The jig was up.
It had been a couple years and a few more secret spins with vertigo before Julia caught him puking in the yard one afternoon and immediately called a Quincy audiologist. No more hiding his dizzy spells now, but hopefully, a cure—Dr. Hanson explained to them that Jack might be developing Meniere’s disease, the result of an abnormal amount of endolymph fluid in the inner ear.
“So that’s why it feels like I’ve got a head full of water?” he burst out in realization. “Interesting!”
“Are you suffering from tinnitus, a persistent ringing, buzzing, roaring, whistling or hissing sound in your head?”
“A little. Off and on, in bed. Kinda sounds like white noise. But really not anything too annoying enough to keep me awake for long.”
Dr. Hanson continued, fairly optimistic. “Meniere’s disease usually affects only one ear, so you’re lucky there, and can occur at any age, but it usually starts between young and middle adulthood.”
“And has nothing to do with old age?” Jack asked, happy about the news. “My hair’s fading, as is my youth and eyes, and that sucks enough. I’m really quite sure I’m not ready to begin the complete and totally irreversible, accelerated transformation of growing ancient, yet,” a little radio patter rattled off in relief.
“Hearing loss caused by Meniere’s disease may come and go, particularly early on; sometimes signs and symptoms improve and might disappear entirely for a while. Over time, the frequency of episodes may actually lessen,” the doctor told them.
“Really? Great. It’s starting to make me a little nuts,” Julia said, relieved. “Sometimes it seems I need a bullhorn to get his attention, other times it seems like he still hears pretty well. Thanks for setting us straight.”
The audiogram chart generated from his hearing test showed some mild hearing loss in the left ear, the right, okay. “My advice is for you to turn down the music.”
“You’re going to have to talk to the boss about that,” Jack replied. “It’s an occupational hazard, I guess.”
“Fatboy, I love your show, but do your ears a favor…turn down the music.”
2
The Friday evening of October 14, 2005, set the mood for the upcoming autumnal spook-fest two weeks away. That afternoon there had been a cold drizzle; by dusk, “the fog came on little cat feet, sitting over Dallas City on silent haunches,” paraphrasing the poet, Sandburg.
The melancholy atmosphere matched the town’s mood. Local landmark, the Riverview Supper Club, once Little Italy, housed in the last standing Burg factory building, and a regional eating icon for decades, succumbed to fire only three weeks before. Everything was gutted, including its entire collection of taxidermied animals—dusty, flea-bitten creatures with glass eyes staring down at customers while they chowed down on their freshly slaughtered cousins.
To add more pall about town, tonight was the final Homecoming game for the Dallas City Bulldogs. Next September, after 90 years in the Castle, the high school would be shuttered, students bussed to Carthage in the newly consolidated school district called Illini West. Once arch-enemies, they were now on the same team. Go Chargers!
The nearly century-old building, DCHS student spirit, and teachers dedicated to shaping young minds would be no more, the victim of budget cuts because enough citizens didn’t want their property taxes raised—to the majority, that was being trod upon. This evening, at the football game, there is lamenting. Some wonder if other ghosts with a musical bent will join the one that had been heard practicing an old Henry Mancini tune in the band room lately.
Billy and Stacy could give a big shit about all that—their immediate concern was consuming the last of the half ounce of crank they invested in five days before. It had been one hell of a party, staying up for most of the past 120 hours. Tonight, still functioning, they were ready to tally up the cash after their final customer left for the game. The small fireproof safe they had purchased was brought to the kitchen table; out came a salad of cash.
“You count this, I’ll do these,” Billy instructed, sniffing, tossing the lettuce to her without a bowl, then counting and straightening up his pile neatly, like bank tellers do. “700 even. How much ya got, there?”
“575. A good week.” Stacy celebrated with another fat line. “We’re set for a while.”
Billy did one, too, and gasped when he looked over to answer her.
“What’s the matter, hon?”
“Jesus Christ, Stacy! Uhhh . . . I think I better put the straw down for a minute, Babe” he sputtered. “Your face flashed for a second and you looked just like the old Indian living in our cellar!”
