As I Die Lying Page 16

  Miss Billingsly pushed her eyeglasses up her nose. "The parents are frantic. They're flying down from New York, according to the paper. With all these school shootings, everybody’s on edge anyway."

  She stood behind the counter, a woman in her element. She was like a captain standing on the bridge of a ship, as if the bookstore were a pleasurecraft of words. But my own pleasure was plundered along with my recent memory.

  Mister Milktoast wagged a cautioning finger from the back closet. Brittany, the other weekday employee of the Paper Paradise, came down the history aisle.

  "I knew a friend of hers," she said. I looked into Brittany's heart-shaped face, her brown hair parted in the middle. She wore a leather string around her neck. Little Hitler saw it as a noose while Loverboy viewed it as a mild bondage prop.

  "Said her roommate hadn't seen her in three days. She lived in an apartment off-campus. She liked to sleep around, if you know what I mean—"

  Brittany must have seen Miss Billingsly's look of disapproval. Or maybe it was a look of wistfulness. But she continued. "Anyway, the roommate didn't worry about her for a while, but then she went in her bedroom to borrow a sweater and saw none of the clothes had been disturbed."

  "Meaning she hadn't come back for a change of clothes?" Miss Billingsly asked.

  "No. So she checked around, called the parents..."

  "And now the police," Miss Billingsly finished.

  “Well, her boyfriend is a person of interest,” Brittany said. “He has a motorcycle. You know the kind.”

  Arlie, the geezer in the hunting vest, approached the counter, eyes afire with the fervent conspiracy of gossipers. I had explained to him earlier in the morning that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus wasn't a book about our alien origins. His wrinkled hands clutched a coffee mug that was half full of decaf. We’d watered him down.

  "You talking about the girl?" he said in his raspy voice that was as native as the Appalachian dirt.

  "Hello, Arlie," said Miss Billingsly. "I was just telling Richard about it."

  "Well, they don't know for sure, but I got my own theories," Arlie said.

  The silver wires of his brows arced heavily over his dark eyes, giving him the appearance of a vulture. His neck crooked, as if drooping to peck at carrion, and this heightened the raptorial effect. He was clearly enjoying the opportunity to impart hitherto secret knowledge.

  "There's been no indication of foul play," Miss Billingsly said. I nodded at Arlie.

  I had a hunch about his theory. I had sold Arlie more than one book on UFOs and had listened to him describe his back-porch sightings. I had a suspicion the alien visitors rose from the bottom of a Mason jar of white lightning. He was also a fan of what he called "unexplainable phee-nomenons," the kind of stuff you'd see in shows hosted by washed-up character actors from the various "Star Trek" series. But I couldn't exactly ridicule his theories, because I was starting to develop an unsettling theory of my own.

  "Lunatic killer," Arlie said.

  Miss Billingsly shook her head, and her glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them up with a finger and said, "I just can't see it happening here. A small town like this?"

  Arlie's eyes shifted joyfully from side to side under his vulturine eyebrows. "Then maybe it was one of them alien abductions."

  Miss Billingsly and Brittany laughed.

  Arlie's face reddened. "It's that college, is what draws them here. I seen them. They come after these kids who move here with television antennas stuck up their noses and shooting up all kinds of mindrot. I been against that college from the very start, from back when it was just a two-room shack out in a cow pasture."

  I didn't know how I felt about aliens. Intellectually, I figured they probably existed. Yet I had never seen one. What was even more frightening was the idea that they might not exist, that humans were the highest achievement of the universe. That we were the best that God, nature, and evolution could come up with. If so, the divine creator needed to eat some psychedelic drugs.

  "Now the school's gobbling up the whole damn town," Arlie continued. "I see where they bought out Ralph's feed store and gonna tear it down to put in some tennis courts. That college is just a magnet for trouble, I tell you.”

  "And you believe the college has something to do with the girl’s disappearance?" asked Brittany.

  "Sure. She wasn't missing before she came here to go to school, was she?"

