LITERAL REMAINS

Jeff Dwyer Was An Eagle Scout

 

Yeah, that’s right, Jeff Dwyer was an Eagle Scout.  Among other things.  Where we come from, that lofted rank of Eagle is highly thought of, even regaled.  At least it is in Cedar Grove, and other little towns just like it, and of course it’s the absolute big shit in the Boy Scouts itself. 

When Jeff reached that summit in the organization (whose outfits at times reminded me of the Hitler Youth I’d see in the old footage on the history shows on the TV.), there was indeed a balls out big to-do in our town.  There was even a letter given to Jeff from our Senator, or Representative or something, and the mayor congratulated him on his character and thanked Jeff for his Eagle Scout project which was collecting the money needed to remodel the playground in the public park.  I’m sure the mayor was just happy the town treasury didn’t have to pay out.

So, there was a big to-do in Cedar Grove when Jeff Dwyer made Eagle Scout.  His grandmother shed some proud tears and his dad actually showed up to the event.  His mother, his grandma’s only child, was MIA and had been for the majority of Jeff’s life.  When Jeff’s parents got married, they moved next door to his dad’s parents, which was in the little community on the northern edge of Morgan County known as Louse.  That should give you some idea of what that community was like, and you’d be correct in every low-rent, trailer trash thought that crossed your mind.  When Jeff was no more than three, his mother just left and vanished into thin air— never heard from again except for a postcard one Christmas with a Wyoming postmark. 

It was his God-fearing grandmother that rescued him from Louse.  His grandmother, Grannie Mills as we all called her, did her best to turn things around for Jeff.  She gave him things that had been sorely missing from his short life at the time, and would have been missing forever if he had stayed with his dad, things like love and nurturing.  She tried her best, as all parents, or most, do, I guess.  That Eagle Scout project was the best thing Jeff Dwyer ever did.  It was the only good thing he ever really did, too.

I met Jeff before we started our long strive through the Cedar Grove school system.  We lived just a couple streets from each other, and my mom was a beautician.  Grannie Mills was one of my mom’s customers— she was there every week, right on the dot of eleven o’clock every Friday to have her hair washed, styled, and set.  She most times brought Jeff with her when we were kids, and that’s how we became friends.

Everybody loved Jeff.  In school, most everyone like him that knew him— which, considering the small size of our school, was just about everybody.  He was the class clown, and the rebel, and it was something to see him turn on the charm with the teachers.  Jeff got into the average, and expected, amount of trouble in school, but nothing too serious and he usually talked his way out of any punishment.  It was a boy being a boy as the principal, or whoever, would inevitably say.  They didn’t know Jeff, though, the way I knew him.

Jeff had…not a mean streak, but a dark streak that ran through him.  A black cloud that would come over him.  Jeff’s childhood antics grew right along with us, developing from the juvenile, petty, crimes of shoplifting soda, candy, or comic books from the corner pharmacy to the more serious crimes that most people would not have believed him capable of.  It wasn’t a very long stretch for Jeff to go from filching Sweet Tarts to stealing a car.

Grannie Mills saw it in him.  That’s why she signed him up for the Boy Scouts.  She hoped it would round out the straight and narrow path that she and God had planned for Jeff— whatever they missed, the scouts would catch.  I think, though, that her plan backfired in her face, and maybe God’s, because I think the Boy Scouts only gave him fresh ideas for when the darkness called to him.

But, to his credit, Jeff stuck it out and made it all the way to the top of the scouts.  There was the ceremony, then life went on as it always did in Cedar Grove.  Me and Jeff finished school, and neither of us went to college, like a lot of our fellow classmates.  It wasn’t because we weren’t the college types, it was because we just didn’t go.  We stayed in Cedar Grove, we didn’t escape like some people.  We got jobs, we became somewhat respectable people.  That is me and some of our fellow classmates got jobs and became honest members of the community.  Not everybody does, and especially not Jeff.

Jeff never had what you would call a normal, regular, job.  No 9 to 5 like a lot of people.  No getting up in the early hours and heading out to make an honest living, no honest pay for an honest day’s work.  Jeff always had money, but no job anyone could ever recall.  Whatever his work was, I know it couldn’t have been something good.  Or legal.  But his pockets were always full, and he always had the most money, and that money was always burning a hole in his wallet.

