Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  “I’ll be shit.” The old man, noticing the body. “Son, is he drownded? I’ll be damned—is he drownded?”

  “I think so.”

  “Oh, lord.”

  Mr. Raymond grabbed the pool net and made to fish the corpse over toward the shallow end.

  Devin, stammering and sobbing all sudden, like a kid. “I tried to help him.”

  Raymond, a startled look—a realization. Withdrawing the long pole back away from the body, left there to float. The oldtimer, squinting and sweeping his gaze around the pool area. “Son, don’t touch another thing out here. Come on, we got to call the sheriff’s department.”

  Devin couldn’t stop staring at the body. “I think he was still alive when I jumped in.”

  “Don’t look at that no more.” They hustled over to the golf shack, neither of them looking back.

  A whirlwind of events had followed—the police, the ambulance, his father, a rubbery black shiny bag with a heavy shape inside, the reporter from the Edgewater Advocate, begging and pleading but who was not allowed to talk to Devin; the worst was having to explain that the puke had been his. “Are you certain,” the coroner had asked twice in a row. “Are you certain that’s your vomit?”

  He had felt three years old. “I ate Frosted Flakes.”

  Devin, closing his eyes in the shower, why was he thinking about it all again. Seeing the flash of the light from the necklace and the empty eyes, dead like that of a shark, piercing him. Seeing through Devin. The dead man’s voice, a last gasp: trying to tell him a secret. The sorriest part for Devin was that it seemed to have worked.

  Considering this moment as before. For both the floating man, as well as himself.

  The questions. Relentless.

  Endings—what they meant.

  How they would feel.

  Worst? When they would come.

  When.

  Devin before; Devin, ever after. Did everyone feel this way? The rest of them seemed untroubled. As was Devin Rucker, who figured, among all his hard partying friends, that the way to deal with a wicked hangover on a class day was to have a cold beer with breakfast. Nothing crazy. A Natural Light. After all, Devin wasn’t a drunk. He liked to party. Sue him.

  Twenty-One

  Creedence

  Chelsea Colette Rucker: rebellious, fifteen, a recent burning desire to be called by her first given name rather than middle, yet still Colette to every dumbbell who didn’t already think of her as Creedence.

  Colette, a dumb little girl’s name. Creedence, that one’s special, her Daddy’s name for her. Chelsea, however, needing a name to call her own.

  They all thought it silly. If that’s what they thought of her, well: silly’s what she would be.

  Her mother, of course, number one on the top forty of having no truck with her name-changing. Calling it foolishness. Telling her she would slap her smart mouth if she didn’t shut up about it. Her Mama, at the stove stirring a pot of greens that’d stunk up the whole house, working her lips, soundless, furious, a coiled jungled cat of maternal rage.

  Composing herself. A flinty, precise statement. “The name that I chose is your name. That’s the end of it.”

  “What about what I want?”

  “That’s not the way the world works, young lady.”

  Tonight’s kitchen contretemps, with pots bubbling and biscuits baking, was not truly about names, rather a big brother’s offer of a wild time at an upcoming concert by a famous rock band with a scary name.

  “But Devin said I could go if I wanted. He would look out for me.”

  “No.”

  “He’d get me a ticket and the whole dang bit.”

  “I said to forget it.”

  “But Mama—it’s the Grateful Dead.”

  “You think I’m going to let you run around Columbia? At your age? With the likes of Coy Wando out there?” Eileen, during and since the time of the Wando murders, more protective than ever.

  How stupid old people could be, though. How fearful. Granted that Wando had killed three Edgewater County girls and taken credit for about a hundred more, all up and down the eastern seaboard, so he was definitely a monster. But still: “P’shaw. They caught him and locked him up last year.”

  Ignoring her facts. “And I remember those San Francisco hooligans from before you were born. Not from their terrible music, mind you, but from the news stories about their various drug arrests.”

  “But, Devin said—oh, fudge.”

  Vicious and low, like a mob boss Chelsea’d seen in a movie on TV referring to an untrustworthy henchman: “When it comes to my little girl, I don’t give a good-god-durn what your brother says. Or what he thinks.” Brandishing a slotted spoon, collard juice dripping on the tiled kitchen floor. “Is this understood?”