  A woman of about thirty walked up to the counter with a stack of psychology books. Arlie stepped back to allow her access to the counter and Brittany began ringing up the purchase.

  "Say, here's a smart woman," said Arlie, looking at the book titles. "You teach at the college?"

  “Yes,” the woman said. She was pretty, with long blonde hair. Loverboy drank her in through my eyes and built nasty little fantasies in the basement of my brain.

  "What about the missing girl, then? You probably know more than we do," Arlie said.

  "It's too early to form a conclusion.” Her voice was cold, as if idle chatter with townies was beneath her. “Not enough evidence yet. And it’s only been a day and a half."

  "What about the damned underground installations I heard about? Down there under the gym. Got UFO radar dishes. What about them?"

  The woman drew back as Brittany bagged the books. Miss Billingsly put a hand on Arlie's shoulder to calm him down.

  "I call that evidence, don't you?" Arlie shouted. The other customers were starting to stare. Miss Billingsly apologized to the woman, who ripped the bag from Brittany and hurried out the door without looking back.

  "Tell us about the RABBITS!" Arlie yelled after her.

  Miss Billingsly led him to the reading corner and sat him at a table. I listened in without trying. Or rather, the Bookworm lent an ear.

  "Now, Arlie, I don't mind you hanging around, because a little local color is good for business,” she chastised. “But you have to control these outbursts. Everyone at the college is not an alien from one of your television shows.”

  "That college is a magnet, I tell you. Draws all kinds of weirdoes. From different worlds."

  "Arlie, I've lived here as long as you have, and I say change isn't always for the worse. I couldn't keep this bookstore in business without the college."

  He seemed small and defeated as he sat staring out the window. I almost felt sorry for him, but I had learned to store my pity. I knew I would need it for myself, and the Bone House cupboard was bare of such compassion.

  Plus, I knew the strangest invasions came not from without, but from within.

  I busied myself at the register as Brittany stocked the shelves. Mister Milktoast was glad the conversation had turned from murder. He was feeling a little squeamish.

  "Trouble in paradise," he said to me.

  Shady Valley?

  "No. Here in the House. Upstairs."

  Are you trying to tell me something?

  "Just a sour note from a lemon drop."

  I'll keep it in mind.

  Arlie came back to the counter, subdued now. He lowered his voice to a confidential level.

  "Something damned fishy is going on in this town. Ain't been the same since that double rape and murder here in '72. Folks has all but forgot that one. 'It'll never happen here,' they say. Well, it does. Because they are here."

  I nodded. Arlie had told me about the silver saucers that flew down from Widow's Peak, the high stony mountain above his farm. They were here. Sure. I’d believe that like I’d believe four or five little people lived inside my head.

  "It's a pitcher-perfect town on the outside," he said. "The one they put on the postcards and the travel guides. But under the whitewash is a black bellyful of trash. All the decent, God-fearing families that settled these parts been wet down and poisoned by slick money and big-city lawyers. They call it progress, they do.

  "I remember the day they cut the ribbon for the college. The mayor and even old Senator Hallifield was there, all of them standing in the middle
of that pasture and grinning like a pack of turtles eating saw briars. With one foot on a shovel, as if any one of that sorry bunch had ever turned a day's work in their lives."

  "Now, Arlie, don't have one of your spells," I said. Miss Billingsly had taken his mug, but his hands still cupped as if he were nursing it.

  "Senator Hallifield stepped in a big pile of cow shit and fell and busted his ass." His laugh was a frog’s muddy croak. "That part never made the papers.”

  He was quiet again, limp, like a skeleton on a hook in an anatomy class whose lesson was nearly over. "I remember old Vernell Hartbarger standing there in his coveralls. Vernell was the one that sold them the cow pasture. That land had been in his family since before the American Revolution, been tilled and bled on by a dozen generations afore his. But now he had a pocketful of slick money, and he didn't give a damn if they built an open sewer there."

  Arlie looked at me, at Bookworm. Bookworm listened. I didn’t. "Vernell went off with that money, down to Charlotte. Had a heart attack on top of a big-city whore three days later. Died in her arms, they said. They never did find the money."

