The Bright Forever (12 page)

Now he was up, pacing the floors, tired of tossing and turning in his bed, going back over everything that had happened that night.

Earlier, around ten o’clock, when the policeman with the fat fingers had come to his house, he had only told as much of the truth as he could bear to hear coming from his mouth. Yes, he had been with Katie Mackey that afternoon. Three-thirty until five. An hour and a half working on story problems. Then he lied: No, he said, he hadn’t seen her since.

The truth of the matter was, that afternoon, when he was with Katie, he found himself, without knowing that he was about to do this, leaning down and kissing her. They were sitting beside each other on the Mackeys’ porch swing, swaying back and forth in the shade, a lone bird singing somewhere in one of the oak trees. The scent from Patsy Mackey’s petunias was fragrant, and Mr. Dees would never be able to smell petunias from that day on without remembering how Katie had solved a story problem using the Parker 51 he had bought for her—“Fifteen banana Popsicles. Holy moly, Mister Dees”—and when she lifted her face to look at him, the light came into her eyes and she was more beautiful than he could stand, and he did what he had wanted to do all that summer since their lessons began—what he had done only in his dreams: he kissed her. He kissed her on the cheek, and it was only a fleeting moment—that quick kiss. Later, he would be tempted to believe that it hadn’t really happened. Only, he knew that it had. He had kissed Katie Mackey on her front porch, in plain view of anyone who might have happened to have been watching.

Katie didn’t even seem to notice. She was a girl who was used to being loved. He could tell that she thought there was nothing out of the ordinary about the fact that he had kissed her. But he was horrified over what he had done. He called the lesson to an end.

“Wasn’t I right?” Katie said. “Fifteen banana Popsicles? Isn’t that the answer?”

Yes, he told her. “Yes. Oh yes, Katie. You’re absolutely right.”

He heard the front door open, and there was Patsy Mackey stepping out onto the porch. In an instant he stood up from the swing, saying in a rush, good-bye, good-bye, it was time for him to go. What a good girl Katie was. What a smart girl. “She’s really coming right along,” he said to Patsy.

“Wait. Don’t go just yet,” Patsy said. “I need to make out your check. Katie, let me borrow your pen. It was so kind of you to give her that pen, Mister Dees. You’ve done wonders for her, really you have.”

Yes, yes, the check, he said, of course. He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was hurrying down the steps, eager to be alone, still stunned by what he had done, and only a few seconds before Patsy had come out on the porch. What if she had been watching from inside the house?

When he left the Mackeys’ he didn’t go straight home, as he had told the fat-fingered policeman. He made it as far as the downtown square before the heat became too much for him, and he had to sit awhile on the courthouse lawn. He slipped off his poplin suit jacket and thought what a fool he was for wearing it, trying to look like an upright man. He had kissed Katie Mackey. God forgive him. He took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, the dark-blue linen handkerchief he had folded carefully so three points made a line of pickets. He shook out the handkerchief and used it to blot the sweat from his forehead. He sat on one of the loafers’ benches in the shade and loosened his necktie. It was nearly five-thirty.

He watched the traffic go by, taking note as he always did of the makes and models of cars: Ford Fairlane, Chevy Impala, Buick Sebring. Later, at home, he would note them in his journal. He would uncap his Parker 51 and jot down the names of the cars and the snatches of song lyrics he heard coming from their radios. He would record the day’s high temperature, ninety-three, any fact that would keep him from thinking of Katie Mackey and what he had done. All those people passing by him, and none of them knew what had happened. None of them had any idea. He tipped back his head and closed his eyes. Then he felt a stir of air, and a shadow fell across his face. When he opened his eyes, he saw Raymond R. looking down on him.

“Teach, you look tapped out.” Raymond R. leaned over and took Mr. Dees’s face between his rough hands. He patted his cheeks. “Jesus in a basket,” he said. “You look like you’re ready to give up the ghost.”

“It’s the heat,” Mr. Dees said.

“Jesus, yes. I know what you mean. Come on. Let’s go home.”

Mr. Dees let Raymond R. take his arm and pull him to his feet. He followed him down the slope of the courthouse lawn. Later, he would think how easy it had been to do this, to put one foot in front of the other and follow Raymond R. to his truck. He was going home. He would lock the doors, pull down the window shades so no one could look in. He would sit inside his house and tremble with the thought of what he had done that afternoon.

By the time they got to Raymond R.’s truck, Mr. Dees was weeping. He was making no sound, but the tears were running down his face.

