Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (23 page)

I think Deuce forgave me, after that. He didn’t say much on the drive home, but he did talk about how it was some kind of weird gift I had and that he hoped I didn’t erase it with Beam.

Truth be told, I felt the weirdness of these visions was stronger when I drank. The idea of tying one on made me actually afraid. Not that it would stop me, probably.

*  *  *

That night, sipping beer in the dark by myself on the couch - I had given Vanessa the bed to sleep on - I started to see it all a bit more clearly. I had been missing the point of these sleepwalks into the woods. In my mind, I had conceived them as keys to unlocking doors, but they weren’t keys at all. That was my fault.

They were flashlights, peering into the dark corners of the history of that building, of the people who went to the Boogie House and sweated away their pain and suffering.

I had foolishly underestimated their intent. Little details began to surface to me again as I slept, as if I had somehow been given a highlighter for the energy in that room.

If it were going to help me solve the case involving Emmitt Laveau, I had to quit trying to squeeze answers out. I had to see them for what they were, as artifacts.

As I started to get buzzed, I felt the familiar swimming quality associated with going to another world, and this time I eased up on the beer, because I didn’t want to miss it. I felt like I had been missing out on something by not embracing this all along.

It was a gift, and I was throwing the box away with the present still inside.

At first I thought I felt the presence of someone else in the room with me, and then I saw him. Or her. Or it. But eventually the feeling itself went away. I downed the lukewarm drink in my hand and tried to sleep, but Emmitt Laveau didn’t visit me in my sleep that night.

Instead, I went searching for my mother in a darkened land, in a world lit by a black hole of a sun. It covered everything in its path like a blanket of absolute nothingness. It wasn’t real, but it was like one of those dreams that yanks you awake halfway through, that leaves you wondering if any line at all exists between waking life and all the rest of existence. Dreams and death and comas and fantasies. They all sort of meld together in the wake of particular types of otherworldly experiences.

My hands were gone, replaced by stumps, though one appendage ended in a rudimentary claw dangling near to the ground, and even though I “came to” halfway into whatever was happening, I immediately understood the whole situation.

I was dying. It wasn’t dark because the sun itself was black but because my own lights were going out. I was ambling along the edge of a trail in the woods, and in the distance someone was vaguely visible among the trees and the pine needles and the darkness.

This time, I wasn’t anywhere near the woods by my house. These were mountainous woods, the kinds of woods that exist only in a wilderness rarely touched by humanity.

But the edges of my vision were closing in, and I seemed to be making no progress toward the figure ahead of me. It was apparent, though, that it was a woman, and I assumed it was my mother, though I could only discern that she was a white patch against the darkness of the canvas in front of me.

I stumbled and fell, but each time I slipped, I got up and was closer to my target. I looked down and saw that the reason I couldn’t make progress was that one of my legs was broken in half, the bone showing, insect-like, through the meat of my shin. It was the sort of injury that wouldn’t heal, and the me in that moment - the dream me - didn’t care.

The only thing that mattered was making it to that one person to catch up with her and tell her the thing stuck in my head. It was more than just a few words; it was a feeling that I had to get out of me. It was so intense, it felt like it was burning its way out of my throat.

I wasn’t crying, but tears moistened my cheeks, electric against my skin.

I fell again, and this time I was twisted around so that I was completely lost in this wood. I got up and saw what was knocking me down. It wasn’t the leg, after all.

A beast straight out of Dante’s visions of Hell was pursuing me. It was a giant, multi-legged beast, a lumpy mound of evil with hundreds of eyes. It was ugly, and it was vile, and it wanted me dead.

There was no escape.

It approached, and I felt something deep in my chest. When I looked down, I saw that I had a fist-sized hole in me. My shirt caught fire and the flames spread up to my neck. I scrambled to my feet in time to feel another blast rip its way through my upper torso. The beast was no longer a beast but a set of men, and they were hunting me.

I turned and ran, but I didn’t have the energy. My field of vision had been dimming, covered by thick, dark branches collapsing in on one another and making it impossible for me to see the road ahead.

But still, I desperately ran forward, knowing that this was my last chance. The figure ahead of me was a series of white lines, or dots, like pixels, but I thought maybe that I was closer than before.

Each time my pursuers knocked me down, I got back up, a bit slower each time. I could hear their voices, but they came out like a high-pitched buzzing, a colony of bees in my ears.

All of a sudden, I came to a clearing and stumbled forward into the tall grass. My vision was a pinprick in front of me, and I headed toward it, desperately trying to convey one last thought, whatever it was. The words roiled inside of me, and though I could tell they were there, it was as though I had inhabited some other person.

Another volley of gunfire knocked me horizontal, and this time I couldn’t get up. I crawled ahead, dragging myself on elbows roaring with pain. I looked down again and saw that the one hand was not gone but holding a sawed off shotgun. That’s why it seemed to dangle loosely beneath me.

I struggled to my knees and then fell sideways. If only I could stay upright, maybe I could fire the damned shotgun. Balancing the barrel on one mangled forearm, I fired blindly. Three henchmen dropped unceremoniously, action figures toppled by an indignant child. The others marched ahead, firing in a sort of horrific, synchronized attack.

More of me was flung into the air in a fine red spray, but I didn’t stop. I racked the shotgun with the crook of my arm and fired a second time. All but one of the men dropped to the ground as I readied yet another round. Click. Click. Click. Empty gun. Empty brain. My one remaining thought slithered off to another remote corner of my head, where the lights had been knocked out. I tapped the trigger again. Click. Not enough rounds left. Never enough rounds left.