  "And now the college is a lasting testament to his folly," Bookworm said.

  Arlie looked at me, confusion clouding his red eyes.

  "Our own big-city whore," Bookworm added, meaning the college, not caring whether Arlie was quick enough to make the metaphorical leap.

  He turned slowly, again just a lonely and scared old man, the vulture's fierceness faded. He walked to the door, stooped and defeated.

  "Maybe the aliens got that girl," he said, his hand on the front glass. “Or the rabbits.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he went out and got behind the wheel of his rusty Ford pickup. A cloud of blue smoke rolled across the parking lot as the engine whined to life. Arlie pulled the truck out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane highway that headed out of town towards his farm.

  I had been out to his farm once, a ramshackle group of buildings at the foot of Widow's Peak. His was the last house on Tater Knob Road, before the mountain really started rising out of the ground. He had offered me some moonshine but I didn't want it. Then he’d pointed out the spots in his fields where the saucers had landed.

  Now, as he drove away, hunched over his steering wheel, I imagined he was remembering when the road was just a dirt stitch in the flesh of meadows, back before aliens, lawyers, and madmen invaded Shady Valley.

  Brittany came to the counter as I watched the Ford disappear in traffic. "Crazy old coot," she said.

  "I suppose." I was trying to fight back Loverboy, who had been developing an attraction to Brittany. "What was her name?"

  "Who?"

  "The missing girl." I tried a Milktoast smile. “The one the aliens got.”

  "Oh. Shelley," she said. "Shelley Birdsong."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Night.

  I couldn't sleep, because I might dream.

  And while I dreamed, something else might awaken. Something that had worn my skins during my blackout. Those missing hours hung wide and heavy over my mind, a fog on a lost sea. And Shelley might be in that swirling mist, sucked down by the Charybdis of my unknown appetites, rolled over by the Sisyphus stone of my futility, or otherwise undone through a mythological metaphor that Bookworm hasn’t looked up yet.

  "Nutter coincidence," Mister Milktoast said, ever the optimist. Or maybe merely a habitual liar. Tiny warning bells sounded, elves hammered on the roof, a steam train blew its whistle, smoke sucked itself down the chimney.

  I rose from bed cold. I had put Shelley's phone number in my top desk drawer, there with a handful of letters from Mother and a dozen old photographs that I had found in the Valiant's glove box. Loverboy wouldn't let me forget to write the number down. He knew I had a lot of things on my mind.

  The number wasn't there.

  I checked my pockets. Nothing.

  I went downstairs into the laundry room, which was Mister Milktoast's tidy milieu. There, in the pants I must have worn the day before, the number was creased and fingered like an old secret. As I touched the paper, a mental picture flashed of my dialing the number.

  Then came another picture, like frames of a film that had jammed the sprockets of the projector, so that the motion didn't fit together. The illusion revealed its lie. The frame froze.

  Shelley downstairs, on the sofa. Late afternoon sun streaming through the window, catching the back of her head and making her red hair blaze. She is holding a cigarette—no, a joint—in her right hand. Her feet are on my coffee table, her leather sandals pressed against my Incredible Hulk comic books, wrinkling the covers. Her gray eyes stare at me, oblivious of my identity. As oblivious as I am.

  The frame jittered and jumped. The image disappeared in a rush of black. My head hurt as I stood in the basement.

  "Richard, you're not supposed to see that."

  Mister Milktoast?

  "Don't look.”

  "You know something, don't you?

  "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

  Liar. I thought you're supposed to protect me.

  "And that's what I'm trying to do."

  I looked down at the concrete floor of the basement.

  Spots. Rust. Brown. Cool as stone.

  "Go back upstairs, Richard."

  "Yeah, Beth might call, and I wouldn't mind shoving the old crème horn into her breadbox again," Loverboy said. "Hell, it's been three days. Course, it was years before then. I ain’t waiting that long for honey butter again."

  "Upstairs, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said. “Fast.”

