(28) Dead Like A River

I overslept in Charleston.

We had stayed up late, thanks to our afternoon nap; watched a movie and wrestled through a series of mock rape attempts for the next two or three movies, and, after a snack of Pringles and a shared meatball sub, had finally fallen asleep.

I planned to be up at nine and on the road by ten. As it happened, my trak phone said ten-fifteen when my groping hand found it under a sheet of greasy wax paper.

I lay there with my arm hanging over the edge of the bed thinking there was no hurry about leaving. This led into thoughts of Top and the house his sister had bequeathed to him in the woods near Cheat Lake. I had been telling Moira about my initiation into the Roadents, when I guess I drifted to sleep licking tomato sauce off the fringe of my mustache. The initiation wasn't exactly a complicated business. I smoked a joint and swore allegiance to the charter and to Top. The final test was a game of nine-ball in his garage. I barely qualified, beating him once in four tries. But then, I'm not all that swift with a cue stick. I'm better at Cricket, but Top didn't go in for darts.

What I hadn't gotten around to telling Moira, but which I had intended to, was that Top was a mystic, a spiritualist, and an honest-to-God psychic; in other words, all fucked up. She had asked me earlier if the Cheat Lake house really was haunted or if I was just trying to spook her. I said, Who knows? It's not something you can prove one way or the other; although I wouldn't want to bet it wasn't. Top put it down to a double-murder suicide that occurred not far behind the house, in the woods, and that this was why his sister never stayed at the house and ended up giving it to him for his eightieth birthday.

I rolled over, reaching a hand out to shake Moira awake. But she wasn't there.

I looked at the dresser and saw her backpack. At first I supposed she had gone to the lobby to collect the free Continental breakfast for us. Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of palms slapping water. She was in the bath.

I got my nakedness out of bed, crusty in the loins and smelling like a warmed-over corpse, and went into the dressing room where I stood staring at Moira sitting hunched over in the steamy water of the bathtub, her hands holding something black under the water between her thighs. She looked at me with the cold blue marble eyes, smiling faintly. She said: "I couldn't really remember it anymore. I had forgotten what it was like. I tried to remember. I did try to."

"Show me." I said. She looked away, blinking and touching her tongue to her upper lip. Then she yawned, and that seemed to break the spell. She held up in one hand a sopping wet wad of black cloth.

I went in and gently took it from her. As I did so she said, "Take a shower with me? Let's take a shower." The object was a folded pair of my woolen socks wrapped up in one of my three sleeveless black t-shirts. I asked: "What's this supposed to be?"

For a good minute she stared up at me off-and-on, making up her mind. Her lips were slightly parted and they kept faltering in the act of smiling. I knew that a patient but expectant expression on my part worked best in getting an answer from her.

She said, "It's, like, Roberta's cat."

I asked if Josie's mother knew what had happened. She shook her head. "I told Josie. But I don't think he's ever said a peep about it to his mom, or his dad. William, it's crazy I know but it makes me feel better, I don't know why, it just does. Whenever I remember I just feel okay. Help me up--" I took her under the arms and got her up out of the tub and hugged her hot wet body. And then we took a shower and tasted the soap on each other's mouth.

We were on the 79 by noon, tooling toward Morgantown.

Normally I don't hot-dog it, but that day I felt especially reckless. I tore between the lanes and red-lined the RPM's, screaming past the traffic at better than a hundred. This gave Moira a thrill. It was her introduction, I was thinking, to what was to come in the witching hours at the house that brooded in the ghostly woods.