Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery Read Online Free Page A

father perched on his ear, demanding him to explain what had taken so fucking long, and, Jesus, aren't we paying you for a service and on and on and on. The good doctor, unaware of my father's interpersonal practices, offered a million apologies before readying the bedroom for delivery.
    I wasn't allowed inside.
    It was like an exorcism. I knelt on the floor at the end of the hallway and listened, pivoting over to the wall anytime I thought somebody might walk out and catch me.
    There were loud sounds the whole time, but they changed, became something else entirely. Even at that age, I could tell they weren’t what proud parents should be uttering.
    Then there were screams of rage and then panic and then despair. I nodded off at one point and found myself, upon awakening, staring right at my dad, who stood in the doorway to their bedroom.
    I couldn't read the number of emotions on my father's face as he pleaded with me to get the fuck into my room, before something awful happens to you too, Rolson . I was sent to my room when the complications became apparent to the adults.
    It wasn’t raw anger. He suddenly had the look of a man whose entire life has been one long series of Twilight Zone episodes. I tried to peer between my father and the door frame, but all I could see was my mother's body, still damp with sweat.
    She was very still.
    I couldn't hear my mother or the baby, and I couldn't be certain if they were both dead by then or not. To this day, the hours that followed are a strung-together mess of images.
    It’s like a collage. Part of me thinks I have included movie images and old, distorted dreams into my memories, but even then I can’t quite put all of that night into a single narrative. I can piece together some things, but mostly I just remember sitting on my bed, picking at the shoelaces on my Keds. I would lie down and try to look up at the ceiling, but something about it just didn’t feel right, so I sat up again. That felt like it was helping, somehow. It must have been the beginning of my weird sense of superstition.
    It could have been a few hours I sat on that bed, or it could have been a few days. Either way, I didn’t move, and it got so bad that I peed my pants instead of going out there. The thing my father became shortly thereafter was not unlike a monster, and I think the full transformation happened that night. I distinctly remember him banging drunk around the house, screaming, “You can hide from the devil, but you can’t hide from God.” Just like that. Over and over.
    For the life of me, I can’t remember if he came to check on me at all. Whiskey was his dark companion from then on, until that other thing happened.
    Maybe the old biddies of the town are right. Maybe I have blocked some things out.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Watching what it took to get that young man's remains out of the Boogie House pried something loose in me I may never get back, something I did not realize I even had in me anymore.
    Spooner proved ineffective at resuscitating the body, so Billy Margolee, the coroner, had to be called out, causing a series of setbacks. Margolee, a drunken, irascible sack of a man, complained nonstop. Not just about the stink, but about the bugs and the heat and the moisture and anything else that kept him from his daily pint of Old Bushmill's.
    I stood around, mostly, and nobody seemed to mind. I kept one eye on the officials and another on the body, wondering if a chorus line of corpses would break out in an impromptu version of the Charleston for me. Nothing happened, though, and once the befuddled locals dispersed, so did I.
    Back home, I drew a large glass of water from the tap, no ice, and drank down half before pouring it out and replacing it with something a little more amber-colored. Topping off the Beam with a shot of Coke and supplementing it with a High Life, I propped open the front door with a mud-caked boot and watched the uneven downpour of rain from my recliner.
    Time