SLEEP TIGHT
an excerpt
(C) 2018 Keith Bergman. Please link to this site in lieu of reproducing.
These are excerpts of a first draft.
1963:
"How come we don't have a hotel in River Mouth?"
"Because the fog eats people in the night up there."
Kirby squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, staring at a point somewhere over his district manager's head. "You're a real fucking hoot, Chet."
Chet shrugged, brushing crumbs off the ledger on his desk. "S'what they tell me. It's one o' them local legends. Lotta people disappear up in those parts. Nothin' really up there to go see, I dunno if it's 'cause of the stories, or if the stories are from people up there bein' bored."
"Yeah, and there's a Sasquatch out west waitin' to eat your pork and beans when you go camping. Save me the heebie-jeebie act."
Chet shrugged again. He shrugged a lot. "Sue me, buddy-roe, I didn't make up the story. It's a whole thing. Now Pendleton, there's a whole soap opera there, we had a property till this local guy come in and -- "
"Fuck Pendleton. I wanna check out this River Mouth. If there's no good full-service property up there, we could really clean up. Maybe play into the whole ghost story thing, get people to come up and check out the spooky town and buy some knick-knacks in the lobby."
"It's half a day's drive and the road sucks. Place isn't next to anything. What's in it for you?"
Kirby squinted. "You ever actually read these memos?"
"Try not to. They give me gas."
"Well, dumbo, this last one says they're doubling the commission on any new properties we break ground on this year. Maybe you don't wanna big fat Christmas bonus, but I'm tryin' ta get enough scratch together so that when I ask Cheryl's dad for his blessing, he don't flip his goddamn wig on me for wearin' last year's shoes."
"All comes down to the trim, don't it? I shoulda known."
"You watch your fucking mouth, Chet, that's my fiance." There was a taut second or two of silence, and then both men burst out laughing.
"Listen to you, 'watch your mouth,' cussin' like a dock worker right here in the damn office."
Kirby shrugged. "G'wan with it. It's Maureen's day off, right?"
"So you goin' up there today? It's already after lunchtime."
"Nah, I'll wait'll tomorrow. Get an early enough start, spend a couple hours poundin' the pavement, I can be home in time for late supper and a drink at Bart's."
"Sounds like someone's afraid of the killer fog," Chet shot back, only he said it 'keel-er FOG' in what he imagined was a good Dracula impression.
"You're an asshole, my friend, don't let anyone tell ya different." Kirby ducked out of the office, barely dodging several balls of crumpled up paper and laughing like hell.
By the time Kirby rolled into River Mouth, though, he knew he wouldn't be back before nightfall, and he was plenty pissed off about it. He'd hit a pothole on 47 that knocked one of the magnetic "RITZ INNS INC PROPERTY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION" signs off the door of his station wagon and flattened one of his tires. He rapped his knuckles a good one changing it, and he'd forgotten to bring a spare shirt -- a rookie mistake -- so now his jacket covered sweat stains the size of pie plates. He hoped it masked the body odor his roll-on and Aqua Velva were barely containing. He'd scrubbed his hands for minutes in the washroom of a diner north of Bartlettsburg and he could still see faint swirls of oil and road grime in the whorls of his fingerprints.
River Mouth looked like a real pile of crap, he had to admit. There was no swell of restaurants and hotels at the entrance to town, the sort of real estate he thrived on. There was just space with no houses, and then space with more houses, and then a rusty sign that read "WELCOME TO SCENIC RIVER MOUTH, POP 4659, HOME OF THE HAWKS" between the shiny scars of BB holes.
He drove on, slowing to 35 as the patchwork of houses on larger lots gave way to some pleasant enough residential blocks. The usual car garages, dissolute shops and small offices lined the main thoroughfare. He reached downtown in a minute or two.
He wasn't sure where the locals were doing their shopping, but wherever it was, it was doing a number on the place. He was used to seeing downtowns this decrepit when new shopping centers had gone in at the edge of town, usually by the gleaming new exit to an interstate, but he was surprised to see so much of downtown River Mouth empty. There was an A&P with some cars in its lot, a men's shop with outdated suits hanging on crooked mannequins, a store called Record Barn, a druggist with a soda fountain, one of those old time peanut shops that roast 'em right in the store. But half the windows he saw were soaped over, and only a few had real estate agents' signs pasted up. There were vacant lots in places that seemed like good retail locations, old charry debris overgrown with young trees and scrubby grass.
Kirby hit the one diner that still looked alive. A tired woman wiping the counter with a dirty rag jumped a little when the bell on the door rang. "Evenin'," she said. "Anywhere ya like."
He grabbed the stool closest to the door. No one else was in the joint. "You closin' up soon?" he asked.
"Not for another hour yet. We usually get a coupla stragglers after work. Me, I'm content to close up after the lunch rush, but the boss man don't see it that way. You know what you want, or you need a menu?"
"Coffee, and a menu, thanks."
She arched an eyebrow. "Gonna have to make a fresh pot, this late in the day."
He peered at his watch. It wasn't even five yet. "I can wait."
She sniffed, dropped the menu in front of him on the swirl-damp counter, muttered "tuna melt's off" and grabbed the empty Bunn pot.
He ordered a patty melt and onion rings, knowing he'd pay for it later, sipped his coffee when she brought it over, and picked up and set down the ratty, scrawny newspaper someone had left on the counter. The River Mouth Gazetteer shared the same AP wire stories he saw in every other paper in every other town he scouted. The funnies boasted Peanuts and Dondi and Brenda Starr, and the editorial page lamented the state of the water in their lake and wondered if any of the proposed new highways in the state would bother extending a better expressway to town.
Why would it? Kirby wondered, sour over his delayed coffee and his flat tire and his dirty shirt. He saw the writing on the wall, like people said. That was one of his strong points. There were gonna be winners and losers, when the highways came in, and some of these sleepy towns out here were gonna win big. They'd be exactly one pee break away from the beach, or their folks would have the gumption to put up the world's biggest of something, to make the marks stop and spend some dough on their way to whatever the hell they were doing that summer.
But this dump? Jeezly crow, they'd given the hell up. You could smell it in the air. The whole town stunk like a damp basement, half the stores were closed, and if everyone here did their job like this lady, he was willing to write the whole burg off as losers. Kirby was oriented for success -- he read every book about salesmanship and getting rich that he could get his hands on, subscribed to several informative newsletters, and kept his wits about him at all time. Why else did Mr. Abernathy let him take the car and go on these fact-finding missions without a bunch of meetings and proposals first? Mr. A knew a go-getter when he hired one.
Kirby flipped through the Gazetteer some more, annoyed at how long his food was taking. He noticed an ad for River Mouth's lone movie house. Their last showing, the only one not at matinee prices, was at 6pm. Where was the late show? No monster flicks at midnight? He saw an ad for a drive-in running the second-run pictures in a double feature (he wasn't much of a movie guy and even he'd seen both of these flicks already). He quickly noticed that the drive-in was a good thirty miles from town, and that they offered "onsite camping and discount motel rates for patrons."
"You ever go to this drive-in over to... Fort Cummings?" he asked, peering down at the ad, when she brought his plate over.
She shrugged. "Once or twice, yah. Don't like to be gone overnight tho."
Kirby scowled. His medium patty melt crunched when he bit into it. "I mean, you don't have to stay over, though, do you?"
