Rick Moody - Demonology

Loud popular music emanated from the Foster house. The Californian idiom, soft rock, like a perfumed glob of used toilet tissue or a sample of imitation American cheese food product or meatless chili. He liked the crass stuff coming out of England and New York City, where people couldn’t play their instruments very well. But soft rock was no surprise here. Peltz was standing at the edge of the driveway poking dead leaves with a stick. His absurd ringlets, about which he constantly complained, could not be combed down. He was dressed the same way he always dressed, in the regulation nondescript corduroy trousers and blue pullover sweater So much for the costumes of a Halloween party. Gerry was careful to lock the doors of the Jeep. Somebody’s car would get rolled before night was over. Its canopy would be crushed. And allowing his own parents’ car to be crushed would be a sign of adolescent pathology, and he would be grounded until receipt of his first social security check.

— You’re late, Peltz said.

— Nice costume.

— I’m a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Peltz replied.

— Lots of thinking went into that.

— What are you?

Gerry, too, wore nondescript corduroy trousers, matched with a navy blue turtleneck.

— I’m a lupus sufferer. Peltz mulled it over.

— They look just like everybody else, Gerry said.

— What about the skin problems?

— The turtleneck is covering my rash. I’m telling you, we have hopes and fears just like you do.

Another car pulled up. Parked on the lawn. Out of it came a procession of attractive girls, more girls than should have been able to fit in a Honda Civic. Amazingly, these classmates were also wearing nondescript corduroy trousers. But with frilly blouses. They paid no attention to this pair of boys, these interlopers of Eastern European extraction secreted in the shady grove of the Fosters’ yard. The girls themselves disappeared in and out of shadows of oaks and maples on their way across the enormous lawn. As if these sylphs were the muses of his fantasies and daydreams, Peltz announced that he had a plan for the evening. In order to make the party more happening. Multiple conquests, he elaborated. Like see that carload of girls just got out here, well, there’s Nancy Van Ingen, heir to the Weyerhauser paper fortune, at least I think her dad is somehow involved with those paper products, paper towels, and next to her, that’s Bernie Cooper, a Rockefeller through an aunt, her family goes back to the dawn of time, which was when her family rented out the space on cave walls for the guys who did the cave paintings. They were already going to France for vacations, see, and they cornered the market in cave walls. Next to her is Annie Win-ningham. Annies great-great-grand aunt owned the boat where the Boston Tea Party took place, actually sold tea to protesters at a huge markup, and that’s not all. Lots of them are inside, heiresses, women who’ll rule the world, Gerry, they’ll rule the world. They’re related to the kings of all different countries, they’re related to the kings of Monaco and Estonia and Macedonia and Bhutan, and one of them is actually the God Queen of Krakatoa, no shit, these girls, they’re coming to this partyexpecting that something memorable is going to happen, that there’s going to be a surprise, because it’s Halloween, and even though these women will probably figure out later on that really they’d rather be with other heiresses, not with the guys they’re supposed to marry, well, eventually they’ll get married anyway so that their fortunes can be given away to kids instead of to charitable foundations. We still have to be ready to offer them the stuff that they need, Gerry, we have to be able to tell them, look, we have pot, we have booze, and we’re ready to teach you what premature ejaculators on the football team won’t be able to teach you how to, you know, experience it, feel the whole thing, feel the feeling called love. But that’s what we have to be able to do. We know all there is to know about love. We know everything. That’s what I’m saying, Gerry. Heiresses of Fairfield County, they’re here for us.

Gerry didn’t believe a word of this speech, but it was made more impressive by the sight of the Fosters’ mansion, which loomed in the distance. Up over the rolling hill just ahead was the sand trap where the foster patriarch once practiced his chips and putts, back before liver disease. Gerry sprinted to the edge of it, out of the sheer enthusiasm for sprinting on a night in October, but at the lid of the trap he almost tripped over a body. Sand billowed. He tumbled to the side of the trap. It was Lyle Hubbell. Wearing the obligatory nondescript corduroys, of course, affixed with a few patches, a T-shirt, a denim jacket. Lyle Hubbard, completely unconscious. Expressions of shock issued from Gerry, instinctively, at the insult of this corpse. And yet it was consistent with Hubbell’s character that he was here. Hubbell failed all the tests of human company. And he was always sneaking beers. It was said that the diet sodas that Hubbell frequently carried around school were actually filled with intoxicants. He was even rumored to have his own distillery out in the woods, by the retirement facility next to the school. Since, in this tableau, there was a six-pack of pull-tab Millers in Hubbell’s left hand, and a couple of loose cans nearby, prejudice on the matter of his condition was justified.

— Bodes well, Peltz remarked.

— I almost kicked him in the head. You know, head injury leads to a lifetime of impulse-control problems.

— We could put a sign up. Teenager trying to escape from feelings of isolation, use caution. People would steer clear.

Next, on the landscaped walkway, the goldfish pond, brightly illumined with subaqueous lamps. The pond was in season, too, because the color of the fish, their unearthly orange, was a near match with the pumpkins, actual and plastic, that were strewn widely across the premises. The fish were demonic, possessed. Casting off their usual lethargic demeanor, they streaked from end to end in the little pond, as if unfed or disturbed by pressure from without. Perhaps it was the fact that two teens, Steven Dodge and Eloise Falk, were sitting in one end of the water, the pond rippling well above their waists, ruining their outfits. They talked calmly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Julian Peltz wished them a good evening with exaggerated felicity. They looked up briefly.

— Definitely talking about sex. He’s claiming that he really loves her deeply and that it will be really meaningful for him to express the depth of his profound love for her in this special way. And she’s stuck. If anything, she’s more into it. Abramowitz, let’s be clear. Guy and a girl, getting wild, it’s the girls that are driven to a frenzy. That’s why all those other girls, like Nancy Van Ingen and Polly Firestone, they need men like us, who can offer them the real experiences of love.

— So we head off in different directions, each with our really bad social skills and we try to get these girls interested in us, and then later we compare notes?

— Brilliant.

— If you say so.

Foster’s greyhounds came bounding out of the orchard on the west side of the main house. Freed from lethal injection, they had reservoirs of energy, in accordance with which they were cantering from the gazebo where Nick Foster had once pretended to hang himself. One of them paused, by the parked cars, to lift a leg on a Mercedes. Then off toward the house again. Gerry and Julian didn’t have time to reflect on the immediate need for shelter from these marauders, because the dogs were immediately surrounding them, snouts low to the ground as if bent upon retrieval of their primeval mechanical rabbit. In lead position, a whippet, ribs multiply protruding, kicked up divots on the magnificent lawn, moist from the rain that month; in second position, but gaining, since the whippet seemed to be tiring, was an Irish wolfhound, a tall example of the species, too, close to four feet, a mighty hound with a blood-curdling grin, which just then veered around Peltz, before vanishing into darkness at a full gallop; in show position, the Fosters’ exotic pharaoh hound, a breed brought to Spain during the Saracen invasions and later exported abroad, thus a dog as old as civilization, in third place, yes, but exerting enormous pressure on the leaders! Look at him nosing on the wolfhound! He could almost sniff the underside of the larger dog’s tail! Restof the pack several lengths back, an afghan, a borzoi, three of your traditional Anglo-Saxon greyhounds. Banking around the house, they poured it on, heading for the home stretch, frolicking in draperies of mist!