Blackbird (24 page)

So, as I said, I went underground. I went to school and studied and kept pretty much to myself. I was already beginning to count the days, not only until graduation, but until what was certain to be the longest, hottest, most uncomfortable summer of my life had come and gone. Until I, too, could be gone.

About a week after Efrem came back, about a week before finals, I think it was a Wednesday night, I was awakened by the unmistakable sound of a motorcycle coming up our driveway. I had fallen asleep sprawled across my bed with my face in my trig book – the last thing I remembered was staring blankly into the book, wondering half-aloud what possible use a logarithm might be in my future life, when suddenly I heard this motorcycle in front of the house.

Now, this isn’t a big motorcycle town. It’s a Chevy-van town, a souped-up Toyota-truck town. There just aren’t that many motorbikes around here. So when I heard the cycle outside, I immediately thought, Todd. It had to be Todd. At my house. I literally jumped out of bed, my heart thumping, and did a double-time tippy-toe run down the hall and through the living room, and opened the front door just as Todd Waterson’s Honda Three-Sixty sputtered to a stop in the driveway. I watched Todd dismount and kick-stand the bike, and pushed open the screen door to let him in.

“Todd,” I whispered.

“Hello, Johnnie Ray.” Todd was talking as if it were high noon instead of after midnight. I ran to close the hall door between the living room and my parents’ room.

“My folks are asleep.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s good to see you. Where in the world have you been? Are you okay? What are you doing here?” To my memory, Todd had never been to our house before – I wouldn’t have thought he knew the address. Here he’d been gone – missing, in fact – for the better part of five weeks, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, he pops up at my house. It made no sense.

He looked terrible. His hair was visibly dirty and matted with grease; his jeans and t-shirt and Levi’s jacket were so dirty and wrinkled, it was a foregone conclusion that he’d been sleeping in them, probably for as long as he’d been away. And as he stepped into the house, I realized he smelled worse than he looked. I took a step back in an attempt to escape the funk.

“I just came to say goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye? You’ve been gone for weeks, and now you’re saying goodbye? Where are you going? Where have you been?”

“I just wanted to let you know what a good Christian brother you’ve been to me.”

“Where have you
been
, Todd? Do your folks know you’re back?”

“No.” He grabbed me by the arm, squeezing hard. “And don’t you tell them you saw me. Just don’t, okay?”

“Okay. Okay.” He let go of my arm.

“Anyway, I know what you’ve been doing, and I appreciate it.”

“What have I been doing?”

“You know: being nice to me when everybody else was treating me like shit. Being my friend. The song and everything. Sorry I won’t be able to do it with you.”

“So stay and do it with me. Stay till after the concert.” There was something wrong here. But really wrong. I wasn’t sure just what was going on in Todd’s matty blond head, but I felt like I should hang on to him, not let him go wherever it was he thought he was going. I knew I couldn’t stall him there forever, but I didn’t know what else to do. Todd shook his head.

“No. No, I gotta go. Like I said, I just wanted to say thanks. Say goodbye.” I was at a complete loss for what to do. I stammered a few syllables, reached out to touch Todd’s shoulder, and stopped short, then stammered a little more.

“I also wanted to give you this.” Todd pulled the silver-and-opal ring off his little finger (the ease with which it slipped off made me notice just how much thinner Todd was than when I’d seen him last; I wondered when he’d last eaten). He held the ring out in his dirty palm. The sight of that nearly knocked the wind right out of me.

I suddenly knew, as if informed by a reliable source, what Todd planned to do. Even without my on-again off-again intuition, even if Todd and I hadn’t joked that I’d get the ring Leslie gave him only over his dead body, any Psych 1 student knows what it means when somebody who’s been through some major league personal loss starts giving away his prized possessions. I don’t think I’d ever felt such horror.

I pushed Todd’s hand away.

“No. Keep it. You’ll want it yourself.” My voice had jumped a nervous octave. I glanced toward the hall door (I could hear Dad’s snoring all the way from the bedroom), wondering if I shouldn’t wake up my folks.

“Please take it.” Todd thrust his hand out toward me. “I want you to have it.”

“Please, Todd,” I said, beginning to feel desperation clutching at my throat. “Take the ring. Don’t go – wherever you’re going, don’t go. Just go home, Todd.” I clutched at the collar of Todd’s jacket.

“Please go home.”

“I’ve got to go now.” Todd took my hand, placed the ring firmly in the center of my palm, and closed my fingers around it.

“Please!” I was beginning to cry. I looked into Todd’s face, he was smiling.

“I’ve got to go now,” he repeated. He gathered me into a big hug. He held me tight against his foul-smelling chest, so tight it hurt my ribs, and said, “I love you in Jesus.”

Then he released me, turned and let himself out the screen door, mounted his bike, and was gone. Leaving me standing at my front door, feeling small and powerless and scared. Staring through the screen door with Todd’s ring tight in my fist, and tears falling down my face.

Finally, suddenly, as the sound of Todd’s bike faded away, I ran toward my parents’ bedroom, screaming like the eyewitness to a murder: “Mom! Dad! Wake up!”

About ten miles out of town, due north, is a steep, narrow winding mountain road known as Grady Pass. It is one of the sillier traditions around here that, on the last day of Driver’s Training, at least one lucky (or unlucky, as you prefer) student driver brave that hill-hugging road, curling precariously above the valley, in one of the school’s Ford Pintos. It has long been an event of squealing anticipation for girls, a thrill-seeking macho rite of passage for the kind of thick-necked male type given to such things, to clutch and brake one’s way up one side of Grady Pass and down the other, arriving back at school with one’s instructor, one’s backseat-driving classmates, and one’s ass in one piece. A couple of years back, a fun-loving Home Ec class even designed an “I Survived Grady Pass” t-shirt, to be presented to each successful driver at the end of his ordeal.

