The Bright Forever (16 page)

Clifford Ford, who tended bar at the American Legion: “He come in with Monk Stevens. Must have been one-thirty. ‘Hi-dee-ho,’ he said. ‘I’m Colonel Raymond R. Wright, United States Air Force, retired.’ He had a membership card, Post #591 down in Macon, Georgia. So I give him what he asked for, a Budweiser, and one for Monk, though Lord knows by that time he didn’t need it. You know Monk and the booze. Story too sad to tell. Anyway, that blowhard, that Raymond R., he got under my skin, squawking about how he’d been base commander up at Scott over in Illinois and before that at Robins in Georgia. Said he had two sets of twin boys—‘Now that’s something, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of starch I’ve got where it counts.’ Claimed those four boys were all in the Air Force, dropping napalm over in Vietnam. ‘How old are they?’ I asked him. That got him all flustrated. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘Old enough to serve their country just like their old man.’ Finally, I’d had enough of his gab, so around about three o’clock I cut him off. He put his arm around Monk. ‘You’ve got to serve us,’ he said. ‘I’m Colonel Wright and this boy was a command sergeant major under me.’ I just laughed. What a peckerhead. I was in the Air Force myself and I knew. No such rank as a command sergeant major.”

Tubby Carl, who played pool with him at the VFW: “He was alone. Yeah, I knowed him. Married Bill Mains’s widow, Clare. Knowed him and didn’t like him. I run the table on him, and he said he’d buy me a drink. ‘Let’s drink to all you bastards who never gave me and Clare a chance,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll drink to the asshole who put me out of work.’ And that’s what I done. Just exactly that. Liquor’s liquor, and I’m no fool. If you’re buying the drink, I don’t give a good tinker’s fart what you think of me. Bring it on.”

Betty Mallow, who was driving up Fourteenth Street to the Super Foodliner: “I saw him cross the street, headed toward the courthouse. That man. The one you’re asking about. He waited for the ‘Walk’ sign before he crossed. He went over to his truck and he put some money in the parking meter, and I thought it was funny because by that time—it was after five—the parking was free.”

Emma Short, who was sitting on a bench outside the Little Farm Market on Tenth Street: “The truck came from the south. I know it was after seven because I was listening to the Cardinals game on my transistor radio. It was the top of the first. Bob Gibson on the mound against the Phillies. This truck came into town from the south. I couldn’t see if there was a little girl. But I can tell you this. The man driving that truck was Raymond R. Wright. I picked him out of a police lineup. He looked over at me when he went past. He even tooted his horn. Now it gives me chills to think about it. He looked right at me. Him.”

So we knew all that, but the one thing we didn’t know was how to find Katie. And Raymond R. Wright still wasn’t saying a word. We even knew that Tom Evers had gotten so desperate for answers that he had gone to Margot Cherry, the woman up in the Heights who claimed to have ESP.

“
J
,” she told him. “Look for the letter
J
, and you’ll find her.”

J
, we kept thinking as we lay in our beds.
J
. But we didn’t have any more of a clue than Tom Evers what it might mean.

Mr. Dees

S
O THAT MUCH
you know, but you don’t know this. You don’t know that on Sunday morning, close to one o’clock, Junior came to my house and said, in a low, even voice, “I want you to bring him to me. Raymond Wright.” He was carrying an attach case. He laid it on my kitchen table and opened it. The bills were in bundles, neatly stacked. “I want you to bail him out.” He closed the attach case, and he looked me square in the eyes. “I want you to do what I say.”

He told me he’d hashed it out with Patsy. He’d told her that Tom Evers was so out of leads, so down-to-go-for-broke, that he’d gone to Margot Cherry. “A woman who claims she has that ESP,” Junior told me. “It’s clear Tom doesn’t know where to turn, and time’s just slipping away, and I’ve got to do what I can for Katie. I said to Patsy, ‘Now, I can’t stand by and let this go on. I’ll get that Raymond Wright. I’ll make him talk.’” He was at the end of something. I could see that. “Henry,” he said, “I can’t do this alone.” Someone would recognize him, he told me—the police, Raymond R.—and everything would go haywire. They’d know what he was up to—a tormented father out for revenge. That’s why he needed me. He said I had a way about me—collected, dignified. When I said something, people couldn’t help but take it as true. “You’ve made it plain what you think of Katie. You’ve said you’ll do whatever you can to help me. Well, now I’m asking.”

