At the End of the Road (3 page)

He had heard of awful things happening in this world, but they did not happen in his little part of the world. And he certainly had never been the cause of a Bad Thing. One Bad Thing that happened in the world was caught in his mind as a constant reminder of just how bad the world could actually be. He had been riding in the car with his father, and the news was on the radio, and the newsman was talking about people being beat up for their money in a laundrymat. And that one of the bad guys had taken a ballpoint pen and punctured the eardrum of one of the people. And Kyle had never realized until that time that truly horrible things could happen to a person. Having a ballpoint pen driven into your ear and puncturing something inside you was a violation he had never imagined possible. Or that one person would do something like that to another person. Why?

He was familiar with laundrymats. Before his family had their own washer and dryer, his mother used to take him and Grace to a coin-operated laundrymat once a week. It had always seemed like a safe place to Kyle, warm with good smells and lots of women. But now, he realized that if that thing with the ballpoint pen had happened in a laundrymat, then that thing could have potentially happened to him. Truly horrible, violent things could happen to him.

And now it had. And he was the one who had caused it.

He ate his pineapple sandwich, surprised that it still tasted good and that he still had an appetite. The glass of milk was cold and it tasted good too. He even asked for more Charles Chips, but his mother said no because they were so expensive. He had decided that since he did not have the words to tell his mother what had happened, he would just let it happen. That was the best way. The woman should be here any second, scratching at the door with her nailless fingers, the dried spiderweb of blood on her face branding her. So he finished his lunch and went to the living room and waited.

But the woman never came. Kyle spent the rest of the day in the bedroom playing Operation with Grace, and that night the whole family watched
Hee Haw
(which he really didn’t like) and then
The Brady Bunch
on TV. He loved to sing along to the Brady Bunch theme song, and he did so that night. He had learned that it was possible to be scared and carry a burden of fear and worry and guilt, and still behave normally.

His daddy never did say anything, and he would have driven right past the wreck on his way home after his Saturday shift at the mail sorting plant.

What had happened to the woman?

careful not to dirty his Sunday clothes, Kyle took his bicycle out to the end of the driveway, stopped, and peered up and down the dirt road. There was no evidence of what had happened yesterday. It was like it had not happened at all. Kyle did not understand how this was possible, but he was just a boy. And while he did realize that probably God had intervened to save him, he gave no more thought to what had happened until the police lady came to the door later that day.

the man who the boy became would realize that there was a dividing line in his life, a border that, once crossed, would tinge everything that happened after, and dim all events prior. That border was a swatch of time, the space of a single summer. He was ten years old, and his sister, his partner in that strange borderland, was three years younger. The year was 1976.

It was a dividing time for America as well. The year Kyle Edwards turned ten, America celebrated its two-hundredth birthday, and everything that happened that year was somehow informed by the genocide, the slavery, the savage wars, and the casual cruelties that had gotten them, as a nation, to that point in time.

Of course, Kyle was mostly unaware of any of this. He was not precocious or insightful or strikingly bright. He was just a boy. He was only aware that it was a special year, that during that year, everybody was a patriot. As far as the world at large went, Kyle had accumulated only a handful of basic facts: He knew that the news stories about Watergate that his daddy took such interest in had finally sputtered to an end (although he still did not understand what a Watergate was), Patty Hearst had been found guilty (of what he didn’t know), and Vietnam was finally really over. The searing image of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a black bloom of napalm was replaced in his mind by the ubiquitous “Bicentennial Minute”—those patriotic commercials that came on every night right before nine o’clock, Kyle’s bedtime.

That year, everybody felt good about America.

But in the summer of 1976, Kyle Edwards was ten years old, and his world was an insular one. His world was a red dirt road in rural Georgia. A rural Georgia that was fast becoming suburban. County workers would lay down asphalt on Eden Road before the year was over, and backhoes and graders would break the earth all along it to build massive subdivisions.

In Kyle’s world, his family’s personal Vietnam was only just beginning. His parents, the warring factions, were in an arms race, each side amassing weapons for the divorce that was to come. And like Americans who watched the bloody conflict unfold on their television screens, Kyle and his sister Grace, and their two older brothers, Jason and Wade, watched the war develop. A cold war, really. Resentments and suspicions building beneath the surface. They were fascinated and horrified, unable to look away, unable to alter its course.

The oldest brother, Jason, was six years older than Kyle, so he would have been sixteen that year. Wade was next at thirteen, then Kyle, and Grace was seven. They were all three years apart. Kyle was supposed to have been a girl. Their mother had already bore two sons and very much wanted a baby girl, but got Kyle instead. She tried a final time and succeeded with Grace.

that summer from his wheeled metal perch, was the paralyzed man. He grew into a mythical figure that haunted Kyle. He had been there on Eden Road for Kyle’s entire life, and before he became the paralyzed man, he was just a cipher to Kyle, just “that man who lives across the road,” or “that man from church who passes the collection plate.” He was aware of him, but he was no more important to Kyle than a pine tree, a vague point of reference in his world. Then just a few days after Kyle caused the woman to wreck her car, Mama said Mr. Ahearn from across the road had a stroke and that they had to put him in the hospital. And then the workmen had been at his house a week or so later, building a ramp that sloped down from his front porch. When Mr. Ahearn got back from the hospital, Kyle’s mother took over some peach preserves with the special yellow ribbon tied around it. His mama had said to his daddy that Mr. Ahearn was paralyzed. She whispered the word when she said it. And then Kyle started to see him sitting out there on his porch, day after day, just sitting there, sunning himself like a salamander. Day after day sitting in that big metal chair with wheels on it.

