by Lee Durkee
“Only if I can have another joint, for later.”
“Deal,” Tim snapped. “But we both get a drink.”
“One each. Small ones. And while you’re in there, Tim, bring me another bottle of red, please. And take your time. I want to talk to Noel alone for a few minutes.”
Tim headed for the liquor cabinet in the den. Noel, in an effort to calm himself, started rolling the joint for Miss Weiss. She watched him a moment then said, “Let me try that.” He pushed over the workings to her. Her brown eyes burrowed as she arranged everything with her little-girl fingers. While mangling the first attempt, she said, “Noel, I’m going to ask you a question you don’t have to answer.” She shot the table an exasperated look. “But first, is there anything you want to ask me? You’re quite the regular over here. Do you have any questions that need clearing up?”
He beaked his lips thoughtfully before shaking his head no.
“Your parents, do they ask you questions about me?”
“No,” he lied. “What kinda questions?”
“Oh, I have no idea. Any kind.” She seemed to be listening to some minute noise. “You know that feeling where it seems like you’ve dreamt all this before?”
“Yeah. That happens to me a lot.” He plucked a new paper out of the pack. “Here. Start over. It’s ripped, it’s no good.”
“Questions about my lifestyle. Does your stepfather ever ask you about that?”
“He doesn’t like me coming over here, if that’s what you mean.”
“Because we’re Jewish?”
“He thinks Tim’s a bad influence on me.”
“Tim’s a bad influence on you!” She growled playfully then went back to rolling the joint. “Ahh, let’s not talk about him. Anyway, that wasn’t my question. Here’s my question. The one you don’t have to answer.” She knocked over the empty wineglass. It didn’t break, and Noel caught it just as it rolled off the table, then sat it back upright between them.
“I heard the police came over and talked to you, and that—”
“I didn’t kill him,” Noel interrupted her. “That’s just a rumor started by people in my church.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you did. I’m just curious as to what you thought about it all.”
“Did Tim tell you about it?”
“No. But I did ask Tim. And he told me the police questioned you.”
“If Tim didn’t tell you, then who did?”
“I work at the hospital, remember? It’s all the talk over there. Like some soap opera. Who killed Ross Altman? The police even questioned some of us nurses. They think one of us might have been in on it.” She pouted. “I am having the hardest time following this conversation.”
“You were gonna ask me some question I don’t have to answer.”
“I was?” She rubbed her nose with her palm. “I thought I already had. Oh! I was going to ask why you were in his room that day in the hospital.”
“Did you tell the police you saw me?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Naw, they already asked me about it.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“The truth. That I just wanted to see what he looked like. They didn’t believe me, though. Nobody does. Everybody thinks I killed him, especially the police.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard his family did it. And that the police are about to arrest his father or his mother or somebody in the family.”
“Who told you that?”
“A number of people. It’s just another rumor, probably.”
“You wanna hear something weird?” Noel asked. “When I went in his room that day, there was a Ouija board spread out on top of him.”
“A Ouija board?”
“Yeah. Not on the table either, but right on his stomach. And you know what they say about Ouija boards, right?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Noel.”
“They’re used by devil worshipers. The whole company that makes them is devil worshipers. Milton Bradley is.”
“Is that something your stepfather told you?”
“Yeah,” Noel agreed, though once again it was his cousins who had told him this. “Have you ever read that book The Exorcist?”
“You mean the movie they banned here?”
“Not the movie, the book.”
“No, can’t say I have.”
“This girl in it gets possessed. And that’s how it all starts, with her playing on the Ouija board. That’s how she gets possessed.”
Noel had shoplifted The Exorcist from the mall Monday along with two books on hypnotism. Since then he had been staying up reading The Exorcist late into the night. Finally he would switch off the bedside lamp and try not to think about Satan, knowing that if Satan detected fear He could appear inside Noel’s bedroom. He might be at the foot of Noel’s bed already, bending over Noel, reading his mind—hearing him think this!—and waiting for Noel to open his eyes so that Satan could dive into his soul like into a river. . . .
“Did you tell the police about the Ouija board? That sounds like a clue to me.”
Noel had not told the police. It had felt too much like a shared secret, like something that would incriminate him. He was about to try and explain this to Miss Weiss when she called out, “I can see your shadow. You can come out now and quit eavesdropping, Tim.”
As Tim reentered the kitchen, carrying the bottles, Miss Weiss pushed her second mangled effort across the table and said, “You better take over, Noel.” Turning to Tim, she reminded him, “One drink each.” Then she covered her ears, as if her own voice were unpleasant to her, and very softly added, “I’m going into the den, to paint. Noel, this will be our little secret. You have to cross your heart that you’ll never tell anybody about tonight. Do you cross your heart, Noel?”
He did. He crossed his heart.