“Here, now.” Raymond R. opened the truck door, took Mr. Dees by the shoulders, and eased him in. “You just sit there. We don’t have to go nowhere. Not just yet. You tell me when you’re ready.”

It wasn’t bad there in the shade. A breeze moved through the truck. Raymond R. got behind the steering wheel and he didn’t say a word. Mr. Dees appreciated that, the way he just waited, and he remembered the night that Raymond R. had repaired the martin house. They were in Mr. Dees’s garage, and Raymond R. hammered in the finishing nails with such gentle taps, careful not to split the wood. Finally, he laid down his hammer and he told Mr. Dees that any time he needed him he should just call. If he had something that needed getting done, Raymond R. Wright was his man.

Now, in the truck, he was merely waiting, letting Mr. Dees dry his face with his handkerchief, saying nothing that might embarrass him, respecting whatever it was that had shaken him to the point that he could cry in broad daylight on the courthouse square, where anyone passing by would see him.

It touched Mr. Dees, this courtesy, and before he could help himself he had started to speak. He said it all in a whisper, and what he said was this: there were times, he told Raymond R., when he felt like a little boy, the boy he had been all those years ago when numbers had started to make sense to him. He could add one to another and come up with an answer; he could subtract them, multiply, and divide. He could write out an equation and then see the proper moves that would isolate the unknown and solve it. Numbers he understood; they had a science to them, an integrity—they were what they were. But people—ah, people—they were a different story.

He told Raymond R. about the hours he had spent, even as a child, trying to understand where he went wrong when it came to making friends. It wasn’t that his classmates didn’t like him. He had opportunities to join their games, though he was never athletic, and their clubs—he tried Cub Scouts, the Methodist Youth Fellowship, the Junior Jaycees. But he was shy. Once in junior high, during an MYF hayride, a girl said to him, “Why don’t you ever smile? If you’d just smile, you wouldn’t be so weird.” He practiced at home, looking at himself in the mirror, but always there was something unnatural about his smile, a forced and hesitant stretching of his lips that made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Better to ixnay the smile, he decided, no matter what the girl had said. Her name was Bonnie, and because she had made that suggestion to him about smiling more, he got the idea that she liked him. She sat in front of him in their seventh-grade English class, and when she slouched in her chair, her long blond hair often fell over his desk. One day he started wrapping her hair around his pencil. It fascinated him, that hair. It was the color of wheat, and it gleamed in the sunlight slanting through the tall windows. He loved the feel of it on his hands and the way he could wind it around that pencil. Then the teacher noticed what he was doing and she said, “Pity sake, Henry. Leave her hair alone.” Bonnie tried to turn around, but his hands, that pencil, they were in her hair, and when she moved her head, he got all tangled up, and the teacher had to come and patiently work him free, and all the while Bonnie was saying, “Ew, ew. Henry Dees, you’re a creep.”

That was it, he told Raymond R. That’s how it was done. From that day on, to his classmates, he was that kind of boy. “I thought she liked me,” he said. “I guess I figured she’d understand that I liked her, too.”

“You don’t have to say anything else,” Raymond R. said, and then he told Mr. Dees the story of having to eat his lunch each day in the dimly lit hallway outside the school cafeteria. He told him about the steam pipe and how it leaked water on his head and how the kids, the ones who ate the hot lunches in the cafeteria, pointed their fingers at him when they came out into the hallway.

“People,” Mr. Dees said. It shook him to think of all the misery wrought in the world. He found himself telling Raymond R. that he had kissed Katie Mackey. “I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not right. A man like me.”

“Maybe you’re a different kind of man than you figure.” Raymond R.’s voice was soft, kind. It held no note of judgment. “Maybe it’s like that.”

Mr. Dees knew, as much as he hated to admit it, that Raymond R. was right. He’d been going through his life thinking he knew who he was, when all along he was dumb to his own mysterious heart. It was a frightening truth to run up against. Here he was, a man in the middle of his life, lost, desperate now for the chance to atone for kissing Katie and to move on to a better way of seeing himself. He wanted to erase that afternoon from his mind, from his heart. He wanted to go to sleep and not have Katie come into his dreams. He wanted to sleep a dead sleep and not wake, tormented with shame and guilt. He wanted to sleep through the night and let the martins wake him, their dawnsong a joy bubbling up inside him.

