Chapter 9
Stu, Maurice and Curtis: This Town is Fucked
Maurice Fetterling makes his way into the WTCP studios and he’s immediately pelted with Dixie cups. Riddles come at him fast and furious. Frosty the Snowman has just started, joyous Christmas music being piped into a Greener Valley that is not the Greener Valley it was at dawn.
“Stu! Get a hold of yourself for fuck’s sake!” Stu lunges at his former boss, an empty Jack Daniels bottle in his hand.
“Fuck you, Fetterling! You ruined my goddamn life. You ruined Greener Valley. You woke up the sleeping dogs. Do you understand that? Do. You. Understand? You destroyed my life for a few bucks without even consulting me about it first. Maybe I would have bowed out gracefully if you did. Maybe I would have drank myself to death before work last night. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing what I’m about to do now.”
“What? What are you going to do now? You’re drunk, Stu. You need some coffee. You need to calm down.” Fetterling talks a mile a minute, trying to figure out in his head how to get Stu to back off at the same time he’s trying to calm him down. He doesn’t like the way this is going. This whole thing is wrong. His cell phone rings. He picks it up, figuring that if Stu starts to beat the shit out of him, whoever’s on the line will hear it and call the police.
“This is Fetterling.” He answers the phone in his standard way, in this very non-standard moment.
“Maurice!” Oh god, his wife. What the hell could she want now? She should be doing whatever women are supposed do to get ready for Winter Festival. “Maurice! What the hell is going on? Do you know what Stu is doing? Did you hear him?” Her voice is shrill and high and carries through the room. It momentarily throws Stu off and he backs away from Maurice. “For Christ’s sake, Maurice. This is an epic disaster! Everything is going wrong and there’s not even any fucking snow!” Her voice sounds panicky.
“It’s ok, Jackie. I’ve got it under control.”
“Bullshit.” She hangs up on him. Stu comes toward him again and Maurice steps backward.
“Your wife.”
“What?”
“Your wife, Fetterling. She fucks around. Did you know that? Everyone in town knows it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve gone nuts, Stu.” But he does. He does have every idea what Stu is talking about and it’s the reason there’s a financial disclosure form in his top left drawer, a long ass piece of paperwork standing between him and divorce papers.
“Yes. Maybe I have gone nuts. Maybe. I. Have. Gone. Nuts.” With each word he takes a step toward Maurice. When he’s right on him, when his fetid alcohol and no-sleep breath makes Maurice Fetterling gag, Stu raises the Jack Daniels bottle and brings it down on the head of the man who signed his paycheck for the past fifteen years. There are two satisfying thuds: the bottle making a heavy-handed connection, and Fetterling’s body hitting the ground. He’s out cold.
“Frosty the Snowman” ends. Stu sits down, grabs his mic.
“Merry Fucking Winter Festival, Greener Valley.”
He puts the needle down on his signature song. He digs another bottle of Jack out of Fetterling’s desk drawer, takes a long pull and puts it down. He has things to think about.
The DeFranco Family sings. Stu McLundy sings along but the joy is gone. The song has been ruined. He feels bile working its way up from the pit of his stomach and he assumes he’s going to puke but the bile stops somewhere around his heart. Something ugly and cold has gripped him. He looks at his boss’s body splayed out on the floor and he knows. He knows what Mrs. Beasley knows.
Greener Valley is doomed. And he understands in that moment that he played a part in it. It would have happened regardless, once they fired him. But he hurried it along by putting his drunken belligerence on display at the Winter Festival. He wonders what’s going to happen now. Will the chariot come for him? Will She come to fight him? Or will She send the shadows to Greener Valley? Perhaps She already has, he thinks.
He suddenly remembers the tear in his forehead. Stu puts his palm to it, waits for it to warm up a little, then closes the tear. One of these days, he thinks, his ability to close the tears will be gone. He’s surprised it’s still there.
Stu has things to do. He leaves Fetterling on the floor, stumbles down the stairs and out the door, leaving dead air and what he hopes is not a dead boss. As he turns the corner and heads toward the Winter Festival, he bumps into Curtis Freeman. With Stu’s mind elsewhere and Curtis’s head down, the two of them meet in a deranged sort of chest thump.
“Stu. Sorry.” Curtis feels sorry for bumping into him but more sorry about the whole sordid situation that has brought him chest to chest with Stu McLundy; the on air debacle, the firing, the end of Scratch and Skip. All that, plus the lack of snow and the town’s sudden incapability of staging the Winter Festival has unnerved him. He needs to take action.
“Uh, it’s ok, Curtis.” They look at each other uncomfortably for a minute. In that space where no one wants to make the first move in the small talk game - in those ten seconds of uncomfortable silence - Stu feels that cold, ugly thing grip his heart again and he suddenly fears Curtis Freeman. He almost laughs to himself at being afraid of this hapless loser but his fear is greater than his audacity and he shivers. Something’s not right.
Curtis stares hard at him. “Greener Valley has problems, Stu.” Understatement of the year.
He walks away from Stu, toward the radio station. Stu walks toward the festival, telling himself that tomorrow might be a good time to try out sobriety.
Curtis enters the radio station, climbs the stairs and finds the unconscious body of Maurice Fetterling in the studio. He checks his pulse then, just to make sure, listens to Maurice’s heart. Satisfied he’s still alive, Curtis pulls a pen knife out of his pocket and hovers it over Fetterling’s heart. He stays like that for a full five minutes, poised to take the action he has come here to take, to slay at least one beast that has upset the balance of his life. Maurice Fetterling has taken from him the one thing that brought him comfort and peace. Not so much Stu; Curtis Freeman doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Stu McLundy’s livelihood or his personal demons. But he cares about the show. He cares about Stu McLundy’s voice and Stu McLundy’s ability to transport him back to a time when Greener Valley wasn’t festering with sin and darkness barely hidden behind doors. He cares that every weeknight and every Saturday afternoon, he is still one with the town as they listen to Scratch and Skip. He cares about the meetings and the karaoke because they are all he has. He cares very much that Maurice Fetterling took those things from him.
Curtis places the pen knife so the tip is barely touching the place where Fetterling’s miserable heart is. He doesn’t know if he can really kill him, just that he wants to. The act of putting the knife to Fetterling’s heart makes him feel triumphant in itself. He hovers there, knife over Fetterling, letting the side of him that has fantasized about murder battle it out with Curtis the coward.
And then Maurice Fetterling opens his eyes and speaks to Curtis.
“You’re all so fucked.”