’d let a man rape his own little girl had no control and sure as hell didn’t deserve to meet me before I was ready to bitchslap Him back to the Book of Genesis. This called for spiritual cross-training, more forging by fire, beating soul plows into swords.
I found a bookstore called the Paper Paradise down on the main highway. I began spending my days there, drinking free coffee and haunting the aisles, finding comfort in the borrowed imaginations of books the way I had done as a child. I believe that was where Bookworm was born, squirming into the light of my consciousness, as I turned those pages and met Jung and Freud, Dante and Homer, Mohammed and Buddha.
Bookworm could have been there all along. It is horrible to not even know your own mind. But maybe none of us do, and that’s why we share these stories, even though half of everything is bullshit. We never know which half, and it keeps changing on us, so all we can do is keep searching and guessing and turning the page. Pray that you don’t get a paper cut.
I was holding a hardback copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha when the woman I came to know as Miss Billingsly came up behind me. I had seen her at the counter often enough to know she was the storeowner, and I tried to stay out of her sight as much as possible. Too bad I couldn’t be as invisible as my Bone House roommates.
“I see you know how to treat a book,” she said, in her firmly gentle voice. I turned and she was looking at me over the top of her glasses. “You don’t stretch it wide open and break the spine like most people do.”
She had a sharp Roman nose and the iron-gray patches in her dark hair gave her a stern aspect, which was part of the reason that I avoided her. She pushed her cat-eye glasses up the steep slope of her nose. She was in constant battle with the glasses. They skied down her nose, cutting a slow slalom on her skin, then stopped at the slight bulb at the end of the run. They perched precariously there before leaping into space when she tilted her head. The glasses landed safely on her drooping bosom, dangling from a gold chain.
“I would never harm a book,” I said. Only people, Little Hitler whispered, especially the ones I tried to love. I was afraid she was about to order me out of the store, exile me from my only refuge.
“I’ve seen you in here almost every day for three weeks. But I’ve never seen you buy anything.”
I shrugged. “It’s not because I don’t want to.”
“You’re not a student, are you? When they come in to buy books, they have a list and a grimace, as if they’ve been sent to cut a hickory switch that’s going to be used on their bare hind ends.”
I was too uncertain to laugh, wondering where this was leading. “No, but I might go back to school someday. I just moved here.”
She put her glasses back on. They instantly slid an inch down her nose. She peered over them like a school marm. “Where from?” she asked, hands on her hips.
“Iowa.” Also known to me as Purgatory, The Seventh Stage of Hell, Auschwitz, the Badlands, that little room where you pee in a cup for a cancer test.
“A Midwesterner, huh? Did you start suffering from agoraphobia?”
If only I had such mundane fears. The truth? I killed my father, I’m working on killing my mother, I drove my first true love to kill herself, and the people in my head won’t let me commit suicide. Other than that, I heard the scenery here was nice.
“Shady Valley seemed like a peaceful place to move to,” I said. “My grandfather lived here once.”
“I can see you love books. I tell you what, I need somebody to work here during the day. I’ve had a stream of students working for me, but they’re always going off on vacations without giving notice. I’d like to have somebody who knows a little about books and has the time to spare. And you surely can’t have a job, as much time as you’re spending here.”
I looked down at the floor, avoiding her schoolmarm gaze.
She continued, “That wasn’t meant to be an insult. I’m offering you a job. A mutually beneficial relationship, I hope.”
“But you don’t know anything about me.”
“What’s there to know? If you can run a cash register, I don’t care if you’re the devil’s keeper. Besides,” she said, pointing at my mug, “if I’m going to
keep you in coffee, I may as well get some work out of you. So, are you interested, Mr.—?”
“Richard Hitler. I mean Coldiron. Richard Coldiron, ma’am.”
“Let me get the forms for you to sign, then I’ll give you the official orientation.” She cocked one of her sienna eyes. “Unless you have other plans for the day...”
“I was going to be here anyway.”
I managed a weak smile, or maybe it was Mister Milktoast or even the new one, Bookworm. She pushed her glasses up her nose again and went into the storeroom. I started working at the Paper Paradise that day, though I did have to write my goddamned birth date on the job application. I lied about it, of course.
