NaNoWriMo, Part IX

NaNoWriMo, Part IX

Thought I was done writing for the day, but it kept on. Maybe that's a good sign. Maybe not. Links to parts 1-7 and part 8 can be found on the post preceding this one.

Just a warning: Don't read too much into the faulty, first draft logic of the narrator.

Here's more:


I’ve been sitting here, trying to sort out this crazy, fucked-up day.

You know how you wake up with an idea of how a day’s going to go? I’d set this day aside to sit on my ass and watch football all day. I’d had eyes on maybe heading up to the barbecue place on the road to Quincy and getting a plate full of pulled pork. And I’d thought maybe I’d finish the night with more football and a few beers at the Mule.

Well, I don’t exaggerate too much, I think, to tell you that this Saturday had its eyes on the prize of Weirdest Day of my Life. From the time where the strange gentleman had woken me up with the news that I was asked to serve in Lyndon Waverly’s funeral to buying the suit to Teddy showing up after all this time (and borrowing my football helmet and golf club) to this whole fucked up conversation about the missing girl with the scary-ass pictures in the pit of the Trainersville Herald-Frontier.

There are two more things I think I need to cover, both of them fairly short.

The first is this: I don’t know why, exactly, I didn’t call the police. In my heart, I knew I believed Willie. I knew that, for whatever reason, Willie had been lied to.

But my brain held me back. I don’t know if there was part of me that didn’t believe Willie, or part of me that just wanted to see how it played out without involving the finest of Dickerman County’s Good Ol’ boy network.

Fact is, I didn’t even consider the question for long. And I don’t know if that was an insult to Willie or not.

We didn’t call the police, but my reasoning leads into the second topic I need to discuss, before moving on to other things.

Several hours and several beers at The Mule later, I returned to what I’d decided was, indeed, the Wells Homestead. It was a couple hours past dark. I knew this because of the complete absence of light in the sky.

I got out of the truck, shut the door, and wandered my way up the walk to the house.

I’ve never in my life described my mood as “dismayed.” But that’s the only word I could come up with. My Saturday of complete and utter sloth had been turned on its ear. I was heading to the first funeral since my parents’ in the morning. The governor’s daughter was either lost in the woods or safe at home, depending on who you want to believe, and all I could let myself do was drink oat sodas at a smalltown bar, and head home to an empty house.

I could feel the alcohol, but I wasn’t drunk. I think that’s what bugged me. Don’t know if it was my sour mood not wanting to give way to a pleasurable buzz, or simply the grease from the burgers at the Mule soaking up the alcohol. Everything had a cottony feel to it, but it hadn’t been enough to turn a dark night into a lighter one. I found myself wishing that I’d found myself in a county that allowed something a little harder than beer at its pubs, though then I’d have had to have walked home instead of driving.

“That’s my life in a nutshell,” I said, fishing my keys from my jeans pocket. “Duelling Responsible Alcoholism with my Deeply ingrained Sloth.”

I found the right key, and saw Cletus sitting the window sill, staring at me as I opened the door.

He jumped down from the window and wound himself around my ankles.

He stayed with me as I walked past his food bowl, which was empty.

I sluffed off my shoes, kicked them down the hallway, and pulled the blue bag of cat food from the open cupboard. I poured a bowl full of dry food for the cat, who ate in great, duck-like swallows.

While Cletus ate, I pulled a Shiner Bock out of the fridge, wishing again for something stronger, thinking that if I found time in the week, I’d have to head toward the next county over, and find something with a kick.

I went back into the living room, and flopped down on to the couch. I twisted the cap off my beer and punched the television on. I didn’t care what was on. I wanted noise. Flipping through the channels, I settled upon a NASCAR race. Not because I was a fan. I generally find spare time to think nasty thoughts about the heritage of somebody who wears a Tony Stewart jacket or a Dale Jr cap into public–thinking them just a step up the food chain than somebody over the age of 12 who wears a pro-wrestling t-shirt. But that night, I think I found something soothing in watching something besides my the thoughts in my head go around in a circle over and over again.