  "Let him see," said Little Hitler. "I could use a good laugh."

  I knelt on the concrete and peered into the murky corners of the basement. Camping gear. Old tires. Bookshelves. Streaked cans of paint and wood scraps. Large plastic rubbish bins.

  One of the bins was bulging.

  I took a step deeper into the basement, into madness, into the house of mirrors. The room smelled like stagnant water in an iron pot.

  "Go ahead and look, Richard,” taunted Little Hitler. "You can always find someone else to take the fall. After all, when you killed Father, you had me to blame."

  I clenched my fists, but there was no one to punch. I took a second step then faltered.

  "Don't listen, Richard," coaxed Mister Milktoast. "I can explain everything."

  “Why can’t I remember?” I screamed at the cinder block walls. My voice echoed, sharp and dead. I might as well have been beating the cheap Sheetrock in the Bone House.

  "You gutless little worm," said Little Hitler. "You've always been too weak to grab what you wanted. You can't even control your own pathetic sack of meat."

  I never needed to...do something like that. Never needed hate.

  "Hate? Oh, you loved Daddy's dancing boots. You loved the bruises and the taunts. You loved Mommy dearest. In the best and worst ways.”

  And I have you to thank for what happened to Father.

  "Sure you do, Richard. But remember this. I'm just another of your monster masks."

  I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS. I DIDN'T ASK FOR ANY OF YOU.

  "Sometimes monsters are made and not born. Just ask the one who knows.”

  And who would that be, Little Hitler?

  "Oh, haven't you met?"

  What are you talking about?

  "The days of cowering are over. No more hiding in the closet. You missed a payment on the Bone House mortgage. This house is in foreclosure. You’ve been evicted."

  No...

  I turned and ran up the basement stairs, missing the top step as my eyes blurred. I fell onto the kitchen linoleum. The phone was ringing. Or it might have been my ears.

  I laid there for minutes or hours, as my little friends took their turns behind my eyelids. Finally I lifted myself and went to bed. My heart played its sick rhythm, pumping sorry blood through the sewage pipes in my limbs. Night fell, harder than the night in my skull, black, solid, and merciless.

&
nbsp; "Like a house of bricks," whispered Mister Milktoast. “But I tried, Richard.”

  "We all tried," said Bookworm.

  "Not all of us,” said Mister Milktoast.

  What happened? Tell me. Surely you owe me that much.

  "Some things are better left unknown."

  But it's me. My body. My life.

  "Oh, but you're wrong, Daddy Killer," Little Hitler said with a sneer. “Or should I say Mother Fucker?”

  I clutched my head, pressed my fingers into my temple as if to squeeze his voice out like pus from a boil.

  Memory came flooding in, blessed memory, cursed memory: Shelley in a swing at the town park. The park is circled by laurels, tucked away from the street. A skewed slide huddles under the branches of a birch on the far side of the park. The empty seats on either side of Shelley shiver in the wind, like ghosts rattling their chains. The park is empty, its summer charms gone to weed. Shelley is laughing. She has her back to me. Hands are on her shoulders.

  My hands. No, not quite mine.

  Shelley straightens her body, rocks her shoulders back, and shakes her hair free. She lifts her legs and Loverboy pushes her shoulders. Shelley grips the chains and goes into the air, defying gravity. She comes back quickly, and Loverboy pushes again, from the waist this time. He watches as she presses against the sky, purple dress billowing.

  And I am Loverboy. I see as he sees. But it's not just Loverboy. Something else watches from behind our eyeballs.

  Shelley soars up and out, to that delicate moment of suspension at the height of her swing, to zero gravity framed against the sun. She is a goddess, Hera in silhouette ruling the heavens, the apotheosis of her gender. There, in that eye blink, she attains her immortality.

  And I am almost willing to condemn my salacity. I am seized by rapture and nearly converted.

  But gravity holds sway, rushing her back once again to Earth, into my human hands. The touch of flesh brings earthly desires. The illusion shatters. She is again meat, prey to be snared, a trophy to be won.