Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  But, not worrying. Her brother’s good humor—and perhaps his soul—seemed, by all accounts, restored. Despite the fall, whatever had occurred between Billy and her brother on their trip together seemed to have healed the grievous wound Devin suffered for all those years.

  Billy.

  She didn’t know what he’d done, but wanted to thank him.

  In a very special way.

  She wasn’t pregnant anymore. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again. She’d be divorced in another year, in any case.

  Moments came and went, however, in which she thought she glimpsed glimmers of Devin’s old pain, the melancholy near-madness flickering in the eyes hidden behind his shades, twitchy flashes of pique that bordered on seething rage. Or perhaps she’d only been primed to expect such out of him, and projected those expectations. She’d been thumbing through Oprah’s line of self-help books, a subscription her mother had gotten for her and Devin, and her field of consciousness felt duly expanded.

  The only real argument they’d suffered as a family was over their impudent smoking, in particular at the dinner table.

  “I don’t care if you both huff yourselves into the ground,” she’d shouted, “but I can’t take this stink while I’m trying to eat supper.”

  Devin’s response? A rare flash of genuine hot rage, pounding the table and declaring how he’d smoke wherever he goddamn pleased and whenever it pleased him to do so, thank you very much, and for her to kiss his ass and piss up a rope all at once.

  Eileen, on the other hand, had burst into tears, begging her children not to fight at their father’s dinner table. Coughing into her pink napkin and not touching her food, she deigned, however, to snub out her own smoldering butt. So it went.

  The separation from Dusty, ongoing; Chelsea, counting the months until said divorce would be final.

  After the loss of the baby, Dusty had no longer pressed the issue of reconciliation. So far he’d agreed to Chelsea’s demands, which by anyone’s standards were modest and fair. Especially gracious, all things reconsidered.

  After all, she could have been like chubby Shelby Fordham, who, on a stop-by last week to see Devin—and making goo-goo eyes at him the whole time, brazen and obvious to all but him, it seemed—told her that, after catching her husband making time with another ‘bitch’ as she termed it, she’d stayed married for another five years.

  “Just to make the son of a gun miserable. To remind his ass who writes the checks inside this house. And I am not talking about the monthly bills, either.”

  Chelsea, horrified, said more power to her, but she’s history.

  But, also thinking of the enjoyment of doing Dusty that way—staying with him, but never getting near that peterpiper again.

  Which would only make him stick it somewhere else.

  Like they all didn’t do it. It’s what her mother always said. “You ought to just forget it and get on with your lives.” Eileen still cussed her daughter occasionally for having ‘made all this happen.’

  Thinking about Buddy Lawler. Getting all shaky inside. Thinking of the few text messages he’d sent her lately. Wanting to get together.

  Forget it, good-time Charlie. I have my sights on bigger game.

  As with Devin and his Big Book recovery work, she’d taken inventory. Had done wrong, too—had hit Dusty first, she had to admit, on the night he’d beaten her down to the floor with a belt. Admitted this to herself that she had had a hand in creating this reality.

  It didn’t make his escalation any more right. But it did take two to tango, as the one Oprah book that covered addiction and adultery and abrogation of personal responsibilities had suggested. Also, that blame and guilt are childish games. She tried to forget and forgive. Sure. You betcha. But was moving on anyway. No apologies.

  The house and lot had been put on the market to be sold, which had been a relief. Dusty, swinging by a few days earlier to deliver a box of kitchen items from the house, all-but wept as he told her how much he missed the cats—his way, she supposed, of saying that he missed her. Watching the way he’d put down the big carton of utensils and pots on the table, running his hand across the top, talking about the kitties he used to despise, she found his discourse literally incredible.

  Chelsea, giving him a chaste hug and little pats on the back, could feel his legs shaking at her touch. He all but collapsed into her arms.

  “I just still love you so much.” Crumbling into tears. “I can’t believe what all’s happened. It don’t seem real.”

  He almost got her. No—this was manipulation, like when she broke up with him as teenagers and he cried for a week. Emotional manipulation. Her mother yelled, or wept; Dusty, mostly weeping. Before the grownup him had started to try yelling.

  And whipping with a belt.

  They had both done it to her—Mama and Dusty. All this time. Beaten her into submission. She couldn’t get rid of her own mother, though.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she finally said. “But it is what it is.”

  Dusty, lingering rather than leaving, mentioned how after the house sold he had a plan to move into the new apartments over near the industrial park off the interstate. “They got a big-old pool area, with a hot tub. It’s gonna rock on Saturday afternoons.”

  “They’ll be real spiffy, I hear.”

  “I’m sure. Y’all come and swim all you want. I’ll make sure you got a key.”

  “No, now. Nothing like that.”

  “It ain’t far from the dealership.”

  “I know.”

  “In case you ever need something.”

  “Dusty—?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Awesome. Noted.”

  Now was the time. She announced she wouldn’t be here much longer. “I’m going to college, finally. In Columbia.”

  “No you ain’t. Really?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  His eyes spun with wonder. “Naw—you ain’t going to college. Are you?”

  “I’ll have you know I’ve applied to Southeastern. To start in the spring.”

