The Risen (10 page)

One night, unbidden, Bill explained what had changed
. Seeing Leslie again, I realized how wrong being with Ligeia was. It's disrespectful and it would hurt her if she ever found out. I want to marry her.
Less than a year later my brother did. As Bill and I waited in an anteroom for the wedding to begin, he'd told me why.
She makes me a better person than I really am,
my brother said.

A
n hour after Sheriff Loudermilk leaves, my brother hasn't called. I've resisted another drink but knowing the bottle is an arm's length away is too tempting so I get my keys and drive to Bill's office. All the while, memories flip like calendars in old movies, blurring events, blurring time. I try to center on a single thought, confirm its solidity, the way I'd test boards on a rickety porch.
My brother has lied to me.
This is true, because Ligeia died from a slashed throat, not drowning.
But why would my brother lie to me?
The obvious answer:
Because my brother is a murderer.
But I don't know
how
to believe such a thing. The man I know now could not have done that.
But he's not now who he was
then
. And to bury her there, the cruelty of that, especially for Ligeia's family
.
Bill had bruised my feelings at times, but how many times deliberately? Even the teasing stopped when he saw I was truly upset. We never fought and rarely engaged in the rough horseplay brothers so often get into. His anger at Grandfather and at the player who'd cleated him were instinctive responses to provocations. Didn't any act of cruelty require a degree of calculation?

But then a memory of another baseball game. Bill was pitching and in the first inning a batter hit a home run, the first he had given up all season. Bill looked stunned as the batter trotted the bases, as if thinking:
How dare you. Don't you know who I am and who I'm going to be?
Maybe the batter did something more, a smirk as he tapped the plate, an under-the-breath taunt. I don't know. What I do know is when the batter came up again, Bill threw right at his head, forcing him to dive to the dirt. The umpire and Bill's coach rushed to the mound. The coach threatened to send Bill to the dugout, and the umpire vowed the same if he did it again. Grandfather was in the stands with my mother and me.
That's the way to do it, son,
the old man had shouted.
Show them we Matneys don't back down.

Volatility, calculation,
and
a sense of superiority, and yet another element—desperation. What might my brother do at twenty-one if he believed Ligeia threatened the future he'd planned, especially the one with Leslie. I think of the slit hose on the gas mask. A slit hose and a slit throat, the same in their effect. The Ka-Bar knife, which had weighted his right pocket since childhood, could have done it easily. But to imagine Bill's hand on the knife cutting Ligeia's throat, his face close to hers, as it would have to be, that
intimacy
, and then to watch her bleed out and after that bury her.

Another burial, not imagined but recalled. Nebo had not come to Grandfather's funeral, but he'd been at the cemetery, standing alone, dressed in the same mismatched work clothes he always wore. Perhaps like many of us there, he could believe Grandfather was truly dead only when dirt clods began thumping onto the coffin. Afterward, Nebo boarded the bus, no suitcase, nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever was in his pockets. He was never seen again. Months later when my mother and I were selling Grandfather's house and grounds, I ventured into the guesthouse where Nebo had lived for fifty-six years. It was as spartan as I'd expected, almost everything utilitarian. The
only surprise was a heart-shaped locket left on a nightstand. Inside the locket was a black-and-white photograph of a young woman. Engraved on the back:
For my beloved Nebuchadnezzar
. Mother, girlfriend, sister?

Beloved.

So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth.

That July I bought an AM/FM radio at Pike's Drugstore. Before, I'd spent the last hour awake reading or attempting poems and stories in a Blue Horse notebook, but now I spent much of that time with a finger and thumb on the dial, searching for stations playing the music Ligeia told me about. The signals drifted in and out between gulfs of static. After a while I knew where they'd be if they did break through. I'd imagine the pulsing antennas of Fort Wayne and Chicago, New Orleans and Kansas City. Even on the best stations, like WLS in Chicago or WKDA in Nashville, there would be top-forty fluff, but then I'd hear something by the Doors, or
Jefferson Airplane, or Big Brother and the Holding Company, even an occasional single by the Dead or Jethro Tull. I learned to recognize bands by voices, Morrison or Joplin, or by guitar, Clapton or Hendrix.

