CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
This was the point at which I almost quit writing this book, because I have a great fear of confrontation. I was going to dedicate it to Virginia after it was accepted for publication, because I was her Poet and she died young, which is always fashionably tragic.
But here came Beth and was acting like the kind of woman whose feelings would be hurt if I dedicated my autobiography to another woman. And she didn’t seem like the kind who would conveniently die. Plus, there’s You-Know-Who, the ghostwriter, the hack who wants all the credit but does none of the work.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before: “Hey, I got this great idea for a book. Why don’t you write it and we’ll split the money?”
The problem, of course, is that this particular co-author has no need for money. All he craves is a little attention. Why do you think he wants to be the protagonist? But so far I’ve spared you from his nihilistic clichés and self-serving, ideological crap. Hopefully I’ll get this submitted before he finds this version, so forgive me if I type real fast for a few pages.
I was drifting on a black sea, with the Little People like sharks nibbling away at the rubber raft of my psyche or the pirate captain’s sword walking me down the gangplank or some other lost-at-sea simile. The darkness was no longer safe. I needed an anchor. I needed Beth, for hope and help and all the other selfish reasons people used as an excuse to love one another.
Love. Speaking of unwilling suspension of disbelief…
I called her the next night, after a long battle with Loverboy and Little Hitler. Her roommate answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said. “Is Beth home?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Know when she’ll be in?”
“I think she went out with somebody.”
A date? A bright flame of jealousy roared in my chest. But what claim did I have? None but that of the needy.
The mellifluous voice on the other end broke the silence. “Uh...do you want to leave a message?”
“Yes. Just tell her Richard called.” Nah, say “Loverboy,” numbnuts, whispered one of my roommates.
“Richard?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Oh. Faux pas. You’re the guy she’s been seeing, right?”
Seeing. Was this sweeping romance for the ages reduced to mere ocular activity? I wanted to slam the phone into the wall. I wanted to blink razors. I wanted to...
Kill Beth.
Who said that? Little Hitler? Loverboy?
Or...
“I saw you yesterday,” said the roommate. Her voice was deeper than Beth’s, huskier.
“You did? Where?” My throat was tight, as if Little Hitler were squeezing it into silence.
“Walking down the street.”
“Oh. Uh...were you...?”
“...the one looking out the window yesterday? The girl at the bar?”
She’s just another skinbag, Richie. A sopping camel toe dipped in a desert oasis.
Loverboy, stay out of this.
“...I mean, I don’t think we’ve met,” I finished, slamming the Bone House door.
“I’m Monique. I’ve seen you, you know, bringing Beth home.”
Did I hear her giggle? Was she taunting me? Like Sally? “I’ve got to go. Do me a favor. Don’t tell Beth I called.”
I hung up fast, before Loverboy had a chance to lick his chops and say something I’d regret later. I had enough to worry about as it was. Had some new dark closet opened inside me? Some crack in the plaster that patched over my ego?
Help me, Mister Milktoast.
“Come inside, Richard.”
No. Not in there. Not with them.
“It’s safe. It’s dark. It’s cool.”
But...
“Come, Richard.”
Don’t.
Want.
To.
Lose.
Me.
“I’ll protect you,” Mister Milktoast whispered, in that maternal tone that both comforted and disturbed and ultimately always won.
Darkness. Something dreamed, something walked. I lost thirty-six hours.
Because this is my autobiography and I’m writing this in retrospect, I could easily make up a bunch of bullshit about how I went out of town for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip. But if I started making up alibis for my own life, I doubt if you’d stick with me. We’ve established a relationship, you and I. We’ve reached a mutual misunderstanding. If you walked out on me now, closed the book, that would prove you are unreliable and fainthearted. I have faith in you. You’re made of better stuff than that.
“Did you see the paper?” Miss Billingsly asked me at the bookstore on Wednesday.
“No, I haven’t had a chance. I’ve been doing inventory on the Harry Potter backlist.” Actually, Bookworm had been doing the work, but of course I couldn’t tell her that.
