Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (19 page)

I opened my mouth to say something, anything—
none of your business, we were in fifth grade for God’s sake, what difference does it make
—but instead I snapped my jaws shut, turned on my heel, and slipped out the door. She had made me feel like a criminal after all.

“Am I right?” Ellie called after me, her voice raised in desperation. I shut the door hard, hopped into my car, and drove away without glancing back.

D
RAGON
M
IKE’S
T
ATTOO
E
MPORIUM
was on Pearl Street, tucked between a cosmetology school and a Chinese takeout. The front room was poorly lit and the walls were plastered with tattoo designs. There was a large metal desk set up in the corner with an upholstered chair behind it and a metal folding chair in front. Behind the desk hung a red curtain and I could hear voices—a man and a woman, and a steady mechanical humming. In a minute, a woman with spiked magenta hair emerged from behind the curtain. She was dressed in tight jeans, biker boots, a white T-shirt, and a leather vest.

“Howya doin’?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“Yeah? Good. Take your time. Check out all the flash. We got books to look through, too. Ask if you need a price on anything. You ever had a tattoo before?”

“No.”

“A virgin, huh? Well, it’s true what they say. You can’t stop at just one. There’s just somethin’ about it. You can’t get enough. An addiction, I guess.” She held her arms out for my inspection. They were encircled with dozens of red roses. Woven into the flowers were several hearts, a black panther, and a few brightly colored butterflies.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said with a wink. “The real beauties are hidden.”

I prayed she wouldn’t offer to show me.

It’s a good kind of hurt.

“Actually,” I confessed, “I didn’t really come for a tattoo. I was hoping to talk to Mike.”

She eyed me skeptically.

“You know Mike?”

“Yeah, we went to school together.”

“Then you know he won’t be doing a whole lot of talkin’.”

I nodded. She continued on, a wistful look in her eyes.

“Some of my girlfriends wonder what I’m doin’ with a guy that can’t talk, but the way I figure it, God took away one thing and gave him another. The man’s an artist. He’s got a gift. You know what I’m saying? We gotta be thankful for what we got, not bitter about what we don’t. Right?”

I nodded again.

She smiled widely, showing several gold-capped teeth.

“He’s just doing a touch-up job. I’ll let him know he’s got someone waiting. What’d you say your name was?”

“Kate. Kate Cypher. I don’t know if he’ll remember me.”

“I’ll let him know.” She disappeared behind the curtain again, leaving me to study the walls. I found myself face-to-face with skulls that had snakes crawling out of the eyes and skulls with roses surrounding them.

Bones,
I thought.
Del’s just bones now
. Or is she? I shivered.

The woman emerged from behind the curtain.

“He’ll be out in a minute. I’m headed home. Make yourself comfortable.” She gestured toward an old vinyl recliner in the corner. Next to it was a coffee table piled high with tattoo magazines. She grabbed a leather jacket from under the desk and walked out. “See ya,” she called to me.

In a few minutes, an enormous man with a shaved head came through the curtain, followed by a tall wispy man who wore his hair in a ponytail. I remembered how tall and thin Mike had been and it seemed like not much had changed, until I heard the skinny guy speak.

“Thanks, Mike,” he said, passing the hulking giant a wad of bills. The giant nodded and smiled. The skinny guy left the shop.

“Mike? Mike Shane?”

I
was nearly struck mute. My old classmate now resembled a biker version of Mr. Clean, complete with gold hoop earring. He wore ripped jeans and a black leather vest with nothing beneath it. His exposed flesh literally rippled with muscles. His biceps were nearly as big around as my waist.

He nodded at me, his face expressionless.

“I’m Kate Cypher. We went to school together. Remember?”

This got me another nod.

“The thing is, I’m here for a reason. A kind of strange reason. I’m here about Del Griswold.”

No nod this time. He took a breath and seemed to hold it, his impossibly large chest looking larger still. He gestured me over to the desk and I sat down in the metal folding chair across from him. He pulled out a pad of paper and a pen and wrote a sentence, then turned the paper toward me.

 

What do you want?

 

“I want to know about Del’s tattoo.”

He narrowed his eyes.

 

What tattoo?

 

“The letter
M
on her chest. You gave it to her, didn’t you?”

He studied me a minute, didn’t write anything down. I realized he wasn’t going to give me anything if I didn’t give him something first.

“No one knows about the tattoo, Mike. I think I was the only one Del showed it to. She was really proud of that tattoo. She told me someone very special had given it to her.”

He scribbled violently on the pad.

 

I didn’t kill Del.

 

“I believe you. I just want to know about the tattoo.”

He wrote rapidly for a moment, then shoved the pad toward me defiantly. It was covered with neat, slanting block letters, amazingly legible for the speed with which he wrote them.

