Eli the Good (4 page)

W
hile my mother and I danced, the shape of our family was changing without our knowledge. Although we could not have not known as much while we spun and laughed, two things were happening on opposite ends of the county that would mark us forever.

Now that I am grown, I can float like a spirit over the distance that separated us from my sister, who was at that moment watching a preview showing of
The Omen
at the Sky-Vu Drive-In on the other side of town. Knowing Josie as well as I do, I can imagine exactly what was happening with her that night, especially since she told me some of it later.

If I could have flown, I would have slipped out of our living-room window, floated down our road with the warm river by its side, and glided above the main highway, over Refuge’s closed but well-lit businesses, the courthouse steeple’s flag that rose and fell as if breathing in the thin summer breeze. Out into the darkness of the country again, over the high school and the spillway where teenagers went to park, over mountains becoming black with the deepening of night, and then to the drive-in, where the screen stood like an impossibly big and wide tombstone. The face of Gregory Peck loomed large there as he drew back the hair of his son’s head and found the Mark of the Beast. Among the rows of cars — the movie was sold out that night — was a candy-apple red 1966 Mustang that belonged to Josie’s boyfriend, Charles Asher.

Inside the car, Charles Asher was kissing Josie’s neck, but she paid him no mind. She ate great handfuls of popcorn and kept her eyes on the movie. She paused from this only long enough to reach down into the floorboard for her Pepsi. She took a long drink, her lips capped around the straw for a moment after she was finished, and then set it back down without taking her eyes from the screen. Before leaving the house, she had shoved her flag pants into her big hemp purse and had changed into them as soon as Charles Asher picked her up. She had done so in the backseat, slapping Charles Asher’s ear when he tried to watch her in his rearview mirror as he drove away from our house.

Charles Asher — one of those people who is always called by his first and last names for no particular reason — was used to my sister not paying him very much attention. It was common knowledge that she had first gone out with him simply because he drove the sharpest car at the high school. After that initial date, she was taken by how he fawned over her, and then grew to like him, and then dislike him, but ultimately she felt such a mix of pity and gratitude to him that she was never able to quit him. He told me more than once that he thought he loved her, but he also knew that he’d never capture her heart completely.

Gregory Peck’s demon-child, Damien, was running into a church and the horrifying music was rising, and Josie couldn’t stand it anymore. She had snuck into a showing of
The Exorcist
when she was only twelve and had been forever scarred by that experience, so horror movies were not her strong suit, although she was scared of nothing else as far as I know.

Josie couldn’t stand it anymore and had to look away. Only then was she completely aware of Charles Asher nibbling on her ear. She pushed him away, glad for this diversion. “Cut it out, Charles Asher,” she said. “God almighty, you’re like a dog in heat.”

“I was just kissing you.” Charles Asher straightened himself in his seat, his elbow knocking against the horn so that it let out a brief, halfhearted honk.

Josie ran the back of her hand down her neck. “You were slobbering all over me,” she said, but then she realized how hateful she was being and felt a momentary pang of guilt. Later that summer she told me that it had taken her a long time to understand that the very reason she could never love Charles Asher was because he allowed her to treat him so badly. She could have never respected anyone like that. But that night she didn’t understand why she sometimes detested him, no matter how much he bought her, no matter the long letters he wrote to her, confessing his undying love (she kept these in a cigar box under her bed, and I had read them all while she was out on dates). Really, she didn’t understand much of anything at all.

Josie told me everything, even when I was very small, so I already knew that that summer she felt there might be something wrong with her. Any other girl at school would have killed for Charles Asher. He was good-looking in a JC Penney catalog sort of way, his face all angles and jutting bones, so that Josie sometimes had to look for the beauty there. His lips were his best feature — pink as the inside of a shell and plump as a girl’s — but his brow was too high set and his eyes too far apart for her. The problem was, he wasn’t interesting to look at, the way Steve McQueen or Paul Newman were. She found beauty in irregularities, in roughness. Charles Asher had none that she could find; he was all perfection and smoothness. He was a good dresser, though, and drove this fine car and knew how to treat a girl, always buying her record albums and roses in little plastic sleeves. Josie preferred daisies.

She laid her head on his shoulder and tried to watch the movie again, but she had lost track of what was happening, although she could see that Gregory Peck was holding a knife up to stab someone.

“I didn’t intend to be so mean,” she said, and she felt his forgiveness wash over her so instantly that she had to fend off the urge to simply bolt from his arms and walk home from the drive-in. Why couldn’t he ever fight back?

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Mom and me were into it again, before you came to get me.”

“Over them stupid pants, I guess,” he said. He had been through this before.

Josie sat bolt upright, mad again from thinking about it. “They’re just pants,” she said. “I don’t see what the big deal is about the flag and all that.”

“Because it’s disrespectful for the flag to be worn. To be made into clothes.”

“It’s not made out of a real flag, for God’s sake.”

“Still, though,” Charles Asher said, and looked straight ahead at the screen, where the credits were beginning to roll. His father had been in Vietnam, too, so he often heard long lectures on the merits of patriotism and serving your country and good Americans versus bad.

“Still, what?” Josie said.