Cletus jumped up onto the coffee table, where I’d popped my feet. I moved my feet to the right to give the cat a little room to sit. He’d never been a lap-type cat, but he did appreciate proximity. It was enough for him to sit next to my feet, generally, when I found myself lazing around the house.

The fellows on the television calling the race had all nearly creamed their pants calling that there was “Trouble in turn 3,” when I heard somebody say “Preciate the food. I figured you’d come home drunk and forget to feed me.”

I jumped and did a complete 360 degree turn.

“Who said that?”

“I did.”

I went lurching into the kitchen, into the bathroom. Up the hallway. My directional senses were for shit, thrown for a complete loop by the fact that somebody had spoken to me in my home when I was under the belief that I had been by my lonesome.

I stood there in the hallway, looking into rooms, turning lights on, looking in closets.

“Who’s there?” I asked

“It’s me,” the voice said.

This time, I got a direction. I turned, tripped on the shoes I’d taken off a few minutes before, and fell into the living room, just missing the coffee table with my head.

I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. “Who?”

“Me.”

Cletus was staring at me. It was the stare I associated with Cletus when he was thoroughly entertained by something I’d done.

“Cletus?”

He opened his mouth and spoke in a calm and clear baritone:

“Michael, I hate to drop this on you, dude. But we gotta talk. I need you to tell me what happened at the newspaper.”

I’ve run up against a lot of weird shit in my life, but on this day, this one took the cake. “You can talk?”

“Is it really that surprising? Today? With everything that’s happened?”

I couldn’t force the words out. I think I finally managed to answer: “A little bit.”

“I suppose so,” he granted, not taking his eyes from mine. “Still, I need you to pull your shit together so we can have us a conversation. Understand?”

“I think so.”

“Now get up off the floor, and have a seat. Do you need another beer? You spilled yours flopping around like a fish in a flannel shirt.”

My Shiner Bock had fallen from the coffee table, and had run mostly out on the rug.

“I think I’ve had enough, tonight.”

I stood up, and took off my flannel shirt. I picked up the beer bottle, and threw the shirt on the wet spot the beer had made.

“That’s alcohol abuse,” Cletus said, looking down at the puddle now soaking into my shirt.

“You can talk.”

He looked up at me. “You’re quick, you know that? How about sitting down, now?”

I sat in my hole on the couch.

He moved himself on the coffee table to face me. He regarded me with his serious, yellow eyes.

“Michael, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about this funeral tomorrow.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more worried about going insane.

“I’m not sure what’s going on with this whole Lyndon Waverly mess, but the word I’m hearing through the grapevine is that no human’s died over on that end of town for a while. Not since that whole thing with Lester Abbott and the horse.”

Lester Abbott had died a couple weeks earlier, drunk, reportedly after announcing: “By God! I’ll prove to you mine’s bigger.”

“How’d you know about that?”

“Michael, it’s not like we all just sit around waiting for you people to come home. Did you really think we didn’t have anything better to do? We talk. A little bird told me.”

“I’ve never really given it a lot of thought.”

“We talk. And we laughed about the thing with Lester Abbott.”

“Yeah. So did we.”

“Anyway, this thing with Lyndon Waverly. Something’s not right.”

“Not right how?”

His ears went back for a second, a gesture I took at first for annoyance, but then decided it was more of an unconscious gesture, something he did while thinking or sorting his thoughts, kind of like if I’d scratched my head.

“Look at it from your end. You’ve never had this Lyndon Waverly guy over to your house. I’ve never heard you talk about him. Why all of a sudden are you not only invited to the funeral, but are an integral part of it?”

I shrugged.

“Add to that this whole thing where there’s no obituary in the paper. We looked, remember?”

“Yeah.”
“This is why I wish you’d married that Lauren chick. You don’t confide in me as much as you did her. You’d come home and tell her what happened at the paper. You don’t confide so much in the cat.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize our breaking up impacted you so deeply.”

“Well, I can see why you don’t talk to me the same way.”

“I might have if you’d talked to me before.”

“You humans are too needy. I don’t like to talk to you, to be completely honest. Makes me feel dirty.”

