Chapter Five: Juke Box Hero
What was he thinking playing that thing? Believing that he could be transported to California by the keys of the piano? That he might forget his life, hiding away on the prairie? That she is resurrected in Asher Strange?
Wake the hell up, Billy Hargrove. Life is not some fantasy. Neil is waiting, belt in hand. That's reality.
The Camaro bites into the gravel and ploughs through, leaving tracks of exposed dirt in his wake. Billy changes gear and tears out of there.
The house is soon hidden from view by tallgrass. Careening along the country road with the dry stalks whipping past, his rage builds and the word coward starts repeating in his head. A twist of the volume knob and a Van Halen guitar riff rips through the cab and through his own damn brain.
He winds down the window and howls at the setting sun.
Where to? He has no idea. He feels so unpredictable it surprises himself. It's electrifying. Billy is almost jittering in his seat as the thunder of the engine and the pulse of his heartbeat heightens his emotions to a fever pitch of excitement. Van Halen is screaming. He could do anything. He got to fight Steve Harrington and his band of losers this afternoon and everyone knows that the evening is when things get really interesting. The excitement bubbling out of him is intoxicating.
"I'm coming for you, Stevie boy," he murmurs and sudden hysterical laughter crashes out of him. The Camaro dives into the forest and the moonlight comes in shards through the naked trees. It ripples over the bonnet and into his eyes. Life tonight is perfect.
Until it isn't.
Because that's the Chief's truck parked across both lanes waiting for him.
Billy grins. Oh, hell yeah, this could be it. He could be done with the stupid town and his bastard dad and his new pet of a wife and Max . . .
And Max.
Billy swears, yanks at the wheel, slams on the breaks. The Camaro whips around, tyres almost lifting from the ground, and an unholy screech fills the quiet forest as the car skids closer, closer, closer, oh crap, the Chief is leaning on the truck, Billy's gonna crush him –
The Camaro stops as if the hand of God smacked it out of motion. It rocks on its wheels and settles. Billy turns off the engine. The burning metal clicks as it cools.
The khaki mass of Chief Hopper swells in Billy's open window. The boy himself flexes and relaxes his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. His hands are cramping. Some of the cuts over the knuckles have opened and seep red.
"It's a nice night for a drive," Hopper comments. He doesn't look into the car. He lights a cigarette instead and stares at the trees. The waist of his heavy winter coat is three inches from Billy's ear.
Billy matches the inappropriate composure and slouches in the driver's seat. "Better in Cali."
"Probably right. Sometimes I wish it was warmer around here. It gets below minus twenty some years."
Well ain't that grand. Frickin' mid-west towns. The coldest it ever got in San Diego was forty-five and that was in January, not November. He's meant to be in t-shirts for another two months. At the moment a breeze slips through Strange's dad's leather jacket and goose bumps ripples over his arms.
"You got a reason to be out here, Chief, or were you missing me?" Billy drawls. The Chief chuckles.
"As much as I love your pretty face, I'm working right now. Your sister gave me a call." The Chief leans down and the twilight flashes in Hopper's eyes. Anger, smouldering, turns that usually bored face into a criminal's nightmare. "If there's one thing I don't like about California, it's the crooked cops. You wanna help me take one down?"
.
I retreat to the kitchen, my place of busywork when the quiet becomes too much. Here there is the record player and the frying onions and the snap, crackle, pop of the kitchen fireplace.
He's gone again, like the snap of fingers, and the loneliness is back and worse than ever and all I can think is how much I don't want to be alone anymore.
How cruel, God, to bring Billy here if it's just to remind me of how alone I am. He will not stay, that is for certain, and so this month of his community service will end with me in a renovated house full of fresh reminders that no one stays, and I will try to drag back that veil of busywork and self-blinding to hide the jagged scar in my heart that's been ripped afresh by Your hand.
"Get a hold of yourself, Asher," I mutter. "It's not as bad as that. Besides, you're acting dependent, and there's no way Billy would stick around if you're this desperate. It's not healthy."
And what is healthy about this?
Right. Busywork. If it's a choice between sitting and pining versus working and pining, I'll take the latter. After all, it's not like there's anyone else around to do it for me.
