The Grimscribe's Puppets (23 page)

By Scott Nicolay

“On prend un peu de recul. On abandonne la douleur un instant—on s’éloigne. IL N’Y AVAIT QU’à FERMER LES YEUX—”

—
Maurice Roche

Ray Bevacqua hated what winter did to central Jersey, but he was barely over the bridge from Lambertville before he decided he hated it even worse in eastern Pennsylvania. The everywhere dull grayness, the dirt and soot fouling the plow-curled mounds of snow along the roads, all that was the same. But west of the Delaware, rows of low and lumpy hills ate the daylight, and last week’s snow had not even begun to melt.

Route 202 was a tunnel through a shadowed world whose brightest color was brown. Woods that in spring or summer would offer green relief from the drab and dreary towns were gnawed to bleak orchards of black bone. Ray’s mood already sucked, and the PA landscape only aggravated it.

Even without the miserable scenery, Ray experienced increasingly mixed feelings about this trip. Spending the weekend with Danny and Colleen, having to sit through their lovey-dovey bullshit; this was not looking like the best way to heal his own mangled emotions. Worse, the last time he saw them was the day he and Lisa drove down to help them move into that same dingy little apartment in Lansdale. The high point of their trip was almost getting caught mauling each other in Danny’s bathroom when they thought everyone else was downstairs, and that meant he would be reminded of Lisa every time he took a leak, standing there with his dick in his hand...

Lansdale. It looked even more dismal than the other sorry-ass towns he’d driven through to get there. More boarded up shops, more abandoned vehicles; everything grayer, deader. A total shithole. But this was where the last of his three best friends had packed off to with his just-out-of-high school girlfriend.

It was always the four of them: Danny, Luke, Lisa, and Ray. Danny and Ray grew up in the same central Jersey burb, friends since junior high; they met Luke and Lisa freshman year at Rutgers. Lisa that first week of Freshman Comp, when she’d leaned across the aisle to him while their untenured junior prof scrawled a line from “Sailing to Byzantium” on the board, and said, “I must tell you, this man knows absolutely fuck-all about William Butler Yeats.” And, oh, there it was: that accent...Dublin and Manchester blended so smoothly as to give the lie to the shattered marriage that produced her.

Two months later they met Luke at a party in Frelinghuysen, the tower dorm on the Raritan River where he lived on the special floor reserved for students in the Fine Arts Honors program. It was Lisa who got the invite, but she and Ray and Danny were already inseparable by then and she brought them along. Luke, Mr. Perfect Hair and Tortoise-Shell Frames, cornered Ray to ask who his friend was, the blonde, and they struck up a conversation about
symbolisme
in art and literature, Odilon Redon and Rimbaud. And then they were four. Ray always considered himself the pivot that brought them together, made them a group; the Nick Fury of their Avengers. Had he thought they’d be a team forever? Wrong again. Truth was, the whole thing began falling apart months before the class of ’90 walked.

First Danny found this young bimbo from Temple over Christmas Break, just a frosh, and they saw less and less of him until June when he finally packed off to Colleen’s hometown in PA. That meant back to working in a garage, same as high school. Brand new BA in Communications and he’s replacing fan belts. The rest of them didn’t even need to look at each other to share their disgust. But Ray hadn’t complained: his roommate’s departure left room for Lisa to move in. First girl he’d actually lived with after dating all those others, the one he’d wanted all along.

Next Luke got a plum design job in the city and an apartment in the Village. Which left Ray the last one still at RU, in grad school and switched from English to Comp Lit, dissecting Poe and struggling through Maurice Roche with a measly three semesters of undergrad French.
Tel quel
...if he could just tell what the hell...

But he still had Lisa. They finally started up as a couple third quarter senior year. None of them had discussed that this was a big part of the reason Luke left, but Ray was sure they all knew it. Well, maybe not Danny, but Danny was busy with his own thing. And Ray kept asking himself why he hadn’t asked her out way back freshman year, back when he wasn’t buried in grad work and she didn’t have a full-time job. Back when his dad was still around. He remembered how she hit it off with the old man when he discovered they both smoked Benson & Hedges Multifilters. “Why don’t you strike up with this one?” he asked one night in front of them all, and who squirmed worse: Ray or Luke?

