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As I Die Lying Page 24
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My tongue reconnected itself to my nervous system. “What are you doing here?”
Mother looked down at the streaked tiles on the depot floor. She pushed her parka hood back with an unsteady hand. “I told you to call back if you changed your mind. And since you didn’t...well. . .“
She looked up. The skin of her neck seemed to follow with reluctance. Her once-proud chin had given up, accepted its humble lot and sagged in defeat. Her skin was gray, creased, but underneath the pallid flesh, broken blood vessels streaked outward like red roots thirsting in barren soil. She smiled with effort, as if the muscles of her mouth couldn’t stretch in an upward direction. “Well, here I am,” she finally finished.
She dropped her overnight satchel and her suitcase and they clattered on the floor. Then she looked away, her spidery eyes almost girlish with delight.
I’m glad to finally meet you, my pretty. Richard’s told me so much about you. And, believe me, the pleasure’s all mine.
I stared at Mother, still petrified, holding a chilled breath. Surely the Insider’s power couldn’t extend halfway across the continent?
But at that moment, the Insider’s power was nothing compared to Mother’s. With one shift of her eyes, she dredged up the past, stirred a witch’s brew of memories, raised the dead and flaunted the bones. With one heavy-lidded look, she made me her little boy again, weak, guilty, vulnerable. With one trembling step forward, she possessed me more completely than the Insider ever could.
“Richard,” she half-whispered, half-whimpered, and then she shredded the last of my resolve by letting one silver tear leak from the corner of her eye. She fell into my helpless open arms.
Welcome home.
She was as light as a bird, bones all hollow. Her hair stood up white and wild, Einstein tufts, Warhol with a blow dryer.
“Mother, I...”
Say it, Richard. You know you want to.
No.
Say it. Or are you going to force me to let Loverboy say it?
Please. Not him.
I love it when you beg, Richard. Now say it.
“. . .I missed you, Mother.”
Close enough for now. But you’ll get better. Because you’re going to get a lot of practice.
“Richard, it’s been so long,” Mother said, in her cracked, smoke-saturated voice. She hugged me with a strength that couldn’t have been hers alone. Her spindly fingers gripped my coat like beggar’s lice. Her breath was tomb dust and gin.
As I held her, as I fought with myself to push her away, I felt the fluttering batwings of shadow at the corners of my consciousness. Wafting cobwebs in the Bone House.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Mister Milktoast said, thinking she was still a weak, pathetic failure as a protector. Especially when compared to him. “Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in your lap and you were singing ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.’”
Loverboy twitched at the mention of “bread” but I shoved a loaf down his throat before he could speak.
“So you’re really glad to see me?” Mother said, and her expression was so eager, so desperate, that Little Hitler had an urge to drive his fist into her brittle jaw.
Oh, no, Little Hitler. There will be plenty of time for all that later. Remember, mental pain is so much more savory than physical pain. You can inflict your bruises and gouges, but that’s too human. I feed on fruit at the top of the tree.
“Yes, I’m glad to see you,” hissed Little Hitler.
Patience, my mad little bootblack. I promise you’ll like what I have in store for her. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. Everyone will get their turn, even Richard.
Especially Richard.
Mother tried to laugh but a cough caught in her throat and she made a strangled, hacking noise. She spat on the depot floor and what landed and shivered on the tiles was red and yellow, a cancerous slug. She bent and put a hand to her chest.
“Are you okay?” said Bookworm, touching her elbow. His tenderness was almost as appalling as Little Hitler’s simmering hatred.
“Yes,” she said, after clearing her throat. “Just…I couldn’t smoke on the bus.”
“You’ve logged some mileage,” Mister Milktoast said.
She stretched and I heard her joints pop. “Eighteen hours. Hard on an old woman’s back.”
“Mother, don’t talk that way. You’re not old.”
“I’m on the downhill slide and, to tell the truth, I don’t mind a bit. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life standing in a bus depot. Show me this house you’ve been telling me about.”
