As I Die Lying (9 page)

So, back to 1989 and forget that other stuff.
Let’s get real.

I was the kind of teenager that, if I were in
high school today, everyone would worry about my walking in on a
bad hair day and shooting up the place. The kids at school viewed
me as an alien freak, the greasy-haired, wild-eyed boy who clung to
the corners. They whispered behind my back about what had happened
to my father or sometimes taunted me to my face, especially
Brickman, the school thug. My fantasies never moved to mass murder,
though. That seems so impersonal. Besides, I had poetry.

Others had sports, student government, clubs,
or band instruments to consume their time and energy. I dawdled
between the covers of books, fixed in two-dimensional fantasies
whose protagonists traveled where I could only go by proxy, who
dared to have lives that seemed far more real than mine. Kurt
Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, John Steinbeck, anybody but Faulkner.
I prefer my liars to do it honestly, though I could never manage
the trick.

Home life was increasingly torturous and I
avoided our apartment whenever I could. Mother was drinking nonstop
by then, downing huge tumblers of strong brown bourbon, slowing
only to replenish the ice. The misty-eyed mirth of her early
experiments with liquid escape had progressed rapidly into a
constant haze that was punctuated ever more frequently by fits of
anxiety and despair. She was in the final stages of decay, as if
the flesh would have given up if not for the preserving quality of
the alcohol. Father had taught both of us well, only he’d given us
different lessons.

On my rare visits, she became clingy and wept
openly. I tried to soothe her and coax her out of the bottle, but
she was beyond reach. The horrors of the past were too real, still
too fresh because she treasured the memories even as she
obliterated them with drink. She collected and savored them just as
she had once done the ceramic cats that lined her windowsill. Those
knick-knacks now gathered dust while her new hobby of slow
self-destruction filled the shelves of her life.

I had quit sleeping there three months
before, when she had started crawling into bed with me again. She
was only seeking comfort, needing a man in her life, a replacement.
There was something blasphemous in that mockery of family
closeness, even though the physical contact was limited. What was
most horrible was the flicker of arousal I had felt. I tried to
tell myself it was a lie, an illusion, but I could never trust
myself to stay there again. I didn’t even want to think of my
babymaker tilling that fallow soil.

I spent the nights in the old Plymouth
Valiant I had bought with money earned from my summer job bagging
groceries at the Food Fair. I had a constant crick in my neck, my
breath stank, and my clothes grew crisp from continuous wear. My
grades suffered and many times I was on the verge of running away,
to start an untainted life in a far city, free of everything but
the chains of memory and the people in my head. What kept me in
Ottaqua was the hope that I could rescue my mother from her black
pit of despair. As if I could be the savior of anything—call me
what you will, I never had any messianic delusions.

In the classroom, I was sullen and aloof, and
I secretly ridiculed the ambitions of the other students. They were
planning to go to college, get married, and have jobs, buy homes
and a stake in the American dream. The seeds of envy were ready to
sprout into hate. I found myself wallowing in bitterness, just like
Father had done. The Coldiron Curse hadn't died with him after
all.

Virginia became my savior. She was an
outcast, too, but had sought out the role, rehearsed it as a
devoted understudy, and slipped into it like stage costume. She was
from a wealthy family, both parents members of the local school
board. She sat across from me in Biology, and I stole glances of
her out of the corner of my eye, watching her with an admiration
that bordered on worship. When she caught me looking, she would
smile at me with perfect teeth.

Though I had an affinity for Biology, I
wasn't a top student because I was afraid of standing out, of being
noticed. But I wanted Virginia to notice. With her fine ash-blonde
hair and oval face, she became the meat of my dreams, the main
course of my unformed fantasies. Her eyes weren't bovine as were
those of the cheerleaders and beauty queens. These were cobalt blue
and deep, almost painful to look at.

