The Secrets on Chicory Lane Page 8

  The plan was to stay for a month over that holiday season of ’76, as I didn’t have to be back at Northwestern until the end of January. Mom looked like she had aged ten years, but my presence boosted her energy and morale. Dad told me he hadn’t seen her so happy in a long time. I was afraid the visit would be depressing and interminable, but I had promised my father that I’d spend some serious time with Mom.

  The neighborhood looked the same. A different set of kids were playing outside on the block. The Newcotts’ house across the street hadn’t changed a bit. Every time I stole a glance to look over there, it was quiet, dark, and vacant.

  “Do the Newcotts still live across the street?” I asked Dad while we were in the car on a trip to the supermarket. It was my first day back.

  He nodded. “Mrs. Newcott and Eddie do. You know Mr. Newcott died?”

  “No! When?” It was the first I’d heard of it. The news jolted me.

  “Gosh, nearly two years ago. Not long after Eddie got back from overseas. Eddie was in Vietnam a couple of years, you knew that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Did you know he went AWOL right before he was set to come home?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I understand. He left the base one morning and disappeared into the jungle. His battalion shipped out without him.”

  “Wow, really?” I couldn’t imagine what that meant for Eddie. “So what happened?”

  “Eventually he just showed up at the base one day. He’d been gone a long time. That’s really all I know about it. He was discharged and came home toward the end of ’73. Then Charlie Newcott had that accident.”

  “When was this?”

  “The accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, the beginning of ’74. You were in Austin.”

  “I know. So what happened? What’s the story?”

  “Not much to tell. Charlie fell off an oil well and broke his neck.”

  “No!”

  “Yep. Eddie was there, too; he saw it happen. Eddie started working for his father’s oil well supply company after he got back.”

  “So it’s just Eddie and his mother over there?”

  “Yep.”

  I had mixed feelings about Mr. Newcott’s accident. I’d never liked the man, and Eddie used to hate him. I wondered how Eddie felt about losing his father.

  “How come y’all never told me about this?”

  Dad shrugged. “I didn’t think to do so. And your mother wouldn’t have. Her feelings for the Newcotts really soured after what happened to your little brother. And you didn’t come home, you know.”

  “I’m here now. I’m sorry, it’s just hard for me to be around her, Dad. She doesn’t … oh, you know what I mean.”

  “She doesn’t what?”

  “I was going to say she doesn’t love me anymore, but I know that’s not true.”

  “Of course it’s not.”

  “But she holds it against me, Dad. She still blames me for what happened.”

  “That’s not true, Shelby. Your mother—the only person she blames is herself. That’s what is eating her alive.”

  “What can we do?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Be nice to her. That’s the only thing we can do now, because we’ve tried everything else. The doctors—I don’t know if they help her or hurt her …”

  “Don’t you think she takes too many pills?”

  “She makes it worse by mixing them with alcohol. I don’t know, honey, I’ve tried to get her to go easy on that stuff, but she does what she wants. In many ways, she’s a very strong-willed woman, despite her weaknesses.”

  It was the first in a long time that my father and I had mentioned Michael’s abduction. We did our grocery shopping and returned home in silence.

  That evening, after dinner, I walked alone to the park. Though the layout was the same, it wasn’t completely how I remembered it. For one thing, the airplane and yacht had long been removed for being “unsafe.” The playground equipment was more modern. Since it was winter, the trees were leafless and the grass was brown. The place was desolate and cold. It didn’t feel the same. I turned around and made my way back to the house.

  It would have been an unmemorable holiday had I not decided, four days before Christmas, that I was going mad being alone with my parents. I announced that I wanted to visit some old haunts and could I please have the car. Dad didn’t mind; in fact, he encouraged me to get out of the house. I went to the Oil Derrick, which was still in business. It no longer had a separate seventeen-or-younger room—it was now all eighteen-or-over. The drinking age had not yet changed in ’76, so I suppose the Limite elder statesmen decided that having an underage establishment connected to what was basically a pick-up bar was inappropriate. At least, that’s what the joint had become.

  The possibility of running into someone from high school was fairly high. Half the people who grow up in Limite usually stay there as adults. They go to the local community college and straight to a locally based career, and they plant roots. Some folks are just better suited for small towns. And as it was the holidays approaching Christmas, I figured someone I knew would be there.

  It must have been around nine o’clock when I walked in through the door. A blast of music and cigarette smoke hit me in the face. People had always smoked in the Oil Derrick, but it had become worse than when I was seventeen. Never liked it. I suppose we just lived with it back then; it was part of the nightlife everywhere. Today, I wouldn’t be able to step inside a place like that without choking.

  I distinctly remember the song I walked in on, that duet Elton John did with Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” I almost started laughing at the irony. After all, what the hell was I looking for in a bar in Limite, Texas? Certainly not romance. I was never into one-night stands, despite the few I’d had in college. Dancing with a stranger wasn’t on my to-do list, either.

  Maybe I just wanted a stiff drink. The dark cloud hanging over our house called for it.

