And, expected the same one day out of the daughter, Eileen had warned. The way of the Bevinses was closeness, and now Rucker women as well. “Your grand-mammy’s watching from on high. We can’t let her down. You got to call me just like that. Every day. When it’s your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“To be the god-durn daughter. Calling on the phone.”
A million years in the future. Ha. She might call, occasionally. From wherever she landed. Besides far away from here.
Chelsea, happy and excited about her plan of subterfuge regarding the concert, and while it caused a sting of hot guilt, far from worried about poor dead Big Ma-Maw, who had suffered in the end and was now at peace, as Daddy had explained when it was just him and the two children talking after the funeral.
As Mama took a hushed phone call in the kitchen—another ELMS crisis—Chelsea made small talk with her dad at her own breakneck teenage girl speed. She banged her knee up and down against the underside of the table, jazzed on the Cheerwine she and Dusty drank before messing around in her room; teenage girl-gossip, school dramas, the spoiled privileged cheerleaders and dumb redneck girls alike who picked on her, thoughts and observations tumbling out unbidden.
Finally her father managed to break in. “Sweetie, can you quit with your knee?”
“What with my knee?”
He informed her of the bouncing and bumping. “Poppa’s had himself a long day.”
“Oh—sorry.” She pretended not to have known she was doing it. Stopped. “That better?”
“Much.”
“Well, la-ti-da,” in mimicry of Diane Keaton from a movie she’d watched with Devin and Libby, one with the little squirrelly New York Jew, as her Mama said of the man, talking right into the camera. She’d never seen an actor do that. She threw up her hand like the actress and laughed, ha-ha-ha, I-don’t-care. “La-ti-da.”
“Quit being smart now, sugar. Pretty please? One day, you’ll have headaches.”
“How was work?”
“Spent all day up in Union,” Dwight said, pleased at being asked. Beginning his own more languorously paced small talk, he catalogued the minutia of his endeavor running “over yonder” to talk to a man about partnering up and expanding further into the upstate—the people of mountainous upper South Carolina could use more insurance. No question about that part.
The Rucker patriarch, as Chelsea thought of him when he was crabby and cross and trying to rein in Eileen’s foolishness, made good money. Had been a success—more, he said, than he’d ever dreamed of having when he’d started out. He came from millworkers, back when mills existed in which folks could work, as he often said and she had seen when Gray-Peele had closed the last one here in Edgewater County.
Dwight had grown up near Spartanburg, he said, barefoot and fishing in the Pacolet River, and with not a brain in his head. Proud, then, of all he made of himself—entrepreneurship. Civic leadership. A home and family well beyond the means from which he’d come. She had heard his little speech so many times. He told her this was his way of showing gratitude to the God who had made all this possible. Had given him a chance, the gumption to make a man of himself.
The magic formula? “You got to love what you do. And be happy doing it. Folks will respond in kind by loving what you do and being happy.” Among the family record albums were two or three to which she remembered Daddy listening years ago. No music, only these old men speaking in their deep voices—Acres of Diamonds, one was called. Think and Grow Rich was another. “Success is always right there waiting for you. You just have to learn to look for it with the right eyes.”
Always so full of good advice and stories and parables. It wasn’t nothing but old man horse-doody, of course. But she always listened and nodded and went uh-huh.
“I wish you didn’t have to be gone so much.”
“Well—that’s the card I done drew, sweetheart. That’s my path. I hate the driving. You can’t get a blessed thing done except, well, drive. Can’t stand wasting time having to drive places.”
Drive places.
A tingling. The moment. She’d had an announcement simmering for weeks, now, since before wanting to go to the Dead show. Much more important. With Mama out of the room, maybe now the time.
“Daddy—I need to tell you something.”
Dwight, who’d turned one eye toward the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions fanfare blaring from the living room set, put down his fork. “What, angel?”
“I want to go to SCAD, for college.”
“What’s ‘SCAD’? Sounds like an off-brand bug spray.”