 

I was in the ER when Del was killed. I was there 5 hours. They took X-rays. Set my arm and nose. You saw the beating I took that day. Police knew I couldn’t have killed Del. All it took was a phone call to the ER and one look at my busted arm.

 

“The police never knew about the tattoo, Mike. The killer cut it off her.” His face went slack and he looked down at the desktop, his eyes glassy as marbles. I continued. “I’ll make a deal with you. If you tell me the truth about the tattoo, I won’t go to the police about it. I believe you didn’t kill her. Like you said, you couldn’t have. But I think you may have given her that letter
M
. And I also think the police would be mighty interested in that part of the story.”

He looked me in the eye, scribbled on his paper.

 

It was 30 years ago.

 

“Yeah, I know. But in case you hadn’t heard, there’s been another murder. A copycat killing. Ellie Bushey’s daughter. So the police are all of sudden interested in the unsolved case of Del Griswold. Now am I going to go to them with what I know, or are you going to help me out? I’m not interested in getting you in trouble, Mike. I just want to know what happened. I want to understand everything I can about Del’s last months alive.”

I wasn’t good at giving hard-boiled detective ultimatums, but I needed to get somewhere. I felt I was getting close to finding out what had happened to Del, and Mike was an important piece of the puzzle.

He looked at me a moment, then down at his yellow pad. He picked up the pen and started writing. His brow furrowed and his eyes squinted. He held the pen so tight that I was sure it would crack in two. The writing came slow at first, then faster, the letters scrawled quickly, like he was running a race. He filled three pages—as he finished a page he would tear it off and push it toward me, already starting on the next. When he was finished, he wiped sweat off his wide brow and set down the pen.

 

Most people didn’t know Del like I knew Del. They thought she was just some dumb retard, which I guess is the same way they thought of me. “Two peas in a pod,” that’s what I used to write in my notes to Del. Del said we were more like onions than peas, each of us with all these layers. When people looked, they saw our dirty outsides, that was all. That’s how Del used to say it.

I gave myself my first tattoo when I was 12. Tiny heart with the initials
DG
inside it. It’s on my right thigh.
Dear God.
That’s what I tell Lucy those initials stand for, but she must know I’m lying. Never mentioned Del to her. Not now, not ever. I don’t think she’d send me packing, but it would wreck her. To know I’d cared for some other girl so much. Even if I was only a kid. And if she found out that girl was dead, there’d be no contest. You can’t compete with a 1st love—especially not one who’s dead. You’ll always feel 2nd best.

I sure did love Del. All her layers. Even when peeling them back made me cry. Seems like that girl was always finding some new way to make me cry. She said there were other boys. Described what she did with them to me sometimes, like it was supposed to get me all hot or jealous or something, but really it just made me cry. But she said I was her only one. I was special. And to prove it, she asked me to tattoo my name across her chest. That way we’d be bound together…forever. Yeah, forever.

Well, like you know, there’s no such thing as forever. I only got as far as the
M.
Then some fucker, one of the other guys, I guess, killed her. Maybe he saw the tattoo and freaked out in some jealous rage. Maybe that’s why he cut her like that. To make her all his. I could almost understand that in some fucked-up kind of way. I had no idea the tattoo was cut off. I always expected the police would connect me to the
M,
but they never did.

Anyway, like I said, I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did. The girl was a fucking mystery. I loved her yeah, but I never got anywhere close to the center, if you know what I mean. The heart of the onion. I just scratched the surface. Left my
M
there as a mark.

 

I finished reading the pages and pushed them back to Dragon Mike. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I felt a combination of things. Jealousy, humility, sorrow. Had I ever let myself love anyone as Mike had loved Del? Loved someone enough to carve their initials in my skin, to carve mine in theirs? I was jealous that he had known such love. And that he had had that chance to know Del in that way. I realized that I hadn’t had the courage to peel back those layers, not just with Del, but with anyone. Not even with my husband. Ex-husband.

One thing was clear—I hadn’t known Del at all. She’d had a whole other life I knew nothing about. A life of boys who loved her, tattooed her, messed around with her. And one of them had killed her. My gut told me it wasn’t the huge man across the desk from me. He’d loved Del, he’d given her the
M
, but I didn’t think he’d killed her, nor did he know who did.

“I think I’d like a tattoo, Dragon Mike,” I told him, feeling suddenly spontaneous and brave. The big man smiled at me.

“I’d like a name,” I told him. “Desert Rose.”

Mike nodded, turning to a clean page in his pad. He wrote down the name in scripted letters, not unlike the letter
M
he’d done on Del’s chest.

 

You want any flowers around it? A red rose maybe?

 

“Uh-uh. Just the name.”

 

Where do you want it?

 

“On my chest, the same place you did Del’s
M
.”

Mike nodded and took me behind the curtain. As he was setting up, I asked him about the star.

