As I Die Lying (20 page)

“
Look up 'enigmatic' in the
dictionary, and the definition is 'a Faulkner scholar,'” Bookworm
said, shyness giving way to interest. “You can analyze his work
into circles. I think 'The sound and the fury, signifying nothing'
sums up his career quite nicely.”

She laughed and pulled out a volume on
evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, leaving a gap like a wound on the
bookshelf.

"Why are you studying literature if you don't
like it?" I asked, wondering if I should tell her I was a writer.
Or was going to be, as soon as I got around to it.

"Well, I wanted to study
music, play the clarinet or something, but the practice time sucks
donkey. And then if you graduate, all you can do is teach. I guess
it's sort of the same with English, but I already know English. It
doesn't have all these
scales
, you know what I
mean?"

She read the jacket liner of the Gould book.
"Huh. This guy says bacteria is the present, past, and future ruler
of earth. Bizarre."

She wrinkled her nose as if an insect had
landed on it. "I changed my mind about getting Steve a book. I
think I'll buy something for myself."

Loverboy was wearing his wolfish grin
somewhere in his room, probably beating off under the sheets with a
flashlight, but Bookworm was taking care of business.

"There's always the horror," Bookworm
said.

Always the horror? Sounded like a Little
Hitler line.

"I don't know, I'm in the mood for something
upbeat. A little pop literature, maybe. Thanks for your help,
uh...," She stretched her neck to read my nameplate. "Richard."

With a swish of her dress, she turned toward
the magazine rack. I went back to the counter, where I sat amid a
clutter of calendars, postcards, and colorful buttons that had
sayings like "Where Books Are Burned, People Are Next" and "Without
Word there is no World.”

My Little People stirred, wandering the
halls. Loverboy was chiding Bookworm for blowing a chance to get
his rocks off. The trick of perfect failure is to practice,
practice, practice.

"She's one fine slice of white bread, my
man," Loverboy said, his voice as smooth as a lizard in mud and
about as filthy.

"She's already spoken for," said Bookworm.
"You heard her talking about her boyfriend."

"And what about Beth?" I thought.

"Last night's news," Loverboy said. "You
think she'll be back? I mean, I know I was damn good, but you,
Richie, you're a total waste. What could she possibly see in
you?"

"Hopefully not
you
."

"Fuck you, Richie, and the donkey you rode in
on. And maybe your slut of a mom while we're at it."

At the mention of Mother, Mister Milktoast
minced out. "Loverboy, don't be a shellfish. We're all in this
oyster together."

"Yee-haw. Mister Milkshit, a.k.a. the Dalai
Lama of the Coldiron collective. Brotherhood of man, inner peace,
and all that crap. I’m thinking you want Richie here all to
yourself, you sugar-wristed little beat boy. Well, this here hunk
of American steel likes his biscuits hot and buttery. So don't mess
with my action."

"Here she comes now," said Mister
Milktoast.

"You think I don't
notice
,
Dickwheat?"

She laid a magazine on the counter. It was a
“Rolling Stone.” Keith Richards was on the cover, grinning like a
dried skull that didn't know it was dead.

Loverboy forced my eyes over the front of her
dress. Bookworm lifted my gaze with effort and smiled at her.
"Found something light?" I asked.

She looked back into my eyes. I wondered who
she saw there. It must have been Bookworm or Mister Milktoast,
because she didn't flinch.

I got a discount card out from under the
counter. Usually, the customers filled out the cards themselves,
but someone had ulterior motives. "Name, please?" I asked.

"Shelley Birdsong," she said. "That's
'Shelley' with two 'L's."

"Like the poet," I said, scribbling.

"Who?"

"One of the Romantics."

"Oh, with that song about secrets in your
sleep. The guys with the big hair."

"Telephone number?" I wrote it down as she
recited it, tucking the numerals away in the back rooms of the Bone
House.

She was turning to leave when Loverboy
erupted. "Shelley?"

She looked back.

"Nice to meet you."

