Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  Yippee—big deal.

  Devin, pitching his smoldering butt at the back bumper of a Ford Expedition, watched as the cigarette exploded in a tiny shower of ash. The resolution to one of the great emotional sagas of his life had come and gone like any other moment in the history of life on terra firma—there, and then not.

  At least Hill had not asked about Eileen’s condition. Hell, for all Devin knew, she’d kept it secret from him as well.

  Other people’s business—he wanted no part. Held no responsibility. He was Gen X. If they wanted him to help, they should have paid attention when they had they chance, when they could have been a good influence; instead they let the television sets raise their children—a cold medium. Oops.

  Devin, driving back to Pine Haven in the blue F-150—new, only thirty-three miles on the odometer, shiny and chrome and with a specific Ford type of brand-new smell, like leathery men’s aftershave—took the long way around. He did this often, to avoid the spot where Libby’d bled her death-water back into the earth, leaking out like the acrid vitals from the Mustang’s pipes and valves.

  Feeling lighter of spirit that at any time in memory, however, he made himself not go the long way.

  Made himself say it didn’t matter. Now was now and then was then, and what did then matter?

  His ribcage vibrated and he got the creepy-crawlies. But he went and drove the old highway. Went and done it, dang it.

  What he found: a new highway, expanded to four lanes all the way down thanks to the massive Wally-world distributor now located in the county, and in the nick of time since all the millwork was long gone. Trucks, coming and going—not drunk rednecks passing on a yellow line but big-old semis, the sort with which Devin had jockeyed on the hot, unforgiving slabs American of the highway system.

  The ground were Libby died? All dug up and gone. Scooped out and turned into a concrete culvert. Like the literal space itself had been removed.

  That felt good.

  Devin, pulling into the emergency lane right whereabouts it’d happened, tucked a smoke into his mouth and turned on the flashers.

  Devin, squinting and nosing his beak around, said, all different. The trees gone. Concrete where had been real grass, and fake grass where had been trees. In Devin’s moment, it been grass and glass, trees and blood. Sunlight, yes, shining down.

  But other than the current shimmering sun, more white than yellow, the landscape, transformed. What memories and ghosts floated here now so incorporeal as to be useless in provoking the old demonic memories—the anger, the black depression, the guilt.

  The knowing.

  The remembering.

  Devin got out of the Jetta and ambled around. He stood smoking and looked down into the culvert as a couple of kids, Latino boys of ten and twelve, pedaled BMX bikes along the dry concrete culver. They passed below Devin going up and down its angled sides, back and forth, a double-helix dance among the four tires of the bicycles and the eight limbs of the boys; they rode away singing a melodic Spanish-language pop song.

  No death here. Only right-now.

  Devin, spitting and feeling all right, all right as he could, got back in the car. Enough with memory lane. But in a good way.

  Satisfied, he went home to shove a load of crap into the pickup bed. He had gotten the hotfoot to go move stuff into the new apartment, but news of Creedence’s date, with none other than Roy Earl, meant he’d need to stay.

  Creedence, gorgeous and smelling like heaven, came downstairs. Devin, thinking Roy Earl likely to pass out at the sight of her. Checking on all the cats and Mama, she went outside to get in her fine little American-made Ford Focus.

  But no need—outside sat Roy Earl Pettus, wearing a suit and holding a bouquet of flowers. He held the door open for her to his car, a Mercedes SL-350 convertible like Billy used to drive. There went some of that smoothie cash.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Devin heard his sister say.

  Roy helped her into the car. “I couldn’t not come to get you a second time, angel.” They drove off.

  Eileen, haggard, shuffled outside in her housedress, dragging her oxygen tank.

  “You need help getting out the door?”

  “I’ll be damned if I need anybody’s help. Oh—so at least one of my children is still here?”

  “Mama?” Devin stretched a strap taut across boxes in the bed of the midnight-blue pickup truck. “I need to axe you something.”

  “What, son.” Breathless, annoyed and coughing blood-flecked spittle, she sat down on the front porch rocker.