  Chelsea, the Dead show, how unbelievably cool and strange and different the night was sure to be. Burning for the chance. Begging. “But Mama—everybody’s going.”

  “What about Dusty? You haven’t said a word about what he thinks. He’s not invited?”

  Not giving a thought toward Dusty also going. Not wanting him there. “No. I want to do this with my brother.”

  “But, poor Dusty.”

  “Mama, he likes country music. Don’t you understand nothing?”

  Sounding hurt. “Well. I guess I don’t, then.”

  Chelsea, beyond curious about her brother and his friends, about the person she’d once known as a happy-go-lucky sibling, and what he’d become. Devin, changing so much through the years, starting back when she’d been twelve. It was after he found that black man in the pool. She had figured it out, one day. She didn’t know why. It all sounded like her Boy Scout brother had tried to save the man, at least according to the story in the Edgewater Advocate about it.

  Devin was sneaking liquor after that. He never did it before. A little sister notices these things.

  Remembering ugly scenes: Once, she and her parents coming home from the steak house to find him in his room drunk as a skunk. He was playing his old Atari game console from years earlier, a bottle of Henry McKenna procured from god knows sitting at his elbow half-empty—“Brazen, just brazen,” her Mama kept saying. “Henry McKenna, Henry McKenna,” she wailed, as though the distiller, a long-dead brand rather than a living human, had personally shamed the family.

  Rather than being contrite or ashamed, however, Devin had staggered around, waving his arms and slurring his words; so sarcastic and hateful, pointing his finger and cursing at his own mother. He tried to explain himself, but it all came out like gobbledegook. Creedence, remembering the smack of Eileen striking Devin openhanded across the face, and her poor father Dwight, standing by, horrified, helpless.

  But what happened next had been so much worse: Devin, pimp-slapping Eileen right back. Clean across the face, boo-yow. How it’d all slowed down like in a movie—Mama falling backward, staggering down the hall boohooing her way into the master suite at the other end of the house. How Chelsea’s heart dropped into her stomach like on the rolly-coaster at the State Fair.

  He had meanness in him. It was scary. Where’d it come from? Devin, always sweet to her, though. Protective. Like a big brother should be.

  As for hanging out with Devin on campus, precedent had been set:

  “You let me go that one other time.”

  “That wasn’t for no damn rock and roll concert. That was for a cookout during the goddurn afternoon.”

  Enough whining the previous semester had resulted in her riding over with Libby to the building where the boys all lived, when Devin and Dobbs and their friend Roy Earl held a cookout in the tiny yard next to the building, a gathering like folks held every Sunday back home in Edgewater County, but with college students: Steaks and baked potatoes and iced tea, cold cans of beer, the girls drinking wine coolers.

  Libby had let her have a couple of Seagram’s white wine coolers, sour-sweet. Her stomach had been cold, then warm. It had been so wild. Drunk at college. Couldn’t wait to do more of
it.

  And then, Billy Steeple. Like nobody she ever saw. No punk rock kids in Edgewater County, not at her school. She hadn’t known what to make of him, except that she could see how handsome. How sophisticated he spoke—he wasn’t from no podunk Edgewater County. Roy Earl Pettus, who followed her around the whole time, was a sweet but round-faced doofus too much like Dusty Wallis.

  Too much like back home.

  Chelsea pushed her chair back from the kitchen breakfast table with a scrape. Letting loose, she jabbered in describing her need for adventure and experience; in hysterical detail how bored she was out here in the country; in shrieking injustice how Devin being away made her feel as though she were constantly missing out.

  Her Mama, fed up, slapped her. Creedence quieted. But she didn’t cry. She had been slapped a hundred times in her life.

  “I’m getting tired of you acting like you can’t stand to be here where your little smart-butt mouth belongs.” Grumbling about Devin running wild, how it’d not happen again, not with her babygirl. “No more trips to Columbia. And that damn university. It’s already took one from me.”

  “I can’t wait to get out of this house for good.”

  Back to the mob boss voice. “Hush your damn mouth. Before I hush it for you.”

