Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  To be left alone.

  To ponder.

  Devin, watching as Prudy, frustrated, struggled with her cast. Turning around and around, trying to get settled into a comfortable enough position to cat-nap. Four weeks of this.

  Devin: Consumed with the notion of getting himself and the cat back over to the duplex. Understanding the breadth of the work to be done. To get where he needed to be. Much work.

  Devin, getting started once his mother left to run errands by getting down the bottle of Jack Daniels his father kept around for when Uncle Hill hung out, which was often. Cracking the tax seal. Throwing the cap away. A plan, underway.

  Fifty-Three

  Billy

  Back in Columbia the weeks rolled on unabated, hot and terrible like a good Carolina summer oughta be, or so the Rucks of the world would put it.

  Billy, in Best Friend mode, all but moving in with Devin and Prudy. Bringing his top-of-the-line stereo over and setting it up in the living room. Playing great albums: Making Movies. Lou Reed’s accomplished and fascinating excoriation of Reagan’s crumbling, diseased America, New York. REM, Life’s Rich Pageant. Dead tapes he’d started acquiring. No punk.

  Billy, wishing to go back—not to the day of the Dead show, all the way to the morning of buying the tickets. A time so innocent and full of promise, him and Libby by the tree, chatting. All of it squandered—even while she still lived.

  Only one answer—he needed the flux capacitor in Doc Brown’s DeLorean to start fluxing.

  But also, and this was a big but-also, the air in the Arcadia mill house gave him a modicum of peace—’twas the last place Libby’d lived, if only for a brief interval. Sitting on the sofa, he convinced himself he’d catch a whiff of her divine scent, the Egyptian musk oil she wore, tickling his nose as though she’d walked past. Hiding these notions from Ruck, tortured enough already.

  To the outside world, for all appearances Ruck seemed normal as could be. Drinking heavily all summer, in good spirits, telling ribald jokes, speaking with a more pronounced Southern twang than before, which Billy thought odd but acceptably eccentric behavior in this survivor of a near-death experience; folks came and went checking on Ruck and Billy, bringing by sixers and good tidings. A tall drink of water named Carmen, who’d lived down the block in UT, had shown a particularly motherly interest in Ruck’s recovery. After Libby dumped Ruck for Billy, next step in his plan had been to arrange Carmen for rebound duty with Ruck. And now? Here we are.

  Billy, suggesting they visit Dobbs over in the rehab facility in the hospital complex, but Devin, refusing.

  “I can’t look him in the face.”

  “But Ruck—I feel like we’re leaving him there.”

  “I got his blood on my hands, too. I can’t.”

  “He’s asked for you, man.”

  Bill, Ruck said. I can’t.

  Devin Rucker wept, then, for only the second time that summer, at least that Billy had seen. He let him off the hook.

  Billy, visiting in Devin’s stead; Dobbs, a mess, but coherent. Asking after Devin. Billy, trying to explain. That Devin’s pain was so great, he sought to keep it to himself. To not spread it round.

  Billy, coming home one night after a movie at the Bijou—Sex Lies & Videotape, a resonant work on more levels than he felt capable of articulating—cried out in shock upon stumbling in the dark over an unconscious Ruck.

  Sprawled across the front steps, he looked dead.

  Billy, yelping with alarm, collapsed alongside his roommate. He cradled Ruck like a lover.

  Still breathing. Shirt covered in puke. Not dead—just ungodly intoxicated.

  Thank un-god.

  Unmindful of the vomit and the stink, Billy wiped his mouth and cooed reassurance. “It’s okay, buddy.”

  Devin, incoherent, drunk as two skunks, called out in a cloud of astringent breath: “Where’s Libby at?”

  “Quiet, now.”

  A garbled string of gobbledygook.

  “Libby’s fine.”

  “She is?”

  “Yep. You fell down.” He held him close. “That’s all.”

  “Ah,” he gurgled. “Thank god.”

