Sweet Dream Baby (21 page)

I think of her walking to meet him. It's only three blocks down and one block over. I think of him sitting there in the alley behind the grease rack in his street rod with the midnight-blue paint and red flames coming from the engine. Lakes Pipes and the moon discs gleaming in the moonlight. I see him in his leather jacket, and his white T-shirt and the ducktail haircut and the scar above his eye. I wonder if he's doing this to her because Grandpa Hollister hit him. I wonder if it's his way of getting revenge.

I think of him taking out the silver Zippo lighter as he sits there waiting for my Aunt Delia. I see him light the cigarette and throw his head back and draw a big chestful of smoke and blow it out into the still night air.

And then it comes to me.

The cigarette on the driveway this morning had a filter. Kenny Griner smokes unfiltered Camels. I lean forward and turn the key, and the starter whines, and the white Chevy comes to life around me. I reach down and pull the lever that moves the seat forward and strain my legs down to the pedals. I turn on the lights and put the Chevy in reverse and back out of our hiding place behind Dr. Cohen's house. I'm driving slow on the empty streets, past the parked cars and the houses with open windows and flickering screens where Ed Sullivan is saying goodnight to America.

I keep the speed down to twenty. Three blocks down and one block over.

I turn into the alley behind Mr. Dameron's ESSO station, and all I see is the shut door at the back of the grease rack and moonlight on a stack of empty oil cans. I sit there with the engine idling and the radio telling me, “No muscle-bound man can take my hand from my guy. There's not a man today who can take me away from my guy.” I don't know what to do. I don't know where they are. I try to think, but my mind is whirring like the big Westinghouse mixer Marvadell uses to make frosting, and the things in the mixer are pictures of my Aunt Delia with Griner. I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand, and my mind goes still, and I try to get a message from my Aunt Delia about where she is. But nothing comes. I hit the steering wheel with my fists, and then the radio says, “Under the boardwalk, down by the sea. On a blanket with my baby, is where I'll be.” And I get it. There's only one place they could go.

I know I can't go the way they went. I have to go the other way, the way me and my Aunt Delia went when she took me swimming. I've never driven at night, and it's scary. The headlights bore down the county hardroad, and the broken white line rushes at me, and the wind pours through my window with all the wild smells of the country night. The white faces of cows are sudden and then gone as my lights sweep the fields, and I hope there won't be any people. Everybody in this county knows my Aunt Delia's white Chevy, and all the kids are out driving at night, going to see who's there.

I cross the bridge and take the narrow hardroad that runs with the river a few miles, then I turn again on the two-rut track with the weeds growing up tall between my wheels and lashing underneath the Chevy. Night bugs zip through my lights like tracer bullets I've seen in war movies, and a red fox runs ahead of me for twenty yards, then stops to watch me pass. I find the place where me and my Aunt Delia parked. I kill the Chevy's engine and leave the keys in the switch. I run to the river. Standing on the bank with my shoes sinking into the wet sand, I see the white clot of driftwood downstream in the moonlight. I take off my shoes and socks and wade out and look back upstream at Widow Rock. It's white and dreamy in the moonlight, and I can see something, something up there. I stare hard at it. I try to make my eyes reach long and bore through the dark, and maybe I see something move. I can't tell. It's too far and too high. I know what I have to do now. All the way out here in the car, driving with my hands claw-tight on the steering wheel, I've been thinking about it.

I take off the rest of my clothes and pile them on top of my shoes and step into the river to my waist. It's colder than in the daytime, and the sand slips away downstream as my feet sink in, and I can feel the riverbed sloping out to the deep water. The river pulls at me. It wants to take me downstream, all the way down to the Johnny Barnes Fish Camp where me and my Aunt Delia rented the boat. It wants to take me all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I lean down and push off and swim hard in the cold. I swim as hard as I can to get warm and to reach the far bank without landing too far downstream.

It's a long, cold swim, and out in the middle of the river, my mind tells me there's no other side. It whispers to me as I churn and kick and open my eyes to the dark sky when I breathe. It says I'll just swim on forever, and then my arms and legs will seize, and my breath won't come anymore. It whispers I'll sink, and no one will ever know what happened to me. My arms and legs get thick and slow, and my stomach goes sick, and my mind mixes pictures of Griner and my Aunt Delia naked together up on Widow Rock, and then I see my body blue and scraped and limp washing up on a beach somewhere along the coast where the river ends.

