Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery Read online

Back home, I drew a large glass of water from the tap, no ice, and drank down half before pouring it out and replacing it with something a little more amber-colored. Topping off the Beam with a shot of Coke and supplementing it with a High Life, I propped open the front door with a mud-caked boot and watched the uneven downpour of rain from my recliner.

  Time passed. I finished the bourbon and three Millers under the impression that I'd get drunk. All that happened was the hangover returned. I slept until the rain stopped at dusk, at which time my cell phone rang. It was my lawyer, Jarrell Clements.

  I flipped open the phone and said, "Run out of my money so soon? You know I'm on a cop's salary."

  His voice was purely old school country. "Not anymore, you’re not."

  "Ouch."

  "Ah, hell," he said, "ain't a damn thing, son. Even Thomas Jefferson died in debt."

  "As long as you realize how broke I am."

  He chuckled. His voice was low and refined but contained a slight drawl, like a verbal birthmark. "I came in fully understanding that. Can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

  "That's an old saying."

  "I'm old school. Gimme a minute and I'll tell you firsthand about the War of Northern Aggression."

  I rolled my eyes. "You got something?"

  On his side of the line, I heard shuffling papers. "Sorry. My old ass is getting disorganized. The wires aren't firing as smoothly as they used to. I’m trying to get all my business settled for the day."

  "That's all right. You're working hard."

  The shuffling ceased. "Janita Laveau's made a turnaround in her opinion of you."

  Now that was something. "What's that mean?"

  "Means she's made it clear she does not want you prosecuted for ramming her with your car. Damndest thing I've ever heard of. You must have knocked something loose in her brain."

  Even though I felt an extreme amount of guilt over the accident, I wasn’t ready to bow out for a stint in lock-up. "Anybody listen to her?"

  "Course not. Nobody's rooting for you in this situation."

  "Nothing to root for, Jare. I got drunk, T-Boned a poor woman's Chrysler."

  "Can't do anything about the DUI, but you already know that. That's a done deal. You were drunk, admitted to a breathalyzer. It would take a whole lot more than what you’ve got to be able to get that dropped down to reckless driving or some other nonsense. But if she clangs around enough, she might convince the DA to reduce or throw out the other charges."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Me?" He made an incredulous pfft sound. "I'm gonna let her do it. You don't go-"

  "Looking a gift horse in the mouth. That’s also an old one.”

  “I’m an old man. A day older’n dirt and twice as gritty. You’ve got to have a little faith in the old man, though. I’m all that’s keeping you from living the next six months in a box.”

  “You’ve got no bedside manner, do you?”

  "Ask the people I lost cases for. They'd agree. Hell, ask my exes. They’d say the same thing. Have a good evening. I'll keep you posted on Laveau, see if she’s using some kind of reverse voodoo on you."

  “That’s not funny,” I said.

  Jarrell was about to say something, but I cut him off. I hung up the phone and watched the rain sweep in large sheets across my lawn.

  * * *

  I proceeded uneasily inside. The Boogie House was dark, but it seemed to be made of bones or matchsticks or something. This was not the juke joint of reality, but a strange, otherworldly manifestation of it.

  There was no moonlight to guide me, and clouds had blocked out the moon. I walked on, stumbling forward into the gaping holes of the building's floor in a strange, determined zombie-march. Each time I fell down, I almost lost consciousness, my eyelids trying to shut so I could rest. I persevered.

  "He's not here," I repeated, unsuccessfully trying to convince myself that the dead body was gone. I don't know if you can break out in gooseflesh in dreams, but my entire body went cold. My stomach was engorged with ice water.

  The ragged old piano situated behind him, the dead man stood at the room’s center. Smiling broadly, one grizzled hand reaching behind his leg and tinkling random piano keys. Reality broke, and I was left hanging onto the jagged shards of what I hoped was a dream.