She wasn't squeamish about dissection, and
I’ve always admired a girl who had a way with a blade. That
semester, as we graduated from worms to frogs to small sharks, her
savagery escalated accordingly. When her partner was no longer
willing to work with her, repulsed that Virginia was going so far
beyond the demands of the assignments, I volunteered my services. I
had been working alone, shunned, the twenty-fifth student of a
class broken into pairs.

Virginia had a terrific sense of humor. She
saw right away that I matched her skill with a scalpel. She enjoyed
shocking the others, sticking pins haphazardly into the eyes of the
defenseless dead creatures. Once she fashioned a crude earring by
attaching a fish heart to a looped paper clip and wore it most of
the afternoon. Finally a teacher stirred from apathy long enough to
report her to the school authorities. A quick search of the rules
found nothing prohibiting the ornamental display of animal organs,
though Virginia was chastised for "disrupting the classroom." Of
course, because of her parents' being on the school board, no one
was willing to suspend her.

Because she was an untouchable, she became
even more outlandish. She began wearing a black leather jacket she
had found behind a bar on Devlin Street. The jacket had a huge
grinning skull sewn on the back, with crimson ribbons of flesh
clinging to the bone. What she was doing in that part of town, and
what would happen when the owner claimed his rightful property, I
never asked. She wore camouflage pants that billowed out above the
ankles and adopted hiking boots long before it became a weary
fashion.

We quickly became inseparable. She saw behind
the granite facade of indifference I hid behind, saw the sensitive
child inside the man I was awkwardly becoming, or maybe she peeked
through the windows of the Bone House. In turn, I encouraged her
originality and served as a willing audience for her stunts. She
was "Negative Girl" and I was "Her Poet," not because I ever wrote
anything but scribbles on napkins, but because I wore thick glasses
with black frames and she mistook my involuntary solitude for
intellectual disdain. We began meeting at the football field during
lunch, sitting in the bleachers and looking for gods in the April
clouds.

Our friendship had been based on mutual
distrust of "the system," and our relationship had been confined to
school hours. In some secret locker in my heart, I had stored a
small hope of something more. Certainly not love, not ever again
love, Sally had carved that coffin and Mother had driven the nails.
Virginia caused me to twitch, and she inflicted a vague ache I
hadn’t known since Hope Hill’s aromatic hair.

One lunch hour at the football field, she
went for the kill. "What really happened that night, Richard?"

I smelled the grass that a worker was mowing,
smelled the lilies that grew in the marshy moat around the press
box. I counted the wrens that were sitting on a power line
overhead. There were seven.

"I don't know for sure. I guess what they
wrote in the papers is probably the truth."

"Didn't your mother ever talk about it?"

"I suppose she's trying to forget." Just like
I was

"Doesn't it freak you out?"

To know that sometimes things happen that are
beyond your control? Even if you made them happen? Though I enjoyed
looking into those blue eyes, I turned away from her. "I don't want
to talk it about it anymore."

She touched my shoulder. "Hey, Poet, it's
okay."

Three sparrows flew away.

"We all have our secrets. Forget about it,"
she said.

Forgetting was my sole
occupation. Or rather,
soul
occupation, as Mister Milktoast put it. He loved
his puns.

"Richard?"

I looked at the power line. The sparrows were
gone, stolen by the freedom of wings.

"What?"

"Let's go out on a date."

I turned back to her and fought upstream
against the force of her eyes. After a moment, I was breathing
again. I smiled, trying out unfamiliar muscles. "Are you
kidding?"

"Well, I can't wait forever.
Were you ever going to ask
me
?"

"You're the Negative Girl." Though I wasn’t a
writer until much later, until I started this autobiography, I’d
already come to know the emasculating sting of rejection.

"And you're afraid of me."

No, just afraid of myself. And the secret
person inside. Or all three of us. "Your Poet fears only words," I
said.

"Words like 'yes'?"

I nodded my head, afraid to say it. She
laughed.

"I'd go anywhere with you." I stared with
desperate eyes, hoping their loneliness glittered instead of
stabbed. She returned my smile, and her face outshone the spring
sun.

