I
n the lichen twilight, dusky, rusky as could be, around the corner of the house he swaggers, stops, puts his fists on his hips, paralyzes Charlotte with a stare. It's already too dark to see his face, but she knows it's him, and she knows he's staring straight into her eyes, and she can't move her legs at all, much less run. Desperately she looks toward the house, for Daddy, Momma, Cousin Doogie, the Sheriff, but there's no one, not even a light, and Channing swaggers straight up to her, smirking and saying, “Party time,” even though she can't actually hear the words. He reaches around to the back side of his jeans and produces a chaw bag of Red Man, digs in with his fingers, and shoves a plug of it into his mouth until his left cheek lumps out the size of a walnut. Smirksâsneers?âat her, does Channing, with a tilted smile, vile brown juice dribbling out of the lower corner of his mouth. He twists his body halfway around so she can see him slide the chaw bag into the jeans' rear pocket, leaving two inches of it sticking out in the accepted fashion. He starts patting it, the chaw bag in his pocket, and leering at her and doing some heavy breathing,
Unggh hunh, unggh hunh, ungghâ
âhunh, unggh hunhâ
Charlotte woke up in the dark, and she could still hear it,
Unggh hunh, unggh hunh,
and her heart started pounding. It's
in here, in this room! Utter darkness! Lunged for the lamp on the little bedside tableâ
crashâ
knocked it off onto the floor beside the bed. With another lunge jackknifed herself over the side of the bed, and even before she could find the stem switch on the lamp's neck,
it
had started crying and whimpering, “Charlotte ⦠Charlotte ⦔ Charlotte turned the lamp onâ
Not two feet away, on the floor, on all foursâBeverly. The crashed lamp cast a huge shadow of her onto the wall opposite. She was onâall fours!âslowly crawling forward on her hands and knees. The way her high heels stuck up in the air behind her made them seem ludicrously superfluous. Her black pants were stretched across her scrawny rear end. A mess of flattened streaked-blond hair hung this way and that.
Charlotte, still in the hypnoidal state: “What's the matter, Beverly ⦔
Beverly looked at her blearily, trying to stanch her tears, her gasps, her whimpers, her bleats of “Charlotte” long enough to sayâ
Before she uttered a word, even the hypnoidal mind knew that the big high-heeled creature on all fours was drunk, and not just a little bit.
“Charlotte ⦠Charlotte ⦠Where are the lacrosse players? Where are the
lacrosse
players?”
“What lacrosse players?”
“This guyâI've got to go back and talk to him ⦠Charlotte,
Charlotte!”
“How can you go anywhere? You're likeâI think you've had too much to drink.”
Beverly looked up into her face with the eyes of a bewildered patient. “Him, too,
Charlotte!
That's the only time they
talk
âwhen they're drunk!
Charlotte!
⦠This is my only chance ⦠He was
talking
to me, Charlotte! ⦠He says he doesn't want to get involved ⦠But I don't care! I
have
to hook up with him tonight.” More tears, whimpers, gasps. “Where are the lacrosse players!”
Charlotte said, “He says he doesn't want to get involved? Isn't that a kind of a hint?”
“But he was
talking
to me! I gotta go find him while he's still interested ⦔
“Then why did you leave him?”
“He said he had to talk to some guy and he'd call me on my cell in ten minutes. That was five minutes agoâmy cell in ten minutes five minutes ago ⦔ Beverly lowered her head and began sobbing ⦠on all fours. “I'm gonna drive back. I
gotta
drive back! I have to hook up with him!
Charlotte
!”
“Back where?”
“The
I.M.
!” Exasperation, as if she were repeating something for about the tenth time: “The
I.M
.!”
The I.M ⦠.
Charlotte said, “You can't drive a car to the I.M., Beverly. You can't drive a car, period.”
“Then
you
gotta drive me. Here are the keys.” Without getting up off her hands and knees, she tried to fish her keys out of her pants pocket. But the pants were so tight she had to twist her body and straighten one leg and dig into the pocket while supporting herself on one arm and canting her neck to one side, grimacing, eyes shut, all the while. She finally retrieved the keys and held them up toward Charlotte.
“I can't drive you anywhere,” said Charlotte, “least of all the I.M. You've had enough to drink. Here, why don't I help you go to bed.”
Charlotte was just about to swing her legs over the side of the bed when Beverly grabbed one sleeve of her pajama top and tried to drag her toward the door. She was strong, too.
“Hey, let go! You're going to rip my pajamas!”
“You gotta drive me!âdrive me!âdrive me!”
“Stop it, Beverly!”
Beverly let go and keeled over on her back, then struggled up into a sitting position. “Aw right, aw right,
don't
drive me. Next time, no thanks, I'll do the same for you. Don't do me any favors ⦔ Baffled, she began feeling about on the floor for her keys, finally found them, and looked up angrily at Charlotte. “Thanks a lot. I'm gonna go, I don't careâ”
She tried to get her feet beneath herself, but the high heels skidded and her bottom hit the floor hard. She began crying again. She rolled over toward her own bed, got up on all fours, and managed to pull herself upright by steadying herself on the metal bed frame. She glowered at Charlotte, then lurched off balance toward the door.
Charlotte sprang up and blocked her way. “You can't do that, Beverly. You can't drive! You can't even walk!” Big sigh. “Okay, I'll drive you there. I don't even know why you want to, but I'll drive you. You'll get yourself killed. Just let me put on some pants.”
She stepped out of her pajama pants and into a pair of shorts without stopping to put on underwear, slid on her sandals and said, “Okay, now give me the keys.”
Beverly handed them over with the smile of a little girl who has gotten her way.
