As I Die Lying (26 page)

“
How’s the weather there?” I
asked. “Had a frost yet?”

“
It’s been laying on the
corn, I hear. But by the time I get up of a morning, it’s melted
away. I used to like that, looking over them sparkly green fields.
Like magic, it was.”

“
Any luck finding a
job?”

She coughed, an empty rattling sound. “Who
wants an old woman without a high school diploma? Especially the
way they talk about me. I still hear them, even after all these
years, whispering behind their hands at the Gas-N-Go. Got quite a
reputation. You’d think people would forget after a while, that
they’d let bygones be bygones.”

I could apologize. But every time I had
tried, the words set in my mind like wet cement. I sighed, the air
of my resignation reaching across the miles, filling the pink ear
of the woman who had given me life. The statute of limitations on
forgery and uttering never expired.

“
I mean, the Lord teaches
forgiveness, doesn’t He?” She said. “You’re supposed to hate the
sin but love the sinner.”

I heard a glass click against her teeth, then
she swallowed twice. She waited.

“
Why don’t you move away?” I
asked, clipping off the silence as carefully as if it were an
ingrown toenail.

“
Where would I go? Got no
people left that would have me. Except maybe you.”

Maybe me.

A vision flashed in my mind. Mother as part
of my daily routine. Mother asking about Beth. Mother filling the
cabinets with her bourbon bottles. Mother across the hall at night,
terribly close, only a couple of doors between us. Mother coming
out of the bathroom after a shower, a towel around her bony
chest.

And Loverboy’s uncontrollable urges.

And the Insider’s constant craving for
pain.

I didn’t know if I still loved Mother. But I
didn’t hate her, at least not enough to expose her to the real me.
All of me.

“
It wouldn’t work, Mother.
There’s still so much—”

“
I know. It was just a
thought. I may be an old drunk, but I’m not stupid.”

I found myself squeezing Shelley’s tights in
my hand. “Well, listen, Mother. I’ve got to go now.”

“
Richard—”

“
I’ll call you back. Or
write.”

A pause, as swollen as beached whale. “I love
you, Richard.”

I gulped, a greasy glacier sliding down my
throat. I opened my mouth.

It would be easy to say, here in a dark room.
No one to hear but my eavesdropping little friends. No one to
witness but the all-knowing Insider. No one to please but my
mother. A little white lie that any god would forgive.

It would be easy to make a mother happy, to
pay back just a little on an insurmountable debt. Three little
words that might bring the tiniest spark of joy to a withered
heart. Three little words that are all a mother asks in return for
the greatest of all pains, for the greatest of all sacrifices, for
the greatest of all gifts.

Three little words that I could never
say.

“
Goodnight, Mother.” I
softly hung up the phone.

A tear rolled down my cheek. The stars
outside my window blurred. Night bled darkness. Beth’s scent
lingered faintly on my pillow.

The child never existed.

“
Yes, he did,” said Mister
Milktoast. “We did. And Mother loved us.”

“
Was that really love?” I
asked the one inside my head.

“
Yes.”

“
How can you be sure? She’s
like a cavity in my soul.”

“
Abscess makes the heart
grow fonder.”

“
So it’s a love that only
exists at a safe distance.”

“
That was real. Compare it
to everything you’ve known since. Sally. Beth.
Virginia.”

“
No one forgets Virginia,” I
said, wiping the tears from my cheeks.

The world outside the window was scrubbed
clean by the autumn breeze. A tall maple swayed in the yard. Its
arms spread, majestic and gnarled, like a newly dead grandmother
paying a visit in dreams. Wanting a last hug.

“
No one forgets Virginia,”
Mister Milktoast repeated.

“
Especially not me,
Roachrash,” said Loverboy, stepping from the psychic shadows.
“Almost got me some that time, till you dicked it up with your
numbnut feelings.”

“
A miss is as good as a
smile,” Mister Milktoast cut in with a smirk. “Or as good as a
mistress.”

