As I Die Lying (22 page)

Arlie, the geezer in the
hunting vest, approached the counter, eyes afire with the fervent
conspiracy of gossipers. I had explained to him earlier in the
morning that
Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus
wasn't a book about our alien
origins. His wrinkled hands clutched a coffee mug that was half
full of decaf. We’d watered him down.

"You talking about the girl?" he said in his
raspy voice that was as native as the Appalachian dirt.

"Hello, Arlie," said Miss Billingsly. "I was
just telling Richard about it."

"Well, they don't know for
sure, but I got my
own
theories," Arlie said.

The silver wires of his brows arced heavily
over his dark eyes, giving him the appearance of a vulture. His
neck crooked, as if drooping to peck at carrion, and this
heightened the raptorial effect. He was clearly enjoying the
opportunity to impart hitherto secret knowledge.

"There's been no indication of foul play,"
Miss Billingsly said. I nodded at Arlie.

I had a hunch about his theory. I had sold
Arlie more than one book on UFOs and had listened to him describe
his back-porch sightings. I had a suspicion the alien visitors rose
from the bottom of a Mason jar of white lightning. He was also a
fan of what he called "unexplainable phee-nomenons," the kind of
stuff you'd see in shows hosted by washed-up character actors from
the various "Star Trek" series. But I couldn't exactly ridicule his
theories, because I was starting to develop an unsettling theory of
my own.

"Lunatic killer," Arlie said.

Miss Billingsly shook her head, and her
glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them up with a finger and
said, "I just can't see it happening here. A small town like
this?"

Arlie's eyes shifted joyfully from side to
side under his vulturine eyebrows. "Then maybe it was one of them
alien abductions."

Miss Billingsly and Brittany laughed.

Arlie's face reddened. "It's
that college, is what draws them here. I
seen
them. They come after these kids
who move here with television antennas stuck up their noses and
shooting up all kinds of mindrot. I been against that college from
the very start, from back when it was just a two-room shack out in
a cow pasture."

I didn't know how I felt
about aliens. Intellectually, I figured they probably existed. Yet
I had never seen one. What was even more frightening was the idea
that they might
not
exist, that humans were the highest achievement of the
universe. That we were the best that God, nature, and evolution
could come up with. If so, the divine creator needed to eat some
psychedelic drugs.

"Now the school's gobbling up the whole damn
town," Arlie continued. "I see where they bought out Ralph's feed
store and gonna tear it down to put in some tennis courts. That
college is just a magnet for trouble, I tell you.”

"And you believe the college has something to
do with the girl’s disappearance?" asked Brittany.

"Sure. She wasn't
missing
before
she
came here to go to school, was she?"

A woman of about thirty walked up to the
counter with a stack of psychology books. Arlie stepped back to
allow her access to the counter and Brittany began ringing up the
purchase.

"Say, here's a smart woman," said Arlie,
looking at the book titles. "You teach at the college?"

“
Yes,” the woman said. She
was pretty, with long blonde hair. Loverboy drank her in through my
eyes and built nasty little fantasies in the basement of my
brain.

"What about the missing girl, then? You
probably know more than we do," Arlie said.

"It's too early to form a conclusion.” Her
voice was cold, as if idle chatter with townies was beneath her.
“Not enough evidence yet. And it’s only been a day and a half."

"What about the damned underground
installations I heard about? Down there under the gym. Got UFO
radar dishes. What about them?"

The woman drew back as Brittany bagged the
books. Miss Billingsly put a hand on Arlie's shoulder to calm him
down.

"I call
that
evidence, don't you?" Arlie
shouted. The other customers were starting to stare. Miss
Billingsly apologized to the woman, who ripped the bag from
Brittany and hurried out the door without looking back.

"
Tell us about the RABBITS!"
Arlie
yelled after her.

Miss Billingsly led him to the reading corner
and sat him at a table. I listened in without trying. Or rather,
the Bookworm lent an ear.

