The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(27)

“We never found out what happened to Michael’s body. Mr. Alpine died without revealing his secrets.”

“I know. The coward shouldn’t have hanged himself. He got what he deserved—death—but it should have been by the book. There should have been a trial. You’re right.”

I sighed. “I still don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense.”

Then Eddie looked at me with those intense brown eyes. I swear, they were mesmerizing, as if he could look deep into your very soul. He said, “Evil lives where you least expect it,” and I got chills. Just the way he spoke the words sent a shiver down my spine.

We continued to talk, and time passed. We even danced, I think, one dance. Eventually I said I needed to get back to my folks. We mutually ended what turned out to be a meaningful and enjoyable catching up. He asked for the phone number at my house and wondered if I’d like to get together again with him while I was home for the holidays.

I said yes.





11


My mother was absolutely horrified that I had a date with Eddie Newcott. She went on and on about how the neighbors across the street were “strange” and “snooty”—as she always had. When I asked what she meant, Mom said that they always gave her dirty looks. Did she consider that perhaps the Newcotts held it against her that Eddie had been roughly interrogated by the police for an entire day in 1966? I didn’t say that, though.

Yes, the Newcotts had been strange from the beginning. Charles Newcott was a cruel, alcoholic, wife-and-son-beating bastard. I agreed with Eddie on that one—good riddance. As for Eddie’s mother, I believe she had been so abused by her husband that she had become a mere shell of a woman. According to Eddie, she was an alcoholic, too, and I imagine she suffered from depression, just like my own mother. In many ways, both our mothers were similarly damaged.

All my father had to say about my date was that he hoped I knew what I was doing and that we should have a nice time.

Eddie and I got together on December 23 to go to a movie—Network, that film about a fictional television network starring Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch. For the rest of the evening, Eddie and I kept laughing and reciting the famous quote, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” It was a good show. Afterward we went back to the Oil Derrick, which was hopping as usual. We sat at the same table we were at the other night. Lord, I don’t remember what we talked about, but we were there until midnight. Eddie opened up to me. He spoke about how his father had hurt him and his mother ever since he was a toddler. It was shocking. In the mid-seventies, domestic abuse was rarely talked about in the media. It was one of America’s ugly, dark secrets. Women didn’t want to press charges for fear of losing their livelihood in the form of a working husband. Kids were just plain scared to tell on their parents. At least in the past forty years, the public has become somewhat more aware of the problem, and measures are now in place to combat it, although there could be a lot of improvement in that regard.

At some point, the conversation drifted to the memories of our childhoods on Chicory Lane. We talked about hunting horny toads in the vacant lots and riding our bikes downtown to the library. The names of some of the neighborhood kids—Dean and Greg and Sally and others—came up, and Eddie filled me in on what he knew about them. It wasn’t much. None of them lived on the block any more. Both Dean and Greg still lived in Limite—Dean was married. He didn’t know what happened to Sally.

We were both a little intoxicated by the time we got in his car—a beat-up Chevy Nova. Eddie said he still had a motorcycle and usually preferred using it, but for the date he borrowed his mother’s car. We made it safely to Chicory Lane and he parked in his driveway.

“You want to see my artwork?” he asked.

I thought, Sure, why not? It wasn’t as if I had far to go to get home. I said okay, and he led me into the house. I hadn’t been in there since ’66, but it still looked the way I remembered it. Betty Newcott wasn’t the greatest housekeeper. The furniture was old and run-down. There was clutter everywhere, mostly stacks of newspapers and magazines. A light had been left on for him in the living room.

He held a finger to his lips and said, “Mom’s asleep. Let’s go out back.”

“Out back?”

“Yeah, my studio’s in the bomb shelter!”

The bomb shelter. “Really?”

“Yeah, you remember the bomb shelter, don’t you? Come see what I’ve done to it.”

If I hadn’t had three screwdrivers, I might have made an excuse and said I’d come back during daylight hours. But I felt giddy and reckless. I followed him through the back door and into their yard. The shelter door looked the same as I recollected, except there was now a big padlock on the handle. Eddie pulled a key chain out of his pocket, found the right key, and opened the door. He went in first, turned on the lights, and called for me to descend into the ground.

It was a very different space. Eddie had decorated the walls with his art, which was the first thing that struck me as I gazed at the room. Most of it consisted of black-and-white sketches, but there were several full-color paintings. A drafting table and chair stood in front of the partition that separated the living quarters from the bathroom. A work-in-progress sat on the table, depicting a devil crucified on a cross. A devil crucified on a cross. It was very disturbing.