I was already telling my mother I wanted a turntable with stereo speakers for Christmas. I made lists of albums to buy, groups I'd never heard of before Ligeia came. But in late July I'd found an even better station, not thousands of miles away but in the next county. Waynesville had a small FM station that played gospel and country all day and bubble-gum pop from seven to ten in the evenings. Except on Wednesday nights. Perhaps the station manager assumed that those who'd object were busy beneath the steeples dotting our region's every nook and cranny. But for whatever reason, it was as if someone had hijacked a minibus filled with albums bought in Haight-Ashbury, because the DJ had a penchant for album cuts from West Coast bands.

It was here I first heard the Grateful Dead's “China Cat Sunflower,” and Quicksilver Messenger Service's “Light Your Windows,” and the Steve Miller Band's “Children of the Future.” But also darker tunes, including the darkest of them all, the Doors' “The End,”
with its premonition of what would soon come about in Brentwood and Altamont. Reflecting now on that summer, I realize the Doors were the group I should have listened to most intently.

IN MY FRESHMAN COMP CLASS
at Wake Forest, I wrote an essay about listening to these stations and imagining the restless cities below their stilt-like towers, and how one day I would visit those cities, perhaps write about them. I remember my search for the right extended simile: the static like sand I sifted through to find gold nuggets, the radio towers like lighthouse beacons showing me the way to where, like Wolfe, I could escape the “imprisoning” mountains. The one I settled on was of bottles swept onto a deserted island by waves of sound, and in each one the same message:
Swim away from the island and we'll be out here to rescue you
. B+, my instructor wrote, forgiving my purple prose and Shelleyan angst, but not two misspelled words and a misplaced modifier.
He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say ‘The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges,
Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of
Look Homeward, Angel,
and those words I spoke aloud to the bathroom mirror that summer, and thought of Wolfe in New York, writing between journeys to the West, and of Hemingway traveling from Paris cafés to African veldts.

“YOU'RE THE SWEETEST GUY
I've ever hung out with,” Ligeia said two Sundays after Leslie's visit.

In her hands was the chain and small silver sea horse I'd bought at Brock's Jewelry the day before. When I asked if I could put it on her, she gathered her hair and bared her neck. I kissed the pale white skin before hooking the clasp.

“You're raring to go, aren't you?” she said, opening one of the three Quaalude packets I'd brought. “Soon as I eat my candy, I'll be ready too.”

Afterward, we lay on our backs. The honeysuckle's sweet blooms thickened my languor.
There can be nothing better than this.
That's what I'd thought that afternoon, Calypso had come to Carolina. We sat up and finished the wine.

“That radio station I told you about,” I said as I filled my cup, “the DJ played the Jimi Hendrix Experience.”

“He's a great guitarist,” Ligeia said. “Damn, I've got to at least get a transistor radio, because I'm marooned up here until October.”

“For certain?”

“Yeah. My old man is still telling Uncle Hiram this place has been so good for me that I should stay for my senior year. Which is bullshit. They're just wanting to dump me off on someone else.”

“I'm glad you'll still be around.”

“Well, at least I found someone to help me make some money,” Ligeia said. “Her name's Angie Wellbeck. I met her in Sunday school. You know her?”

“I know who she is. She'll be a senior like you, right?”

“Yeah. Uncle Hiram and Aunt Cazzie like her parents since they're real churchy, so they're letting me hang out a couple of hours with Angie on Saturday. They think she's a good influence, but Angie's a wild child too, and she has wheels, so at least I can go somewhere besides church and the Dairy Queen. But the best thing is, Angie digs getting high, and she knows who else does too, including some who'd use the harder stuff I can get from Florida. From what Angie says, I can even make enough to buy some straight-looking
clothes to interview in. That way I'll get on at a fancy restaurant where they tip big.”

She paused.

“What's bumming you out?”

“I kind of hoped you'd want to stay here.”

“If I don't return to the ocean I'll just die,” Ligeia said. “But you can come visit and crash at my place. I bet you'd dig Miami. The ocean is right there, and they don't let it get scuzzy like at Daytona Beach.”

“It sounds nice.”

“By the way, Tanya had the book
Of Mice and Men.
She left it when she moved out and I read it.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was good, except I didn't like how it ended, but that other book I'll skip,” she said, and smiled. “Angels don't much interest me, if you haven't already noticed?”

“It's not really about angels. It's more about growing up.”