•••
After rebrimming their drinks for a third time, Tim thinned the Southern Comfort with water, then left a blurred note saying they’d gone out for a walk and would be back soon. Noel placed two fat joints beside the note. Then they stumbled into the carport and down the street, staggering into the night, yelling, “FUCK!” at dark houses. Yelling, “EAT ME!” Yelling, “SUCK MY DICK!” Later, inside a half-constructed house, they nested themselves in plywood to smoke the last joint and Tim started detailing ways he would fuck Layle Smokewood, “if she’d asked me to the damn Sadie Hawkins.”
Sadie Hawkins was the first dance of the coming school year, the eighth grade, which began in two weeks. Much to his own surprise, Noel had been asked to the dance by three different girls. His voice became somber as he explained to Tim, “Hell, her dad’s our preacher. What am I supposta do? Move in on her while he’s driving us home?”
“What you oughta do is hypnotize her. Like you did me the other day. Turn her into one of those farm animals.”
“You’re just pissed off nobody invited you to the dance.”
“Turn her into a cow then milk her titties all night long.”
“I knew you were just pretending to be hypnotized. It works, it just doesn’t work on morons. You have to be intelligent to be hypnotized, that’s what Edgar Cayce says.”
“Who’s Edgar Cayce?”
“Hell, your mom owns every book he ever wrote.”
In fact, that’s why Noel had shoplifted the Cayce book on hypnotism. Now he passed the joint to Tim and began telling him about Edgar Cayce, this redneck kid from Virginia who had wanted to be a preacher and who, when he was failing fourth grade, discovered that if he slept on top of a book, then the next morning he would know the contents of the book by heart.
“Wonder what would happen if he’d slept on a Hustler,” Tim commented.
“This was before Hustler,” Noel explained.
He closed his eyes and asked, “Is everything spinning around for you?”
“What’s the matter, Weatherspoon? Can’t handle your liquor?”
Noel frowned, then forced himself to continue his story.
After Cayce had grown up, he lost his voice one day and had to quit his job, because he couldn’t speak anymore. No doctors could cure him. But then a fair had come through town, and the traveling hypnotist said he could cure Cayce.
“Here,” Tim said.
“I don’t want no more. We’ll save it for later.”
They crawled out of the plywood and started weaving down the street. Noel was seeing banners, like he was still riding the Black Dragon.
“EAT ME!” Tim screamed at a graveyard. “SUCK MY DICK!”
“That a cop?” Noel asked as headlights approached.
“Why’re you always so worried about cops?”
“Hell, you would be too, if you were wanted for murder.”
“You’re not wanted for anything. You just want everybody to think you are.”
They waited until the car had passed.
“So what happened next?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That Cayce guy?”
“Oh.” Noel drew in a few deep breaths then said, “This hypnotist, he puts Cayce under. Then, all’a sudden, this weird voice comes out of Cayce’s body telling exactly what’s wrong with his throat. But this voice, it’s using all these fancy doctor words, like Latin and shit. Cayce didn’t even finish high school, he didn’t know any damn Latin. And from then on, that’s how it worked. Cayce never even met the sick person, he’d just hypnotized himself and then somebody would read off a name to him. He’d settle back and start talking in that super-scientist voice, saying, We have the body in front of us. Then he’d describe the exact room the sick person was in right at that moment, and he’d list off everything wrong with the person’s body. Everything—old scars, missing teeth, cavities, broken bones. Then he’d list off what exact medicines they needed or what operations or what—”
Noel’s legs tangled under him and he went down and scorched his palms on the blacktop.
“We have the body in front of us,” Tim said. “It needs to quit falling down.”
Noel stood up too close to Tim and bumped his chest into Tim’s face. He asked if Tim had a problem or what.
“You’re just drunk,” Tim said. “Don’t get violent on me, alright?”
“Don’t tell me what to do. You’re always act like you’re so much smarter than everybody else.”
“Hey, take your hands off me, alright? Please. Look, I got a plan for tonight—a good one—but first you have to let me go.”
Noel released him, conditionally.
After hearing the plan, Noel balked. At least he did until Tim accused him of being pussywhipped. Then they veered west, toward the new Sunflower supermarket. The dark pools between streetlights chirruped and cricketed. Noel clapped his hands to try and silence the wilderness. The claps dissolved. He shouted, “FUCK!” into the woods then listened as the word pioneered through the trees.
Automatic doors sprung them into the otherworldly fluorescence of the supermarket. They quickly bought their supplies then left. Noel finished the soda and ricocheted the empty bottle into the pine tops.
“So one day these doctors,” he continued suddenly, “without even warning Cayce, these doctors started asking him all sorts of questions about God. After he’d hypnotized himself. Just’a see what he’d say. And that same spooky voice started saying all this weird shit about reincarnation and higher selves and that the real Jesus wasn’t nothing like the one in the Bible. Then, after Cayce woke up—and they’d told him what he’d said—it scared the blue pee outa him. Because he was still this regular born-again Christian guy, and everything he’d just said, even though he’s the one said it, he thought it was all pure sacrilege.”
Tim shifted the grocery bag into his left arm and asked what was sacrilege.
“What’s sacrilege? It’s like taking the Lord’s name in vain. That’s the only sin can’t ever be forgiven. You burn for that, son.”
