Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  5

  She had coughed a lot the afternoon she’d had to go down to the local Catholic church, a summons from one of the nuns.

  “Not again,” Nessie said after she’d gotten off the phone. She felt as if she were back in grade school about to be punished for some minor offense. She was dressed in her usual uniform: pumpkin-colored sweater with baggy sleeves, polyester double-knit slacks, and sneakers. She’d been dressing up all her life for other people and she was damn sick of it. It didn’t matter that it was a church she was standing in; she didn’t think God wanted fashion plates in Heaven anyway. Ab Speck, his flattop rising as his eyebrows dueled across his high forehead, kept his mouth shut.

  Sister Agnes Joseph was nothing if not hip in a short blue skirt, her hair cut short but free of the wimple Nessie was used to seeing on nuns. But Nessie knew that Sister Agnes Joseph was a wolf in sheep’s clothing: the woman was a ballbuster, and if she had not had the vocation to marry Christ, Nessie was certain she would’ve answered an ad looking for a dominatrix.

  “It’s not the paper itself, you understand,” the sister said.

  “Because she will pay for the stationery,” Nessie added.

  “Her contributions to the church are sufficiently generous.” Sister Agnes Joseph smiled grimly. “The problem is one of purpose, Mrs. Wilcox. I believe she is forging my own signature and sending letters off to points unknown.”

  “Harmless. If I went through her dresser drawers I’m sure I would come up with every letter she’s written.”

  But the sister had ammunition. From the pocket of her skirt she produced one such letter, handing it to Nessie. “This was returned to us because of insufficient postage. Of course, we never sent it. I was addressed to a man in Los Angeles named Peter Chandler.” Nessie read the letter.

  6

  Dear Mr. Chandler,

  You have not responded to our recent inquiry, and I wondered if you received our correspondence to you. We feel that your presence now with regards to Stella is urgently required.

  It is not a question of money, I assure you; it is one of salvation, Mr. Chandler, the salvation of a human soul.

  Yours in Christ,

  Sister Agnes Joseph

  The Queen of Heaven Catholic Church.

  7

  “Not my handwriting at all,” Sister Agnes Joseph said.

  Nessie scanned the letter. “No, it’s definitely hers, but this defies everything I’ve known about her. She swears she has no living relatives—isn’t that right, Ab?”

  Ab nodded. “Far as I know. Keeps to herself.”

  “What a mystery for us all, sister. I’ll of course mention this to her immediately. Although it doesn’t seem to be cause for alarm, does it? It’s just paper, and she will stop.”

  “In the past we’ve had at least one case of a parishioner soliciting money under the banner of the church.”

  “I doubt that she’s interested in money.” Nessie coughed as she said this.

  “Perhaps if you were to find out exactly what she is interested in, then the mystery would be solved. She won’t talk to me and you know she is not interested in confession.”

  8

  After the sister left, turning abruptly, her blockish shoes clopping down the cold stone hall, Nessie nodded to Ab and said, “She’s just mad because Queenie’s paid for half this church. Well, you foot the bill at a hotel, least they let you do is take some towels home with you.”

  9

  Later, Nessie stood in the open doorway of Queenie’s room. “Can I talk to you?”

  “If it’s more nonsense about the paper I allegedly stole...” Queenie was standing at the window. She was looking out the window, but it was dark outside. The window mirrored the woman gazing at it. Nessie could imagine the wicked queen in Snow White asking the mirror who was the fairest of them all. Queenie wore her silk dressing robe. Her skin seemed a coral-pink from light reflected off the shiny red of the robe.

  “No, Queenie, I don’t care about the paper. It’s just curiosity on my part. The paper, the telegrams, all of it. If we had a computer here, you’d be sending email, wouldn’t you?” Nessie swallowed a cough.

  “Not as nefarious as it sounds. I’ve only written a few. I’m lonely, it’s some harmless fun. Well?”

  “Is this Mr. Chandler a relative?”

  “You’ve come in here without knocking to invade my privacy.”

  “Don’t bark at me unless I bark first, Queenie. I don’t give a twig for your privacy. If privacy’s what you’re after, you certainly have the gold to lock yourself up in Fort Knox.”

  “You have a way with words.”

  “Three brothers, all lawyers, taught me to speak up.”

  “Well, I won’t shroud this in secrecy any longer. Mr. Chandler is an old suitor, and he and I write back and forth to each other now and again as a kind of joke. I imagine he laughed his head off when he saw the letterhead: ‘Queen of Heaven Catholic Church,’ and then the signature.”

  “I raised four children in my time, and let me tell you, Queenie, you lie worse than all four of them put together.”

  “How dare you—”

  “You’ve been going down to Western Union on Tuesdays and sending messages to this Mr. Chandler every week since you’ve been here.” Nessie detected the strong scent of whiskey. She’s drunk, and she’s popping pills. Hell, what kind of a place am I running?

  “Damn you for coming in here!” Queenie yelled in a rage. “You have no right!”