Outside in the dark, in the dead of the night, Charlotte regretted her generosity. She was still groggy. The massive wall of Little Yard seemed to pitch forward at an ominous angle, about to collapse and bury them under tons of stone. Windows were lit up here and there, and somebody was playing a country music song whose hook went “I'm not slick's you, but I'm gon' fix you. I'm gon'eighty-six you hick sombitch.” There appeared to be no one else about down here at ground level. Beverly had left her car almost three feet from the curb in a no-parking zone on the drive that ran between Little Yard and the parking lot. The vehicle was enormous. Charlotte knew that Beverly had a car, but she never dreamed she had a monster like this one. It was a black thing called a Denali, an SUV, but as big and heavy as the pickup truck Daddy drove. The driver's seat was so high Charlotte had to take two great pumping steps, one up to a running board, the second up to the seat itself. It was like sitting on a leather-upholstered throne. There was tan leather everywhere and superfluous panels of wood with a showy, highly polyurethaned grain. The windows were tinted black. The whole thing was disorienting. How could it be that she was way above the ground at the wheel of a leather-upholstered monster of a vehicle, getting ready to take a besotted girl back to a bar ⦠in the dead of the night?
The I.M.âthe bar's name came from the Internet function “Instant Message”âwas near PowerPizza and other enterprises geared mainly to students, on a strip just off campus on the edge of a slum known among students as the City of God, after a cult movie of that name about packs of homicidal boys in Rio de Janeiro. Under other circumstances it would be an easy walk.
As she drove, Charlotte said to Beverly, “Why do you like lacrosse players so much?”
“Why?” said Beverly. She turned away and looked out the side window, as if the matter was too obvious to bear explaining.
After a bit Charlotte said, “What's his name?”
Beverly continued looking straight ahead. “His name?” A dark cloud formed, and she burst into tears again.
Charlotte said, “How about if I take you back and you go to bed? Come on.”
“No!” Beverly abruptly stopped crying but still didn't bother to look at
Charlotte or wipe off the tear tracks where they coursed through the makeup on her cheekbones. “I know his
room number
. He lives in Lapham. They all live in Lapham! All the lacrosse players!” Now she looked at Charlotte. “And he's
drunk
.” (Don't you understand?) “That's the only time they
talk
to me!” (
Please
understand!)
“I thought you said he was at the I.M.”
“He
is
! Where'dya think I just fucking
came
from?”
Charlotte pulled up in front of the I.M. At this hour there was almost no traffic. Beverly opened the door, wriggled and lurched out of her soft leather bucket seat. The high heel of her right shoe slipped off the running board, and she nearly pitched face forward onto the pavement, finally staggering to a stop like an ice-skater who has lost control. She was listing perilously to port.
“I'll come in with you!” said Charlotte.
“No!” said Beverly, offended, like most drunks, by any insinuation that she needed someone to babysit her.
A row of downlighters illuminated the front entrance. Beverly's blond hair, cerise shirt, and the waifish bones of her backside beneath the black pants shimmered as she passed beneath the lights and opened the big plate-glass door. A rush of drumbeats, electrified wails, and the voice of an adolescent curdling his vocal cords in an attempt to sound like a hardened country-slacker, veteran of a thousand jook houses ⦠and the door closed. Charlotte kept the engine running.
What am I doing here
?
â¦
Two-thirty a.m ⦠.
By and by Beverly emerged, walking at a terrific pace even though weaving slightly, opened the door of the Denali, and began blubbering and sobbing again.
“He ⦠wasn't ⦠there ⦔ She broke
there
into two long, plaintive, tear-sodden syllables.
“That's all right,” Charlotte said almost maternally. “Let's get in, and let's go back and get some sleep.”
“No! I gotta find him! He was
talking
to me before! I know where he lives. You gotta take me to Lapham. You
gotta
!”
Beverly said it with such monomaniacal belligerence, Charlotte was intimidated. She was afraid of what the inebriated girl would do if she said no. So she drove her over to Lapham College. Everybody knew Lapham, thanks to the huge baroque gargoyles along the edges of its parapets. Here in the middle of the night, the faint streetlights threw the gargoyles and the building's architraves, compound arches, and stone facing into deep relief.
This time Charlotte insisted on going inside with Beverly. She wasn't going to wait out here in the SUV for the rest of the night.
Obviously this wasn't Beverly's first visit. She headed immediately for a side entrance secured by heavy, ornate wrought-iron gates and an oak door studded with iron bolts in the medieval fashion. Without hesitation, she punched a numerical code into a lock panel to the right of the gates. A low hum sounded, and she opened the gates and the door. They entered a small Gothic vestibule; straight ahead, a narrow staircase; to the right, another stout wooden door; to the left, the door to the elevator. The elevator took forever to arrive. Beverly was swearing under her breath. At last, with much ancient rattling and clanking of the outer and inner doors, it appeared, and they ascended. When they reached the fourth floor, Beverly lurched out, still listing to port. As she staggered down a corridor, she managed to do a regular tattoo on the floor with her high heels. The noise reverberated between hard-plastered yellow-ochre walls. Halfway down, she stoppedâthen flung herself upon a door and began hammering it with her fists. The door was so thick, this produced nothing more than muffled thumps, whereupon she started crying again and screaming, “Harrison! I know you're in there! Harrison!” A couple of doors opened down the way; boys' heads poked out, saw it was only some drunk girl, and withdrew. From inside the room ⦠nothing.
Charlotte pulled back a few steps to distance herself from her roommate. Beverly hung her head and cried some more. In a burst of fury, she took off her shoes and began hammering the door with the high heels. A terrific racket. The door opened, and a tall, lean youth appeared, clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts hanging on his hip bones, exposing the slabs of weight-room muscle on his shoulders, chest, arms, and abdomen. He had close-cropped curly brown hair and a lean face that at this moment looked fatigued and annoyed. He stared at Beverly and took a stance blocking the doorway.