Jeff spent more money than I knew could be made.  He was always turning up with some new gadget and this and that.  He bought Grannie Mills a brand new car when her old lemon finally went belly up, and he paid cash on the barrel head for it to boot.

It was that habit, or vice, or propensity, or just plain self-centered generosity, that finally got the best of him.  That, and the darkness.

#

It was a Friday evening, and I was at home.  My mother’s home.  I had lost my own place due to the fact that I simply couldn’t afford it anymore.  See, I was working at the saw mill, the only job I could find after Lanskey Corp. moved South of the border where they didn’t have to pay their employees as much as they did here in the States to assemble industrial heating and cooling units.  Lanskey Corp. shut down in the good old neighboring town of McClinton, and a lot of us— about 2,000— were left with a big bucket of fuck.  Which is nothing.  So, being mildly lucky, and being a cousin to the foreman at Cedar Grove Saw Mill, I got a job there.  It paid a lot less, grossly, nauseatingly less, but it paid most of the bills, just not all of them.  So I lost my little rental house and packed my bags and hauled ass to mom’s.

I was sitting in the tattered recliner that we had had for God’s knows how long, feeling not too sorry about my state of affairs— lousy job, no girlfriend, living at home, and…well, that was enough to feel sorry about.  So, I was channel surfing, ignoring my mom busying herself about the house, talking to herself, when in pops Jeff Dwyer with one of his big grins on his face.

“Hello, Ms. Saris,” he said to my mom as she scurried about, his eyes twinkling.

Mom patted him on his smooth cheek as she hurried through.  “Hey, Jeff,” her smile was warm.  She pointed a finger at me:  “Nolin, you’re filthy, get off my furniture.”

I ignored him, glued to the television networks as they flickered past, one after another.

“Get up Nolin,” he said.

“Jeff, I’m tired,” I told him.

“Let’s go,” he plopped down on the couch.  “Get dressed, wash your ass, clean up, or something, man, and let’s hit the road.”

I looked over at him.  “I worked all day.  Actual work.”

“And you need actual play,” he said.  “You don’t do nothing anymore, man.”

“It’s an adult thing.”

“You need to cut loose, and I need your help.”

I hesitated on a channel, decided it was boring, and began flipping again.  “What kind of help?”

“Just come on,” Jeff said.

I stretched back in the chair, nestling my head into it.  I was still dirty from the saw mill, sweaty and layered in saw dust.

“Come on,” he motioned towards the door.  “It’s all on me.”

That’s how I ended up in his car, on the cool leather seats, swigging from my fourth can of cold bear procured from an ice chest on the back seat.  Jeff drove us down the back roads, turning from one gravel, tree-lined swath to another.  I didn’t much care for the beer, but at least it wet my mouth.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.  It felt like we’d been riding around for hours.  The summer sun was still far from setting, and I was thoroughly lost in the flashes of light through the trees, I was near dizzy.  I knew we weren’t in Cedar Grove anymore, and I was certain we had left Morgan County far behind us.  I had a sudden urge to want to go home and pass out on my bed.  “Where are we?”

Jeff said, “Don’t worry about it, man.”

Of course, that made me to worry.  Then I saw the sign.  Louse Community Methodist Church.  “What the hell are we doing in Louse?” I asked, finishing off my beer.

“Some business,” he said.

“We’ve been driving around forever—“

“Killing time,” said Jeff.  “We got an appointment.”

I tossed my empty beer can out the window.  “With who?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like your surprises,” I said.

“Hang on,” he muttered and made a hard left turn down a cloistered dirt road.  He slowed the car, cruising the car so dust barely kicked up behind us.

“Business and pleasure,” Jeff said.  “I got some business to take care of, and you may get some pleasure out of it to boot.”  He smiled big, that shit eating grin that shows all his shining white teeth.  “I’ll get some pleasure out of it too.”

“I’m sure.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t just a secluded dirt road in the middle of Louse.  It was a secluded driveway in the middle of Louse.  Jeff stopped the car beside a pieced-together Camaro and sighed.  “Here we are.”