“Mike, do you remember that sheriff ’s star you gave Del?”

Mike looked puzzled, reached for his pad of paper, scribbled his answer, and passed it to me.

 

I didn’t give Del that star.

 

“Well, who did?”

 

Not sure. I think maybe she said she got it from her brother or someone her brother knew, maybe. Yeah, I think that’s it. Some friend of her brother’s.

 

“Which brother?”

 

The youngest one, maybe. The one she was close to. Can’t think of his name.

 

“Nicky?”

 

Yeah, Nicky. Some friend of Nicky’s. Didn’t he have some friend Del was close to? An older guy? Lived up at that commune. He’s the one who gave her the star.

 

T
HE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL
was a field day—kickball, a watermelon seed–spitting contest, a three-legged race. The recorder band played a concert they’d been practicing for all year. And all the graduating fifth graders would get a diploma—even Artie Paris would be handed a paper and pushed on to junior high at last.

The back soccer field was a wide-open space behind the playground, and it was here that all the kids from Number 5 Elementary were gathered. We spent the morning playing games, and around eleven, the principal started grilling the hamburgers and hot dogs.

After a long and chaotic lunch, Miss Johnstone announced that it was time for the fifth grade scavenger hunt. We were each given a list of things to find and clues telling where we might find some of the more obscure items. Some of the objects were simple:
a dime-sized stone, a buttercup
. Others were things that had been planted by the teachers:
Find and write down the poem in the trees. Somewhere around the storage shed there is a picture of a famous man. Tell us who he is and what he did.

I was looking at the picture, writing
President Abraham Lincoln
, telling how he freed the slaves then got shot in a theater by a man called John Wilkes Booth, when Ellie came up behind me, breathless from running.

“They’ve got the Potato Girl and Mute Mike down by the river. Come on,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me along behind her.

To the teachers, we must have looked like two playful, innocent girls on a scavenger hunt, running happily across the soccer field. We were moving fast and Ellie was laughing, her white-blond hair streaming behind her, her pretty yellow dress flapping around her unscathed knees.
Isn’t it nice that weird Kate has finally made some friends,
the teachers might have said to one another.
Isn’t it nice how well she’s fitting in
?

Beyond the soccer field lay a swath of tall grass, which gave way to bamboo-like reeds a little way in. I had heard that if you knew where to look in the shoulder-high grass, you could find the hidden opening that was the beginning of a path. This path would lead you through the grass, reeds, and wildflowers down to the river. It was here that kids snuck away during recess to shoot off caps or even make out (so the rumors went). Ellie seemed to know the way and did not hesitate before diving into a slight parting of the reeds, dragging me in tow. The damp grass soaked my jeans and Ellie’s fingers dug into my palm as she pulled me toward the sound of running water and teasing voices.

Bloodroot River was not much of a river at all. About the only fish in it were minnows, and during the spring floods you could walk across it and get wet only up to your knees.

When we came into the clearing on the bank of the river, I saw that about a dozen kids were gathered there, standing in a rough semi-circle, looking down and singing Potato Girl rhymes.

When Ellie and I moved into the circle, she still held my hand. I imagine this is what Del first noticed when she looked up at me.

Del was lying on her back in the sand, propped up on her elbows. Artie Paris stood at her feet and had Mute Mike’s arms pinned. Artie held the taller boy as if he were some gangly puppet.

 

One potato, two potato, three potato, four!

We don’t want this rotten potato ’round us anymore!

 

The kids were chanting, shouting each word down at Del. A few boys spat on her, and Fat Tommy kicked Del in the ribs.

 

One potato, two potato, three potato, four!

Del Griswold is a trashy, potato-eating bore!

 

Del looked relieved to see me.

“Desert Rose,” she mumbled. Her lip was bleeding. I thought maybe she bit it in the fall. Or maybe someone clocked her one. It was hard to say. The one thing that was clear was that Del was in trouble and it looked like I might be her only chance. Her deputy had arrived.

The dozen or so kids gathered around began throwing pebbles down at her; tiny stones they’d stuffed in their pockets. The stones pinged off her, made her twitch like she was being stung.

I
KNOW THAT
I
SHOULD HAVE GONE
to Del’s side, hoisted her up from the dirt, snarled a warning to Artie. I should have done what a good deputy would have: backed my sheriff up, right up until the end.

In college, I read in a sociology textbook about a sort of mob mentality. I guess that is the closest I have to an excuse for myself. I got swept away with the feeling that I was part of the group, and in those few confused moments, that felt more real, more exciting to me than my friendship with Del.

I was ten, for Christ’s sake. Doesn’t everyone make mistakes like that back then? Have moments of weakness, cruelty born of fear?

Most people, probably. But I suspect most people don’t spend the rest of their lives reliving those moments, playing the if-only game:
if only I had picked Del up out of the dirt that day, if only I’d been brave and true, as she would have been for me, then she might not have been killed.

