Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set

by Douglas Clegg

  Getting into a good college.

  I don't have the heart to get Whit to cheat on my behalf. I'd never ask a friend to risk that.

  I'd much rather drag down a nodding acquaintance. Or an enemy.

  So I look to my left and there is my best friend, ha ha, Bart Kinter. Looking like God's fool. Bart, nineteen years old and here he is in Junior Chemistry for another year. This year, I am sure, Bart has done his homework. He knows what he's doing.

  Then, something like seduction occurs. I drop my pencil to the floor.

  I wait for my classmates to look up and see what my next move is going to be.

  I make no move.

  I pretend that I haven't even noticed the missing pencil.

  I am still reading the exam. I squint my eyes and drop my lower lip down, slightly, so that it looks like I am intent upon a particular question. Then I glance up to the ceiling as if the question I have just read needs to be rolled around in my brain until it hits something and then, tilt!

  So. Now I am ready to answer this question. I reach for my pencil, which Not Two Seconds Ago rested upon the worn horizontal groove at the top edge of my desk.

  I look around the desk for my pencil. Not there. Under the blue examination book? Nope. Maybe it's still in my pockets—not there, either. So I look down to my right and then to my left, and—there it is, on the floor!

  I reach down for my Number 2 pencil. As I come up, in the arc of my ascent, I cock my head just a bit more to the left and gooseneck it out further to catch the tail end of some chemical equation Kinter has just written down.

  I begin to write scrawl for jagged scrawl exactly what Kinter is writing. After two years in this course, he is a good chemistry student. He has even studied for this test.

  I forget it is his paper I am looking at. As I copy his work, our papers become one.

  Like I said, it's pure seduction.

  Only I'm the one who gets screwed because Bart Kinter turns around. He is smiling. He puts two and two together. His curdled ears blaze crimson with delight. He raises his hand to get the Proctor's attention.

  And after the wheels are set in motion, I am given a stay of execution until after Christmas break.

  What I remember most, after the Honor Trial, was that I cried a hell of a lot. Getting caught cheating probably meant no Good College, and worse, public humiliation. I was sure I'd be expelled. Pontefract Prep had a strict honor code. Lying, cheating, stealing. If you were caught, no questions asked.

  But when I was done crying, I thought of Bart Kinter. The boy who found it in his evil heart to turn me in. To squeal.

  I plotted in my feverish adolescent mind. What would be his punishment? What form of execution? It scares me now, thinking back on all this, retracing my footsteps to that night twelve years ago. Now I know the outcome, where things finally led. I know I planted the seeds that night just as surely as I'd taken that bone from a dog before the Tenebro initiation ritual. The night Lily stole a bottle of Jack Daniels from a faculty party.

  What is it about an open field at night that frightens you? Could it be that someone, or something, is waiting in that field for you?

  Back when I was sixteen, stealing bones and bourbon and getting myself royally expelled, I didn't worry too much about consequences. I didn't worry about things waiting for me in empty fields.

  In those days, all I knew about was revenge.

  4

  Cup was shivering behind the snow-covered boxwoods outside the Marlowe-Houston House while the faculty party continued inside. He was trying to keep in the shadows, out of the light from the veranda while he urinated in the snow. He tried to pee in the shape of a heart, but only succeeded in getting it all over his hand. He washed his hands in the fresh snow.

  While he was zipping up and adjusting himself, Lily emerged from the back door. She waved the bottle in the air. As she came down the veranda steps, Cup noticed that her royal blue dress was hidden beneath an oversized men's jacket. "Gower Lowry," she said. When she mentioned the names of his teachers, Cup felt that she was a part of that adult world to which he could only spy upon through kitchen door cracks. Lily was twenty, but at times she seemed far more mature than any college girl he had ever met; she seemed comfortably worldly. "Very tweedy," she continued, raising the collar up around her neck. She gently tucked her shoulder-length blond hair into the back of the collar. "He couldn't wait to slip this over my shoulders." She laughed at this, and her delicate laughter created tiny clouds in the cold air.