I know it's panic. I know I can't give in to it. There is no river without two banks. I keep swimming, pulling my head up every two strokes and sucking in cold, river-smelling air, and my mind goes dark, and I'm only legs and arms beating water, and finally trees lean out over me with moonlight silver on their leaves, and my fingers claw sand, and I lie full flat naked, retching for air on the river bank.

When my breath comes back, and my legs warm, and the cramp in my stomach eases, I walk back upriver, looking across for the white driftwood clot. I walk maybe a hundred yards, picking my way along in the shallows careful of the rocks and the claw hands of tree roots reaching out from the bank. I see the driftwood clot like bleached and tangled bone across the river. In the moonlight, it looks like the skeleton of some huge beast that died and rotted huddled there against the bank. It tells me where I am.

There's a way up somewhere. I know it because Griner came down this way the first time my Aunt Delia took me to Widow Rock. After he drank whiskey and gave my Aunt Delia some, and me a sniff, and we heard Bick and Ronny and Quig Knowles and Beulah and Caroline calling from below to my Aunt Delia, Griner stepped into the trees heading downstream. My Aunt Delia said, “Careful, Kenny. It's slippery that way.”

I know I'm only a hundred yards downstream from the rock, and I know there's a way up.

I turn into the woods feeling with my hands. I'm a naked boy in the woods at night, and the vines and branches claw and catch at me. I stumble and cover my eyes and my parts and keep pushing ahead looking for the path. Fifty yards into the woods I stop and grind my teeth in rage and stop my mouth from howling in it, too. I turn back toward the river, going upstream. I promise myself I'll find it. It has to be here. I'll step out into a clearing and see the path snaking into the trees, rising with the land up to the bluff. It has to be here.

I'm about halfway back to the river when I fall and cover my eyes and slide on my butt down a bare clay ditchbank into a culvert of roots and rocks. My feet stop me hard at the bottom, and I know they're cut. I get to my hands and knees and look up. A silver line of moonlight falls through the trees. I've found it.

From here on, I have to be quiet. I go up on all fours. I'm an animal now, climbing four-legged, nose to the ground, smelling my way up the rocky, rooty track to the top of Widow Rock. My breathing is hard and fast but silent, my bleeding feet make no sound as they find their holds on the soft clay, the rock, the bark. I see where the trees open at the top. I see the moonlight bright, glancing from white limestone. I slow and creep. At the top, at the tree door, I rise to my feet and become a human boy again, but a mad boy, and resolute. Yes, that's it: resolute.

I see them lying out on the rock, their bodies glowing in the white moonlight. They've made a bed of their clothes. He's on top of her and moving. I can see the muscles of his arms taut and wet with sweat as he holds himself up over her, his head hanging and buried in her hair. I can see her throat white and her head thrown back. I can see her knees rise and her heels dig into the rock, and his legs taut and straight as his feet push behind her heels. I can hear him breathing hard and ragged, and worst of all I hear her moan. I wish it were the moan of her sorrow, her abuse, her cry for someone lost, but it's the moan of her pleasure, and though I've never heard the sound before, I know its name.

My rage comes white hot and as loud in my head as the storms outside my window at night. I walk out onto the rock on feet that have grown fur and claws. I feel the cool wind on my naked skin. I stand there with my fists knotted at my sides. My feet grip stone still hot from the sun. I wait, the last of my boy giving way to the wild thing that swam the river and climbed the bluff, and then I howl rage to the moon. I scream the name of wild, outrageous insult to the moon, and then I run.

Ten strides to go, but they're ten miles. It's a year, and it's over in an eyeblink. As I near, I see him crouch between her legs and see him rise. I see him shove his hands out to defend. I see her push back from under him, crabbing back with the shape of her moan still on her lips. I don't look at his face, I look at my target. It's his bare middle, white and muscled in the moonlight. That's where I hit him, and I hear the breath go out of his body, and the hitting takes my breath, too. I'm lying face down on the rock, my eyes banged shut. I open them, and he's doing his tightrope walk out on the edge, and it's not until I hear my Aunt Delia scream, “Bick! No!” that I look at his face.

