Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (5 page)

I set the oil lamp on the bedside table and lay down on the cot to rest for a few minutes. Magpie joined me, purring like a lawn-mower. My mind was racing and my body thought it was barely suppertime, much less bedtime—I could easily foresee the sleepless night before me, soon to be followed by a blurry-eyed day. What I needed was a drink, preferably something hot, with spiced rum. Then I remembered the locked box of drugs in the kitchen and made my way to it, keys jingling. Now, I am not a person to indulge in the casual use of pharmaceuticals, but one little Ambien never hurt anybody. To be on the safe side, I took two.

While I waited for the drugs to take effect, I studied the shadows of my mother’s paintings as they glowed in the lamplight. They were still lifes mostly, the one on the easel half finished: a bowl of fruit in somber shades of gray. It was an underpainting, a scene stripped of its color, only a shadow of what it promised to become.

R
ON
M
ACKENZIE WAS OUR BUS DRIVER
back in the fifth grade. He was a bulldog of a man with a thick neck and beady, watchful eyes. He always wore a black knit cap and worked his jaw as he drove as if he were chewing on his own tongue. Looking at him, you would have thought he had always been driving school buses, but the truth was that once he’d worked for NASA. He’d tell the new kids on his route this, letting them think he must have been an astronaut or something, and only when they pressed him did he admit that he had driven trucks and forklifts, not lunar landers. He had moved rocket parts around. Ron Mackenzie had gotten to touch metal that blasted off into space. He moved from Cape Canaveral back home to Vermont because his wife’s mother got sick, and that’s when he started driving buses and working down at the town garage.

On good days, Ron called us his chickadees. When he was angry, when one of the kids had disappointed him in some way, we were monkeys, and you could tell from his tone that monkeys were, in Ron’s mind, a pretty low-life thing to be.

“I’ve had just about enough from you monkeys today!” he’d say through clenched teeth when the noise on the bus got too loud or when kids switched seats while we were moving.

Del and I caught Ron’s bus each morning at the bottom of the hill by her mailbox. Three of her brothers rode the earlier bus that took them to the Brook School, where grades six through twelve went. Nicky, the crow assassin, was fourteen. Her twin brothers, Stevie and Joe, were seventeen, seniors in high school. Mort was nineteen. He had never graduated and was still living at home, helping out with the farm. Her other brothers, Roger, Myron, and Earl, all had places of their own in or near New Canaan. Earl, the oldest, was married with two kids not much younger than Del.

Stevie and Joe kept to themselves and showed no interest in Del. When they weren’t doing chores, they were working on a GTO that they planned to race at Thunder Road. They had girlfriends—pimply, overweight girls who loved to ride in that red GTO, fixing their hair and blowing cigarette smoke through their noses while greasy wrenches and car parts rattled at their feet. They’d drive through town too fast, gunning the engine and squealing the tires at each intersection. Sometimes I would see the four of them riding or back in Del’s yard—the ugly girls sprawled out and smoking on the brown lawn while Stevie and Joe banged around under the hood.

D
EL RODE TO SCHOOL
in the morning on Ron’s bus, but took the afternoon kindergarten bus home right after lunch along with the three other kids in the Special Ed room. I guess the school figured half a day was about all these kids could handle.

The other three Special Ed kids were boys. Tony LaPearl had Down syndrome. Artie Paris was twelve like Del—they’d both stayed back twice. He was a big hulking kid already growing a scraggly mustache. Mike Shane was twelve also, and the tallest, skinniest boy in our school. He could not speak. No one really knew why, but there were lots of rumors. The most believable was that he’d had some kind of illness as a baby that badly scarred his vocal cords. Mike went around with a pad of paper tied with a string around his neck, communicating by notes.

The morning after our first meeting in the field, while we stood waiting for the bus, I noticed that Del wore the same soiled cowgirl shirt. She had on a clean pair of tan corduroy bellbottoms that hung loose and were cinched above her narrow hips with a thick brown leather belt. The pants looked like hand-me-downs from one of her brothers. Pinned to her shirt was a silver metal sheriff ’s star.

Neither of us spoke. I waited and watched, leaving it up to her to make the rules. We scuffed the dirt with our shoes and stared down at the patterns we made. I thought of the crow, the letter
M
on Del’s chest, covered, now, not only by the shirt, but by the silver star. Just before the bus arrived, I looked up and caught Del smiling at me and knew I had not imagined our meeting. I also knew, as I caught a glimpse of that broken edge of tooth, that I would return to the crow after school to see what might happen next.