  I ordered something—I think it was a screwdriver—and sat on a stool at the bar. The place was a gas for people-watching, although few couples were on the dance floor. No one looked familiar, but they were all the same type. The men wore carbon-copy blue jeans and western shirts. The women all had on identical Charlie’s Angels wardrobes. And the clientele was all white, of course. Whoa. After living in Austin and Evanston, Limite was Nowheresville. I felt like a fish out of water, to be sure. Leaving my hometown and going off to college had made me grow as a person, both in knowledge and emotional maturity. It opened my mind to so much more than what Limite had to offer. I like to say I learned how to think abstractly once I left home. I studied art and theater and literature and film—and everything else that excited and interested me. I’m not proud to admit it, but it was no wonder I unwittingly felt superior to everyone in the Oil Derrick that night. I just thought they were hicks; I, on the other hand, was smarter, more attractive, and more liberal-thinking. Perhaps I was a little full of myself.

  Within the space of two minutes, a young man—college age—approached me and asked if he could buy me a drink. I was sitting there with a full one. “No, thanks,” I said, and turned away to give him the message. Go away.

  Three minutes later, another man approached me. He was older, more the thirty-something type. Probably divorced, or perhaps even still married, and he was actually quite good-looking.

  “Never seen you here before. Hi, I’m Jack.” He held out his hand. I didn’t take it.

  “Hi Jack, I’m Shelby.”

  He smiled and awkwardly lowered his hand. “Do, uh, you come here a lot?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’d know it if I saw you before. Where do you mostly roost?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Where do you usually go? There’s not that many good clubs on this side of town.”

  “I’m not from here, I’m visiting my folks. I live in Chicago.” />
  “Oh, I see.” He started to sit down on the stool next to me, but I held up my hand—“Please, I’m expecting someone.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. It was nice to meet you.”

  “Sure, okay. Sorry. It was nice to meet you, too.” He nodded sheepishly, smiled, and backed away. Maybe I was too harsh, but I didn’t want to talk to any men that night. My visit to the Oil Derrick was really for anthropological purposes. And to get a drink. A full five minutes passed, and I was halfway done with my screwdriver. It was a weak drink, so I figured I’d stay just long enough to have a second one; after that it would be back to the castle.

  Then another young man walked up to me from the shadows and spoke. “Shelby?”

  The fact that he knew my name got my attention real fast. I turned and looked at him. Time stopped for a second or two, and then a lightning bolt hit me.

  Unbelievable. He was the last person I expected to see.

  Eddie Newcott.

  10

  He had changed quite a bit. Actually, his face looked pretty much the same as it was the last time I saw him at school in ’71—only he looked older than twenty-one. Harder, darker. He wore his coal-black hair long to his shoulders, and his face was framed with full, shiny facial hair. And those dark brown eyes—they were so soulful and pained and gorgeous. I swear he looked like Jesus.

  And his physique—my God, he had bulked out. The military must have done a transformation number on him. He had put on pounds, but in all the right places. His shoulders were broader, and I could see the muscles bulge in his arms and pectoral areas. Plus, he had on tight blue jeans that were like a second skin, with special emphasis on his crotch. He wore a black shirt and black shoes.

  Holy mackerel, I now believe Eddie Newcott became the model for the guy embracing Patricia Harlow on the covers of the romance novels I would later write—subconsciously, in my head.

  He was an Adonis.

  “Eddie? Eddie Newcott?”

  His eyes twinkled warmly when he smiled. “It is you!”

  “Oh my gosh, Eddie, I can’t believe this. Gosh, how are you?” I was flustered and surprised and completely giddy from the alcohol and the sight of the beautiful man standing in front of me.

  “I’m good. How about you?”

  “Good, good.”

  It was discomforting. I was tongue-tied, until he suggested that we sit down in a booth and have a drink together. I said okay, lifted my nearly empty glass, and indicated I’d have another screwdriver. He got something hard for himself, probably a Scotch whiskey. On the way over to our seats, I caught that guy, Jack, checking us out. He must have been ticked off that it was Eddie I’d been “expecting.”

  We sat across from each other, talking loudly to be heard over the mid-seventies soundtrack that was blasting over the sound system. I suggested moving to another part of the nightclub where it wasn’t so loud. We found a new booth, where we had to sit closer together, at a right angle to each other.

  Of course, I can’t remember everything we said or even how we skipped past the awkwardness into having a very nice conversation. I told him about graduating with a BFA in acting, and that I’d just finished my first semester of graduate school in Evanston. It was probably one of the first times I said aloud that I was thinking of switching my creative focus from drama to literature. There were the excuses about my bad first novel, but I said that I wanted to try again. Other than that, my life wasn’t anything remarkable. My parents were still living in the same house, my father still worked for the bank, blah blah blah. I didn’t mention that my mother was not herself.

  Then it was his turn. Eddie told me that he had hated school and that he and his father hadn’t gotten along. “I dropped out. Simple as that. I did it to piss off my dad,” he said.

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Oh, right. I remember.”