She snorted. "Knew YOU weren't a local right when you walked in."
"Whataya mean?"
"Can't be out at night here. I'm sure you heard about it."
He opened his mouth to say something else and she spun on the ball of her foot and went into the back, leaving him to do his damnedest against a near-burnt patty melt and some serviceable onion rings. He let the conversation go till she came back with his bill, mottled with grease fingerprints.
"Any good hotels in town?" he mumbled through his last bite, fishing a stack of ones out of his billfold.
"Nope. Not a one," she replied. "Best off goin' back to at least Kimo, if not fu'ther."
"Any rooming houses? A flophouse? A campground?"
She smacked the coins of his change down next to his plate with a flat, violent slap. "Nothin' like that. You don't stay here. I dunno why you're even askin'. It's rude, is what it is."
He tried to keep it up for a second longer. "I'm just passing through, lady. I got business, I'm a location scout for -- "
She hissed. The sun was almost down and her skin looked like gray parchment stenciled with dessicated blood vessels in the wan fluorescents of the diner. He clamped his jaw shut.
"You heard the stories, you know what happens, but you don't believe in things like that, or you're some kind of thrill seeker, you wanna get in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, or something. Well la de da, mister. You're not even the first one o' you that's been in here this week. You can go to Fort Collins, or go to Bartlettsburg, or go to goddamn hell if you've a mind to. It's ary any skin off my ass, okay? Now I wanna close up. Get on."
Kirby got. He threw an extra dollar on top of the change she'd slapped on the counter, or tried to, in a flippant up-yours gesture that wound up looking like he had a palsy. His dollar fluttered on the edge of the counter, then fell on the floor in front of the stool he'd recently vacated. She stared at him as he scurried out.
Back inside his car, peering through the bug-spattered windshield at the purple bruise of the sun's last rays, he cursed his nerves, as well as that rotten spooky bitch at the diner. Why, Chet would piss his pants laughing at how much she'd gotten to Kirby, let him get into his own mind and believe the stories about this dumb town. It was almost dark, and people were still out on the street -- she'd already flipped the diner sign to closed and turned off the front lights, but the men's store was still open, and people still came and went at the A&P.
Screw this, he thought. He knew exactly what a Ritz Inn would look like in River Mouth. It'd look as good as all Mr. A's properties in the beginning, but six months later there'd be weird stains on the hallway wallpaper, the whole place would smell like a bucket of dead fish, and the locals would be using it to fuck their secretaries or park their mothers-in-law on weekend visits. It'd be half empty all the time and never up to snuff. An embarrassment. It wouldn't be any skin off his ass, as his lovely waitress friend might say; he'd have earned his commission. But that's not how Kirby Furbay wanted to do by his boss.
He got his state map out of his glove box, peering at it in the shadowy blare of the dome light. Fort Collins was a good 45 minutes away and he was tired, his stomach already protesting the input of that patty melt and onion rings. He started his car, shifted into first and headed further north, through the other side of River Mouth and toward the lake and marina.
A couple miles after the turnoff to the lake, he spotted a rest area -- nothing more than an outhouse with two picnic tables, but he was okay with that. He pulled in, parked, crab walked to the outhouse, and spent fifteen minutes inside. When he emerged, pale and clammy but much better from the neck to the knees, he assessed the situation and decided sleeping in his car was his best bet. No sense driving back down that stretch of potholes and misery in the dark of night, and no one was expecting him back.
He drifted off as soon as he was back in the car, seat pushed back as far as he could go, jacket covering him backwards like an awkward blanket, shoes and socks off and sitting neatly next to him on the passenger seat.
Just as he fell asleep, he thought of Chet's dumb story, about the fog and the disappearing in the night. He peered up into the sky, at the bright, waxy moon and the speckles of stars. He'd loved the night since he was a boy. He devoured all the news stories about men going to space, even Russkies. There wasn't so much as a cloud to obstruct his view of the heavenly firmament.
"Bunch of bushwa," he murmured, cranked down his driver's side window a bit, and sighed as he dozed off.
His eyes popped open and he saw cotton.
It seemed that way, at least. He couldn't see the steering wheel, or the windshield, much less the outhouse or the trees beyond. He saw only gray-white in a roiling cloud. He felt damp, like he'd sweated and let it partially dry.
And as soon as he'd had time to register that, he felt pain.
It wasn't a biting, or a rending, or a stabbing. It hurt as much as any of those things -- he'd impaled his hand on a shard of glass from a broken picture window once, in his wild youth, and he remembered the jagged slice and the neverending arthritic ache of it. But what he felt now was a tingle, like a limb falling asleep. Only it was that sensation turned up to a level that took breath from his lungs, kept him from screaming, made his eyes bug out and tear up as he mouthed silent expletives.
The tingling, burning, rubbing increased and he swore he heard a slobbering growl, or moan, or maybe the sound of a crack in the earth opening like a million-year-old coffin lid. He was rigid, unable to look down, afraid to know what was happening. He wanted to scream, willed muscles to move his hands,to grab the car door, to roll outside, to smudge his face and body into the dirt and make this infestation of needles go away.
In the time it took him to register that want and that thought, he was gone. Just not there. Nothing left. No one was there to see the empty car in the rest area parking lot, not now, not until the fog receded, until the first infected tendrils of morning snaked across the perfect night sky and made their intentions known.
The people who would come later, to find the car and cluck and shake their heads and make arrangements to make it disappear too -- those people were all sound asleep, most with the aid of medication, though a few still trusted alcohol. The same fog that made Kirby Furbay not be a thing any more pooled around their snoring hulks, like water eddying around rocks, and moved on, washing forward like beach foam before pulling back to where it came at the first threat of daylight.
1984
Gail and I came here knowing what this place was, seeking it out, and I still lost her six months later. I have never quite forgiven myself for that.
It's popular to say there are no lodgings to be had in River Mouth, but that's not entirely true. My house has rented rooms since Gail and I moved here five years ago, although we scarcely call attention to it. We keep it from the locals as best we can, but I'm sure most of them have seen the small, neat sign in the front window, leaning on the inside of one dusty pane, tilted as if to deflect attention from itself: TOURIST.
That sign, a little bit of word-of-mouth, and a few well-placed classified ads in the backs of the right kinds of magazines are enough to bring in folks like Gail and me. People who want to experience an anomaly in their Earth mother's skin, to get close to the old untamed pagan magick, even if they know the price may be oblivion.
We came here to seek this, and because we rightly assumed that in a town that kept its secrets, our relationship would be tolerated. We'd moved from the west coast to rural Indiana when Gail developed an interest in beekeeping and we wanted a big cheap parcel of land, but we found the stares, comments and boorish hostility to be too much to bear. We had no interest in hiding our love, for each other or the earth, and for that we were mocked, shunned, and threatened. After one horrible week when Gail's colonies were destroyed and our beloved collie was poisoned in our own yard, we knew we had to move.
River Mouth was already on our minds. We'd seen a TV show about it a few years back, and even through the sensationalism and bored faux-skepticism in the narrator's voice, we realized there was something here we needed to see. Information about it had been hard to come by, but once we lived in Indiana we were able to make several car trips north to check out the area. I had my eye on this house, its rusted realty sign crumbling into the overgrown yard, before we'd decided to cut and run from Evansville.