She waved and left.

Loverboy grinned and
repeated the line, riffing on the Milkster’s puns.
It will be nice to meat you.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After work, I walked into the October
sunshine.

Something made my feet move. Something looked
out of the back of my skull and through my eyes. Something saw the
town anew like a traveler who has returned from a long trip. The
view from the front door of the Bone House was an everchanging
thing, a yard that shifted its seasons, a sidewalk that buckled and
roiled, a street without sense in a neighborhood with nebulous
borders.

Cholesterols of traffic clogged the arteries
of the highway. The tourists poured into the mountains for the tail
end of leaf-looking season. The air stank of spent fuel and rubber.
Exhaust for the tired beasts.

I headed down the sidewalk, toward the heart
of town. The highway cut a straight river through Shady Valley, a
map dot that didn’t accommodate the curves and swells of the
Appalachian geography. Gas stations, fast-food joints, and auto
parts stores lined the highway, their brittle steel and glass and
hard edges contrasting the mountains that rose gently above. The
buildings were like sharp temples at the feet of giants.

The leaves were changing across the face of
the slopes, in blazes of red and purple from the maple, the yellow
of poplar, and the orange of oak, with the tufts of evergreens
occasionally brushing through. Mingled with the car pollution was
the soft decay of leaves and sweet grass. The sky was crayon blue
and solid. A few clouds drifted aimlessly, white patches of
contentment.

"Yes, I can find peace here," I thought.
“Alone.”

Alone together.

"Mister Milktoast? Is that you?"

Whoever, whatever, whichever one of my little
friends had momentarily skittered free, I couldn't tell.

After three blocks of walking, the shiny
facades of construction gave way to seedy brick buildings, squat
and fat like red toads. In the distance, the tops of dormitories
pricked the belly of the sky. A spindly metal crane perched over a
tower of beams, guarding the bones of a building in progress.

I passed a gray laundromat,
its front window cracked and littered with pieces of masking tape.
An old Hispanic woman stared out at me, her face as impassive as
the windowglass and as cracked as the stucco. Loverboy had no
interest in her.
Withertits
, he snickered.

I passed the abandoned garage that I had
slept behind when I first moved to Shady Valley. I had learned that
it had been closed by the state Division of Water Quality because
of an underground leak in one of the storage tanks. The creek
behind the garage still ran rusty and iridescent, even after six
years of healing. The lot yawned emptily, broken glass glinting
among the blotches of oil.

Blocks of student apartments lined the
opposite side of the street, which had dwindled to two lanes in the
older, sadder part of town. The apartments faced irregular
directions, as if randomly dropped from the top of the sky to
plunge into the earth, a God-child’s abandoned game of blocks. The
featureless rectangles were divided here and there by stubborn
white homesteads, flanked by little squares of dirt that were
dotted with cabbages and bristled with tomato stakes.

Another one hundred steps and the town became
more schizophrenic. The decrepit cinder block buildings collided
with the clean corners of Westridge University. The college
sprawled like an island, with the town tainting its beaches,
flotsam littering idyllic shores. On the right was a weathered
structure built into the side of the hill. It had been converted
into a coffeehouse, and students clustered at tables near the front
window.

Young faces peered through the glass,
watching the street, seeing if they were seen. A nose-ring on one,
silver and cruel. There a French beret, oily dreadlocks dangling
beneath. A pair of small blue spectacles, framed by thin eyebrows.
All that self-conscious individuality washed into a vacuous
sameness.

I wondered what it would be like to be one of
them, with their possible futures and choices. Nietzche or
Descartes? Phish or the Byrds? Espresso or cappuccino?

I wondered what it would be like to be
normal.

"Hey, this
is
normal, Richie,"
Loverboy said. He came out easily, with none of the usual stirrings
and struggles. Lately, it seemed the door was always
open.

Loverboy glanced at the faces in the coffee
shop as if he were flipping through a deck of nude playing cards.
"Good hunting. Check out that snow pup in the polar fleece."

