17.Bee-doo Woman from Another Dimension, Possibly Hell
FOR WEEKS AS I RAN OUT OF MONEY AND HAD TO SUSPEND MY excursions to Foreign Book (the legal sports betting sites all over Mexico, now called Caliente Sportsbook) and my Tijuana cathouse forays and worked on my self-help book with Sweets healing my mind, I continued to hear nothing from Shelly. I thought he might call or write, just to give me an update or perhaps ask me to send along items he might’ve forgotten or that he couldn’t get in Bay Minette, hot Mexican peanuts or a secondhand pair of corduroys or a can of 1958 California hair pomade. I was curious what the record market was like in the small-town South. Lots of Elvis, I imagined. Too bad they’d burned all that Beatles memorabilia after John’s big flub about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus.
One day on Del Mar Heights I saw Shelly pulling out of an Arco station, no doubt, for the scorch marks up the side, it was Shelly’s truck. I was about to turn around until I saw he had company, an awkward figure with a large head who, the stiff way it was leaned against the window, looked like a mannequin. Some people drove in the diamond lanes with dummies for passengers. Others I suppose were so lonely that their inflatable dates accompanied them wherever they went. I wondered why Shelly hadn’t called or stopped by. The cab in which he sat crackled with dissonance, and it wasn’t heavy metal or Stravinsky on the radio. I resisted the temptation to follow.
A couple of days later, still no word, I stopped by his house to check in on him. Sweets stayed in the truck. I didn’t want him in a house where pets had been killed. It didn’t feel right pulling that wooden knob at the end of the string that opened the clumsy latch on the other side of the gate. As I came down the walkway I heard muffled conversation, then a burst of music. To my right, the door that opened into the side of the garage was ajar. I peered in and saw the steel cage where his parents had imprisoned him for days at a time. Why would you keep the cage? I wondered. Why wouldn’t you sell or give away the cage?
The dog next door was yapping frantically and throwing itself against the fence. I stood still for a moment, listening to Shelly’s voice. “You said that Lily was your friend . . .”
The response was a muddle. The dog yapped and hurled itself into the fence, then yelped as its owner cursed and hauled it away.
Well, Shelly is home anyway, I thought. Burglars wouldn’t be shouting and playing music. Shelly had a friend in there, I thought, a love interest, that was all, one of those special friends I never got to meet.
Still, he didn’t have to let me in. My curiosity was strong. He was my only friend in the world and I just wanted to know about his mom and Alabama and if his business was okay. I’d leave him alone for another month if he wanted. I pulled back the screen and knocked lightly. I felt like Jem Finch standing at Boo Radley’s door. I heard footfalls, the dropping of a chain, then the door squeaked open two inches and I was aware of one eye looking down at me like a madman from a castle tower. There was something about the large misshapen head that suggested Ronald Reagan. The door promptly closed.
Spooked, I turned and headed briskly for the gate. The argument resumed. Then the door opened a second time.
“Hey, Eddie.” The voice of Shelly. The screen door creaked out. “I didn’t know it was you. That goddamn dog . . .”
I turned, willing my heart to slow. “When you get back?” I said.
“Couple days ago.”
I nodded. “Saw your truck parked out front.”
“Yeah.” He nodded along, as if he were warring with himself. “Hey, come in,” he said.
“Just wondered how everything was going.”
“Great,” he said, laboring over a smile, his face a mask. “Haven’t killed myself, anyway.”
I stepped up through the door. The house was more decrepit than I recalled. I looked about for the partygoers, the arguers, the special friend. The TV was playing in the corner. The voice could have been Shelly’s. He had a habit, like all of us loners, of talking to himself, very demonstratively sometimes, as if he were playing several different roles of Shelly and none too happy about any of them. If that was Shelly who opened the door the first time, then he most definitely had a multiple personality disorder. I decided that I wouldn’t visit him again without advance notice.
I made out I Love Lucy on the box, closing credits. “So, well, uh,” I ventured. “How’s your mom?”
“Dead,” he replied, picking up a Racing Form yellowing from age. He blinked at me and looked blindly at the Form. The way he was standing I could tell he was trying to block me off from a view down the hall. But I was ahead of him on this: I already knew there was someone down that hall and I had no desire to see them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was fast.”
“You want a beer?”
“All right.”
He shuffled into the kitchen, stooped as an old man, and retrieved two beers. That open slot on the couch hadn’t filled yet so I dropped into it, glancing over at Dick Van Dyke pratfall BWAP-BOP. I noted that the cushion underneath me was warm.
Shelly poised at the edge of the chair at his business table opened his beer in a trance. His voice had a faraway quality, as if he were channeling from another dimension. “She was almost gone when I got there,” he said. “Went up into her brain. Never knew she had
