Rick Moody - Demonology

With a fluttering of his pinky-ringed hand, my brother tried to get me to play cool. I’m gone before you know it Man, if I came here singing songs of love, even then you’d bounce me out on my ass.

Now the backing away of my brother Jack, blond dealer of exotic high-performance cars, future dealership owner. I waited for the threatening language, but the silence of his departure was instantaneous. Iwill not punish your sons when they commit whoredom. I knew, I knew. I knew where the police would find the body of poor Elise from the club called Silver Screen, out by the woods at the edge of the golf course in Pelham. There’s always trouble at the edge of this golf course, you know, because it’s the edge of New York City, it’s the beginning of the suburbs, and every threshold must have its darkness, and so Elise, who was incested when young, got driven to the edge of this wood, where she drank wine with my brother, and they kissed, and they cavorted, and they lived such lives as I have never lived, and then they took a dirt road there, by the edge of the canal, where there were only torched hulks of cars, stripped of all but the smoking exterior chassis, the steering column, muffler, disc brakes, upholstery all gone, my brother, at thirty-four miles per hour in an avenue zoned for twenty-five, drove into a tree, knocked her unconscious, ditched her body, flung away its wedding band, and then after the visit to me abandoned the stolen car, the car he brought into the city to impress her, or to impress someone like her, and he waded down into the lifeless river just beyond the woods, and he dove in, in his Armani suit, drifted downstream, in a narcissistic reverie. Leaving no trail.

Remember Melissa Abdow? The girl who saw Bobby Erlich’s crash? Amazing thing. She called last week, at work. (The surfaces of my cubicle are appallingly clean. My rolodex is blank. Here’s a photograph of Tanya wearing a yellow dress.) Melissa wanted a little advice on the inverted yield curve, What’s going to be the effect on treasuries, as a conservative type of investment? She and her husband were trying to salt away some funds for their kid’s college education. And she got my number from somebody who got it from somebody. Research, that morning, had brought in some disappointing news from the markets. It was also scrolling across my computer screen. Full kingdom blessing on traders of bonds, they shall run like mighty men. The horseman lifteth up the bright sword. That I.P.O. for the new web portal is going to sell out fast. Melissa asked about my brother. How’s Jack anyway? Something in my tone made her ask, I knew, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. If it’s possible for a voice to have worry lines, Melissa’s voice had them, when she was speaking to me. My brother? My brother, Melissa? I started and I couldn’t stop. I admitted that I hadn’t seen my brother in years, seven years, that he had married a lovely girl, Elise, and I didn’t go to his wedding, you know, I smote you with blasting and with mildew, because I was ashamed; he had smashed up Elise’s brother’s Porsche not long before the ceremony, cut himself kind of badly, and he came to me for aid and counsel, and I drove him out of the house, and you know how it is with brothers, Melissa, you know how it is.

My wife keeps calling down the basement staircase to where I’m sitting here enveloped in darkness, tightening wood screws on a small racing car that I have made for my nephew, Danny. I have made him many toys. A day of darkness, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as morning spreads upon the mountains, the bugs are kind of bad down here, Take me and cast me into the sea. This basement with its cinder blocks and its exposed bulb, this suits me. Seven years now, a biblical interval, and it was just a little thing. I was a jumpy, anxious person, hard to get along with, I suppose; amazing that I have kept my job this long, when I cannot be comforted. It was just some car that I refused to have in my garage, you would think that would be enough, that it could be forgotten. And I haven’t even set eyes upon my brother’s boy, except in that Christmas card that came this last year (his hair like a crown of goldenrod), and there’s Elise, with the strawberry-highlights, I don’t get too many cards, it’s almost a week now here that I have been worrying about the boy, waiting for my brother to call, our Chevy is gassed and ready. There was a time when everybody knew the future, but a few wise types elected to forget what was to come, as we all elect, eventually, to forget the past. Forgetters raised up many children and made songs of praising, I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Please let me be wrong again. About that sick boy. Let me be wrong.