“
Hey, I could get a lot
luckier if I didn’t have you guys drag-assing around. Every time I
get close to a score, one of you comes out and queers the
deal.”

“
And whose fault is
that?”

“
Always quick with the
blame, Dickwheat. First it was me. Then Little Hitler. Now you got
this otherfucker to heap shit on the pile.”

Loverboy fell quiet, afraid of that
smoldering crater that bubbled like a hot tar pit in the center of
my Bone House. The backed-up septic system in an odiferous water
closet. The swampy morass of icky horribleness.

Little Hitler cackled with the stark raving
laughter of a hyena whose jaws dripped red cotton candy. “We each
have our idea of what love is,” he said. “Yours is wrapped up in
the meat, Loverboy. And so is mine, only in a different way. And I,
for one, am head-over-shitless that the Insider has taken a room
here.”

“
You only love pain,” I
said. “And yourself. Or, better, both at the same time. No wonder
you lick the Insider’s boots. It gives you everything you don’t
have the nerve to take for yourself.”

“
Sure, Richard. And it was
me that did in dear old Daddy.”

“
Of course it
was.”

“
And what kind of love was
that?”

“
The scared kind. The kind
that wore boots,” said Mister Milktoast.

“
What kind of love do you
expect? My kind of love was brave enough to free Mother from the
beatings. You ought to be worshipping me, Richard. After all, I
made it so there was nothing standing in the way of you
two.”

Little Hitler was enjoying my pain. Maybe he
really was the Insider, wearing the Hitler mask. But that was too
unbelievable. You couldn’t make this kind of stuff up and expect
anybody to take you seriously. Unless you made a lot of money from
it, in which case people called you a genius, though they still
crossed the street to avoid you.

“
Love means never having to
say you’re sorry,” Mister Milktoast said.

Little Hitler and Loverboy’s laughter rattled
inside my head like gravel in a hubcap. But what did they know
about love?

Love stomped. Love slashed. Love gouged. Love
disemboweled. Love drove its lessons deep. And, at its worst, love
mattered.

Bookworm came out on the ashes of my
depression, like the ghost of a virgin sacrifice thrown into a
volcano to appease a god that was vacationing in Hawaii. “Love is
why we have the Insider,” he said with the simplicity of one who
might meet a pieman and ask for a slice.

I was silent, they were all silent, as we
contemplated that cold truth. Fear squirmed like maggots in an open
wound, an anthropomorphic metaphor that grew wings and flew away,
looking for fresh shit.

“
Love is what attracted it,”
Bookworm said. “Pain, perhaps, as well. But what causes the
pain?”

“
Looking for love,” I said.
“The Buddhists say, ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering.’ And the
Taoists say nothing, and they say it a lot. But the Insider says
just enough to screw up my autobiography.”

I caressed the tights and imagined the
lingering waft of her perfume. I thought of Shelley as she might
have been. Curled up beside me at that moment, spooning for warmth,
snoring gently.

But I never even knew her. What were her
fears, her secrets, her favorite candy? What colors did she wear in
the spring, when the world begged yellow and sky blue and primary
green? What would she have become, if given the chance? What was
her purpose besides feeding the Insider?

I threw the tights into the dark corner of
the room. Shelley hadn’t fed the Insider. I had fed it. I had
tossed the scraps to my devil dog. It was fat on my grief and
weakness and pathetic need to be published.

I was its meatbag, its Jeeves, its Igor, its
Boswell.

“
Bookworm knows something,”
I said to Mister Milktoast. “Maybe there’s a way out of
this.”

“
Not out,” said Bookworm.
“In.”

In, where the Insider slept, full and
content, waiting for me to dream.

In, where my Little People holed up in their
rooms, haunting the Bone House of my head.

In, where my memories were laid out like a
bad hand of Tarot cards.

In, where monsters dwelled under beds and in
closets.

In, where typewriter keys clattered in the
wee hours.