Problem now was Ray
didn’t
have Lisa anymore, had lost her long blonde hair, her freckled cleavage, her Dublin accent that wasn’t all Dublin and only came all the way out when she was drunk. He still had no clue how he blew it, but he had and she was gone. No more Friday night road trips to Princeton for ice cream; no more plying her with Zinfandel for pre-coital readings of
Finnegan’s Wake
.

A year earlier, three best friends would’ve closed ranks to carry him through a breakup. But dating Lisa meant losing Luke, and Lisa’s own departure left him without his closest confidante, the one person who stuck by him through three years of breakups. Of course Danny, his original roommate and oldest friend, had already done his own up-and-run.

But now, surprise, surprise, it was Danny to the rescue, calling out of the blue as if he already knew the situation: “Come on out to our place for the weekend! We’ll hang, have some brewskis, watch some movies, take your mind off things! It’ll be just like old times.” And there was the vague suggestion that Colleen had an available friend or sister. Or was it a cousin? Probably some steel-town girl with an ass like a Budweiser Clydesdale. Which, yeah...he’d gone without for more than a month. He would. No question. Even sober.

When Ray was a kid, Pennsylvania was a special destination. His dad drove the family out to the Poconos several times each summer. They’d cross the border at the Delaware Water Gap, and Dad always told him to look for the Indian chief’s face on Mt. Tammany. Ray would press his own face against the glass and twist his neck at odd angles, desperate to puzzle any kind of image at all out of that blocky granite ridge while his father cruised by without slowing. It was years before he realized the face was a
profile
. By then it was a disappointment all round. He was past the age where a face in a rock formation held any magic, and his dad had long since given up on him anyway, in more ways than that. Not like there was anyone better than the old man at missing what was staring him in the face: ten year old Ray’s mom jetting off to Cali with her boss, or the way a three-pack-a-day habit was going to put him in the ground eight days before exam week Ray’s sophomore year at RU. Least his friends were there for him then.

The night’s black mist soaked through everything by the time Ray entered Lansdale proper, but the streetlights were late coming on; city fathers probably skimping on electricity. The Interstate T’ed out, forcing him to navigate a broken grid of backstreets to reach Main. Rills of dirty snow lined them all, covering the walks on the side streets and rising up the walls of buildings.

Last time he came through here, he hadn’t noticed just how many storefronts were empty. But Lisa rode with him that time, so he wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings. He was more interested in copping a feel, while she kept shoving his hand away and telling him to keep his eyes on the road. Now he had nothing to feel, nothing to watch except the progression of empty shops, windows soaped or boarded, some even broken. The recession hit Lansdale hard as a Mike Tyson uppercut.

Though it wasn’t much after 5:00 p.m., the streets were all but empty. He passed a handful of gray, shambling figures, heads hunched against the bitter wind, and in some of the more sheltered entrances, vaguely human bundles of rags, but these scattered souls comprised the visible extent of Lansdale’s population.

Here and there where a building flaunted an expanse of wall, rising one or two stories above its neighbors or turning full broadside at a corner, painted advertisements for vanished businesses still clung to the bricks like giant splotches of lichen: Nehi, Something-Something Hardware, “Hickiry” Broom and Cigar Box Factory. Lansdale was a ghost town haunted by its own lost prosperity.

Ray cruised rapidly down Main until a light caught him close to what he took for the center of town. He could’ve run it; there was no other traffic and no cops—at least none he could see. But it would suck ass to get pulled over in this shit berg, so he stopped.

Drumming his impatience against the steering wheel, Ray flicked his eyes left to right. No traffic crossed in front of him; none waited. His gaze caught on a broad building of pale brick to the left. It was vacant like so many others, “FOR RENT” sign taped askew to the inside of its door, but a pale lemony glow from inside highlighted the forlorn arc of gilt uncials that spanned the wide front window. A pair of the scrubby, leafless trees that ran up either side of Main, relics of early ‘80s optimism, blocked parts of the text, but for a moment Ray was sure he read: “EYES EXCHANGE BANK.” Which, no fucking way: that was Roche, not reality. Great. His goddamn thesis was affecting his vision now.

He moved his head forward, back, angling for a clearer view of the floating letters, even pulled up a couple feet, but only made it worse. Now he couldn’t be sure of a single word, couldn’t be sure he’d ever been sure.