We got here with a Uhaul trailer hitched to my Town and Country station wagon, and found our deed and the keys stuffed in the mailbox. I'd contacted the realtor and the bank by mail, and had done everything over the phone, assuming (rightly again) that anyone willing to buy a vacant property in this town would find very little in the way of resistance. It wasn't the best way to buy a house -- we got stuck with a worthless old water heater and the place still needs rewiring to this day -- but it had its benefits.
We'd inferred the basics for survival here just from the TV show we saw, and from a few broad hints dropped by our realtor. I started poking around the library and the Historical Society, looking for more in the way of knowledge, and I wound up striking up a friendship with Avery Collins, the guy who ran the Society. The stuff he had for public consumption was boring -- some nondescript photos, a charred window frame from one of the buildings that burnt in '31, silverfishy old front pages of the Gazetteer in cheap Woolworth's frames -- but once I got to know him, and he'd been over for some of Gail's vegetarian cooking, he gave me a peek into the vaults.
He'd been given some folders of old documents by the last editor of the newspaper, for safekeeping, and he'd tried to occasionally add to it when he could. "People are so closed-mouthed around here, it's rare you get an actual source," he told me one evening in our living room. We were listening to a Siouxsie and the Banshees record I'd special ordered at the Record Barn, and eating lentil pilaf with French bread toast points because that was the most exotic bread I could get at the A&P. "I wish more people were like you two around here," Avery said, and I glowed.
Plenty of other people in Indiana, and then in River Mouth, called me and Gail pretentious, or affected, or just plain weird, but we weren't trying to be off-putting or difficult. For Chrissakes, we were lesbian women's libber tree huggers in the middle of the midwest, so we already felt like we'd taken a time machine to get here. You had to travel fifty miles to get decent Chinese or Indian food, any cool concerts were gonna be three hours away, and forget museums or art galleries for anything but dogs playing poker and a list of what farm boys died in the Civil War. Excuse us for trying to salvage a little beauty and culture!
Avery wouldn't leave the folders with me. I asked him who would know, and he got very prim and proper as he said "I'd know. And I'd be letting down the men who came before me who safeguarded these documents." All very high-minded for a guy who wore Izod shirts and thought Erica Jong was "a little out there," but I had to respect his devotion to preserving this stuff.
He did come over and let me spend hours reading the files while he hung out with Gail, drank wine, and played computer games (we'd picked up a TRS-80 at Radio Shack before we left Indiana; I was still trying to get it connected to CompuServe over River Mouth's miserable phone lines, but we had a couple silly games like Cosmic Fighter and Zork that Avery lost his mind over).
Gail was a slower reader than I was, and she was self-conscious about it, so she entertained Avery and worked in her garden out back, or took our new husky, Nanook, out for walks. She was as interested as I was, and she had me summarize what I read that night in bed, after Avery had gone home. We both were fascinated, and saddened, and angered, by turns. So much sadness had happened in this place, but where in America can that not be said? And how much of River Mouth's misery came from sheer ignorance or lack of respect for our Earth Mother?
Some of the people who wrote those documents, or took down other people's oral accounts, or wrote those letters to the editor, fault the rest of the world for not sending brigades of scientists here to dissect River Mouth, to drain the lake and set up a perimeter and try to get to the bottom of things, as such men do. No one seems willing to just accept that there are old ways, currents and eddies in the universe which our ancestors once understood, that we've forgotten in our quest to solve everything to the millionth decimal point.
I don't understand what happens in River Mouth at night, the same way I don't understand the sun giving me life and politely not burning off that paper-thin layer of air on the planet I call home. The same way I don't understand how a cell can become a baby, and how mortals can paint and sing and write and communicate directly with my soul, and how sex feels good and chick peas can make anything. You don't NEED to understand everything our Mother Gaia can do, as long as you respect it.
There's some very heavy stories in there, though, and part of me will always wonder if those were too much for Gail. I was the tough one in our relationship, and I figured if I was absorbing the bad energy of those painful events, and relating them to her secondhand like a reflection, it would be easier to take. I won't say I regret anything because regret is a tool of shame used by the power elite to undermine us, but if I did anything differently, I might have kept some of that from my lover.
She was gone one morning, just gone. Nanook barked at me to wake me up at sunrise, and the bed was cold. There was a water glass on the kitchen counter and I don't recall if it had been there when we went to bed. The fact that Nanook was still here told me she probably didn't get up -- we'd been warned about having a dog in River Mouth, and we hadn't seen anyone else with one in our time here, but Nanook had always been so good about laying on the floor next to our bed and going to sleep when we did. I'm sure he'd have startled if Gail had gotten up.
I have no answers. I had to call the Volunteer Department, and it was so surreal to talk to them after reading about their past in Avery's files. The rebel in me wanted to go to the news instead, and not the Gazetteer, but one of the Detroit papers, really raise a stink and maybe blow the lid off some old truths around here for good. But even as enlightened as I am, I found myself following the same script, going along with the fake paperwork, perpetuating a lie because I wanted that part to be over so I could get on with grieving my Gail.
One bitter blessing of being who we are, of course, is that calling family wasn't a problem. I still had an aunt I kept in touch with, but both sets of parents had disowned us when we came out, even in "progressive" California, and Gail hadn't spoken to her mom in years. A letter came to the house a year or so ago, addressed to Gail and with her mother's return address, and I burnt it in the fireplace without opening it. I seldom indulge in pettiness, it should be beneath us always, but I hope her mom had a change of heart, and really wants to know where her daughter is, and I hope not knowing hurts her. Forgive me, Goddess, but I do. I know what her scorn did to Gail.
Nanook was such a comfort to me, even though getting him had been Gail's idea and he had been more or less "her" dog. He stayed with me another six months -- even Avery said he'd never seen the like of it in River Mouth -- and then one morning he was gone too, and I sort of knew he would be. I did a little ritual for him the next full moon, naked and painted in the back yard, in the clear moonlight, sleeping pills at the ready for as soon as it was over, and I buried his leash and dog dish and blanket and thanked the Earth for her gifts both understood and misunderstood.
I only took the chance because of the knowledge I'd gleaned from Avery's files. I knew I was safe up to a certain point in any night, even though it seemed that point waxed and waned, like a tide. I didn't see anyone mention it in their stories, but in the older accounts, the fog sometimes came as soon as the sun had descended beyond the horizon. Stories from this century, though, indicated it was closer to midnight before the land was blanketed. That had to mean something, didn't it?
I've resolved not to think about it. I finally asked Avery not to bring the files over any more because they were turning me into a scientist, an analyzer, a number cruncher and measurer of data points, and I don't want to be that. I know people around here think of me as some granola-crunching west coast flake, and I want them to think exactly that. I want to be the crazy lady with the crystals who does pagan stuff in the back yard and grows herbs and takes boarders on tame early-evening excursions into the woods and tries to educate them a little about our Earth Mother while giving them the haunted house chills they came for.
I don't think any of that is a bad way to get through the rest of my life. We all make ourselves into who we are. I'm probably going to be an old maid as River Mouth's token lezbo, and I'm too tired and weighed down with memories and other people's stories to want to move out west again. I can live in my big cheap house and curse the winters here and drink my sleepytime tea every night and miss my girl and marvel at the impassive wonders of this world. I can show them respect and honor the dead quietly.