He doesn't speak as he goes over. He doesn't cry out, and his eyes say only that he's trying hard to stay with us. I close my eyes and see the Widow's black veil spreading out into all that nothing. I see the wings of a big dying bird in its last clumsy mating with earth. I don't hear him hit. I don't know if he splashes or lands blunt. I push over onto my back and look up at stars and moon. I feel the cool wind from the river on my hot skin, and I know I'm not sorry.

Everything is quiet. My mind holds no pictures. I'm only the animal boy with bleeding feet and cool, windy skin, and I know for the first time the still, empty feeling of a thing finally and completely done. I want this moment to last forever, but I know it won't. Nothing does.

I roll and look at Delia. She's standing now, looking out at the edge. She holds her face in her hands, and she tries to get her breath. She starts toward the edge, and her eyes, dead in the moonlight, call me back to the world I left for the wild. I get up and stand in her way. She tries to shoulder around me, and I wrap my arms around her naked waist. She tries harder, and I push her back. “No,” I say, “don't look. It's too far down. It's too dark to see.” But it's not her looking I'm worried about. I remember when she told me, “I don't come up here alone anymore.” I didn't know what she meant then, but I know now.

She fights me hard. She kicks and hits at me, but I move her back. I push her to the rock where we sat the first day, and I sit her down. “Listen,” I say, but she shakes her head and covers her ears. She moans. I say it again, “Listen, we've got to get out of here. Somebody might come.”

She looks at me for the first time. Her eyes are blurry, and her face is slack like it is when she sleeps. She whispers, “Nobody comes up here at night. The path's too hard at night. That's how we knew we'd be safe.”

She's not making sense, but I want her to talk. Anything but the moan. Screaming his name again. Better the blurry eyes and the sleeping face. I say, “We've got to get out of here right now. Put your clothes on.” I tug at her hands to pull her up, but she won't move. She looks at me again, and her eyes go sharp and hot. She says, “Travis, why did you do it? Why?”

“He was hurting you.”

I know it's true, and I know it's not. And I know most things are that way now. I know what I have to live with.

She shakes her head. “I never thought…I never thought you'd do it.”

I look at her. My eyes say there's nothing I wouldn't do for her. The thing in my chest is big now, an unbearable weight I know I'll always carry. The night is a big radio, and the songs are all playing in my head, and they all say you do anything for the one you love. My eyes try to say all this, but it's dark, and the moon's at my back, and I don't know what she can see. I say, “I'd do anything for you, Delia. You know that.”

I pull her hands again, and she gets up, and her shoulders fall like she's run a long race and she's tired. She stands in front of me, and I take her hand and lead her over to her clothes. They're all mixed with Bick's, and I can smell him and her on them as I kneel and pick up her bra and underpants, her jeans, blouse, and socks. Her tenny pumps are under Bick's shirt with his penny loafers. Their shoes were her pillow.

I stand up with her clothes in my hands and turn to her. I say, “Go over there and get dressed.” I point to the seat in the rock.

My mind is telling me now about the things I didn't plan. She can't swim the river in her clothes. Should I turn and tell her not to get dressed? That I'll carry her clothes down with me? I'll swim across the river with them held high in one hand? I can't swim the river with her clothes and keep them dry. I barely made it fanning with both arms. She'll have to get dressed and go down and wait for me by Bick's car. We'll just have to hope no one comes.

I turn, and she's standing by the rock seat with her clothes bundled in her hands. She's so pretty even now. Looking at her stops my planning mind and makes the thing in my chest too big to hold. I drag a big breath and stagger drunk and wait 'til the hum in my heart for her stops, and I say, “Delia, go ahead and put them on. Do you want me to help you?”

Her eyes snap to me sudden and cold. “No,” she says. “I don't need your help. I don't need you anymore.”

I know why she's saying it. I know it's not true. I watch until she leans to fit her chests into her bra, and then I turn back to the bed of Bick's clothes. I think:
What did Bick do? What did he do here in the middle of the night? Alone.

I hear a scrape of shoe and feel a rush of air, and Delia passes me running for the edge. I think she'll go over, but she stops, and I hear her fingernails scratch rock as she claws Bick's clothes up into her arms. She raises them above her head to throw them after him, but I'm there behind her. I seize her arms and twist the clothes from her hands and drop them where they were. She turns and stares at me with crazy eyes, and I say, “Listen to me. He was
alone.
Don't you see? He was here alone.”

Her eyes close, open. “Alone,” she says.

I push her away, back toward the rock seat.