It was a mobile home placed awkwardly amid a clearing of trees; a section of siding was missing from one end of the trailer, or home, or whatever one was to call it.  A tarp covered the roof in the middle, I guess to make up for a lack of tin.  A pit bull, chained to a tree, looked up from a doghouse that appeared to be in better condition than its owners’ dwellings.  The pit laid his head back down, completely uninterested.

“Where is here?”

“Clint Clark’s place.”

I hung my head.  “Dammit,” I breathed.  I looked at my smiling-fool friend.  “Clint Clark.  Janie Clark.”

“Clint is gone for the night.  Working the graveyard shift,” said Jeff.  “Leaves Janie here all by her lonesome.”

Jeff was getting out of the car.  “She ain’t lonesome,” I said, getting out reluctantly.  I slammed the door.  “She’s a goddamn whore.”

“That too,” he said, and he was already on the steps, knocking at the door.

“Why the fuck did you bring me here?”

Jeff knocked, harder.  “I thought you might like to get some pussy.”

I shook the thought of Janie Clark’s pussy from my head.  “Pussy I don’t mind, but AIDS I got a problem with.”

Janie called from inside the home.  “It’s open.”

“She ain’t got AIDS,” Jeff said.  “She keeps her pussy clean, man.”

“I ain’t paying for sex.  Never have, never will.  And I sure ain’t sticking my dick in anything of Janie Clark’s.”

Jeff was about to turn the handle when he suddenly spun around to me and grabbed me by the collar of my shirt.

“You listen,” he said, a tinge of menace in his voice and a seriousness on his face.  A darkness filling his features.  “You be nice.  You ruin this for me, and swear to God…”

“Relax, Jeff,” I sputtered.  I did my best to smile, to diffuse him.  “I’ll try not to ruin anything.”

“You coming in?” Janie called.

Jeff, in an instant, was jovial and opened the door.

The smell about knocked me off the steps.  It smelled of rot, of trash, stale sweat, nasty sex, and reefer.  Jeff had no qualms and entered the too well lit place with a joke and a spring in his step.

“Just deciding who was going first,” Jeff said.  I could hear Janie giggle.  Jeff turned back to me, motioning me inside.  “I lost.”

All manners of thoughts ran at light speed through my brain as I climbed those few rickety steps and crossed the threshold.  I hope was hoping not to throw up what little food I had eaten that day.  I, somehow, I guess knew it would be possible for the stench to be worse, but I was still somewhat shocked that it was worse inside the trailer.  Holding my breath was futile.  Breathing through my mouth only allowed me to taste the horror, and it was a sure fire way to vomit.

“Nolin,” Janie said.  “Well, how about that.”

Janie Clark could have been a beautiful girl under other circumstances.  Circumstances like cleanliness and better hygiene.  Given a proper bath, a good scrubbing, and make-up, I suppose, she could in fact have been a real looker.  As she was, she was too thin, from drugs or malnourishment or both.  She had dark circles around her eyes, a couple of blackened teeth, and greasy hair that was cut badly, hanging in sort choppy locks.  Her skin was pale white like she had never stepped foot in the sunlight, and considering she was one of the biggest whores in town, she probably didn’t get out much:  her home was her place of business.

“Shit the bed,” she said.  “What brings you here, Nolin?”

“Him,” I mumbled and pointed at Jeff.

Janie was smoking a cigarette that had nearly burned down to the filter and was sitting on a sofa leftover from the nineteen-seventies, its fabric course, stained, frayed, and singed in places.  She wore a short bright red silk robe that looked new and that made her seem much paler than she could possibly be.  She had a knee drawn up and I admit the flash of skin and thigh did bring a warmth to my face.  I did my best to look away, not make eye contact, or look at anything else of her.

“We’re just out goofing,” Jeff said, “and I knew Clint was going to be going to work soon, so we had the idea that we might stop by, see if you wanted to party a little bit.  Didn’t we?”

It took me a second to focus from the grimy walls to realize Jeff was speaking to me.  He was sitting on a chair arm in close proximity of Janie.  I was standing near the door, thankful for the slight breeze that was blowing into the rancid trailer.

I nodded, “Yeah, I guess.”

Janie bit at her lower lip and sat up.  She looked me up and down; I could feel her eyes inching over me.

