Chapter 2: Ghost Town (Part One)
A drafty draft of the SECOND chapter of my first novel, Final Vinyl
August 8, 1971. Dawn.
The bank teller, a girl just a few years older than Paul, stood at the front desk behind a faded sheet of glass. Her hair was cut like a boy’s, choppy, above the ears, and jet black like the polished beak of a crow. Her head was tilted to the side, her gaze directed below her waist, her hands moving frantically below the counter. Her right shoulder angled upwards, rubbing against her neck in a slow circular motion. Paul watched as the girl’s thin oatmeal-colored turtleneck took on the color of her skin and disappeared, revealing a foggy outline of her naked body. He glanced around the cavernous bank. It was empty, save for him and the teller, whose moans now echoed off the towering sandstone ceilings, growing louder as he crept closer. Sweat poured from his palms. He had a vice grip on a single paper check, which was now soaked. When he tried to blow it dry, the paper flew from his fingers, drifting across the room and disappearing from view.
One of the teller’s busy hands rose from below the counter like a deep-sea diver coming up for air. It landed with a thud against the window, her fingers spread wide. They slid against the glass, wiping an arched streak through the haze and exposing bare chest.
Out of learned decency and the lingering embarrassment of puberty, Paul tried not to look, discreetly tucking his hard-on up into the waist of his jeans. Still, his feet were a runaway train, braking only when his face was pressed hard against the window, his sightline landing just above the pale pink edges of the girl’s nipples. Slightly higher up, another streak appeared in the glass and a pair of mossy green eyes stared back at him. Eyes Paul knew intimately. Eyes he’d become obsessed with in his waking life, ever since the transformative moment when the opposite sex became more than just something to ignore, to bicker with, or denigrate with your friends. Paul had noticed these eyes when women and their bodies began to overwhelm his daily thoughts. The teller’s pupils, two patches of dark dewy grass, were now beckoning him to remove all barriers. To smash the window. To tear it down. Whatever it took to bring them together, so their limbs could tangle and pull one another to the cool stone floor. Paul seized the pane of glass with both hands and started to yank, but the weight of the Good Book, the sound of the family Bible booming against the living room floor, ripped him from his dream.
“Let’s go, let’s fucking go!” Roddy, his younger brother, was screaming at him from across the small bedroom. “This shit’s coming down!”
Paul, in the safety of his quilt, was too wet and too startled to register his brother’s panic. As the room shook, the memory of Bella’s eyes hung heavy in his mind. He was distracted and stunned by the intensity of his dream. His boots, the black ones capped with steel, flew across the room like a fired bullet and clipped him right above the left eyebrow. In a daze, he pressed his finger to his temple, checking for blood. Roddy didn’t care. Anything to get his brother moving. He continued to hurl Paul’s wardrobe at him — a sweat-stained Ford tee with a burnt-orange collar; thick denim overalls bleached white from his days in the borax mines; and Paul’s stained trucker cap — the curved brim spinning full-speed into the ridge of his slanted nose.
“Jesus!”
Roddy’s eyes narrowed. He was beyond frustrated by his older brother’s motionlessness. Paul was known to freeze up in tense situations, often lacking the ability to act with purpose when it was most needed. Roddy took a breath, and without speaking, he held out his hands, palm-side up, like a scruffy teenaged God, as if to say, Look around, Bud, we’re gonna die.
The town trembled. The bedside lamp crashed against the floor, its lightbulb shattering into a dozen tiny shards. The bookshelf fell face down, spewing books and trinkets across the rug that their mother had woven when she was still pregnant with Roddy. Paul remembers watching her hands through the slats on his crib as they blended strings of color with two long needles. The memory always brought a wave a calm. Some children see their cribs as prisons, and stumble through the occasional jailbreak, but Paul stayed put; he liked when the world was small, confined to a two-by-four foot space guarded by an angel called Mom. Perhaps that was the first official difference between he and Roddy, prior to the curly blonde mullet, the hatred for school, the obsession with rock n’ roll; before all that, his younger brother simply wouldn’t stay put. Roddy was born chasing escape, and no one knew that better than him.
A crack began to snake across the bedroom ceiling, dropping little chunks of plaster on Paul and his quilt. The seriousness of the moment finally hit him.
“Roddy!” Paul yelled, as his brother turned and dashed down the hallway.