“Then it's too late to do me any good,” Ligeia said. “So writers make enough money to live on?”

“Some writers, but for others it's hard.”

“I guess you don't have to worry about that though. Your grandfather will leave you plenty of dough, I bet,
and that big house. All my parents will leave me and my sister will be some junky furniture and a beat-up truck. We rent our house, and it's so crummy I wouldn't want it if it was ours.”

“I don't want my grandfather's house, and I don't want to live in Sylva.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“A lot of writers live in Paris or New York; Thomas Wolfe did. I might for a little while, but after that some other place.”

“Like where?”

“Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West,” I said, trying not to blush, “maybe somewhere around there.”

“Like Miami,” Ligeia said, her smile widening. “That way you could hang out with your mermaid.”

“I'd like that,” I answered, “I'd like it a lot.”

“And the book you write could have me in it.”

“Definitely.”

“You promise?”

“Of course.”

“Well, promise me something else,” Ligeia said, “that you'll leave out these freckles and give me eyes blue as the ocean, not the way it looks up close, but like in a photograph or painting. And change my first name
into something that's not so lame and ordinary as the one I've got.”

“Anything else?”

“And give me a happy ending,” Ligeia said, her smile vanishing, “because it's not going to happen in real life.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“I don't think it. I know it.”

We sat a few more minutes.

“I'd better go,” she said, but instead of getting up, she placed her hand flat on my stomach and then slid it inside my jeans. “Unless you're ready to make it again. If you are, I can stay a bit longer. After all, last week you got all the attention.”

“I didn't bring another, you know . . .”

“It should be safe,” Ligeia said and stilled her hand. “But of course if you don't want to.”

No, not once
, I lied when Bill asked me two months later.

But I had.

T
ell my brother I need to talk to him right now,” I say, leaning close to the glass, “or I'm going back there myself.”

“I'll tell him,” the receptionist whispers harshly, “but he's with a patient.”

“Like you told him earlier today when I called?”

“I
did
tell him, Mr. Matney.”

“Let him know now,” I say, my voice rising.

She presses a button and I expect a security guard to appear. But it's a nurse.

“Tell Dr. Matney his brother demands to see him,” the receptionist says tersely.

The nurse disappears. Soon an elderly patient, back
encased in a hard plastic shell, comes out and Bill follows. As the patient steps to the receptionist's window, my brother motions me to his office.

“Don't bother sitting down,” Bill says and closes the door, “especially if this is about Ligeia Mosely.”

Bill stands next to me and I smell the Aqua Velva he still wears.

“You lied to me,” I say. “You don't cut your own throat by
accident
.”

It's not surprise, I think as I watch his face, but the resignation that something he'd hoped forgotten wasn't after all.

“How do you know that?”

“Robbie Loudermilk came to the house this morning,” I answer. “He told me forensics found a cut on the front of Ligeia's spine. Damn it, her head was nearly cut off.”

“Why would Robbie come and tell you that?”

“Angie Wellbeck, a girl at the high school, saw me give Ligeia money for the test.”

“I can't talk about this now,” Bill says. “I've got to prep for surgery.”

“The hell you can't,” I say, grabbing his arm. “This is more important.”

“No, it's not,” Bill says, his hand slowly but firmly removing mine. “There was a car wreck an hour ago. She's three years old and if I don't stabilize her spine she'll be paralyzed. So I can talk to you, or I can keep her from being in a wheelchair the rest of her life.”

“Robbie Loudermilk may have time to talk to me,” I say as Bill reaches for the doorknob.

“You're not going to see him.”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Because you have no idea what really happened.”

“I know enough.”

“No, you don't,” Bill says softly. “You don't know anything, Eugene. I was there.”

“Why should I believe you when you've already lied to me twice?”

“Because I lied for your sake, not my own.”

I stare into eyes the same shape and color as mine, the one physical attribute we share.
But would you murder for your own sake, Bill?
I could ask, but shadowing that question is one for me:
Who caused her to be there that morning?

“What if Loudermilk wants to talk to me again before you decide to unburden yourself?” I ask. “Angie gave him some names of guys who knew her. If they
link her and us, he could be waiting for me at the house right now.”

“Then don't go home. Robbie won't know where you are. I should be back by five. That's six hours I'm asking you for, Eugene. Six hours.” Bill takes out his billfold and hands me three twenties. “Go get something to eat or some coffee, or go to Malaprop's and buy a book. But
don't
go home.”

