The Haunting of James Hastings (30 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings

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‘Is that so?’

‘Why would I lie to you?’

Rick nodded, something still troubling him, but satisfied for now. ‘How’s your gut?’

‘Fine.’

‘Sorry if I came on a little eager, but I learned my lesson the hard way. Had a greaser down on his belly last spring. Gave him the benefit of the doubt, didn’t search him. I go to cuff him, but before I can get an angle he lunges, just quicker’n Dominican steals third base. Sliced up my thigh and opened my sack ’fore I knew what the fuck happened. Lucky my nuts didn’t go rolling down the got-damned sewer hatch. Crossed a few wires, though. Street vasectomy. Couldn’t dog my gal for a month. You better believe I showed that little prick his own private Gitmo.’

The man had to be on coke or speedballs. Something known to cause verbal diarrhea and general unchecked aggression.

‘But since you’re practically family now, truceyducey? ’ Rick Butterfield extended his hand.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or run. ‘Jesus. You’re not playing, are you?’

‘It’s all a play, muffin.’ Rick pumped my hand. ‘Just good clean livin’.’

We sidled off the porch. I intended to climb the gate.

‘So you’re not doing anything?’ he said.

‘Now? No, but Annette’s probably wondering—’

‘Fuck that,’ Rick said. ‘I’m buying you a drink. Just comin’ off the third shift, I ain’t got anyone to drink with no more and I could use some stink on me.’

I began to protest but he was already steering me toward the car, one of his big mitts hanging over my neck. I realized this might be useful. Rick might be able to tell me a few things about my new girlfriend’s history of mental illness, what Arthur was like. I was starving for perspective, any information.

No, the truth is I didn’t want to go back inside. I didn’t want to know what condition she was in, and after the last twenty-four hours I needed a drink. I deserved a drink. We stopped at the car, doors open, and Rick Butterfield looked at me across the roof like we were partners about to go on a patrol. He was grinning, his soup strainer wiggling.

‘That figures,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘She’s already got you whipped six ways to Sunday.’

‘Hey,’ I said, my face coloring.

‘Don’t sweat it, Ghost.’ He patted the roof. ‘Isn’t a man alive can resist that.’

I took the bait. ‘Yeah, what?’

‘Best pussy north of the border,
amigo
.’

Rick winked and ducked into his cruiser.

I looked up the vacant street, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

Rick Butterfield’s basement was every high school kid’s wet dream come true, minus the girls.

When he wheeled into the driveway of his unassuming but rather sprawling patio home on the edge of the SP’s first wing tip, I said, ‘I thought we were going to a bar?’

Rick finished mounting The Club to his steering wheel before answering. ‘We are. Best one in town.’

I followed him inside. He led me through a cavernous living room that smelled like cat groins, through a small kitchen with a car engine and a cereal bowl full of gasoline on the breakfast table, to a stairway with a runner of baby-blue deep pile. As we descended into his walnutpaneled underworld, my host had to duck a neon sign bolted to the stairwell frame. Next to the pink palm tree, in loopy Vegas font, it said:

The Rick Room

There was indeed a bar, with all the main liquors (low-to-mid-tier brands) faced out in front of a large Budweiser mirror. The bar itself was a ten-foot block of walnut with eight coats of varnish, silver quarters and buffalo head pennies trapped inside like bugs in amber. All three taps pumped regular Budweiser. Rick yanked us each a draught and handed me a frozen glass mug, the ice sheaths sliding like Superman’s fortress at the North Pole.

‘Make yourself at home, Ghost.’

‘Just James,’ I said. ‘Ghost is the real one.’ But he ignored this, busy as he was tinkering with two remote controls.

Shortly the ceiling speakers began to emit a steady stream of hits from Rick’s favorite satellite station. Survivor, Journey, Van Halen, Asia, Toto. By this time I knew this was not a retro gimmick fad for him. I remembered a movie that had terrified me when I saw it in theaters as a child back in the early eighties. It starred Timothy Hutton and was about a caveman found frozen in a block of ice. He thaws out and comes to life, loses his mind and is pursued to a tragic death.
Iceman
, it was called. Yes, Rick Butterfield was like the Iceman, except he hadn’t been frozen back in the Cro-Magnon age. He had been frozen in 1983 and he was never going to thaw out.

The basement was one huge room, all the walls removed, wooden beams holding up the main floor. I nosed around, too frightened to sit down; the tiger-striped couch might bite me. The three hulking antique safes were too large to have been lowered down the stairway. Rick did not tell me what was inside them, only boasted of having cut the foundation open to slide them in. One entire wall was a black lacquer cabinet holding stacks of VHS movies starring Burt Reynolds and a library of porn with all media formats represented. Classic issues of
Oui
and
Swank
and
Knave
were displayed in sealed plastic, as a kid would store Batman #2. Another wall featured a wood case with a glass front and a mounting board of red velvet, a track-lighted showcase of nunchaku, throwing stars and knives, balisongs, a dozen pistols, and a blowgun. The cork ceiling panels alternated with panels of gold-marbled mirrors, like a checkerboard. There were bean bags and a dart board and a regulation-size shuffle board. Budweiser lamps. Posters of hot rods and twenty-year-old calendars of bikini-clad women with Farrah hair, the winter months featuring purposeful protrusions of muff.