The fog is not just the actual fog that crawls over all of us at night looking for wakefulness. Reading those old stories of Avery's was a fog of its own. They've crept into me, weighted me like ballast, made me go gray and paunchy and made my boobs sag, made my laugh lines rueful and wistful, made my eyes dark. They anchor me to a place I had no claim to, save curiosity. They trapped me, just like the physical fog trapped Gail, perhaps just as permanently.
About a year after Gail left me, Avery and I were out for a walk. We stopped as we always did at the lot where the old Methodist church used to be, where the doomsday cult had moved in and that crazy man had killed so many of his fellow wackos, as least as far as all the paperwork said.
Avery put his hand out and I took it. He had some things he wanted to say, and I knew he did, and I felt the energy in the air and I knew it was going to be time, and that was all right.
"I love you, you know," he said.
"Oh, hon. I know. You make it easy to know."
I don't think he expected me to acknowledge it. "I'm not trying to be weird, or funny. I know you're not into -- uh, boys." I chuckled a little. Avery's older than me, by a few years.
"I'm telling you because I'm content with things as they are," he pressed on. "Having you as a friend is the best thing that's happened to me. I don't want anything more than this, or anything that would jeopardize this."
I squeezed his hand. "I feel the same way."
He hesitated for a full minute. Cicadas made their endless test-pattern noise. A few cars went by a couple blocks away, on the main drag. The shadows lengthened. That was one thing about River Mouth, time always had a way of making you wrap up a poignant moment.
"I have to tell you two more things. I'm going to pass the files on to the next person, and I want to move in with you."
I suspected the first thing; the second blindsided me, but I instantly saw the appeal. "Yes," I said, fast enough that he gave me a sidelong glance.
"I'm serious, Laurie. I mean it. That's why I told you I wasn't trying to change our relationship."
"No, I get it. It makes all the sense in the world. We both could use someone around. It's a big house. I wouldn't want to live with those files under my roof, and I couldn't live with you if you were trying to court me. You explained it all very well and you've made your point and I agree with you."
I said all that and I meant it, but I also knew it would make him beam, and boy, did it. Men amaze me. They've accomplished so much and they're pretty much just puppies that want a scratch behind the ears, emotionally speaking.
Avery did have one surprise for me, though. He wanted me to write an entry to put into the files before he handed them off. "Gail and Nanook and you should all be part of the story," he insisted. I've always found words, my own anyway, to be leaden, ineffective, losing so much of their essence between the feelings in my blood and the air of the outside world as to not be worth the effort. And now I had to immortalize my Gail with them!
I told him I'd do it, but I had to work my way up to it, and that he could move in as soon as he wanted to, but he'd have to store the files somewhere else until I got up the nerve.
Well, here I am. I've plowed through a really nice cheap bottle of merlot, my tummy is full of some delightful cauliflower and tahini something-or-other Avery made for us -- he's trying so hard to learn to cook, he does it to honor Gail -- and I'm tapping away trying to finish this before I need to go to bed. Not on my old TRS-80, mind you -- it's taken me three years to screw up the courage to do this. I've got an Apple IIe now, it's in color and everything, and I can usually get the printer to print what I've typed about thirty percent of the time, if I'm sober.
Avery's been here for ages now, of course. He's helped me with the boarders -- it waxes and wanes, but we've been getting more interest over the years, and sometimes there's a whole houseful to feed and instruct and impress and take on walking tours. He quit at the Historical Society, and he works part time at the library now, just enough to toss an amount into the monthly budget that makes him feel like he's not a freeloader. The files aren't here, I've never asked him where he keeps them, and once I print this and give it to him, I won't ask where they've gone.
He knows he's about to be free of them, and it's made him lighter, happier, more jaunty and full of jokes. How strange that neither of us balk at living in the shadow of this impassive mysterious thing that dictates every aspect of our life, and we can never free our minds and hearts of the stories we've committed to them, but we can feel unburdened just by disposing of the physical evidence. Does that make us less accountable? To whom? Does it mean we were standing guard and now our watch has ended?
Questions, questions. They only have power over you if you seek the answers. I seek light and beauty and warmth and empathy, contentment and orgasm and comfort and camaraderie. The fog is none of those things, and neither are answers. I've done my time fighting this world to a draw, and now I'm going to breathe deeply in the space I have earned, move slowly and deliberately, and sleep well in the shadow of that which I do not understand.
2019:
I skipped Titus Watkins' funeral yesterday. I feel bad that I didn't go, but I couldn't make myself do it.
We hadn't lost anyone this year. We were gonna be the senior class that made it. We've been throwing ourselves into school shit like we were all collectively trying to forget something, which is exactly what we were doing. Who gets that excited about Spirit Week and a 5pm prom? The Class of '19 at River Mouth High, that's who, because we've almost done our time and we can get the fuck out of town.
The further into the year we all got, the more everyone seemed to pick up on our energy. All the local stores soaped up their windows with slogans like "GO FOR IT SENIORS" and "MAKE US PROUD HAWKS." This place getting a whiff of hope about anything, pulling together to believe in anything, is the saddest thing you'll ever see. The whole town's has been in a slow-motion car crash since we've all been alive, but if these 54 kids can keep their shit together, we're all gonna make it too!
So fucking pathetic. And it would be Titus, too. He'd already been suspended once this year for smelling like whiskey in homeroom. The word is, he was drinking with Mandy Barnett and he passed out way too early, and she took off and went home. He probably woke up right in the middle of the night, and kapow, that's it. Mandy hasn't been back to school since. I'd be surprised if she even comes back. People are gonna be assholes about it.
I probably woulda still gone to the funeral -- Titus was a douchebag, but he was in my class and we're all in this together, you know? But yesterday I was on Facebook and this dude from Kimo, Ronnie Vann, I don't even know how I know him, but he's on my friends list, he posts this meme. It's a picture of two empty chairs, there's a crown on one and a tiara on the other. There's that transparent typing all over the picture, like it's a stock photo from somewhere. And the caption says "RIVER MOUTH HOMECOMING KING AND QUEEN, OFFICIAL PHOTO."
The picture had 39 likes. No one in the comments was like "hey, someone just died" or "what the fuck is wrong with you?" Just a bunch of "oh man, you're going to hell for this one" and "LMAO" and that crying-laughing tongue-sticking-out emoji and shit.
I've seen people put filters on their profile pictures when there's a terrorist attack in a city they've never heard of. They donate money when a dog five states away needs a kidney operation. We live in a town that is picking us off one at a time and the rest of the world either doesn't know, doesn't care, or apparently thinks it's hilarious.
I've been thinking a lot about Mr. Sullivan and those folders. It's only three months till the end of the year and my chance to get my hands on them. For a while there, I was gung-ho about doing that, and getting that information out to the world, and really trying to get some attention paid to our town and what we go through. I wanted to save us. I wanted to win.
Now, though? Fuck that. I'm right back where I was at the beginning of the year. I wanna get out of town even if it's with my diploma and the shirt on my back. I don't wanna smell the lake or get nervous watching the sun go down ever again. I don't want to feel this flood of sympathy for someone I didn't even like because he died on my battlefield and I have to care about him because the rest of the world doesn't. Once I'm ready to bail, I'm laying the smackdown on my parents -- come with me if you want, but if you don't, it'll be a cold day in hell before you see my ass again.
To hell with this place. I'm out. Sullivan can give all his ghost stories to someone who gives a shit, because I don't.