  “C’mon, brotherman. Let’s get you inside.” After helping Ruck to his feet, Billy managed to wrestle him upstairs. Quiet, penitent and careful as though he were a monk crossing a frozen river stream, he cleaned up his friend, undressed him and rolled him into sheets.

  Only once did he allow himself to break down in front of Ruck, during the weekend when he finished unpacking the last of the moving boxes to discover a couple of her school notebooks.

  Not too shabby, this one breakdown. Considering the depth of rage and the jags of privacy which often overwhelmed him into total lassitude and ill-contained accidental murderous rage, barely able to concentrate on the summer school courses he’d taken to keep up with the classes in which he’d received an F or W. It’s amazing Billy hadn’t gone out and killed someone just to do it, finally. Just to see if doing so would mitigate the pernicious and pathological weeping.

  Libby’s mother and brothers, still shellshocked over her loss in such proximity to that of Frank, came to Arcadia one afternoon in July to gather her clothing and other possessions.

  Her mother had requested these items. Ruck, more than willing to offer them up. She was her mother, after all, he’d said with a shrug. “You don’t say no to a dead girl’s mother.”

  That Ruck, Billy thought. You want to see someone bounce back from abject horror and tragedy? He seethed with envy at his friend’s fortitude.

  Billy, watching with interest from the living room as Ruck carried a pair of Libby’s sneakers—a pair of gray Nikes she’d worn the night of the Dead show—and stashed them away on a shelf in the top of the broom closet underneath the stairs. He placed them there along with a manila envelope of papers: her now forever-unfinished screenplay.

  It went without saying he quietly died inside more each day in his desire to read the pages. Ruck would say yes. It was that Billy, feeling profane and unworthy, found himself unable to ask for the rare privilege.

  Looking at her cover sheet—the title, the words ‘first draft’, her name Frances E. Meade, the date, now a few months in the past—he’d never in his life experienced such a pusillanimously rancid sensation of discouragement and despair. A yawning, opaque emptiness. A sense of disappointment bordering on the outright bothersome.

  But, he didn’t want to kill anyone. Not again. Those had been accidents anyway.

  No—this time, he wanted to kill himself. Would that he had the courage.

  Perhaps he needn’t act—the planet would be turning to ice in the early 21st century, anyway. Real estate below the Mason-Dixon line would become so expensive even the monied classes like Billy’s wouldn’t want to live anymore.

  And yet Ruck, he was the one. He had seen the worst of it all. A stalwart, strong mo-fo. To be admired.

  After bidding Libby’s family adieu, Billy drifted around outside. He kicked at an old basketball, half-deflated and covered with mildew, found in a forgotten corner of the weed-strewn backyard. A rental property in a college town, several residents’ worth of junk had piled up against an ancient chain link fence.

  A great rumbling came—train tracks bisected the neighborhood only a block away. Lengths of freight cars trundled through day and night, shaking the old mill houses to their foundations and residents out of the beds.

  Ruck, appearing on the back deck, plumed smoke out of his nose and saluted Billy with the first libation of the afternoon. Skipping the beer stage, he gulped half of a bourbon and water he’d mixed for himself in an oversized iced tea glass.

  They stood looking at one another. Billy spoke up. “That went okay.”

  “Glad it’s over and done with.”

  Hiding an errant tear from his friend, Billy kicked the ball one last time, so hard it disappeared into the thicket of the weeds.

  “Damn, son.”

  “Yeah. That hurt.” He had to
ask. “Why the shoes?”

  Ruck seemed to cogitate on how to answer. He came down into the back yard and looked at Billy.

  “To remind me.” Having to clear his throat. “That she once walked this earth alongside us all. Was real as you are now. Like we are. Stuck here on this prison-planet.” A long, cool drink. “That she wasn’t just a dream.”

  Profundity, every hair on his body standing endwise—and Billy had been the one trying to become a writer. His fraudulence stung like alcohol in a cut. The dreadful voice laughed at him the way the au pair had tittered at his meatstick. He wanted to strangle himself.

  “It does feel that way. Doesn’t it? A little dreamlike.”

  “Just a little.”