  Lily came over and handed him the bottle of bourbon. "Daddy didn't even notice when I grabbed it. I did my best Lauren Bacall for Gower, who became my unwitting accomplice. He cornered me, Cup, against the bar, like this—" Lily squared her shoulders and came as close to Cup as she could without touching him. The tweed jacket fell open revealing her royal blue dress, with just a suggestion of nipples beneath the fabric. Cup's eyes wandered up the pale skin of her neck, back to her face. His breathing became very slow. He could hear his own heartbeat and was afraid that she might hear it, also.

  Her lips barely parted as she said softly, "He told me, 'My dear, you certainly are our winter's blossom, a rare flower indeed.'" Lily reached up with her right hand and began stroking the edge of Cup's face; he became painfully aware of the peach fuzz on his chin that had yet to be replaced by heavy beard. "'A rare flower that blooms in such a cold climate.'" Lily's warm palm remained against Cup's face. "So I picked this ice cube out of my glass and slipped it into his mouth like this "

  Lily's fingers were on Cup's lips, parting them. She scraped a fingernail along the bottom row of teeth, and his tongue licked her finger. " And I said to him, 'Gower Lowry, you could melt ice, couldn't you?'"

  She laughed and plucked her finger from Cup's mouth. She brought her hand back down and rubbed it with the other as if she'd bruised it. "That old masher."

  Cup was praying she would not notice the erection that was straining against the inside of his trousers. He took a step backwards, embarrassed. He tried to pull his jacket further down so as to hide the lump.

  But it was no good. She'd already seen the wet spot around his crotch. "Oh, Cup, did I make you do that?"

  Cup unscrewed the cap to the Jack Daniels bottle and took a swig from it. His face was red.

  "It must be difficult at times being a boy. All that testosterone."

  This made Cup feel even more self-conscious. He gulped down more bourbon.

  Lily raised her chin and peered at Cup critically as he moved the bottle away from his face. "You better save some of that for your little pow-wow tonight. I don't think I can get away with swiping another bottle. Gower might want more than just an ice cube to help with that."

  5

  From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

  There I was, drinking from the bottle I was supposed to be saving for the Tenebro initiation ceremony, while Lily Cammack watched, back from her first year in college, no doubt fascinated by the alcoholic consumption of the average, or in my case below average, preppie. Sticking out from my down jacket's side pocket was some animal bone I'd wrestled away from one of the janitor's dogs, while another, more personal bone pressed against my khakis.

  Lily told me that her older sister Clare was getting married and asked me what I thought of that. I told her I didn't think anything of it—Clare was four years older than Lily, and I had never met her. She lived in New York. What did I care about her marriage? But Lily insisted I think about it—not Clare, but the idea of always being there for someone. Not the marriage that ends with "Death do us part," but the marriage that will always be, in this world and the next.

  "You know, true love, do you believe in it?" she asked. She had to repeat herself a few times before the question even registered on my drunken adolescent brain. Let's see, I'd had a beer with my friend Whit earlier in the evening, then three plastic cupfuls of sherry while hiding behind the kitchen door in the Marlowe-Houston House, and there, speaking with her in the backyard of t
he house, I had drunk the equivalent of at least three shots of bourbon. I had a right to fuzzy thinking.

  She took my hand at some point. We began walking down to the chapel. If you've never been there, the way the campus is laid out: you've got your Marlowe-Houston House facing Campus Drive and Clear Lake, but behind it, Pontefract Prep just opens up like a flower. To the north, about fifty yards, are the academic buildings along a brief, but impressive colonnade; straight ahead, as you face away from the Marlowe-Houston House, is the new library, the alumni house, and the dormitories; and due south is the chapel.

  So we took that southern route to the chapel. Our shoes crunched in the snow. I took the bourbon bottle and swept it across the top of a row of boxwoods, with snow scattering like dust from the leaves.

  I glanced back at the house where the party continued, half-expecting someone to be following us. I've always had that habit, looking over my shoulder. It is not a good one. You never get anywhere, just back where you started.