  “How long you got?”

  “Till what?”

  “You know.”

  The mother, the son, locking eyes. “I’m afraid don’t have the slightest inkling of what you’re talking about.”

  Nodding. Understanding. “A favor.”

  She waited.

  “When you get there, let me know.”

  “Oh, p’shaw. You talk in riddles.”

  “Hey—know what I’ve been thinking?”

  “What, darling.”

  Devin went to his mother. Leaning in and stealing a hug. Her body stiff at first, then molding itself to his. He felt her bones jutting out.

  “I ain’t got to move over there with her straight away. Creedence—she’ll be fine. Roy Earl’s right there. And so’s Billy.”

  “Darling,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as I am about anything.”

  “Well,” she whispered, pushing back, straightening her hair. “I think that’d be lovely. Just wonderful, in fact. We can pay for your part of the rent ourselves, for now.”

  “That’s right. We’ll put checks in the mail.”

  “Yes, we will.” Eileen, needing to say more. “Devin?”

  “What, Mama.”

  “Let’s you and me take Mr. Bubbie to the doctor tomorrow. So Colette don’t have to mess with all that. Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think.”

  “It’s her cat, Mama.”

  “Devin—she wants us to do it. For her. To protect her. Don’t you see?”

  “Does she want that?”

  “We both do.”

  Despite knowing the news wouldn’t be good—it couldn’t go any other way—he agreed. Least he could do for his little sister. And his mom. About that time the hospice nurse arrived, and they all went inside for her to take Eileen’s vitals, check her meds, and answer any questions they had.

  Eighty-Three

  Billy

  Billy, exhausted, greasy, shagged, spent; in other words, worn the fuck out, the prior evening having seen no small amount of energy expenditure, oh my brothers. It’d taken him until nearly dawn to dispose of the two accident-victims in the Green Hole, after he’d accidentally fucked them both to death during the wild threesome he’d engendered after picking up the middle-aged women at the Parlor.

  Business types from out of town, they’d been attracted to Billy’s free spirit and gentlemanly bearing. He’d gone out looking sharp, losing the tie-dye and flip-flops for a blue suit and loose tie like the lawyers drowning their perfidies in happy-hour oblivion. Showering, man-scaping, whole bit; he went out intending to get laid, have some fun. Blow off steam from the Creedence slight.

  He’d yet to fully recover from it. That bitch.

  Also, away from Melanie, with all her insidious planning.

  Planning their life together.

  Way way way ahead of herself.

  Full of herself.

  But he couldn’t simply accident her out of the way. Not Melanie.

  He halfway loved her, he finally realized.

  Sickening.

  How could he betray Libby? His love, full as a hothouse flower, remained only for her.

  Yesterday he’d felt better, though, he had to admit, especially after picking up those skanks. Hell of a pop or two before things had gotten out of hand. He’d told himself it was going to be straight sex and how these women, drunk and amazed at themselves for agreeing to fuck this handso
me stranger, would return home from their business trip gaping and sore, with only a headful of memories instead of grievous injuries.

  But accidents, happening.

  Quick.

  Brutal.

  He couldn’t remember any of it with clarity. He’d been drunk. Lucky, again, his muscle-memory at dumping bodies continued to served him well.

  But now, sitting in his old Mercedes, furtive, glancing at the quiet Old Market, lifting the whip cream dispenser to his mouth and inhaling, he didn’t worry ’bout a thing. Holding in the gas, getting the sound of distant, hallucinatory sirens. No one would believe him capable of murder, nor of sucking nitrous oxide in broad daylight. Who would do this? Not I, said he.

  Wah-wah-wah.

  He’d bought a box of chargers and a fresh dispenser—his old one slipped out of his hand on the balcony and tumbled fifteen stories to the sidewalk below, shattering like a bomb going off. He’d ROLLED INTO the fancypants gourmet food shop across the way, buying his goods and hightailing it back to the car and setting to work.

