Seven Deadly Pleasures (20 page)

M
y name is James Raybeck, and if you are reading this message I am already dead.

It most probably took about two weeks to work through all the young hard-asses, younger jackasses, and older disbelievers trying to make it all night in the booth just once for the thrill of it. It probably took another pair of weeks to put feelers out past Westville and come up absolutely empty in a serious search for long-term toll collectors to work the graveyard shift. I would estimate it was another three or four working days to rush through paperwork issuing the green light for removal, and a couple of business lunches to secure a deal for the dismantling the booth itself, the demolition of the concrete pad beneath, and the excavation of the ground under that.

It is no secret to the townspeople of Westville that the Siegal Group claimed back in '74 that the footer under the base was never properly surveyed and assessed while Runnameade Engineering gave the quicker OK for the construction of the pad, and later, the single toll booth at the base of the exit ramp off the Route 79 overpass. Everyone and their mothers knew that Siegal never really cared so much about that initial pour (small beans) or the possible flaw in the footer (a technicality to be used for leverage). Their real interest was in the contract for an entire toll plaza, a complicated network of lighting systems, road signs, a restaurant complex, a gas station complete with plumbing of its own, and a double-lined two-way straight through to Main Street. It was Goliath's vision. Risky, gargantuan costs up front, and when it all came down to whose bid was chosen, Ed Runnameade was the now late Mayor Smitherbridge's second cousin, and his middle boy was just starting out on his own with Runnameade Concrete, Road Systems, Builders, and Wreckers. The easiest (and most expeditious) solution was dumping in the backfill, pouring the concrete, and enjoying the highest initial profit margin that a simple guard shack, traffic signal lamp, and barrier gate arm would bring despite the horrible things that happened right there at the edge of Scutters Woods.

Since the present-day removal of the booth itself will be the first item of business (the current governor is married to a Siegal) and certain individuals in current positions of power downtown have been waiting for an excuse to move forward with the closure of this particular chapter in Westville history no matter what the cost, I would estimate you are reading this approximately five weeks after my demise, six at the outside. A new contractor recommended by the conglomerate now known as Siegal/TriState Industries, initially agented by some twenty-five-year-old kid with a hangover from last night's adventures at the Pleasure Chest Gentleman's Club out on the Pike, will have found this packet of writing long before his team has taken out the safety glass, disengaged the roof support channels, and used mini-grinders to cut through the welds bonding the wall panels. He will have found this writing in its manila envelope under the storage cabinet that I bolted to the floor with wedge anchors last February. I kept the night-time stuff in that steel case, the lot consisting of a pair of Embury Luck-E-Lite Kerosene traffic lanterns, a Streamline Fire Vulcan flashlight, and a pair of PF 500 power flares, so as to absolutely disinterest the dayshift employees: Tim Clements Monday through Thursday, and Frank Hillboro the long weekend crew chief. And just in case one of them had gotten a wild hair up his ass, unscrewed the bolts, and moved the cabinet before I died of "natural causes"? Well, I do carry a Ruger LCP .380 for protection. I would have had no problem turning it on myself. It has been a long road, my friend.

Since the age of seventeen I have dedicated my life to this toll booth, this literal sanctuary, this metaphorical prison, Monday through Monday, 6:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. Cal Ripken's got nothing on me. If you entered the town of Westville, Indiana, from Route 79, down Reed Road and through Scutters Woods between the years of 1979 and 2008 after the sun dipped below the horizon, you did it on my watch.

I am the one who endures.

When this structure went up, the first collectors on graveyard shift initially complained of feeling faint. Then came rumors of severe palpitations, followed by stories of visions in the windows, always at the edge of sight, teasing the periphery of the given operator's view of the 360-degree sliding glass safety panels around him. Some claimed it was a boy laughing maniacally and then being decapitated from behind, while others swore it was a woman ripping apart an embryo. After two short weeks, the booth almost came down. I dropped out of high school to save it. I had no choice.

Within days of my first moments on the job, I started taking Geritol to up my iron and B vitamin counts. It was like a Band-Aid on an amputation. The visions were bad enough, but the blackouts were disastrous. In the first month I was woken up from a dead faint three times, twice by customers laying on their horns, and once in August when a young waitress from Kulpswood actually exited her vehicle, opened the portal door, and helped me off the floor. I approached my doctor and was refused medicine for anemia, which I showed no signs of in my life outside of the booth.

I thickened up my blood the old-fashioned way. I went on a "diet" including high-fat stuff like liver and whole milk. Since my late teens I have consistently eaten breakfasts made of a minimum of five egg yolks, three large links of Hatfield sausage, home fries smothered in onions, and Jewish hallah covered with butter. My lunches have been constructed of various red meats, and my dinners have always included drawn butter, fried side dishes, and cheeses. Between meals I've pretty much settled with deep fried Cheetos and good old-fashioned vanilla chocolate chip ice cream, but have been known to go off the beaten path with Hot Fries, Ranch Doritos, and Ring-Dings. There is no physician worth his salt that would ever tell you that there is a correlation between cholesterol and anemic need, but please believe me when I say that you could not survive the booth with an LDL or triglyceride count under 330. When I started there I was five foot-eight inches and a cool one hundred and fifty-four pounds. Though I have quietly cheated any overt sort of obesity with a lightning metabolism passed down from my mother's side of the family, my small pear-shaped paunch and respectable weight of one eighty-four is deceiving. Stuff like this catches up with you, and I have been a poster-boy for a stroke, blood clot, or heart attack for some time now.