“I don't need the money.”

“Just take it,” he says.

I stuff the twenties in my pocket and we walk out.

“Maybe get here a few minutes before five,” Bill says once we're on the sidewalk. “That way you won't be locked out if I'm late. I shouldn't be, but complications arise.”

My brother strides across the archway that connects his office to the hospital. With six hours to kill, I'm in no hurry to get anywhere, so I leave my car in the office lot and walk down the sidewalk past the hospital, veer right, and enter the heart of Asheville's downtown. I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe's house. I'd planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so
he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote,
by the wind grieved
.

The yellow house comes into view. A tourist stands in the yard, a camera strapped around his neck. When he sees me he turns and walks up the street. I step onto the porch. My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read
Look Homeward, Angel
for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character.

It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.
I've heard that said many times and it seems so. Like my mother, who'd read the book as a sophomore at Greensboro College, I discovered it at the right time. That day we walked through the house together, we'd discussed passages set in the different rooms, lastly in the upstairs bedroom where Wolfe's favorite brother died:
but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?
“I never truly understood that passage until your father's death,” my mother had told me as we stood there, her hand tightening on my arm as her eyes welled with tears.

I'm still on the porch when a man opens the door. He tells me the house is open if I wish to come in. I shake my head. That afternoon I'd visited here with my
mother, a summer thunderstorm had come up and we'd waited on this porch until the rain and thunder ceased. She knew I wanted to be a writer and while we waited she'd turned to me.

“Isn't it amazing how you can go up to that room and see where Wolfe's brother died and then you can read about Ben's death in the book, dead in both life and in the book; and yet every time I reread and hear Ben's voice, he's every bit as alive as before, and a part of me thinks this time maybe Ben
won't
die, and it hurts as much as the first time when he does.”

I'd told my mother that I could understand that.

“I know you do, Eugene, and I know that you feel things as deeply in real life, and that can be hard, but look at it as a gift too. It makes us more fully alive, more human.” My mother had paused. “The morning Bill left for Wake Forest, I told him that, if he were you, I would talk about how it was natural to feel homesick and lonely at first, even want to pack up and come back home, but that I didn't need to feel that way about him. I was trying to reassure your brother that he'd do fine away from home, but instead, for a moment at least, I believe I hurt his feelings. But then he said, ‘Grand
father told me the same thing, so I'm certain I will be fine.' And of course Bill was. Almost a month passed before he called home.”

“THIS IS THE LAST TIME
William's getting beer and wine for us,” I told Ligeia the last weekend in July. “He says it's not right, but I think it's because I can outdrink him. He can't stand not being the best at anything.”

“What a jerk,” Ligeia said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“He's not drinking even one beer?” she asked, nodding at the plastic rings that held two beers as I pulled the tab off my fourth.

“No.”

“If you have ten bucks I can score us some whiskey. Angie knows a bootlegger.”

“I've got that much in my wallet,” I answered. “I'll get it out of the truck before we leave.”

“Good,” she said. “You ever drunk whiskey before?”

“No.”

“You'll live it, I mean
love
it,” Ligeia said, and giggled. “Damn, it makes a difference taking three
Quaaludes at once instead of two. Anyway, you'll get loaded quicker and you'll feel it sliding all the way down to your stomach.”

“Sounds good,” I said, holding up my can. “Three of these hardly give me a buzz anymore.”

“Next time I'll bring that joint I promised you.”

“Groovy,” I said, trying to say the word without any hick accent. “How come you never smoke pot when you're here?”

“I don't need it with the downers and wine,” Ligeia said. “I save the pot for other times.”

She closed her eyes.

“Groovin' on a Sunday afternoon,” she said, “right?”

“Right, groovin'.”

“But not your brother.”

“No,” I answered. “He's still bitching about how loud my radio is. Says he can't concentrate. I told him to go buy some Geritol and earplugs and shut the fuck up.”

She laughed.

“You really said that to him?”

“Pretty much,” I said, “and guess what? Wednesday night I finally heard ‘White Rabbit.'”

“It's the hippest song ever, don't you think?”

“Yeah,” I said, propping up on an elbow, “and one by Moby Grape, though I didn't catch the title, and this new group, the Steve Miller Band. Have you heard them?”