When Ron stopped the bus, I got on before Del, just like always, and took the first empty seat in front. I half thought she might take the seat beside me and guiltily prayed she wouldn’t. I said thank you to God when she passed me and went to the back to take a seat alone.

“I smell rotten potatoes,” whispered one boy to another when she passed.

“Potato Girl, Potato Girl, smells so rotten it makes your nose curl,” sang the other boy.

Ron Mackenzie, strict as he was about behavior on the bus, never once stopped the kids from teasing Del. He just gripped the wheel tighter, working his jaw extra hard, like he was embarrassed or something.

“Hey Del, how do spell
potatoes
?” asked the first boy, looking out at the misspelled sign in her yard.

“Retards can’t spell. Retards just smell,” said the other.

Del just stared out the window, grinning widely, like the joke was really on them.

I
SAW
D
EL ONLY TWICE
that day at school, at the same two times I saw her every day: morning recess and lunch. During morning recess I was on the monkey bars when I saw Del go to the maple tree at the edge of the playground. She was alone, as usual. She said something to herself, something out loud that must have been funny, because then she laughed. I watched with curiosity as she picked a twig off one of the lower branches and pretended to smoke it like a cigarette. Artie, the big Special Ed kid, approached her with two of his fifth grade friends.

“What ya got there, Del?” asked Artie. “Wacky tobbaccy?”

Del just kept smoking, pretending not to hear. She tilted her head back and stared up into the branches with their freshly unfurled leaves. I climbed to the top of the monkey bars to get a better view. Two other girls played below me—Samantha Lancaster and Ellie Bushey. They whispered and giggled to each other when I smiled down at them. They were best friends who wore their hair in identical braids, and each had a matching pink windbreaker. They were popular girls, surrounded by a glow of normalcy and self-confidence, the first two to be picked for teams, shoe boxes overflowing with cards on Valentine’s Day. I went back to watching Del, doing my best to ignore Ellie and Samantha.

Over by the trees, Artie was still talking to Del, swaying a little as he spoke, as if he needed extra momentum to get the words out.

“Cat got your tongue, girl? You a mute like Mike now? Mute Mike and the Potato Girl. What a couple. I seen him passin’ you notes in the classroom. Little love notes prob’ly. Maybe you two should get married. Have little dirty mute babies. Raise ’em on raw potatoes. Ain’t that what you cut your teeth on, Del?”

Del said nothing, just sucked hard on her stick and blew invisible smoke rings, still staring up at the highest branches. When she leaned back like that, her sheriff ’s badge caught the sun and gleamed like a real star might. I remembered what Lazy Elk had told me about talismans and thought that maybe that silver star was Del’s.

“Where is that Mute Mike, anyway?” Artie wondered out loud. He made a visor out of his hand and scanned the playground like a general surveying the battlefield. He spotted Mike.

“Get him over here, Tommy,” Artie ordered, and off lumbered Tommy Ducette, the fattest kid in fifth grade, to drag poor Mike over. By the time Tommy forced Mike back to the maple tree, a circle of curious kids had formed, including the two girls who’d been under the monkey bars. I climbed down and walked over to get a closer look. Samantha whispered something to Ellie, who then turned to look at me and blushed a little.

“There’s that mute!” Artie grinned. “There’s your sweetheart now, Del.” And there stood Mike Shane, toothpick thin but taller than the other boys by a head. His wrists and ankles stuck out beyond his cuffs. The spiral pad hung around his neck on red yarn. Mike kept his head down, studying the worn rubber toes of his Keds.

I had watched Mike Shane before. He was, like Del, like myself, a kid who stuck to himself for the most part. I’d seen him playing checkers at recess with Tony LaPearl, the boy with Down syndrome, and from what I saw, Mike let Tony win each time. I had also noticed, as Artie had, that he passed notes to Del from time to time and, occasionally, she would lean close and whisper something in his ear that made him smile and look away, embarrassed.

“Now you two are gonna be married,” Artie announced. “Stand together now.” Tommy gave Mike a shove so that the quivering string bean of a boy stood nearly touching Del, who continued to play-smoke like some glamour girl movie star.

“Do you, Del the Potato Girl, take Mute Mike to be your husband, for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death do you part?”

Del blew smoke in his face.

“That was a yes. Sure, sure you do. Now do you, Mute Mike, take this here smokin’ Potato Girl to be your smelly old wife? A nod will do, Shane. You don’t need to write it in your freakin’ book.”