  Lily wrapped her right arm casually about my waist as we walked, slipping her hand into my coat pocket. I'd like to tell you that my love for Lily, my enormous crush on her, was pristine and free of animal motivation. Because I did worship her. I was sixteen, clumsy and unpopular, and here was this beautiful girl who, at the very least, enjoyed my company. But at sixteen, my mind was still in the gutter when it came to girls and sex. I was a virgin, and like most virgins I cherished any feeling that even came close to sex; my senses were not yet dulled by experience. When Lily slipped that hand into my pocket, I felt a sweatshop heat rising up in my loins. I was afraid that that would be all I needed to send me over the top.

  When I glanced at Lily, her pale face and white hair glowed in the scrim darkness like luminescent white sand beneath an ocean wave.

  Do you believe in true love? As if she had to ask me. How could I not, Lily? Just looking at you, brushing against you like this. Every moment with you is a constant ecstasy. These are a rough approximation of my thoughts then. I was so naive and romantic that just the touch of her hand made me believe that love could not only be true, but that it could last through all eternity. This meant constant, never-ending sexual bliss.

  But I said something blas and noncommittal. "I don't know, I think maybe, but who knows. Maybe when your sister gets married you can ask her."

  Lily didn't pursue the subject of love any further.

  "I guess," I continued with my non sequiturs, "Bart Kinter's got teachers like Lowry on his side. That fucking brownnose."

  "Oh, ha ha, your best friend," Lily said. "He's just—" but she gasped before she could finish her sentence. "Cup, do you have to hang on to that thing?" While we'd been talking, her hand, still in my pocket, had felt the old bone in my jacket.

  "It's part of the ceremony, Lily."

  "And you can't tell me about it."

  I nodded.

  At sixteen I thought it was pretty cool to have gotten hold of a bone of that size—all my blood brothers in the Tenebro would think I'd really gone out to one of the cemeteries in town and dug it up. But the truth was: I stole it from a dog. Since it was my second year in the tribe I knew I had to come up with something pretty unusual for initiation. Your first year you are an initiate, but the second year is crucial. You're either a Shaman or a Warrior, and almost every guy was just a Warrior. But a select few got to be Shaman. That's what I was shooting for. I have never been so ambitious since. Most Tenebro brought pigeon feathers and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. One of the guys who made shaman last year, during my initiation, brought a bottle of Cuervo Gold. Another brought what we figured out was a possum skull, but what he swore was a giant rat's skull. So, here was my chance. I had not only a bottle of Jack Daniels, but also this huge bone, about as long as my arm from wrist to elbow. Not only that, I had bad karma on my side; I didn't just buy the booze and I didn't just find the bone. I swiped the bottle from the headmaster's party, and I dug the bone out of Christ Church cemetery.

  But what really happened (and this is not the story I would tell my blood brothers) was I saw this mutt dragging a bone around in the snow. This was such a good omen I knew I had to get that bone. Who cared if I was going to be kicked out of school after Christmas for cheating? I would go down with flying colors. For the Tenebro initiation ceremony, it would be bones and bourbon all the way!

  I had to really wrestle with that dog; the animal growled and shook its head violently. I almost lost my grip. I only was able to get the bone when the dog relaxed for an instant. I pulled as hard as I could, thought its teeth were going to come with it when the bone popped out of its mouth. The dog whimpered after that, and I felt bad. I am a sucker for dogs. I gave it a Baby Ruth bar that had been rotting in my pocket for a few weeks.

  And the bone itself! It was the bone to end all bones. That bone even had some maggots on it! How authentic could you get? It never occurred to me to wonder where the dog could've found it.

  Lily pulled the bone out of my jacket pocket. She held it with disdain. "Is it one of Bart's?" She swung it back and forth, almost dropping it. Then she slipped it back into my pocket. "What perverted things do you boys do with bones?"

  "It's a secret."

  "Yes, well, I can tell you what Freud would say about that bone, but I don't suppose you'd want to hear it. You're a lot more like Bart Kinter than you'd like to admit, Cup."