  I lurched toward him, fighting to keep my eyes open. Getting closer, I saw that he wasn't smiling at all. His teeth and gums shone through ragged flaps of skin. His mouth had eroded almost entirely. It was a fleshless grin. His tuxedo, complete with tails, shoddily concealed the smeared blood and bile and mucus. There were other things on him, too, things that crawled and sputtered around at night on dusty wings, but I tried not to think about them.

  I would say his eyes were fixed on me, but some predator had plucked them from the sockets, so all I saw was cavernous darkness. The body, even in dreams, was not immune to decay.

  We stood across from one another, long-lost strangers. I wanted to scream - my skin wanted to crawl off to some other place when I saw him - but it was an empty, silly gesture. All I did was open my mouth and make a horrible choking sound. An astronaut lost in space.

  "Don't be frightened," he said. He opened his mouth in what appeared to be a sigh, but no breath escaped him. "I'm not here to hurt you."

  I stammered, searching for a reply. I looked down. The suit coat bulged below the final button, and I gawked at his paunch as I reached for something to say, but he didn't seem interested in the questions circling my mind, which is where I felt his presence strongest. He was peering into my brain, checking my thoughts for...for something, but I couldn’t quite know what at this moment.

  He answered one of my questions before I could ask it. "That's gas in my belly," the body said. "The gas will continue to accumulate until I'm embalmed. Don't you know anything 'bout the dead?"

  That was easy. "I know they don't tinkle piano keys or wear cheap tuxedos."

  The lipless grin widened, and his shoulders shook in mock laughter. I say ‘mock’ because it was an impossible gesture. He couldn't laugh or sigh. How could he talk? Then he said, "Maybe the dead that you knew didn't, but, then again, they don't have a monopoly on what we all do, now do they?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I never thought about it, I guess."

  Simply being here opened up a whole new world for me. I had all sorts of new things to consider.

  "Seems like you should. I am here, after all."

  "I'm not so sure about that. You’re dead, and I’m dreaming. It's no more complicated than that, I don't think."

  I tried to rationalize. This is not happening, not happening happening. This 'thing' is a hallucination in a dream, a dream you cannot control somehow. He's actually in a morgue, ready to be autopsied.

  But I didn't believe any of that, no matter how fervently I tried to convince myself. I was utterly dumbstruck. The urge to ask the all-important question, not how but why he stood there, circled my mind, buzzard-like, but in the dream I didn't possess the faculties to pose the question. I could only gape stupidly at him and wonder.

  Flies lit on his face, skirting in and out of grotesque wounds I honestly tried not to stare at. He seemed not to notice. He said, "Don't forget about what you already know. Sometimes re-seining the pond will yield new fish."

  I thought about men holding nets and walking the length of a drained pond. I thought about mud on the ends of sticks, and of a gross, dark net, and I had trouble keeping my stomach from rolling. It was then I looked down and saw I was wet all the way up to my waist, and I smelled the distinct odor of pond water.

  There were more pressing matters for the moment, however. I said, "Are you telling me to go back to the Boogie House?”

  I looked around. “I mean, I’m here, but – I’m dreaming, right? This isn’t the place place, is it? The last two times I went there – or came here – all that came out of it were gunshots and dead bodies. I'm afraid of what I'd discover if I went back."

  "Fear isn't
what motivates you, Rolson. The truth does. You're a seeker, and you are looking because you have something inside you that needs solving as much as my death does."

  “If you want it solved, maybe you should. You’re in the all-powerful business now, invading people’s dreams and all.” To put a finer point on it, I thought of something crude and mean, hoping he’d see it, but he gave no indication that he had peeked that far into my head.

  “It don’t work like that,” he said, and the resulting look, somehow, was saddening.

  He breathed out, and I swear to God I smelled putrefaction, even though I knew it was a dream. My stomach lurched, and I leaned over to vomit. All that came out was dust and sand. It flowed out of me in a coarse, grimy jet. I closed my eyes to avoid looking, but my mind created the picture of it all, and in that picture, I saw more than just dead bodies and old memories. Flashes of situations, of things I had not yet seen but would, jumped in front of me in a continuous stream, pummeling my sense.

