Chapter Seven
~
. . . Corey looked at his hands. His fingers were blue. They would be gone before long. He stuffed his hands into the heavy overcoat that he had bought in McAbee years ago.
He curled his upper lip down over his teeth and brought his lower lip up to press against his snow-caked upper lip. He wondered how much of his upper lip would remain. He huffed warm air at his nose. Hot breath gushed from his lips, and blood gushed from the wounds on his face.
If only he had been able to warn Warrick in time, he might have been able to prevent what was going down in this riverside town, but few people would have believed him – particularly the prediction made by what Nick Sterns had called a moth-man. Most Americans wanted scientifically based reality, empirically verifiable reality, not a reality that was only half-accepted by academics like Nick and himself.
Ruts in the field were hidden under snowdrifts, waiting to catch him by surprise, waiting for him to step down and be encased to his knees. Scrubs clawed at his jeans, slowing his pace. He angrily kicked them aside.
Corey could see bare trees ahead of him, their ice-covered branches throwing shadows across the hillside. There might be a stream at the bottom. Probably frozen. It was not much, but it would be a break in the monotony of the open field. He clomped through the drifts -- huffing and cursing. The wind howled in his ears and pressed against his coat like a hundred hands. There was no longer any feeling in his ears, or his toes. If he stepped the wrong way, one of his toes might break off.
Off in the distance, he heard a loud pounding sound, as if someone were taking a sledgehammer to the side of an old shed or slamming walnuts against the corrugated roof of someone’s shack.
He reached the edge of the bluff and looked down into the small ravine. A clear stream, unfrozen, snaked between snow-covered chunks of ice.
Maybe this was where he did belong, where he did have a place. Maybe that was why he was not trembling, vomiting up blood or shrieking in terror. What would his life had been like anyway if he had been allowed to continue his own plane of existence? Would he have made further contributions, even to McAbee? Probably not. That was not the way his luck had run.
Corey backed away from the stream and looked around him. Several yards away he saw a snowdrift, welcoming him like white sheets on a warm bed. He could pull the collar of his coat up around his ears and curl up into a fetal position.
He felt warm thinking about it. Wondering if this environment would be the last that he would ever see, wondering if Nick would be able to find any trace of him in the boiler room of the Warrick Theatre.
“Corey…”
The drift shifted. Something stood up. A girl covered in snow.
“You are Corey.”
“Right. Who are you?”
The body shifted and a bluish hand swept away the snow that had encrusted her chest and legs. “I am Patty Ruffcorn.”
Corey reached for the short-statured girl. “You are alive.”
She shook her head sadly. “No, Corey. I’m sorry. We are both…”
Finally, Corey understood.
***
“It’s not every day,” Corey said into his cell phone, “that I dream how I am going to die.”
What are the odds that I would reach Cooter by mobile phone on his farm?
“You sure that is what you saw?” Cooter asked him.
“Yeah, fairly sure. But I think it was shown through archetypal images.”
“Can you tell where it was supposed to be?”
Corey could tell by the ambience that Cooter was outdoors on his acreage. “Somewhere,” he told his friend, “not far from Warrick. But that’s just a feeling.”
***
Two hanging signs burned on Main Street. One was located about three blocks from the Warrick Theatre and had red and purplish-blue lights that spelled out ELMER’S. The other sign, less than a block from the theatre, had white lights brighter than the sun and painted a pale wash of light on the deserted sidewalk. It spelled out the name of a café: THE FISH BASKET.
Nick shifted his interest from the café sign to the Quonset-hut theatre building as Cooter parked the Saturn at the curb.
“It’s illegal to park in front of a theatre when it’s in operation,” Corey said from the back seat.
As Nick got out of Cooter’s car, he felt a cool breath from the river on the back of his neck. He looked up at the blank marquee.
“What if it’s not in operation?” Cooter shut off the ignition.
“That…I don’t know. Anyway, no one’s going to care now.”
Warrick sat on a bluff above a bend in the river, so one could reach the river by driving at right angles – straight west on Main Street or due north on Fifth Street. Either way, one would eventually meet the curving shoreline by keeping in a straight line. The wind that blew across the river, therefore, came from the west or the north; it swept across a mile of cold muddy water.
He started at the corner of Fifth and Main Street. On the other side of South Fifth Street, flanking the side of the theatre building, stood an old garage and a collection of junked cars in the crowded lot behind it. He could smell dirty oil. The sight of abandoned cars, car parts, oilcans, and what oil and grease did to the grass and soil as it drenched the earth like blood annoyed him. almost repulsed him.