That which you are reading at this moment, I composed on my Dell. It took me four months to say it exactly the way it needed to be said, and since I wanted you to get the whole picture I put the thing in story form. I even added italics at times to express inner monologue and recent flashbacks. Though I am no professional, everyone knows that even a high school dropout can up his level of discourse through reading. And I have had nothing but time on my hands. I have had time to read, to write, to mourn, and adapt to the unthinkable.

Reed Road is a one-way thoroughfare that cuts through Scutters Woods for five miles and eventually opens out to Main Street. To use Reed Road up until now, you would have had to come off the Route 79 overpass and pay me a toll anywhere from fifty cents to two-seventy-five, depending on where you originally picked up the turnpike. So to all my customers, to my acquaintances in the past, to my mother God rest her, my relatives, and those of you that will hear of this through the media, know and try to understand my story.

And to you, my contractor friend with the hangover, he who has just found this packet under the bolted-down cabinet. I finally want to confirm something before you dismantle the walls, stack the safety glass, put my cash drawer and F9 500 POS touch screen on eBay, and start busting out the concrete pad below your feet.

The toll booth still erected around you is haunted.

I am going to tell you how it got that way.

This is my confession.

1.

Kyle winked, pushed out of the pit, and crawled under the caution tape. On tiptoe I peered over the lip of our new hiding hole and watched him strut across the abandoned job site. He stopped by a stack of cinderblocks and a pile of long steel bars with grooves in them. He turned and scratched his head. He stroked an imaginary beard. He hawked up and spit into a red wheelbarrow with a flat tire, then spun away, spread his feet, and fumbled with his pants. He started pissing down the side of a dented fifty-gallon drum. His shoulders were shaking as were mine, and his stream went through a number of unsteady spurts in rhythm with his laughter. He started gyrating his hips and the urine that dissolved the old dust in shiny splatters became a pattern. He was writing his name.

"Kyle, don't."

He zipped up and climbed into the cab of a bulldozer.

"Don't what?" He grinned and started yanking on the gear handles. He was not quite tall enough to reach the floor pedals with his feet.

"Don't mess around."

"But Jimmy, this piece of shit won't move."

I giggled a bit. It was forced. He knew it was forced and he challenged me to say exactly what was on my mind with a hard, watery stare. Then more yanking. Hard. His teeth were clenched beneath the thinnest of smiles and sweat ran through his dirty blond crewcut. The scene was becoming a familiar one. It was a hot summer day in Westville, we were thirteen years old, I was Kyle's new pal, and we were out making mischief.

"C'mon," I said. "You're gonna bust it."

He stopped.

"So? What are they going to do, take fingerprints? Next you're about tell me that the chief of police is going to connect some busted dozer gear with my name written in piss over there on that can. You're one paranoid little jerk-in-pants, ain't you?"

I shrugged. He shrugged back and we both laughed. It was the usual standoff. My base instincts screamed "foul" long before we chucked apples at the Levinworths' tin roof, or doused the church doorknobs with bacon grease, or lit up a bag of dogshit right by the umbrella stand in Mr. Kimball's front foyer. I was the worried voice of what could go wrong and Kyle would twist around my illustrations to prove we wouldn't get caught. He always had ironclad proof and a way of presenting that proof that left me speechless.

I rested my forearms on the edge of the trench and looked for a place to draw pictures in the dirt. There was a half-buried tube of liquid nails and a scuffed-up red gas cap next to a fanned-out toss of broken green glass pieces. The bent-up Genesee Cream Ale bottle cap was a foot to the left, and I made note to possibly flip it at Kyle if the moment was right. I rubbed my index finger into the ground. It was good dirt. Soft, with pretty little mica specs in it. I drew a cartoon penis and a cartoon vagina. A stalk with a bulb and an oval with an upside down "Y" in it. Why did vaginas look like peace signs anyway?

"So," I said. I scratched out a dot where I imagined the clitty thing would be. "This is the big secret?" I looked up. "We rode bikes five miles just to trash some old dozer? You said you had some new surprise out here that was ultimate pisser."

Kyle put his elbow up on the steering column.

"Still drawing pussy instead of getting it, Jimmy?"

I yanked up my finger as if burned. If Kyle had heard, it was pretty clear that more had gotten in on the story over the summer.

Mr. Ferguson had caught me drawing weird stuff in my notebook on the last day of school back in June, and I'd gotten a weirder lecture in the hall after class. He told me all about respect and being appropriate and careful and all. He'd colored up while telling me, reddened right at the neckline, and when Miss Royer came around the corner from teaching her gym class he'd gone scarlet. As all the boys in school had been doing since the beginning of time, we both ignored her horse-face, peeked at her long mane of straight brown hair that went nearly down to her waist, and then shot a quickie glance right to her Olympic legs. We looked back at each other, and his finger was right in my face.

"Now look, Jimmy. You're a good kid, but you're a bit lost. You've got one more year of junior high school and I want you to fly straight. I've seen you looking at the girls sitting next to you and across from you, and it's getting a bit obvious. Other kids are snickering about it. Keep your eyes out front, all right?"

Now
I
was scarlet. The fact that he was looking at Miss Royer's legs just as I was a second ago seemed suddenly petty. His accusation was true. I couldn't keep my eyes off anything female. They were all so . . . sexy. Since last year I couldn't help but always stare at the girls in their swishing little field hockey kilts, and the cheerleaders in their green and white "Go Wildcats" sweaters and matching black miniskirts, and the girls in gym class with their high-cut white shorts. How could I not stare? They were a dizzying carousel of feathered hair, shags, tight pants, blue jean skirts, strawberry lip gloss, and light blue eye shadow with sparkles in it. I studied them every chance that I had!

The urge had been so overwhelming that I had not considered the possibility that others were watching me watch the skirts and all. Weren't other boys doing the same thing as I was?