“Sometimes.” He couldn’t stop himself. He’d had no idea that he felt this until he heard himself giving it words. “Sometimes,” he said again, “I think if she weren’t here. Katie. If she didn’t exist, I’d be all right.”

He sat there, stunned. What a thing for him to say. He wished he could snatch the words from the air and stuff them back into his mouth.

“How much would that be worth to you?” Raymond R. asked. Mr. Dees was about to tell him that no, it wasn’t like that at all, but before he could speak, Raymond R. said, “Jesus in a basket.” He pointed toward Fourteenth Street, where Katie was coming down the sidewalk on her new bicycle. Mr. Dees recognized the black T-shirt and the orange shorts that she had worn that afternoon. She was barefoot. She stood up on her pedals, and he could feel the hard rubber digging into his own arches. Then her foot slipped, and she almost took a tumble. She got off her bicycle in front of the J. C. Penney store. She leaned the bike on its kickstand and squatted down beside it. The chain had come off its sprocket. “Lordy, Lordy,” Raymond R. said. “Speak of the devil. Yonder’s your little girl.”

July 6

J
UST AFTER DAWN,
the skies opened up, and rain fell. It came in silver sheets, falling straight down. It fell over the cornfields and the wheat fields and the soybean plants in their straight green rows. It fell over the woodlands, soaking down through the canopies of the hickories and the oaks and the sweet gums. It drummed the tin roofs of barns and grain bins. It flattened pastures of timothy and the turkey foot grass on the prairies. It pocked the White River and the lake at Shakamak. It muddied the shale roads and left them slick and black.

The searchers moved through the rain—slowly, deliberately—the way the police had told them. They were just ordinary folks, people who the day before had been wishing for this rain, who had planned, when it finally came, to be enjoying it from inside their homes, their businesses, or else cozied up in their cars, glad for the shelter, thankful that all they had to do was sit there. Nothing required of them but their slow, easy breathing as they imagined going out to their gardens later to check their rain gauges. They’d gab about the rain with their neighbors. “It was a toad strangler,” they’d say, and they’d linger in the cool air and hope that it might be the start of blackberry winter, that cold snap that always seemed to come when the blackberries were in bloom.

But now they were out in the storm, sweeping in lines across fields and meadows, disappearing into woods, down quarry roads. They were looking in ditches, barns, abandoned cars, anything that was in their path, eyes open for any clue that might lead them to Katie Mackey.

In Gooseneck, Mr. Dees watched the rain streak his windows. Down the street, Clare was watching it, too. She was standing at the back door, keeping her eyes on the policemen who were going in and out of the garage. Earlier, they had moved the burn barrel in there to get it out of the rain. They had been there all night. This was after they had taken Ray away in a police car. They didn’t even let him put on clothes. Now the police officers went in and out of the garage, and some of them left in cars and then came back. Sheriff’s officers and state patrolmen arrived, and men in suits with gleaming white shirts. Clare stayed in the house, letting the feeling sink in that nothing was hers any longer—not the house or the garage or the person she was to herself. Nothing in her life. It was all slipping free from her, attaching itself to whatever had happened that night of July 5 while she waited for Ray to pick her up. Whatever had happened then was larger, more potent than she could ever be. She knew that. She knew how Ray must have felt every time the sun overwhelmed him, everything going dark, shrinking in the glare of that bright light.

The soft-spoken policeman, who identified himself as Chief Evers, showed her a search warrant. She listened very carefully to what he was telling her: a little girl, eyewitnesses, a green Ford truck with black circles on the doors.

She kept quiet. She couldn’t think of a thing to say that would make any difference. What could she tell Chief Evers? That Ray had always been good to her? He’d built that porch, that garage. He’d kissed her hand at the Top Hat Inn one night. They’d driven down to Louisville and gotten married, and she’d never regretted it. He called her
darlin’
. He kept her company through the winter, and then spring came, and he lay beside her in the mornings while they listened to the martins singing. What would any of that matter to Chief Evers, who was convinced, he told her, that he had the right man?

Just after dawn, he came into the house and said he needed to ask her some questions. Where had Ray been that night, he wanted to know. What time did he get home? What had he been up to?

She told him that he had gone to look for work. “He dropped me off at Brookstone Manor,” she said, “and I didn’t see him until he came home. It was late. After midnight. I was asleep.”

They were in the kitchen. She was sitting at the dinette. Chief Evers was standing beside her, jotting things down in a notebook. “Clare,” he said. For the first time, he called her by name, and it startled her. “Clare,” he said again, “I want you to help me. You’ll do that, won’t you? I want you to tell me the truth. Do you know a girl named Katie Mackey?”

