by Jay Nichols
Chapter 19
Russell threw the paperbacks away with the next day’s trash. He didn’t know what else to do with them, but he knew that he’d never be able to look at them, let alone read them, ever again. Pete’s oils and sweat had yellowed the pages, rendering them unreadable to Russell’s eyes. Plus, there was dust from Pete’s room on the tops of the pages. Unacceptable. They had to go.
He hauled them to the curb in a Hefty bag after his parents left for work. For some reason he didn’t want them seeing him throwing them out. It just didn’t seem like the type of thing they ought to know about. Even if he were to sit them down and clearly and concisely explain the reasoning behind his actions, they wouldn’t understand. They never did.
When he returned to the house, he went upstairs and rooted around in his night stand for his address book. Finding it, he headed into the narrow hallway and placed six calls to the parents of kids he taught piano to during his free time. Of course that had been back when he’d still had free time. Now that he was no longer working for Busby, he couldn’t call it free time anymore. It was just time.
He told the parents that he had developed a lung infection ("Just one of those freak things…") and had to cancel their sons’ and daughters’ lessons for the remainder of the summer. They all bought it, too. And they all wished him a speedy recovery, because they had absolutely zero reason not to believe he was telling them the truth. Russell Whitford was a role model, after all, a pillar of Riley’s musical community. Russell Whitford didn’t lie.
To the handful of fledgling teenage guitarists, he told them he was going on vacation and wouldn’t be back until the day before school started. They, like the parents, believed him, because as far as they knew, Russell Whitford was as honest as they came. Sure, he may extend the truth from time to time—tap dance around the facts when they fail to stack in his favor—but he would always do it in such a way that absolved him of guilt and blame. For example, he could take a stomach ache from earlier in the day and extend it to get out of watching a meteor shower with a friend later that night.
What a clever guy.
The last number he hesitated dialing. He had no reason to be afraid, but he was afraid anyway. Perhaps it was because the voice on the other end would recognize the lie as soon as it was uttered. Maybe he’d go with the truth this time and say, "You know what, I just don’t feel like being your goddamn musical guru anymore. Find another teacher if you want to play guitar—or, better yet, teach yourself. Any monkey can learn how to make chords, you know."
After dialing the number, he tried hanging up. He waited too long, though, for a disinterested female voice picked up the line and said:
"Hello."
Damn.
"Oh, hi…uh…is Michelle around? This is Rusty Whitford, her guitar teacher."
For a second, he thought Michelle’s mom was going to ask, "Who did you say you were again? Jeffrey Fishford?"
But she didn’t.
Instead, she said, "No, she’s not. She’s out with her boyfriend at the moment."
Russell’s heart seized; his stomach collapsed; his bladder twitched.
When he spoke, his lips were rubber bands. Whether gravity still planted his feet to the upstairs hallway was uncertain. Everything seemed so far away, translucent, stretched. The voice that sounded from his mouth was someone else’s. It wasn’t his. He was too distant from his body to make his mouth move.
Escaping.
Floating into the ether.
Getting the hell out of Dodge.
"Can you tell her I won’t be able to give her guitar lessons for the next three weeks. I’m vacationing in my lung—I mean, I’m going on vacation ‘cause I need some fun."
Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb. So fuckin’ dumb.
It took her a while to respond, and Russell couldn’t blame her.
She thinks I’m nuts.
"Okay, I’ll tell her."
"Thank you—wait don’t hang up!!"
What are you doing? Don’t you dare ask her that!
"What?" Mrs. Donovan said. Russell detected a hint of annoyance in her voice. He didn’t care. He was asking anyway.
"Who’s her boyfriend?"
The second between his asking and her answering lasted a lifetime. He feared the name she was about to speak, but he had to hear it.
He had to be sure.
"Hector Graham," she said before adding testily, "Anything else you want to know about my—"
Russell didn’t catch the last part. He had already hung up.
He trudged into his room and tossed the address book into the open drawer. From his berth between the bed and the wall, Apollo glanced over the mattress and licked his chops.
Russell rushed around the bed, leaned over, and ran his knuckles across the Dane’s blonde scalp. "Go back to sleep, boy," he told the dog. "There’s nothing to worry about now. I’ll be staying by your side till all this blows over, or until school starts—whichever comes first. It’s way too fuckin’ dangerous out there, buddy. I have no idea what’s happening to this world we live in. All I know is it’s not good."
And, for the most part, Russell kept his word. There would be no shirking of responsibility this time—he made a promise and he intended to keep it. And so it came to be that over the next week and a half, Russell kept Apollo within his line of sight at all times. When he took showers, or used the bathroom in any other kind of way, the door was left open. When Apollo used his bathroom, the back door was kept ajar. The majority of his waking hours Russell spent stroking Apollo’s neck, or making physical contact with the Dane in some fashion, while at the same time imagining bad things crashing through the windows, vicious things seeking to snatch his perfect dog away from him. He grew deathly afraid of the phantom intruder, the maligned animal with huge, yellow fangs that shattered glass and tore limbs from bodies. In his mind, he prevented these monstrosities from inflicting harm upon his dog by diving in front of Apollo just as the beasts began to pounce, sacrificing himself so his last, true friend could live. His thoughts festered on what it would feel like to be mauled, like the old naked woman on Crooked Back Lane had been mauled.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. He knew how pathetic it was to be able to keep a promise made to a dog but not one to a friend—a human friend—who had never really asked much from him to begin with. Russell rued that terrible, heated exchange of words on his porch. He wished he could go back and fix his mistake. But he couldn’t. So he was stuck with what he had—or rather didn’t have:
Pete…
Throughout his self-imposed exile, Russell never once stepped foot beyond the backyard patio bricks. And when the phone rang, he refused to answer it. Why should he? The person on the other end only spoke of bad news, never of good.