Paul ripped off his quilt and jumped from his bed. He pulled his overalls on over his soiled underwear, along with his shirt and his hat. He had two identical holes in the heels of his alpaca wool socks. But before he could bolt, the way the floorboards trembled against the skin of his partially exposed feet sent him somewhere else — propped up on the back of a horse for the very first time. No saddle, no reins. He remembers staring down a newly-formed bald spot at the crown of his father’s misshapen scalp. Wrapping his small hairless arms around the beast’s giant neck as his father loaded up his long arm like a shotgun. The old man was seconds away from smacking the horse’s ass as hard as he physically could and Paul knew he’d have no control over the animal once his father made contact. The animal would bolt to the horizon in an all-out sprint and he would need to hold on as best he could. “Don’t fall,” his father had said in his gruff, intimidating tone. Haunted by the echo of that first ride, Paul knew this earthquake could become a bronco just as wild. Bucking, unbroken, driven to chaos, capable of anything.
As he stumbled from the bedroom, still trying to latch the left strap of his overalls, the shaking grew more violent. He struggled to stay upright. The light fixture illuminating the dark hallway swung on a pendulum. Sparks flickered inside its pink circular orb and showered Paul as he gripped the walls for balance. He screamed out for Roddy but couldn’t hear his own voice over the deafening rumble of nature; it was as if a freight train were barreling straight through their home. The roof had begun to slide, but Paul didn’t notice until dawn’s orange glow crept through the living room and kitchen, casting long heavenly shadows over a graveyard of the Bellamys’ former life. Paul could see the front door, it was wide open. Beckoning him to follow his brother to safety. He froze. The damage was addicting. His father’s deep-seated rocking chair — where the old man snoozed for a few hours after overnight shifts at the mine — was split in two by a long slab of sandstone that must have dislodged from the top of the chimney and fallen to the earth like a Looney Tunes anvil. His mother’s artwork — paintings housed in frames Dad had fashioned from desert driftwood — lay scattered across the floor. Behind some broken glass, Paul recognized the wide strokes of a yellowish superbloom his mother had sought out to capture each autumn. The disaster’s forewarning — the family Bible — was there too, wide open, lit by the rising sun. Despite the quake’s menacing roar, Paul crouched down and picked up the massive book. He was immediately comforted by how the worn leather felt in his hands. He read aloud what it said at the top of the page. Revelation, Babylon has fallen.
The roof, which was old and slightly angled, had fully slid from its anchors, crashing into the back bedrooms like an ocean wave made of asphalt. The Bellamy home, or what was left of it, now had the world’s largest skylight. The blinding glow of morning forced Paul to look up and take in the view. The sky had never looked so out of place, so invasive. It was magnificent. The endless tapestry of oranges and yellows. Transfixed by the fiery glow, Paul was stunned by something he could not yet name, stuck in a moment that would forever alter his path, a brief period of time that would sink its fangs into the boy, informing every decision he would come to make, refusing to let go. Broken only by a pair of strong hands that seized his shoulders and yanked him backwards, dragging Paul’s useless body through the front door.
Paul was laid out in the dirt yard. The shaking had stopped. He himself up just in time to watch his childhood home collapse into a thick cloud of smoke and dust. Roddy coughed and spat at the ground, bent over his brother, panting like a rabid dog —“Paul, you’re a fucking liability.”
“Dad wasn’t in his chair…”
“He’s probably still at work,” Roddy said, hacking a wad of phlegm into the dirt. A quake strong enough to bring down the house was sure to have done some serious damage to the mines. As the dust settled around them, Roddy tried not to picture the working men with the earth moving unpredictably beneath their feet, shaking intense enough to throw them from the steep rock terraces carved into the canyon. Their father was a tough old bastard, and Roddy had inherited his grit, but despite what he may have told them growing up, he was by no means indestructible, and neither was Roddy.
Paul was still holding the Bible in his right hand, with his middle finger wedged inside, marking the page that greeted him inside so he could delve in later. He held the book tight to his chest. Aside from the clothes on his back, this leather-bound book was his one remaining possession. Screams ricocheted through the neighborhood. About 50 yards to the East, the facade of the Fust’s three story townhouse hit the ground with a soft thud, kicking up a dust cloud that blew through the brothers’ hair and cloaked a small pile of vinyl records in dirt — the one thing Roddy had rescued from the house, along with his portable red and gray Phillips turntable. The Fusts were known for throwing Sunday potlucks after church. Together, with their belongings, the boys turned their heads in unison to look back at their next door neighbors’ home. All that remained was a life size dollhouse, its rooms perfectly exposed from the side.
“Happy birthday, brother,” Roddy said, choking on the air.
Paul said nothing. He was still scanning the rooms, looking for Bella — the bank teller, Bella Fust — but she, nor her family, was anywhere to be seen. He closed his eyes, lay back in the dirt, and cried.
“Come on, let’s go find Dad.”