Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(40)
The parking lot was empty except for a few pieces of windblown litter. From forty yards away, it looked to Huston as if the place had been battened down for the winter. If he could get inside the shed without being seen, he could hole up there with his remaining groceries. Then make his way to Annabel. He tried to remember the probable distance. Tried to see the topless club on a map in his mind’s eye, the squiggling two-laner heading north-northwest, snaking toward the Ohio border. “Slouching towards Bethlehem.”
Why did you think of that? he wondered. Yeats and his mystical anarchy. His spiritus mundi, his hell-raising Sphinx. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
For just a moment, he imagined himself at the front of the classroom again, reciting to his students, trying to tap into Yeats’s mad vision. How he loved those moments when he lost himself in words. Stirred himself and others with the music and the power.
Focus! he told himself now. He squeezed his eyes shut, then with one quick jerk, shook his head like a drunk trying to stay awake. Thomas Huston is dead, he told himself. The teacher is dead. The writer is dead. Words and music and stories are all dead now. Now only power remains. The power of the dead.
He stared hard at the equipment shed. “It will be locked.” Yes, but all the buildings will be locked. Nothing will be easy now, nor should it be. Everything will hurt. Everything does.
He needed a tool. Metal. Strong enough to force a padlock or to splinter the wood around a dead bolt. He was too far away to be able to see how the door was secured, so he would just have to assume the worst. He needed a pry bar of some kind. Couldn’t bang or pound or hammer, not even at night. The sounds would echo like a jungle drum.
To his left lay the town of Bradley, a quarter mile south. He had skirted it by hiking through the trees. Could he risk going back now to assess the possibilities? “You have to,” he told himself. “You have no choice.” He would stay off the main drag. Keep to the backstreets. Maybe somebody’s garage door would be standing open. Somebody’s garden shed. People are trusting out here, he thought. People don’t know.
He stood up. Brushed the leaf litter off his knees. Left his groceries nestled in the thorns.
“You don’t look that bad,” he reassured himself, though he did not believe it.
“What choice do you have?”
“Okay. Try to look normal.”
Thirty
To DeMarco’s eyes, the first several pages of Huston’s journal appeared to contain nothing but random, spontaneous notes. Ideas for scenes, characters’ names, a tentative plotline, passages quoted from Nabokov’s novel.
“When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.” (Lolita)
main character named Howard (means noble watchman) Humphreys? Harold? Houston? (means hill town; might be fun to pique readers’ curiosity)
main character needs a nemesis to parallel Nabokov’s Quilty. Denton as physical model: smooth, charming, designer clothes, lots of styled hair. He should be younger than main character, more attractive to women/girls. Somewhat predatory. Doesn’t love women the way main character does. Loves their attention, their idolatry. Narcissistic.
contemporize Lolita, but how? College freshman—too easy?
nemesis gets jealous when the narrator gets more attention than he does from the sexy new student. But why does she prefer narrator? She’s intellectual? Disdains her beauty?
Maybe as story progresses, Lolita character gets more and more aggressive in trying to ruin her beauty. Hacks off her hair. Starts cutting herself. This makes narrator only want her more. Aches to heal her. So that his empathy overrides his common sense?
Nabokov’s narrator on “nymphets”: “Good looks are not any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm. I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did.”
These entries were followed by more of the same, plus occasional allusions to some of the strip clubs Huston had visited.
McKeesport place: Smoky, noisy, big bouncer. All in all a bit frightening. Men at horseshoe-shaped bar mostly older, middle-aged or more, mostly blue collar but a couple in suits. Watered-down draft beer is free with $20 cover charge. Most of the girls look stoned. Only one of them looked me in the eye. Afterward came to my chair, sat on my lap, made me squirm. She looked fourteen but surely must have been older. Are there age limits for strippers in this state? In the booth later, she told me her real name is Joyce. Pretty but not up close. Christ she was hungry for something, not just my money. I kept thinking about Alyssa. Went home so fucking sad.
His visits to clubs in Titusville, Wheeling, Beaver Falls, Ambridge, New Castle, and one along Exit 7 of Interstate 80 left him similarly depressed, not only for the way the dancers must have felt, how they viewed themselves, but also for the way he felt when they thrust their shaved pussies at his face.