To recap: Devin, on his way back home, is now to ‘swing by’ and meet him this week in San Antonio. To hang out and party and reminisce.
Mark it down—my shizzle is now fazizzled.
Billy, recovering his wits enough to call Creedence Rucker and inform her of his horrifically hard-won success regarding the engagement he’d achieved with her brother, said, “Maybe I got through to him. And who knows, it could be good that we hook back up on neutral territory out there.”
“Bless you.”
Insincere and gut-knotted furious at the imposition of troubled old dicknut Devin back into his life, Billy could barely get the words past his teeth: “It’s my deepest joy and honor to assist.”
Heartfelt, broken-voiced gratitude in response. “You’re the best. I hope I can do something one day in thanks.”
“Are you kidding?” He owed her one. Said so.
“You always were the sweetest.” She sighed. “Among other qualities.”
What a guy. A real mensch. Creedence had been cute as a teenager. He had almost had it off with her, too, before coming to his senses.
But now, it felt refreshing to hear her flirt. So much it gave him a bothersome, half-mast trouser snake in need of wrangling.
They rang off pledging to see one another soon as Billy could get Devin back home. He noted how she expressed a husky and determined desire to ‘get together soon.’ She repeated the phrase no fewer than three chuckling, nervous times.
The call, troublesome; for some bizarre reason, now Billy started obsessing about nailing the living shit out of Creedence Rucker. Profane and naughty, thrilling by default, bucket list material.
Yes: He would do it at first opportunity. She’d wanted it a long time; she wanted it now.
Christ, how he’d have to be careful. In his size, excitement and strength, he had often injured sexual partners.
On purpose.
No—by accident.
Or: sometimes both.
He’d only killed a few along the way, though. A couple-three. Four or five. In the ballpark of a half-dozen. Ya know. Those he allowed himself to recall.
He could barely remember what the victims looked like. He hadn’t meant any of it—the killing part, anyway—and so, and so, you had to give him a freaking pass, yo. Unintended consequences. Acts of God type-deal.
His memories of dumping various bodies, both in South Carolina and the ones back at various prep schools—a couple of girls, also a dude who’d made the mistake of talking Billy into an interesting mutual masturbation experiment gone terribly wrong—all lay hazy, inaccessible. Like shitty movies remembered from watching late at night all by oneself, stoned, lonely, confused, murderously depressed and angry from missing Libby Meade so goddamned much.
Movies, more memorable than the victims.
Accident victims, he meant. Semantics were key, here. If ‘semantics’ was the right word for what he meant.
Eyes slitted, Billy peeked through the window of his office at neat rows of steel industrial shelving which held the 16mm, VHS, and DVD elements making up the Southeastern academic film library. His forgotten kingdom.
A nerdy, introverted girl holding a clipboard pushed a gray cart of film cans by the open door of Billy’s office. His new intern from the Mass Comm college had circles under her eyes, a labret piercing, orange threadbare Che Guevara babydoll T-shirt, strawberry blonde dreadlocks pulled back by a tattered puke-green paisley bandanna that revealed jug ears rattling and jangling with piercings. Morning breath. This grungy hipster trollop was far from Billy’s type, which of course seemed for the best—fucking the interns to death, probably not considered ethically sound leadership of a department like the Media Archive.
Oh, but so lonely and secluded down here. You could fuck until bloody and screaming, coming and coming until emerging from the trance to find carnage; a crime scene, yeah, but really an accident. The mess; the sadness and terror in their cold dead eyes.
It was why he didn’t drink. His issues—the accidents—required a high degree of self discipline to manage. A double-edged sword: concentrate, don’t come; concentrate, don’t fuck them to death.
Which wouldn’t have happened with Libby. What that nasty little drunk Devin stopped that dreary night after the Dead show was the two of them, Billy and Libby, on the cusp of falling in love, but forever forestalled.
Oh, but now Ruck’s the one talking about killing people? Fucking amateur, dude.
Billy’s life, unfolding quite different now but for that redneck’s meddling. So what if Libby had been Devin’s girl. So what.