There is bread enough for sandwiches, which I'm in dire need of after Billy's massacre, and I've been restocked with oatmeal and apples for breakfast. But what to have for dinner? I have no idea if Billy's coming back and Chief Hopper might come with him so I better make enough for three. And if there's leftovers I can have it tomorrow. There are mushrooms in the pantry. And Mr Smith left a slab of beef in the fridge and it would go wonderfully with mashed potatoes. With gravy.
All the ingredients go on the kitchen table since the counter next to the sink is taken up by the microwave and bread box. Oh, the day when I can run from here and start anew in the city – the real city. New York, not Indianapolis. I'll be a writer, a reporter, whatever God wants me to do as long as it isn't in Hawkins, living under the roof my parents abandoned. I will go to jazz clubs and sit in cafes and stare at the glamorous as glossy and pristine as the magazines they inhabit and they will . . .
. . . The dreams slip from my fingers and drown in what feels like a becalmed ocean, gunmetal grey, conjured by Billy. But where he coaxed it into waves, I can only see a mirror showing nothing but the unhappiness I have lived with for as long as I can remember.
When I become poetic, it's usually a bad sign.
I reach for the repurposed icebox, a heavy rectangular cube meant for, well, ice. Its new use is much more helpful, especially in quelling my feelings.
On top of the icebox is Dad's old record player and inside are my favourites of his records. He collected them during the fifties and sixties, before meeting Mom at college. She studied history, him architecture. It was a match made in Heaven. I think he lost all taste for modern music when he met her. I remember growing up listening to Bach and Beethoven and Haydn and wishing for something else. It came in the form of a box found in the attic a week after Kato left.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Bill Haley and Frank Sinatra have since helped me through a lot of cold, lonely nights, when the wind bashed at the boarded-up fireplaces and the nearest person felt further away than the moon. The female singers, Billie Holiday and Etta James, remain in the box now under my parents' bed. Couldn't tell you why, but I've always preferred the men. Perhaps they remind me of Kato. The whole protective 'big brother' vibe.
Then again, what sort of big brother ditches his twelve-year-old sister in a creepy mansion?
Scratch that idea. I just like guy singers.
In the middle of the collection is the well-handled Frank Sinatra '58 LP, Come Fly With Me. With great reverence, I place it on the platter and slide the stylus into the outermost groove. I twist a dial on the casing. The record spins, and with a hiss and a crackle, a jiving fanfare fills the kitchen and Frank's croon invites me to take to the skies.
I pretend I'm in church, on the stage, where no matter how tired and unhappy I am, I can put on a smile and believe for those four songs that I am cheerful. It's probably wrong. No one has taught me the alternative.
Forcing myself to sing along, I return to chopping onions and mushrooms and meat. My feet dance across the linoleum. I spin around the table and snatch a skillet off its hook and plonk it on the stove with a flourish. Butter in the pan and one by the one the ingredients. Water bubbles in a pot and I toss in the salt and, with more care, the potatoes. In a heavy-bottom casserole dish I brown the squares of meat on all sides and toss in the sautéed mushrooms and their friends and add a few cubes of frozen homemade beef stock. Soon it's simmering, and the kitchen smells heavenly. It's too bad I have to open the window, lest the steam encourages the ceiling to grow its own mushrooms.
With a pirouette and a cha-cha, I glide to the bread box and, in a heroic effort, attempt to think about this week's homework assignments. It lasts maybe a minute, and then the numbers three and twelve shine in the torchlight. The memory starts spinning out and it won't stop. Running through those dark halls, hearing Tyler screaming, knowing that even when I escape here, he will be waiting at home –
"Ah!" Blood beads from the shallow cut on my finger. I shove the digit against my lips before it can drip onto the bread slices. Plasters, plasters. I trot out of the kitchen, duck under the stairs, and enter the tiny tiled space where Morell hid. It barely fits the toilet and sink. On a shelf above the toilet next to the Tampax are the plasters. I fumble it open and manage to wrap one around my finger.
Note to self, don't have a traumatic memory when handling sharp objects.
Chicago swings through the entrance hall, and the ringing of the telephone joins in shrill dissonance.