  Admittedly, he’d had a tough time calming down from the prior night’s adventures in Eros and accidental murder. And for all he knew, Melanie—she’d gone home to Charleston to make wedding plans with her mother, was due back “before New Year’s,” meaning today, probably, the thirtieth—would return any second. Calling him every five minutes with her whole ‘I love you’ theatrical production.

  No woman had loved Billy. That much he knew.

  Billy, inhaling the gas. Wah-wah, like George Harrison said. Wah-wah-wah. It helped him forget the unloved thing.

  Billy, scheming for a way to break into a hospital and steal a big honkin’ blue tank of medical grade gas. Get it rigged with an octopus array of hoses. Recruit five or six bouncing betties together at once, get rocking and see if fucking that many at the same time helped quell the bothersomeness.

  All could be arranged.

  Billy, feeling nothing. Feeling relief at feeling nothing. But the moment, like all moments, coming and going, and soon the gas wears off. And he is Billy, again. Bothersome.

  The purchase of the gas and dispenser a spontaneous addition to the plan at hand, to get a holiday gift he’d promised to his dad:

  A shave and a haircut—neat, trim, Young Republican-approved and respectable, the slightest bit not-so-young—because, with Bush the Second reelected—who’d a thunk-it?—we would usher in what the pundits were calling a potential forty-year Republican majority in the government, one ready to expend political capital the way Billy, a firehose, shot thick ropes of Spiderman-webbing semen every which way.

  With the election over, January 2005 begins a new cycle. And with conditions this favorable alongside his deep well of contacts on the hill—the folks with whom the family had long did business, and big business at that—the elder Steeple, it seemed, had decided to run in the 2006 midterms for a Virginia congressional seat he’d coveted. The district included any number of his military-industrial complex lobbying clients. Getting into the dome at last made sense.

  Billy, having never gone back to work at Southeastern after getting Devin home back in April, felt more than onboard with a change of scenery. Already possessing the right clothes for his new position on the Steeple campaign—oxfords and khakis and penny-loafers, but with vibrant Garcia ties to set him apart from the rest of the politicos—he could transition as soon as his dad needed him.

  The long hair, though? The hair, needing to go. It was fine. Jerry had been dead for ten years this year.

  Billy, at peace with his decision. His Dad, running for congress like he’d always dreamt of doing, of serving his constituency and his country, he said? Righteous. More like doing the K Street Shuffle, as it was known, he held ideals he hoped Billy, with his writing skills, could help him convey to his media lapdog contacts who would promulgate the inevitability of a Steeple win.

  A pip. A new scene, a new crowd.

  Billy, ready to leave.

  Leave his troubles behind.

  Over Libby, at last.

  Over it.

  Darn it all.

  Or at least that’s what he kept telling himself.

  In any case, Billy, starting work next month, hired onto the campaign full-time as a Paid Consultant, a title sounding loftier than the task itself: the elder Steeple wanting first to put Billy in the trenches. Answering phones, making coffee, intern-style grunt work.

  Saying to his son: “The others will respect you more if we do it this way.”

  “What am I? Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun?’”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing, dad.” Billy might have been over Libby, but he’d kill for a partner who knew movies.

  Billy, not giving a shit about the campaign, the job, the dignity, so long remaining able to party-hearty, keep getting blazed and drunk and laid. He felt certain, as the son of the candidate, he could wander in late a few times a week, severely doubting anyone would have the temerity—the stones—to make hay out of his privileged behavior. It had been well-earned and would of course exist and unfold beyond any censure or reproach.

  Complications, also necessitating Billy’s current line of thinking: Crushed and angry to discover that the full inheritance not his yet after all.

  Speaking of dignity? He had none.

  At his father’s Machiavellian insistence, prior to Granddad’s death the two of them revised the terms of Billy’s trust to add another ten blessed bloody years—fucking indentured servitude, this.

  Difficult to take at first.

  Humiliating.

  Nearly fifty, now, by the time the real money at last rolled in.