  That wry fuck-it grin of his. What did the bastard know?

  Billy seethed and agonized anew at his failings. Ruck had always been the smartest one of them all—no wonder she’d chosen him instead. A big dick, money, none of it could compare.

  The shoes. “Treading the ground. Instead of gracing the sky.”

  “Now you’ve got the poetry of it, beau. And once I’m gone, you’ll be able to explain the fable of them gray shoes.”

  “What’s ‘gone’ supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said, barking like a dog and chugging his drink. “Let’s party, beau. Let’s forget.”

  Later that night, gone indeed, but only down to the Old Market to embark upon a gold-standard, obligatory and obliterating drunk which absolutely raged.

  Ruck, gregarious to a fault, had the time of his life—roaring with bonhomie and buying shots for people; Billy, hitting on every halfway decent-looking filly who’d stop long enough to listen, and doing well with most, the ones who weren’t totally turned off by a now six-months shaggy-haired big-ass Adam’s apple dude the size of a linebacker.

  Billy, cocky. Getting bothersome inside. Not taking a liking to the looks of some dude at one of the tables outside McHaffie’s Pub. Words. Flipping them off, but keeping on down the block.

  Later, picking a fight in the alley outside Group Therapy with a group of frat cats, who, while all smaller than Billy—but far less besotted—still managed to knock both him and Ruck onto their staggering asses. Their assailants strolled away, chortling and calling them dick-sucking pussies.

  Another failure. It was as though Billy the one sitting on the other side of the desk where his grandfather sat, also father and assorted headmasters, in abject, stupefied disappointment at his obvious intelligence, yet poor academic performance and behavior problems.

  Ruck, helping his buddy to his feet, said, dang, beau—a cut on Billy’s cheek from someone’s college ring dripped hot blood onto the front of his tie-dye, the dark color intermingling with the bright. They took a cab a few blocks uptown to Baptist Hospital to get his cheek stitched up.

  At Ruck’s insistence they filed a police report regarding the assault. He reported the ‘college toughs’ has taken roughly sixty dollars from his wallet—about the amount he’d spent that night on his tab—after assaulting both he and his friend. Ruck, having fun with it. The drunker Ruck got now, the more Billy swore he seemed sober.

  At another bar, on yet another night of heavy boozing the day Billy’s stitches had come out, both young men stood frozen in their tracks as Chryssie Hynde’s voice came over the speakers.

  It couldn’t have been a worse track. ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ caused lightning fast look of horrid, unavoidable recognition between the friends. The Pretenders, one of Libby’s faves. Loved a kick-ass rock band fronted by a strong and confidant chick, she had.

  Splitting the scene.

  “I’m going to be the Chryssie Hynde of Hollywood,” she had promised. “The movies I’m going to write will be like nothing a woman ever wrote before.”

  Billy, remembering that moment. How Libby’s courage and ambition had made the true perfidy of his fraudulence, in every aspect of life, well inside him like a stomach bloating with gases from a rotting convenience store burrito.

  Ruck, out on the sidewalk, the pop tune echoing out of the bar, became not so much weepy as withdrawn. “Ah, shit,” he kept saying. “What a waste.”

  “Let’s not go there.”

  “‘There?’ Fuck, dude–we’re already there.”

  “I feel you.”

  Ruck, demanding to be led to another bar with less offensive tunes playing; Billy, cursing the night sky and kicking at newspaper boxes and trash cans. Punching a brick wall hard enough to break skin, but not bone.

  Collapsing, inconsolable, into his friend’s arms.

  Ruck, supporting his friend.

  And not for the last time.

  Another milestone, fraught with tension and personal tumult: Ruck, finally getting a new car courtesy Edgewater County’s automotive legend Hill Hampton, who procured the Ruckers a brand new 1990 VW Jetta at wholesale, the model chosen after Billy and Ruck went to the library to scan through the latest Consumer Reports vehicle reports. Hampton Motor Company sold Fords, but his Uncle Hill could get any kind of car that Devin wanted from his business partner’s import place over in Columbia, or from the auction up in Hartsville or down in Lexington County.