The theatre that had once been in operation, lighting up at night the single street of what amounted to a business district, now stood before them in the sunlight like an unnatural hulk of metal and concrete; it did not smell like the garage and junk yard, but it still resembled a ghostly image in a dusty photo album.
“When were you last here?” Cooter locked the car door. “Your father’s funeral, according to that George guy.”
“1994,” said Corey. “I can’t believe it was that long ago. I don’t want to believe that it was that long ago.”
“I don’t remember seeing you then.”
“No. When made the trip here for Dad’s father’s funeral, we hadn’t lived in Warrick for years, but the family had wanted his body to be shipped here from Florida for services and burial in the family plot out in Moss Ridge.”
Nick looked again at the theatre and inched toward the milky glare of the box office. A padded metal chair was still inside the tiny booth, as well as the old radiator that must have fogged up the glass on winter nights.
Corey jiggled the key chain in his palm.
“You’ve a key to this place on a key ring?” Nick asked him.
Corey barely glanced at his friend. “I added it to my key ring before I left McAbee.” He edged toward the glass doors to the left of the box office. He fitted the key into the lock, worked the key back and forth several times until it clicked into place; then he yanked the door open. The hinges whined. The echo drifted like a cat slinking under the musty lobby couch.
Corey looked down at the key ring in his hand, at the key he had just used, barely glinting in the half-light. “With this key to the front door, I used to lead Lucy here after Friday night football games to sit for a moment in the darkness. She would talk about livestock births as freely as she talked about girls’ locker-room gossip. Then her parents’ station wagon would appear to take her home.”
“Wow,” said Nick. “Good ol’ days. I didn’t have that kind of fun when my family lived here. All we did was play hide ‘n seek in the cemetery next to us or spin the bottle when we got older.”
“Our high school had a snooper gossip column in the school newspaper: “Is it true that Corey B. has his own key to the theatre? How about that, Lucy S.?”
“No shit?” said Cooter.
“Red-cheeked farm boys used taunt me in PE class, repeating wild stories they circulated about her, goading me into what they insisted would be an easy conquest. They giggled when I neglected to take advantage of what she had supposedly offering, spouted dirty phrases from car windows whenever she was seen walking with me, and proposition her when she alone. ‘You still goin’ with Corey Braedon? He don’t know shit from nothin’.’”
“That’s pretty scummy,” Nick offered.
“But I didn’t know shit. That was why I lied – why I made stuff up. But why I lied to Lucy about events that had never happened to me, I didn’t know. I just liked becoming characters I had seen on the screen in this theatre; I enjoyed stealing lines of dialogue and tailoring my life to fit movie situations.”
“We all do that to a small degree, I think,” Nick told him. “Maybe we don’t admit it, or maybe it remains below our conscious level.”
Nick’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. He waited until he could see the pink plaster walls, empty poster frames, and cobwebs in the ceiling corners. He stared at the green lobby couch and tried to imagine Corey sitting there with his girlfriend.
An auto with a faulty muffler turned left from North Fifth Street; as it swung past the theatre, the brief flash of its headlights brought the lobby to life.
“She dropped it on the floor,” Corey said as if he were speaking to himself.
“Dropped what, Corey?” Nick asked him.
“Her bra.”
“Whose?” Cooter twisted his face into an incredulous expression.
“Hers,” Corey repeated, nodding toward the unoccupied lobby couch. Perspiration beaded on his forehead. It was winter.
How can it be so warm in an unheated old building? Nick thought.
“Who was her?”
“Lucy.”
“Corey,” said Cooter. “Are you okay?”
Corey focused on Cooter’s frowning countenance in the semi-darkness. “Sorry. I was talking to her in my head. Sometimes I finish a conversation in the present that I left unfinished years before, merely because I can replay it in my head like a movie scene.”
“Oh.”
“Although, for a second, I thought I really saw her bra.”
“I know how memories can play tricks on us,” Nick told them. “You spent a lot of time here, Corey, either making out with her on that couch or calling her at her farm from in there.”
The door of the box office was ajar, and its interior was outlined in the glow from the streetlight. The streetlight: It was undoubtedly not the same light Corey had stared at so many years before when he had used the box office to call Lucy’s farm, but, for some reason, it looked the same. On the counter, they could see the square area where the telephone had been located.
Nick half-laughed as if clearing his throat. “I remember how you used to call Lucy from in there. We both would cut up with her on the phone.”