In the absence of gunfire, I heard a tiny buzz, like the sound of bees on television. It sounded artificial but was real enough to make me snap my head sideways
.
The buzzing transformed into a bizarre whirring sound, and I turned and crawled forward, trying to separate myself from the last of the men. If only I could make it to the edge of the field, maybe I could be lost among the trees.

My eyes locked on the figure ahead of me. She had stopped to watch me, but she didn’t hurry back to help. She was a pale, willowy statue, concerned but held aloft by something ethereal, something I myself probably couldn’t see. Truth be told, she was all I could see. Everything else had gone dark, and I was quickly fading.

So I crawled on.

I felt the killer, his footsteps shaking the ground beneath me. He was no man but something else, and I thought that if I didn’t look back, if I only kept facing forward, maybe he couldn’t affect me.

The woman was my focus now, though. I made my way toward her, and when I got close enough, I saw that she wasn’t anyone I knew at all. It wasn’t Vanessa, and it wasn’t my mother. When she saw the blood and the tears, she turned and ran. The last I saw of her was her back as she ran into a thick covering of bushes on the other side of the field.

I couldn’t hang onto the words any longer, so I blurted them out in a single, dying breath. I had been hanging onto them for no reason, because in my haste to get them out, I slurred them together so that they made no sense.

The muscles in my neck gave out, and I came to rest right there, face down in the grass. The last moment consisted of me feeling the hot metal of a gun barrel pressing against the back of my neck. I smiled because I knew I’d be dead before he could kill me.

When I awoke, I went straight for the fridge and guzzled down two beers while standing in its dim, sickly light. My stomach turned, and I knew I’d be sick. Only a matter of time.

It was then I began to believe in what both the old man at the fire tonight and Uncle K had been telling me. I believed in the idea of a wavy, unsure truth and also in the power of the magic that was “curing” me of drinking. I needed it for now, but I was thinking about taking it easy so that I didn’t ruin my chances of solving this murder.

I’d just have to be sick when I had to be sick, I guessed.

As I tossed the second beer into the trash, I saw the flash of a man in the kitchen, a tall, lanky figure in a hat and old suit, and the feeling of Emmitt Laveau’s presence washed over me.

I broke down, kneeling and weeping until Vanessa appeared in the doorway. She put her hand on the back of my neck, and I wrapped my arm around her knees, breathing in deep the smell of her until she pulled away.

“I’m thinking ‘bout going to a meeting,” she said, “if you want to go with me.”

I shook my head and grunted under my own weight, as I found a seat at the kitchen table. “This isn’t about my drinking.”

“Not for nothing, but everything is about your drinking. That’s why we was so perfect for one another. Back to back, we held each other up.”

I nodded, because a part of me knew that, but it was a part of me that was in severe denial.

Instead of talking about it, we sat on the back stoop and smoked cigarettes in silence, watching the wind blow rain clouds in our direction. At one point, she reached over and slipped her hand into mine, and I felt such an electric charge that I nearly let go out of instinct.

“I wish the world hadn’t fucked the two of us up,” she said.

“I know.”

“We could have been happy, if there were worlds other than this one.”

I stubbed my cigarette and flicked the butt into the distance. “Maybe there is another world out there,” I responded. I let that settle and then said, “We could be happy there.”

“I’m so lost, Rolson, I don’t know if I’d be able to find you.” She sighed. “But hopefully that’s the point. If we spend our whole lives lost and searching for something, maybe we use up all the hurt and the pain, and we can be happy after it’s all said and done. I just wish it didn’t have to hurt so much right now, especially if we don’t know what comes after.”

“Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything, and we have to find meaning in this world,” I said. “You and I have been dragging one another down into the darkness for two decades now. All the hurt that’s been heaped on you isn’t just applied to you. It applies to me, as well.”

Her eyes were wet with tears, but she wasn’t sobbing and heaving the way she normally did. Maybe she was too tired for that, or she didn’t have any of that left in her.

“I’m just sorry, so sorry, and I don’t know how to make things right. It’d be easy if it was a little bit, but I spent the last few years going through life like I was being controlled by somebody else. I don’t know that I could even count all of the bad shit I did. I mean, even to
you
. The list is so goddamn long-”

“Don’t worry just yet about apologizing to me,” I replied, cutting her off. “There’ll be plenty of time for that, but don’t make anything up to me. I’m fine.”

She nodded.

“Matter of fact,” I continued, “don’t worry about making anything up to anybody for a very long time. You’ve been walking through a field full of burs, and there’s so many of them you can barely move. You try to pick them off, one by one, you’ll be doing that for the rest of your life.”

“Well, what do I do instead?”

“You tear off the clothes that are so sullied with those things, then people will notice that. They’ll forgive you by the sheer change you’ve undergone.”

“That doesn’t mean they’ll trust me again. You’ll never trust me again.”

I patted her on the leg. “Trust is a whole different beast, and yeah, you’ve got your work cut out for you there, but for every day you spend fixing yourself, you’ll be one step closer to regaining trust from all the people who want to trust you. All the people that don’t want to trust you, who want to hang on to the past, well, fuck them.”

“And where do you stand?”

“I want to be in the first group, but I don’t know if I am,” I said, and then I got up. “Let me know if you want me to take you to the meeting.”

“Will you think about going with me?”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, and then I went inside.

*  *  *

The next day, I dropped in to try and see Jeffrey Brickmeyer, but the frumpish secretary told me he wasn't in. Something about her tone made me think differently.

I tried to play it cool. "Where's he run off to? I had an appointment with him right about now."

"His father's called him off to get some documents signed and notarized and" - she glanced at her watch - "he might not be back before two or three."