“No, babe,” Ligeia said, smiling drowsily. “You're going to be hipper than me before long. I bet you're already the coolest guy in this county, and once you start smoking pot . . . I bet you'll be trading in that pickup for a minibus by the time school starts.”

Eyes still shut, Ligeia's hand found my forearm, lightly stroked the hairs with her index finger.

“Your mermaid needs a favor.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to get me some uppers.”

“You said you didn't like those.”

“I don't, but other people do. I need some extra bread.”

I looked through the foliage and caught a glimpse of Bill sitting by the big pool.

“I don't think that's a good idea. If you sell the samples, people could figure out where they came from. And Grandfather, he'll know if I take too much at one time.”

“Six or eight tablets,” Ligeia said, still stroking my
arm. “Dexedrine or Desoxyn, okay? I'll take them out of the packets first. Hey, you know I'd do it for you. With a little help from our friends, that's how we all get by, right?”

“All right,” I answered after a few moments.

“That's my babe,” she said, and lay on her back again. “Thanks, Eugene, I mean it.”

After a fourth beer, my worries began fading, and by the sixth, having taken some long swallows of Strawberry Hill, I was, for the first time, indisputably knee-walking drunk. The suffusing glow freed something inside me.
Freed,
though perhaps
summoned
is a more honest word. As I staggered upstream to get my wallet, Bill still sat by the pool.
He looks lonely,
I thought,
and that's a new feeling for him, like no longer being Grandfather's golden boy. And I'm glad he feels it.

When Bill saw me he headed to the truck too.

“Back in a minute,” I slurred as I took the ten from my billfold.

“What are you doing with the money?” Bill asked, but I ignored him and went on to the creek and gave Ligeia the ten.

“Don't forget the speed,” she said, “as much as you can get, babe.”

“And lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” I giggled as she waded across the creek.

I fell twice before I got to the truck. As I came out of the laurel, I grinned at Bill.

“Lions and big brothers and bears, oh my,” I said, and laughed so hard I fell again.

On the drive back, Bill didn't speak. Not that I gave him much chance to. I had the radio blasting, switching between top-forty stations for rock songs, banging the dash and singing along when I found “Light My Fire.” We were nearly home when Bill turned into the post office lot and turned off the radio. He pulled a roll of mints from his pocket, took one for himself, and tossed them to me.

“Put the rest in your mouth, and sober up quick.”

“Sure,” I said.

As I loudly crunched the mints, the bright taste of peppermint filled my mouth. Bill didn't reach for the key. For some reason, the seriousness on his face brought to mind Elmer Fudd.

“Ehhh, what's up, doc?” I said, attempting a Bugs Bunny voice.

“I'm going to tell you some things, for your own good,” Bill said. “This drinking, it's getting out of
hand, and I talked to Tanya again. Ligeia didn't just use drugs, she got caught selling them. Prescription drugs, Eugene. That's serious. She was damn lucky she wasn't sent to reform school.”

“So Ligeia's suddenly the worst person in the world.”

“I'm not saying that, Eugene,” my brother answered. “From what Tanya says, Ligeia's had it damn tough growing up. Her dad's never been able to keep a job and her mom sounds like a first-rate bitch. But that doesn't change the fact that she's gotten into serious trouble, and with people who weren't your age, or mine either. The guy she got arrested with was thirty.”

“So you're saying what, William, that she couldn't like someone my age?”

“No, I just don't want you to get too involved with someone who could get you into serious trouble.”

“You weren't worried about that in June.”

“I didn't know as much then,” Bill said. “If I had, I wouldn't have let us get involved with her in the first place.”

“You can't stand it, can you?” I said.

“Stand what?”

“That Ligeia likes me, not you, that she doesn't give
a damn about you having a letter jacket or planning to be a doctor.”

“It's not about that at all, Eugene.”

“I think it is.”

My stomach roiled and a surge of bile rose into my throat but I held it down. I let my tongue rub bits of peppermint off my teeth to help dim the taste.

“I'm not taking you out there again,” Bill said.

“Fine,” I answered. “I'll take Mom's car. Ligeia can get us whiskey, so I don't need you to do a damn thing.”

“You won't take Mom's car either.”

“The hell I won't,” I answered. “You can't stop me.”

“But Mom will if she knows why you're going out there.”