Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  “You forget—I know the real you. When you were sober, I saw the real Devin Rucker. And, this little act? It isn’t him.”

  “So you claim.” He held out his arms. Snowflakes landed on his arms like butterflies. “But this is this. And it’s all I know. It’s all I got left.”

  Deep breath. “Ok, last-chance-charlie: if you want to get help, I’ll forget all our nonsense and be a friend to you again. An advocate. But nothing more.”

  “Aw—I’ll ease off the throttle again, like we done it before.” A soothing voice, lying like a dog. “Hell, I’ll call you soon as I get settled in back home. I’m’a get in treatment this time. Get right again one of these here days. You’ll see.”

  Melancholy Millie returned. She didn’t believe him. “Take care.”

  “So I’ll call. We’ll maybe write letters sometime, like they done in the old days—”

  But way too late for such talk. Devin, watching her peel out into the traffic on the foothills highway like she had somewhere to get to; somewhere to be.

  West. Toward the mountains. She lived in Boulder, now. Probably fucking college kids and professors like Billy Steeple.

  What a load of hooey; what a load of melodrama. Who cared who she was fucking? Off the hook, now—remember?

  “Yeah, I remember.” But no one to hear the affirmation.

  Trying to light a smoke, the wind too stiff even for his Zippo, Devin, searching his mind for the next step. Right then a floral delivery truck with a spray of yellow roses pictured on its side trundled along the highway.

  Billy Steeple.

  A road trip.

  Devin, slapping his thigh. “Deep in the heart of Texas—shit-yeah, boy. Enough of this piddly-ass pooting around.”

  For once, something in his gut churned besides aching nausea; instead, a twinkle of anticipation. But no need to get moving, not just yet; why not enjoy a few last rounds at Chubby’s? Sure. One for the road, jack. It’s the American way.

  Nine

  Creedence

  Sitting in the crapper paging through last month’s Southern Living, Chelsea thought she would hurl. As though the iconic periodical hadn’t covered Charleston a million times before.

  She announced to her empty bathroom: “Charleston? I wouldn’t live in that stinky old marsh if you paid me.”

  The magazine had been a blurry faraway object in her hands anyway—Billy’s smooth and flirty voice on the phone earlier still rang in her ears like a church bell.

  Billy, agreeing to help with Devin.

  Her shining knight, Billy.

  What might have been.

  How stupid, letting herself get knocked up. The timing.

  Despair.

  Chelsea, flinging the slick publication into the basket beside the toilet, finished up, or at least hoped she’d finished. Ever since she’d peed on the stick and seen the two lines, she’d suffered a stomach best described as rotten. Nerves, maybe. Or part of the process, like the morning sickness and cramps. A puking and peeing and squirting vessel of life, her.

  Charleston. So close, so far. She lied to herself—of course she’d love to live there. In fact, doing so remained her dream.

  Chelsea, on her infrequent visits to the Holy City, adored strolling one of the few preserved pieces of colonial America left besides the theme park version in Williamsburg. Sure, Tillman Falls down the road had beautiful old houses and the courthouse and the Revolutionary War battle monument and the gurgling, wide Sugeree River and the lake country below the nuclear plant, but nothing to her came as romantic as the idea of strolling the Battery on a cool morning, gazing up to the night herons asleep in the branches of the enormous live oaks, tasting the salty breeze blowing in from beyond Fort Sumter. Feeling a tingling, untethered sense of freedom staring out at the enormous freighters chugging, lugubrious, through the shimmering green harbor to disappear, finally, in the haze along the watery horizon.

  Lugubrious? Listen to her. Must be some dumb word she’d picked up reading one of those bullshit, purple-prose Pat Conroy doorstops. Had had to look up the word, made herself try to remember it. She much preferred Dotty Frank or Mary Alice Monroe or Jo Humphries anyway, all giants in the pantheon of South Carolina low-country family melodramas, characters standing ankle-deep in the pluff-muddy inlets of their gauche narratives of suicide and adultery, sea turtles and grass baskets and class struggles. Such novels and stories often revolved around nearby, good-old Charleston and its sea-island environs.