Mister Milktoast collected her bags and led her to the Subaru.
“Moving up in the world,” Mother said as she folded into the passenger’s seat like a crippled crab. “Remember that old car you used to drive, back home?”
Back home. She sent the first dagger into my chest.
“How could I forget?” said Little Hitler.
She put a hand on my knee as I started the car. “I can’t tell you how happy it made me when you wrote and asked me to move in with you.”
I could only scream silently, killed by my own quill, drowned by the juice of my own inkwell, caged by the alphabet. A toilet flushed in the Bone House.
Oh, Richard, didn’t I tell you? How forgetful of me. Well, you know how it is when you have a thousand lifetimes’ worth of thoughts.
I wondered which black night, which stolen moment, which part of my life had been sliced away from me so the Insider could write the letter. Or letters. What else had it told her?
When you sleep, I’m awake.
Mother squeezed my knee with her graybriar fingers. “It can be just like old times,” she said, spraying spittle and liquor mist into the air. Her head swiveled as she studied the towering mountains that were such a contrast to Iowa’s sweeping flatness. She pointed to a store on the side of the highway.
“Anything your heart desires, Mother,” Mister Milktoast said. “Your lush is my command.”
He pulled the car up to the glass front of the ABC store. I could see our reflections in the plate glass, my mouth smiling dotingly at Mother, her eyes bright in their nest of crow’s feet. If I looked closely, I could see myself writhing in agony in the pools of my pupils. But that must have been my imagination, because I didn’t look closely. I blinked and I was behind the steering wheel, myself again thanks to the wicked beneficence of the Insider.
Mother bought four bottles of Jim Beam, a fifth of gin, and a bottle of Glenlivet “just for a special celebration.” We drove to my house and Mother oohed and aahed in appreciation in the living room as I took her bags to the spare bedroom. I looked around for ghosts of Shelley, bits of clothing or stains, any trophies Little Hitler might have accumulated without my knowledge. You know how roommates are.
When I came back downstairs, Mother was sitting on the couch nursing a six-ounce glass of straight bourbon between drags of her cigarette.
I moved as if through a dream, and then I realized it was a dream. The Insider’s dream, come true through psychic manipulation. My nightmare, made flesh and given shape by a vengeful visionary. I was just a bit actor in a grainy movie. The Insider was star, writer, producer, and director, the Orson Welles of spiritual possession.
I sat on the chair, my limbs as stiff as wood, bracing for whatever atrocity the Insider might have in mind.
Relax, Richard. Why do you always expect the worst of me? I’ve gone to all this trouble to reunite a loving mother with her only son. See how much I care for you.
Mother had taken off her parka and hugged her arms against her chest. I tried not to look at the lumps her shriveled breasts made under the fabric of her sweater, but Loverboy gawked anyway. “Frostbit peaches” was his assessment.
“Thought it would be warmer here,” she said. “But I guess this is pretty high up, what with all the mountains and all.”
I nodded, the dutiful ventriloquist’s dummy.
“We’re g
oing to be happy together, Richard,” she said. She was halfway through the drink. Her words already sounded thicker on her tongue. “Just like the good old days.”
She looked at me the way she had done from the witness stand at her court hearing those long years ago. The virgin whore, diva of denial, a mother load, spearing me with guilt and gratitude at the same time. Driving her words like nails into flesh, the same way she did while telling the prosecutors that Father had beaten the both of us for years.
“We’re all we got left,” she said with a watery sneer. “Us, and memories.”
She drank to that. Then she drank to the previous drink. And the one to come.
Precious memories, how they finger. I was a prisoner of my own life, never more so than at that moment. An inmate of the Bone House, but also the warden. But even before that, I was the architect.
“I would do it all over again,” she said, “even if I had gone to jail.”
“Mother, please. Let’s not talk about it.”