Mike Shane nodded, still staring at the ground, jittery as a cornered hare.

“I hereby pronounce you man and wife. Now kiss your bride,” Artie ordered.

Mike looked up at this, his brown eyes wide and truly terrified. Del just smiled. Mike tried to bolt, but Artie and Tommy stopped him and pulled him over to Del. He made howling sounds like an animal trying to speak. Spit ran down his chin. The two bigger boys pushed him up against Del, who just stood her ground. She dropped the twig she was smoking and ground it out with her foot, then leaned forward and kissed Mike Shane on the lips. It was a long, soap opera kind of kiss, and when Del pulled away, Mike’s face was no longer pale but a vivid, burning red. The kids gathered around squealed, laughed, said
gross
.

“Ew! Potato Girl germs,” Ellie said.

“Worse than cooties,” Samantha added.

“Poor Mute Mike,” one boy said.

“They deserve each other,” sang back another.

Then the party was broken up by Miss Johnstone, who demanded to know what was going on.

“Playing cowboys,” said Del. “I’m sheriff,” she added, smiling, pointing to her shimmering badge.

W
HY’D YOU LET THEM
do that today?” I asked later, when I met Del back by the dead crow.

“What?”

“The way they teased you and Mike. Why’d you kiss him? You didn’t have to.”

“What was I gonna do?” she snorted.

“Go get Miss Johnstone. Holler out. Anything.”

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“You could have tried.”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Kissing Mike Shane.”

“Like kissing any boy, I guess.”

“Have you kissed lots of boys?”

She shrugged casually and pulled back the sleeves of her shirt. Her left forearm was covered in purple bruises that I was sure hadn’t been there the day before.

“Enough.”

With that, Del tore off toward the pasture where her pony was penned, pointing her fingers like the barrels of guns, shooting everything in her path.

“I’m Wyatt Earp!” she hollered. “Gonna get me a bad guy. Come on, Deputy. Catch me if you can!”

So I chased Del through the garden, past the horse fence, both of us shooting from pointed fingers, her yelling,
Catch me if you can,
the whole way. I chased her past the pigpen, keeping my distance from the fence, not slowing to try to get a look at their teeth. We ran to the root cellar, which Del announced was a bank being robbed. We drew our guns and threw the wooden door open, hoping to catch the robbers in the act.

“Shoot ’em dead!” Sheriff Del cried.

“Shoot who dead?” asked the raspy voice behind us.

We turned and saw Del’s brother Nicky. He had a real rifle in his hands, a BB gun, probably the one he used to kill the unfortunate bird hanging in the field.

Suddenly Del wasn’t Wyatt Earp anymore.

“Take us shooting, Nicky,” she whined, grabbing the fabric of his white T-shirt and twisting it into a ball as she pleaded.

“No way, Del.” The boy spoke to his sister, but studied me with his sly fox smile. He was long and tan. His arms hung low, looking impossibly dark as they poked out from the sleeves of his white T-shirt. He wore stained blue jeans and the same huge, worn work-boots as the day before. His face looked as if it were chiseled from some dark, exotic wood.

“Take us, or I’ll tell Daddy about you know what,” threatened Del, still tugging at the shirt.

“Bullshit. I’ll tell Daddy you’ve got a friend who comes over.”

“Take us, or I’ll tell him, Nicky. I swear.”

“No way.” Nicky jerked his shirt out of Del’s grip and took off running toward the back field.

“The bank robber’s getting away!” shouted Del. “Stop him! I think it’s Billy the Kid!”

We took off after Nicky, chasing him through the garden, the field of peas, and into the woods, up the path that I took home. It looked like he was going to lead us straight to New Hope, but he jogged down an overgrown path I’d never noticed off to the left. The path went on a ways, the vegetation thick and jungle-like, before it opened into a clearing. In the center of this grassy area stood a tiny, leaning cabin, like something from a fairy tale. A witch’s house, a gathering place for trolls.

Nicky was stooped over, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath, the gun in the weeds by his feet.

“Surrender, Billy!” sang Del as she tore into the clearing, pointing her loaded fingers at her brother. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her words sounded wheezy.

He put his huge hands in the air and smiled. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and clung to his narrow chest.

“What is this place?” I asked once I caught my breath.

“Used to be a deer camp,” Nicky said. “Daddy let it fall to shit. Our grandpa built it.”