“Yeah. That was fun.”
“I was even in your kitchen with you when you called her from your place.”
“The kitchen,” Nick told Cooter. “He had a kitchen in that house with knotty-pine walls and a cut-out wooden booth which his family referred to as a breakfast nook. Corey and I would call Lucy to play practical jokes on her. Then they would call my girlfriend, Gail, and spring the same jokes on her.”
“Maybe hearing Lucy in your head,” Cooter started, “or thinking that you saw her bra makes more sense to me than you think it does.”
Corey froze. “Whoa. If I’d known this was going--”
“Stop, Corey.”
“Hmmh?”
“You were about to say that you wouldn’t have come. That’s why I didn’t tell you before you left McAbee. I need you here, more than before. Maybe you and I are not experts in this area like Nick here is, but since we’ve had similar experiences, we can support each other. You say you saw Lucy’s bra--” He pointed at the floor in front of the couch. “– I believe you.”
Corey stared at the old couch in the dark lobby and sighed. “I don’t know what I believe.”
Nick nodded at them. “Don’t worry about it, fellas.” His hand swept toward the doors leading into the theatre auditorium. “Remember where we are.”
***
Selena settled into the passenger seat of her husband’s car.
She hated cold and gloomy mornings. This morning was both. What did she hate more -- leaving their mobile home on such days or being alone for more than several hours within the confines of such a small space? It often became a metal cage with only a blasting television to keep the skeletons from coming out of her own closets, and she could only take so much of the TV commercials. When she was not nose down in her books, she often just sat at the bar counter and stared at the washcloth draped over the faucet arm in the kitchen sink, the yellow wall phone near the sink, and the narrow door of the flimsy broom closet that would never stay completely closed.
Today, Brent had to make some stops in town, to run some errands, before going to his mother’s. Sabrina had, at first, rejected his invitation to accompany him, but after receiving the strange text message on her cell phone from Cooter – something about joining him and two of his colleagues at the theatre – she decided that meeting academics might be interesting. And a break from cabin fever.
Daphne was staying with Brent’s mother who liked to have her granddaughter visit her whenever Selena would allow it, which was frequent enough. Brent approved of this arrangement; it allowed his daughter to substitute this for the time that he would otherwise feel obligated to spend with her.
As Brent shifted into reverse and backed out of the Herrmann driveway, forcing the rear of his car out into the Old River Road, she studied the back of her own orange VW still sitting in the gravel driveway. Had she locked the engine compartment after the last time she checked the oil? Brent yelled at her when she forgot to check the oil, and she yelled back at him because he expected her to remember it. The last time when the oil light on the dash had gone on and she had discovered, by checking the dipstick, that it had enough oil, she had panicked. Brent had checked the motor and discovered that the oil sensor had gone bad.
Selena then shifted her attention to the curtained window of her neighbor’s home to see if the nosy woman happened to be watching them. The curtain moved. So, she had been.
Brent drove them north along the narrow road that curved around the base of the bluffs, the tree-lined tops of which Selena could see if she pressed her head against the passenger window and squinted upward. Several roads cut through the trees as they climbed up toward residential neighborhoods, but the steepest road was Main Street that took them past the grain elevator and up to the business district.
Selena turned in her seat. Out the rear window, the Old River Road stretched away beyond the Warrick Bottoms.
Several weeks before, Selena had driven with Daphne along the Old River Road. She had just wanted to escape the narrow confines of the mobile home by going for a drive. The dirt roads to the west, she had learned from Cooter who had lived in the area most of his life, dwindled to narrow and winding paths that eventually took one to the river; those roads extending into the hills to the east carried one for miles into a tangled wilderness.
She had journeyed for a mile or so beyond Cooter’s and Ellenor’s and turned around. Pulling over to the side of the road, she had stared up at their farmhouse through the passenger window. Daphne, for once, had been strangely silent.
Her visits to the farmhouse, however, had not been as helpful to her, not as rewarding, as her telephone conversations with Cooter. She had found him to be the first man with whom she could talk about anything intimate, perhaps because he seemed to take her seriously. He listened, and when he responded, it was a direct response to her – not a rehearsed response that he might give to students. But it was not only that.
She had come to realize that she was able to say things to a telephone mouthpiece – to explain her feelings to a disembodied voice – that she probably never could to a male face. He was the priest in the next booth who heard her confession, the psychiatrist who sat listening in a comfortable chair while she stared at the ceiling.
***