Seven Deadly Pleasures (33 page)

It must have been what they called a "one-nighter," or what Kyle would have referred to as a "pump and dump." They probably met at some crowded bar or some lecture she had attended in the past and gone and gotten a room. I understand and believe this now as an adult, and even at thirteen I had my imagination. It was not too difficult a stretch.

Maybe they had been drunk. Maybe recently he even recognized her picture on the news and had remained silent, ignorant of the pregnancy, sure of his innocence, and unwilling to arouse suspicions that would swallow his time, mar his reputation, and prove answerless anyway.

The fatal ride of Maryanne McKusker came to me with a hideous clarity. She did not want Dad the minister to know she was pregnant, so she anonymously called for directions from a mall or gas station telephone.

Hell, Rolling Joe's was
on
Crum Creek Parkway and she probably passed it. But soon afterward she must have gotten lost. I do not believe, in fact, that she ever got to the clinic or much past Rolling Joe's, for that matter. I think she took a wrong turn at the "Y."

At the end of Jukins Cross there was a "Y" in the road all right, but it was not really a "Y." It was a three-pronged fork that had two major, unmarked arteries and an offshoot to the far left that looked more like a private driveway than a real street. Byline was definitely at the left of the "Y," but to the newcomer it would have appeared more as the center path of three, if you counted the little side-chute.

Maryanne McKusker's directions had specifically stated "bear left at the 'Y,'" and she did just that, even though the avenue in question looked generally untraveled with a center line of crabgrass sprouting between the dirt-worn tire marks.

The small patch of unmarked country lane was actually called Mulberry Street.

Mulberry Street led one way to the Route 79 overpass.

Maryanne McKusker had bumped along Mulberry Street, maybe fearing she might run over the amount of time she allotted herself for the false appearance at the lecture in Concord, fretfully searching for the clinic a "mile up." What she got was an ongoing, lazy panorama of seemingly deserted horse farms, barns, and meadows back dropped by dustings of trees. No gas stations, no general stores, just a confusing wind of back road stretching farther and farther to nowhere.

She was probably relieved when Mulberry Street curved suddenly and opened out to the overpass.

She would have passed under the big green overhead road sign that announced "Westville" in friendly white letters. She would have immediately understood her mistake at the "Y," regrouped, and opted for the first possible left turn allowing her to double back and try it again.

It was a mere fifty feet between the Mulberry street on-ramp and the fatal left turn. It is entirely possible that she, for that short period of time, was the lone motorist on the overpass and unobserved. It is fact that the triple guardrail kept her from knowing exactly where the left turn was about to take her, and it remains my own speculation that at this particular moment it felt right to her. At least it was a turn in the right general direction.

Considering the "alibi" she told her father, the time was getting tight. She was probably pressing on the gas a bit harder than usual. She swung down that ramp and onto the dirt road faster than you could say
"death trap."

She wanted an abortion and she got one.

Kyle and I killed two birds with one nail.

14.

The toll booth did not go up until the summer of 1978. There were legal snags, and Runnameade's proposals that received initial local approval were put on hold at the state level. For a year and a half cars simply came into Westville off the turnpike for free. Then in late '75 there were questions about the integrity of the original exit ramp, and they closed off the turn on the overpass for another twenty-three months.

Of course, I did not know of these details until years later when I could access all the documents, transactions, and bureaucratic maneuverings online. As a developing adolescent I was left to my own assumptions. I therefore took it upon myself to continue going regularly to the jobsite as I had begun doing as a thirteen-year-old, so as to hide in the cover of the trees and see if today was the day the hardhats started poking around again.

I meticulously read what the papers gave away, but the information back then was spotty at best. It was old news that Runnameade Construction had won the bid with a simple, low-risk scheme to put a single toll booth in at the base of the overpass. In the Nineties, many referred back to this as "The Blair Witch Plan," not only because Runnameade's booth wound up being haunted, but more so to compare it with the miniscule cost the creators of "Blair" put forth to make their blockbuster in the first place.

The Siegal people always questioned the integrity of that original footer, but those protests were really trivial to them, more footnotes in fine print than the dollar signs that came across in bold. They wanted the powers that were to shoot the moon. Still, neither the "petty" technical angle nor the lofty financial one ever got past City Hall. These mavericks wanted the government to spend big, and plain and simple, the Siegal vision had a higher cost than what many believed would turn a profit. Through the years, as the running debate wore on, interested parties on both sides did traffic volume evaluations and Siegal's independent firms always seemed to come up with different results than those hired by the government. Go figure.

And when the single booth did go up in the summer of 1978, as predicted, it began turning that slow, faithful profit, like a low-risk, low-interest savings bond. Every time Siegal got to the table through the years, their bid was rejected for the same basic reasons.

The booth started turning a profit the minute it was put up.

We are a small town.

Your plan will cost millions in exposed funds that will take years to show dividends. As long as that booth stands, and continues to come up in the black on the quarterlies, there will be no plaza. Period.

That is why I dropped out of school in 1978, a year before graduation. Runnameade installed the booth and could not get anyone to stay in it, at least not after the sun went down. I do not recall the names in the succession of those who tried to work nightshift there throughout that critical month, but I know it was more than twenty. The reported physical symptoms were "lightheadedness, heart palpitations, and minor bleeding for no apparent reason," but it was the psychological symptoms that really captured everyone's imagination. It was bad enough that some actually recognized Kyle Skinner's fleeting image just at the periphery of vision, laughing silently and snapping his head back and forth on that flap of neck-skin. The one that really scared me, however, was Maryanne's image, hair flying behind her in slow motion, eyes crawling with worms, a baby in her arms that she reportedly first caressed, next scratched, then bit into, and finally snapped back and forth in clamped jaws like a frenzied dog tearing at meat. Supposedly you couldn't really "see" her, since the minute you fixed your eyes on the particular glass pane she was occupying she switched to a neighboring panel, but I could not afford to take the chance that someone would actually recognize the face (or worse, take a photograph of it) and connect it to Maryanne McKusker.

