Everybody's Fool

Hill Comes to Dale

WHEN RAYMER FINALLY RETURNED to his senses, he was still on his knees at the foot of Becka’s grave, the storm having passed. He had the distinct impression that he’d actually vacated his body for a time, left it to fend for itself, but for how long? A few minutes? Half an hour? The rumbling thunder was now miles to the north, and the rain had stopped, so probably closer to the latter. Taking inventory, he discovered his right hand was cramped painfully into a claw. He shook the damned thing vigorously, trying to restore circulation, but it remained frozen, numb. Had he suffered a stroke? Struggling to his feet, he became aware of an odd, tingling sensation in his extremities — toes, ears and, for some reason, the tip of his tongue. Had he been struck by lightning? Wouldn’t a direct hit have killed him? Reduced him to cinders, in fact? What about an indirect hit? What if lightning struck a tree over in nearby Hill, say, then traveled along the ground in search of somebody dumb enough to be kneeling in the soaking wet in Dale and delivered enough of a jolt to short out a circuit or two but not enough to fry them all?

“Hello?” he said, trying out his tingly tongue, the word echoing in his skull like it would in an empty drum. Why did he half expect an answer?

Then he remembered: reaching out for the florist’s card as the sky lit up like broad daylight, the pile-driving peal of thunder as he closed his fist around it, the howl escaping his throat subsumed simultaneously by the thunderclap. And finally the nauseating sense of having been split in two, of a malignant new presence filling up every cell of his body. Dougie, he remembered naming it. “Hello?” he said again, louder this time, akin to a man shaking a shoe and listening for the pebble trapped in its toe. “Dougie?”

Silence.

Thank God. Because one Douglas Raymer, he thought, was all the Douglas Raymer anyone would ever need, including himself. Evidently the second entity, whose rogue electrical impulse he’d detected, hadn’t survived the drier, fresher, cooler air that trailed in the wake of the storm. Good riddance.

And yet it had been, he had to admit, a very close call. He’d come dangerously close to losing his mind. Hard to believe, but as the storm raged overhead, he’d actually believed that his dead wife, somehow in control of nature itself, was trying to kill him, hurling lightning bolts at him like a vengeful Fury, as if he’d been the one cheating on her instead of vice versa. Insane. He’d nearly killed himself for the sake of a card from a florist, for God’s sake.

Soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably, Raymer made his zombielike return through the slop, arriving back at the parking lot just as the three-quarter moon scudded out from behind the clouds, so blinding it was a miracle it didn’t dampen all the stars in the sky. The last of the fast-moving storms seemed to have finally broken the back of the heat wave, the temperature plummeting a good twenty degrees. That morning, standing beneath a broiling sun, Raymer had prayed for just such blessed relief, and now that prayer’s answer was delivered, like those of so many prayers, like retribution itself. Unlocking the Jetta, he slid behind the wheel and studied his right claw under the dome light, marveling at its rigor-mortis determination to remain clenched. Using the thumb and forefinger of his good hand, he was able to straighten his frozen pinkie, but every time he let go of it to work on its neighbor, it snapped back into the claw again, and he finally gave up, grateful that no one was around to witness his futile struggles against himself.

It was going on one, so the sensible thing would be to find someplace to crash, but where? Charice’s? No, not a chance in hell. Even under normal circumstances he would’ve been reluctant to show up on the doorstep of fastidious Jerome, whose upscale Schuyler condo was the ’Stang’s glove compartment writ large. About the only person he could think of who might welcome him at this hour was old Mr. Hynes, but since Raymer had his own apartment at the Morrison Arms that made no sense at all. Besides, after all he’d been through, what he really needed was to be alone for a while, in a hotel room’s bathtub where he could soak his freaky paw in warm water and wait for the tingling in his extremities to subside. By morning, if the hand still hadn’t relaxed, he’d have to haul it into the ER. Follow the biblical injunction and have the fucking thing amputated if it continued to offend him.

Unable to grip the ignition key, he awkwardly inserted it with his left hand, finally managing to turn it in the ignition. When the engine turned over, the windshield wipers leaped unexpectedly to life, startling the hell out of him, and once he switched them off the radio blared on, loud. He cut the volume and checked the dial, which was tuned, inexplicably, to a country station. Raymer seldom listened to the radio at all, much less to this hillbilly shit. Had someone been playing around in his car? When he snapped the radio off, he noticed an ambient buzzing in his ears that hadn’t been there before. He shook his head vigorously, even more convinced that he’d somehow absorbed some sort of electrical shock back at Becka’s grave. “Hello?” he said again, his voice causing the buzzing to get even louder.

Then, a moment later, it stopped altogether, and a gravelly voice said, Hello, fuckwad.

—

AT THE CEMETERY’S MAIN GATE, instead of turning right onto the highway, Raymer turned left onto the gravel road that separated Hill from Dale, at the other end of which was the rarely used Spring Street entrance. That would lead directly out to the interstate, where he just might, against all odds, find a vacancy at one of the chain motels.

He’d waited back in the parking lot for over half an hour, praying for the voice in his head to say something else, but instead the buzzing in his ears had returned, only louder. Sleep. Dear God, sleep was what he needed. If he couldn’t find a room out there, he’d conk out in the vast Lowe’s parking lot. And tomorrow he’d hand in his resignation. In the unlikely event anyone objected or wanted to know why, he’d tell them he was hearing voices and going batshit crazy. Maybe he’d drive to Utica, to the state mental hospital, in hopes they could sort him. They hadn’t done shit for the mayor’s wife, but who knew?