Look—there’s a chick right now: Damn if Marleigh didn’t present as appealing and bright. Best of all, possessing a wealth of cinematic knowledge. Beyond sexy, into the realm of threatening. Stinky, but smarter than him.
Awesome.
Billy, swearing to himself to be careful on the approach here, feel her out, and if or when it happened, exhibiting precise and sedulous caution to not break her as had happened before with other rosebuds of such small stature.
Accidents. Nothing that feels as good as coming could be associated with any true malfeasance. Accidents, he insists.
Libby, she’d been smart as well. A cinephile, and a writer. The smartest and coolest girl he’d ever known. But Libby, gone gone gone.
Billy leaned way over, stared out the door at Marleigh standing on her tippy-toes. Scrutinizing a stack of film cans on a high shelf, she scribbled a notation on her clipboard.
“Remember to tell me if you smell vinegar. Those are the cans we’re going to want to deal with first, if we ‘can’ at all, ha-ha.”
“Can-do,” she said.
“Sounds good, punkie.”
The intern shot him a curt, terrified glance—her normal response to any communication—followed by a dispassionate, professional nod of understanding. Here in a university environment, Billy suspected he ought to lose the cutesy terms of endearment. But only putting her at ease. Making her feel attractive.
Marleigh. What kind of lay would she be? All hippie and hairy and grungy? Earthy? A wildcat, he surmised.
Women, sensing his power, seeking his essence. Billy, like, hey: giving the people what they want.
Khaki fabric stretched and strained, zipper teeth threatening sensitive nerve endings. SPROING!
Billy Steeple, needing to chill the eff out, brothers and sisters and all the ships at sea and grandmama listening back home on the NBC radio network: Chill out, lose the incipient chubby, be cool and stop this; don’t let this happen. Marleigh’s a good girl. She’s an employee. She’s becoming a friend.
Like Libby.
Except that Billy didn’t love Marleigh, so there. Another reason to ignore the bothersomeness that made him want to fuck this decent kid to death.
Ah. He felt better. Relaxed. He’d nail Mel to the headboard later. She got into being held down; threatened. She came—hard, screaming and thrashing—while Billy pretend-choked her.
Melanie Pinckney: the most dangerous and perfect girlfriend he’d ever had. She had to go.
Marleigh’s knowledge of cinema, he understood, probably offered the majority of the reason for Billy’s incipient lust. Discovering to his delight the young student could keep up in a discussion of Bergman or Kurosawa made her a rare breed indeed among her peers. This lady had seen movies, knew the work of the masters. Could talk the talk of both critic and filmmaker.
Melanie, for all her welcome carnal vigor, was quite the opposite. Hating all that auteurist stuff. Finding his favorite art films dull, turgid. Preferred rom-coms, revisiting Disney or other jams from her youth like Clueless.
Billy, in many cases agreeing with her taste, albeit in secret: Most of the art-film selections in his collection were to lend street cred with other media academics. Yeah. He had close to five hundred Criterion spine numbers on display. Add in the screenplay stacked to the ceiling, and here, a film scholar beyond reproach.
In truth?
Billy dug main
stream, popular titles the most, classics he’d loved as a youth: starships and heroes and time-tripping luxury cars and heavy makeup effects and happy endings. Whether they smacked of deus ex machina, whether contrivances made sense, it didn’t matter so long as the conclusion reached left him feeling as though satisfying resolution had been achieved.
Further, he followed the weekly box office results less like a baseball fanatic following stats than a solemnly penitent monk memorizing lines of scripture. He often commented under a variety of nom-de-gueres—BO Sock Puppet, Emilio Lizardo, AlexDeLarge420, a few others—posting arch and smarmy flamebait on various industry blogs, engaging in vicious and cutting comment threads sometimes amassing into the hundreds of responses. While trenchant and apt, his prognostications made alongside knowledgable and bonafide industry insiders nowadays left him empty as most of the plots of the megafilms sitting atop the top of the charts.