  Ruck, explaining to Billy that any old car would have done, but that he had what he called ‘a marker due’ him from Hampton, and so he might as well get what he wanted.

  “This model,” Ruck told Billy, “gets good MPG. It’s got a deep trunk, too. You could just about live out of that trunk.”

  The price had also been right—the insurance pay-out from the accident covered the cost of the VW in full, a condition upon which Ruck had insisted. “My folks had just made the last payment on the damn Mustang. They ain’t paying for no more cars for me.”

  Billy could have arranged to buy Ruck a brand new car, and would have offered, but felt ostentatious. Ruck’s dignified and adult bargain further sullied the worth of the modest Steeple trust fund upon which Billy drew. What was money in the face of true human dignity and grace in the face of tragedy?

  One night in early August, a get-together gelled in the mill house, with Ruck insisting that young Creedence be included in the revelry.

  “More I think about it, I got something to make up to that little lady.”

  Billy, remembering—the Dead show, how the sister had been forgotten, precipitating a pernicious family conflict over the slight.

  Had there ever been a stupid rock concert portending more drama and strife? he pondered. Had there ever been more to forgive than that night? The wretchedness concealed inside had caused his face to break out in acne, which hadn’t happened since before the first accident back at Androscoggin, after which his skin had cleared.

  At the party, the usual suspects attended save for Roy Earl, who’d gone on vacation to Myrtle Beach with his grandparents. One afternoon when he and Billy went to see Dobbs, soon discharged and ready to begin life in the wheelchair, he confessed how the drunk driver having started at The Dixiana, his family’s bar, caused him enormous grief.

  “The dude’s people said they drank all over the county. Nobody’s closing up their barns.”

  Roy Earl shook his head. “One day I will shut down that damn ‘barn.’ That honkytonk’s always been the biggest embarrassment of my sorry life.”

  “It’s kinda legendary in the country music world.”

  “That was forever ago. Now, it’s just a dump where drunks drink. But not for long.”

  The festivities were centered out on the back deck, a keg placed in a blue plastic tub of ice melting in the heat of summer. The humidity heavy and relentless, the entire world seemed covered in condensation; everyone chatted, laughed, smoked, played music. Newcomers stood in shocked amazement when one of the trains rumbled through and blasted its horn.

  Eschewing food all day, Billy, in particular, got ripped while pumping full the red Solo cups. In a fit of alcohol-induced delirium coupled with sudden-onset-empty-stomach syndrome, he bolted inside to order ten large pizzas, about three times as much fo
od as needed. Thirty minutes later he paid for the pies with a stack of twenties fluttering out of his pockets like the confetti which had fallen from the ceiling at midnight during the Dead’s New Year’s Eve show, an experience he barely remembered but for the experimental sex with the nameless, chubby cooze he’d met out there.

  Again: he let go about as much as he dared, yet hadn’t fucked her to death. A win.

  After wolfing down pizza the partiers drifted back outside, leaving Billy in the living room with young Creedence. She’d been dropped off by her dad with an overnight bag. A big family deal, this sleepover.

  Buzzed, she lay kicked-back, narrow bare feet on top of the couch. Creedence, cute as a button, Billy noted, in cutoffs and a yellow, formfitting Madonna T-shirt.

  Looking, Billy admitted to himself, sexy as hell.

  How long had it been since he’d gotten laid?

  Since the Oakland accident prevention experiment.

  A rocket in his pocket.

  Another test, maybe?

  He leaned over, grabbed her foot. Her eyes lit up. He kissed her toes, a quick peck, and placed it gently back down beside its pink twin.

  Breathless. She couldn’t speak. He winked and sat down in the chair opposite her.

  Billy, beaming dick-eyes at her while he twisted a fat number using a filthy yellow Frisbee full of stems and seeds for a tray, made small talk.

  “You like smoky-smoke, fair Miss Creedence?”

  “Hale yes I do,” her Southern accent becoming more pronounced with each sip of beer. “Light me up one.”