“I figured you’d know what to do. You’re the expert on women.”
“Expert screw-up. I’ll tell you what. I have known many a Marvelle and every one was a train wreck.”
“I shoulda stayed in Downey,” he whined.
“I’ll take you back if you want,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. It’s too late. God, I wonder what she’s doing now. In her bathrobe probably.”
Shelly was crestfallen. Much of this I suspected was frustration that his fantasies were never realized. “We’ll go back up there next week and check on her if you want,” I consoled. “Booey’ll probably be back in the pen by then.”
This seemed to lift his mood. “You wanna beer?” he said.
“Parky’s still around?” I said, thinking he meant the old folks bar down the street where we had logged many an hour.
“I got some beers at my house,” he said, looking over at me with a face unnervingly transparent and fragile. “You wanna come over?”
“To your house?” I repeated.
“Hate to see the day end,” he said. “You’ve never been inside before, have you?”
Not in the entire time I’ve known you, brother, I managed to avoid saying. As much as I liked Shelly and was curious to see what his living quarters looked like, I wasn’t sure I was quite up for it right now.
I parked and climbed out of the truck, my tongue tasting of dark rum, my hands tingling from holding the steering wheel tightly for too long, and followed Shelly up his driveway. Through the tall ragged hedge I caught a glimpse of a wagon wheel crawling with vines. The windows of Shelly’s house were black and gleaming as obsidian. Forming a vast umbrella over the roof was an acacia tree that looked as if it had been drawn by a demonic magician with a charcoal pencil who’d then smudged the lines.
Shelly, waiting for me, keys in hand, seemed now to be having second thoughts about his invitation. Cold phantom flashes whispered through my bones. This was the house full of crazy secrets, the museum of the savior of his wretched affliction. I caught a corner-eye glimpse of his father sodomizing him in SS boots while his mother chanted in circles all around him holding an incense burner and a pattern for a size-nine dress.
Shelly pulled a string with a wooden ball attached to it. The tall wooden gate opened with a creak. “Scene of the crime,” he said with a leer.
The garage was to the right, so stuffed with junk that a car could not be parked inside. The backyard was a bosky snarl of stunted pepper trees and yucca plants, thornapple, gnarled live oak, and that otherworldly acacia tree.
Besides being a repository of suffering and his sanctum of television and light beer, this is where he ran his record business, most of which involved rare or odd issue records, though he made the bulk of his earnings buying chaff like Pat Boone and Ed Ames albums and selling them at a 1,000 – 1,200 percent markup to the Norwegians and Japanese, the International Schlock Market as he liked to call it. Shelly hunched up in the darkness worked keys into two locks until he freed the door.
The house smelled dank, the airless chill of a vault. My impulse was to move about and open windows. He switched on the living room light. The low-pile carpet, once green, was worn down in most places to gray thread. The curtains slowly moldering to dust didn’t look like they’d been opened for years. Every furnished surface in that living room was heaped with mail, Racing Forms, newspapers, album covers and sleeves, receipts and music lists, slumped and slid and lapping up against the island of the hallowed TV, an ancient Zenith with a curved screen. He made his way down a narrow path and turned the TV on.
Indistinct cottony green and murky blue shapes flittered and floated up into view. The speaker was about an inch wide and the voices all came across like mice playing kazoos.
“After all these years, why did you invite me in?” I asked him.
“I always wanted to invite you in before, babe. But Hitler’s henchmen were here.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
He cranked out one of those snaggly bugcatcher smiles. “Bay Minette.”
“Alabama?”
“Yeah. They don’t come back here anymore. Too old. They never much liked California anyway.” He smiled without showing teeth. “I’m the sole curator of the museum now.”
“When was the last time you went back?”
“Oh hell,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a grimace of grievous amusement. “Twenty years maybe. Not long enough. Beer?”
“Sure thing.”
He moved to the dingy gray-green film noir kitchen, cracked the fridge, leaned inside. I scanned the acres of spider silk strung across the ceiling.
He handed me a can of Miller Lite, shook his heavy head. The forelock, limp from a day of action in the rain, fell into his eye and he brushed it aside. “Have a seat.”
I sank into the one spot open on the couch among the peanut shells and crumbling foam rubber. The end table had a stack of books, true crime and pop psychology. Shelly was a serial killer scholar. He could recite facts about the lives of Ed Gein (the real-life killer used as the model in Psycho) and Jeffrey Dahmer (one of the rare killers who preyed exclusively upon and cannibalized young men) with the same facility and lipsmacking relish as he could the history of early rock music. He was a fan of the famous ones as well as the obscure. His favorite might’ve been Charles Starkweather, a James Dean knockoff who did his work in the late fifties, was executed in 1959, and became the literary basis, as did Ed Gein, for many dramatic and creative works. Starkweather was one more case of a young misfit who got his revenge on a society that treated him poorly and refused to understand him. Shelly identified with the serial killer.
