Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  By sunrise, perhaps, she would rest again.

  7

  Here’s what their fathers and mothers did:

  Alison’s mother was reading a romance novel, and her father was looking at the dirty magazines he kept out in the gas station and garage that he ran—while her mother’s book was called Love’s Tender Triumph, her father’s magazine was called simply Jugs. Alison’s mother was reading in bed—at the Motel 20 with Chip Grubb, also known as the Grubman. Chip snored, while Alison’s mother, reading her romance, wondered how to disentangle herself from the life she had been leading.

  Peter Chandler’s mother pretended to be asleep, because she was sick of all the fighting. If the truth were to be known, she valued peace and harmony above all things, which is why she kept a small, airport-miniature bottle of Jack Daniels beneath her bed, along with a vial of pills that helped her pretend to sleep. If she took all these, she lost the will to fight back against her husband. Her husband, Joe, had gone out again, for a drive, because he was so angry at his wussy-ass son.

  Than Campusky’s mother was cooking, which, given the number of children she had, lasted all day and all night. His father was on the road with his truck, but would be coming back through town at about four in the morning.

  Charlie Urquart’s father, Gib, watched Laurette Montgomery, the Healer Lady, on TV who believed that if the Spirit is Strong, Anything Can Happen, All is Possible. Charlie’s mom, Gladys, was out playing cards with three other ladies. “Playing cards” was another way of saying “getting plowed, getting faced, getting plastered,” but nice ladies in Palmetto who wanted to climb out of the wasteland never called it that. Playing cards was good enough, and around about eleven, she would drive home somewhat shakily, perhaps taking a turn just a mite too fast, and if she were lucky, she might avoid hitting small animals.

  8

  Wendy Swan’s mother lay down in darkness.

  9

  Others, too, finished suppers and watched television or went for early evening walks, for the temperature dropped to a good seventy degrees as the sun itself dropped.

  Few stores stayed open past six. On a Sunday in the Palmetto-Nitro area, although the All-Nite Rx and Sundries was open ‘til nine, with none other than Charlie Urquart behind the counter.

  10

  “Well, hey, sweetheart,” Charlie Urquart said, a big, old shit-eating grin plastered on his face like he just got laid. He put down the Playboy magazine he was ogling and nodded to Wendy Swan. “You look about as out of place in a drugstore as I do.”

  She didn’t smile. Her sunglasses seemed impenetrable. “You look like you fit right in like a pack of Trojans,” she said.

  “Lambskins or ribbed?” It was almost closing time. Charlie hated this damned summer job business, but his dad practically handed him this one, seeing as how the old man owned the All- Nite Rx and Sundries, and even though it was billed as All-Nite, it hadn’t been since 1973, a month after it had opened. Only a bunch of old biddies coming in for sleeping pills and Epsom salts since he opened at ten that morning—Mike Frost, the pharmacist, was off on Sundays—and damn, Charlie hated wasting his summer behind the counter.

  “What are you looking at, boy?” she asked.

  “Something that looks good enough to eat.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to my boyfriend,” she said, but didn’t move. “We’re going out tonight.”

  “Way I figure it, it’s a good four hours or more ‘til night.”

  She finally smiled. “Is that what you want?”

  “What—I—want?’

  “Is that what you want? My body?”

  He gulped, finishing the last of the Ice Cold Cherry Gushee, setting down the Playboy and the paper cup. “Yeah, sure.” His voice was a whisper.

  “If I give you what you want,” she said, “will you do me a favor?”

  “Anything,” he gasped, and felt more like a little boy than he ever had in his entire life. Damn Alison for dumping me, anyway. Charlie Urquart was going to get some tonight.

  “Where can we go?”

  “My place.”

  “I need somewhere dark. I want to do things to you in the dark.”

  “I know where,” Charlie said, and all of it was forgotten later—how he closed up shop, how they got in his car, how they moved from the living room to the garage because she said she wanted to feel him there, dirty, greasy, cold.

  In the dark.

  11

  “Don’t touch me,” Wendy said. “Not like that.”

  White light shone through the cracks in the garage door—the headlights to his mother’s car. But Charlie knew his mother wouldn’t open the garage door, not if she’d been out playing cards. She usually left the Cadillac in the driveway; sometimes she forgot to turn off the headlights.

  He hated his mother. He heard the door of her car creak open, and then the uncertain steps of her heels on the walk. She had forgotten to shut the door. Then the clatter as she tried to wrestle her keys from her purse; then the sound of the front door opening.

  The shards of light that penetrated the cracks in the garage door and outlined the objects around them in white shadow: a bicycle hanging from above, a small car—his dad’s Mustang—draped with a cloth, cans of paint jutting out from the edges of shelves, two plastic trash barrels, like sentries guarding the door into the house.

  His own shadow, melding with hers. His breath was all Pabst Blue Ribbon and Certs, with a touch of Listerine, because he’d gargled just before he’d shut the All-Nite Rx and Sundries down. He wanted to kiss her, but she hadn’t allowed him that privilege.

  He brought his fingers around her shoulders, but she pushed him away, holding him back. His desire weakened him—he wanted to hold her, to have her, to screw her.