"Sleep Tight," the debut novel from Keith Bergman, will be released in 2019.
"How come we don't have a hotel in River Mouth?"
"Because the fog eats people in the night up there."
Kirby squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, staring at a point somewhere over his district manager's head. "You're a real fucking hoot, Chet."
Chet shrugged, brushing crumbs off the ledger on his desk. "S'what they tell me. It's one o' them local legends. Lotta people disappear up in those parts. Nothin' really up there to go see, I dunno if it's 'cause of the stories, or if the stories are from people up there bein' bored."
"Yeah, and there's a Sasquatch out west waitin' to eat your pork and beans when you go camping. Save me the heebie-jeebie act."
Chet shrugged again. He shrugged a lot. "Sue me, buddy-roe, I didn't make up the story. It's a whole thing. Now Pendleton, there's a whole soap opera there, we had a property till this local guy come in and -- "
"Fuck Pendleton. I wanna check out this River Mouth. If there's no good full-service property up there, we could really clean up. Maybe play into the whole ghost story thing, get people to come up and check out the spooky town and buy some knick-knacks in the lobby."
"It's half a day's drive and the road sucks. Place isn't next to anything. What's in it for you?"
Kirby squinted. "You ever actually read these memos?"
"Try not to. They give me gas."
"Well, dumbo, this last one says they're doubling the commission on any new properties we break ground on this year. Maybe you don't wanna big fat Christmas bonus, but I'm tryin' ta get enough scratch together so that when I ask Cheryl's dad for his blessing, he don't flip his goddamn wig on me for wearin' last year's shoes."
"All comes down to the trim, don't it? I shoulda known."
"You watch your fucking mouth, Chet, that's my fiance." There was a taut second or two of silence, and then both men burst out laughing.
"Listen to you, 'watch your mouth,' cussin' like a dock worker right here in the damn office."
Kirby shrugged. "G'wan with it. It's Maureen's day off, right?"
"So you goin' up there today? It's already after lunchtime."
"Nah, I'll wait'll tomorrow. Get an early enough start, spend a couple hours poundin' the pavement, I can be home in time for late supper and a drink at Bart's."
"Sounds like someone's afraid of the killer fog," Chet shot back, only he said it 'keel-er FOG' in what he imagined was a good Dracula impression.
"You're an asshole, my friend, don't let anyone tell ya different." Kirby ducked out of the office, barely dodging several balls of crumpled up paper and laughing like hell.
By the time Kirby rolled into River Mouth, though, he knew he wouldn't be back before nightfall, and he was plenty pissed off about it. He'd hit a pothole on 47 that knocked one of the magnetic "RITZ INNS INC PROPERTY MANAGEMENT AND ACQUISITION" signs off the door of his station wagon and flattened one of his tires. He rapped his knuckles a good one changing it, and he'd forgotten to bring a spare shirt -- a rookie mistake -- so now his jacket covered sweat stains the size of pie plates. He hoped it masked the body odor his roll-on and Aqua Velva were barely containing. He'd scrubbed his hands for minutes in the washroom of a diner north of Bartlettsburg and he could still see faint swirls of oil and road grime in the whorls of his fingerprints.
River Mouth looked like a real pile of crap, he had to admit. There was no swell of restaurants and hotels at the entrance to town, the sort of real estate he thrived on. There was just space with no houses, and then space with more houses, and then a rusty sign that read "WELCOME TO SCENIC RIVER MOUTH, POP 4659, HOME OF THE HAWKS" between the shiny scars of BB holes.
He drove on, slowing to 35 as the patchwork of houses on larger lots gave way to some pleasant enough residential blocks. The usual car garages, dissolute shops and small offices lined the main thoroughfare. He reached downtown in a minute or two.
He wasn't sure where the locals were doing their shopping, but wherever it was, it was doing a number on the place. He was used to seeing downtowns this decrepit when new shopping centers had gone in at the edge of town, usually by the gleaming new exit to an interstate, but he was surprised to see so much of downtown River Mouth empty. There was an A&P with some cars in its lot, a men's shop with outdated suits hanging on crooked mannequins, a store called Record Barn, a druggist with a soda fountain, one of those old time peanut shops that roast 'em right in the store. But half the windows he saw were soaped over, and only a few had real estate agents' signs pasted up. There were vacant lots in places that seemed like good retail locations, old charry debris overgrown with young trees and scrubby grass.
Kirby hit the one diner that still looked alive. A tired woman wiping the counter with a dirty rag jumped a little when the bell on the door rang. "Evenin'," she said. "Anywhere ya like."
He grabbed the stool closest to the door. No one else was in the joint. "You closin' up soon?" he asked.
"Not for another hour yet. We usually get a coupla stragglers after work. Me, I'm content to close up after the lunch rush, but the boss man don't see it that way. You know what you want, or you need a menu?"
"Coffee, and a menu, thanks."
She arched an eyebrow. "Gonna have to make a fresh pot, this late in the day."
He peered at his watch. It wasn't even five yet. "I can wait."
She sniffed, dropped the menu in front of him on the swirl-damp counter, muttered "tuna melt's off" and grabbed the empty Bunn pot.
He ordered a patty melt and onion rings, knowing he'd pay for it later, sipped his coffee when she brought it over, and picked up and set down the ratty, scrawny newspaper someone had left on the counter. The River Mouth Gazetteer shared the same AP wire stories he saw in every other paper in every other town he scouted. The funnies boasted Peanuts and Dondi and Brenda Starr, and the editorial page lamented the state of the water in their lake and wondered if any of the proposed new highways in the state would bother extending a better expressway to town.
Why would it? Kirby wondered, sour over his delayed coffee and his flat tire and his dirty shirt. He saw the writing on the wall, like people said. That was one of his strong points. There were gonna be winners and losers, when the highways came in, and some of these sleepy towns out here were gonna win big. They'd be exactly one pee break away from the beach, or their folks would have the gumption to put up the world's biggest of something, to make the marks stop and spend some dough on their way to whatever the hell they were doing that summer.
But this dump? Jeezly crow, they'd given the hell up. You could smell it in the air. The whole town stunk like a damp basement, half the stores were closed, and if everyone here did their job like this lady, he was willing to write the whole burg off as losers. Kirby was oriented for success -- he read every book about salesmanship and getting rich that he could get his hands on, subscribed to several informative newsletters, and kept his wits about him at all time. Why else did Mr. Abernathy let him take the car and go on these fact-finding missions without a bunch of meetings and proposals first? Mr. A knew a go-getter when he hired one.
Kirby flipped through the Gazetteer some more, annoyed at how long his food was taking. He noticed an ad for River Mouth's lone movie house. Their last showing, the only one not at matinee prices, was at 6pm. Where was the late show? No monster flicks at midnight? He saw an ad for a drive-in running the second-run pictures in a double feature (he wasn't much of a movie guy and even he'd seen both of these flicks already). He quickly noticed that the drive-in was a good thirty miles from town, and that they offered "onsite camping and discount motel rates for patrons."
"You ever go to this drive-in over to... Fort Cummings?" he asked, peering down at the ad, when she brought his plate over.
She shrugged. "Once or twice, yah. Don't like to be gone overnight tho."
Kirby scowled. His medium patty melt crunched when he bit into it. "I mean, you don't have to stay over, though, do you?"
She snorted. "Knew YOU weren't a local right when you walked in."