  Reading about the city, however, made it seem like a thousand miles away. That’s how little interest Dusty showed in her desires, including going to Charleston, “Where everything’s so high-priced nobody can’t have no fun.”

  Chelsea held a vivid memory of her teenage self standing on the battery one evening with her father during on a beach house week on nearby Isle of Palms. Devin and Libby had stayed behind, and she knew why—Creedence, naughty, had spied on them making love one night in Devin’s car parked outside, late, their parents long asleep; moonlight fell across Libby’s back as she rode with rhythm on top of a shadowy, unseen Devin. Creedence knew what they were doing, but still did not ‘know’ what it was, exactly. She kept waiting for her mother to have the talk, but at thirteen, it had yet to come.

  Watching a massive ship vanish into the distant violet nothing, squinting, the experience frightening as the vessel disappeared, its running lights twinkling like receding stars, she smiled with comfort as her dad draped an arm around her.

  “Life is long and beautiful, my dear girl. Make the most of it.”

  “I will. I want to be an artist, someday. And live in one of those houses—like that one,” pointing behind her across the battery.

  “No,” he said. “Not an artist—let’s call it being a designer. Designers get jobs. Artists don’t make no money, sugar.”

  “I don’t understand the difference.”

  “You will. They way you love to draw, you ought to think about getting into making Hallmark cards.”

  “That’s dumb,” she had heard herself saying. “I’ll be rich and famous for my paintings and what-not.”

  He had laughed with gentle affection. “You’ll find out, sugar. Don’t nobody live as an ‘artist’ unless they already got somebody paying them to do it—maybe Daddy will get rich, though, and he’ll pay for it.”

  Otherwise, nobody had encouraged her. Wouldn’t let her go off to SCAD down in Savannah. Mama always told her she was silly about wanting to draw. That she needed a man, and later a job or career as well, if she wanted. But a real one. Nobody was wasting money on a college degree to draw horsies. Her mother had all but said it that way.

  “You find a man to take care of you,” Mama had instructed. “That you can trust.”

  “What you mean, trust?”

  “Like your daddy.” Scoffing. “He wouldn’t do nothing out of turn if it killed him.”

  At last one day, Creedence had realized something—this had been her mother’s version of ‘the talk.’

  She was in prison. Her, and now, her baby.

  She had finished in the bathroom but stayed sitting on the closed toilet lid. Yeah—fighting off another wave of cramps.

  No more recounting of old grievances against Mama, though. Doing so all the time made Chelsea sick. Maybe her sour-patch attitude was the origin of all these cramps, she thought, and not her pregnancy. She needed attitude adjustment. She needed Billy to spirit her away. She needed his baby in her belly. Not Dusty’s.

  Speak-of-the-Dusty rolled in from the hardware store about six-thirty, in time for the start of the second of two episodes of Seinfeld. The show sometimes seemed over her head with its silly, sarcastic humor. She didn’t have the word for it—how unrealistic it was, like, letting the audience know how the show and its characters kind-of knew it was all dumb? Like the one with Elaine on the subway telling the lady that something was ironic, and the lady going, like, what’s ironic, like, no, what does it mean? That type-deal? She had a hard time e
xplaining herself when it came to the ‘why’ of things like Seinfeld.

  For instance: One night while watching the Kenny Rogers Roasters episode, she’d tried to verbalize her complicated thoughts to Dusty about irony, celebrity and fried chicken. He’d looked at her like she had six heads.

  Forget TV. She needed to get it on—pregnant horniness was a real thing, evidently. Would it be like this the whole freakin’ pregnancy? She’d starve.

  But she also needed a decent conversation. Dusty couldn’t talk about nothing worth a durn except NASCAR, video games, horror movies and hamburger meat. That’s about it.

  After he hung a greasy ball cap in need of laundering onto the coat hooks by the front door, her hubby smacked a perfunctory kiss on the cheek; the cracking of a can of Bud Light.

  Creedence—Chelsea—looked at him and him at her.

  “Busy today?”

  “Busier than I care for. How about y’all?”

  “I didn’t go in. I was sick.”