  All of the answers I needed might have been present in those few seconds of torment, but I couldn’t know. It seemed like I didn’t exist on the right plane of existence for it, that - just maybe - I had to be in the same condition as the dead man to be able to understand it all, like a foreign language. I could catch clips but only clips, and I couldn’t formulate them into a narrative of any kind. It was just data. Binary code. Ones and zeroes for those who had stepped beyond.

  Did he somehow think I might be able to understand it, or was this just an unfortunate outcome of being privy to this world? Did all people who ended up on this side of the void have to experience the same kind of torture?

  When I was done, I stood up and saw his face mere inches from my own, his eyeless sockets glaring into me. There was detail in the face, but it still looked like an oil painting in which the artist used thick, broad strokes. "Who did this to you?" I asked. I didn't expect an answer, and I didn't get one, but I couldn’t walk away without asking it.

  It just seemed like the easy way to go about solving this, getting the information directly from the source. I can be fucking silly like that, trying to use logic.

  He reached two purplish hands out and placed me face-up in the hole at our feet as if I were a toy. A puppet. Ha.

  Through eyes growing hazy and confused, I stared up at him, garbling nonsense words, trying to get at what I'd been trying to say all along: What do you want me to do about this?

  Dirt poured from the cuffs of his jacket, filling the hole, covering me completely, caking my eyes and clogging my mouth with cemetery dirt, and all I could think to do was scream. I didn’t care about goddamn answers or goddamn memories, but I couldn’t focus on the one thing that I needed: goddamn air.

  Try as I might, nothing came out but that choked, ineffectual whuffling sound. My hands wouldn't move. Only my eyes would work, and the last thing I saw was him placing a section of floorboard across the hole above me, leaving me in a warm, forbidding darkness.

  * * *

  I snapped awake, sensing the darkness crumpling in on me, crowding me like bullies in a schoolyard. Never did loneliness plague me more than the early evenings I awoke hungover on my couch, staring down the possibility of yet another sleepless night.

  I sat up and breathed in a deep whiff of a bizarre smell, something I recognized but couldn’t put in context. The Boogie House. The dead body. Could have been. It went away before I could put it together, but I was beyond feeling shock, so I just nodded and processed the possibility that I was breathing in the air from miles away.

  Nights had never been easy, but I was growing accustomed to them. With Vanessa gone, I spent more of them awake than not, though the perpetual ache of her absence was growing fainter each day. The possibility of her return had diminished so that it only occasionally flickered in my mind, like the sudden realization of something you’ve already done.

  In the first months of our "separation" (her words), the house possessed a lived-in quality, as if it, too, entertained the thought of her coming back. The feeling that Vanessa might walk through the front door persisted long after the reality that she wouldn't had set in. All of that had disappeared, too, leaving a simple and desperate isolation in its place.

  I rolled over on the couch and checked the clock on my cell. 9:30 on the dot. Too early in the day for morose dreams. I had to get out of the house.

  With the vision of the dead man horrifyingly fresh on my mind, I dressed soundlessly in the dark of my bedroom and drove my junker of a second vehicle into downtown Lumber Junction. The rain had called it quits, but everything you could touch, bump into, or walk on was wet.

  * * *

  Lumber Junction is a town bedecked in a blue collar, a town of truck drivers and iron workers, of men who work on cars and race cars and make meth in their cars. People who live in the Junction commute and yet never really leave. They never really think to leave. They just stay because that’s how it is. In that way, it was a thousand other towns in the nation and also no other town in the nation. Distinctly generic, maybe.

  The town could have gone in another direction and prospered so that its people did not struggle to make ends meet, but it did not, and the result is a picked-over hull of a place. It used to be that the timber coming through gave people jobs, and the Junction was, for a short time, a hub of activity. It was situated just far enough away from Dublin and Vidalia to be pleasant and yet close enough to enjoy the comforts of slightly larger towns.