The pale square of W.J. Morell's old hanging place is a new thing. I look at it while I pick up the phone, fascinated to see this house changed for the first time in years.
What else might change? What might this house become?
What will my parents say?
"Yes?" I say into the receiver.
"Want the good news?" says Hopper. His gruff voice is downright jolly, with a hint of bloodthirst.
". . . Yes?"
"Your boy Billy's all right."
I sigh in relief. "Oh, thank God."
"That's not the good news. You promise you won't tell a soul?"
Is he being conspiratorial? "Of course. I got kicked off the newspaper team and I live alone. Who'd I tell?"
"Don't you have a clique or whatever they call it these days?"
"Yes. We're called the pariah club. It's me and Steve Harrington."
"Cool it, kid," he deadpans. "Stand up is my weekend job."
"What's the good news?"
"We've got Neil Hargrove in custody."
.
"You wanna talk to him?"
Weirdly, Billy doesn't. He looks through the tiny glass pane in the wooden cell door. His father sits on the narrow metal bed. Lit by a bare, burning bulb in the centre of the room, he looks sallow and ill. His moustache is black and limp, his hair hanging over his forehead. The terrifying monster that is Neil Hargrove seems to have been drained away, leaving this pitiful man in its place. Billy always thought his father was a big man. But, after seeing Hopper drag him into the police station and shove him into a cell, Billy now sees that he's average at best. It was his voice, that glare, the sudden and unexpected violence, his unassailable right to do whatever he liked to his son, that made him such a terror.
Neil looks up and spots Billy in the window. The bitter, poisonous glare he gives his son hardens Billy's heart.
Pathetic, Billy thinks. When they brought him in, Billy was waiting in the entrance area, having driven to the station under the Chief's orders and told to wait there or else.
Upon seeing his son, Neil went rabid. "You're listening to him? Don't believe anything he told you! The boy's mad!" Hopper's lack of response made Neil turn on his son. "I take care of you and this is how you repay me? You don't know how much trouble you're in. When I get out –" Then Hopper had thrown him into his cell, locked the door, and clapped his hands together.
"What a piece of work," he said with relish. "You wanna talk to him?"
Now, Billy gives his father the finger and turns his back on the cell. "No," he tells Hopper, who might just be his hero, and last week he would have shot himself at the thought. "Let him rot."
Hopper nods. "You're better off without him, kid. By the time he gets out, you'll be old enough to live on your own. And don't you worry 'bout Red. She's got her mom."
Billy shoves past the big cop and heads down the tiny stub of a corridor, past Hopper's office, and into the entrance area of Hawkins Police Station. There is a long wooden bench out here that he collapses onto and closes his eyes. He breathes in his first, hesitant taste of freedom. It smells of stale coffee, cigarette smoke, and old carpet. It smells like Chief Hopper. And if anyone except Chief Hopper had his father in jail, he wouldn't believe he was free at all. He knows how abuse charges work in California. A slap on the wrist, a five-hundred dollar fine, and the abuser is back home and angrier than ever. Yeah, back in San Diego, he'd be in more trouble than ever right now.
Yet, for some reason, he trusts this Chief of Police. How could he not? Billy saw that deep, burning anger in the Chief's eyes when he suggested taking dear old Dad into custody. No way is Chief Hopper going to let Neil Hargrove go free. And Chief Hopper isthe law around here. There are perks to small town America.
Billy grins.
He doesn't have to go home to a belt ever again.
Then the station door crashes open and there are two redheads in front of him. Ah, right. After having Neil arrested in their own home, Susan would have driven by the Wheeler's to pick up Max before coming here. The girl's got that stubborn, angry expression on her paling face. Lack of sun is washing her out fast, as it is him.
Underneath that scowl is a hint of glee.
"Mrs Hargrove," Hopper says, holding out a hand. Billy sits back to watch this unfold. Alice Weaver, the night secretary with the gossipy son, took his cigarettes when he came in earlier, something about a woman named Flo and her health magazines. She took Hopper's at the same time. An instant camaraderie formed between the two males, built on injured masculine pride and exasperation at women and their bizarre ideas but what's a guy to do? Women are the better half of humanity, after all, and life would be too damn depressing without their smiles and wiles and uncanny ability to make a room cleaner just by walking through the doorway.