I worked there for four years, saved enough money to buy a small house and settle down to something resembling a routine. A lot of other stuff happened, some of it probably important, but don’t you hate it when you’re right in the middle of a good story and the author veers off into some meaningless masturbation? Sometimes you have to hit the fast-forward button. Any scars from that period are still scars, and the highlights will probably become important later on. I’ll let you know if any of it turns out to matter. Trust me.
Though I made my home in the North Carolina mountains, Iowa may as well be in my front yard, it’s so much a part of my daily existence. The terrain is different; here, granite has been squeezed up from the Earth’s crust and coated with dark alluvial soil, instead of being bulldozed flat by ancient glaciers and paved with red clay. But rain and snow still fall from the same sky, and the same sun still burns holes through the clouds.
When those clouds are blown by a hard northwestern wind and make shadows on the ground, I sometimes see faces in the mountains, fleeting black ghosts. If only the dead would stay dead, did not fly that way across the stands of ash and poplar, did not flit over the stunted, acid-raped balsams at the highest peaks that are ghosts themselves, perhaps my escape would have been successful. But those dead always move on, lance me with memories and then head to the Atlantic. It’s the other ghosts that truly haunt, the other ghosts that linger and which no winds touch. Those without faces or else wearing my own.
I had hoped that here in these time-worn Appalachian mountains, I could lose myself among the rocks and streams, duck into the vast laurel thickets where the light never reaches. I could become loam, lie down and rot with the brown leaves, find noble purpose as food for grubs. Then perhaps my soul could emerge, cleansed of sins, to cavort with woodsprites and squirrels.
But nature and that bastard God, in their sadistic wisdom, have overblessed me with the gift of life. Instead of one soul for which to beg forgiveness, I get a congregation. But their sins are not their own, because they spill over onto me. And I can’t be sure if there is a part of me that motivates them, that has forced them to share my darkness, that has nourished them with possessive poison.
The sun reached through the windows of my house all day and the trees provided enough of a border that the lot seemed larger than half an acre. My neighbors kept to themselves, waved politely while mowing their lawns or hanging birdhouses from birch limbs. We were strangers, keeping our secrets as carefully as fences, in separate worlds only yards apart.
I wrote to Mother after I settled down, more out of guilt than a son’s love. What did I hope to hear? That she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and rededicated her life to Christ? That she had peddled the rights to her life story to be used in a made-for-TV movie? That somehow the drinking had permanently blacked out the past, so we could again safely be family?
I received an occasional rough-cornered postcard, featuring Mother’s bleary scrawl, asking me to come home because she was getting lonely. Three times I sat in my packed car in my driveway, with several free days ahead, time enough for the drive to Iowa. Each time, I reached for the key and froze. I had escaped those memories, or at least put time and distance between them, and there I was, about to drive straight down a one-way street to a bone-littered tar pit.
I could hear myself as she opened the door.
“You’re looking real good, Mother.” Despite the roadmap of broken blood vessels on your face, despite your watery red eyes, despite your mottled skin that you insist on exposing far too intimately.
“No, really, the years have been kind to you.” Kind enough to bring you closer to a restful grave and farther from the past.
“You haven’t changed a bit.” You’re still drinking two pints a day and your breath is still rancid and you still don’t look a day over a hundred and ten.
“It can be just like the old days.” Except I don’t have another father and you don’t have a husband to dance with, because the medical examiner most definitely did not bury him with his boots on. If the dead someday rise up and walk, that’s one corpse that will be barefoot.
“I’m so excited about the future.” Because one day you will fall face-first in your own vomit and the flies will lay eggs in your eyes and at last I can be able to say “I love you” again. And my own time will expire, my own clock will wind down, and these little people in the Bone House will jump ship like a pack of wharf rats, leaving me finally and forever alone.
“Oh, yes, and the reason I hate you is because you heaped shit on me, guilt with one hand and love with the other. Because you apologized for your state of chronic denial. Because you fucking forgave me, when you should have nailed me to a dirty dogwood.”