She sipped the bourbon and smiled down into the brown liquid. She had already settled in, her thin hips parting the sofa cushion as if she’d been sitting there a hundred years. She picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater.
“You’ve never wanted to talk about it,” she said, not accusing, just cold, empty, windswept. “Or about us.”
Anger boiled inside me, a hot bubbling tar pit erupting, the red lava of rage flowing down my brain. This wasn’t one of Little Hitler’s petulant tantrums. It was honest, rightful indignation. The realization was frightening, yet liberating. I could feel.
Richard Allen Coldiron could have emotions that weren’t gifts bestowed by Little People or psychic circus masters or calculating narrators. I tensed and sat forward, ready to rise and cross the room and...
And do what?
Its laughter rattled down the alleys of my mind, the sound of vermin scurrying in rubbish. I sat down and slumped in the chair, defeated before the battle even began.
“That wasn’t us,” I said. “That couldn’t have been us.”
“It was us, Richard. But we got through it all together. That’s what people who love each other do. They get through things.”
She lifted her arms with a sudden spasm and spilled bourbon on her polyester pants. She didn’t notice. The blotch looked like Nietzche’s profile or maybe a spatter pattern.
“Just surviving isn’t enough,” I said. “Sometimes, you have to live.”
Mother finished what was left of her drink and sent the pale slug of her tongue over her lips. “Sometimes, you have to love,” she said, her voice catching. “It’s what makes us...human.”
No. The Insider couldn’t be working her strings, too. Feeding her lines straight from the mind of Mister Milktoast. The Insider couldn’t be working her mouth and mind and heart just to get to me, could it? Could it? Bookworm flitted in with his line about “unwilling suspension of disbelief” and hustled back to his nook or cranny or wherever he hid.
“Comes a time to forgive and forget,” Mother said. “Now, be a good boy and go refill my glass.”
I was in the kitchen when she said to my back, “Besides, it was all my fault.”
“No, it was nobody’s fault,” I yelled over my shoulder. The liquor I was pouring was momentarily tempting, its sharp sweet odor both a threat and a promise. The Coldiron Curse was relentless. It was as if Father’s ghost hovered somewhere behind me, laughing gleefully and whispering “Taste it, Shit For Brains. We’re bottomless.”
Ghosts. Memories. Curses. Richard, you’re starting to lose it, my dear human host. You’re starting to see things my way. You’re starting to become me.
Clink of glass.
And tonight, who will we be? Hmm, Richard? How about Mister Milktoast, giving Mother a sponge bath? Maybe Bookworm, opening his heart and spilling the pages of his pathetic diary? Little Hitler, swapping war stories about dear old Daddy? Or Loverboy. What about HIM?
With shaking hands, I poured an extra drink. It burned like hellfire in my throat.
Like Father, like son.
In every way.
I went back to the living room on legs of hot rubber.
Mother took her drink and smirked at the one I held in my hand. “You hold it just like your father,” she said.
Just wait until I put on my boots.
Her eyes crawled across the room like fleshflies looking for a soft opening on a corpse. They lit on a photograph of Beth on the mantel, a still-life Beth whose face was trapped in innocence, cheer, and happiness.
“Who’s that?” Mother asked.
“The woman I love,” I said, working another swallow of liquor toward my burning stomach, washing down the bitter aftertaste of that final word.
Mother frowned, wrinkles on wrinkles.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Mother passed out while the afternoon sun was still heavy in the sky. I covered her with a spare blanket and stood over her, looking down at her stale-pastry face. She was already a corpse, lacking only the butterfly stitches in the eyelids.
I thought about taking off her scuffed loafers, but I was afraid to touch her.
You can touch her, Richard. She’s yours. All of her. My gift to you.
“No. You can take my awareness, you can shuck my consciousness from me, you can steal my flesh, but you can’t make me hurt her.”