Susan shakes Hopper's hand. "What's going to happen?" she asks, trying to stay calm. The last word wobbles a bit, though. She always was a passive one, drifting along in Neil's wake and never raising a hand to Billy's defence apart from a few, wobbling words of, 'Really, Neil, you don't have to . . .'
Billy's mom once picked up a plate and smashed it over Neil's head.
"I need to interview you," he replies. Not Maxine, of course. Because he and Maxine have already talked and she's the one who got his father thrown into jail and his freckle-faced brat of a step-sister is his unexpected saviour. She looks at Billy and winks. Billy winks back. They grin at each other, sharp-toothed and savage.
Susan is watching Hopper, wringing her hands. "Tonight?"
"Best to do it quick."
"Oh . . ." She glances at Billy, questioning.
Hopper answers for him, "He's given his statement."
Billy doesn't like talking to cops. That conversation, however, had been a good one.
"Does your dad beat you?"
"Yeah."
"When did it start?"
"Whole life. Beat Mom too."
"Anything else?"
"He's more corrupt than a cavity."
"Got proof?"
Little did his father know, he paid attention on those trips to the San Diego Police Department after his mom left. Over time, most of the trips became because of misdemeanours instead of after-school care. He listened to the whispers, the running commentary on his father's indiscretions and beatings of incarcerated blacks. He knows how much had been covered up for Neil's sake – and it is a heck of a lot more than just Billy's beating of David Westley.
In Hopper's office, the police chief wrote down Billy Hargrove's statement, clapped Billy on the shoulder, and drove off in that beat-up khaki Chevy to arrest Billy's father for child abuse. It felt like a dream then. It still does.
A new future unrolls before of him. One where he and Maxine can sit silently beside each other and not be at each other's throats and there isn't a moustached maniac forcing them to hate each other. One where he talks to cops. One where Neil Hargrove isn't in control.
Billy closes his eyes and slumps against the wall and wonders when he's going to wake up.
.
"Billy." Someone is shaking him. "Billy, wake up. We're going home."
It's Maxine. The hell is she doing waking him up? He's gonna break her fingers for coming into his room, the little –
He smells the coffee and smoke and old carpet and bolts upright. Max leaps back. Over her shoulder is the secretary's window into the station bullpen. Inside Hopper chats with one of the uniformed officers – the black one, Officer Powell if he's remembering correctly. The one who was there the night this whole Asher Strange thing started. He idly wonders what they've done with Morell. He wasn't in the cells when Billy was down there. Hopefully he's been shipped off to some max-security lunatic prison and will be stuck in a straitjacket for the rest of his life. Bloody psycho.
Susan is by the door, hands clasped, waiting. Her hair has deflated, her shirt is wrinkled, but she has a tentative smile on her face like she can't believe what is happening. Max doesn't even try to hide her delight. They wait for him to come with them to their new, empty, Neil-free home. What will it be like, he wonders, to not stand between them and Neil's rage? Who are these two, when they're not another reason he's getting beaten?
There will be time to find out, later. Right now, the rug of his reality has been ripped away and he doesn't know what he's standing on anymore. He needs to be somewhere Neil Hargrove hasn't been. He needs distance and peace and time to figure out what the hellhe is without his father. He doesn't want Neil haunting him from Max's shoulder or Susan's wedding ring.
He's also starving. Not far out of town, there's a full pantry with his name on it.
He shoves his hands in her father's jacket pockets.
"Billy?" says Susan as he brushes past.
"You go," he says quietly. "I'm out tonight."
"Oh." She, unlike Neil, knows when not to push. "Okay."
And because tonight is already bizarre, he offers up information without being forced. "I might be back for dinner tomorrow."