"Now, Arlie, I don't mind you hanging around,
because a little local color is good for business,” she chastised.
“But you have to control these outbursts. Everyone at the college
is not an alien from one of your television shows.”

"That college is a magnet, I tell you. Draws
all kinds of weirdoes. From different worlds."

"Arlie, I've lived here as long as you have,
and I say change isn't always for the worse. I couldn't keep this
bookstore in business without the college."

He seemed small and defeated as he sat
staring out the window. I almost felt sorry for him, but I had
learned to store my pity. I knew I would need it for myself, and
the Bone House cupboard was bare of such compassion.

Plus, I knew the strangest invasions came not
from without, but from within.

I busied myself at the register as Brittany
stocked the shelves. Mister Milktoast was glad the conversation had
turned from murder. He was feeling a little squeamish.

"Trouble in paradise," he said to me.

Shady Valley?

"No. Here in the House. Upstairs."

Are you trying to tell me something?

"Just a sour note from a lemon drop."

I'll keep it in mind.

Arlie came back to the counter, subdued now.
He lowered his voice to a confidential level.

"Something damned fishy is
going on in this town. Ain't been the same since that double rape
and murder here in '72. Folks has all but forgot that one. 'It'll
never happen here,' they say. Well, it
does.
Because
they
are here."

I nodded. Arlie had told me about the silver
saucers that flew down from Widow's Peak, the high stony mountain
above his farm. They were here. Sure. I’d believe that like I’d
believe four or five little people lived inside my head.

"It's a pitcher-perfect town
on the outside," he said. "The one they put on the postcards and
the travel guides. But under the whitewash is a black bellyful of
trash. All the decent, God-fearing families that settled these
parts been wet down and poisoned by slick money and big-city
lawyers. They call it
progress,
they do.

"I remember the day they cut the ribbon for
the college. The mayor and even old Senator Hallifield was there,
all of them standing in the middle of that pasture and grinning
like a pack of turtles eating saw briars. With one foot on a
shovel, as if any one of that sorry bunch had ever turned a day's
work in their lives."

"Now, Arlie, don't have one of your spells,"
I said. Miss Billingsly had taken his mug, but his hands still
cupped as if he were nursing it.

"Senator Hallifield stepped in a big pile of
cow shit and fell and busted his ass." His laugh was a frog’s muddy
croak. "That part never made the papers.”

He was quiet again, limp, like a skeleton on
a hook in an anatomy class whose lesson was nearly over. "I
remember old Vernell Hartbarger standing there in his coveralls.
Vernell was the one that sold them the cow pasture. That land had
been in his family since before the American Revolution, been
tilled and bled on by a dozen generations afore his. But now he had
a pocketful of slick money, and he didn't give a damn if they built
an open sewer there."

Arlie looked at me, at Bookworm. Bookworm
listened. I didn’t. "Vernell went off with that money, down to
Charlotte. Had a heart attack on top of a big-city whore three days
later. Died in her arms, they said. They never did find the
money."

"And now the college is a lasting testament
to his folly," Bookworm said.

Arlie looked at me, confusion clouding his
red eyes.

"Our own big-city whore," Bookworm added,
meaning the college, not caring whether Arlie was quick enough to
make the metaphorical leap.

He turned slowly, again just a lonely and
scared old man, the vulture's fierceness faded. He walked to the
door, stooped and defeated.

"Maybe the aliens got that girl," he said,
his hand on the front glass. “Or the rabbits.”

Without waiting for a reply, he went out and
got behind the wheel of his rusty Ford pickup. A cloud of blue
smoke rolled across the parking lot as the engine whined to life.
Arlie pulled the truck out of the parking lot and onto the
four-lane highway that headed out of town towards his farm.

I had been out to his farm once, a ramshackle
group of buildings at the foot of Widow's Peak. His was the last
house on Tater Knob Road, before the mountain really started rising
out of the ground. He had offered me some moonshine but I didn't
want it. Then he’d pointed out the spots in his fields where the
saucers had landed.