“It’s in Savannah. Savannah College of Art and Des—”
“Do what?” Eileen had burst back in.
“Me and Daddy were talking.”
Eileen stared down the daughter, took her time in getting seated. The presence of her impending disapproval preceded any words she might say, and knowing this, she took her time: stubbing out her cigarette, messing with her napkin, finally starting to daintily eat without making eye contact with her daughter. “Don’t start no mess tonight, Colette. I told you Mama feels like she’s run a durn race all afternoon.”
“That’s the god’s truth,” Daddy said. “Mercy.”
“We decided, the Queen Mother and me, that I ain’t going to go through with a ‘little to-do’ tonight about going to no rock concert. But we didn’t say nothing about college.”
A stand-off. Eileen, daggers for squinting eyes hovering over her readers.
Dwight cleared his throat. He looked at her like go ahead. “Tell us about college.”
“The Savannah College of Art & Design. That’s—that’s where I want to go. That’s what I want to be.”
“You want to be a what?”
How dumb were they? “An artist.”
Her daddy beamed but with a little frown, caution knotting up his eyebrows they way they did when he was looking at bills or having to sit listening to Mama pestering and instructing on this’n that. “I think that’s wonderful, honey. Now, can you make a living being an artist?”
“If I go to college and learn how.”
“Can’t you do that at Tri-County Tech?”
“I don’t want to be no plumber or electrician. If I go to SCAD, art is, like, what the whole school’s for.”
“The whole durn school’s for art.” Mama said it like it was filth in her mouth.
“For—drawing. Stuff like drawing.” Chelsea’s words were barely there. Her mother’s diatribes when she wasn’t getting her way came enormous, vicious. This felt like one brewing. She cowered.
Dwight spoke up. “Here’s where I come down on all this: If you can make a living at what you study, I’ll pay for you to study it. And, long as Mama thinks you going to Savannah for four years is all right, then it’s fine by me.”
Chelsea watched as her Mama quelled and controlled anger that nonetheless bled from her eyes like tears. “Drawing pictures ain’t what people go to college for,” she insisted. “Least not someone who can already draw as pretty as you can. I ain’t never even heard of SCAD. You could at least pick a school with a reputation, not some fly-by-night foolishness coming from the back of a comic book.” Scoffing in her savage hateful way, as though her daughter had uttered one of the stupidest remarks ever imagined. “All the way in Georgia? For god’s sake.”
“It’s not but three hours away.”
“Not only is college still years away, you’re not going out of state. Furthermore: people like us do not become ‘artists.’ Trust me, in planning and executing the Spring Fling Festival each year,” an annual Tillman Falls to-do with vendors and crafters and artists and music, “being an artist seems to do something terrible to the normal functioning brain. Lord help me at such wanton, childish foolishness. Bless your heart—so young. You’ll find out.”
“But Mama—it’s what I want.”
“Since when does the child get to decide? I’ll tell you—when she has her own babies. Until then? No wa
y, José.”
Nothing rankled like when Mama would say ‘No way, José.’ Chelsea’s face and eyes burned like somebody was cutting up onions. “I hate you.”
“Now Creedence and Eileen, let’s not start—”
“And I swear, if you don’t quit encouraging her, Dwight, I will put arsenic in that tea you drink like well water. You both make me so durn mad I could bite a tire iron in half.”
“Devin says you made him go to Southeastern too, ‘just so you could keep tabs on my ass’.” Chelsea, mimicking his deep voice.
“Don’t bring your brother into this. He ain’t got nothing to do with none of this. And watch that mouth.”
“Mama?”
“What.”
It was time to make it clear. “I hate you.”
Her daddy cussed and popped her on the forearm with his butter knife, hard enough to hurt. “Don’t you talk like that to your mama.”
Mama sat mortified with shock. “Dwight Rucker—don’t you dare hit that angel with a knife. What’s wrong with you?”
More breath than voice. “I hate you both. I hate myself.”
Here came the tears.
