Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Her breasts lay flattened above her ribs. He grasped the nipple on the left. His claws circled the aureole. He squeezed.

  3

  “You missed your turn,” his father said, tapping Charlie on the shoulder. The cab was now filled with the smothering odor of his cigar, which Charles Urquart II had managed to light without the benefit of the car lighter.

  Charlie glanced from the road up to the rearview mirror. His father looked bored and weary. His eyes were puffy, the way they used to be when business was bad and he hadn’t been getting any sleep. No rest for the wicked.

  “I said you missed your turn.”

  “Did I? I guess I was thinking about Paula.”

  “Well, it’s all coming back, is it? Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. She would’ve screamed and brought down the house, too, but you were wise enough to do a little creative surgery on her vocal cords. Sloppy, but creative—I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite like that, like boning a live chicken with a dull knife. If it had been me, you understand, I would’ve had it over with quickly, but I suppose I don’t need to keep telling you that.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “But you did have a way with her, what you did there between her legs. The unkindest cut of all. She herself would probably tell you (if poor Paula could return from the dead) that what you were doing with that bit of genital mutilation was getting back at your mother for ever bringing you into the world. That showed a certain flair.”

  “Shut up. I didn’t do that. I don’t believe it. This is a dream.”

  Charlie tried to block the mental image that was coming to him: her legs, his claws scratching her legs, everything dark red, the human walls watching him, waiting for him to finish what he had begun, to do what his father would’ve wanted him to do, to teach her a lesson.

  His father interrupted his thoughts. “Don’t you tell me to shut up. That’s—”

  Paula’s eyes milky red, her mouth moving silently like a fish brought out of its lake, its lips opening and closing, opening and closing.

  “Shut up shut up shut up!”

  The people in the wall pictures,their mouths opening and closing, opening and closing.

  Paula’s fingers opening and closing, opening and closing.

  “Shut the hell—”

  Her trembling lips.

  “That’s…” his father said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  That’s Three

  1

  “Charles, now it’s time for your lesson. You have something that doesn’t belong to you, and you must give it back. Pull over here, now.”

  “Pop,” Charlie said, fighting tears that made no sense to him. But like a dutiful son, he brought his cab to rest curbside. He kept the engine idling. He kept his foot on the brake, but lightly.

  “You’ve got it, don’t you?”

  “Got what?”

  “You know what. Don’t play games with me, son, this is your father you’re talking to, not some grad student with her brain where the sun don’t shine. Got what? God, you’re whiny. If I’d had a lick of sense I would’ve made sure your mother had her diaphragm in place so you’d’ve just slid down her leg rather than up into her womb. Got what?”

  Charlie thought: Just a dream, just a dream. He felt a fever break inside him, sweat along his forehead, his bladder giving way, his teeth chattering. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

  “Got what?”

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

  “Got what?”

  Life is but a dream.

  “You know goddamn well what! The knife, you worthless whelp, the knife! We know you have it. We know you’ve kept it all these years!” His father leaned forward. Charlie felt an arm go around his neck. In the rearview mirror Charlie could see that it was not his father leaning forward, his red eyes glaring back at him, it was something big and gray and smelly.

  Behind the refrigerator.

  Dead rats behind the refrigerator.

  It had a long snout curled back into a snarl as it bared its sharp, dripping, yellow teeth. It smelled musty and old, and Charlie knew both the smell and the face of this particular rat because once upon a time it had burrowed like a chigger beneath his skin.

  Deadrats.

  Charlie Urquart reached to his right for his cigar box.

  He lifted the lid.

  Deadrats.

  Reached inside it.

  Coins jangling as his fingers combed through them.

  Lifted a cloth.

  Clutched the knife.

  Charlie Urquart pressed his foot hard on the accelerator.

  “Want it?” Charlie asked.

  His left hand twisted the wheel sharply to the left.

  Did I kill Paula? Dear God, Wendy, what did you do to me? Are the others like this, too? Or are they in asylums, are they telling their crazy stories about the girl of their dreams, are they talking to dogs as if the dogs understand, are they howling at the moon?

  2

  The taxicab sailed into the opposite lane, and if it had not been for the quickness of another driver, would’ve crashed head-on into a bus, but instead spun a three-sixty before coming to a screeching halt.

  Charlie began laughing.

  3

  Later when the sun was up, he called Paula.

  “You’re alive,” he said, relieved.

  “Charlie? Are you all right? You started freaking out and—”

  “I know,” he said. “Listen, I need to go west for a week.”

  Then he hung up the phone.

  He could no longer distinguish between reality and dream.

  PART SIX

  THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN CATHEDRAL CITY, CALIFORNIA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Nessie and Queenie

  1

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” the old woman said, glancing around the bus because she realized she was speaking aloud again.

  The man across from her stared, but no one else seemed to have paid any attention to her. Would they see the papers she had in her hands? Would they know she’d stolen them and was scribbling notes on them? No one seemed to be aware of it.

