by Ron Rash
As soon as she said it, I did. Everything shifted closer and then farther away. One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, I told myself, then said the words aloud.
“‘And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all,’” Ligeia added. “That’s a great song, isn’t it?”
“Groovier than groovy,” I said, grinning. “That show I listen to played it again last week. ‘Feed your head.’ That’s how it ends.”
“Yes, ‘feed your head.’”
We chanted the words to each other, like a mantra, until Ligeia stood up and motioned toward the creek.
“Come on, let’s get in the water.”
I took another swallow of whiskey and stood. The world swirled around me. It was like a carousel ride, except I was on the carousel and watching it at the same time. On the bank Ligeia took off her bikini top and bottom. She waded in until her pale breasts bobbed. Unlike where Bill and I swam, this pool was surrounded with more laurel than trees. Sunlight dazzled the pool’s surface and for a few moments I believed that Ligeia’s lower body shimmered in silver scales, and that she was summoning me to follow her downstream, back to her magical ocean kingdom.
I removed my cutoffs and waded in, but the pool’s wider sky brought with it a sensation of vulnerability. What I’d felt in June came back now, but more intensely. I knew I was being watched, if not by Grandfather then by a policeman or game warden. I looked upstream and Bill wasn’t there. No, I thought. He didn’t come today, and it’s because he knew what was going to happen.
“What’s wrong, babe?” Ligeia asked.
“Somebody’s watching us,” I said, splashing to the bank and jerking on my cutoffs. “They know we’ve got drugs and they’re going to arrest us.”
Ligeia came out of the water and we stood still and listened. The only sound was a woodpecker’s tap-tap-tap near the road. No, I thought, it’s not a woodpecker, it’s someone using that sound as a signal.
“There’s no one else here, Eugene,” Ligeia said, holding my hand as she led me back to the quilt. “Lay down and close your eyes. Listen, babe, sometimes pot can do this. In a minute or two you’ll be okay. I promise.”
She settled behind me and placed her arm over my stomach and pulled closer, her bare breasts against my back, knees and thighs touching mine. After a few minutes I felt better, but I’d confirmed what I’d never doubt again, that despite all the songs celebrating pot, my drug was the old-fashioned one. And now I knew where I could get it for myself, and I would.
FEED YOUR HEAD, Grace Slick wails a last time and the final drum cymbal fades from inside the record store and the song is over. But then the song is not over, in my head at least, because a line of verse scalds like a cattle brand:
And the red queen’s off with her head
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When I look back on the summer of 1969, I marvel at how unconnected Sylva seemed from the rest of the United States. To young people raised on the Internet, it would be unimaginable. A boy from Sylva had been killed in Vietnam, another badly injured, but the war never felt within our world. Neither did the antiwar movement in Berkeley, the civil rights protests spilling into violence in Louisville and New York, or the killings of Sharon Tate and her friends in California. We saw these events on WLOS in Asheville, the sole TV station we could pick up, but drained to black and white and behind glass, it was if we peered into a telescope at some alien world.
So little changed in Sylva. As they had since my earliest memory, the same stores stood on Main Street, and what was inside varied little. The smallest things had their assigned place. If I went into Pike’s Drugstore, candy bars were in front of the counter, comic books on a wire rack to the right. Winkler’s Restaurant had the same menu year after year, the same food served on the same green plates. A few things might change, a new brand of sunglasses at Dodd’s general store, some bell-bottom jeans at Harris Clothing, but these anomalies, like the first cracks in a house’s foundation, went unnoticed.
A willed innocence masking the world’s injustice and evil, even the town’s name a nostalgic turning away from reality, some might say. There would be some truth in such a view, but Sylva’s residents needn’t look beyond their own town to know injustice and evil. As Sheriff Loudermilk noted, small towns have a way of giving up their secrets.
Some, however, are not given up, one of which was why Shirley had worked for my grandfather three decades when most of his nurses rarely lasted a year. She never questioned what he asked her to do, which included telling patients to their faces that Dr. Matney refused to treat them. She’d seen his temper, his bullying, and at times surely endured it, though strangely enough, I can’t recall witnessing such a moment. Nor can I remember a single instance when she questioned what he asked or did. Even that one seeming act of defiance—stabbing the needle in her own arm—could be seen as an act of submission. The abuse of Bill and me hadn’t been challenged, instead, partially absorbed. I do know that Shirley had eloped when still a teenager and returned to town five years later with a nursing degree but no wedding band. She’d moved back into the same house she’d fled and lived there with her mother, and when her mother died, Shirley lived there alone. What had happened during those five years was unknown. No one, including her parents, had received a phone call, telegram, or letter. I had been at her funeral, and the town gossips were still wondering. But the consequences of that return were clear. In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment. Maybe Shirley believed so too, and that Grandfather was that punishment.
When I awoke on Monday morning, I had to cover my head to avoid any piercing shard of light. Had I not felt so bad I’d have been more alert, because Bill watched me closely since my drunken “I’m not afraid to get her what she likes” comment. Grandfather and Bill were with a patient and Shirley on the phone when I went into the hall and opened the closet door. I stuffed a Librium packet into my pocket and was reaching for some Desoxyn when Bill’s hand clamped my wrist.