“Some girl from the college has been reported missing.”
My heart flipped, hung upside down. “When?”
“They’re not sure. Could have been a few days ago.”
“Maybe she had enough of school and took off for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip,” I said, in Mister Milktoast’s reassuring voice. But something inside knew better. I started to sweat, even though the air was cool. No Bookworm could amend this panic, no Milktoast could sop this doubt.
Miss Billingsly pushed her eyeglasses up her nose. “The parents are frantic. They’re flying down from New York, according to the paper. With all these school shootings, everybody’s on edge anyway.”
She stood behind the counter, a woman in her element. She was like a captain standing on the bridge of a ship, as if the bookstore were a pleasurecraft of words. But my own pleasure was plundered along with my recent memory.
Mister Milktoast wagged a cautioning finger from the back closet. Brittany, the other weekday employee of the Paper Paradise, came down the history aisle.
“I knew a friend of hers,” she said. I looked into Brittany’s heart-shaped face, her brown hair parted in the middle. She wore a leather string around her neck. Little Hitler saw it as a noose while Loverboy viewed it as a mild bondage prop.
“Said her roommate hadn’t seen her in three days. She lived in an apartment off-campus. She liked to sleep around, if you know what I mean—”
Brittany must have seen Miss Billingsly’s look of disapproval. Or maybe it was a look of wistfulness. But she continued. “Anyway, the roommate didn’t worry about her for a while, but then she went in her bedroom to borrow a sweater and saw none of the clothes had been disturbed.”
“Meaning she hadn’t come back for a change of clothes?” Miss Billingsly asked.
“No. So she checked around, called the parents...”
“And now the police,” Miss Billingsly finished.
“Well, her boyfriend is a person of interest,” Brittany said. “He has a motorcycle. You know the kind.”
Arlie, the geezer in the hunting vest, approached the counter, eyes afire with the fervent conspiracy of gossipers. I had explained to him earlier in the morning that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus wasn’t a book about our alien origins. His wrinkled hands clutched a coffee mug that was half full of decaf. We’d watered him down.
“You talking about the girl?” he said in his raspy voice that was as native as the Appalachian dirt.
“Hello, Arlie,” said Miss Billingsly. “I was just telling Richard about it.”
“Well, they don’t know for sure, but I got my own theories,” Arlie said.
The silver wires of his brows arced heavily over his dark eyes, giving him the appearance of a vulture. His neck crooked, as if drooping to peck at carrion, and this heightened the raptorial effect. He was clearly enjoying the opportunity to impart hitherto secret knowledge.
“There’s been no indication of foul play,” Miss Billingsly said. I nodded at Arlie.
I had a hunch about his theory. I had sold Arlie more t
han one book on UFOs and had listened to him describe his back-porch sightings. I had a suspicion the alien visitors rose from the bottom of a Mason jar of white lightning. He was also a fan of what he called “unexplainable phee-nomenons,” the kind of stuff you’d see in shows hosted by washed-up character actors from the various “Star Trek” series. But I couldn’t exactly ridicule his theories, because I was starting to develop an unsettling theory of my own.
“Lunatic killer,” Arlie said.
Miss Billingsly shook her head, and her glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them up with a finger and said, “I just can’t see it happening here. A small town like this?”
Arlie’s eyes shifted joyfully from side to side under his vulturine eyebrows. “Then maybe it was one of them alien abductions.”
Miss Billingsly and Brittany laughed.
Arlie’s face reddened. “It’s that college, is what draws them here. I seen them. They come after these kids who move here with television antennas stuck up their noses and shooting up all kinds of mindrot. I been against that college from the very start, from back when it was just a two-room shack out in a cow pasture.”
I didn’t know how I felt about aliens. Intellectually, I figured they probably existed. Yet I had never seen one. What was even more frightening was the idea that they might not exist, that humans were the highest achievement of the universe. That we were the best that God, nature, and evolution could come up with. If so, the divine creator needed to eat some psychedelic drugs.