I won’t belabor the first hour of conversation, our meet and greet before we got around to the interesting part of the morning. Suffice to say that, as he eased into his buzz, Rick Butterfield’s contribution to the small talk revealed only the following:

He wasn’t just obsessed with prison, homosexuality, fist fighting, pussy, violence, criminals, firearms, strippers, tiny breasted women, authority, anal sex and ‘dropping massive loads’ - all of which he referenced, peppered his speech with, or attempted to discuss in absurd detail, with alarming and then numbing regularity. No, no. Rick Butterfield seemed to believe the world, and all human interaction in it, had as its chief aim the seeking of, and revelry in, as many of these pastimes as possible, the
coup de grâce
of a life well lived being the arrival at some sort of miraculous locale where all of them happened in one night, Rick was the king, and everybody present looked like ‘that real sexy hooch from
Charles in Charge
’.

I was all but certain Rick Butterfield was a true psychopath, and I confess that after my fourth beer and second shot of Beam I could not stop laughing at him and with him. He was in his own way as charismatic and singularly warped as Ghost. He just didn’t have talent to mask his proclivities. I kept telling myself one more beer and then, if I hadn’t learned anything useful, I would go home.

‘So, how exactly did you two meet?’ he asked from behind the bar. He was pouring another round into two new frosty mugs and had just finished his third anecdote from his time served as a security consultant at Chuckwalla, the medium-security facility in Blythe. That would be California’s most remote, sweltering, middle-of-nowhere prison.

‘She didn’t tell you?’ I was on a bar stool against the wall, afraid to turn my back on him.

‘Nope.’

He knew I had lost my wife, and of course he must have known about Arthur’s suicide. That would have been big news in the SP. Had Annette told him why Arthur killed himself?

‘She moved in next door,’ I said. ‘It was strange because my neighbor, this old guy named Mr Ennis, died of a heart attack. I was beginning to think the place was, uh, sort of cursed when she showed up. Another week or two, I might have been gone.’

‘Interesting.’ Rick was staring at me again. He had a way of doing that, almost as if he were trying to decide if I was real, or the way a crazy person looks at an imaginary friend. ‘So, uh, how’d you make your move? You lay the Ghost rap on her? I bet once she knew who you were she threw it right atcha, huh?’

‘Rick, buddy,’ I chuckled. ‘I don’t think you heard me earlier. I’m not Ghost. I had nicknames and we were . . . but you keep saying . . .’

I might have been speaking Portuguese.

I snapped my fingers a few times. ‘I was his surrogate, a fake, a double. It was theater, man. You know that, right?’

Rick was bobbing his head. ‘How long before she let you put it in her deuce hole?’

I reared back. ‘Come on, seriously? This is what we’re talking about?’

Rick looked hurt. I’d just put a ding in our new buddyhood. ‘So, you’re like one of those sensitive types, is that it? Used to rap about roofies, guns and bitches, but now you’re a saint?’

I didn’t bother correcting him this time. I was tired of trying to explain the difference. ‘With the whole shop talk, already. Give it a rest?’

Rick laughed, his hard belly jostling. ‘I’m just fucking with you, man. Jesus, she’s really got your balls in a sling.’

It was like high school. Soon as I pushed back, I felt like a jerk. ‘I can take a joke as much as the next guy. It’s just been a long week, all right? A fucking strange week.’

Rick was pouring two more beers, additional to the ones we were holding. I put a hand out and he cut me off. ‘What’s your hurry? Give her some time to cool off.’

I settled back onto my stool. ‘She didn’t tell you why we came back?’

‘She didn’t tell me you were coming back at all. Otherwise I wouldn’t a ganked you.’

I decided to tell him. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe I just needed to say it again, the way I had told Bergen, considering things were getting worse.

‘You’re gonna laugh,’ I said.

‘Swear I won’t.’

I told him everything that had happened since Annette arrived. The fall in the tub, the paintings, the signs of disorder around the house, the shoes buried in the yard, the phone calls. I told him about Lucy. Her total loss of sanity before running into traffic. The only thing I left out were the more serious changes in Annette since we came back. The lashing out in the furniture store, the foul tongue, the disappearance of her freckles.
The possession
, I thought drunkenly, wondering idly for a moment if I should consult a priest. Some things are too awful to say out loud.

‘Most of it is attributable to Lucy,’ I said, nearing the end. I took a long pull of the Bud. ‘That makes sense, I guess. But I’ve seen things that can’t be explained.’

‘Like?’

‘You have a boy running around the neighborhood?’

‘A boy?’

‘About this high.’ I held my hand out above the barstool. ‘Wearing a black hooded sweatshirt. Very pale?’

Rick stared at me, giving away nothing.

I continued. ‘There’s a kid’s bike in her garage, little green BMX thing. Does she have a son? Did she and Arthur have a son?’

‘Nope.’ Rick dabbed his thumb in a bowl of salt and licked it.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I would know if she had a son,’ Rick said.

‘The other thing is, she’s not really herself since we came back. She’s always got a headache. She’s turning mean. She’s sick. Like bad flu sick.’

Rick nodded. ‘She’s moody.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s worse than that. She’s not well, Rick. Annette is not well. She says things no one else could know. No one but me and Stacey.’