  “You’re night and day, you know that?” His voice was scratchy, almost disappointed. “I thought we were gonna have some fun. Hell, we coulda done it at the drugstore. But you wanted to do it in my old man’s garage.”

  “I want to do it in your old man’s bed.”

  “Kinky,” he said, not thinking she was serious. “But he’s in it.”

  “You boys are easy,” she said. “You promised me you’d do me a favor.”

  “I meant it. But you promised something, too, and you better deliver.”

  “Little boys like you,” she said, her hands sliding down his waist until he shivered because he was so damn horny, “so easy.”

  “Is this a little boy’s?” He grabbed her wrist and cupped it over his crotch, deftly unzipping his pants with his free hand.

  “I said don’t touch me.” She spat the words at him, wriggling free of his grasp. She wiped her hand against her stomach. “I’m the one doing the touching,” she warned him. “If you touch me again, when I don’t want it, that’s it, I slice it off.”

  Given the tone of her voice, Charlie Urquart believed her like he had never believed anyone ever before.

  She calmed down. “Tell me what you want. Not what you’re used to getting, but what you really want.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say it, not because he was too embarrassed, because very little ever embarrassed Charlie “the Irk” Urquart, but because it was something he’d been dreaming of since he’d been a little boy, something that would feel like a humid velvet curtain drawn across his nerve endings, something beyond what other people expected.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He almost had tears in his eyes when he asked for it—he, Charlie Urquart Scourge of Seven Palms High, Quarterback in Training, Stud, The Thruster—tears and fear and even a little terror.

  “I-I-” he stuttered, “want it.”

  “What is it?”

  “The big one. The Big O. The Big O. Please.”

  Then, like night and day, she changed, her mood, her hands, her caresses, because he had told her what he wanted from her. She came to him.

  She gave him what he craved.

  12

  But afterwa
rd, he felt different.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Charlie Urquart and the Big O

  1

  The truth about Charlie Urquart was he would’ve given his right ball for the Big O. It was something all the guys talked about in school. The mind-blowing orgasm at the end of the universe. That’s how Campusky had put it. “The place where your pecker meets nirvana head-on, and boldly goes where no man has gone before.” As if Campusky knew.

  Charlie knew there was something to what Campusky said. Somewhere out there the Big O was waiting for them all, all boys as they went into manhood. Had his father ever experienced the Big O? Or could you only get to that state of orgasmic grace with a woman so wild, so uninhibited, like the women in Penthouse? Charlie’s ex-girlfriend, Alison Hunt, she only put out under intense pressure, and he knew what she had really wanted to do: force him into marriage, when that was the last thing that Charlie was ever going to do. There were too many nice girls in Palmetto, anyway. He had watched Wendy for the weeks following the end of the school year. Never seen her before that, but Jesus H, when she sidled up to him, what else could he do but pop a boner? A guy couldn’t spend the rest of his life living on a diet of porno mags just because one bitch dumped him, could he? Wendy Swan was the kind of girl who took care of the needs of guys like Charlie, he was sure of it.

  Sex was weird with her, but even more of a turn on than normal because of it: she wanted total darkness as if she were ashamed of her body. She had told him to imagine that she was any girl he wanted her to be. She made him lean back and then climbed on top of him, rocking back and forth, breathing in a way that was demanding, wanting, and he lost himself in the sensations. At first, it was her, Wendy, riding him. Then he let his mind go, and he was making it with Alison doggy style while she protested, and then he was choking Mrs. Gaffney, the school nurse who was ugly as a cow with two heads. He imagined fiddling with her innards until she starting singing—then it was Alison again, he was pumping Alison (what she did to me, the look of superiority in her eyes when her family was nothing but trash, what would that bitch look like moaning on top of him, under him, begging for it, deeper, deeper...).

  For just a second, a blink, a shiver, it was in the cellar of the house, he was eight years old, he was looking at a face, something so deformed that it had no mouth at all just skin and scar tissue beneath the nose, but its eyes staring at him, and the sound, the whatifwhatifwhatifwhatif, like giant wings beating, and he looked up, because whatever was there was coming down for him, and he called out, “CAMPUSKY!” But no one was there to save him, or help him, and when the thing above him grabbed him, he looked at the mouthless face and was sure he heard a scream come from it, although it must’ve been in his head.

  Then, it was Wendy in the dark, shuddering on top of him.

  He was sure if there were a Big O out there, this was the woman to take him to that peak, to push him over that edge.

  Afterward, Charlie Urquart felt like he’d been up two weeks in a row, drinking coffee and popping speed down the back of his throat. He felt twitching in his face, his eyebrows, his cheeks, his nose, muscle spasms running the length of his neck, tugging at his Adam’s apple, and down, rippling through his chest, across his shoulders. He felt like he’d run a marathon: he was sore all over, and his muscles were cramping up on him. But he also felt more alive than he ever thought he would feel, he felt like he could do anything he wanted to, he was the Desolation Angel he had dreamed of becoming, he was a fucking destroyer.

  So this was it, the Big O, holy shit! He was stronger now, that’s how he’d changed, his battery was recharged. He was a man, he could take on the universe. How had she done it? How had she sent him there?