  “I was a pretty angry kid. I needed to take out a lot of frustration, so I joined the army.”

  “I heard that. Gosh, you never seemed like the soldier type growing up.”

  He laughed. “I used to draw bloody battle scenes, remember that?”

  That made me laugh, too. “Yes.”

  “I also did it to get away from my father. A friend of mine got me an ID that said I was eighteen. So I went to Vietnam.”

  His eyes darkened when he said the name of the country. Eddie proceeded to tell me how he was put right in the thick of it at the end of ’71, after boot camp. The whole thing was madness, in my opinion. Especially now, in retrospect, I think it was a huge blunder.

  I asked the inevitable question. “Did you see, uh, action?”

  Eddie nodded. “Quite a bit.”

  My voice dropped. “Did you kill anyone?” He swallowed and his eyes darted past me, before he shrugged. “I guess that means you did?”

  He nodded. “It drove me a little nuts toward the end.”

  “I heard … my dad told me you’d gone AWOL?”

  Eddie told me the whole story. It was summer of ’72. His unit was about to be brought back to the US—but he stayed. He had met a Vietnamese girl named Mai and had gone to live with her at her home in the country, some eighty miles from Saigon. He purposely didn’t tell anyone where he was going. “I wanted to hide from the world,” he said. “It was a crazy thing to do.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was thinking of marrying her and bringing her back to the US. We were together about a year, and then I guess I came to my senses. It was a real mess over there, and we didn’t do much to clean it up. If you ask me, it was hell on earth. Finally, I just got out and came home. Dishonorable discharge, but what the hell.”

  After a pause, I asked, “What was she like?”

  He shrugged. “Small. Friendly. Cute. I met her in a bar in Saigon. She couldn’t speak English at all; she knew just a few essential words in order to communicate with GIs. It never would have worked, though. Things were different between us once we were living with her family.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s change the subject, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Upon his return in the fall of ’73, Eddie had started working for his father’s drilling company. He hated it but there weren’t many opportunities for young GIs home from the war. He still had to get his GED.

  There was definitely a harder edge to Eddie. When we had been close in the sixties, he boasted a rather sarcastic sense of humor and a cynical personality. Now I could feel that this aspect of his demeanor was even more pronounced. The thing was, I agreed with him. I empathized with him and completely understood why he was being so derisive. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but afterward I realized he downed his whiskey pretty quickly and ordered another one before I was half-done with my drink. He was definitely self-medicating. There was a lot of pain inside him, and, God help me, I felt for him. I wanted to help somehow.

  He then rolled his eyes and added, “And then Dad went and fell off an oil well.”

  “Gosh, tell me about that. What happened?”

  “It was a couple of months after I had come home and started working for Dad. I was with him at a drilling site. There was something wrong on the crown block—that’s the very top of a derrick, a little platform where you can stand and work with the block and tackle. Anyway, we were up there, and he lost his footing somehow. Splat. Broke his neck. He was dead on the spot.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “No, it isn’t. You remember my father, don’t you?” I nodded. “He was a bastard. He was a no-good son of a bitch, pardon my language. Even when I was in high school, the guy beat on me and my mom. That’s one reason why I worked on my body while I was in the army. After I came back, he didn’t mess with me. I wasn’t sorry at all about my dad falling off that oil well. Good riddance, if you ask me.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that.

  “Since then, I’ve just been living with my
mom in the same house across from yours. I quit my dad’s business and started drawing comics. I’m, uh, I’m a little better than I was back in elementary school.”

  “I believe it.”

  “I’d really like to show you some of my work.”

  “Do you make any money from it?”

  “A little. I sent some stuff to a handful of comic publishers but I haven’t heard anything back. On the other hand, I’ve sold some pieces at a flea market I go to. Right when I got back from Vietnam, I was in California for a couple of weeks. I went to a convention for people who buy and collect comics. It was on Harbor Island, near San Diego. I sold some stuff there and talked to a lot of publishers.” He laughed. “You’ll get a kick out of the comic book I created. It’s called Devil Man, and it’s about a demon with superpowers who comes to earth and causes all kinds of hell. He’s a bad guy that you love to hate. I’ve got three issues drawn already.”

  The description made me laugh, too. “You always used to draw creepy things like monsters and bugs!”

  I’m pretty sure there were refills on the drinks by then.

  “How are you supporting yourself and your mother if you don’t have a job?” I asked.

  “Oh, Dad had some pretty good insurance. We’re okay. The house is paid for.”

  We continued to talk through the night. He asked about Chicago, since he’d never been there. I was dying to know more about Vietnam, but he seemed to want to avoid that subject, except for the few stories he told me about some of the friends he had made over there.

  Then, after a few moments of silence, he said, “You know, Shelby, you had a pretty good high school experience. I could see that you did.”

  “Thanks. I’m sorry you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t junior high suck?”

  I laughed. “It did.” Then I remembered. “Hey, where were you that one year you were gone? You went away that … that summer.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I, uh, went to live with some relatives in Wichita Falls. My parents thought it would be good for me.”