  "Right," I said sarcastically, suddenly furious that she would even compare me to Bart. I wasn't anything like him. No way.

  Lily hugged me closer. The chapel bells rang the hour: eleven o'clock.

  I still wanted this to be a romantic scenario. I wanted it to lead to something. There she'd mentioned love a while back, and now we'd descended into bones and Bart Kinter.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said, "No, you're really not like Bart, are you? Whenever he's around me he licks his lips. Like he's just waiting for his moment. You're much more chivalrous, Cuppie. You'd be my knight in shining armor, wouldn't you?"

  "Slay all your dragons," I whispered drunkenly.

  Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. We continued trudging through the snow—it seemed to take forever to get to the chapel. When we reached the chapel steps, she asked me if I meant it about slaying her dragons. Not realizing what I was getting myself in for, I said yes.

  "Sometimes, Cup, dragons are big monsters in stories, and sometimes " Lily seemed very mysterious now, and for the first time since I'd met her when I was thirteen and she was seventeen, practically babysitting me, I realized that there were things about her I didn't know, things she was just now hinting at. It almost scared me to think that Lily Cammack was not just the image I had of her, but that she possessed a life independent of my knowledge. "Cup," she said, "let's play 'Smoke.'"

  What Lily liked about this game, silly as it was, is that when you are It you can crawl into someone else's skin and see things through their eyes. Even though you make fun of them, you try to, momentarily, put yourself in their place. You could never just be yourself—the game required that you be the other person, answer as the other.

  But all this is in hindsight. When I was sixteen I thought it was a stupid game, a game for little kids, actually. But I did love Lily. How easy it is to write that now: I do love you, Lily. She didn't play "Smoke" with anyone else but me.

  The way the game goes:

  You ask the person who is It, What kind of smoke are you? She tells you, and in answering this and other similar questions (what kind of animal, vegetable, mineral, fire, wind, water, etc.) she reveals something about the nature of the mysterious It.

  And there were other questions if you were wrong with your first guess.

  The last question, however, is set. When you ask it, it's a signal that the jig is up, the game is over, and you are on to whomever the mysterious It is.

  The last question: What kind of monster are you?

  6

  The boxwoods that surrounded the front entrance of the small chapel in a precise semic
ircle shook off their snow as if shivering from the cold. Wind blew from off the lake. Cup Coffey and Lily Cammack heard it whistle as it came through the trees near the Marlowe-Houston House.

  But it wasn't the wind that caused the bushes around them to tremble. Cup first heard a low growling. The noise seemed to surround them. He wished that the chapel door hadn't been locked, initially because he was freezing, but now because of the lurking animal or animals in the hedge.

  But Lily saw the dog and pointed it out to Cup. "Have you ever been dog fishing?" The dark, wet dog came lumbering out of the boxwoods, its tail wagging. It was a black Labrador retriever, a clumsy, friendly dog Cup had often thrown sticks to. One of the janitor's dogs.

  "Here, puppy," Lily coaxed the dog into the chapel floodlights. An aside, she whispered to Cup, "I've never been fond of these campus dogs. But I think it's because of their master."

  "You think Riley owns every dog that runs around here?" Cup asked. Riley Amory was the new head janitor; he and his family lived off in the woods "with all the albinos," Lily would scoff.

  Lily didn't respond. She picked up the half-empty Jack Daniels bottle that Cup had set down between them. She dipped the bottle down to the dog's level and snapped her fingers. "Come on, girl, that's a good doggie."

  "Don't do that."

  "Cup, this wasn't the dog you took that femur from?"

  "You think it's a femur?"

  "Femur, tibia, whatever." She shrugged.

  Two other dogs also emerged from the bushes, sheepishly wagging their tails, heads down. "How many dogs does Riley own?"

  "I see a certain resemblance to their master," Lily said. "Let's see if they get as drunk as Riley does." She tipped the bottle so that some bourbon splashed onto the Lab's muzzle.

  One of the dogs, a miniature collie mix, came up to Cup and began sniffing around his jacket. "This is the one," he said. He reached down to pat the dog, but it snarled and backed away.