  Now came childish tears of disappointment, a sudden downpour, feeling stupid and diminished here in the grand two-story all brick with a huge island and the high ceiling of the great room, a dream house her Daddy had had built for Mama and them two years before here on the best cul-de-sac in Pine Haven, the nicest subdivision this side of the Sugeree River Plant and the Tillman Falls/Chilton exit off the interstate. The county had a good many new subdivisions going, and so being called best said something, as her mother liked to point out.

  Nobody at school treated her like a girl who had money, though. Too goofy, she guessed, or like Devin, way smarter than them. And they knew it.

  She wished. She didn’t feel smart. No faking those report card Cs.

  “I can’t wait get out of here and away from you,” in her own most dreadful cadence. “I hate this place.”

  “Stop trying to sound like Joan Crawford. Go fold that laundry I told you to do an hour ago.”

  “No.”

  Mama ran out of steam. Muttering, unable to form a cogent verbalized response, she wiped her hands on a kitchen rag hanging on a butcher-block island stained by legions of steaks tenderized upon it. “Please, honey. Mama’s getting one of her headaches from all this.”

  Chelsea, feeling half the time anymore as though she could scream, and if everyone wasn’t careful, someday she might. Everyone including Dusty, hell-bent these days on putting it all the way in. Chelsea, thinking herself all-but ready to do so.

  But, on the other hand? Not yet. A tingling at the back of her neck. Lessons taught about the putting inside of peterpiper being an activity only for the betrothed. And in love.

  Don’t let it be Dusty. He’s like your cousin, somehow. This voice was the one always right. But she didn’t listen. Not enough.

  Chelsea’s resolve, hardening like the spike in Dusty’s shorts whenever they made out. What Eileen and Dwight Rucker would and wouldn’t allow, soon a moot point. Go to the Dead concert or be damned, yessir. Sneaking out, if she had to.

  A close-up on Chelsea’s scheming eyes; cue the dramatic music before the commercial break! Lord, but Mama loved them stories all day long. That TV never went off for a blessed minute.

  Chelsea, smiling a big Cheshire grin. Saccharine, hugging her mother tight: “Mama, I’m sorry. I’ll forget about that silly concert just like you want me to do.”

  Eileen’s puckered grimace melted into a smile, not so much in affection, but in triumph. “That’s better, sweetheart. Now, let me get this damn supper on before your Daddy gets home. Not another word about this at the table. Is that understand? He’ll be too tired at supper for one of your little to-do’s.”

  “‘Our’ little to-do’s? Ain’t that what you mean?”

  “Hush.”

  Singsong, the fluttering of eyelashes. “I’ll be a good girl.”

  “You’d better be. That’s all I know.”

  The next day, Dusty Wallis, in theory not allowed home alone with Chelsea in the afternoons, lay back and sighed. Leaving almost as soon as he’d quite literally come with his patented, wide-eyed yelp of pleasure, splurt splurt all over her bedspread, his entire body convulsing as though jabbed with an electric cattle-prod; this time, he touching her down there for about twenty seconds. Not interested in a blamed thing except his own squirty-squirt. That turd.

  Powerful, in a way. What she could do with a little tickling and tugging. And yet he’d rubbed and poked her till she was all-but sore, with no equivalent result.

  In any case, the horse out of the barn for Dusty, now.

  For both of them.

  Maybe, thinking, she should let him put himself inside her. Maybe owing him that honor. Poor Dusty.

  Not without a rubber, though. He kept hinting riding his bike all the way out to the Food Chief by the interstate. They had condoms in the bathroom there, he reported.

  Chelsea, aghast at the thought of something from a nasty filling station bathroom on Dusty’s winkydink and then up inside her. “They have them there for you to just take? In a basket?”

  Dusty, grinning and rubbing his hands all up and down, rough and clumsy. “They’re in a machine for a quarter,” cort-der. “Like the ones at the Piggly Wiggly.”

  “At the Piggly Wiggly? Where?”

  “Not rubbers. The gum and bouncy-ball machines.”

  Oh, she said, I get it. But panicking. “Daddy’ll have a fit if he catches us here alone.”

  “Please,” he had pled showing her the pup tent in his pants, the damp spot at the peak. When they made out, he sometimes would end up with a huge wet patch.

