Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (4 page)

"I don't know," I said. "I never thought about it, I guess."

Simply being here opened up a whole new world for me. I had all sorts of new things to consider.

"
Seems like you should. I
am
here, after all
."

"I'm not so sure about that. You’re dead, and I’m dreaming. It's no more complicated than that, I don't think."

I tried to rationalize. This is not happening, not
happening
happening. This 'thing' is a hallucination in a dream, a dream you cannot control somehow. He's actually in a morgue, ready to be autopsied.

But I didn't believe any of that, no matter how fervently I tried to convince myself. I was utterly dumbstruck. The urge to ask the all-important question, not
how
but
why
he stood there, circled my mind, buzzard-like, but in the dream I didn't possess the faculties to pose the question. I could only gape stupidly at him and wonder.

Flies lit on his face, skirting in and out of grotesque wounds I honestly tried not to stare at. He seemed not to notice. He said, "
Don't forget about what you already know. Sometimes re-seining the pond will yield new fish.
"

I thought about men holding nets and walking the length of a drained pond. I thought about mud on the ends of sticks, and of a gross, dark net, and I had trouble keeping my stomach from rolling. It was then I looked down and saw I was wet all the way up to my waist, and I smelled the distinct odor of pond water.

There were more pressing matters for the moment, however. I said, "Are you telling me to go back to the Boogie House?”

I looked around. “I mean, I’m here, but – I’m dreaming, right? This isn’t the
place
place, is it? The last two times I went there – or came here – all that came out of it were gunshots and dead bodies. I'm afraid of what I'd discover if I went back."

"
Fear isn't what motivates you, Rolson. The truth does. You're a seeker, and you are looking because you have something inside
you
that needs solving as much as my death does.
"

“If you want it solved, maybe you should. You’re in the all-powerful business now, invading people’s dreams and all.” To put a finer point on it, I thought of something crude and mean, hoping he’d see it, but he gave no indication that he had peeked
that
far into my head.

“
It don’t work like that
,” he said, and the resulting look, somehow, was saddening.

He breathed out, and I swear to God I smelled putrefaction, even though I knew it was a dream. My stomach lurched, and I leaned over to vomit. All that came out was dust and sand. It flowed out of me in a coarse, grimy jet. I closed my eyes to avoid looking, but my mind created the picture of it all, and in that picture, I saw more than just dead bodies and old memories. Flashes of situations, of things I had not yet seen but would, jumped in front of me in a continuous stream, pummeling my sense.

All of the answers I needed might have been present in those few seconds of torment, but I couldn’t know. It seemed like I didn’t exist on the right plane of existence for it, that - just maybe - I had to be in the same condition as the dead man to be able to understand it all, like a foreign language. I could catch clips but only clips, and I couldn’t formulate them into a narrative of any kind. It was just data. Binary code. Ones and zeroes for those who had stepped beyond.

Did he somehow think I might be able to understand it, or was this just an unfortunate outcome of being privy to this world? Did all people who ended up on this side of the void have to experience the same kind of torture?

When I was done, I stood up and saw his face mere inches from my own, his eyeless sockets glaring into me. There was detail in the face, but it still looked like an oil painting in which the artist used thick, broad strokes. "Who did this to you?" I asked. I didn't expect an answer, and I didn't get one, but I couldn’t walk away without asking it.

It just seemed like the easy way to go about solving this, getting the information directly from the source. I can be fucking silly like that, trying to use logic.

He reached two purplish hands out and placed me face-up in the hole at our feet as if I were a toy. A puppet. Ha.

Through eyes growing hazy and confused, I stared up at him, garbling nonsense words, trying to get at what I'd been trying to say all along:
What do you want me to do about this?

Dirt poured from the cuffs of his jacket, filling the hole, covering me completely, caking my eyes and clogging my mouth with cemetery dirt, and all I could think to do was scream. I didn’t care about goddamn answers or goddamn memories, but I couldn’t focus on the one thing that I needed: goddamn air.

Try as I might, nothing came out but that choked, ineffectual
whuffling
sound. My hands wouldn't move. Only my eyes would work, and the last thing I saw was him placing a section of floorboard across the hole above me, leaving me in a warm, forbidding darkness.

*  *  *

I snapped awake, sensing the darkness crumpling in on me, crowding me like bullies in a schoolyard. Never did loneliness plague me more than the early evenings I awoke hungover on my couch, staring down the possibility of yet another sleepless night.

I sat up and breathed in a deep whiff of a bizarre smell, something I recognized but couldn’t put in context.
The Boogie House. The dead body
. Could have been. It went away before I could put it together, but I was beyond feeling shock, so I just nodded and processed the possibility that I was breathing in the air from miles away.

Nights had never been easy, but I was growing accustomed to them. With Vanessa gone, I spent more of them awake than not, though the perpetual ache of her absence was growing fainter each day. The possibility of her return had diminished so that it only occasionally flickered in my mind, like the sudden realization of something you’ve already done.

In the first months of our "separation" (her words), the house possessed a lived-in quality, as if it, too, entertained the thought of her coming back. The feeling that Vanessa might walk through the front door persisted long after the reality that she wouldn't had set in. All of that had disappeared, too, leaving a simple and desperate isolation in its place.

I rolled over on the couch and checked the clock on my cell. 9:30 on the dot. Too early in the day for morose dreams. I had to get out of the house.

With the vision of the dead man horrifyingly fresh on my mind, I dressed soundlessly in the dark of my bedroom and drove my junker of a second vehicle into downtown Lumber Junction. The rain had called it quits, but everything you could touch, bump into, or walk on was wet.