  He combed his fingers back through his dark greasy hair; bit his own lower lip until he drew blood; he could feel his skin glowing with the difference. The change.

  “I feel like I’m a god or something,” he said.

  He was answered by the dark night, by the sound of a howling dog, by the woman lying naked next to him, her right leg draped over his thigh, Wendy Swan said, “Now you’re mine.”

  They lay there entwined for what seemed like hours while Charlie felt blood pumping through him like it was gasoline and he was revving his engine up. It burnt and it tasted sour in the back of his throat, but he felt as if he’d been injected with heroin or something, and even while he wanted to leap up and race down the streets into town, raising hell, his flesh seemed paralyzed, unable to move: the signals in his brain weren’t connecting to his nerves. Even though he felt like hot shit, he couldn’t bend one lousy finger.

  Now when he asked her, there was a tremor in his voice: “What did you do to me?”

  “You got what you came for. And so did I.”

  It was as if he’d been under anesthesia, because he could recall the moments of building, like a rocket launch, the ten-nine-eight-seven-six of countdown, the sweaty, sucking slaps her thighs made as she rode him. But the moment of orgasm was forgotten, a blank, as if he’d gone from hard to soft with no fireworks in between.

  Where had his mind flown in that millisecond?

  Where had she taken him?

  2

  As they lay there, together, he felt something different about her.

  Her skin.

  It was slick, almost oily.

  She whispered in his ear, “Now you have to do what I ask.”

  “Okay.”

  She pressed a hammer into his hand.

  Just then, he heard footsteps coming to the door that led into the kitchen.

  The door opened.

  His father stood, staring into the shadows of the garage. Flicked the light up.

  When the light flooded the garage, Charlie realized he was lying there, naked.

  Hammer in hand.

  “What in the name of God are you doing, Charlie?” his father demanded.

  Charlie sat up and hefted the hammer. It was a good-sized hammer, one he had used to drive in stakes around the property before they’d put the fencing up. Something in his head hurt, real bad. Like there was an animal in there, scratching at his skull. It was a big headache coming on, and his father was yelling at him while the headache grew and grew, a big balloon of a headache, with some wild animal in there trying to pop it.

  “Charlie,” his father said. “That’s one. Now you get inside and explain to me what’s going on here.”

  But in his head, a galloping fever, a scratching claw, a gnawing like he had a tumor growing and this animal this this—

  deadrats

  deadrats behind the refrigerator

  trying to claw its way through him.

  “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Charlie shrieked. He was about to slam the hammer into his ear just to stop the pain, but his father rushed down the steps and held his hand down, trying to peel his fingers off the handle.

  “Give me the hammer, Charlie,” his father said. “Charlie, obey me, son, now that’s two.”

  For a moment, the noise in his head stopped.

  Charlie sighed.

  His father’s face was red. When his father got angry, his father got very angry and did the one, two, three routine. “That’s one,” his father would say, and if Charlie didn’t stop what he was doing it became, “That’s two,” and if he STILL didn’t stop, it turned into, “That’s three,” and the punishment became unbearable.

  Now, if Gib Urquart had stopped there, Charlie figured, perhaps things would’ve turned out different.

  Perhaps Charlie would’ve just lied his way out of this situation, gone to bed, heard the end of it. His father would’ve gone to bed, his mother would’ve woken up the next morning to make scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast with chicory coffee, and life would’ve just greased on the way it always had in the past. If Gib Urquart had just let it go, maybe Charlie would’ve, too.

  But he didn’t.

  “That’s three, son, now give me the hammer, put your pants on, and get inside the house this minute.”


  Deadrats said, “Dirty, filthy, naughty man, you want the hammer? You want the HAMMER?”

  Gib Urquart looked at his son strangely, as if he were seeing him for the first time. Funny what you notice about people you’ve known all your life, because when Charlie looked up at his father, he saw a paunchy middle-aged Emperor Wannabe with Grecian-Formula’ed rust-gray hair, a round, pink multi-veined nose, a lipless mouth, and yellow teeth that needed some polishing to make them shine. But he wasn’t scared of his old man anymore, nosiree. Not with Deadrats out of the braincave.

  “Yes, Charles, I’d like the hammer.”

  “Say please.”

  “Give me the hammer.”

  Charlie obliged.

  It was just like hammering the stakes into the ground, one by one. The first blow knocked his father out, and then the next made a cracking sound just behind his ear.

  Charlie went for the nails that his father kept in a Mason jar near one of the paint cans. There were thirty nails or so in it, and he took one out. He returned to his father who was still breathing.

  The nail was long and slender, and Charlie positioned it just above his father’s left ear.

  And he hammered.

  And he hammered.

  And he hammered.

  3

  When a boy works that hard, hammering away, there’s bound to be some noise, and even when someone, say, his mother, has been drinking and then falls asleep on the couch in the living room, even then, that person will hear the noise and call out to see what the ruckus is about.

  And when that person, say the boy’s mother, goes out to investigate, smiling drunkenly, why, that boy may see that he’s got to stop her from screaming because it hurts his head too much, and the Thing in his head doesn’t like it.