Out the door, not bothering to stop and say goodbye to the Chief. Billy gets into his car and is out of that carpark as quick as he can. Van Halen starts screaming again and he shuts it off, wanting the quiet for once. He drives as fast as he can, racing through the down, from third to fourth to fifth gear along the country road heading east. The small town businesses drop away, then it's houses set far back from the pavement. Then it's pine trees and the occasional winding drive branching off the main road. Jolting over the train tracks. Further, further, and there. The prairie opens up, a sudden shock to the system, and he's careening between the tallgrass towards that black monolith. Sleet scrapes across his windscreen. The porch light is on, shaking in the storm, and light blazes over the backyard from the kitchen. The time on his dash reads 10:10. He must have been asleep on that police bench for hours while Hopper went through the policy routine of What To Do with the Wife of an Arrested Officer. His shoulder certainly feels like it.
The driveway is a surprise and he almost misses it, wrenching the wheel at last second. The tires skid, kicking up gravel before catching traction. In seconds he's upon the house.
He jumps out almost before the car's stopped moving. Raw, jagged wind rips through him, propelling him up the steps, raising his hand to the door and . . .
White scars lace across his knuckles. The jutting bones, the sliding tendons under their tanned covering, the pale blue lines that suck blood from fingers and send it back to the heart – he has seen these hands a thousand times before, fisted and flying towards his face, snatching at his shirt to slam him against a wall, wrapping thin brown leather around those tendons, the buckle left hanging . . .
I'll hurt her, like he did.
Billy's hands are his father's, and so is the rest of him. He is his father's creation. What was he thinking, walking into Asher Strange's life, dragging in his vices and violence without a thought? That's what Neil did. That's what drove his mother away.
A wrong word, a careless comment, anything, it could set him off and he'll fly at her like Neil used to, and he won't have the excuse of 'my father beats me' to rely on because it is his father inside him. He absorbed Neil like a second skin even as he raged against the man.
No matter that he hasn't hurt Asher yet. It's only a matter of time before he snaps. Proves the world right, that he's a screw-up, that he'll never change, and his future is an unchanging world of fights and birds and flunkies and not one ounce of meaning in any of it. Once, he welcomed the simple anarchy.
Now . . .
People don't change, though. And he's a Hargrove man, right down to the marrow of his bones. It's all he'll ever be.
No.
A smile made from love. Humming in harmony.
You are my son.
Blonde hair and green eyes and a heart of pure sunlight that he wanted to bask in all day long . . .
He made his choice long ago. It's time to make yours.
The door opens and the smell of casserole spills onto the porch. Billy's stomach growls.
Asher stands in the gap, dressed in a thick knitted sweater. She has tucked the ends of her pyjama pants into her socks and pulled her hair into a braid, fringe swept back by the tearing north wind. The sweater covers her from neck to wrist.
There's this look of surprised delight on her face. Confusion too, tension, but mostly relief. No one has ever looked at him that way before.
"Hi," she says. He nods slightly. Silence falls, the cold of outside and the warmth from the kitchen fire fighting for dominance at the threshold. In the awkwardness, Billy goes for a cigarette – only to find he doesn't have one. That secretary with the gossipy son – damn it, his father's arrest is going to be across the school by tomorrow lunchtime, won't it? – has them. Asher watches the aborted move.
What should he say? He can't explain why he left, can't explain the roaring of the caged, whipped animal inside, and he doesn't know if he won't leave again.
Then Asher opens the door wider. "Do you want to come inside? You'll freeze out there."
"Dad's been arrested," he says before he knows he's going to say it.
She nods. "Hopper called."
The sharp, wet cold slashes at Billy's back, his neck, and mere feet away is the warmth of the kitchen fire and casserole and a bedroom that Neil Hargrove has never invaded with his belt and his stone-faced fury.
Asher bites her lip, glancing at the furious night behind him. "It's starting to snow," she murmurs, green eyes narrowed in annoyance. Off-handed, she tells him, "Biking in snow is a nightmare." It's said with no hint of insinuation, no attempt at manipulating, and that's why Billy drawls,
"I can give you a ride in the morning."
She stares. "Really?"
He shrugs. "Max has decided to ride the bus now." And, before he can lose his nerve, an eventuality that he's never considered possible until now, he slips past her into the house and heads towards the kitchen. "It'll be easier if I stay the night," he calls over his shoulder.
She laughs and shuts the door and he finds a spare blue bowl warm on top of the covered casserole dish. Waiting for him.
I know you'll make me proud, my darling.