So profound was his exhaustion that when Raymer came to the ten-foot mound of earth sitting in the middle of the blacktop and blocking both lanes — as if lowered from the sky — he pulled up and stared at it, unsure if what he was looking at was even real. Could it be, like the voice in his head, a figment of his insanity? At the top of the hill stood a gnarled tree, mostly dead from the look of it, tipped over at an absurd angle, exposing its root system to the open air. In the moonlight, the whole thing put him in mind of an absurdist painting, its details dreamlike, their deliberate inclusion meant to induce wonder. The most bizarre of these was the oblong box protruding from the soil at pavement level where something ornate and silvery, a handle of some sort, reflected Raymer’s headlights. It took a minute for the composition to add up to a casket whose lid, he now saw, was askew. Above, a good fifty yards up the hillside, a great gash in the slope suggested that there, until recently, the hill itself and the tree and the casket had all resided.

In other words, what he was looking at had a rational explanation. His eyes weren’t playing tricks. All the trees in the Hill section were old, and many were dying, literally falling over. The torrential rains had loosened the hummocky ground, causing this section to pull loose and slalom right down to the road. The external world was what it was and operating as it always had. Tomorrow, when citizens asked the chief of police What the hell? he’d have a comforting explanation ready. Though reassured that he hadn’t come completely untethered from reality, Raymer nevertheless found himself overwhelmed with sorrow. He was, he realized, actually weeping, gently at first and then more violently, his shoulders quaking with sobs. It was as if mundane and mechanistic things were suddenly revealed to have been specifically designed with an eye toward maximum cruelty and guaranteed suffering. Bad enough that our relationships with the living should always be undermined by fear and venality and narcissism and a hundred other things, but it seemed especially awful that we couldn’t be faithful even to the dead. We put them in the ground with expressions of love and admiration and eternal devotion, promising never to forget, though then we did, or tried to. The old judge they’d buried just this morning was already receding from the collective memory. Nobody except Raymer remembered his poor mother anymore, and when he was gone it would be as if she never existed. No wonder the dead protested. No wonder their caskets came lurching up out of the ground, their lids awry, as if to say, Remember me? Remember all your promises? Poor Becka. If she was angry at him, could he blame her? He hadn’t even made any of the usual promises. He’d put her in the ground because he was her husband and that was his duty, but he’d been unwilling to forgive or forget her perfidy. Tonight, he now realized, he’d managed to get things exactly backward. It was his anger at Becka that was metastasizing into something lethal, not hers at him. She wasn’t vengeful beneath the ground; he was vengeful above it, his rage fueled by the corrosive knowledge that someone else had loved her better and more truly than he ever did. Another man had made solemn promises and, as the bouquet of roses testified, even kept them.

The buzzing in his ears stopped abruptly.

Oh, listen to yourself. Do you have any idea how pathetic you are?

Sorry, what’s that?

Well, how would you describe yourself?

Unable to decide whether he was the accused or the accuser, Raymer was speechless in his own defense.

Be honest, for once, then.

Honest?

I know, a brand-new concept.

Go fuck yourself.

Okay, but think twice about that.

I know who I am.

At this, much hilarity. You don’t have a fuckin’ clue. The old lady was right. His voice changed here. Who is this Douglas Raymer? Who is this Douglas Raymer? A perfect impersonation of Miss Beryl back in eighth grade. God, you kill me, you really do.

Raymer waited for the laughter to stop, which it finally did.

Okay, so, this black chick, the voice continued. You say you know yourself? Then explain to me why you’re messing around with her?

Raymer could feel his shoulders shrug. He thought about Charice, what a nice evening it had been when it seemed as if she liked him. He couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed himself nearly so much. I don’t know, he admitted.

Sure you do.

It’s complicated.

It isn’t. Try being honest.

Well, he thought. Right now I could really use a friend…

See? That’s exactly the kind of bullshit I’m talking about. What you want is to see the butterfly on her ass.

You know what? You’re not a good person.

Finally. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Raymer opened the car door and vomited lamb chops and asparagus and red wine onto the ground, hoping he’d expelled whatever had taken up residence in his head along with the contents of his stomach. No such luck.

Feel better? the voice wanted to know when he shut the door again.

I do, yes.

After a pause, I’m not your enemy.

You’re hardly my friend.

That remains to be seen.

Leave me alone. Go back where you came from.

I’m where you came from.

No, you rode in on a bolt of lightning. When this tingling stops, you’ll be gone.

No.

Raymer swallowed hard and tasted the rancid truth of this.

So, I gotta ask: aren’t you even a little curious?

About what?

About what’s on the card, you dope.

My hand won’t open, Raymer said, holding up his claw to where anyone could see it, as if he weren’t completely alone.

Try again.

This time, sure enough, the fingers slowly began to flex, his skin suddenly alive with a thousand pinpricks. Inside his fist was the crumpled florist’s card, which he smoothed out, as best he could, on his pant leg, then held it up to the light. GILCHRIST’S FINE BLOOMS, it said in raised letters. Below this was the ubiquitous wing-footed Mercury, bouquet in hand.

Turn it over.

Raymer opened the door and vomited again, mostly dry heaves this time.

Quit stalling.

Can I tell you something? Raymer asked.

Anything.

I’m so tired of being everybody’s fool.

He expected to be laughed at, but he wasn’t. I’m here to help.

Raymer regarded the card, thinking about the choice he was being given. When I know, will things be different?

Let’s find out.

What if they’re even worse?

Turn the fucking card over.

Raymer did. There was just one word, scripted in what Raymer guessed must’ve been an elegant hand before the ink ran. There looked to be five or six letters. The first was clearly an A, the second, most likely, an l. Alfred? Alton? No, the other legible letter — second from the last — seemed to be a y. Allen, but spelled with a y? Finally it came to him. It wasn’t a man’s name at all, just the word Always.

Well, said Dougie. I don’t know about you, but I find that very disappointing.

And then the buzzing was back.