“You come with me,” he hissed, pulling me through the reception room and out the front door.
Bill was about to drag me into the side yard, but stopped when he heard the rasp of Nebo’s razor.
“I’d hoped that was just drunken bluster,” Bill said in a fierce whisper. “How many times have you gotten something out of there?”
“What’s it to you?” I answered. “You did it.”
“I did it once, once. How often, Eugene?”
“Take your hand off me,” I said.
Bill did, but stayed close to keep his voice low.
“Tell me, damn it.”
“Every week after the time you did it,” I answered, rubbing my stinging wrist.
“Every week,” Bill said, shaking his head. “What is wrong with you? I told you we couldn’t do that.”
“Maybe I’m tired of you making the rules.”
“It’s not about rules,” Bill hissed. “If those packets get traced back to Grandfather’s office, it won’t be just him knowing, which is bad enough, the law will be involved.”
“Don’t get so bent out of shape,” I said.
“Are you listening to me? If the SBI only suspects we are involved, our futures—”
“Our futures?” I interrupted. “Don’t you mean yours? You’re freaking out because you’re scared it might keep you out of med school.”
“Not could, would,” Bill said, stepping closer, his face inches from mine. “I’ve worked my ass off at Wake Forest three years to get into Bowman Gray, and if you think I’m going to let anyone screw that up, you’re wrong.”
The office door opened and Shirley came out to tell Bill our grandfather needed him. He nodded and Shirley went back inside.
“Damn it, Eugene,” my brother said, grasping my arm. “Don’t do it again. Do you understand?”
“Sure, William,” I said.
“You know, I’ve tried to be . . .”
<
br /> Bill let go of my arm.
“But you will,” he said resignedly, and went back into the office.
The next morning Grandfather stepped onto shattered glass when he entered his private office. A windowpane was broken and the paint chipped where someone had tried to jimmy the wooden frame. At lunchtime Nebo came in with a power drill and installed a Corbin brass padlock on the closet door.
“Even if some son of a bitch does break in, he’s not getting into that closet,” Grandfather told us and pocketed the key. “That’s probably what it is, some welfare deadbeat stealing drugs. I hope he tries again, because Nebo’s spending the night in here for a while.”
“SO YOU WON’T BE ABLE to get in the closet again?” Ligeia asked the following Sunday.
“He’s got a lock on it and there’s only one key.”
She sat beside me on the quilt, hands clasped around her knees, the empty Quaalude packet beside the pint of whiskey I’d bought from the same bootlegger Angie used. He didn’t know who I was, and when he asked I said a friend of Angie’s, which was enough to elicit a grunt and disappearance into his house. He came back with a bottle and I paid him. Don’t you come at daylight no more, he’d told me. I ain’t exactly selling you kids sno-cones.
“But I can get plenty of this,” I said, picking up the bottle and taking a swallow. “Next time I’ll bring two pints. We can still get loaded.”
Ligeia looked toward the stream, then spoke.
“I think it’s a sign.”
“What kind of sign?”
“A sign that summer’s over,” she answered. “Time for us to move on, right? It’s been groovy, but ‘ob-la-di ob-la-da life goes on.’ Besides, Angie and her buddies are starting to help me deal. They’re all seniors and when school starts next week I’ll be hanging out with them.”
“So this was just because I got you drugs?” I asked. I turned my head and stared at the creek. When Ligeia touched my shoulder, I slid out of reach, only then looking at her.
“No,” Ligeia said, her blue eyes meeting mine. “Making it with you, it’s been good. But you are just a kid.”
“I’m just a year and a half younger than you.”
“Only on a calendar, babe,” Ligeia said.
She moved closer and kissed me on the mouth, a long, lingering kiss.
I reached to untie her top, but she took my hand away. I must have looked like I was about to cry, because then, very softly, she said, “Okay, one last time,” and reached back and undid the ties herself.
I thought she might change her mind, so I went to Panther Creek at two o’clock the following Sunday. I sat by the pool and waited, the bootleg whiskey lowering in the bottle as did the sun in the darkening sky. It was my first time drinking alone and two epiphanies came to me. The first was that I was a tragic young swain fallen upon Shelley’s “thorns of life.” I outgrew that particular bit of sentimentality, but not the second epiphany: true intimacy with alcohol was best achieved alone.
Then school started back.
Ligeia’s classes were mostly in the vocational wing, so I saw her only at her locker or during our overlapping lunch periods. Back then our high school allowed students to smoke as long as they did so on the grass outside the cafeteria. When I went to lunch the first day, Ligeia was outside with Angie Wellbeck and a couple of other girls, who, unlike Ligeia, wore heavy makeup. Their lipstick left pink rings around their cigarette butts. The rest of the smokers were males, the rough types who got suspended for cursing and fighting. They flicked burning matches at each other and threw elbows, their laughter aggressive, edged.
I sat where I could watch Ligeia through the cafeteria window. One of the guys came in and made a call on the pay phone. When he went back out, he and his buddies huddled with Ligeia and Angie. One of them saw me watching. He snuffed out his cigarette and came into the cafeteria.