Michelle called frequently during those first few days, and after she hung up, he would play her messages over and over again until the words no longer made him physically ill. He thought of it as a kind of therapy. Immersion Therapy, perhaps. Sometimes it took him whole afternoons before he no longer wanted to strangle her.
Michelle, he would think while listening to her recorded voice, I thought you were different. But you’re not. You’re just another talentless bitch in a world overflowing with them. I was so wrong about you. You’re nothing special. At one time, I had hoped you were. But the purple hair, the rock n’ roll tees, the cussing: they’re all part your front, the façade you built to make people think you’re an artist. You’re not one, though. You don’t know first thing about suffering.
Some of the things she said on the answering machine were beyond ludicrous, beyond clichéd. She racked up hours of phony empathy toward Russell, explaining her actions over and over again, rattling off typical girl shit, like, "He’s really changed," and "I know what you’re thinking right now," as if she knew the secret to crawling inside his head and reading his thoughts. She didn’t have clue one as to how Russell thought, let alone what he thought about. She had let him down in ways
she couldn’t imagine.
His parents yelled at him to get out of the house, lectured him on how he was turning into a bum. "What’s wrong with you?" they’d ask. And: "Why are you moping around all the time?" Russell didn’t hold their curiosity against them, but goddamn if they couldn’t cut him a little slack. It was as if they expected him to juggle bowling pins and turn cartwheels less than a week after his best friend splattered himself over a brick patio. Sometimes he thought Diane and Darrel belonged in a booby hatch alongside his old pal Mike O’Brien.
He told them to fuck off quite a lot during that week and a half. And he meant it, too. He genuinely didn’t want to see them. And how their faces would crinkle in frustration, their eyes slit in confusion, when he walked past them on the living room couch, on his way to the kitchen to grab something to eat. They thought he was on drugs. They thought he had a brain tumor. They were both idiots.
And nearly every time he sat down at the piano or placed a guitar in his lap, his wrist and forearm would cramp in under two minutes’ time, making play too painful an endeavor. The aches were especially pronounced in his left hand, where, out of nowhere, a fiery star would explode in the center of his palm, like the tip of a lit cigarette pressed against his flesh, then radiate to the tips of his fingers and wrist. In his frustration, he’d throw the guitar on the bed or slam the fallboard on the piano and stare at his hand for several minutes while silently cursing its betrayal.
He spent most of those listless, lazy days watching TV (like a bum: Mom and Dad were right) and thinking about all the sordid, perverse things Hector Graham was likely doing to pretty Michelle Donovan. His body would reel at the images his mind conjured, because unlike so many others, he was able to imagine; he was able to see. For the first time in his life, he wished for that gift to go away. But he didn’t know how to get rid of it.
Hector. Did he really change? Is he still changing? After giving him that surprise pep talk at the corner of Magnolia and Johnson, Russell wouldn’t be surprised if the fat slob was actually making a go of it. He’d been acting different that day, that’s for sure—almost like a human. He had cried.
But will it stick? Is it the real deal? Michelle certainly thinks so.
Then Russell would imagine Hector’s nude, fat body rolling on top of Michelle’s slim, delicate one, and he’d have to rush to the bathroom to vomit.
Then, flushing the toilet and watching all the pink and gray chunks spiral down and under, he would recall the private moment he and Michelle had shared outside her house and how she had hugged him and how he had hugged her back—how she had felt so hollow and light then, like her rib cage was made of wooden dowels and her chest stuffed with goose down.
I better warn Hector not to crush her.
Then Russell would remember that he was supposed to be hating her, not protecting her.
That’s Hector’s job now. He’s the boyfriend.
"Fuck her, and fuck Hector," he’d say to Apollo and the blaring TV after returning to the living room with the bitter tang of bile on his tongue. "It’s not fair."
And Apollo would stare up with his chocolate eyes, listening to his master rant. Russell could (and often did) carry on for hours about how much effort he had put into keeping everything and everyone together while everything and everyone was unraveling and nobody seemed to be caring but himself. He’d curse his old friends—alive and dead—and go on wild tangents about conveyer belts and constellations and cockroaches. Occasionally he’d grab his left hand with his right and wince.
Apollo would listen (or give the impression of listening) to every word of it, and, for that, Russell was grateful. Apollo was his only friend now (he didn’t count Michelle or Hector, because they were off together in their la-dee-da world, skipping stones, picking four leaf clovers, or doing whatever the hell else they did together when they weren’t fucking and weren’t real friends anyway), and his loyalty was immutable.
But Russell did break his promise to his last remaining friend. He left his dog’s side one night ten days after promising that he would never, as long as summer was in effect, leave him. He locked the Great Dane in his bedroom as a precaution, but that didn’t count. The promise was still broken.
He had to do it, though. He had to leave.
He had to stop Hector Graham from killing Mike O’Brien.