  She had not turned from the dark mirror window.

  It was as if she were raging at her own reflection.

  10

  When six came around on Sunday night, Her Majesty did not deign to join the rabble at dinner.

  “She’s sulking,” Nessie said when Mr. Evans asked about her.

  “Poor delicate butterfly,” Mr. Evans said. “Perhaps I should take something up to her.”

  “You will do no such thing, you masher.”

  Ab said, “If she’s not having her potatoes...”

  Nessie waved her hand wearily, and Ab reached for Queenie’s cooling plate to scrape off some of her food. “Can’t see them going to waste.”

  Cleo leaned back in her chair, creaking (and Nessie wasn’t sure if it was the chair or Cleo making the noise). “She’s always prattling on about her great sin. She’s insane. She’ll set fire to this place with those cigarettes of hers.”

  Cove grinned, his teeth like rows of irregular tombstones. “Great sins require great sinners.”

  “Great foolishness requires great fools, and don’t look like you know anything, old man, because you don’t,” Nessie said. “And if I catch you in front of the TV after dinner I will make sure you’re kissing a cactus before midnight.”

  “Queenie’s a sinner?” Mr. Evans asked with some interest. Cleo nodded, enjoying her moment in the spotlight. “This man she writes to, she’s sent him telegrams. I think they have a daughter. She’s told me things...”

  “Enough,” Nessie said. “No more gossip.”

  But Cleo continued, undaunted, “I think perhaps this man she writes to murdered their daughter.”

  The one thing Nessie Wilcox’s hacking cough was good for was to disrupt the dinner table, and she pulled it out of her lungs now, coughing and coughing until the subject finally changed to more pleasant matters.

  11

  The cough often got out of control, and Nessie prayed sometimes that bits of her lungs would just crumble up and come up her throat to choke her. Coughing until she cried, covering her face with a pillow, somewhere in the back of her mind would be the thought: If I just push a little harder it would be over in seconds; smothering under a pillow would be a nice, soft, dreamy way to go.

  But she’d end up casting her pillow to the floor, gasping in great heaving breaths that brought the cough right back again.

  12

  Then one day she’d had enough, one day the pain was too much, the knife in her chest, beneath her breas
ts, seemed to be poking up through the skin.

  Nessie Wilcox considered herself less a religious person than a spiritual person; she was a fallen Seventh-day Adventist. But she knew that her religious beliefs could not be contained in any one Christian tradition: she believed that all things could be forgiven except one, despair.

  And second, she believed that suicide for someone her age would be a perfectly suitable way of saying “Up yours” to nature and society.

  Anything, she thought constantly,anything to end the pain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Death of Nessie and the Life of Queenie

  1

  “Who’s there?” Queenie asked the darkness, but knew the answer.

  At the window looking in.

  Who opened the curtains again? I always close the curtains.

  At the window, the face pressed against the glass.

  “Rudy?” she asked.

  But there was no face at the window.

  “Wendy?”

  And again, she would lose another night’s sleep.

  2

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said to the window. “I have done those things which I ought not to have done and I have left undone those things...yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  I have lain with the Devil himself, I have made myself a vessel for Hell’s minions.

  I have brought into the world a demon.

  3

  Her name was not Queenie, but Stella. Stella’s skin along her arms and sides was mottled with purplish-yellow marks like tiny stars, the result of pinching herself to try to wake up. The dream was constant, and the dream involved this boardinghouse and these other people and this window through which she saw the other side of the dream almost all the way to reality the way a fish must see the sunlit world when it heads to the surface of a lake. The biblical phrase “through a glass darkly” came to her often: she was chock-full of biblical phrases. She had been saved nine times in the past twenty years, first by the Baptists, then the Mormons, then the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then by a string of fundamentalist and/or charismatic organizations including the Jews for Jesus. But they, too, were all part of the dream. Finally, through years of searching for an awakening, she decided to give up. She attended the Queen of Heaven Catholic Church every few Sundays with the other residents, but she mainly went because she had enjoyed the idea of a mother who actually brought a holy child into the world as opposed to an unholy one. It was an idea that amused her. It was the part of the dream that was a joke on her. It was the part of the dream that mocked her, and she, in return, could laugh at herself during Mass.

  But she had to break through it, she had to tear the fabric of the dream. She had to find the others, get in touch with the others, because they needed to wake themselves up before Wendy awoke them.

  Stella Swan had begun seeing through the dream to the real world, distorted through her bedroom window, coming down from the hills to the northwest.

  And on this particular night she saw something else in her window.

  She saw Nessie Wilcox running a steaming bath and settling into it with some grim determination. The water burned her skin. But Nessie didn’t seem to mind.

  The bathwater slowly began turning red as Nessie’s eyes closed, as she smiled.

  4

  Gretchen, the Scottie, was scratching at the bathroom door as Stella came down the hallway. The dog sniffed and whined and looked up at her.