  Bless his heart. He tried to sound happy. “That’s awesome. I reckon.”

  “Mr. Hampton keeps saying he wants to pay for it all, too. But I was like, um, what? No way, José.”

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t let him.”

  “Mama’s got plenty of money.”

  Besides, she told him Hampton said he knew someone ‘over yonder’ who could help her figure out the financing. “Uncle Hill’s always been a big Redtails booster. Hobnobs with all the big wheels over there, like him and Daddy always did. Anyway, I just need to get accepted.”

  “That’s exciting. I reckon.”

  Creedence, not caring whether Dusty became disappointed, discombobulated, disenchanted, or disenfranchised like those black people said they were in the last county elections over in Tillman Falls, at least according to that Nixon preacher’s claims in his Edgewater Advocate letters-to-the-editor he wrote every other week. Chelsea skipped over political junk, usually. Yawn.

  Not long after Dusty left Eileen arrived home from the ELMS meeting, her group for which she seemed to live, determined to still keep the books for them as she’d done for years. Despite complaining of searing back pain from what she claimed to be arthritic old bones, she lugged a pair of heavy grocery sacks and a leather satchel bulging with ledgers back and forth every week like always.

  Upon seeing the box on the floor, Mama dropped the satchel. “Dusty came?”

  “You just missed the little shit.”

  Eileen grimaced in disappointment. “Oh, me.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “I would love to’ve seen him.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  As she put away the spoils of her quick-stop by the Piggly Wiggly, Eileen, wistful, embarked upon anecdotes and memories of Dusty Wallis and his sad childhood—the drunken father, the familiar details recited like family scripture; how if it hadn’t been for
the Ruckers, he’d have had nothing. “Nothing at all. And us living high on the hog.”

  Chelsea knew every syllable, every inflection. At this point it sounded like an incantation of nonsense words.

  “And now, here we’ve gone and abandoned him. Shame on us.”

  “Mama? It wa’n’t only Dusty who done wrong.”

  Eileen, pausing in the act of putting away a jar of Ragù, cut her eyes across the kitchen. “Oh—did my little girl do something wrong, too? Do tell.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I did.”

  Her mother put down the spaghetti sauce. “Did he ever know?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t tell him now.”

  “It would pour cold water on it, I bet.”

  “You little shit. It would only hurt him worse than you already done. Which in light of what you’re telling me, seems like outright meanness. That’s not how we raised you, Colette. Lord have mercy.”

  “I ain’t gonna tell him nothing.”

  “You better not.” This explicit threat, complete with devil-eyes and a crooked old finger thrust in Chelsea’s direction, was as serious as it got with Mama. “I’m-a tell you what, little missy.”

  In any case, what was past remained past, and Creedence Wallis—soon to be Rucker again—was all about moving forward and doing whatever with whomever she pleased, now. One in particular.

  But even with her freedom, Billy Steeple remained out of reach. How could she compete with Melanie Pinckney, whom she had met a few times during Devin’s long hospital stay?

  It would be wrong.

  And for once, little Creedence needed to be right.

  Still. The ache for Billy, it persisted. Like one last unresolved bit of her unrequited past still demanding attention. A final itch to be scratched. She had to know, if for no other reason than to ask him in their moments of intimacy to tell her, at last, why she had so turned him off. What she had done wrong that night. And what she could now do to make him love her, finally.

  Fifty-Nine

  Devin

  Devin, taking his daily hobble in the acre-large backyard among the tombstones and mosquitos and gnats, puffed away on the smokes in which Mama kept him stocked. A sacred routine.

  He strove to recall the pets themselves. Having been gone so long, though, several he didn’t remember at all. One of those, as explained to him, had been a kitten, Prissy, stricken by rare, juvenile feline cancer, with the animal living for only three months.

  Devin, asking about it. He’d seen his mother weeping over this one.

  “In that last summer right before Daddy died. Lord, son—don’t make me talk about it.”

  Examining the fine-carved gravestone, Devin smoked and remembered his own losses.

  My Sweet Miss Prissy

  May – July

  2002

  His heart, clenching at the brief life span. Grief welled for an animal he’d never known.

  How long had Libby gotten to live, in cat years?

  Sick in the head, still.

  He could see dead people, like that little turd in the movie.

  But this was no movie.

  Devin, knowing damn well what he needed to do. Yeah. Pay a visit to the memorial garden down the road. To see Libby. These were the practice runs out here every day with the cats. The real tombstone still awaited.

  Speaking of gravestones:

  After his latest, spectacular plunge, or more to the point his amazing recovery, Devin, beginning to consider whether he could die at all. A vampiric bloodline, let’s say, or a reincarnated knights-templar of the crusades, hacking through the modern world and invincible until justice and peace restored to the holy lands. Perhaps he existed as an All-American, righteous and upright exemplar of superhero: the invincible Dipsomaniac, able in a single bound to drink entire cities dry of liquor.

  Devin, wondering if he should start taking insane risks in order to save people from themselves. See how many he could rescue from the cruel hand of fate. Build a watchtower over Edgewater County. Stay up there for months at a time, scanning the horizon for events.