"Whataya mean?"
"Can't be out at night here. I'm sure you heard about it."
He opened his mouth to say something else and she spun on the ball of her foot and went into the back, leaving him to do his damnedest against a near-burnt patty melt and some serviceable onion rings. He let the conversation go till she came back with his bill, mottled with grease fingerprints.
"Any good hotels in town?" he mumbled through his last bite, fishing a stack of ones out of his billfold.
"Nope. Not a one," she replied. "Best off goin' back to at least Kimo, if not fu'ther."
"Any rooming houses? A flophouse? A campground?"
She smacked the coins of his change down next to his plate with a flat, violent slap. "Nothin' like that. You don't stay here. I dunno why you're even askin'. It's rude, is what it is."
He tried to keep it up for a second longer. "I'm just passing through, lady. I got business, I'm a location scout for -- "
She hissed. The sun was almost down and her skin looked like gray parchment stenciled with dessicated blood vessels in the wan fluorescents of the diner. He clamped his jaw shut.
"You heard the stories, you know what happens, but you don't believe in things like that, or you're some kind of thrill seeker, you wanna get in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, or something. Well la de da, mister. You're not even the first one o' you that's been in here this week. You can go to Fort Collins, or go to Bartlettsburg, or go to goddamn hell if you've a mind to. It's ary any skin off my ass, okay? Now I wanna close up. Get on."
Kirby got. He threw an extra dollar on top of the change she'd slapped on the counter, or tried to, in a flippant up-yours gesture that wound up looking like he had a palsy. His dollar fluttered on the edge of the counter, then fell on the floor in front of the stool he'd recently vacated. She stared at him as he scurried out.
Back inside his car, peering through the bug-spattered windshield at the purple bruise of the sun's last rays, he cursed his nerves, as well as that rotten spooky bitch at the diner. Why, Chet would piss his pants laughing at how much she'd gotten to Kirby, let him get into his own mind and believe the stories about this dumb town. It was almost dark, and people were still out on the street -- she'd already flipped the diner sign to closed and turned off the front lights, but the men's store was still open, and people still came and went at the A&P.
Screw this, he thought. He knew exactly what a Ritz Inn would look like in River Mouth. It'd look as good as all Mr. A's properties in the beginning, but six months later there'd be weird stains on the hallway wallpaper, the whole place would smell like a bucket of dead fish, and the locals would be using it to fuck their secretaries or park their mothers-in-law on weekend visits. It'd be half empty all the time and never up to snuff. An embarrassment. It wouldn't be any skin off his ass, as his lovely waitress friend might say; he'd have earned his commission. But that's not how Kirby Furbay wanted to do by his boss.
He got his state map out of his glove box, peering at it in the shadowy blare of the dome light. Fort Collins was a good 45 minutes away and he was tired, his stomach already protesting the input of that patty melt and onion rings. He started his car, shifted into first and headed further north, through the other side of River Mouth and toward the lake and marina.
A couple miles after the turnoff to the lake, he spotted a rest area -- nothing more than an outhouse with two picnic tables, but he was okay with that. He pulled in, parked, crab walked to the outhouse, and spent fifteen minutes inside. When he emerged, pale and clammy but much better from the neck to the knees, he assessed the situation and decided sleeping in his car was his best bet. No sense driving back down that stretch of potholes and misery in the dark of night, and no one was expecting him back.
He drifted off as soon as he was back in the car, seat pushed back as far as he could go, jacket covering him backwards like an awkward blanket, shoes and socks off and sitting neatly next to him on the passenger seat.
Just as he fell asleep, he thought of Chet's dumb story, about the fog and the disappearing in the night. He peered up into the sky, at the bright, waxy moon and the speckles of stars. He'd loved the night since he was a boy. He devoured all the news stories about men going to space, even Russkies. There wasn't so much as a cloud to obstruct his view of the heavenly firmament.
"Bunch of bushwa," he murmured, cranked down his driver's side window a bit, and sighed as he dozed off.
His eyes popped open and he saw cotton.
It seemed that way, at least. He couldn't see the steering wheel, or the windshield, much less the outhouse or the trees beyond. He saw only gray-white in a roiling cloud. He felt damp, like he'd sweated and let it partially dry.
And as soon as he'd had time to register that, he felt pain.
It wasn't a biting, or a rending, or a stabbing. It hurt as much as any of those things -- he'd impaled his hand on a shard of glass from a broken picture window once, in his wild youth, and he remembered the jagged slice and the neverending arthritic ache of it. But what he felt now was a tingle, like a limb falling asleep. Only it was that sensation turned up to a level that took breath from his lungs, kept him from screaming, made his eyes bug out and tear up as he mouthed silent expletives.
The tingling, burning, rubbing increased and he swore he heard a slobbering growl, or moan, or maybe the sound of a crack in the earth opening like a million-year-old coffin lid. He was rigid, unable to look down, afraid to know what was happening. He wanted to scream, willed muscles to move his hands,to grab the car door, to roll outside, to smudge his face and body into the dirt and make this infestation of needles go away.
In the time it took him to register that want and that thought, he was gone. Just not there. Nothing left. No one was there to see the empty car in the rest area parking lot, not now, not until the fog receded, until the first infected tendrils of morning snaked across the perfect night sky and made their intentions known.
The people who would come later, to find the car and cluck and shake their heads and make arrangements to make it disappear too -- those people were all sound asleep, most with the aid of medication, though a few still trusted alcohol. The same fog that made Kirby Furbay not be a thing any more pooled around their snoring hulks, like water eddying around rocks, and moved on, washing forward like beach foam before pulling back to where it came at the first threat of daylight.
1984
Gail and I came here knowing what this place was, seeking it out, and I still lost her six months later. I have never quite forgiven myself for that.
It's popular to say there are no lodgings to be had in River Mouth, but that's not entirely true. My house has rented rooms since Gail and I moved here five years ago, although we scarcely call attention to it. We keep it from the locals as best we can, but I'm sure most of them have seen the small, neat sign in the front window, leaning on the inside of one dusty pane, tilted as if to deflect attention from itself: TOURIST.
That sign, a little bit of word-of-mouth, and a few well-placed classified ads in the backs of the right kinds of magazines are enough to bring in folks like Gail and me. People who want to experience an anomaly in their Earth mother's skin, to get close to the old untamed pagan magick, even if they know the price may be oblivion.
We came here to seek this, and because we rightly assumed that in a town that kept its secrets, our relationship would be tolerated. We'd moved from the west coast to rural Indiana when Gail developed an interest in beekeeping and we wanted a big cheap parcel of land, but we found the stares, comments and boorish hostility to be too much to bear. We had no interest in hiding our love, for each other or the earth, and for that we were mocked, shunned, and threatened. After one horrible week when Gail's colonies were destroyed and our beloved collie was poisoned in our own yard, we knew we had to move.
River Mouth was already on our minds. We'd seen a TV show about it a few years back, and even through the sensationalism and bored faux-skepticism in the narrator's voice, we realized there was something here we needed to see. Information about it had been hard to come by, but once we lived in Indiana we were able to make several car trips north to check out the area. I had my eye on this house, its rusted realty sign crumbling into the overgrown yard, before we'd decided to cut and run from Evansville.