“Needy? Says the cat who can’t let me walk two steps into my house without demanding to be fed.”

His ears went back this time, in real irritation. He stepped across the table, onto my lap and took two steps up my chest.

“I don’t have opposable thumbs, asshole, and you keep too clean a house for there to be enough mice to live on.”

“Sorry about that.”

He backed down, and moved onto the seat next to me. “It’s alright.”

He continued: “Listen. I wish I could say it better than this, but this whole deal’s got my dander up. What happened at the paper?”

I sat there that Saturday night, and recounted my trip to the paper. With the pictures, the faked phone calls. After prompting, I even told the story of Willie and Ronnie Hammond in the woods.

I even mentioned my concerns about the police.

Cletus digested all this. “You know two people in the year 2006 with the name Willie?”

“This from a cat named Cletus.”

“You named me, asshole.”

“I don’t think the police would do any good,” he said, changing the subject.

“Why not?”

“Take this with whatever grain of salt you need to, Michael. But I notice things you don’t. Things are weird out there right now. Something’s happening out in the hills and it’s got the outsiders stirred up.”

“Outsiders?”

He struggled for a second to come up with an analogy. Finally, he said “I’m an insider, and the ones who sleep outdoors are outsiders.”

“Oh.”

“And the thing is, they don’t even know what’s going on out there, except that something’s disturbed the natural ebb and flow of the day. I can’t think of a better way to explain it than that.”

“I don’t understand.”

The ears went back, and the whiskers twitched.

“Michael, have you ever felt like you’re being watched?”

“Yeah.”

“The word I’m getting is that there’s a lot of that, right now. Only, when it happens outside, there’s enough interplay that you find out pretty quickly who’s watching who. Do you know what I mean?”

“You mean like a predator watching a prey?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Say, a pack of coyotes is watching a calf, right? Well, the calf will somestimes feel that, the same way you or I will, okay? Well, if that calf is astute enough, he can ask around. Maybe ask a bird, or a rabbit. They’ll know if something’s been stirring in the weeds.”

“I get it.”

“This has been going on for a few days, now. Everybody. EVERY BODY feels like there’s something stirring in the weeds. And anybody who can is clearing out. I’m getting word that you won’t find a deer for miles. Rabbits. Skunks. Even the predators are clearing out. The coyotes. The boar. Nobody’s heard from the bears up on Starr Mountain for weeks. And some of those guys won’t leave their own stomping grounds unless they’re dead.”

“What’s running them off?”

“We don’t know. That’s the thing. Even if it’s you guys,” I realized he meant humans, “we get a sense of it, when you’re out there. But whatever’s out there in the woods, we feel it, but we don’t have the first clue about what it is. The best I can come up with is that it’s a darkness.”

My mind whipped to the pictures from the newspaper’s camera.

“All the outsiders know is that there’s something stirring out there mainly in the hills, it’s big, and nobody wants any part of it. They’re making themselves scarce.

“And your stories don’t make me feel any better, especially that bit with the girl from the newspaper. That’s why I don’t know if talking to the police would do any good. I almost think it’d be throwing fuel on to a fiery situation.”

“I’d be more curious,” he said, almost an afterthought “why Cecil Reece didn’t call the police.”

More silence.

“So Cletus,” I said after taking all that in, neither of us saying anything. “What’s this got to do with Lyndon Waverly’s funeral?”

“Maybe nothing,” he admitted. “It’s just an oddity, that’s coupled with another couple of oddities. It may be a coincidence. It may not be. Don’t you think this whole thing is off?”

“Cletus,” I said, “this has been, by far, the strangest fucking day of my life. I don’t even know what to think, at this point.”

“Are you going to the funeral?” He asked, finally.

“Yeah, I think I have to. They’re expecting me to be there.”

“Are you taking Teddy?”

“I asked him to come. Told him to go stealth.”

Cletus took that in. I felt myself spiraling towards sleep.

The last thing I remember before falling asleep on my couch is Cletus saying that it probably shouldn’t be that strange that my cat’s talking to me, when one of my best friends is the Ghost of the 26th President of the United States.