  In addition, the people have mellowed to the point that they seem somewhat zombified by life here, or at least lulled into a faux-drugged existence. Bootleggers and cattle thieves and outlaws used to occupy the city, but those types, holdovers from a specific era in American history, have gone away, leaving behind desperate, working-class folks. Since there is no income flooding in, the remaining businesses are closing. The Junction’s downtown could exist in any number of desolate American cities, places where the world has gotten up and moved on. It is the starter wife that never quite managed to find a suitable follow-up partner.

  The pickup I drove belonged to an old buddy of mine who said if I could get it running, I could have it. That was two years ago. I'd put some plugs and wires in it, replaced the battery, and rebuilt the transmission. Three hours here or there on weekends. I kept it in order to haul things off to the landfill or help people move. Insurance was cheap, though I imagined it was about to spike. The good side was I wouldn't be driving it - or anything else - much longer. The other car was totaled, so the pickup would have to do for now.

  I parked the F150 in back at Virgil's and rounded the parking lot, looking for the truck I had seen last night. A moment of clarity saw the particulars of the taillights flashing in my mind, and I thought I might be able to recognize them. No luck. I went inside, where the mood was at least artificial enough to make me forget about how fucked up the last twenty-four hours had been.

  Virgil's Bar was a small, reputationless place. There weren't many fights, no one sold meth out of the bathrooms, and women going home with someone generally did so for the company and not in exchange for money.

  But there were exceptions to every rule.

  The haze of smoke and long-soured beer hung as thick as humidity in the air, and the reddish glow of neon gave me an unpleasant feeling. Reminded me of the Boogie House somehow.

  The people who didn’t stare made a point of not staring. I knew what I was doing by showing up here. At a bar. If the Junction were bigger, there'd be more for struggling alcoholics to do. More distractions. More things to keep me out of trouble. People "in the program" say that excuses only get you so far into the recovery process. What those people don't realize is that an excuse only needs to get you to the bar, get that first beer open. Then the excuses go right out the fucking window.

  My best friend was nowhere to be found. Deuce was usually propped up here in the evening for a couple of beers before heading home, but his usual spot at the bar was occupied by a woman whose face was turned down
and displeased.

  Deuce would be pissed to know he was the last one to find out about my troubles. He liked to gossip.

  I ordered a High Life and a shot of Beam and was halfway done with my beer and wholly done with the excuse that had gotten me here when two old timers came down to say hey.

  "This ain't official business, I take it," the bearded, cockeyed one said, drawing his lips back into a half-teasing smile.

  "Unless I was secretly hired by Miller-Coors," I replied, taking a long tug on my High Life. “How are the two of you doing this evening?”

  Lyle Kearns and Red Tyson. Two old pulpwooders claiming to be retired but really just too worn down to do the back-breaking work anymore. What made them best friends was they liked to drink up their social security checks every month.

  “I shouldn’t be able to complain, but I still do,” Lyle said. Red nodded in agreement.

  Lyle was burly but withering, broad-faced and sporting a white sea captain's beard. Red, on the other hand, had no distinguishing features, except that he looked like a baseball knocked way out of shape. He was big and blunt and dumb, and you could probably pick him up and beat someone to death with him and he wouldn't register it had happened.

  But even though they were like two old Chevys left on blocks in the yard, they weren’t useless. A little worse for wear, but not one foot in the grave.

  “I hope it’s nothing serious,” I said.

  “I just don’t feel good,” he replied quickly. “It ain’t anything of the mortal sort, but goddamnit, I just don’t have it all together. Makes me think I’m dragging some kinda sickness along with me.”

  “I get like that sometimes,” I replied.

  “Least it ain’t cancer,” Red said quietly from beside him. “You see Buddy Freemantle wither up like an old sack of collards?”

  Lyle nodded this time. “It gets to be most of the way through the day, and I just start feeling feverish, run down. Can’t get my mojo rising, you know? It ain’t cancer, but it might as well be. That’s what’s in my head whenever I get a sickness I can’t shake.”