“I guess I just been waitin’ for you,” she said.  She patted the sofa and thin cloud of dust puffed.  “Come here, Nolin, I ain’t seen you in forever.”

Jeff looked at me, a curious glance.

“We all went to school together,” I told him.  “Remember?”  I did not want him thinking I had ever been here before.

“I remember,” he said, then turned his twinkling eyes to Janie.  “Well, let’s get the party started.”

He stood and stretched and nudged me forward.

Janie had lit another cigarette and was enveloped in a cloud of smoke.  “You guys want to tag team me?” she asked.

I turned, ready for the exit, but Jeff put his arm out and stopped me.  A hint of menace was in his look that quickly disappeared as he spoke to Janie.

“No,” he said, affable.  “We tried that once before with a girl, but, you know, it’s just awkward.  Me and Nolin being like brothers and all.”

“I understand,” she said, flicking ashes on the rank carpet.  “So come on ever here, Nolin.”  Her voice took on a seductive, purring quality I didn’t think she had it in her to do.

Jeff canted his head, an almost pleading in his eyes.  I turned around, faced her.  “Yeah, I won first go,” I said.

I eased down on the sofa as far from her as I could get.  It felt slightly damp and an odd odor wafted to my nostrils, but I swallowed the lumps that wanted to rise in my throat.

“I’ll just wait outside,” Jeff said, “and have a beer.  Or two.”

“You can watch,” Janie said.

“That’s okay,” I blurted.

“Yeah, I’d rather not,” Jeff said.  On the step, just before closing me up in that hellhole, Jeff told me, “Do whatever you want, I’m paying.”

And then the door was closed.

I stared at the door, hoping my vision could somehow bore through and strike Jeff down, or at least put a hole in him.  I definitely wished I was home now, or anywhere but here.

Janie stubbed out her cigarette.  “So you want to party?”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.  “I, uh, I don’t know now-“

“You don’t have to be shy with me, Nolin Saris,” she said, sitting sideways, arm on the back of the sofa.  “You look like you been working hard.”

I glanced down at the dirt on my clothes.  I was glad I hadn’t changed and cleaned up; I’d probably have to burn the t-shirt and jeans I was wearing, just for safety’s sake.

“It was a regular day,” I said.  “Gotta work for a living.”

Janie ran a finger along the corner of her mouth.  “Yes we do.”

“We can just talk,” I said.  What the hell was Jeff planning?  Why did he pick me for this?  Was I his only goddamn friend?

Janie untied the belt that held her shiny red robe, loosely, together.  The robe parted, partially exposing her breasts.

“I can do more than talk with this mouth, baby,” she said.

Another admission:  I felt my heart beating in my throat, I felt my dick stiffening as she sat up on her knees, leaning over to me.  The robe was open, and her body was lithe, the evening gloom cleaning her up, her perky tits jutting from cover.  My eyes feasted, yes they did, and I felt my pulse racing the Indy 500 throughout my body.  Her snatch was shaved bare, and I swallowed a ball of spit.

She bent down, kissed the corner of my mouth.  She breathed in my ear, nibbled at my lobes.  “You ready, Nolin?”

My hands, God I don’t think I could control them, found her hips, and I raised up to nuzzle her neck, bringing us closer together.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.  I asked that, I actually did.  When a man is horny, God help him.

Janie ran her fingers through my hair.  “This is your party, baby.  You can fuck me as hard as you want.”  She breathed, hotly, in my ear, a fucking scorching whisper, “Anywhere you want.”

My hands, a will of their own, my brain on blind auto-pilot, crawled up her body to her breasts.  My lips were locked with hers, tongue finding tongue.  If I had been in my right mind, I would never have found myself there, I would never be making out with Janie or feeling up her tits.  But what man is ever in his right mind?  Why are we so stupid?

A delicate moan escaped her lips and she effortlessly unbuckled my belt.  The feel of her bare flesh sent goose pimples along my arms.

There was a crash outside, behind the trailer.

Janie shot up, ears attuned.  “What was that?”

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely certain I had heard anything.  Pussy on the mind, even Janie’s all of a sudden, can cloud the senses and make me think of nothing else.