“I’ve heard tell of the name.” She was worrying a thread coming unraveled from the hem of her housecoat. “Katie Mackey. Yes.”

“From Ray? Have you heard him talk about her? Did he have his eyes on her?”

It was that one word,
eyes
. That was what did it. She was speaking before she even knew what she meant to say. “It’s Henry Dees,” she said. “He’s got short eyes.”

“Short eyes?”

“He’s an uncle.” She was talking fast now. “A puppy lover, a chicken hawk, short eyes. Henry Dees. He likes little girls. He had his eyes on Katie Mackey. You go talk to him.”

MR. DEES
was ready when the police came. In the night, he had found the petal that he had torn from one of Patsy Mackey’s roses on the evening when she and Junior took the kids to the Dairy Queen. What a small thing. A petal from a pink rose faded now to white. Who would think a thing about it if they found that petal, pressed and dried between the pages of Mr. Dees’s Bible? But now everything was suspect. Carefully, he slid the petal onto his palm and carried it out the back door. He crushed it to powder with his thumb and forefinger and then dusted it from his hands, letting the wind, which had come up in the early morning hours, carry it away from him.

The hair—that fluff of brown hair taken from Katie’s brush—it was dawn before Mr. Dees could bring himself to let it go. He took it from its envelope and once more, for the last time, he rubbed it on his cheek, knowing it was a pitiful thing to do. His life had come to that. He let the hair tickle his face, thinking, Katie, my Katie. He started to slip the fluff of hair back into the envelope, but it fell from his fingers, and then a gust of wind caught it and sent it skittering through the air.

A purple martin swooped down from above and snatched the hair up in its beak. The martin curved up and disappeared into one of the houses atop the tall poles. What a thing to have happen. Mr. Dees told himself he would have to get a ladder. He’d have to climb up to that martin house and try to get that fluff of hair. He took a step toward the garage, but then he heard a man’s voice calling for him.

“Mister Dees,” the man was saying from the front of the house. “Henry Dees.”

It was the police chief—Evers, Tom Evers. Once upon a time, he had been a student in Mr. Dees’s calculus class. A soft-spoken boy with a sharp mind. The center on the basketball team. Mr. Dees remembered his square jaw and thick neck, the sad look in his eyes that told Mr. Dees he had accepted the fact that he was sturdy and dependable. He had resigned himself to always being someone people could count on. When Mr. Dees looked at him in class all those years ago, he saw the boy he wished he had been.

“Hello, Tom,” he said.

“You’re up early, Mister Dees.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yes, sir,” Tom Evers said. Thunder was rumbling in the west and the first drops of rain were hitting the windows. “Mister Dees, I suppose you’ve heard about Katie Mackey.”

By this time, few people in town didn’t know that Katie had disappeared. They’d either heard it the night before or as they rose and turned on their radios. Katie Mackey, nine years old, four feet three inches tall. Seventy-two pounds. Green eyes. Brown hair. Last seen wearing orange shorts and a black T-shirt. The police claimed they had the man who had kidnapped her—Raymond R. Wright, a construction worker from Gooseneck—but he wasn’t saying anything that would help them find her.

Only a few months before, in March, the biggest news in town had been the high school basketball team winning the state championship. There was a parade down High Street. It was Sunday, and the team and cheerleaders rode on fire trucks. Sirens blew. The cheerleaders waved green-and-white pom-poms. The players, many of them in their green letterman’s jackets, held the championship trophy aloft. Fans lined the parade route and later crowded into the high school gymnasium, where the coach and several of the players spoke to their adoring fans.

The next day, Monday, the
Evening Register
reported that Mrs. Madeline Brokaw had picked the year’s first ripe tomato. She found a volunteer plant in her backyard in early December, dug it up, put it in a flowerpot, carried it into her house, and set it near a south window, where it would get sun. It grew to be five feet tall, and on March 10, she picked the first tomato. It was a Golden Boy, she reported. A yellow tomato, sleek and bright, large enough to cover her palm.

That was the news folks talked about: the basketball team, the first ripe tomato, hamburgers five for a dollar at the Dog ’n’ Suds, the grand opening of the Super Foodliner, the Carnival of Spring Fashion show at the high school.