“Now the school’s gobbling up the whole damn town,” Arlie continued. “I see where they bought out Ralph’s feed store and gonna tear it down to put in some tennis courts. That college is just a magnet for trouble, I tell you.”
“And you believe the college has something to do with the girl’s disappearance?” asked Brittany.
“Sure. She wasn’t missing before she came here to go to school, was she?”
A woman of about thirty walked up to the counter with a stack of psychology books. Arlie stepped back to allow her access to the counter and Brittany began ringing up the purchase.
“Say, here’s a smart woman,” said Arlie, looking at the book titles. “You teach at the college?”
“Yes,” the woman said. She was pretty, with long blonde hair. Loverboy drank her in through my eyes and built nasty little fantasies in the basement of my brain.
“What about the missing girl, then? You probably know more than we do,” Arlie said.
“It’s too early to form a conclusion.” Her voice was cold, as if idle chatter with townies was beneath her. “Not enough evidence yet. And it’s only been a day and a half.”
“What about the damned underground installations I heard about? Down there under the gym. Got UFO radar dishes. What about them?”
The woman drew back as Brittany bagged the books. Miss Billingsly put a hand on Arlie’s shoulder to calm him down.
“I call that evidence, don’t you?” Arlie shouted. The other customers were starting to stare. Miss Billingsly apologized to the woman, who ripped the bag from Brittany and hurried out the door without looking back.
“Tell us about the RABBITS!” Arlie yelled after her.
Miss Billingsly led him to the reading corner and sat him at a table. I listened in without trying. Or rather, the Bookworm lent an ear.
“Now, Arlie, I don’t mind you hanging around, because a little local color is good for business,” she chastised. “But you have to control these outbursts. Everyone at the college is not an alien from one of your television shows.”
“That college is a magnet, I tell you. Draws all kinds of weirdoes. From different worlds.”
“Arlie, I’ve lived here as long as you have, and I say change isn’t always for the worse. I couldn’t keep this bookstore in business without the college.”
He seemed small and defeated as he sat staring out the window. I almost felt sorry for him, but I had learned to store my pity. I knew I would need it for myself, and the Bone House cupboard was bare of such compassion.
Plus, I knew the strangest invasions came not from without, but from within.
I busied myself at the register as Brittany stocked the shelves. Mister Milktoast was glad the conversation had turned from murder. He was feeling a little squeamish.
“Trouble in paradise,” he said to me.
Shady Valley?
“No. Here in the House. Upstairs.”
Are you trying to tell me something?
“Just a sour note from a lemon drop.”
I’ll keep it in mind.
Arlie came back to the counter, subdued now. He lowered his voice to a confidential level.
“Something damned fishy is going on in this town. Ain’t been the same since that double rape and murder here in ‘72. Folks has all but forgot that one. ‘It’ll never happen here,’ they say. Well, it does. Because they are here.”
I nodded. Arlie had told me about the silver saucers that flew down from Widow’s Peak, the high stony mountain above his farm. They were here. Sure. I’d believe that like I’d believe four or five little people lived inside my head.
“It’s a pitcher-perfect town on the outside,” he said. “The one they put on the postcards and the travel guides. But under the whitewash is a black bellyful of trash. All the decent, God-fearing families that settled these parts been wet down and poisoned by slick money and big-city lawyers. They call it progress, they do.
“I remember the day they cut the ribbon for the college. The mayor and even old Senator Hallifield was there, all of them standing in the middle of that pasture and grinning like a pack of turtles eating saw briars. With one foot on a shovel, as if any one of that sorry bunch had ever turned a day’s work in their lives.”
“Now, Arlie, don’t have one of your spells,” I said. Miss Billingsly had taken his mug, but his hands still cupped as if he were nursing it.
“Senator Hallifield stepped in a big pile of cow shit and fell and busted his ass.” His laugh was a frog’s muddy croak. “That part never made the papers.”