We got here with a Uhaul trailer hitched to my Town and Country station wagon, and found our deed and the keys stuffed in the mailbox. I'd contacted the realtor and the bank by mail, and had done everything over the phone, assuming (rightly again) that anyone willing to buy a vacant property in this town would find very little in the way of resistance. It wasn't the best way to buy a house -- we got stuck with a worthless old water heater and the place still needs rewiring to this day -- but it had its benefits.
We'd inferred the basics for survival here just from the TV show we saw, and from a few broad hints dropped by our realtor. I started poking around the library and the Historical Society, looking for more in the way of knowledge, and I wound up striking up a friendship with Avery Collins, the guy who ran the Society. The stuff he had for public consumption was boring -- some nondescript photos, a charred window frame from one of the buildings that burnt in '31, silverfishy old front pages of the Gazetteer in cheap Woolworth's frames -- but once I got to know him, and he'd been over for some of Gail's vegetarian cooking, he gave me a peek into the vaults.
He'd been given some folders of old documents by the last editor of the newspaper, for safekeeping, and he'd tried to occasionally add to it when he could. "People are so closed-mouthed around here, it's rare you get an actual source," he told me one evening in our living room. We were listening to a Siouxsie and the Banshees record I'd special ordered at the Record Barn, and eating lentil pilaf with French bread toast points because that was the most exotic bread I could get at the A&P. "I wish more people were like you two around here," Avery said, and I glowed.
Plenty of other people in Indiana, and then in River Mouth, called me and Gail pretentious, or affected, or just plain weird, but we weren't trying to be off-putting or difficult. For Chrissakes, we were lesbian women's libber tree huggers in the middle of the midwest, so we already felt like we'd taken a time machine to get here. You had to travel fifty miles to get decent Chinese or Indian food, any cool concerts were gonna be three hours away, and forget museums or art galleries for anything but dogs playing poker and a list of what farm boys died in the Civil War. Excuse us for trying to salvage a little beauty and culture!
Avery wouldn't leave the folders with me. I asked him who would know, and he got very prim and proper as he said "I'd know. And I'd be letting down the men who came before me who safeguarded these documents." All very high-minded for a guy who wore Izod shirts and thought Erica Jong was "a little out there," but I had to respect his devotion to preserving this stuff.
He did come over and let me spend hours reading the files while he hung out with Gail, drank wine, and played computer games (we'd picked up a TRS-80 at Radio Shack before we left Indiana; I was still trying to get it connected to CompuServe over River Mouth's miserable phone lines, but we had a couple silly games like Cosmic Fighter and Zork that Avery lost his mind over).
Gail was a slower reader than I was, and she was self-conscious about it, so she entertained Avery and worked in her garden out back, or took our new husky, Nanook, out for walks. She was as interested as I was, and she had me summarize what I read that night in bed, after Avery had gone home. We both were fascinated, and saddened, and angered, by turns. So much sadness had happened in this place, but where in America can that not be said? And how much of River Mouth's misery came from sheer ignorance or lack of respect for our Earth Mother?
Some of the people who wrote those documents, or took down other people's oral accounts, or wrote those letters to the editor, fault the rest of the world for not sending brigades of scientists here to dissect River Mouth, to drain the lake and set up a perimeter and try to get to the bottom of things, as such men do. No one seems willing to just accept that there are old ways, currents and eddies in the universe which our ancestors once understood, that we've forgotten in our quest to solve everything to the millionth decimal point.
I don't understand what happens in River Mouth at night, the same way I don't understand the sun giving me life and politely not burning off that paper-thin layer of air on the planet I call home. The same way I don't understand how a cell can become a baby, and how mortals can paint and sing and write and communicate directly with my soul, and how sex feels good and chick peas can make anything. You don't NEED to understand everything our Mother Gaia can do, as long as you respect it.
There's some very heavy stories in there, though, and part of me will always wonder if those were too much for Gail. I was the tough one in our relationship, and I figured if I was absorbing the bad energy of those painful events, and relating them to her secondhand like a reflection, it would be easier to take. I won't say I regret anything because regret is a tool of shame used by the power elite to undermine us, but if I did anything differently, I might have kept some of that from my lover.
She was gone one morning, just gone. Nanook barked at me to wake me up at sunrise, and the bed was cold. There was a water glass on the kitchen counter and I don't recall if it had been there when we went to bed. The fact that Nanook was still here told me she probably didn't get up -- we'd been warned about having a dog in River Mouth, and we hadn't seen anyone else with one in our time here, but Nanook had always been so good about laying on the floor next to our bed and going to sleep when we did. I'm sure he'd have startled if Gail had gotten up.
I have no answers. I had to call the Volunteer Department, and it was so surreal to talk to them after reading about their past in Avery's files. The rebel in me wanted to go to the news instead, and not the Gazetteer, but one of the Detroit papers, really raise a stink and maybe blow the lid off some old truths around here for good. But even as enlightened as I am, I found myself following the same script, going along with the fake paperwork, perpetuating a lie because I wanted that part to be over so I could get on with grieving my Gail.
One bitter blessing of being who we are, of course, is that calling family wasn't a problem. I still had an aunt I kept in touch with, but both sets of parents had disowned us when we came out, even in "progressive" California, and Gail hadn't spoken to her mom in years. A letter came to the house a year or so ago, addressed to Gail and with her mother's return address, and I burnt it in the fireplace without opening it. I seldom indulge in pettiness, it should be beneath us always, but I hope her mom had a change of heart, and really wants to know where her daughter is, and I hope not knowing hurts her. Forgive me, Goddess, but I do. I know what her scorn did to Gail.
Nanook was such a comfort to me, even though getting him had been Gail's idea and he had been more or less "her" dog. He stayed with me another six months -- even Avery said he'd never seen the like of it in River Mouth -- and then one morning he was gone too, and I sort of knew he would be. I did a little ritual for him the next full moon, naked and painted in the back yard, in the clear moonlight, sleeping pills at the ready for as soon as it was over, and I buried his leash and dog dish and blanket and thanked the Earth for her gifts both understood and misunderstood.
I only took the chance because of the knowledge I'd gleaned from Avery's files. I knew I was safe up to a certain point in any night, even though it seemed that point waxed and waned, like a tide. I didn't see anyone mention it in their stories, but in the older accounts, the fog sometimes came as soon as the sun had descended beyond the horizon. Stories from this century, though, indicated it was closer to midnight before the land was blanketed. That had to mean something, didn't it?
I've resolved not to think about it. I finally asked Avery not to bring the files over any more because they were turning me into a scientist, an analyzer, a number cruncher and measurer of data points, and I don't want to be that. I know people around here think of me as some granola-crunching west coast flake, and I want them to think exactly that. I want to be the crazy lady with the crystals who does pagan stuff in the back yard and grows herbs and takes boarders on tame early-evening excursions into the woods and tries to educate them a little about our Earth Mother while giving them the haunted house chills they came for.
I don't think any of that is a bad way to get through the rest of my life. We all make ourselves into who we are. I'm probably going to be an old maid as River Mouth's token lezbo, and I'm too tired and weighed down with memories and other people's stories to want to move out west again. I can live in my big cheap house and curse the winters here and drink my sleepytime tea every night and miss my girl and marvel at the impassive wonders of this world. I can show them respect and honor the dead quietly.