Not Chelsea—Mama. Eileen began to wail and boohoo, melodramatic, reminiscent of the day two summers ago when Devin announced he no longer believed in God, if he ever had in the first place. “I can’t go through this again, Colette,” sobbing. “I can’t lose you, not like Devin. I can’t let you go, I can’t, I can’t. You’re all I have.”
“All we have,” her Daddy added. “Don’t do us like Devin. Please, girl.”
Chelsea, ripping apart inside. Cussing and pointing at her mother, vicious, the way she’d heard the woman herself curse any number of people—her husband and son and daughter, people like Uncle Hill (which seemed inexplicable, and only when no one else was around), repairmen, salesmen, waitresses, her so-called friends in the ELMS, random passersby. Even Big Ma-Maw here and there, when she was alive. Cussing a blue streak over the old woman after she got sick with the stomach cancer and laid there dying for two years. Chelsea’s Mama had really turned pissy back then, boy. Yowzers.
“I hate all this mess,” she shrieked, throwing her own silverware across the room against the wall. “I’m dying upstairs in that room, and at this table with y’all still treating me like a baby!”
With adrenaline squirting, Chelsea ignored their pleas and admonitions to bolt upstairs, fake-wailing like her mother. Feeling thrilled by her profanity, and at disobeying her father’s orders to come back and sit down and apologize and yadda-yadda, she slammed her door and screamed for the second time today—primal—and flung herself across the bed, bouncing to a place of quiet and stillness where she could only hear the thudding of her heart. Leaping up, doing a crazy Creedence dance, herky-jerky, in a circle around and around. Collapsing again.
Crying for real. Hard.
Chelsea, at last feeling cried out, came to a fuller understanding of her brother’s animus toward their mother. Dried her eyes. Sat up. Glad no one could see her spazzing out.
How the little sister had been in denial, a fool. How she’d have to be strong to get her way.
Or else, if necessary, to run away. Maybe on the night of the concert, when she would sneak out and have a head start—the lie was she’d be staying at Shelby Fordham’s house to study and watch movies. Leaving and not coming back.
How much money did she have stuck away in the piggy bank? Fifty? Sixty? Maybe she would call in the morning to the Greyhound station and see what a bus ticket to Charleston or Savannah would cost.
Ain’t much, girl. What then?
“I don’t know, Devin. Shut up.”
Chelsea, contemplating what she could stuff into her overnight bag. What she would need, where she could go. Her mind, racing, kept her up half the night.
When she did sleep, she suffered vivid, lucid dreams—of running with Devin and his friends in Columbia on campus, but the city changed into the woods, where they were then galloping like a pack of deer or those cute little pygmy goats they have on the Glasscock farm over yonder off River Ridge Road, little animals running free and crazed and directionless; like the wind, unbridled. Directing how and where she ran in the dream, in control and thinking that what lay ahead was marvelous. Calling back to the others, come this way this way this way, this is the way I just know it, a big meadow full of freedom always right there out of sight. And Devin, laughing and running crazily, encouraging her to run faster, to keep going, to find that place, whatever and wherever it was. A dream that had been more real than the life to which she again ascribed the nature of reality in the morning light. Another day. The same. Creedence.
Twenty-Two
Billy
Libby Libby Libby Libby LIBBY.
Billy, at his high-rise condo on the southern side of campus. Two bedroom, nice, a corner unit, no roommate needed or wanted, the building overlooking the slender city park running parallel to Blossom. A quick shower and a soapy wank—LIBBY—with an explosive release that left him weak-kneed. Three slices of cold pizza, book bag repack, ready to jet off to afternoon classes. Billy.
On the walk back home from dinner in the student union dining hall, he thought through the play-out—the approach, the score, the follow-through—and in the process, a tortuous but naughtily thrilling idea came to him: Billy, calling for a sit-down summit with Ruck. Not to lay things on the line, no, but ostensibly to help him and Libby, thus demonstrating his own level of caring sensitivity. How wonderful a man he was in every way. How considerate.