I was to drive to the jail in Georgetown—that’s where they had Raymond R., Junior said, that was what Tom Evers had let slip. I was to say I’d come to post bail. If anyone asked, I’d say I was family—Raymond R.’s brother from Minnesota. I’d open that attach case full of cash, and what else would the police be able to do but bring Raymond R. out of his cell and turn him loose?

“He’ll trust you,” Junior said. “He won’t know I’ll be waiting. Believe me, I’ve thought this all out.”

Junior would wait in my car, crouched down in the backseat, while I fetched Raymond R. from the jail. “You’ll park in the shadows. If Wright sees me, he’ll spook.” Junior said he would wait until I’d driven away from the jail. Then he’d rise up. Then he’d be calling the shots.

He reached around behind him and pulled a gun out of the waistband of his trousers. “This is a Colt Python,” he said. “A .357 Magnum. I’m going to put it right up to Raymond R.’s skull. You don’t worry about that. You just keep driving. We’ll come back to town. We’ll stop at my glassworks. Then we’ll get down to business.”

It was a muggy night, starless. Cloud cover hung over the moon. It was the kind of night that always made me wish for the cool days of October, bright days full of sun and sharp air and crows calling from the trees.

I had to sit down. I bowed my head, thinking how I’d given away my quiet life. I noticed that one of my shoes was untied, and I bent over to see to it. I fumbled with the laces—my fingers were trembling so—and finally I gave up and sat back in my chair.

“A gun,” I said. “Good mercy.”

Junior knelt on the linoleum floor, and he took my laces and tied them. How many times, I wondered, had he done the same for Katie? I recalled the rhyme from my own childhood, the one my mother had used when she was teaching me how to tie my shoes:
Build a tepee. Come inside. Close it tight so we can hide.

“I can’t do it, Junior,” I finally said. As much as I wanted to agree to what he was asking, I knew I’d never be able to make myself say yes. I had to admit, with a certainty that pointed out the difference between him and me, that I’d never go to the same lengths as he would for the sake of Katie. “I just can’t,” I said again. “You wouldn’t want me to, Junior. Right now you’re sure that you do, but think of everything that could go wrong. Someday you’ll thank me for saying no. You should go home now. You need to be with Patsy and Gilley, not out in the dead of night with this gun.”

He got back on his feet and gave me a hard look. “You just keep your mouth shut,” he said. “If you won’t help me, at least you keep it quiet what I told you I mean to do.”

“Will you go home?” I asked. “Promise me that, Junior.”

But he wouldn’t answer, and all I could do was watch him walk out my door. He had that money, and he knew any number of men who would do what he needed. I’m certain there were even men for hire who would do that sort of thing, show up in the dead of night and claim that Raymond R.’s family had sent them to post bond.

That’s what someone did, someone who never came forward to claim the deed. Of course, there was speculation. In the days that followed, whenever Junior shook hands with someone in the Rexall, or clapped someone on the back at the country club, or leaned in close to whisper to someone at church, people thought, There, he’s the one. I heard rumors—I even heard names—but I was never able to say for certain who it was who brought Raymond R. to Junior that night, nor could Tom Evers. Some even said that Tom was in on it, and though I can’t say he wasn’t, it would pain me to know that about him.

It happened like so many things did in our small town—on the q.t. It happened and then it got hushed up, and for years and years after, people were left to gossip about what really went on. Sometimes I wonder if that man is still alive and how he lives with what he brought to happen. All I can say for sure is it wasn’t me, even though later I was there at the glassworks when Junior finally had Raymond R. That much, I’ll hold as true.

Gilley

I
KNEW WHAT
my father meant to do. That night, Saturday, when we were still no closer to finding Katie, he called me into his office, and he closed the door behind us, and he told me to sit down.

“I want you to listen to me.” He leaned against his desk. “Gilley, I don’t want you to say a word.” He told me Tom Evers didn’t know which way to turn. That much was clear. “Taking advice from Margot Cherry,” my father said. “That’s his investigation? Jesus.” I could tell that he had made up his mind about something. “Here’s the story, Gilley.” He walked around behind his desk and opened a drawer. He took out the handgun he kept there, his Colt Python. “I’m going to make that son of a bitch Wright talk.”

How my father got the money so quickly, I’ve never known. I was too young to know it then, and in the years that have passed neither he nor I have mentioned it. All I know is that at some time and in some way outside my knowing, he had come up with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, 10 percent of Raymond R. Wright’s bond.