The art movies, however, sat displayed upon bookshelves to protect his rep as a cineaste, and while he purported to have watched them all, the truth was that in the last couple of months alone, he’d passed out during (or otherwise bailed on): Bergman’s Winter Light, Ozu’s Late Spring, a Mexican Buñuel, a postwar Kurosawa, the early Herzog about the dwarfs, Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy (after only twelve minutes, a record), Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (the four-hour version, so he had an excuse for passing out), Bertolucci’s 1900 (the five hour version, stopped after only ten minutes, new record), two Altmans (Nashville, Three Women), two painterly Malicks (Days of Heaven, the three-hour extended director’s cut of The New World, which with all the whispering, awestruck narration made for a mean soporific), an award-winning, universally praised Errol Morris documentary, a bare-bones Dogma 95 effort from Lars Von Trier, a brutal Michael Haneke, a chilly Atom Egoyen, and the Bresson featuring a donkey as protagonist.
All dull, pretentious claptrap; all of it like homework.
No one knew of Billy’s completion problem but him, thank god. Thanks to the arrival of capsule internet reviews, his ability to fake his way through a conversation about either an artist’s oeuvre or a particular picture remained impressive, even fooling the film studies faculty into believing him an expert.
Billy, a magician. They saw the reality he wished them to experience. Godlike, I tells ya.
Movies. Before Libby, he’d barely given a shit about them. He’d been into music, his punk band Choking Hazard, was headed toward rock stardom. Libby’s interest in cinema, though, had changed all that. Until she went and died on him. Till Devin killed her by letting a drunk hit them head-on.
Devin, a drunk himself.
But not drunk that time.
Which at least would have given him a decent excuse. He heard the character from Seinfeld asking, “What’s irony?”
Billy, crying out, shoved back from his messy desk as though stabbed. He gripped his side, the ribs on the right, which tingled and quivered with incipient panic. He felt grateful Marleigh had moved out of sight.
Ruck.
With all of Billy’s problems, to babysit a volatile drunk like his old friend, especially at this academic conference about which he’d been so eager and anticipatory, offered an additional layer of BS. Spoil-sport Ruck.
The conference, a little vacation, had nothing to do with his work as a media librarian; a fun trip to hang out with other erudite pop-culture geeks like himself, presenting papers and talking late into the night about movies or great albums or whatever, fucking some chicks, but not hard enough to kill them. Not ones he knew, anyway.
Calm blue ocean, he thought.
He had bigger issues.
Melanie.
Eh. He’d bang her silly tonight. Fill her head with bullshit, go to Texas, come back, kick her ass out and, and, hell, who knows? Put her head on a pike. A warning to others who dared transgress.
Or?
Start.
Fucking.
Creedence.
Rucker.
A capital idea.
Despite exhaustive experience with such matters, though, dumping Melanie had so far presented a wee small amount of difficulty. Like, her totally not picking up on all his signals and subtext.
He’d taken matters to the next level by ignoring her all day, with resulting frenzied and frantic jabbering messages left on the voicemail, a lengthy email screed hysterical with capital letters and exclamatory punctuation, over three dozen text messages. Billy feared she’d come strolling into the Media Annex at any moment to create an uncomfortable scene, if not worse—maybe his was the head awaiting prejudicial removal. A wild-woman, Mel.
With said possibility in mind, he pushed back from the desk and folded up his tent. Almost four. Enough for one day. No one to make any hay out of closing up shop early.
Media—who cared? All his beloved film reels and videotapes, now supplanted by the exchange of pure information through every dorm room’s hot T-3 connection to computer services. The DVDs, yes, were available to students. Still, few ever came his way but maintenance folk, custodians, the occasional film geek wanting to screen an actual print for a class.
No one to care, no one to bother him.
Not stuck way down here like this.
Tomb of the unknown Billy.
Slipping on his tweed sport coat, he strolled down the long metal racks of film reels to tell Marleigh of his departure.
“Let’s wrap it up for today.”
“Already?”
“Tragic, I know. I’ve an important meeting up the hill with the Dean and the Vice Provost.”
She dropped the clipboard onto the metal cart with a clatter. “Hate to quit in the middle of a shelf and all.”