“You mean like saying goddamn.”
Noel winced then continued, “Anyway, that’s what Cayce thought might be happening, Satan possessing him. He didn’t know whether he should stop doing it or not. Hypnotizing himself. Because every time he did it, he cured some little kid or somebody.”
“You’re really afraid of saying goddamn?”
“You burn in hell for that, Tim. That’s what the Bible says.”
“We don’t believe in hell.”
“Don’t believe in hell?” That stopped Noel midstep. “Everybody believes in hell, Tim,” he explained. “The whole world believes in hell.”
“We don’t.”
“Not believing in hell, that’s like not believing in Australia or something.”
“We don’t believe in Australia, either.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m joking.”
A street lamp was flickering and clicking its light down upon the husks of dead frogs, flat and brittle as leaves, scattered over the road. Noel scuffed the husks along with his sneakers. He was feeling less dizzy now. Finally he asked, “Okay, say some guy spends his whole life murdering people, like Hitler, where does he go after he dies?”
“That’s easy,” Tim replied. “Mississippi.”
•••
Set back from the street, the front lawn landscaped with magnolia and dogwood receding in perfect rows toward the still-lit windows, the Smokewoods’ home resembled something out of a fairy tale, at least to Noel it did. The grass was as perfectly groomed as a golf course’s. The dirt driveway was lined with railroad ties. Tim and Noel stood facing a moat of flower beds glowing white with chrysanthemum and hydrangea. Tim reached into the grocery bag and opened a package of white toilet paper then handed two rolls to Noel. They moved inward, launching the rolls into the air, watching them crest and unfurl over tree limb and power line, then retrieving the rolls to hurl them skyward again. Noel reached the shadow of the house and stepped into a bright pane of light beneath a window—he could see into the empty living room—and from there he lobbed a roll onto the roof and stood planted on the grass while it unwound down the slope and leapt the rain gutter. He caught it and threw it again. When their supply was empty, they went around gathering loose rolls and relaunching them until the house and trees and power lines were all draped a ghostly white. The whole process was as silent as Noel imagined snowfall to be, and for years afterward this was how he pictured snow.
An hour later he was lying on his back beside the road, staring up at the three tangential moons, his hands folded behind his head. They had just smoked the last half of the last joint, and now Tim was pissing into a nearby ravine. Suddenly a sheet of light inserted itself between Noel and his moons. Sitting up, he found himself blinking into an incomprehensible vehicle that appeared to be hovering above the ground.
Tim, using his most bitingly sarcastic voice, yelled out, “Hey, Weatherspoon, it’s a cop!” A second later he added, “Oh shit, it really is a cop.”
•••
They were placed in separate rooms downtown. Staring at his shoelaces jumbled with briars, Noel informed a police officer that some guys driving a green Camero had thrown a bunch of beer at them. The cop, middle-aged with short orangish hair, a bird-beak nose, and rusty eyebrows that twisted upward like a mustache, was leaning forward behind his desk. His hands appeared to be clasping his head onto his shoulders.
“Weatherspoon . . .” he mused, “now why does that name sound familiar?”
Noel, who thought he was facing a whole roomful of orange-haired cops, muttered, “I was just out for a walk. I couldn’t sleep.”
After twenty minutes of interrog
ation, the cop shut his eyes and said, “Son, let’s try working up from something small. What color is grass?”
When Noel answered green, the cop clapped and said, “That’s real good, Noel. You didn’t lie about something.” He stood and came around the desk. “Let’s try something a little harder now. For instance, you mind telling me what’s this on your arm?”
And he rolled up Noel’s sleeve. They both stared at the tattoo of the Zig-Zag man on Noel’s upper forearm. Then the cop wet his finger and smeared the face.
“Who’s that supposed to be, Jesus?”
“Yes sir,” Noel agreed. “It’s Jesus.”
“Jesus don’t smoke.”
“No sir. It started off being someone else. Then kinda turned into Jesus.”
“You a pretty religious fella, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Look at me when I talk to you.”
“Yes sir.”
“What religion are you?”
“First Baptist.”
“That why you got your hair so long, to look like Jesus?”
Noel shrugged, started to speak, but didn’t. His stomach was doing strange things, as were his eyes. Opening his mouth did not seem like a good idea.
“Drawing pictures on yourself, that something you do a lot of?”
He shrugged and said, “Only when I’m bored.”
The cop nodded a circular digestive nod, then he reached into his shirt pocket and asked, “What else you like to do, son, when you’re bored?”
And he held the creased Polaroid in front of Noel’s bloodshot eyes.
“I didn’t kill nobody,” Noel said.
•••
Noel was shaking his head no, no, no, no . . .
The cop was asking, “You take that picture?”
He was asking, “Wait, let me guess. Some guys in a green Camero threw it at you?”
He was asking, “That your girlfriend?”
He was asking, “She’s a bit old for you, ain’t she?”
He was asking, “She the one sold y’all that wacky tobaccy?”
He was asking, “You know there’s laws against this kind of behavior? This ain’t exactly Louisiana.”