  But what to do? Run around screaming, blowing people’s heads off, taking a shit on the floor, smearing it all over himself and flinging it at the audience like G.G. Allin? Holding his breath until turning blue? Raping and pillaging? Killing a string of women and concealing their bodies, instead of accidentally loving them to death to hide the fact of his lack of control?

  Considerations.

  As for Melanie, better not to have all that money at hand; all the harder to shake her loose, eventually, married or not.

  Because of the campaign excuse, he had managed to put off a hard date for the wedding; continued fervent lovemaking, thanks to the miracle blue pills, with assurances that he wished not to (a) break it off, (2) break up, or (III) take a breather, all plans confirmed though postponed, life trajectories fixed and stable, had kept her quiet.

  Melanie, balking, decried the long engagement proposed by him. At first. Not caring about finishing her degree. Ready to quit and be Mrs. Steeple.

  Billy, disgusted. No career track? Housekeepers now did what women used to do. Late capitalism demanded careers, not caretaking. He wanted to puke.

  Libby wouldn’t have needed Billy. For anything. No wonder her strength had been so attractive.

  Melanie, concerned about the drinking, though. Tiresome beyond measure. If it’d been good enough for Ruck, good enough for Billy. Hell, he couldn’t say it that way, however, so he merely promised it all a passing affectation that DC life would cure.

  Ruck. The dude had it all together. Had come through the fire. Was onto something. You want to see someone bounce back from the abyss? Call Devin Rucker. A fucking superhero. Billy, not worthy of touching the hem of his jean jacket. Had let him almost fall to his death again.

  Billy would die before he’d face his old friend again. Which almost felt worse than his shame, or anger over being thrown under the bus by Creedence. All of it toxic, he cracked another charger and tried to forget.

  Killing the last of the nitrous out of the whip cream dispenser, Billy lurched out of the Mercedes with his head spinning. He staggered around, chuckling. Time for a drink.

  Then, a vision—a girl, a grungy angel, a familiar face, a friend: his old intern Marleigh, peddling her bike the wrong way down Saluda Avenue toward the Beanery. At the sight of her, his mind and body, ramping into overdrive.

&nbs
p; Here, another one that got away.

  Throbbing. The way of the flesh, pink and wet and sticky and pulsating like some David Cronenberg-style makeup effects fever dream; one more chick, her mind blown at the sight and feel and staggering awesomeness of Billy. Providential; foretold, he speculated.

  But he had felt the same about Libby.

  And Creedence.

  And them all.

  Maybe this time it’ll be different.

  Billy, stagger-stepping after her, called out in good cheer.

  Marleigh, stopping, putting her feet down, appeared cautious: “Dr. Steeple?”

  Billy, trotting over heavy-footed, was glad she still thought him a terminal degree holder. “This unbelievably super-amazing, totally unbelievable incredibly good fortune is beyond all possibility of coincidence.” He held out his arms to steady himself against a wave of vertigo. “Whoa. I think one of these cracks in the sidewalk just tried to crawl up my leg.”

  “What happened at the film archive?”

  He ignored her. “What are you doing here? It’s holiday break.”

  “My dumb parents went to Europe.”

  “This time of year?”

  “My mom had to have Christmas in Paris. It’s all she’s talked about since Home Alone came out.”

  “No shit. Now that’s movie fandom.”

  “I told her I thought the idea was idiotic. That they could count me out.”

  “Not Home Alone. God, I hate that shit.”

  “It’s the worst.”

  “You get along with your mother otherwise?”

  Marleigh frowned: are you kidding?

  In secret, of course, Billy loved the movie. He watched it every Christmas, with it never failing to give him a serious lump in the throat. A boy untethered, making the most of the predicament, triumphing over directed and premeditated adversity, but getting the family back together as well; everything miraculously working out. Having cake, eating it too, a wonderful modern American fable. That thing fucking ROCKED, bro. He wanted to bash in her stupid girl-head for not appreciating Home Alone.