But now, on this Thursday morning in July, all anyone could think about was Katie Mackey. Downtown, all the stores were closed. Everyone who was able was out in the rain with the search parties, sweeping through the fields and the woods. They could tell, though no one had the heart to say it, that the storm was one of those cloudbursts that came after a string of humid days, came as a torment really. Soon the clouds would break, and the sun would come out and heat up all that rain. The ground would steam, and the temperature would inch back up into the nineties. The gnats would come out, and the horseflies. The searchers would slog through the mud, hold the sting of sweat in their eyes. Soon there would be search dogs, and airplanes with infrared sensors, and Margot Cherry, who claimed she could see in her head what everyone had missed with their eyes.

But first there were these people out in the downpour, these gray figures, shoulders hunched against the rain, and what no one spoke was the secrets they carried in their hearts, the weight of all their sins. That day and all the days after, every bit of wrong they’d ever done was knotted in their chests. What they thought, but never said, was this: It should have been any of us but her. If God had any interest in punishing the wicked, it should have been us. They had gone about their business the evening before, not taking note of that girl, that man, that bicycle, that truck. Only now were they starting to come forward, to say what they remembered, hoping that they weren’t speaking too late.

AT THE
Mackey house, the grandfather clock in the foyer was ticking, its pendulum swinging back and forth. Patsy, who had been awake all night, opened the cabinet and threw the lever that stopped the works. It was two minutes after seven.

“I couldn’t stand it,” she said in a quiet voice, hoarse and weary. “That noise.”

All night, Gilley had listened to her crying, praying, bargaining with God. If only he would bring Katie home to them, she would never again let her out of her sight. And she would tell Junior exactly how she felt about that night in Indianapolis, and she would admit her sin—right now she’d confess it, and please, dear God, wouldn’t he forgive her and see to it that Katie was safe? At one point, she got down on her knees at the back door where Katie’s sandals were still on the mat, and she pressed her hands together and held them at her chest, and her lips moved so quickly with her prayer that Gilley couldn’t tell what she was saying in her fast, desperate mumble of words. He didn’t know what she was saying, and he didn’t know what she meant about that night in Indianapolis or what she had to confess. He had his own guilt. At the supper table, he had told his father that Katie hadn’t taken back her library books that day, and that had started the chain of events that had brought them, finally, to this moment, two minutes after seven on a Thursday morning in July, when the rain was falling and they had no idea where Katie was.

He tried to comfort his mother. He rubbed his hand in slow circles over her back, telling himself to remember this, to memorize the way it felt to touch her with tenderness, to store it away so he would know it all through the years, no matter what happened from this point on. This touching, this love: he wanted it to be theirs forever.

“They’ll find her,” he said. “They have to find her.”

At first, after they had discovered Katie’s bicycle in front of the J. C. Penney, Gilley had told his father that maybe she had left it there and walked home. “The chain’s off,” he said. “She couldn’t get it back on.”

“She would have pushed it,” Junior Mackey said. “Don’t be stupid.”

By this time, the library was closed. As they walked around the courthouse square, Gilley imagined that at any moment they would see Katie gazing in a store window, enchanted with something that had caught her eye, or at the Rexall Drug on the penny scale that would tell her weight and fortune. “Gilley, Gilley, Gilley,” she would say the way she always did whenever she wanted to show him something. “Look.”

At the Rexall, there was no one but the pharmacist and the high school girl who worked the cosmetics counter. Neither of them had seen Katie.

“Well, she’s somewhere,” Junior said, and the pharmacist, a round-faced man who wore a red bow tie, said he was sure she’d turn up soon. “Kids,” he said, and then he shook his head.

But she didn’t turn up. She wasn’t at Rene Cherry’s house or the city park or the Dairy Queen. Later, after they had given up and called the police, Gilley stayed with his mother, as his father ordered, while Junior rode through the Heights in a police car, revisiting with Chief Evers all the places where Katie might have gone.

All night, police cars cruised up and down the streets in the Heights and downtown around the square and out Tenth Street past the glassworks. They knocked on people’s doors. Have you seen this little girl? they asked, showing them Katie’s school picture, the one Patsy had given them from her photo album. In the picture, the ends of Katie’s hair curled over her shoulders and onto the front of her jumper. Her blouse was covered with a pattern of roses and daisies. Her hair was pinned back at the temples with two gold barrettes, as it had been that evening when she had ridden away to the library. The next afternoon, the picture would be on the
Evening Register
’s front page. Her round face and big eyes. A pretty nine-year-old girl, grinning to beat the band.