  A few minutes later, the front door was hitting Dusty on the ass with a thump as he bolted out before Dwight’s arrival home from the Union office. Chelsea, left to get a damp washcloth to wipe up the glob of Dusty’s semen on her arm and bedspread. He hadn’t even wanted to kiss anymore once she started her tickling.

  Her princess phone ring-a-linged, vibrating an old glass ashtray of Mamas where Chelsea kept her rings and other jewelry. Delighted to hear her dearest Devin, calling back already.

  Her mood brightened further at his report: that he’d done as she asked and talked an initially reticent Roy Earl into coming for her. “For some dumb reason, he’s agreed to spirit your little frecklefaced butt over to the Dead show.”

  “But—I’d rather you came and got me.”

  “You’re breaking my heart. It’ll be fine.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “He likes you. He’ll take care of you.”

  “Wouldn’t you take care of me?”

  “Not as good as somebody who actually liked you.”

  “Kiss my foot.”

  “Serious question.”

  That usually meant Devin was funning with her, and she warned him he better not be. “Go ahead.”

  “Anything else I can arrange about your life for you?”

  She said no, thanked her brother with deep and abiding sincerity. Chelsea, elated, slammed down the phone and spun about her room, long legs and feet and frizzy hair going every which way. She shrieked, long, raw, her throated shredded. Mama’s cats went running every which way.

  Suddenly self conscious, she froze. Collected herself. A grown woman going over to party with college boys in Columbia didn’t hurl herself around her bedroom like that demon girl in The Exorcist.

  Still, she twirled one last time and danced her way downstairs in time to see Mama arriving home and closing the back door and calling for help putting away all the groceries. Pork chop night. They had a routine. “You’ll understand men and their routines later, sweetheart,” her mother always said.

  Supper: Mama had not liked the looks of the chops, so it turned into fried chicken wit
h mashed potatoes and greasy, yeasty dinner rolls from the deli at the big new Publix fixing to run the Piggly Wiggly out of business, or so her Daddy kept saying. Their take-out deli was excellent, however, and besides: Mama had had too much to do with the ELMS, the civic organization in town, and this and that and the other duties she also had on her plate, to do justice to pork chop night. Not this week.

  If this pace of seeing to everyone’s needs here and downtown at the Edgewater Ladies Munificence Society lodge kept on, Eileen threatened, she was going to have to hire help to cook and clean—a Mexican, she specified, or a young woman from another ‘latin’ country as she put it, not one of those light-fingered colored girls prone to pocketing spoons and heirlooms out of spite if nothing more, or so the family legend went about a previous hire of housekeeping help; or else they’d all be eating takeout and TV dinners to the end of days. Back like when they’d started out, she would say in at this point in the speech, “when Dwight hadn’t yet been worth a plug-nickel, and we thought open-faced sandwiches smeared with beef, gravy and potatoes out of a Dinty Moore can made for a king’s feast.”

  Next, Lord, how the children had come; and no struggle that’d come before come compare, nothing had been the same. Not for her. Not for any of them. “Mama’s little angels,” she’d say, but her tone sounded more like some work obligation than her dearest life connection.

  The Mama monologue. Chelsea felt like she had heard it all, through countless versions and iterations. A work in progress, ever more baroque in its recitation of sufferings, as her gay English teacher would say it. For queers to be so awful, he was the nicest teacher they had at that school.

  Surely grownup life wasn’t supposed to be all opposites and lies. With all the complaints. It felt like Mama had so much resistance inside her that it would one day snap like when that plane crashed at Edgewater County Airfield and broke the power lines.

  Chelsea and her father, now home and at his table-place with iced tea in hand, ignored Eileen’s prattle from inside the kitchen. They talked between themselves and paid attention only when Eileen came in through the swinging door, yap yap yapping the way she did, about how the food, such as it was, would be coming out as soon as she microwaved the chicken. If not going on and on about what interested her, instead gossiping through the meal on the phone with Chelsea’s aunt or one of the ELMS women, or in years past, Chelsea’s grandmother, Big Ma-Maw, rest her sweet soul. Called her twice a day, Mama did, till the day the woman had died. Hadn’t picked up the second time, that day; how everyone found out.