Alimbo bar festooned with streamers, by the bathhouse entrance. Tuna on shish kebab and pineapple slices in large stainless-steel serving cisterns arranged on a buffet table. At the edge of the snack bar, the undergrad who gave golf lessons, in chefs hat and lei, carving a roast pig. The carcass had menaced the staff from the walk-in kitchen fridge for upwards of five days. The Olson kid, chaperoned on either side by his parents, in the moment of asking if they had cooked, you know, the pig on a spit. Logical inquiry under the circumstances, on Hawaiian Night. No evidence, however, of a spit. Polynesian slide guitar drifted across the patio, from a concealed speaker. Don Ho.

Lena Beechwood, at Table No. 1 (my table, though she was no relation of mine), worried aloud about her crew for the Round Island Race, peppering her sentences with fine acerbities: Pete Evans got his jib twisted in the middle of the Memorial Day course, just let the sheet right out of his hands. They’d placed second, when they could very well have won, and so He wont do, wont do at all, you just can’t trust him. They could take Evans’s wife, Hunter, but she was sluggish from having the twins and might not have the energy or the reflexes. Second place goes to the weary, to the inert.

Northeastern sun, that pink hatbox, drifted into a margin of haze as the kids of Hawaiian Night threw off their regulation jackets and ties or their cardigan sweaters and flats and began to caper on the lawn. The Costellos, Dan and Pete and Gretchen; the appallingly smart Sam Harvey, who intimidated everybody else’s towheads; little Rene Hennessy, with the platinum-blond crewcut and the French accent — his parents had been transferred to the Paris office, but they made it back across the pond for August; Marilyn Wendell, who would almost certainly get as stout as her mom, and, like her mom, be the consort of all local boys until that day. Two dozen kids, maybe, interchangeable, by virtue of their long-standing acquaintance; interchangeable, by virtue of the physical resemblances each to each; interchangeable, by virtue of the hidden entanglements of their parents over the years, or by virtue of these times. Perhaps it was simply that all children were one phylum, one kingdom, one species, one throbbing, pulsating corpus of velocity, language, and enthusiasm.

Andrew Grimms boy and girl were thick in the stew, though Andrews wife had died the summer before. The Grimms had taken the cigarette boat out, at dusk, with Ellen Moss and a shaker of cocktails, to pick up house guests who’d missed the last ferry. In the course of demonstrating for Ellen just how fast the Pretty Young Thing could go — she on the wheel, he the throttle, Andy’s wife, Debby, gazing pacifically upon the action — they had jumped a large wake. One engine failed, the craft lifted up into the air, and they began to spiral to port, to be thrown into the magnificent bay. Outboards exposed in the shadows above the three of them. Here comes tragedy. As Andy and Debby and Ellen bobbed and ducked and breaststroked, laughed nervously at first, their unmanned boat embarked on its repetitive circular course, leftward, sinisterly, coming around and bearing down again on the three swimmers, who couldn’t match its forty-nine miles per hour (fifty if you tilted the engines just so), who couldn’t get out of its way. The boat struck Andy’s wife decisively and crushed a plurality of vertebrae. Andy Grimm served as distraught witness, with the craft circling ominously between himself and the afflicted woman. Ellen Moss called out to Debby across the water, having just sidestroked inside the perimeter of the concentric rings that the Pretty Young Thing made in chop and spray. Don’t move! Then Ellen Moss, of Foyle, Decker, Greenwood and Peacock, Management Consultants, Ellen Moss of the size-four tennis skirts, of the collection of antique porcelain miniatures, Ellen Moss risked heavily insured life and limb to swim back to Debby Grimm, to remove Debby from harm’s way, to hold her as she lost consciousness, Ellen Moss whispering endearments as best she could, Just a minute or two, huh? while Andy watched, immobilized by the menace of events. At last, a passing speedboat threw out its coils, hauled them from the sea, and the trouble really began. Debby’s pulse fibrillated and then quit. The Coast Guard spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to put a stop to the circular imperatives, the eternal return at forty-nine miles per hour of the Pretty Young Thing. Then they tangled its prop in a drift net.