  They are pretending, she thought, because they want to humor me. But they could be spies, couldn’t they?

  She could’ve sent them from the canyons; they could be some of her army, couldn’t they? She can send them anywhere, into anyone, she could easily have chosen one of them to follow me. She’s tried before. She will stop at nothing, and only one thing can stop her. Who has it? Does Peter? Will he answer my prayer?

  The man who had been staring at her looked away, out the window of the bus. The old woman eyed him suspiciously awhile longer before realizing she’d missed her stop.

  2

  “If you keep these goddamn windows closed,” Nessie Wilcox said between coughs, “you’re going to drive even the flies away. God Almighty, it smells like it rained piss.”

  She moved over to the shades, drawing them apart. Her hands bothered her—not just arthritis; she’d handled arthritis for twenty-eight years, but now it was just that her bones were old. That was it. Old bones. The cough wasn’t exactly fun and games, either, but you live long enough, eventually everything goes. Should’ve been wilder when I was a girl and I wouldn’t’ve lived so dang long. And she had to care for a woman a good six years younger than she. As far as Nessie could tell, her boarder was as able-bodied as they come at seventy. But the woman spent too much time in bed, as if she were an invalid—just like Nessie’s husband, Cove, whom Nessie’d had the smarts to move across the street from to avoid waiting on the man hand and foot day and night. So instead I do the same thing for Queenie, except at least with the Queen I get paid. “Two things, Queenie. First you get out in the fresh air now and then, and two, open a window now and again. Wouldn’t smell like piss so much in here.”

  “I would not have expected even you to be so common,” the woman sitting up in bed said over her newspaper. “I suppose yo
ur husband could just not tolerate it. Perhaps there are still things to learn in life after all.” When she spoke, her voice always sounded strained, unnatural—she hid behind it as much as anything else. Nessie only took to people if they were upfront about themselves. Nessie divided the world into two kinds of people; first those who pretended to be something they weren’t (like Queenie, although this was the broadest category in her definition and Nessie could place entire cities inside it), and second, those people who divided the world into two kinds of people, like herself.

  “That’s right, Queenie, I’m an old desert rat, common and coarse and vulgar and rude and crude and socially unacceptable,” Nessie growled. She’s so high and mighty, no wonder her other boarders had nicknamed this one “Queenie.” Her name was Stella Swan, and she was anything but—she was just one old ugly duckling. How the hell did somebody live to her age acting like that? Somebody would’ve shot her by now. “You’d do well to get out and about now and again.”

  The dry rattle of the newspaper.

  “Summer’s gone, you need to get some cool air in here, make you feel glad to be alive.”

  The woman called Queenie dropped the paper to the side. Everything she did was melodramatic. Queenie said, mocking and tough, “If the room seems particularly redolent with urine, it is the result of your little mongrel running through here. I think I pay you enough at this flophouse for you to keep comments of a personal nature to yourself.”

  Nessie Wilcox muttered as she turned back toward the door. “Excuse me, Mrs. W?”

  “I was just saying a prayer, Queenie, just a prayer’s all.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “Do you some good if you said a few yourself.”

  The woman in bed opened the silver cigarette case beside her bed, withdrawing a cigarette. After she’d lit it, she said, “I go to church. I do what I can.”

  “A good prayer now and then’s not only for your trips to church, you know. And two things, Queenie. First: I booted Cove out of here, not vice versa. And number two,” Nessie said, closing the door, “my little Gretchen would not pee anywhere near Your Highness. And one more thing, you know the rules: no more smokes in my house. You want to kill yourself, you go outside with those filthy things.” She coughed in punctuation, closing the door behind her.

  3

  Nessie Wilcox had bought the house back from her husband when the divorce was final, but had run herself so far into debt back in 1985 that she had to take in paying boarders just to make ends meet—and even then she barely scraped by. Her kids would send her cash to help out, but Cove needed it more than she did—that man could squander in the most original ways: he fancied himself a sort of Grandpa Moses with a dash of bad Picasso thrown in, and he dropped thousands of dollars on canvas, paints, and gallery shows for paintings that to Nessie looked like they’d do better on black velvet. Cove felt his artistic urges pulling him toward nude studies, which of course accounted for more wild spending, because anywhere within a two hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles you could find young girls to take their clothes off for cash, even for an old man whose teeth had gone the way of the dinosaur. Sometimes in the morning she’d look out her window and see him there in front of his little one-bedroom bungalow, with his paints and brushes, a felt beret balanced jauntily on his shiny scalp, blue, red, yellow, and white splotches all over his smock-like shirt, pretending to prepare for the day’s work. Nessie had moments when she wished her bedroom window didn’t face the road, but sometimes it gave her a good laugh.

  “You old fart,” she might say as she watched him strut like a headless rooster in front of his model-of-the-day, “just give her three days with you hovering over her like a vulture and your mindless chatter and she’ll start looking for a cliff to jump from. Make that two days.”