He was quiet again, limp, like a skeleton on a hook in an anatomy class whose lesson was nearly over. “I remember old Vernell Hartbarger standing there in his coveralls. Vernell was the one that sold them the cow pasture. That land had been in his family since before the American Revolution, been tilled and bled on by a dozen generations afore his. But now he had a pocketful of slick money, and he didn’t give a damn if they built an open sewer there.”
Arlie looked at me, at Bookworm. Bookworm listened. I didn’t. “Vernell went off with that money, down to Charlotte. Had a heart attack on top of a big-city whore three days later. Died in her arms, they said. They never did find the money.”
“And now the college is a lasting testament to his folly,” Bookworm said.
Arlie looked at me, confusion clouding his red eyes.
“Our own big-city whore,” Bookworm added, meaning the college, not caring whether Arlie was quick enough to make the metaphorical leap.
He turned slowly, again just a lonely and scared old man, the vulture’s fierceness faded. He walked to the door, stooped and defeated.
“Maybe the aliens got that girl,” he said, his hand on the front glass. “Or the rabbits.”
Without waiting for a reply, he went out and got behind the wheel of his rusty Ford pickup. A cloud of blue smoke rolled across the parking lot as the engine whined to life. Arlie pulled the truck out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane highway that headed out of town towards his farm.
I had been out to his farm once, a ramshackle group of buildings at the foot of Widow’s Peak. His was the last house on Tater Knob Road, before the mountain really started rising out of the ground. He had offered me some moonshine but I didn’t want it. Then he’d pointed out the spots in his fields where the saucers had landed.
Now, as he drove away, hunched over his steering wheel, I imagined he was remembering when the road was just a dirt stitch in the flesh of meadows, ba
ck before aliens, lawyers, and madmen invaded Shady Valley.
Brittany came to the counter as I watched the Ford disappear in traffic. “Crazy old coot,” she said.
“I suppose.” I was trying to fight back Loverboy, who had been developing an attraction to Brittany. “What was her name?”
“Who?”
“The missing girl.” I tried a Milktoast smile. “The one the aliens got.”
“Oh. Shelley,” she said. “Shelley Birdsong.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Night.
I couldn’t sleep, because I might dream.
And while I dreamed, something else might awaken. Something that had worn my skins during my blackout. Those missing hours hung wide and heavy over my mind, a fog on a lost sea. And Shelley might be in that swirling mist, sucked down by the Charybdis of my unknown appetites, rolled over by the Sisyphus stone of my futility, or otherwise undone through a mythological metaphor that Bookworm hasn’t looked up yet.
“Nutter coincidence,” Mister Milktoast said, ever the optimist. Or maybe merely a habitual liar. Tiny warning bells sounded, elves hammered on the roof, a steam train blew its whistle, smoke sucked itself down the chimney.
I rose from bed cold. I had put Shelley’s phone number in my top desk drawer, there with a handful of letters from Mother and a dozen old photographs that I had found in the Valiant’s glove box. Loverboy wouldn’t let me forget to write the number down. He knew I had a lot of things on my mind.
The number wasn’t there.
I checked my pockets. Nothing.
I went downstairs into the laundry room, which was Mister Milktoast’s tidy milieu. There, in the pants I must have worn the day before, the number was creased and fingered like an old secret. As I touched the paper, a mental picture flashed of my dialing the number.
Then came another picture, like frames of a film that had jammed the sprockets of the projector, so that the motion didn’t fit together. The illusion revealed its lie. The frame froze.
Shelley downstairs, on the sofa. Late afternoon sun streaming through the window, catching the back of her head and making her red hair blaze. She is holding a cigarette—no, a joint—in her right hand. Her feet are on my coffee table, her leather sandals pressed against my Incredible Hulk comic books, wrinkling the covers. Her gray eyes stare at me, oblivious of my identity. As oblivious as I am.
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