But that’s not what happened.

ONE POTATO
,
two potato
,
three potato, four!

Your daddy is your brother and your mother is a whore!

It was a rhyme I knew well, had heard hundreds of times, but had never joined in on. That day, with Del in the dirt at my feet and Ellie’s hand in mine, part of the pack, I sang along.

Del continued to study me, her pleading face cracking into a twisted, jack-o’-lantern smile, showing her chipped tooth. Then, down in the dirt, pelted by stones, she began to laugh. She laughed as if she could not stop, and her laughter made the crowd around her all the more angry. I was enraged.

“Shut up!” I yelled. “Just shut the hell up!”

The rocks were getting bigger. She flinched each time one hit her, but made no move to escape. She rolled back and forth in the dirt, cackling. Ellie leaned down to get a rock and I did, too. The stone I held was smooth and dark, the size and shape of an egg. It fit perfectly in my palm.

“I got somethin’ for you, Del,” Artie sang, as he shoved Mute Mike away with disgust. The kids stopped throwing rocks and waited to see what would happen next. We all watched in silence as Artie walked over to the edge of the river, where he picked up what looked like a large brown stone. He pulled a jackknife out of his pocket and cut into the object, which I quickly realized was a potato, slicing the end off and carrying the piece over to Del.

“Open up wide, Potato Girl.”

Del kept her jaw clamped shut, but Artie pried her teeth apart and shoved the piece in.

“Have some more, Delores,” he said, straddling her. He pushed another hunk of raw potato into her mouth and she gagged, started to choke.

“Hey Mute Mike, did you know your wife has a secret?” asked Artie, as he tossed the rest of the potato away and wiped his hands on his thighs. He remained in position, straddling Del, pinning her under his weight. Mike was kneeling in the dirt beside them, holding the same position he’d been in since Artie let him go. Del twisted her head, spat out bits of potato. Then she began her mad, grinning laughter again.

“Why don’t you show us your tattoo, Del?” Artie asked.

The smile disappeared from Del’s face and she fell silent. She turned her gaze to me again, but now her eyes glared.

“Traitors get shot in the back,” she hissed.

“What?” Artie asked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Who said you could talk, Potato Bitch?”

Del began to fight then, tried to wrestle Artie off, twisting and bucking, but he held fast. I saw that she was wearing the silver star pinned to her chest, but it would take more than that to protect her. So much for talismans.

“Who wants to see the Potato Girl’s tattoo?” Artie called out. “A quarter a look. Come on. Step right up. Where’s that tattoo at, anyway, Delores? Is it on your butt?” At this, he lifted off her, flipped her body over, and jerked down her pants. Her underwear was covered with faded flowers. The elastic had sprung and the panties were loose and clown-like. Artie jerked them down, exposing her bare ass.

“Nothing here,” he bellowed.

But there
was
something there: both buttocks were bruised brown and yellow, roughly in the shape of hand prints. Ellie let out a little gasp and let go of my hand.

“Jesus, who’s been at you, girl?” Artie asked.

Seeing Del like that was more injustice than Mute Mike could bear. He was skinny, but tall, and when he dove at Artie, no one expected it.

Mike and Artie rolled around on the riverbank that afternoon, stirring up sand, gasping and grunting like neither one of them knew how to speak. Artie proceeded to beat the shit out of Mute Mike. It was the worst fight I’ve ever seen—worse than any of the scuffles in the state hospital years later, or the boxing matches my husband dragged me to when we were dating. I watched that day as Mike’s nose was broken and his left arm was pulled from its socket, where it hung like a loose and useless wing. But Mike fought on, no doubt fueled by his love for the Potato Girl, his need to honor her in some public way. Mike was too busy getting whipped to notice Del as she rose from her place on the ground and backed away, slowly at first, then turned and ran. The other kids, distracted by the fight, yelling, “Kick his ass, Artie,” and “Mutilate Mute Mike!” didn’t seem to notice Del leaving. She ran not back toward the safety of the soccer field and teachers, but along the river, toward town. And without much thought, I took off running right behind her, carrying my stone. In the commotion of the boys’ fight, no one seemed to notice us. On we ran.

Del was always faster than me and although I tried, I could not gain any ground, and, in truth, I’m not sure what I would’ve done if I’d caught up. The rock in my hand said that I wasn’t chasing her to apologize.

There was no playful
Catch me if you can
called back to me. There was only the sound of our footsteps pounding over dirt and rocks, our own heartbeats deafening in our ears. I followed her nearly a mile to the bridge on Railroad Street, then I watched her turn into Mr. Deluca’s hayfield and run faster still, heading home.

In my last picture of Del alive, she’s running through that field, her yellow cowgirl shirt billowing behind her, in some ways, a ghost already.