“Pish-posh,” flopping a hinged wrist. “The stuff has already lain here long enough awaiting its savior to come along. A few more hours, days, weeks—they won’t matter.”
“Time is an illusion.”
“How’s that?”
Some mumbled horseshit about it ‘all being right now’.
Bright, this one. Or pretending, anyway. Billy, down with all that. “And ‘right now,’ I have an appointment. So let’s skedaddle.”
“Okay, Dr. Steeple.” Marleigh cast her gaze at the tips of his loafers, a titillating display of obeisant respect.
Billy, glowing inside; he yet to correct her about his academic pedigree. He hadn’t gotten near a piled-higher-and-deeper.
“See you tomorrow, young lady.”
Outside, Billy, thinking about what lay ahead with Ruck, watched Marleigh peddle on her mountain bike up the steep hill toward campus proper. Maybe in San Antonio he’d be able to understand Devin’s fucked-up mental state. No choice but to ride out this mad episode and find out what awaited.
The nailing-Creedence angle. That was the spice in all this Rucker activity. If he could manage to keep from having some unforeseen accidental accident go down—a pernicious problem, no doubt—he’d be golden.
Seven
Creedence
The checkout lines at the Piggly Wiggly snaked lengthy, daunting, and inescapable. Chelsea, on her standard midweek grocery trip, had found every other chucklehead in this misbegotten corner of Edgewater County of similar mindset. Still not as bad as the cattle-call at the Wal-mart on a Saturday, though. So she had that going for her.
Sighing and rolling her eyes, Chelsea surveyed the contents of her cart—preservative-laden, processed crap piled on top of a small cluster of fresh fruits and vegetables, her customary list all but memorized, garbage Dusty relished like manna.
But, didn’t everyone?
As her mother often proclaimed, though, ‘they’ wouldn’t sell food which wasn’t no good for people. Worrying about such matters made Chelsea feel like an alien from Planet X.
A voice from behind, despite its softness and affection, caused her to jump out of her skin. “Colette?”
Chelsea turned to see Miriam Vandegrift pushing her son Dobbs, in his wheelchair, along in front of her. So many people still called her by that stupid ch
ildhood name. Between her father’s nickname and her proper first name, she’d fixed that. Mostly. “Mercy. You scared the mess of out me.”
Dobbs, blinking at her with a grimace, speaking with a slight, moist lisp. “Daydreaming again?”
“It’s what I do.”
“Fancy seeing you at the Chilton Piggly Wiggly.”
“Ha—we oughta both have our durn mail delivered here.”
Winking at her; a joke. Often did they run into one another at the store. Small town blues.
Squeezing her eyes at her brother’s old childhood friend; for the first time in a long while, she felt fresh sorrow at his broken, irreparable body. Her brother’s other passenger. What a day that was. One of the worst.
She got a flash—of Billy in the hospital, looking so grownup and handsome, so calm.
Except when they told him Libby was dead.
And he peed in his pants. In front of everyone.
The small-talkers exchanged weather-chat and Chilton gossip, capped off by Chelsea’s announcement she’d become heavy with the seed of life.
Miriam, awestruck and joyous, hugged her neck. “That’s grand, Colette. I can feel the Lord’s hand in this.”
“Me too, me too.” Dobbs, nodding up to his mother. “I bet Mama Eileen’s fit to be tied.”
“Yeah. She’s over the moon about it.”
Dobbs, wise and knowing, squinted at her: “What about Dusty?”
The fake smile she produced actually hurt. “He’s excited, and all. Everybody’s real—glad.”
“It reckon it’s time, Creedence.”
“Reckon so.”
The line, moving forward. An enormous woman in a floral-print dress like a bed-sheet swiped her EBT card and billowed out the automatic door, her cart weighted down by unhealthy food, a smorgasbord of frozen containers over which Dusty would drool.
Chelsea unloaded her cart onto the belt and handed two canvas sacks to the bag boy, who looked at her like she’d lost her mind—the reusable bag craze, yet to gain a foothold in a place like Chilton.
Mansion of High Ghosts Page 6