The first rejection slip arrived the next
day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I waited outside Redmon Hall, the building
where Beth had her art classes. Black glass squares were set in the
stone front of the building. The morning sun reflected off the
windows, the silver linings of the clouds dulled by the tint.
October was everywhere, as pungent and sweet as a corpse. Oaks shed
their brown leaves, blades of high grass bowed under the weight of
dewy seed, wind sneaked low through the portico.

Students smoked cigarettes between classes. I
studied the clean faces with interest. I was looking at the shape
and plane of cheekbones, comparing the fullness of lips, critically
analyzing hairstyles. I shuddered with repulsion as I realized what
I was doing.

I was hunting. The Insider was hungry
again.

I hadn’t called Beth in a week. Ever since
the blackout, I was afraid to see her. I knew I was fading, and the
Insider was growing stronger. Beth would give it the pain it
needed. A perfect recipe, doled out in exacting measurements.

I stood there in my corduroy jacket with my
hands in my pockets, humming The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was
Mister Milktoast’s choice of music, or maybe Little Hitler’s. At
that moment I saw her, just as the clouds fell away and the sun
threw its carpet at her feet. Her hair shimmered. She was wearing
the brown hat she had worn when we’d first met.

She was talking to a tall guy with a beard.
When he smiled at her, his broad horse teeth exuded steam. I
stepped forward.

“
Hi, Beth,” I said, with
practiced ease. Far too practiced. She blinked.

“
Richard,” she said, off
guard for only a moment.

“
How have you been? I
haven’t seen you in a while.”

“
Same old,” I
said.

She glanced around, as if looking for some
alien starship to whisk me away. “This is Ted,” she said finally.
“Ted, this is Richard. He works at the Paper Paradise.”

I nodded at him. What did Loverboy care? One
walking dish of clam dip was pretty much the same as another. Every
slice came from the same loaf.

Ted gave his equine smile and tugged at his
beard.

“
Ted’s a graduate
assistant,” Beth said. “He teaches etching and
woodprinting.”

“
Physical stuff,” I said in
mock admiration. “Digging out the truth, right, Ted? Cutting down
to the essence. Grooving and moving.”

Ted dropped his smile and looked
confused.

“
He’s just kidding, Ted,”
Beth said. “He’s an amateur art critic.”

“
Taught her everything she
knows,” Little Hitler said. “Which isn’t much.”

Beth crossed her arms and glowered from under
her blond eyebrows. She looked at Ted and said, “Meet you for
lunch, usual place?”

Ted opened his mouth to speak. His teeth
flashed like tombstones set in wet, red mud. Then he thought better
of saying anything and walked away after studying me for a
moment.

Go ahead and study, you
brush-sucking artiste. As if you’d ever be able to understand
what’s going on inside this negative space. Hell, I can’t even keep
up with it myself. There are details buried in here that even a
hundred acid baths couldn’t bring out. But I’ll put your ass in my
book and make sure you come off as an arrogant, navel-gazing
jerkoff with goofy teeth
.

Yeah, Ted, in my autobiography, I’ll look much
better than you. I can type you in and erase your ass.

I looked at Beth with Bookworm’s curious and
slightly amused eyes.

“
Why are you being such a
jerk, Richard?”

“
You haven’t
called.”

“
Well, you haven’t
either.”

“
But, you said... that
morning...”

People brushed past us on both sides as
classes changed, rolling like meat products on a slaughterhouse
conveyor belt. Beth gripped my arm and led me to a stone bench. We
sat beneath a rusting, jagged sculpture that bore welding scars
across its joints. It looked like a sky plow. A brass plate was
attached to its base.

“
Sky plow,” I said
aloud.

“
What?”

“
What ye sew, so shall ye
rope,” Mister Milktoast said. “And leave the audience in stitches.
So don’t string me along.”

“
Richard, don’t play games
with me. Why were you waiting for me here?”

“
Is that your boyfriend?” I
said, watching Ted’s mass of curly hair bob over the crowd like a
frayed basketball.