Then I heard something, the sound of maybe metal screeching against concrete.  It snapped me out of whatever revelry I was experiencing and I was seeing nasty Janie as nasty Janie again.  I was still rock hard, but I knew in that instant I couldn’t put my dick in this woman.  I couldn’t.

Janie looked at me concerned.  “What’s Jeff up to?”

I just wanted out of here, yet again, thankful I had come back to my proper sanity.  “He just wants to, you know, party,” I said.  I was suddenly fearful of letting Jeff down, of ruining whatever he was planning.  I was fearful of that, too, whatever his business was, but what could I do?

The lazy dog outside had begun to bark.

Janie jumped off me and flung the door open.  The heat and wave of air that rushed in was a relief.  My nose was beginning to smell the stench of place again, it had overcome the possessing lust, too, as the blood was being redistributed to the rest of my body.

“Wait,” I called but she was already gone, robe flapping away.  “Oh, shit,” I said to the filth that surrounded me and bounded after her.

“Jeff!” I heard her yelling as I leaped down the steps.  The dog was barking furiously now, straining at its tether.

I was buckling my belt when I rounded the corner of the trailer, making sure I was clear of the snarling, snapping, jaws of the pit bull.  Janie was holding her robe tight around her, staring into the open double doors of a leaning, weathered, wooden shed.

“Jeff!  Get outta there!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, straightening my clothes.

Jeff emerged from the darkened doorway.  The evening light cast dark shadows across his face, the fire of the cigarette dangling from his lips glowing brilliant as he puffed.

“Where is it?” Jeff asked quietly, barely audible over the barking mad dog.

“What?” Janie rocked from foot to foot.  “What are you talking about, Jeff?”

Jeff shook his head.  “I know Clint has it here somewhere, and I want it.”

Janie crossed her arms, holding herself, uncomfortable, maybe, for the first time in her life.  “You’ll have to talk to Clint.”

“I know it’s here,” Jeff said, “and I don’t think he’d hide it in the house.”

I stepped forward.  Jeff’s voice was taking on that certain edge, that certain tinge of anger, I could sense it over the pits incessant yapping.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  I was standing beside Janie.  She kept her eyes downcast, avoiding eye contact, not because she didn’t want either of us to see she was lying, but because she was trying to hide her fear.

“Clint stole it from me, Janie,” Jeff said, his voice rising above the dog and the evening sounds of nature.  “And I’m here to take it back.  He had no right-“

“What’d he steal?” I asked, not knowing if I was heard or not.

Janie met my stare then.  She was on the verge of tears.  “Clint said not to bother it.  It’s dangerous.  He told me stay clear of it.”

“Janie-“

Her eyes were pleading.  “Clint said-“

She was cut off by a commotion:  Jeff had disappeared back into the recesses of the shed, tossing this and that here and there.  He was upturning everything, it sounded like, hell bent.

Janie ran to the entrance, peering in, practically frantic, but wouldn’t cross inside.  “Stop!” she yelled.

“Jeff!  Man, come on!” I hollered, but was only answered by clatter and angry barks.

Janie became animated, as though she were going to burst from her skin.  “Goddamn it!  I’ll call the cops!  I’ll call Clint!” she screamed.  “Clint said let it be!”

She must have gathered her nerve for she dashed inside, out of my view, darting fully into the dark maw of the shed.

The din of disturbance escalated, the clanking, the breaking, the tossing about, with Janie arguing at the top of her lungs with indistinguishable curses and threats, the dog still going full throttle at my back.

Then it all stopped.  Even the pit.  Nature.

Only my heart thumping in the quiet.

I heard a soft voice.  Janie, somewhere inside that shed.

“Don’t open it.”

Nothing.  Only quiet calm.

The dog whimpered and I dared a glance to see the pit bull ducking into the dog house, cowering.

I took a heavy step toward the shed.  “Jeff?  Janie?”

The wood of the shed moaned and creaked.

Janie came running, screaming bloody murder, from the shed.  She was covered in a thick black goo, like she’d been dipped in tar.  The whites of her eyes shown wild, the stuff rising in strands and waves from her as if it were alive.

I stumbled away from her, nearly falling, until my back was against the mobile home.

