As I Die Lying (15 page)

Bookworm could have been there all along. It
is horrible to not even know your own mind. But maybe none of us
do, and that’s why we share these stories, even though half of
everything is bullshit. We never know which half, and it keeps
changing on us, so all we can do is keep searching and guessing and
turning the page. Pray that you don’t get a paper cut.

I was holding a hardback
copy of Herman Hesse's
Siddhartha
when the woman I came to know as Miss Billingsly
came up behind me. I had seen her at the counter often enough to
know she was the storeowner, and I tried to stay out of her sight
as much as possible. Too bad I couldn’t be as invisible as my Bone
House roommates.

"I see you know how to treat a book," she
said, in her firmly gentle voice. I turned and she was looking at
me over the top of her glasses. "You don't stretch it wide open and
break the spine like most people do."

She had a sharp Roman nose and the iron-gray
patches in her dark hair gave her a stern aspect, which was part of
the reason that I avoided her. She pushed her cat-eye glasses up
the steep slope of her nose. She was in constant battle with the
glasses. They skied down her nose, cutting a slow slalom on her
skin, then stopped at the slight bulb at the end of the run. They
perched precariously there before leaping into space when she
tilted her head. The glasses landed safely on her drooping bosom,
dangling from a gold chain.

"I would never harm a book,"
I said.
Only people
, Little Hitler whispered,
especially
the ones I tried to love
. I was afraid she
was about to order me out of the store, exile me from my only
refuge.

"I've seen you in here almost every day for
three weeks. But I've never seen you buy anything."

I shrugged. "It's not because I don't want
to."

"You're not a student, are you? When they
come in to buy books, they have a list and a grimace, as if they've
been sent to cut a hickory switch that's going to be used on their
bare hind ends."

I was too uncertain to laugh, wondering where
this was leading. "No, but I might go back to school someday. I
just moved here."

She put her glasses back on. They instantly
slid an inch down her nose. She peered over them like a school
marm. "Where from?" she asked, hands on her hips.

"Iowa." Also known to me as Purgatory, The
Seventh Stage of Hell, Auschwitz, the Badlands, that little room
where you pee in a cup for a cancer test.

"A Midwesterner, huh? Did you start suffering
from agoraphobia?"

If only I had such mundane fears. The truth?
I killed my father, I'm working on killing my mother, I drove my
first true love to kill herself, and the people in my head won't
let me commit suicide. Other than that, I heard the scenery here
was nice.

"Shady Valley seemed like a peaceful place to
move to," I said. "My grandfather lived here once."

"I can see you love books. I tell you what, I
need somebody to work here during the day. I've had a stream of
students working for me, but they're always going off on vacations
without giving notice. I'd like to have somebody who knows a little
about books and has the time to spare. And you surely can't have a
job, as much time as you're spending here."

I looked down at the floor, avoiding her
schoolmarm gaze.

She continued, "That wasn't meant to be an
insult. I'm offering you a job. A mutually beneficial relationship,
I hope."

"But you don't know anything about me."

"What's there to know? If you can run a cash
register, I don't care if you're the devil's keeper. Besides," she
said, pointing at my mug, "if I'm going to keep you in coffee, I
may as well get some work out of you. So, are you interested,
Mr.—?"

"Richard Hitler. I mean Coldiron. Richard
Coldiron, ma'am."

"Let me get the forms for you to sign, then
I'll give you the official orientation." She cocked one of her
sienna eyes. "Unless you have other plans for the day..."

"I was going to be here anyway."

I managed a weak smile, or maybe it was
Mister Milktoast or even the new one, Bookworm. She pushed her
glasses up her nose again and went into the storeroom. I started
working at the Paper Paradise that day, though I did have to write
my goddamned birth date on the job application. I lied about it, of
course.

I worked there for four years, saved enough
money to buy a small house and settle down to something resembling
a routine. A lot of other stuff happened, some of it probably
important, but don’t you hate it when you’re right in the middle of
a good story and the author veers off into some meaningless
masturbation? Sometimes you have to hit the fast-forward button.
Any scars from that period are still scars, and the highlights will
probably become important later on. I’ll let you know if any of it
turns out to matter. Trust me.