Later, once the switcheroo occurred, they’d meet again over drinks like gentlemen, with Ruck seeing that her instincts were best—she wanted Billy, and who could blame her. The perfect and right-thinking idea, unfolding in its own immaculate moment.
Furthermore, how Billy, unique, privileged and ravenous, deserved to have her. Repeatedly, vigorously. At will. A birthright—when one wielded a knobby, pendulous elephant trunk such as his, you put it where you would, and the few who couldn’t see the boon in receiving its energies were too shortsighted to live. The results of this attitude often manifested in shocking and sudden occurrences of emotional release. It was what it was; he was learning to deal with it.
No Choking Hazard groupies had ended up in the swamp. Not yet, anyway.
As for his friend’s reaction to losing his gal? How Ruck would understand what Billy saw in her; a given. How Ruck was moving on with his morosely chubby and nihilistic self. Win-win. He’s smart, granted, but a drunk suffering a simmering, low boil fixation on mortality? At their epic age of princely abandon? The bars they frequented seethed and roiled with drunken girls. He’d find himself a partner in crime soon enough.
Ruck. A mook, a bringdown. Interested in nothing but his own morbid navel. But Billy still loved him, as far as that went.
Yes. Billy Steeple, snatching that pussy right out from under his boy’s oblivious nose. The logic, irrefutable—if he thought necessary, he’d hit up the Boolean sages over in the philosophy department for confirmation. But Ruck, making this reality himself; Billy, an innocent. Train, leaving station.
Christ, though. He had to be careful. If had an accident with Libby, he’d never forgive himself.
Out on the balcony he inhaled the scent of the city, warm and greasy with afternoon automobile exhaust, and gazed toward campus proper and all future glory awaiting him thereupon.
A light breeze; he convinced himself he detected a hint of crisp fall, always welcome in muggy South Carolina. The first graceful kiss of cooler air reminded him of childhood at prep school in New England during his various semesters at schools like Marvelwood, Androscoggin Academy and Portsmouth Abbey, his three alma maters spread over eight years of fitting-in attempts. These never worked out, not in the face of his pubescent penchant for petty vandalism, poor grades and disruptive classroom behavior, the notorious Androscoggin Pornography Ring scandal, and so on. The two accidents, salacious, tawdry and surprising affairs, had upped the stakes.
<
br /> He had been caught at plenty of wrongdoing, but not the deaths of students, one of which he disguised as a suicide by hanging, no great scandal at a prep school full of rich neurotics. As for him, always an explanation of his whereabouts. Always the right alibi. Billy, watched over by angels. It had continued. The latest, a groupie—a transient girl with terrible teeth and skin, filthy clothes and safety pins through her ears—hadn’t been missed. She had been a pressure-valve, that grungy trollop.
Gazing at the buildings where Devin and the others lived, including the twelve-story women’s dorm within which dwelled the damsel, the exquisite Libby Meade, Billy sighed with vague worry, a pernicious sense of impending accidental doom. He shook it off. No more accidents. Only with background players like the nameless groupie. To do so at this early point with one of the principals, as the main characters in a screenplay were known ‘in the industry,’ would spin the story perhaps too far in a shocking direction. “Only Hitchcock could get away with Psycho’s conceit,” as the screenwriting guru had taught them, “of killing off the ostensible lead after only the first act. The true artist may break rules, but only after he becomes master of them.”
The rolling, hilly campus lay beneath a steel-gray cloud deck: contemporary block-like buildings sprouted among verdant patches of greenery like hideous, angular Eastern Island heads, concrete monuments to mediocrity jutting up in obscene relief from the natural topography that, in this part of town, tested bike riders with steep inclines more reminiscent of the San Franciscan peninsula rather than the midlands of South Carolina. The land, cut through over the eons by the confluence of three rivers a mile or so to the west, must have seemed idyllic to early colonists, indeed worthy of a future state capitol.
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