When the trouble in the booth started there were also reports in the newspapers and the
Construction Times
(of which I had become a regular subscriber by then) that Siegal had heard about the complication and were stirring around again, going back to the footnotes in small print concerning the integrity of the otherwise unexplored footer where that boy died years ago. Suddenly not so trivial.

I actually read an article about that while goofing off at school, and remember walking straight out of chemistry class and Westville High for good. When I told my mother later that day, she accepted the news with quiet defeat. She brought the collar of her robe up under her jaw in a fist and slowly went back into her bedroom. No shock-blue eyes. She had kept them down to the floor. The blue jean queen had lost her power over me some time ago.

I was hired immediately. And while many initially saw it as some sort of sick prank that I earn my living literally standing directly above the spot where Kyle Skinner was killed, there were others who came to understand (or thought they understood) that this was my duty, my way to mourn, my method of healing that allowed me to give something back to society.

And I did give back. The trusty low-risk savings account. I was never told exactly where the money was filtered off to after I took the weekly take in fifty-pound strongboxes and helped pack them onto the armored GM van they also used for prison transport, but I suppose a portion was put right back into the city. I never came up with the cure for cancer, but we erected a huge bandstand down in the Common back in '83. I never discovered a way to solve world hunger, but I would bet dollars to donuts that the war memorial they put in the grove behind the recreation center in '95 was sponsored at least in part by some cash that came from my strongboxes.

Of course this is all well and good, but I am not trying to fool anybody. If you are reading this you know exactly who I am, what I have done, and where it has left me. Working the booth has been no picnic, and I am not immune to the spirits that dwell there. I am forty-six years old and I feel like I'm in my seventies. I eat poorly, on purpose, and have been loading up on daily doses of F9 Blood Liquescence ever since it became possible buy your own smorgasbord of drugs on the Internet. As I said, I am a walking time-bomb, a guaranteed candidate, no, an
elected official
for a heart attack or stroke, but before I pass there are two more things I am obligated to disclose.

First, please know that my mother was always innocent of all this. For your information, she developed osteoporosis, broke a hip when she took a header off the stairway in front of the Staples on Willow Street, and died in the hospital of pneumonia last year. She was always ignorant of the breadth of my sins, and for that I am thankful.

Second, understand that it was not just the supernatural that targeted this booth. Through the years I was attacked a total of twenty-six times on the job. Most were drunk teens chucking empty bottles or rocks at the booth for a laugh, but there were some incidents born of more serious motivation. I was shot at three times. Two of the occurrences were random acts of hate by those in vehicles I could not identify, but the one in the winter of 1984 was anything but random.

I was reading an article in a teen magazine that discussed the differences between Eighties sleaze hair metal and New Wave, when I heard a vehicle screech up to the gate. By the time I looked out, Mr. Skinner had already exited his vehicle. His hair was matted with sweat and he was shirtless. He called something to me but the fierce wind swallowed the words. I was lucky he was so drunk. The other assaults I experienced during my tenure in the booth were drive-bys, but here he really wanted to get his hands dirty. There was a double-plated bulletproof sliding glass unit above the half-door I exchanged cash out of, but I had left it up. Skinner only needed to walk four feet to have a clear, frontal shot at me.

He didn't. He staggered, took a position at an angle to the booth, spread his feet, aimed, and fired his weapon. It smoked and banged louder than I thought it would have. I had covered my face, and now slowly brought away my hands. The bullet had dented the safety glass and glanced off into the roadway. Skinner was not visible.

I got out of my chair and opened the portal door. Skinner had slid down to his butt. He had on dirty overalls with the straps down. He had snot coming out of his nose, and the wind blew it away in threads. He was propped up, back against the front right tire. He had one leg splayed out straight and the other bent at the knee, untied boot against the bottom of the booth. He looked at me with squinting, tearing eyes. He smiled crookedly, and brought the gun to his temple.

I just watched, hands dangling at my sides, breath coming out in steady little puffs that made clouds on the night air.

He started laughing. He laughed as he brought the weapon down, and laughed as he pushed to his feet. He offered me the gun, butt first.

"Eh?" he coaxed.

I just cocked my head a bit to the side and stared.

He turned and tossed the thing into the woods beyond the edge of the concrete deck. He started laughing for the second time, and I could still hear it as he drove off into the darkness. I never saw him after that night. He moved out of state and no one I knew ever heard from him again.

And so that concludes my story. When I am gone, the booth will inevitably fail and Siegal/Tri State Industries will finally control that section of roadway. They may even go back to the fine print, bust the shit out of that dirt-and-concrete tombstone and finally exhume Maryanne McKusker. It will be poor closure for her. She will be remembered as a vengeful spirit and sensationalized as worse.

As for me, I suppose this story is my closure, but one must be human to feel that kind of thing. My soul was erased years ago. I was a boy with dreams and I made a horrible mistake. I do not for a minute think myself more innocent than Kyle Skinner because I only threw one of those nails, and do not consider myself pure because I was unaware of the baby. I do not even feel there was righteousness in bringing fatal consequences to an unfeeling hoodlum who threatened a defenseless animal, even though the law would disagree with me.

When you strip this down to its bare bones, I am the worst kind of sinner. From everything I read about her, Maryanne McKusker was a wonderful person. I turned her into a monster. I could have told somebody before now. I could have at least told somebody.