Though I made my home in the North Carolina
mountains, Iowa may as well be in my front yard, it's so much a
part of my daily existence. The terrain is different; here, granite
has been squeezed up from the Earth's crust and coated with dark
alluvial soil, instead of being bulldozed flat by ancient glaciers
and paved with red clay. But rain and snow still fall from the same
sky, and the same sun still burns holes through the clouds.

When those clouds are blown by a hard
northwestern wind and make shadows on the ground, I sometimes see
faces in the mountains, fleeting black ghosts. If only the dead
would stay dead, did not fly that way across the stands of ash and
poplar, did not flit over the stunted, acid-raped balsams at the
highest peaks that are ghosts themselves, perhaps my escape would
have been successful. But those dead always move on, lance me with
memories and then head to the Atlantic. It's the other ghosts that
truly haunt, the other ghosts that linger and which no winds touch.
Those without faces or else wearing my own.

I had hoped that here in these time-worn
Appalachian mountains, I could lose myself among the rocks and
streams, duck into the vast laurel thickets where the light never
reaches. I could become loam, lie down and rot with the brown
leaves, find noble purpose as food for grubs. Then perhaps my soul
could emerge, cleansed of sins, to cavort with woodsprites and
squirrels.

But nature and that bastard God, in their
sadistic wisdom, have overblessed me with the gift of life. Instead
of one soul for which to beg forgiveness, I get a congregation. But
their sins are not their own, because they spill over onto me. And
I can’t be sure if there is a part of me that motivates them, that
has forced them to share my darkness, that has nourished them with
possessive poison.

The sun reached through the windows of my
house all day and the trees provided enough of a border that the
lot seemed larger than half an acre. My neighbors kept to
themselves, waved politely while mowing their lawns or hanging
birdhouses from birch limbs. We were strangers, keeping our secrets
as carefully as fences, in separate worlds only yards apart.

I wrote to Mother after I settled down, more
out of guilt than a son's love. What did I hope to hear? That she
had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and rededicated her life to Christ?
That she had peddled the rights to her life story to be used in a
made-for-TV movie? That somehow the drinking had permanently
blacked out the past, so we could again safely be family?

I received an occasional rough-cornered
postcard, featuring Mother's bleary scrawl, asking me to come home
because she was getting lonely. Three times I sat in my packed car
in my driveway, with several free days ahead, time enough for the
drive to Iowa. Each time, I reached for the key and froze. I had
escaped those memories, or at least put time and distance between
them, and there I was, about to drive straight down a one-way
street to a bone-littered tar pit.

I could hear myself as she opened the
door.

"You're looking real good, Mother." Despite
the roadmap of broken blood vessels on your face, despite your
watery red eyes, despite your mottled skin that you insist on
exposing far too intimately.

"No, really, the years have been kind to
you." Kind enough to bring you closer to a restful grave and
farther from the past.

"You haven't changed a bit." You're still
drinking two pints a day and your breath is still rancid and you
still don't look a day over a hundred and ten.

"It can be just like the old days." Except I
don't have another father and you don't have a husband to dance
with, because the medical examiner most definitely did not bury him
with his boots on. If the dead someday rise up and walk, that's one
corpse that will be barefoot.

"I'm so excited about the future." Because
one day you will fall face-first in your own vomit and the flies
will lay eggs in your eyes and at last I can be able to say "I love
you" again. And my own time will expire, my own clock will wind
down, and these little people in the Bone House will jump ship like
a pack of wharf rats, leaving me finally and forever alone.

"Oh, yes, and the reason I
hate you is because you heaped shit on me, guilt with one hand and
love with the other. Because you apologized for your state of
chronic denial. Because you fucking
forgave
me, when you should have
nailed me to a dirty dogwood."