I turn to the edge again and think,
What did Bick do?
What did he do here alone in the middle of the night? Nothing comes to me. All I know is Delia wasn't here. I kneel and gather Bick's clothes, and I start to fold them. I don't know why, but I do. I fold the shirt that smells of sweat and aftershave and Delia's secret skin. I fold the pants, the socks, and the underwear. I put the pile of clothes on top of the shoes. I look at them. There's something wrong.

I move the underwear to the bottom of the pile. That's how he'd do it. I stand and look at the clothes, at the edge, the dark well of night out there over the river, and I think about what Bick Sifford did here by himself.

After a while, I'm Bick, and I'm doing what he did. He came because it's beautiful up here at night. It's cool, and even though this town is in a lonely country, there aren't so many good places to be alone. And so Bick came here, and he thought about being a boy again, and he thought about the way it feels to be naked in the wild night under the moon, and he took off his clothes and stood here feeling how good it is, and then he went out to the edge. He stood out there drunk with the wind and the cool and the stars high and bright, and he looked down into the well of nothing, and it called to him…and he slipped. He slipped and fell into the river.

That's it, and it will have to do.

I turn back to Delia. Dressed, she stands there looking at me. I tell her, “I put the car where we parked when we went skinny-dipping. I swam across. I have to go back and get the car. Can you get down the hill and wait for me by Bick's car?”

She just looks at me. For the first time, I get scared. What if she runs away? What if she wanders into the woods? What if she won't move and they find her here in the morning when they come looking for Bick? And the worst thing: What if she tells? I'm bigger than I was an hour ago, a lot bigger, but I can't fight her down this hill. I go and stand in front of her and take her hands. She tries to pull them away, but I hold them. I know I have to take her to her fear before she'll move. I say, “Delia, we've got to go right now. If someone finds us here, we'll go to jail. They'll put us in the electric chair.”

I don't really know what the electric chair is, but I've heard about it. I've seen the men in movies walk down the long, dark hallway with the priest whispering beside them and the guards watching to see if they'll go like men or boys.

She looks at me, and her eyes open wide, and the fear pours into them. She says, “All right, Travis. I'll meet you down at Bick's car.” She shivers and hugs herself, and with that hug, she's the old Delia again. The one who knows the secrets. She whispers, “But hurry. Promise me you'll hurry.”

I nod. I'll never break a promise to Delia.

The river's not so bad this time. I don't fight the water. For every yard I make across, it takes me three yards downstream, but I don't worry. I let the river take me. I swim when I can and rest when I have to. The cold water feels good on my bleeding feet. When I find the bank, I walk back up in the shallows looking for the dead beast's white bones. When I see them, I know it's only twenty yards to my clothes. I don't dress. I can't explain wet clothes. The air will dry me. I run through the woods to the white Chevy. I stand beside it, all dry but my hair, and put on my clothes.

There's dew on Bick's car when I stop beside it. Delia steps out of the dew-dripping woods into my headlight beams. She gets in on the passenger side, but I get out and come around to her window. “Slide over,” I say. “You've got to drive. Everything's got to look like normal.”

She slides over and backs us up, and we pull out onto the red clay track that leads to the county hardroad and freedom. My heart is rattling like nuts and bolts in a coffee can because we've made it through the hard part now. A few more minutes and everything will be all right.

We come to the place where we turn onto the hardroad, and I whisper, “Stop. Turn off the lights.” She stops. She looks at me, confused. I lunge across her lap and slam the light switch into the dash with the heel of my hand. Grandpa Hollister's white Buick Roadmaster stops at a crossroads two hundred yards down to our right. He sits there, idling in the moonlight, and I can see the gray fog of his exhaust crawl under the car on the night wind and become solid in his headlight beams. He sits for a long time, and I know he's looking both ways up and down the road, looking for the trouble he always expects. I hope the hope of heaven and hell that the palmetto scrub along this cow track rises high enough to keep us hidden from him.

His exhaust pumps gray fog, and he turns right, away from us, and when his taillights are tiny red points in the night, Delia turns onto the hardroad.

At the decision place, Delia starts to turn toward home. I reach over and straighten the wheel. “No, we've got to go to Warrington. We've got to get Cokes and fries and sit there like we said we would. Everything has to be like we said.”

She looks at me, and her eyes send me letters of misery and love, and she pushes the accelerator down, and we head for Warrington.