“Are ya nuts? It’s just me, your old bitch from two hundred years ago,” he thought she replied, but in a low and old-man sounding guttural voice. She laughed, gathered up the money, rolled it, banded it, and put it back in the lockbox. Eying the gun, and then her boyfriend, her mind, crisped on meth, was speeding with other jackass ideas.
“Hey Billy, hon . . . .just wonderin’ . . . how big are your balls, tonight?” she asked in her soft, seductive voice, pulling out the .45, teasing the barrel up his thigh to his crotch. “Well. . . just how big are your balls tonight, huh?”
Billy knew what she wanted, they had played this game before: without hesitation, he took the gun, loaded a bullet into a chamber, gave it a few quick spins, put it to his right temple, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
He dropped it on the table and declared, “Looks like Billy’s balls are gonna be super huge tonight, Babe,” he gloated as if he had just reached the next level of Grand Theft Auto.
“Huger than super huge?” she pressed him. “Like cantaloupe-sized, Mr. Huge Balls?” Egging him on, whispering in his ear, she purred, “become Mr. Cantaloupe Balls tonight and you can do me anyway you want, hon.”
“Awesome! But, before we leave Mr. Huge Balls behind, Babe, he’s gotta have one last shot of powder,” he said, smirking, and cut out a mountain high enough to keep the rockin’ going another night. Billy avalanched the entire pile through one nostril, then picked up the pistol and spun its chamber again. “Mr. Cantaloupe Balls is gonna have a real good time tonight.”
“Methihkwiwi, hon!” Stacy shot back in her low and old-man sounding guttural voice.
Click-clickety-click.
3
Deputy Putnam was called to Cottonwood Street with 3:03 minutes left to go in the game, Dogs down by two, but driving the ball downfield. The last DCHS Homecoming game ever, and he was being called back to this troublemaking place again. The past year or so, he earned his paycheck with all the domestic disturbance calls coming from this location—including the odd complaint the occupants filed last June about “purple monkeys danglin’ from the linden tree.”
Putnam knew this would not be an ordinary call to this address; he knew when he got out of the cruiser and heard the muffled wailing coming from inside that this was not one of their usual disagreements.
His instincts proved right when he walked into the kitchen and saw the maroon and purple sprays that had joined the black mold spores on the apples and oranges and pineapples and cherries that were now fogged in a blue gunpowder haze.
Stacy was at the table, shrieking. “We were just sittin’ here and he put the gun to his head and pulled the fucking trigger!” she blubbered. “Billy, please! wake up you dumb, stupid fuck!”
Billy’s body sat slumped over the formica table, the drug money syruped in a mess of brain putty and blood that had blown out the quarter-sized exit hole.
The Winchester, shot close against his right temple, acted like a pipe bomb, the discharged unburned powder close enough to turn the intact pieces of skull on the right side of his face into a grotesque and very messy looking spent firecracker. From his left side, it looked like Billy Langdon was finally getting a nap in.
“I told the dumb shit not to do it,” she bawled to the cops. “He always plays Russian Roulette just to fucking piss me off. And now you’re dead, Mr. Huge Balls!” She was overtaken by another wave of grief and more cotton-mouth tears, her ducts dehydrated by too much dope.
At the police station, Stacy broke down and confessed that she had dared him to play a couple rounds of the deadly game--one a winner; one not. Fifteen years in state lock-up for involuntary manslaughter is a great place for rehab.
4
Julia Mayhew, likewise, did not celebrate Homecoming. Ironic that the student who was so dismal in high school was now a educated holder of an associate’s degree in Information Technology. Adding more irony to the fire, she got her first job at a consolidated high school just outside Nauvoo to do tech work where her great-great-great-great uncle Joe Smith gained his foothold in 1840.
She had persevered through the grief and pain of losing a child; through the stress of computer networking classes, Accounting 101, and HTML; through a miscarriage in her first month of pregnancy. Irony was becoming Julia’s middle name—the home test revealing that she was with child was administered on what would have been Angie’s 16th birthday.