The fog is not just the actual fog that crawls over all of us at night looking for wakefulness. Reading those old stories of Avery's was a fog of its own. They've crept into me, weighted me like ballast, made me go gray and paunchy and made my boobs sag, made my laugh lines rueful and wistful, made my eyes dark. They anchor me to a place I had no claim to, save curiosity. They trapped me, just like the physical fog trapped Gail, perhaps just as permanently.
About a year after Gail left me, Avery and I were out for a walk. We stopped as we always did at the lot where the old Methodist church used to be, where the doomsday cult had moved in and that crazy man had killed so many of his fellow wackos, as least as far as all the paperwork said.
Avery put his hand out and I took it. He had some things he wanted to say, and I knew he did, and I felt the energy in the air and I knew it was going to be time, and that was all right.
"I love you, you know," he said.
"Oh, hon. I know. You make it easy to know."
I don't think he expected me to acknowledge it. "I'm not trying to be weird, or funny. I know you're not into -- uh, boys." I chuckled a little. Avery's older than me, by a few years.
"I'm telling you because I'm content with things as they are," he pressed on. "Having you as a friend is the best thing that's happened to me. I don't want anything more than this, or anything that would jeopardize this."
I squeezed his hand. "I feel the same way."
He hesitated for a full minute. Cicadas made their endless test-pattern noise. A few cars went by a couple blocks away, on the main drag. The shadows lengthened. That was one thing about River Mouth, time always had a way of making you wrap up a poignant moment.
"I have to tell you two more things. I'm going to pass the files on to the next person, and I want to move in with you."
I suspected the first thing; the second blindsided me, but I instantly saw the appeal. "Yes," I said, fast enough that he gave me a sidelong glance.
"I'm serious, Laurie. I mean it. That's why I told you I wasn't trying to change our relationship."
"No, I get it. It makes all the sense in the world. We both could use someone around. It's a big house. I wouldn't want to live with those files under my roof, and I couldn't live with you if you were trying to court me. You explained it all very well and you've made your point and I agree with you."
I said all that and I meant it, but I also knew it would make him beam, and boy, did it. Men amaze me. They've accomplished so much and they're pretty much just puppies that want a scratch behind the ears, emotionally speaking.
Avery did have one surprise for me, though. He wanted me to write an entry to put into the files before he handed them off. "Gail and Nanook and you should all be part of the story," he insisted. I've always found words, my own anyway, to be leaden, ineffective, losing so much of their essence between the feelings in my blood and the air of the outside world as to not be worth the effort. And now I had to immortalize my Gail with them!
I told him I'd do it, but I had to work my way up to it, and that he could move in as soon as he wanted to, but he'd have to store the files somewhere else until I got up the nerve.
Well, here I am. I've plowed through a really nice cheap bottle of merlot, my tummy is full of some delightful cauliflower and tahini something-or-other Avery made for us -- he's trying so hard to learn to cook, he does it to honor Gail -- and I'm tapping away trying to finish this before I need to go to bed. Not on my old TRS-80, mind you -- it's taken me three years to screw up the courage to do this. I've got an Apple IIe now, it's in color and everything, and I can usually get the printer to print what I've typed about thirty percent of the time, if I'm sober.
Avery's been here for ages now, of course. He's helped me with the boarders -- it waxes and wanes, but we've been getting more interest over the years, and sometimes there's a whole houseful to feed and instruct and impress and take on walking tours. He quit at the Historical Society, and he works part time at the library now, just enough to toss an amount into the monthly budget that makes him feel like he's not a freeloader. The files aren't here, I've never asked him where he keeps them, and once I print this and give it to him, I won't ask where they've gone.
He knows he's about to be free of them, and it's made him lighter, happier, more jaunty and full of jokes. How strange that neither of us balk at living in the shadow of this impassive mysterious thing that dictates every aspect of our life, and we can never free our minds and hearts of the stories we've committed to them, but we can feel unburdened just by disposing of the physical evidence. Does that make us less accountable? To whom? Does it mean we were standing guard and now our watch has ended?
Questions, questions. They only have power over you if you seek the answers. I seek light and beauty and warmth and empathy, contentment and orgasm and comfort and camaraderie. The fog is none of those things, and neither are answers. I've done my time fighting this world to a draw, and now I'm going to breathe deeply in the space I have earned, move slowly and deliberately, and sleep well in the shadow of that which I do not understand.
2019:
I skipped Titus Watkins' funeral yesterday. I feel bad that I didn't go, but I couldn't make myself do it.
We hadn't lost anyone this year. We were gonna be the senior class that made it. We've been throwing ourselves into school shit like we were all collectively trying to forget something, which is exactly what we were doing. Who gets that excited about Spirit Week and a 5pm prom? The Class of '19 at River Mouth High, that's who, because we've almost done our time and we can get the fuck out of town.
The further into the year we all got, the more everyone seemed to pick up on our energy. All the local stores soaped up their windows with slogans like "GO FOR IT SENIORS" and "MAKE US PROUD HAWKS." This place getting a whiff of hope about anything, pulling together to believe in anything, is the saddest thing you'll ever see. The whole town's has been in a slow-motion car crash since we've all been alive, but if these 54 kids can keep their shit together, we're all gonna make it too!
So fucking pathetic. And it would be Titus, too. He'd already been suspended once this year for smelling like whiskey in homeroom. The word is, he was drinking with Mandy Barnett and he passed out way too early, and she took off and went home. He probably woke up right in the middle of the night, and kapow, that's it. Mandy hasn't been back to school since. I'd be surprised if she even comes back. People are gonna be assholes about it.
I probably woulda still gone to the funeral -- Titus was a douchebag, but he was in my class and we're all in this together, you know? But yesterday I was on Facebook and this dude from Kimo, Ronnie Vann, I don't even know how I know him, but he's on my friends list, he posts this meme. It's a picture of two empty chairs, there's a crown on one and a tiara on the other. There's that transparent typing all over the picture, like it's a stock photo from somewhere. And the caption says "RIVER MOUTH HOMECOMING KING AND QUEEN, OFFICIAL PHOTO."
The picture had 39 likes. No one in the comments was like "hey, someone just died" or "what the fuck is wrong with you?" Just a bunch of "oh man, you're going to hell for this one" and "LMAO" and that crying-laughing tongue-sticking-out emoji and shit.
I've seen people put filters on their profile pictures when there's a terrorist attack in a city they've never heard of. They donate money when a dog five states away needs a kidney operation. We live in a town that is picking us off one at a time and the rest of the world either doesn't know, doesn't care, or apparently thinks it's hilarious.
I've been thinking a lot about Mr. Sullivan and those folders. It's only three months till the end of the year and my chance to get my hands on them. For a while there, I was gung-ho about doing that, and getting that information out to the world, and really trying to get some attention paid to our town and what we go through. I wanted to save us. I wanted to win.
Now, though? Fuck that. I'm right back where I was at the beginning of the year. I wanna get out of town even if it's with my diploma and the shirt on my back. I don't wanna smell the lake or get nervous watching the sun go down ever again. I don't want to feel this flood of sympathy for someone I didn't even like because he died on my battlefield and I have to care about him because the rest of the world doesn't. Once I'm ready to bail, I'm laying the smackdown on my parents -- come with me if you want, but if you don't, it'll be a cold day in hell before you see my ass again.
To hell with this place. I'm out. Sullivan can give all his ghost stories to someone who gives a shit, because I don't.
"Sleep Tight," the debut novel from Keith Bergman, will be released in 2019.