And after I envisioned this loathsome
reunion, my hand dropped from the key and I unpacked the car and I
got on with a life that would never end too soon. And I could write
her a letter, telling her how the frost makes the grass sparkle
magically and how the mountains have souls and the creek beds sing
here and the wind bends the pines like green sails, telling her a
thousand things about the world that swirls on around me. But I
never, ever dared show anything of myself, of the son she raised
who might or might not have emotions or tears or triumphs, who may
or may not remember childhood's dreadful rites of passage, rites
surely not meant to end in human sacrifice.

And I could never write how I hated Father,
not merely because of the years of fearing his boots, not merely
because he happened to die, not merely because he died by my hand
or her hand or Little Hitler’s hand, but because we only killed him
once instead of inflicting the thousand deaths he deserved.

And I could never thank her for protecting
me, for enduring the taunts and whispers and accusations that
followed her trial, for unselfishly throwing herself on the spears
and daggers of public opinion. Because if we had been found out and
stopped then, perhaps others might have been spared.

And I could never forgive her for trying to
love me as no mother should love her son, even though surely there
was room for forgiveness in my vampire heart. And, though her
motives for loving may have been pure, the road of good intentions
is paved with broken glass and the clabbered milk of kindness and
maybe some shitty asphalt.

So I wrote instead of the slick-furred
groundhog who lived under the barn up the road, of the backyard
blue jays that battled in a flurry of soft feathers over mating
rights, of the moles that cut endless random symbols in the soil,
of the dying oak tree whose limbs were blue-gray with weary age. I
wrote of Arlie Wesson and his tentacled astronauts, Martha
Billingsly's hair done in a beehive that sagged like a sack of wet
raccoons, Denny Moody's pickup truck with the deer antlers sticking
out each side of the cab, Brittany's freshest tattoo, D.J. Uncle
Daddy's latest obnoxious morning show jingle on the local AM
station.

And I always came to the part where I had to
write "Love, Richard," and each time I wrote a lie, folded the
paper, and licked the strip of glue, sealed it not with a kiss but
with mere saliva for a woman who could not know the meaning of a
word she had never heard.

And I placed the letters in the mailbox,
raised the red steel flag, and went back inside, my guilt assuaged
for mother-writing but not for everything else. I could have
happily grown old fooling myself, fooling everyone, pretending to
believe in picnics and sunshine, yellow butterflies and flowering
forsythia, Dick Clark and Froot Loops.

But if I hit fast-forward on the rest of my
life, then I wouldn’t have much to write about. And, to be
perfectly honest for a change, I’m afraid of what will happen if I
ever finish this story. Maybe you’re the person who is making all
this seem real. Without you, I really am alone.

So let’s see together, so neither of us has
to be too afraid.

Because then came Beth, sweet Beth, true love
Beth, the woman of my dreams, the kitten of my ka-boodle, who sent
my heart kiting skyward to hell.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I met Beth at the gallery in the Westridge
University Student Union. I went to art shows there to knock the
dust off my brain, so I could at least watch how the rest of the
human race played the existence game, even if I had to stay on the
sidelines. Besides, Mister Milktoast liked the pretty colors.

The featured works that week were done by a
graduate student who labored under the self-applied label of
"postfuturism." The label was a handy excuse to combine the flat
cubes of Picasso with the sensual serenity of Gauguin without
bothering to master a disciplined style. The canvases swam with
broadly applied pastels in uncoordinated bands of mauve, peach, and
salmon.

I stood before a "landscape," six feet high
by eight feet wide, as if the artist were proving true the old
saying that size matters. On this surface, which strained to crush
not three dimensions into two, but two dimensions into one, the
artist had sopped on a background of oils thinned with mineral
spirits so that every weave of the canvas showed through. Then, in
a remarkable tribute to Brueghel, the artist had scattered a
pollution of thick dark oil blots, which were scratched outwards in
the impression of a hundred starry stick figures. To add insult to
injury, a few daubs a la Van Gogh littered the lower right corner
of the painting. As an afterthought, three or four collections of
green dots, too obviously gouged by the wooden tip of the brush,
hinted at trees. A dozen painters were rolling over in their
graves, entire Flemish cemeteries were in turmoil.