Richard, Richard, Richard. You still don’t get it, do you? After all we’ve been through together, you still misunderstand me. My feelings would be hurt, if I had any besides yours.
“What do you mean? This is all your doing. Just more of your cruelty, so you can eat my pain. Well, eat up, you invisible soulfucker. Because you can make me feel guilty, I admit. You know where to dig up every little bone in my brain cemetery.”
No, Richard. Don’t you see? The beauty of all this, the thing that makes it so indescribably delicious, is that I don’t have to MAKE you do anything. All I’m doing is granting you freedom of choice.
“You monster. I never invited you in.”
Sometimes monsters are made, not born.
“How many? How many do you need to kill before you’re tired of me?”
As many as it takes.
“Not her, please not her.”
I thought you hated her.
“Maybe so. I don’t know. But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s my mother. I know you don’t understand, but humans just can’t help certain feelings and emotions.”
Look at her, Richard. You want to, don’t you? You can do anything you want. I’m offering you everything. You can become one of us. You can join me in eternal life. Just surrender to me and become yourself.
I looked down at Mother. The young winter light made her face almost peaceful. She snorted in her sleep and a clear strand of drool leaked from one corner of her mouth.
This was the woman who had given me life. This was the one who really was to blame. She’d taught me everything I knew and didn’t know about love. I turned, feeling that familiar black curtain descending.
Before I knew it, I was in the kitchen, sliding open the kitchen drawer. The bread knife found my hand. Its serrated edge grinned under the light.
“No, no, no.”
I dropped the knife to the floor and the tip gouged a hole in the soft linoleum. Jagged laughter howled through my veins.
Almost had you that time, didn’t I, Richard?
I knelt on the floor, holding my head in my hands.
“Run inside, Richard. The boots are coming,” Mister Milktoast whispered from the dark.
“What’s in there under the blanket, Dickie?” taunted Loverboy. “Smells warm. Smells ripe. And Beth’s not around to knead this little Pillsbury doughboy.”
“Pick up the knife,” Little Hitler said. “How beautiful that would be. Poetic justice. First Father, then Mother. Patrimatricide.”
With friends like that, Richard...
The curtain lifted and I was lying on the cold lineoleum, sweating.
I could hear Mother’s soft, arrhythmic snores. So she was still alive.
Congratulations, Richard. You passed the first test.
“Test?”
You couldn’t kill her. Because you don’t even pretend to love her.
“What?”
You loved Virginia. Where is she now?
What good did your love do Shelley? A one-night stand, except that for her, the night never ended. It keeps on stretching, out and out and forever.
Monique. You loved her. Inside out.
“Hey, what gives, Filthy Richie?” said Loverboy. “Is the Insider pulling your pud, or what?”
“Get the fuck out of my head.”
“Damn, Dickie. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Come to think of it, as little action as you’re getting me, that would probably be an improvement.”
I rose to my knees and crawled across the floor like a toddler going after a soft, brown comforting thing, a fuzzy cuddle in a harsh room, a consciousness about to form its first memory. But this wasn’t the beginning. This was the wrap of the second act, where the plot complications conspired and forced the protagonist to finally face his nemesis, albeit from a position of weakness.
One arm, Little Hitler’s arm, stretched for the knife.
“Don’t fight it, Richard. You know you love her. And you know what happens to the ones you love.”
“No. I don’t love her. You know that.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” said Loverboy. “You loved her a hell of a lot. Maybe not as well as I could have, but I don’t expect much from a jellydick like you.”
“She loves us, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said. “Appeased in a pod.”
“Then why didn’t she stop the boots?”
“Because we were all too weak—you, me, her.”
“But I sure as fuck wasn’t,” Little Hitler said, fingers caressing the knife handle. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d both probably be whimpering in the closet. You owe me, Richard.
You owe me big-time. And payback’s a bitch.”
“Haven’t I paid you enough? Talk about usury. You’re worse than the Insider. I think you crave the guilt more than it does.”