  Stella had developed a fear of dogs over the years. Whenever she came across Gretchen, as harmless as the dog seemed, the animal sensed her fear and usually played upon it by snapping at her heels or growling.

  But Gretchen’s attention was fixed solely on the bathroom door.

  Stella tried the door.

  Locked.

  She tapped on it. All she heard was the sound of water running.

  Gretchen whined.

  Water running.

  “Mrs. W?”

  Gretchen began wagging her tail, trying to thrust her paws beneath the door.

  “Mrs. W?”

  Rudy was behind her, stroking her belly as she stood there.

  Stella shook the vision, the feeling, off. Rudy was not touching her. Rudy had been dead for years.

  A thought occurred to her, something from the past, something her mother had once said, “Nothing truly healthy ever happened in a bathroom.” But her mother had been referring to Rudy’s always taking forever in the toilet in the Santa Monica house. “What does that boy do in there?”

  “Mrs. W?”

  The water stopped running. Stella heard someone squeaking if off. She imagined Nessie’s hands turning the water off.

  Gretchen scratched.

  Stella knocked again on the door.

  “Occupied!” came the response.

  “Mrs. W? Are you all right in there?”

  When the woman inside the bathroom responded, Stella knew that it must be Nessie Wilcox because Nessie had announced, “Occupied!” just moments before, but the voice that answered her was her half-brother’s, Rudy, and he asked, “Why don’t you come in and do my back, Star? Door’s open.”

  Stella turned the handle of the door involuntarily and it was, after all, unlocked, tugging against her fingers in an effort to open even while she tried with all her might to keep the door closed.

  5

  Rudy sat on the edge of the tub smoking a cigarette. As skinny as he was, his behind was flabby and bunched up, leading up to his pear-shaped middle and narrow chest and shoulders. He leaned on one hand, splashing water with the other. His body was completely hairless except for a reddish triangle down around his penis, hidden for the most part by his crossed legs. At twenty, he had deep lines like walnut shells around his eyes, his skin was shiny and sallow, his hair was thin and greased back exposing his large ears. He spoke with his sophisticated nasal accent as he splashed water up with his foot. “Mother’s gone down to Ensenada for one of her weekends again, and I can’t scrub my back without her. Would you mind terribly?”

  He reached into the steamy water and brought out a fat yellow sponge, squeezing it: soap foam spurted from its craters. He stood up and then eased himself down into the water. The girl Stella had once been crouched down beside the bathtub. He handed her his cigarette. She put it in her mouth. He bent forward. His back was ridged like a dinosaur, his ribs stuck out, his back muscles formed a narrow V. She took the sponge up and scraped it across his back. The sponge glided smoothly along his shoulders.

  “Very good, Star, I did train you well.”

  She dropped the sponge in the water.

  “Done so soon?” He leaned back, lying down in the tub, his face floating just above the water. “Do you want to scrub my front now?”

  And she had reached in with both hands and pushed his face down under the water. He fought her, and as always, he was stronger, he would win, she would not be able to drown her half-brother, and she knew that when he had managed to rise up from the bathtub, he would grab both her wrists and say to her, “Is this what you really want from me, Star, my baby doll, is this what you really want?”

  6

  But Stella was standing outside the bathroom door. Gretchen looked up at her, wagging her tail; Nessie Wilcox said, “Go away, I’m all right, just go away.”

  Stella remembered the vision of Nessie in the red water.

  She drew her house key from her robe. Any key could unlock any door in the house. She put it into the keyhole and opened the bathroom door. Gretchen went in ahead of her.

  “Get out,” Nessie’s voice came to her through the steam. “Please.” Stella could barely see through the whiteness of mist. She went to the tub.

  The blood was just beginning to seep out of Nessie’s wrists, coloring the water around her.

  “Please, Queenie,” Nessie said. “Just leave me in peace.”

 
; “Let’s get you out of there and cleaned up,” Stella said, and reached down, touching both of Nessie’s wrists. “My real name is Stella,” Queenie said as she bandaged each wrist in turn. “But I think I like Queenie better.”

  7

  They sat side by side in the twin rockers on the front porch several hours later. The view from the porch was not lovely: six one-bedroom bungalows that had once been part of a motel, now individual apartments. It would be morning in a few hours, and it was cold, but both women needed the cold. Stella kept a blanket tucked up around her neck, stretched down to her toes. Nessie had neither wanted nor needed a blanket. Nessie swore she was willing to freeze to death, although she did accept a cup of Lipton tea.

  “If you mention doctors again I’ll throw this at you,” Nessie said, holding the teacup to her lips with both bandaged hands. “All a doctor’s going to do is want to cut me and shoot me full of chemicals and hit me with a ton of radiation until I’m glowing like the aurora borealis.”

  “Killing yourself in a bathtub seems more glamorous, I’ll grant you that,” Stella said, not even bothering to conceal her sarcasm.

  “You’ll grant me? Hell, Queenie, I didn’t think you had a sense of humor and now when I’m opening my wounds in front of you, you’re a barrel of monkeys.”