  Yeah: Picturing himself racing into a burning structure, an office tower or perhaps a private residence, escaping unscathed toting a pair of sooty, screaming toddlers and the family dog; his emergence from the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper like, say, the smoldering 9/11 towers, dusting the debris from his shoulders as though movie-rubble made of spray-painted balsa wood and Styrofoam. Lifting impossible weights over his head; undergoing intensive martial arts training, putting his invincibility to work on the mean streets of troubled American towns and cities, side-stepping bullets, bludgeons and blows with equivalent dexterity and ease. The flash of cameras blinding him, mobs of admirers and sinners in need of absolution, healing; microphones thrust into his face, television newsreaders weeping in open awestruck gratitude while describing his selfless and impossible feats. President Bush draping the Medal of Freedom around Devin’s neck, both of them biting the inside of their cheeks to keep from corpsing with emotion at the fevered salvation that came part and parcel with such examples of triumphal American righteousness.

  Devin, more than a hero—a savior machine.

  Fantasizing about immortality: being buried alive, pounding on the coffin lid, decrying his entombment. But when he went down this road—thinking about death—it only made him want a drink.

  If not forty drinks.

  Or: how about a hundred.

  In less fanciful moments, as instructed by a therapist he attempted mental healing by focusing on only good memories instead of tragic-leaning-to-horrorstruck. Forcing the issue, he found himself able to entertain hazy memories of the happy final months with Libby, the time between the Dead show and the mill house in Arcadia. Or pleasant, carefree times back in high school—giving Libby gifts, holding her hand, the first kiss, the warmth and sweet scent of her breath intermingling with his; making love on a scratchy plaid blanket in the sunlit woods behind Pine Haven, or in his or her bed when they had the chance; taking walks and talking about life and the future.

  When Devin had felt like talking.

  These wonderful moments, the only visions of her allowed.

  Not her death.

  Not her face, drained of color.

  Not the sunlight and the blood.

  Not, not, not. All that, over and done.

  But the old dark spots, boiling in front of his eyes. The semicircle of granite markers at his feet, he could barely see them clean enough to read the names.

  Searching again for the happy times: recalling a beach trip with the family when he and Libby had been seniors in high school. The Ruckers had taken a house on Isle of Palms for a whole week, but that chump Frank Meade prohibited Libby from going for the whole trip. Devin, however, would be allowed to return midweek to collect her, driving up to the midlands and all the way back to the low country, a plan over which his mother had caterwauled, her dissent mattering little to a pulsating set of gonads in the grip of seventeen year-young love.

  Devin, his hand on Libby’s thigh the whole drive down back to the beach house… remembering the feel of the hot wind on his face, and of his girl’s bare, smooth skin. Her profile, her sloe eyes, defiant chin, happiness at an adventure with her boyfriend. Like grownups.

  Free.

  Down the shore, three days, the young lovers stealing moments to walk on the beach, read, play cards, and once the rest of the Ruckers retired for the night, to make love in the hot tub, all in a summer atmosphere far more pleasant than the stagnant air and buzzing nuisance insects of Edgewater County.

  Heavenly, in fact.

  Devin bought Libby a necklace at one of the gift shops, a simple silver chain from which dangled a small butterfly. Speculating about one day living in a place like this. Together. How fun it would be to live this way all the time.

  On Friday night, the parents and Creedence went to dinner across the great erector set of a bridge to Charleston, to enjoy Southern authenticity in the form
of low country legacy Jestine’s on Meeting Street. But Devin and Libby, declining; saying they’d rather have hamburgers and hot dogs at the beachfront stand in the commercial district one last time.

  Instead, of course, they’d climbed straight into Devin’s bed. Later, drinking cheap wine and dancing around in their swimsuits on the rooftop deck.

  After full dark descended, Libby had performed an immodest striptease to ‘Brass in Pocket.’ The song played on the boom box radio they’d carried up to the deck. Nobody else like me, she sang, a bit off-key. The next tune had been ‘Back on the Chain Gang,’ from a Pretenders greatest hits CD he’d given her on their six-month anniversary.

  Devin, kissing Libby and holding her eyes as a full moon rose red and fat over the Atlantic, the sea shimmering, a billion diamonds floating upon the placid surface—he was back there now. He tried to hold on as the flashes of quicksilver lunar light reflected from the sheen of perspiration on her tanned skin, glinted off the butterfly necklace. Molding her to his body, and he to hers.

  Hearing her voice in his ears:

  “I love the beach.” The hot oceanic wind blew back her curly, damp hair, dancing ringlets backlit orange by the halide streetlamp mounted on the side of the house. “But I always wanted to go see the mountains—any mountains.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Too hard for my father to drive those roads. Not when someone drinks so much.”

  Devin examined the beer can in his hand. “It’s a self-limiting thing. Isn’t it?”

  “If you want to drive your family to see the mountains on winding roads? Yeah, it is.”

  “If you want to drive them there safely.”

  “That’s right,” she had said. “But the mountains are for later. The beach, and this,” taking his hand and placing it on the tie that held her bikini bottom on her hip, “is for now.”