But he could see that the light in the building came from a single bare bulb on a sagging wire. It revealed an interior empty except for a crooked stepladder and newspapers spread across the visible portion of the floor. And the shadows. They registered all at once: elongated inky streaks unfurling over the dim, scattered sheets of newsprint. He was positive they weren’t there initially; their appearance was as sudden as if some person or persons unseen hurled broad streamers of black velvet from the near end of the empty lobby. But Ray saw no one. The light was poor, but enough to be almost certain that the building’s interior was vacant. And still, the shadows moved, angling over each other and lengthening until they stretched up the back wall to the ceiling. Probably vagrants who wanted out of the cold and found an open door, but kept hidden from his sight by some trick of architecture and optics. He oughtta report them. But to whom? He had no idea where to find the local police station. Not that he could picture himself strolling into a Pennsy cop shop to report invisible bums in an empty bank.

The patterns of their movements reminded Ray of searchlights over a dark cityscape, except these were beams of moving, searching darkness. He watched them, forgetting the light, until all at once they poured out from the front window, over the dirty sidewalk and straight toward his car.

His forehead struck the wheel before bouncing back against the headrest. Outside a dark tree trunk not much thicker than his arm rose above a visible crease in the car’s crumpled hood, faintly backlit by the glow from his headlamps. He was on the sidewalk, the better part of a block west of the bank. On the left side of Main. He’d traveled over two hundred feet, crossed the center line, popped the curb, hit a tree. He recalled none of it. The burnt-syrup smell of hot antifreeze stung his nostrils and he knew the radiator was probably leaking.

Had he zoned out, fallen asleep at the wheel? No one had stopped to check him out. No cops, no cars, no pedestrians. Adrenalin took hold and he got wild; restarted the engine and threw the car in reverse, bouncing back over the curb with a loud scrape from the undercarriage. He hoped it wasn’t the oil pan or the tranny. The Slant-6 Duster that had served him all through Reagan’s second term and now into Bush’s first wasn’t making it much farther without help. Danny and Colleen’s place was close. His friend would fix the radiator and whatever else was screwed up—he had the skills, he had the technology. This visit might be serendipitous after all. Danny would make it all better. And that was
all
Ray wanted now: someone to make it better.

Continuing down otherwise empty Main, he looked left and right into storefronts, compelled to search for more of the long shadows. Several times he thought he glimpsed the interplay of dark streaks within other buildings that proclaimed themselves empty, down alleys, even once in a recessed doorway. He wondered if the whole town was infested with the mobile strips of darkness and he’d only now become attuned to their presence. Were they a trick of the light? But there hardly was any light now. Still they showed, dark on dark. Ray shook his head to clear his vision and fixed his gaze straight ahead. He didn’t need this. Whatever caused the shadows, they were not his problem, not something he wanted to see. He had other issues to deal with. Plenty. He kept his eyes on the road and soon emerged from the moribund downtown into the side streets that led to Danny and Colleen’s crummy apartment.

Ray was in full panic mode by the time he steered off Main. His heart pounded and it was all he could do not to pin the accelerator. He glanced at the scribbled sheet from his notebook on the passenger seat, then snatched it up and pressed it to the wheel with his right hand. He’d forgotten the way since that day he helped Danny and Colleen move, so he’d needed to ask for new directions over the phone. But when he came up on their apartment complex a few minutes later, he immediately recognized the plain brick U, a blocky three-story brick magnet drawing him back to his last significant human connection. He pulled in beside Danny’s restored ’72 Challenger, braking at the last second so as not to slam the lot’s grimy border of plowed snow. Snow got like rock when it was hard and crusted. The front of his vehicle was already fucked, and the snow would sure as shit mash it worse. No telling how much more his radiator could take before it was a complete write-off; no need to compound his problems.

He got out and inspected the damage in the scant light of a single flood high up the side of the building. It was enough to see the deep vertical crease that traversed the grill. Viscous coolant dripped steadily to the pavement. No question the damage breached the radiator. At least the headlights were intact. But what about him? He never blacked out before. Not sober anyway. True, the anxiety attacks came more often since Lisa split—but he never lost consciousness during those.