(47) Dead Like A River [Conclusion]

Top took Neal back to the house, and the next day Neal returned to the duplex in Pittsburg where he lived with an alcoholic woman who worked in social services. Before leaving the cabin that night Top told me not to bother locking up but to be sure to remember to crack open the windows to air the place out.

He said that an Undertaker had contacted him and requested that I be the Roadent who accepted the challenge. It was Redbone, Neal's step-son, currently staying in Ogden, Utah. To request a particular opponent was against the rules of the game, but seeing as how this was Neal's step-son, and in appreciation of Neal's cooperation in the seance, Top would let the infraction slide, if I was up for it. I said I could use the money.

We spoke as if nothing unusual had happened, and for Top nothing had. Well, it had been a little different from his usual dramas, his usual experiments with the human mind and the Reality it controls, but in the end it had been just another game that he convinced himself he had won. I don't know what sort of victory he gave himself, except that his plan had gone as he had expected: Roberta exposed as a person in denial who had shifted the blame from her husband to Moira.

Edgar had felt a sexual attraction to his little boy. Apparently he was okay with the idea of incest but not the homosexual variety, and so he had insidiously manipulated Moira to help him transform Joe into Josie. Children tend to do what is expected of them, anything to get parental approval and affection. Joe turned to his mother as a defensive mechanism, as a buffer against his father, but Roberta refused to see what Edgar was up to. She saw it as an evil whim of Moira's. She noted how upset Edgar would appear to be whenever Joe acted out the Josie persona; but that was a deception, one that she did not want to recognize as such. No, in her mind the fault lay with the girl next door.

Moira liked Edgar's attention. It was compensation for the lack of attention from her father and the dominance of her mother. She had a difficult time trying to sort all this out and to explain it that night in the attic bedroom. I didn't push it. It was all water under the bridge and I was glad for what light had been shed on the curiosity that was Moira.

She spent an hour on the phone with Marcia, or 'Marcie,' and the upshot of it was that Marcia's mom agreed with her daughter that Moira should spend some time with them in Memphis, however much time it took to get her head screwed on tight. Moira was relieved. She had a place to go. She wanted me to see Memphis as my starting and ending point; to come back to her after every little odyssey. At the time I was fine with that. I loved her, but it was not the kind of love that tied me down and suffocated itself. And so the next day I opened all the windows and we left for Tennessee.

At Marcia's we did not take a shower together. I supposed that was a good sign but it depressed me all the same. On the morning I left for Utah she was cheerful and talked about getting a position at the place Marcia worked. It was like we were a married couple, with me, the husband, going on a business trip. That situation lasted until our separate circumstances put a gulf between us that could no longer be spanned by a mere agreement; the agreement of seeing Memphis as the hub from which my spokes extended...ever further in length.

If love has a dark side, it has shades that go from the lightest to the darkest. Somewhere in the lighter shade of that dark side we said goodbye. I like to think that when we parted for the last time and would not see each other again, that we each found the shade growing lighter, on her end and on mine. I don't know. A road does not discriminate between the light and the dark. Neither should love.

Maybe love is the longest road. It should not have an end, and maybe it never really does. It just goes off through the shades, until it seems to die sometimes, but keeps flowing, dead like a river.