point of reference, and more a landmark. He was The Paralyzed Man, and they shunned him.

and-seek in the cornfield that bordered their property and stretched up to Eden Road. The corn was getting full and heavy with fat ears. Floppy golden tassels of corn silk cascaded from the crowns. The leaves were thick, abrasive, and sharp. They poked out from the stalks at odd angles and would cut them quick if they weren’t careful. Already, the field smelled of humid decay. And entering the dense rows was like stepping into an alien world. Inside, it was dark, dense, and tight when only moments before they had been in the open, in the sunshine.

Grace carried her little plastic Wonder Woman doll with her at all times. No exceptions. And so Wonder Woman accompanied them as well. Kyle didn’t think Grace trusted him to protect her, but she trusted Wonder Woman. The cornfield could be a scary place. When you’re seven like Grace was that year, the whole world can be a scary place.

cornfield. And just as easy to get lost. It’s impossible to see from one row of corn to the next. Like a maze with but a single repeated turn, but still deceptively complex. Hide-and-seek in those circumstances was less about finding someone with your eyes, but more with your other senses. And Kyle cheated. Whenever Kyle heard Grace getting close, he would position himself a few yards up from her, listen to time it just right, and then step backward out of the row just as she stepped into it—so that he ended up behind her. At that point, he would invert the game and begin to follow her. He would track silently behind her, match her step for step, and smirk at her growing frustration. At times he could literally be inches away from her, hidden in a row that she’d already searched and wouldn’t think of searching again. He’d watch, delighted, as her frustration escalated to agitation, which eventually gave way to fear. Then panic.

She would shout his name, “Kyle! Kyle!”

But he wouldn’t respond. He knew Grace would be thinking about Soap Sally, the brain-damaged boogeywoman Mama told them about to get them to be good.
You better stop it, or Soap Sally’ll come get you tonight.
Soap Sally had needle-fingers that she stabbed little kids with.

“Kyyyyyyyle!”

Kyle would throw a dirt clod over to the left to distract and frighten her.

“Please, Kyyyyyyyyyyle!”

He would time it so that he would reveal himself only at the last possible moment, only when he was certain her little mind couldn’t take another second of the fear, that she would crumple and her brain would just split, irrevocably scarring her. And then he would reach out from right behind her, touching the back of her neck, fingers slithering like a snake. Or poking like needles.

And he’d revel in the scream.

Years later, when Kyle thought back on these times, he would think,
Jesus, I was a bastard
.

with Jason and Wade, but his older brothers had their own worlds to explore and didn’t want Kyle tagging along. It was Wade and Jason. And Kyle and Grace. Simple as that.

There were three bedrooms in their brick ranch-style house—one for their parents, one for Grace, and one for the three boys. Kyle slept with Jason in Jason’s bed. And at some point, as Jason entered his teenage years, Jason bribed Kyle with a nightly nickel to go sleep in Grace’s bed. Looking back, Kyle could hardly blame him—he was a teenager after all. And, frankly, Kyle wet the bed more nights than not. He supposed few boys of Jason’s age would care too much to wake up in a pool of someone else’s urine. Wade wet the bed too. More so than Kyle. For them to share a bed would have been a disaster. Pee would have cascaded over the rubber mattress cover and warped the wood floor beneath.

But Kyle gladly took Jason’s nickel. His bed was a twin, and the two of them just barely fit in it. And Jason’s growing body pushed Kyle’s small frame to the floor many nights. Grace slept in a full-size bed. Why their parents never noticed the discrepancy of a teenager and a ten-year-old sharing the narrow rectangle of a twin bed versus putting a seven-year-old in the vast expanse of a full-size was just one of those family mysteries that would never be addressed to anybody’s satisfaction.

beginning of the pattern that was set for their sibling relationships. Wade and Jason simply did not want their little brother to enter their secret existence.

Tree houses were built and camouflaged high in treetops—elaborate constructions with trapdoors and drop-down ladders made of knotted rope that could be pulled high and away from Kyle’s outstretched hands. And should those outstretched hands linger too long, the tree house was stocked with weapons of Jason’s creation—slingshot rifles powered by the industrial six-foot-long rubber bands their father brought home from his job as a mail handler. The rubber bands were used to secure mail pallets. They were incredibly strong and seemingly had no breaking point no matter how far they were stretched. The rubber band could power a slingshot rifle (constructed from just the right tree branch) with such force that an acorn shot from one could easily bring down a bird, or shatter a squirrel’s skull. Or leave a welt on Kyle’s back for three days.

Jason also constructed a gun—a real gun—from a bicycle spoke. He took a spoke, unscrewed the tiny metal cap at one end and packed match-head shavings (or black powder from a firecracker) into the little hollow cavity of the metal cap. He would then screw the cap back in reverse so that the hollow end was now pointing out. Then he would bend the opposite end of the spoke into a grip handle like a revolver. Last, Jason would find a BB pellet or tiny rock and jam it down into the hollow powder-packed cavity. Once prepared, the cap end was held over a candle flame or a lit match until the powder ignited and shot the tiny rock with enough force to pierce flesh.