My heart soared like the
sparrows. Then it plunged, shot down by worry. I had never dated.
How should I dress? How did normal people do this? Was I supposed
to get tickets to the ballet, or was a coffee house more in order?
Was I supposed to try to kiss her?
French
her?

I hadn't told Virginia I lived in my car. She
probably thought my slovenly appearance was just more disdain, a
further rebuke of the straight world. I didn't want to take her
home to meet my mother, either. There would be none of the niceties
of a storybook courtship.

"As long as you drive," I said. She had made
fun of my old rusty sedan when I pointed it out among the gleaming
cars in the school parking lot. She drove a jet-black Mitsubishi,
given to her by her grandfather, who had been a county commissioner
and realtor for decades and had owned half of Ottaqua at one time
or another.

"Okay, but you can't say anything about my
speeding. I've got a foot of lead in this here shit-kicking boot,"
she said.

"Are you trying to scare me away?" I’d delved
into the melodramatic pop of The Smiths and The Cure, music best
described as “Let’s fuck and die.” I assumed that air of nihilistic
nonchalance. "What better way to go than in a massacre of metal and
gasoline?"

"That's my Poet, finding romance in
violence," she said, laughing with the confidence of one who was
young enough to think the future rolled on endlessly, with no
detours or red lights to slow the ride.

"I'll meet you tonight." I sensed I had a
date with destiny as well as with this wild and wonderful girl.
Something stirred inside the Bone House, but I made sure the doors
were closed and bolted.

"Come here to the football field at seven and
we'll figure out what to do," I said, so casually it might have
been rehearsed. Or spoken by someone else. "Maybe we can catch a
movie down at the Flick, go out for pizza or something."

Normal, safe, teen-age stuff.

"Or we can sit and watch the stars, talk
about people. Get away from it all." Virginia’s voice had taken on
a dreamy quality, and she idly twirled a strand of her white-blonde
hair. There was a promise in her words, or perhaps a threat.
Anticipation of either rushed blood to my head, choking off reason.
I was ready to risk everything for a chance to be close to her.
And, she didn’t know it, but so was she.

We walked back to the main building. She blew
me a kiss just before we parted, then made a snatching motion with
her hand, pretending to put the imaginary kiss in her pocket.
Corny, but we both knew it was corny, which made it much more
daring.

"For later," she said, and at that moment I
fell in love for real.

“
Fell” is the proper word
for it, or “autumned,” as Mister Milktoast would say. I was rushing
from dizzy heights. My chest expanded like a helium balloon. The
clouds spun and the sky bled blue as I watched her walk through the
doors. So this was what those FM radio songs were about.

The rest of the day blurred by. After school,
I stopped by my mother's place for some clean clothes. I had been
storing my stuff in the trunk of the Valiant, but everything
smelled of musty metal and gasoline. Mother had left my bedroom
untouched, perhaps in the hope that I would one day return. I
pulled into the cluttered driveway and headed up the apartment
steps, determined to get in and out quickly. When I went inside,
she was slouched at the kitchen table in a matted gray bathrobe,
gazing out the window at the big beech tree across the street, or
maybe a dead squirrel that had been caught in a rundown.

An army of liquor bottles covered the
linoleum floor. Flies hovered over half-empty plates of food,
finding heaven in the heaps of fetid meat and moldy pools of gravy.
The stench of bourbon hung thick and sweet in the air, along with a
deeper, ranker odor. Mother was sitting in her own vomit.

She gave me a bleary look.

"My big boy's home," she rasped, her cracked
lips trying to smile, but even that coordination was beyond her.
Her lips wiggled like a pair of fat earthworms mating on a
hotplate. A strand of yellow drool ran from one corner of her
mouth, collecting at the base of her chin, and a gob fell into her
lap as she lifted her head.

She had aged a dozen years in the weeks since
I had last seen her. Creases and splotches fought for domination on
the ruined topography of her face. The late afternoon sun through
the window sharpened her features, sparing not a single wrinkle.
The light was honest and brutal.