  Her four boarders were better company than Cove had ever been, but that bit of knowledge had come forty years too late. Mr. Evans was an old lech at times, but every now and then Nessie appreciated an old lech (and he was only in his sixties, so she still calculated that when she was fifteen he was newly born, so that made him a young lech). Ab Speck helped out around the house, being the youngest boarder at forty, and where Ab was ugly to a point that seemed humanly impossible, he had enthusiasm that in anyone over the age of twenty-six you couldn’t buy for all the bank accounts in Switzerland. Ab also was the only person in the entire house who shared Nessie’s wicked sense of humor.

  The two ladies, nicknamed Queenie and Cleo, were generally more problem than they were worth—except they were both worth a lot and their money helped keep Nessie in clean sheets and Cove in naked models (as much as she despised him for borrowing money from her, Nessie was just happy to pay him to leave her alone). Queenie had the room with the “northern light,” which Her Highness needed for her rest and recuperation (as Ab Speck would say, “Read: alcoholism”); Cleo lived in the smallest room, just above the parlor, and not only could you smell her coming a mile away (“Shalimar an inch thick like pond scum on her”) but she outlined her face with dark eye makeup, her lips were deep red, her yellowing skin dusted with heavy powder. Cleo and Queenie were roughly contemporaries, although Cleo (short for Cleopatra) claimed that “a lady never admits to being more than twenty-five,” to which Nessie would reply gruffly, “Ain’t no ladies in spitting distance ‘round here.”

  The only lady she was sure of at all was Gretchen, her Scottie, who was one of the few folks in the free world who would listen to what she said. So that was her life. She had raised four children, who had scattered to the four corners of the Earth as far as she was concerned (New York, Austin, Seattle, Chicago). She had tossed her husband out on his behind (unfortunately she had been strong enough to send him about forty feet), and this was the life she had chosen. She sometimes wondered what would happen if any of her boarders came down sick—they all had medical insurance, they all had some money to keep them going, but they needed something more than dollar bills stuffed into their mattresses. All four of them were people who had gotten by with luck and some cleverness, but those things never lasted. The one thing that scared Nessie the most was the question of what would happen to them if she died. Who would scold them, who would make sure they got fresh air, who would make them Christmas cookies? Who would chide them for being lazy? Who would get them out of themselves and their petty jealousies, their illusions of grandeur, their angry silences across the dinner table, all those things that kept folks from just having a good time and enjoying a few things before the light goes out?

  Nessie Wilcox wouldn’t normally be one to dwell on her own death. She actually got a little kick out of watching her body wrinkle up on her like a prune, although she wasn’t too fond of the small bald spot at the very back of her white hair—it had taken her until she was seventy-two to start appreciating how a body goes (still got most of my teeth, too), how you start fixing arms and legs and gallbladders and eyes and ears and kneecaps the way you’d overhaul a car, how you rock on chairs on the porch because the movement takes away the thought of arthritis for a good ten minutes, how you look in the mirror for the girl’s face you grew up with and to your surprise you find it even when other people can’t. All that was a hoot, once you accepted the basic premise: that it all goes, all of it, the skin, the hair, the teeth, and finally, somewhere in there, you go, too. When you see death just up the turn in the road, it looks a lot like a friend waiting for you.

  Just maybe not the friend you wanted to make, but a friend nonetheless.

  These thoughts had been occupying Nessie for the past eight months.

  Ever since the doctor who had come to see Queenie had suggested that Nessie get a checkup, too.

  Ever since she found out about the lung cancer.

  “Never put a cigarette to these lips in all my days, Doc,” she’d told him, “but I sure as hell been around smokers since I was nineteen.”

  “That might be all it takes,” he told her.

  “So that explains the cough,” she
said.

  “Let me tell you what can be done,” he told her.

  “I know what can be done,” Nessie said, but the doctor wasn’t listening to her.

  4

  The pain didn’t manifest itself very often, but when it did, it was like a knife driving through her chest, from the inside out. She pretended she was being tortured, that the Inquisition was breaking her on the wheel. She pretended that the pain, the growing cancer, was perfectly natural, simply the beginning of another incarnation, one that would flower within her and eventually ask her to leave. You live long enough and something’s bound to get you. She thought of all her old friends who had died over the years, some at forty, some in their fifties, most in their seventies, and how she now envied them their having crossed that border. Their pain was over; hers was just beginning. She didn’t tell the doctor about the pain, because she knew once she admitted to someone else that the pain existed then there would be no turning back. She would be playing into the doctor’s hands, and she wanted to stave that off as long as possible. She thought of animals that, when sick, would go off by themselves and the in solitude and she wondered, with her boarders, if she could turn her back on them to go into the wilderness where no one could hear her coughs and cries.

  One day, she would do that. She would go into the wilderness. As always she would be master of her fate. If death were there, then she would face it and go to it with love and courage the way she had always wanted to go to a lover but had never found one suitable enough. In her last days, Nessie Wilcox knew she would learn to compromise.