*  *  *

Lumber Junction is a town bedecked in a blue collar, a town of truck drivers and iron workers, of men who work on cars and race cars and make meth in their cars. People who live in the Junction commute and yet never really leave. They never really think to leave. They just stay because that’s how it is. In that way, it was a thousand other towns in the nation and also no other town in the nation. Distinctly generic, maybe.

The town could have gone in another direction and prospered so that its people did not struggle to make ends meet, but it did not, and the result is a picked-over hull of a place. It used to be that the timber coming through gave people jobs, and the Junction was, for a short time, a hub of activity. It was situated just far enough away from Dublin and Vidalia to be pleasant and yet close enough to enjoy the comforts of slightly larger towns.

In addition, the people have mellowed to the point that they seem somewhat zombified by life here, or at least lulled into a faux-drugged existence. Bootleggers and cattle thieves and outlaws used to occupy the city, but those types, holdovers from a specific era in American history, have gone away, leaving behind desperate, working-class folks. Since there is no income flooding in, the remaining businesses are closing. The Junction’s downtown could exist in any number of desolate American cities, places where the world has gotten up and moved on. It is the starter wife that never quite managed to find a suitable follow-up partner.

The pickup I drove belonged to an old buddy of mine who said if I could get it running, I could have it. That was two years ago. I'd put some plugs and wires in it, replaced the battery, and rebuilt the transmission. Three hours here or there on weekends. I kept it in order to haul things off to the landfill or help people move. Insurance was cheap, though I imagined it was about to spike. The good side was I wouldn't be driving it - or anything else - much longer. The other car was totaled, so the pickup would have to do for now.

I parked the F150 in back at Virgil's and rounded the parking lot, looking for the truck I had seen last night. A moment of clarity saw the particulars of the taillights flashing in my mind, and I thought I might be able to recognize them. No luck. I went inside, where the mood was at least artificial enough to make me forget about how fucked up the last twenty-four hours had been.

Virgil's Bar was a small, reputationless place. There weren't many fights, no one sold meth out of the bathrooms, and women going home with someone generally did so for the company and not in exchange for money.

But there were exceptions to every rule.

The haze of smoke and long-soured beer hung as thick as humidity in the air, and the reddish glow of neon gave me an unpleasant feeling. Reminded me of the Boogie House somehow.

The people who didn’t stare made a point of not staring. I knew what I was doing by showing up here. At a bar. If the Junction were bigger, there'd be more for struggling alcoholics to do. More distractions. More things to keep me out of trouble. People "in the program" say that excuses only get you so far into the recovery process. What those people don't realize is that an excuse only needs to get you to the bar, get that first beer open. Then the excuses go right out the fucking window.

My best friend was nowhere to be found. Deuce was usually propped up here in the evening for a couple of beers before heading home, but his usual spot at the bar was occupied by a woman whose face was turned down and displeased.

Deuce would be pissed to know he was the last one to find out about my troubles. He liked to gossip.

I ordered a High Life and a shot of Beam and was halfway done with my beer and wholly done with the excuse that had gotten me here when two old timers came down to say hey.

"This ain't official business, I take it," the bearded, cockeyed one said, drawing his lips back into a half-teasing smile.

"Unless I was secretly hired by Miller-Coors," I replied, taking a long tug on my High Life. “How are the two of you doing this evening?”

Lyle Kearns and Red Tyson. Two old pulpwooders claiming to be retired but really just too worn down to do the back-breaking work anymore. What made them best friends was they liked to drink up their social security checks every month.

“I shouldn’t be able to complain, but I still do,” Lyle said. Red nodded in agreement.

Lyle was burly but withering, broad-faced and sporting a white sea captain's beard. Red, on the other hand, had no distinguishing features, except that he looked like a baseball knocked way out of shape. He was big and blunt and dumb, and you could probably pick him up and beat someone to death with him and he wouldn't register it had happened.

But even though they were like two old Chevys left on blocks in the yard, they weren’t useless. A little worse for wear, but not one foot in the grave.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” I said.

“I just don’t feel good,” he replied quickly. “It ain’t anything of the mortal sort, but goddamnit, I just don’t have it all together. Makes me think I’m dragging some kinda sickness along with me.”

“I get like that sometimes,” I replied.

“Least it ain’t cancer,” Red said quietly from beside him. “You see Buddy Freemantle wither up like an old sack of collards?”

Lyle nodded this time. “It gets to be most of the way through the day, and I just start feeling feverish, run down. Can’t get my mojo rising, you know? It ain’t cancer, but it might as well be. That’s what’s in my head whenever I get a sickness I can’t shake.”

“I think that’s the way it goes after a certain age,” I said. “You just start to think about the thing that’s going to knock you out of your shoes. No matter how you anticipate it, it’s never the thing you imagine.”

“Oh, it’s gonna be cancer, probably throat or stomach. Got my old man. All the drinking and smoking-”

“And the womanizing.”

“And I reckon that, too. All of it has got to be grinding me down.”

“I see what you mean. But you’ve held it off this far.”

“And there might be a tumor the size of a mango floating around somewhere in me. The fact that it hasn’t put me in bed yet doesn’t mean it won’t soon. Doesn’t mean it’s not working its way through me now.”

We sat in silence - I guess to push aside the dangling thread of mortality just above us - and then the more vocal of the two, Lyle, shook it away. “But I guess as long as I’m upright, I should count myself lucky. Which is more than they can say about that old boy they scooped up from that old juke in them pines, I reckon.”