  “What’d you do instead? Lay around?”

  “I went shopping.”

  “You didn’t spend much, I hope.”

  “No more than last week.”

  “Better not.” Shooting her his mean look. “Can’t work no harder. Not for no better’n I’m getting paid.”

  Her head got so hot she started sweating. But she couldn’t start anything. Not feeling as peaked as she did.

  Instead, Chelsea saw an opportunity to broach a familiar subject. “I worry about Mr. Vincent going under.”

  Dusty jerked and jiggled as though goosed with electric current. “That hardware store’s been in business sixty years. It ain’t going nowhere.”

  “The way you hate working, I’m surprised you care.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “It could happen, though. And then what?”

  “Lord, don’t say that. I’d have to start over. Ain’t nobody else gonna pay me ten dollars an hour like Mr. Vincent.”

  “It’s because you been there since high school. He ain’t got no other choice.”

  “It’s because I’m his top employee.”

  Time to put in the knife. “Employee—not manager with salary and benefits.”

  “That’s coming.”

  “So I keep hearing.”

  “He ain’t lying.”

  “Dusty—the manager is his daughter. She ain’t going nowhere.”

  He shrugged. Poked out his lip. “It’s what he says.”

  “Maybe you should get on at Lowe’s once it opens.”

  He all but shouted, “Down in Columbia?”

  “No, dummy. When it opens here next year on that parcel they cleared across from the dealership. Mr. Hampton told me about it.”

  “So it’s true.”

  “There’ll be a Lowe’s, and a new grocery store, three or four chain restaurants. Personally, I can’t wait.”

  Bitter. “He could probably build it himself, with all that car money of his.”

  Uncle Hill lived in the biggest, oldest house over on Whaley Way in Tillman Falls, but he wasn’t that rich. “We ain’t selling that many cars lately.”

  “Shit. He’s got money gone to bed. Ought to pay you more.” Dusty gurgled soda and belched. “Damn, I hate money.”

  Hill Hampton, a close family friend for as long as Chelsea had memories; rich, a second generation car dealer, a Hampton, South Carolina royalty in his blood. He had the run of the county, and damn if oftentimes her Daddy hadn’t been at his side. Men like them had a special club which met all the time—sometimes at The Dixiana, sometimes out at a lodge in the woods near Big Rock and Jensen’s Pond on the other side of Tillman Falls near the country club, where rich people had houses back in the woods. Had no clue what that club was all about. Like the Masons, she guessed, or those dudes with the little fezs who drive the mini-cars in the Christmas and Fourth of July parades. Daddy wouldn’t never talk about it.

  She felt safe working for Uncle Hill. Stable. Like family. Plus, weak sales figures or not for the quarter, wasn’t no way in hell people around these parts were going to stop buying F-150s. Not completely. Best truck on the road.

  But Mr. Vincent’s little two-bit hardware store? Sayonara, señor. Like every other oldschool business in Tillman Falls. The only original ones left were The Dixiana, and Lucinda’s diner, and the Congress Street Grille. Antiques and closed-up storefronts filled out the rest of what was once a thriving township with furniture stores, jewelry, appliances, the original downtown Ford dealership, offices and a bank or two.

  Mama, an officer of the Edgewater Ladies Munificence Society, said they were raising money to restore the old Palmetto Grande movie theater, transform it into an arts center for theater, music, dance as well as film society screenings. Such a move would ‘revitalize’ sleepy old Edgewater County, she and the others said in their campaign to county council.

  Mercy—what did those highfalutin bluebloods think they were up to, turning Tillman freaking podunk Falls into downtown Charleston, or Savannah? Please. So full of themselves, all because their husbands left them money. Damn old baby boomer biddies. They needed to die off. It was bound to happen eventually, she supposed, like all the old businesses.

  Like Mr. Vincent’s, soon. It had to be.

  But Dusty pish-poshed. “It’s like Mr. Vincent says: if that durn Wal-mart down in the lake country didn’t finish us off—”

  “—nothing will. Honey, you can’t sit on your hands and wait for him to close up.” She poked him with a freckled finger. Felt a twinge in her side, way down low. “You got to make a move. Maybe get a tech degree. Something.”