Bookworm was on his heels, curious and aloof.
"It's not your hunt, Loverboy. This is Richard's hunt."

Hunt? For what?

"The outer journey mirrors the inner search,"
Bookworm answered.

Oh. You're going to play little mind games,
are you?

"No. Just a warning. From a friend."

"And with friends like us, you don't need
enemies," Mister Milktoast said. He had entered on mental cat
feet.

Mister Milktoast, why does everyone come out
so easily now?

"Richard, you haven't been paying attention.
All you think about is Beth," he said.

Can you blame me for trying to get away?

"No matter how far or how fast you travel,
you can never outrun your own shoes," Mister Milktoast said.

"Yeah, Dickie darling. Keep
in touch," sneered Loverboy. "Because
we
will. We’ll touch it
plenty."

They left without a trace, back, back into
their holes, into the dank rooms of the Bone House.

I looked into the coffee-shop window. A few
people were watching me, including the girl in polar fleece.

What did they see when looking at the life
form called Richard Allen Coldiron? Just an anonymous, bookish
square, with tan cotton trousers and a button-up shirt and
wire-rimmed glasses. A walking piece of fiction, a star in his own
comic book series, a suspended animation. A minor character in his
own autobiography.

I could have been anyone.
And I would have loved to
be
anyone else. If not for Beth.

But I wanted to love her, despite the
potential cost. After years and years, I had found something
outside myself worth fighting to gain and keep. Or maybe I was a
shellfish oyster, as Mister Milktoast put it.

I walked on, reaching the center of town.
Utility poles stood at random, and wires criss-crossed above in an
insane weavework. This part of town had been destroyed by fire
fifty years earlier. I had seen photographs of that era, back when
the town was just a general store, a feed store, a funeral parlor,
and a movie theater. The structures had been rebuilt with cheap
clay brick, some painted over with muddy shades of green and gray.
The paint curled in a dozen different coats, history lying in
flakes on the sidewalk.

The corner hardware store stood like a mute
survivor. The bank on its left had folded and been taken over by a
boutique. Clever fabrics dressed the window, the vault now a
fitting room. A former gas station perpendicular to the hardware
store was now a law office. No amount of landscaping or custom trim
could disguise the fact that the building used to be a gas station,
and no team of attorneys could ever subvert the immutable laws of
change and decay.

I continued up the street, past the old stone
post office. Students bent under the weight of swollen backpacks
and stooped old ladies shopping for knickknacks passed like camel
caravans. Tourists in bright polyester milled purposelessly, hidden
behind the icy stares of sunglasses. Occasionally a jogger huffed
past in self-inflicted pain, sneakers flapping on concrete. Outside
the door of the pharmacy, two old men in coveralls traded stories.
They wore identical Red Man caps that sat on their heads as if they
had grown there, as much a part of them as wrinkled skin and gray
hair.

I turned the corner toward the university
grounds. The Little People rode as voyeurs, like kids pressing
their faces against the car window on a vacation drive. Off in the
west end of Shady Valley, bulldozers were gouging red wounds in the
Earth where Ralph's Southern Line Feedstore used to stand. A row of
derelict tobacco warehouses bordered the demolition, patiently
waiting their turn under the blade. The tin on the warehouse roofs
caught the sunlight, sending bright spears of reflection into the
mountains.

A restaurant called "The Cadillac Grille" sat
against the bank of a creek, its open deck crowded with students
soaking up afternoon sunshine and beer. Music poured from the
screen door that led to the deck, something cranky and sneering by
the Rolling Stones. I scanned the deck with Loverboy's preying
eyes, or perhaps he scanned the deck with my eyes. I saw a familiar
face at a table of young tan women who were drinking from green
bottles.

The face.

Who?

"Beth's roommate, Dickie," Loverboy said.

She had seen me, but she didn't wave. She
lowered her head.

"Playing hard to get,"
Loverboy said. "But they don't get no harder than
this
boy."

Isn't Beth enough?