“What the fuck are you looking at, asswipe?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled.
“Well, sit over there,” he said, shoving my tray to the opposite end, “and look at nothing from another direction.”
I risked covert glances though, and lingered near her locker between classes. If she saw me, she smiled but didn’t speak. On the Monday of our third week, however, Ligeia waited outside my homeroom. She looked worried.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, and led me to a corner. “I’m still your favorite mermaid, right?”
“Yes,” I answered, feeling a surge of hope.
“How about trying again to get me some speed?” Ligeia asked. “Maybe you can get the key or something.”
“Grandfather carries the key in his pocket.”
“Then maybe there are some samples somewhere else, like in his desk?”
“He locks it too.”
“It’s important,” she said, greater urgency in her voice. “I think I’m in trouble.”
“I can help you with money.”
“How much?”
“I can get you fifty dollars.”
“Fifty dollars won’t get me out of this kind of trouble, Eugene. What about all that money in the bank? Isn’t there some way you can get to it?”
“Grandfather has to co-sign. He’d make me tell him what it was for.”
“You could lie,” Ligeia said.
“No, he could tell if I was lying. Besides, he’d make it out as a check. Grandfather wouldn’t give me cash. But I can bring you fifty tomorrow, maybe even sixty. Won’t that help some?”
“Bring it,” Ligeia said, “but it’s not nearly enough, babe. Not nearly.”
It was only when the tardy bell rang that I understood what Ligeia was telling me.
Don’t worry. It should be safe.
Should be, not will be, she’d told me that Sunday at Panther Creek. The Visible Man. That was the name of the human model Grandfather gave Bill and me one Christmas. Inside the clear-plastic exterior was a human heart with red arteries and blue veins branching out into head and torso. As my heart raced, it was as if I too were transparent, the blue and red strands wrapped like tentacles around my heart.
The bell rang for first period. I wasn’t certain I could get up. But she can take care of it, I reassured myself. That’s what she was saying. It’s just getting the money. I opened my backpack, took out pen and paper and wrote “Are you sure about your ‘trouble’? Maybe you are just late. Eugene.” I folded the note and walked up the hall to Ligeia’s locker and slid it in the door hinge.
At lunchtime Ligeia was waiting for me in front of the cafeteria.
“Yes, I’m sure, and you and Bill have to help me,” she said, looking around to make sure no one heard. “He can get money out of his account, right?”
“Yes.”
“How far away is his college?”
“Three hours.”
“Call him and let him know,” she said. “We’ll meet at seven tonight, at the creek.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I return to the medical complex at 4:45. The receptionist doesn’t send me back to Bill’s office, so I sit alone in the waiting room. Magazines cover the table beside me. Most are what you expect in a doctor’s office, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, that kind of thing. Only one, Christianity Today, catches my eye. I check the address label, and my brother’s name, not a patient’s, is on it. Which shouldn’t surprise me. Bill, unlike me, has continued attending church as an adult. Soon I may know what compels him to.
When I check the clock again it’s 5:05, then 5:15, then 5:20. What if it’s not surgery that is holding him up, I suddenly realize. Robbie Loudermilk may not know where I am, but he could locate Bill easily enough. Since this morning there might be new evidence, or someone who’d seen the three of us at Panther Creek or noticed our truck there the day Ligeia vanished. Each thought solidifies into inevitability. I look down and see that my thumb and middle finger are pinching my left knee.
A TV is mounted on the upper corner of the far wall. It’s turned to CNN, muted but with the close
d captioning on. I go up to the window and ask for the remote. The receptionist looks at me and I know she’s about to say something like We don’t allow the channel to be changed. But we are alone and she knows Bill told me to wait, so she hands it to me without a word. Then, as if the remote were some acknowledgment of trust, she gathers her belongings, locks the front door, and leaves.
At five thirty I keep the television’s sound muted but change the channel to WLOS. There’s been a train derailment in Marion and a protest against the state legislature in Raleigh. After some advertisements, Sheriff Loudermilk appears. His words scroll across the screen, telling of a new source who claims Ligeia Mosely got behind on a drug debt and was eager to leave Sylva as quickly as possible. Which makes it more and more likely the murder was drug related, Loudermilk says, and a serial killer less likely. A third motive, the consequence of a personal relationship, has been considered too, the sheriff adds, but forensics has yet to find evidence of it.
“SHE SOUNDED LIKE it’s real serious,” I told my brother when he came to the dorm’s hall phone.
“Serious for whom, Eugene?” Bill answered. “The way you’ve acted the last couple of months, I wouldn’t—”
“She said serious for both of us,” I interrupted.
“I’ve got my calc class this afternoon,” Bill said. “You go and find out what this is about. Then call and tell me.”
“Ligeia said both of us have to be there.”
“If she’s wanting me to get her alcohol or drugs, she can forget it,” Bill said. “Where are you calling from, anyway? You’re supposed to be at school.”
“I am at school. I’m using the pay phone. You need to come, Bill. It’s serious. I mean it.”
“All right,” he sighed. “Can you get out there without me having to pick you up?”