It is, naturally, local legend that at least one carful of students (and their teacher) met an untimely end attempting to navigate Grady Pass. No one seems to know exactly who these unfortunate students might have been, nor when this misfortune may have occurred. The worst case that can be remembered personally by anyone I know is that now and then a student (generally female) goes somewhat hysterical halfway up the Pass, forcing the instructor to assume the driver’s seat. Still, a legend’s a legend; and in a town like this one, even a half-assed legend is better than none.

There is, therefore, a mystique surrounding Grady Pass such as smallish towns all over America love to attach to such local landmarks as the creek where the mousy bespectacled bank teller deliberately drowned his wife of twenty-seven years; the tree where they once hanged an innocent man by mistake; or the broken-down old house where lives the old man who frightens the neighbor kids, eats kitty-cats for supper, and allows his front lawn to burn brown in the summertime.

And so, it was with a certain amount of awe and barely concealed excitement with the expected horror and sadness that the word traveled from mouth to mouth like a cold sore, as telephones buzzed with the news that on that Wednesday evening (probably mere minutes after giving me both his precious opal ring and the tightest hug I’d ever felt) Todd Waterson had driven his Honda Three-Sixty motorcycle over the edge at Grady Pass, snapping his neck and dying almost instantly on impact with the valley below.

As Grady Pass is very seldom used for anything other than Driver’s Training (and not all that often for that), there were no witnesses to the spectacle of the motorcycle sailing over the embankment; Todd had been dead nearly two full days before the police and paramedics managed to get down to him, separate what was left of Todd from what was left of the Honda, and deliver the broken remains of what a scant forty-eight hours earlier had been perhaps the most beautiful boy in town, to the morgue.

I cried uncontrollably Saturday morning when Mom told me; she’d just gotten the news from good old reliable Hildy Brooks that Todd was indeed dead, that Mrs. Waterson was beside herself and was under sedation. She looked at me, wearing that confused, somewhat tormented look she seemed to wear so much lately, then turned quickly away, murmuring, “Lord, have mercy today.” I sobbed aloud, sitting against the stereo in my bedroom, banging my head against the cabinet; I cried until my throat was sore, until I had no tears left. I cried out of a bitter mixture of emotions, sorrow included, but not sorrow alone.

My initial reaction to the news of Todd’s suicide was, in fact, guilt. Why hadn’t I stopped Todd from going when the idea of his killing himself came to me, whispered in the wee small voice people like to talk about? Couldn’t I have stopped him? And then I thought: even if I’d fallen into a trance at the sound of Todd’s Honda in the driveway, and seen his impending death in a Technicolor vision, what could I really have done to stop him? Talk him out of it? Wrestle him to the ground? Hog-tie him?

What I did do, of course – after Todd had already driven away – was wake up Mom and Dad.

“Dad!” I shook my loudly snoring father sputteringly awake. “Dad, Todd Waterson was just here, and I think he’s gonna kill himself!”

Mom woke, raised herself up on one elbow, grabbed a handful of her sleep-flattened Afro, and asked the ceiling, “Lord, have mercy, where is the end?”

“What?” Dad thrust his face close to mine – he had that bad breath he always has upon wakening. “Did he tell you that?”

“No,” I had to admit. “It’s just a feeling.”

Todd’s sudden reappearance was in itself enough to get Mom and Dad out of bed and into their bathrobes. We called the Watersons’ – the line was busy – and then the police. Sergeant Crandall (the Pastor’s younger brother) arrived in record time. The sergeant got all the looks in the family; he looked like Robert Taylor in
Camille
and filled a cop uniform like nobody I’d ever seen. He questioned me closely but, like my folks, was obviously hesitant to take the suicide notion very seriously, simply because Todd never actually
told
me he was going to do it – even after I explained about the ring, and showed it to him, to boot. I was outraged: Did policemen no longer believe in hunches?

The sergeant assured us all that Todd could not have gotten very far and would be found, and that he would personally go to the Watersons and alert them to the situation. Then he suggested we get some sleep. Strangely, sleep came quickly for me – quickly, and mercifully dreamless.

It was not, in fact, until Friday night, at nearly three in the morning, that I suddenly awoke out of a sound sleep, in a sweat and breathing hard. I jumped out of bed, literally ran to the telephone, and called the police.

“Night desk,” a voice answered.

And I said, “Grady Pass.”

My second reaction was anger. How dare he kill himself? How could this tall and blond and almost obscenely beautiful young man take his own life? He had no right. Even granted the fact that he’d just lost the one person on earth he seemed to give a damn about, he simply had no right. Leslie’s death was a waste; Todd’s was waste on waste. As Mom said, where was the end?

Finally, after what seemed like years of tears, thought, and self-questioning, a strange sort of peace came upon me. Hardly peace like a river, but maybe a brook. As I said, I finally decided I couldn’t blame myself for Todd’s death. I’d done what I could do. And if my psychic abilities were inconsistent and late, well, that wasn’t exactly my fault, either. It also occurred to me that, wherever Todd was, he was probably with Leslie – which, I’m sure, was exactly what he wanted. I have no idea where such a notion could have sprung from. It went against everything I knew from church. In fact, much of the grief exhibited by Mom and Dad and the other parents stemmed from the belief that, having taken their own lives, both Leslie and Todd were (for now and eternity) burning in hell. Well, no way was I buying any of that Crazy World of Arthur Brown everlasting hellfire hoo-ha. Couldn’t
make
myself believe that one.