Charles Asher put his arm out across the back of the seat, Josie’s hair as cool and soft as water against his fingertips. “It’s just that we’re different from other kids, because our fathers were over there. Nobody knows what something’s like unless they’ve lived through it.”

Josie looked at him for a long moment, seeing nothing. She hated his wisdom. Josie watched the credits roll and in that moment things changed for her. That is the exact moment when she began to question patriotism and Vietnam and everything that we weren’t encouraged to question. That night, she told me, she realized that she was less like her father than the hippies he hated. She was thrilled by this discovery, but also filled with a sudden wash of panic.

Before this moment, she had always been Daddy’s girl, his favorite in all respects. She had always sat on the arm of his chair while he watched the evening news, agreeing with anything Daddy said, whether it was his railing against something Ford had done or the legalization of abortion or his assumption that the whole moon landing had been faked. “They did it to get everybody’s mind off the war,” he always said, and nodded for emphasis. “Pretty smart.”

Josie had always agreed with our father, and now she thought that she might not agree with him about anything anymore. It was a turning point in all our lives. Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone’s life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment — a big crescendo of music, close-ups of the actors’ faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer. Like the moment when Gregory Peck was about to kill the boy in
The Omen.
But in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

On the other side of the county from us, my father’s turquoise Ford truck was making its way around the winding curves of the road from the train station in Black Banks. All was darkness in the cab of the truck except for a greenish rectangle of light that glowed from the radio and the circles of yellow light over the steering wheel, showing the speedometer. The radio was playing low, a country song that Daddy was vaguely aware of, somewhere in the back of his mind. He was more concerned with the woman sitting on the truck seat beside him, his little sister, and one of my favorite people who ever existed.

I can just see Nell. I bet she was smoking and leaning on the door, letting her face be pummeled by the good-smelling wind that rushed in her open window. Honeysuckles had bloomed all along the road that very morning, and the smell was so sweet that Nell wondered how such a fine thing continued to thrive in such a horrible world. She let this scent wash over her, hoping it would soak into her skin, even though she had really rolled the window down for the noise more than the fresh air. She didn’t want to talk to Daddy and thought this might keep him from pushing her for answers. Like everyone else in our family, she was carrying a secret with her.

Daddy and Nell had once been very close, but I knew from many overheard conversations and one or two flat-out fights that they didn’t get along because of the war.

While Daddy was in Vietnam, Nell had been a war protester. Eventually she had joined a march in New York City. She had carried a sign that read,
GET THEM OUT NOW
(I had seen a picture of this in a history book), and the fifty thousand people she walked with had sung “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome” and chanted “Stop the Bloody War.” The crowd had marched right up to the steps of the public library and lain down there, spread out so that the people trying to get in had to either turn away or step around them. They had lain there silently, hundreds of breathing corpses.

Eventually the police came with dogs and tear gas, and Nell was one of the many who were dragged away while CBS News and the Associated Press captured it all on film. She was seen all across the country, her body stretched between two police officers who were carrying her away by the ankles and wrists. She managed to wrestle one hand free so that she could thrust it toward the camera, two fingers fashioned into a peace sign. Her face was a scowl that became an image burned into the minds of everybody watching as Walter Cronkite narrated the scene. The photograph was on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

Nell’s arrest had been the talk of the town, and several people wrote to Daddy while he was in Vietnam, informing him of his sister’s actions. Some of them had even clipped the picture from the paper and enclosed it. Daddy never forgave Nell. Any argument between the two of them always led back to that day in New York.

“I did it for
you,
” Nell said one Labor Day when they were both drinking tall cans of Schlitz out on the back porch. They didn’t even notice me, hovering near the kitchen door so I could eavesdrop on them.

“You did it to get on the news, for the thrill,” Daddy replied. His best feature — his eyes — turned evil when he was mad, and he was giving her a murderous look. His speech was slurred. I had never seen him drunk before, and never would again. “Hippie.”

“I didn’t want my brother to come home in a body bag, Stanton.”

“You’re no better than those sons of bitches in Boston who spat on me when I walked down the street in my uniform.”

Nell had put her hand on his arm and said, “But most of us weren’t like that,” in a motherly sort of voice, just as Daddy pushed her away.

“
Baby-killer,
they said.” Daddy wasn’t even aware of anyone around him by then, drunk on beer and memories. “
Baby-killer.
And spat on me.”

Both of them were silently reliving that fight — although one of many, it had been the most honest — as they drove along the summer road, toward our house, where Nell would be living now. My father was not happy about this situation, but she was his sister, and despite how mad he still was at her, he couldn’t let her go homeless. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened, and he didn’t press her for answers. She had called my mother and said she had quit her job and wanted to come home and needed somewhere to stay and that was all Mom had told him.

My mother was closer to Nell than Daddy, anyway. They had known each other since high school and were more like siblings than Nell and Daddy were. When Mom called Daddy at the gas station and told him about Nell, he knew the only thing he could do was drive over to Black Banks to fetch her. He had, and now they were on their way home, the song playing on the radio between them.

They didn’t say a word as they pulled into our driveway, got out, and made their way around to the back door. Our music greeted them, flowing out the open windows.