Now, as he drove away, hunched over his
steering wheel, I imagined he was remembering when the road was
just a dirt stitch in the flesh of meadows, back before aliens,
lawyers, and madmen invaded Shady Valley.

Brittany came to the counter as I watched the
Ford disappear in traffic. "Crazy old coot," she said.

"I suppose." I was trying to fight back
Loverboy, who had been developing an attraction to Brittany. "What
was her name?"

"Who?"

"The missing girl." I tried a Milktoast
smile. “The one the aliens got.”

"Oh. Shelley," she said. "Shelley
Birdsong."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Night.

I couldn't sleep, because I might dream.

And while I dreamed, something else might
awaken. Something that had worn my skins during my blackout. Those
missing hours hung wide and heavy over my mind, a fog on a lost
sea. And Shelley might be in that swirling mist, sucked down by the
Charybdis of my unknown appetites, rolled over by the Sisyphus
stone of my futility, or otherwise undone through a mythological
metaphor that Bookworm hasn’t looked up yet.

"Nutter coincidence," Mister Milktoast said,
ever the optimist. Or maybe merely a habitual liar. Tiny warning
bells sounded, elves hammered on the roof, a steam train blew its
whistle, smoke sucked itself down the chimney.

I rose from bed cold. I had put Shelley's
phone number in my top desk drawer, there with a handful of letters
from Mother and a dozen old photographs that I had found in the
Valiant's glove box. Loverboy wouldn't let me forget to write the
number down. He knew I had a lot of things on my mind.

The number wasn't there.

I checked my pockets. Nothing.

I went downstairs into the laundry room,
which was Mister Milktoast's tidy milieu. There, in the pants I
must have worn the day before, the number was creased and fingered
like an old secret. As I touched the paper, a mental picture
flashed of my dialing the number.

Then came another picture, like frames of a
film that had jammed the sprockets of the projector, so that the
motion didn't fit together. The illusion revealed its lie. The
frame froze.

Shelley downstairs, on the sofa. Late
afternoon sun streaming through the window, catching the back of
her head and making her red hair blaze. She is holding a
cigarette—no, a joint—in her right hand. Her feet are on my coffee
table, her leather sandals pressed against my Incredible Hulk comic
books, wrinkling the covers. Her gray eyes stare at me, oblivious
of my identity. As oblivious as I am.

The frame jittered and jumped. The image
disappeared in a rush of black. My head hurt as I stood in the
basement.

"Richard, you're not supposed to see
that."

Mister Milktoast?

"Don't look.”

"You know something, don't you?

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no
lies."

Liar. I thought you're supposed to protect
me.

"And that's what I'm trying to do."

I looked down at the concrete floor of the
basement.

Spots. Rust. Brown. Cool as stone.

"Go back upstairs, Richard."

"Yeah, Beth might call, and
I wouldn't mind shoving the old crème horn into her breadbox
again," Loverboy said. "Hell, it's been three days. Course, it
was
years
before
then. I ain’t waiting that long for honey butter again."

"Upstairs, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said.
“Fast.”

"Let him see," said Little Hitler. "I could
use a good laugh."

I knelt on the concrete and peered into the
murky corners of the basement. Camping gear. Old tires.
Bookshelves. Streaked cans of paint and wood scraps. Large plastic
rubbish bins.

One of the bins was bulging.

I took a step deeper into the basement, into
madness, into the house of mirrors. The room smelled like stagnant
water in an iron pot.

"Go ahead and look,
Richard,” taunted Little Hitler. "You can always find someone else
to take the fall. After all, when you killed Father, you had
me
to blame."

I clenched my fists, but there was no one to
punch. I took a second step then faltered.

"Don't listen, Richard," coaxed Mister
Milktoast. "I can explain everything."

“
Why can’t I remember?” I
screamed at the cinder block walls. My voice echoed, sharp and
dead. I might as well have been beating the cheap Sheetrock in the
Bone House.