And after I envisioned this loathsome reunion, my hand dropped from the key and I unpacked the car and I got on with a life that would never end too soon. And I could write her a letter, telling her how the frost makes the grass sparkle magically and how the mountains have souls and the creek beds sing here and the wind bends the pines like green sails, telling her a thousand things about the world that swirls on around me. But I never, ever dared show anything of myself, of the son she raised who might or might not have emotions or tears or triumphs, who may or may not remember childhood’s dreadful rites of passage, rites surely not meant to end in human sacrifice.
And I could never write how I hated Father, not merely because of the years of fearing his boots, not merely because he happened to die, not merely because he died by my hand or her hand or Little Hitler’s hand, but because we only killed him once instead of inflicting the thousand deaths he deserved.
And I could never thank her for protecting me, for enduring the taunts and whispers and accusations that followed her trial, for unselfishly throwing herself on the spears and daggers of public opinion. Because if we had been found out and stopped then, perhaps others might have been spared.
And I could never forgive her for trying to love me as no mother should love her son, even though surely there was room for forgiveness in my vampire heart. And, though her motives for loving may have been pure, the road of good intentions is paved with broken glass and the clabbered milk of kindness and maybe some shitty asphalt.
So I wrote instead of the slick-furred groundhog who lived under the barn up the road, of the backyard blue jays that battled in a flurry of soft feathers over mating rights, of the moles that cut endless random symbols in the soil, of the dying oak tree whose limbs were blue-gray with weary age. I wrote of Arlie Wesson and his tentacled astronauts, Martha Billingsly’s hair done in a beehive that sagged like a sack of wet raccoons, Denny Moody’s pickup truck with the deer antlers sticking out each side of the cab, Brittany’s freshest tattoo, D.J. Uncle Daddy’s latest obnoxious morning show jingle on the local AM station.
And I always came to the part where I had to write “Love, Richard,” and each time I wrote a lie, folded the paper, and licked the strip of glue, sealed it not with a kiss but with mere saliva for a woman who could not know the meaning of a word she had never heard.
And I placed the letters in the mailbox, raised the red steel flag, and went back inside, my guilt assuaged for mother-writing but not for everything else. I could have happily grown old fooling myself, fooling everyone, pretending to believe in picnics and sunshine, yellow butterflie
s and flowering forsythia, Dick Clark and Froot Loops.
But if I hit fast-forward on the rest of my life, then I wouldn’t have much to write about. And, to be perfectly honest for a change, I’m afraid of what will happen if I ever finish this story. Maybe you’re the person who is making all this seem real. Without you, I really am alone.
So let’s see together, so neither of us has to be too afraid.
Because then came Beth, sweet Beth, true love Beth, the woman of my dreams, the kitten of my ka-boodle, who sent my heart kiting skyward to hell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I met Beth at the gallery in the Westridge University Student Union. I went to art shows there to knock the dust off my brain, so I could at least watch how the rest of the human race played the existence game, even if I had to stay on the sidelines. Besides, Mister Milktoast liked the pretty colors.
The featured works that week were done by a graduate student who labored under the self-applied label of “postfuturism.” The label was a handy excuse to combine the flat cubes of Picasso with the sensual serenity of Gauguin without bothering to master a disciplined style. The canvases swam with broadly applied pastels in uncoordinated bands of mauve, peach, and salmon.
I stood before a “landscape,” six feet high by eight feet wide, as if the artist were proving true the old saying that size matters. On this surface, which strained to crush not three dimensions into two, but two dimensions into one, the artist had sopped on a background of oils thinned with mineral spirits so that every weave of the canvas showed through. Then, in a remarkable tribute to Brueghel, the artist had scattered a pollution of thick dark oil blots, which were scratched outwards in the impression of a hundred starry stick figures. To add insult to injury, a few daubs a la Van Gogh littered the lower right corner of the painting. As an afterthought, three or four collections of green dots, too obviously gouged by the wooden tip of the brush, hinted at trees. A dozen painters were rolling over in their graves, entire Flemish cemeteries were in turmoil.
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