She came running straight at me.  She fell at my feet, reaching up to me.  I stepped aside, my legs hardly willing to work they felt so frozen and numb I fell down flat on my ass.

The blackness, the goo, the damn stuff whatever it was, was moving, it was alive.  It coursed over her body, feeling, roaming, and roving, enveloping her.  It slithered down in her mouth, down her throat, strangling her cries, it snaked up her nostrils.  And her eyes, the whites so vibrant, were finally covered over.

Janie lay on the ground, her body jerking and shuddering until finally it lay still, her last sighs floating into the rising dusk.  It seemed it took an eternity for her to die.

“Jeff?”  It was a weak cry for help.  My mouth wouldn’t work properly.  My voice failing.  “Fuck.”  I scooted away from Janie’s body.

Something heavy fell in the shed.  Something was moving inside there.

Thick, black, tentacles, and that’s the best I describe them, fanned out from the shed doors and slapped hard against the wood building.  They tensed and flexed like muscles and felt around.

Fuck Jeff, that’s what I thought.  Fuck Jeff Dwyer.

The dog whimpered and the tentacles picked up on the sound, lifting into the air, seeking the sound out.

To hell with Jeff.

Maybe what I did was wrong.  Maybe I’m the worst friend ever in the history of the whole entire fucking world.  But I wanted to live.  I didn’t ask for this shit.  I didn’t want anything here.  Abandoning a friend is wrong.  But I have repented, many times.

I crawled in retreat, not taking my eyes off the tentacles.  I felt heat in my bowels as they churned, ready to shit my pants.

The tentacles turned in the air.  They knew I was there.

Strength comes at some odd times, and luckily it found me.  I jumped to my feet and ran, rounding the corner of the trailer.  I slid over the hood of Jeff’s car and crashed to the ground beside it.  I rose up enough to see over the car.

The pit bull found some balls and was half out of the dog house.  It was growling, foaming at the mouth.

Three tentacles shot out, slapping down on the dog and its house, erupting in a storm of blood, shattered bones, and splintered wood before disappearing behind the trailer.

I opened the car door and got in.  I slammed the door and realized I was forgetting to breath.  I sucked in a gust of air that hurt my lungs and played dots over my vision.

Then the real shitter:  the keys weren’t in the car.

“Shit!  Shit!” I banged my fists on the steering wheel.  I quickly silenced myself.  The things, the tentacles…I’ve been too loud, already.  The car door, the cursing, did they hear or sense any of it?

I sat in the driver’s seat gasping breath and spitting it out, watching all along the mobile home for some sign of those things to come creeping.  But I didn’t see anything.

I eased the car door open.  Dry grass crunched like shells under my feet.  One foot and then the other.  Step lightly.  I scanned the trailer, the top, the bottom, the sides.  One step, two steps, three.

It came from underneath, towering up, flipping the mobile home end over end through the air to land shattered in the field.  It held in the air a second like a monolith and then it was falling.  I ran as it smacked down on the car, crushing it.  I ran, my entire body burning, down that tree shrouded drive.

I ran until I collapsed in a heap on the road.  I still didn’t feel safe.  I crawled to my feet and set about finding my way home.  I hadn’t really paid attention on the journey to Clint and Janie’s, but I knew, in a roundabout way, where I was.

I walked the back roads for hours before I finally saw the clustered lights of the town square.  When I drug myself up the street to home, I stretched out of the damp lawn and slept until sometime in the early hours before sunrise.

Jeff was gone.  So was Janie.  When Clint came home that following morning, he called the sheriff and whoever else answered the emergency lines.  The place was a wreck:  the trailer, the shed, Jeff’s car, all destroyed.  No bodies.

There was no final conclusion to what had happened, not by the standards of the authorities anyway.  Clint knew, though, deep down, that the thing he feared, whatever it was, had claimed his wife.

Jeff’s car was heap a of crushed metal, and it was beyond identifying as his, nothing left to trace.  When I was questioned by  my mother about the last night Jeff was ever seen, I mumbled off a story of Jeff getting drunk and kicking me out the car somewhere on the country roads and wandering home.  She bought the story, just like everyone else, even Jeff’s grandmother, because they knew, somehow, they didn’t want to know the true demise of Jeff Dwyer.

the_novacula