  “You want me to quit? Who would he get to work my shifts? That’s worth a durn? In this town?”

  As though Dusty Wallace were a retail hardware genius. He didn’t even know what half the tools did.

  He sat down and pulled off his work boots. “You can go back to school all you want. Get Eileen to pay for it, or Uncle Hill. Or, go start selling your Mama’s Valium and Xanax over at the high school, for all I care. But I ain’t gonna go sit at a little desk at that tech school with that bunch of shit-turds I see running up and down the road every afternoon. What you trying to turn me into?”

  She broke. All the sarcasm and flinty antagonism washed away in a barking, hollow gale of sudden water from her eyes. “A father.”

  “Don’t start with your mess.”

  Something he’d said struck her: “Really? I should go to school?”

  “What, with a baby on your hip?”

  “You ain’t never heard of daycare?”

  High and whining: “How you planning to pay for all this?”

  “By you getting a better job, dummy.”

  He walked into that one. Turned red as a beet. “Told you I don’t give a flying fudge whether you go to school or bake a cake. Besides, Mr. Vincent says that if I play my cards right, he’ll make me the GM in a few years. I’ll get bonuses and all kinds of incentives, then. That ‘better’ enough for you?”

  “He’s been telling you that tale for ages, now.”

  “Ain’t lied to me yet.”

  “That shriveled up old money-grubbing peanut? He talks out of one side of his face and then the—“

  “Shut your mouth about Mr. Vincent, before I shut it for you,” Dusty roared from the couch, his face a mask like the Devin’s own. The devil’s own, she meant.

  Chastened and furious. Simmering. Ever since getting pregnant, her emotions, a rollercoaster. Hot-cold hatred for Dusty. Seething. Making her cramp as she smushed down the bun of his chicken patty sandwich.

  “You better quit hollering at me.”

  “Just hush up about Mr. Vincent.”

  Sick of his mess. Pushing in a hot, secret knife: “Buddy Lawler says electricians make good money. Welders even more.”

  “Who cares what that fat little queer-bait thinks?”

  “You could get your certificate in a trade like that. Have your own business, like Daddy did with his insuran
ce. Plumbing. Good money there, too.”

  “If Buddy Lawler’s so smart, why’s he selling cars for Mr. Hampton instead of pulling wires through walls, hanging up breaker boxes and getting the shit zapped outta him? Or unplugging toilets?” Toe-lets. “Say.”

  “Buddy makes good money already. Believe you-me.”

  He eyed her sidelong. “How would you know all that?”

  “Because I watched him close on six deals, all new-truck buyers, this week. That’s almost one a day.”

  “Thought y’all wa’n’t selling nothing?”

  “Buddy’s selling. Getting fat paychecks and commissions.”

  “Goody for him.”

  “Yep—it was good for him, all right.”

  “I’m sure. He still driving that Mustang?”

  She really had no clue. “I think it’s blue.”

  Her husband, disgusted, shook his head. “Y’all women don’t pay attention to nothing important.”

  Dusty’s earlier outburst unnerved her. She should tread with care. He had been angry. A lot, lately. Grabbed her by the arm a couple of times. Finger-bruises. He had been drinking too much beer. That was all.

  In a way, she had wanted Devin home for a secret reason of her own: To protect her from Dusty, who had pushed her around a few other times through the years. And now acted like he was finally going to hit her. Hadn’t yet. Not with the baby and all.

  Wouldn’t that be something. Waiting until she got pregnant to pop her a good one, at last. She wouldn’t put it past him.

  Diffusing the tension. Her tone became gentle, loving. “But if I went to school, honey, don’t you see I’d have a better job afterwards, too? For all of us.”

  “A bigger paycheck—now that would be sweet.” His eyes flitted over to the game console, the TV screen. It wasn’t mounted on the wall like he wanted. Dusty gnawed at his thumbnail. “Both of us getting more money would be cool.”

  “More would be nice. More things.”

  “We could get the better movie package,” a cable TV add-on he had lusted after for months. “I been wanting Showtime.”