Her broken soul seemed to be gluing back together a bit as she surprised her husband by buying Halloween treats to pass out to the little ghouls and princesses who would be stalking the town in a couple weeks—it was to be the first holiday the couple would celebrate in almost ten years. For the first time in a decade, she was beginning to look at kids Angie’s age and not wonder. Kids, she came to discover, working with and for them, was much more gratifying than the hellhole pit of manual labor and sweating with bickering adults.
Watching television with the windows closed and the sound up loud, the Mayhews didn’t hear the Winchester’s twin pops; it was the wet blur of red and blue lights from the ambulance and police cars flashing weirdly through the heavy air that drew their attention out the side window. “Looks like they had another knock-down, drag-out. And a bad one.” Julia said, muting the sound so Jack might hear what she was saying without having to repeat herself a half dozen times.
“Yep. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. But it looks like the fun’s over now though,” he said, peeking through the curtains. They watched the gurney being rolled out to the ambulance, making a bet on which one of them was the lump underneath the sheet. Jack won five bucks when the state boys finally brought out a buzzed-out girlfriend in cuffs. Then it grew quiet, with an exception of the occasional clunk of a log chain. “Wonder what will happen with Boomer?”
The Mayhews had become great friends with the beast over the years and found him to be kind, gentle and loyal. After the ambulance left with a dead Billy Langdon, and the state cop car with his arrested girlfriend, Jack and Julia snuck into the yard, pulled up the stake and removed the iron noose from the rottie’s thick neck.
They would exile him into Iowa to a friend’s farm where the old guy could live out his life herding livestock and frolic in their pond. The dognapping scheme was accomplished an hour later—Boomer was safe from the animal control officer who no doubt would have surrendered him to a shelter, restraining him behind bars. Like they did Stacy.
The Mayhews enjoyed the next door quiet for the first time since Betz died.
5
Deena Webber, a 1984 DCHS graduate, cheerleader, and homecoming queen, had asked Ian if he would chaperone her to the final Big Game as Ben was working late nights harvesting, and she was feeling kinda melancholy about the school closing. He did. They enjoyed a classic, and each other’s company.
“So, Deenie, love your outside Halloween decor with the blowup dragons, spooks, and vampires. They’re big enough you can see from the highway and the strands of orange lights wound top to bottom of each column look really impressive,” he told her during a Blue Boys time-out.
“Thanks. Yeah, thank God we have a very long ladder,” she said with a smile. Then she whispered close, as if revealing a deep, dark secret, “I also rented a dry-ice fog machine for when the trick-or-treaters enter through the foyer. I just love decorating for the holidays—any holiday.” She toasted her styrofoam cup of hot cocoa with his.
“As do I.” His yard emulated the birthday cake for Jack Mayhew’s 40th, with funny grave markers, skeletons and plastic bones scattered about. He quietly told Deena about the looped moans and groans and rattles and bumps on the “Sounds of Scares” CD he bought for the occasion, and that his ghost girls seemed to approve of the spooky-sounding sound effects because he heard happy giggles echoing throughout the place.
Ian Noonan was Martha Stewart and Ty Pennington rolled into one, as comfortable crafting cardboard tombstones as he was sanding down a walnut floor. “What’s your Christmas decorating plans going to be this year?” he probed, wanting to make sure his would be different.
She poked her elbow against his jacket, winked, and told him he would have to wait and see, but it would be something grand, like every year.
The homecoming game was a whimpering disappointment as Dallas City High’s final drive sputtered out. The quarterback twice overthrew the ball in the end zone for what should have been an easy winning TD; then, he missed a chip-shot field-goal attempt that sailed wide-tight through the fog as time ran out. Deputy Putnam at least missed that nightmare.
The crowd filing back to their cars and pick-up trucks added to the evening’s Halloween zeitgeist--the dejected hometown fans shuffling through the mist emotionless might have been zombies scavenging through the school parking lot on the prowl for the nubile, mostly unused, brains of the student body to enjoy along with their styrofoam cups of hot cocoa.
ns 15.158.61.5da2