My father showed me the attach case and the bundles of bills. “When you have money,” he said, “you can get what you want.” He was going to use Mr. Dees to get Raymond R. out of jail, and he was going to take him to the glassworks, and he was by God going to get somewhere. He had things in motion. After three days of nothing, he had a plan. “You need to know this, Gilley. You’re not a boy anymore. None of us are anything like what we were. I’m going to do this, and you need to know it because this is about family. This is about standing up and doing what you have to do. Do you understand?”

“I want to go with you,” I said.

“Negative.” He reached around and stuck the Colt into his waistband. “I’m not sure you could handle it.”

When we came out of my father’s office, my mother was pacing about in the foyer. She had on a light summer robe over her nightgown. The sash was undone, and one end was dragging the floor. She held the robe closed, her arms crossed over her chest. She turned to face my father, and I could tell that she was waiting for some sign that what he had already discussed with her was indeed going to happen. He was going after Raymond R. Wright.

My father went to her, and he picked up the stray end of her sash and threaded it through its loop. He tied the sash and then leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. She looked at him a moment, and I saw that her eyes were glistening. Then she crossed the foyer to where I stood at the foot of the stairs. She raised her right hand, and very gently she laid it against my cheek. I knew she was telling me, without having to say a word, that whatever might happen this night, she would still love me, and it was all I could do to stand there without breaking down, overwhelmed by the faith women could hold in men.

What else could we do but try this one last thing to find Katie? We always believed that sooner or later she’d come back to us. My mother kept her faith by reading her
Daily Devotions
. Each night, I said my prayers, asking God to keep my sister safe.

My father, though, believed in the power of money, and the sway of a Colt Python .357 Magnum. “It’s just persuasion,” he said.

I loved him for his optimism. I recalled a joke he’d told earlier that summer about an airplane that flew itself, no pilots, no crew, all computer gizmos and whatnot. On its first flight, as it taxied down the runway, the passengers heard a tape-recorded voice:
Ladies and gentlemen, just sit back and relax. Nothing can go wrong .  .  .  nothing can go wrong .  .  .  nothing can go wrong .  .  .  nothing can go wrong .  .  .

Clare

T
HE CAR WAS
in the drive, poked in back there by Henry Dees’s garage. There was a light on in the back of the house, and I could see a man moving past the windows. I didn’t know who he was.

The night before, I’d come because I couldn’t bear to be alone. Henry let me sit in his house. He turned on nearly every light—somehow, he knew I needed that—and I was thankful to sit on his couch and sip the tea that he brewed.

There were paintings on his walls: a horse, a windmill, a ragtag girl with sad eyes. He did them with paint-by-number sets, he said, just something to help him pass the time. He talked about the purple martins and how, come August, they would start to gather in flocks, getting ready for their long flight south. They’d cackle and twitter. Oh, what a racket they’d make, he said, like they were carping about having to leave their cozy summer home. For weeks, they’d say this long good-bye, and then one day they’d be gone.

He talked like that for a while, and then he stopped. We sipped our tea, and finally I said what I’d come to: “I saw him today. Ray. That police chief—that Tom Evers—he drove me down to Georgetown. He said, ‘Maybe he’ll tell you something.’ I took some clothes for Ray. That night they come for him they took him away in his underthings. I thought he’d need something.”

“Georgetown?” Henry Dees said.

“That’s where they’ve got him,” I said. “To keep him safe.”

Georgetown is a little town like ours. All the county seats in this part of Indiana are pretty much the same: a courthouse, a jail in the basement, stores, cafs, maybe a bus stop, all around the square. Take me out of Tower Hill and put me in Georgetown—or Jasper or Brazil or Martinsville for that matter—and I’d pretty much have the lay of the land.

But that Friday, when I stepped out of Tom Evers’s police car and shielded my eyes against the sun, I felt like I was in a place I didn’t know. Every which way I turned, the sun blinded me. Its glare was on the cement sidewalks, the chrome bumpers of cars, the windshields, the courthouse windows, the steps that led down to the outside door of the jail.

I was afraid. I don’t mind saying so. Think of it: the man you love taken away in the night, arrested, and for something so horrible you can’t stand to imagine it. I would have done anything to put it out of my mind. But I had to think on it, so I took a picture of the Mackeys’ house on account I wanted something to look at, something to make me understand that this was real. I was so desperate to believe it was all a dream—so stupid with hope—I swore I could see Katie in that picture. That’s probably part of the story that you’ve heard, another reason for you to say,
What a fool
.

There were facts. I’d seen Ray burning his clothes. Pages out of her library books were in our burn barrel. By the time I saw him in the Georgetown jail, I knew that what everyone was saying was true. Ray had done off with Katie Mackey.

So what could I say when I was finally with him but “Ray, can you tell me where you took her? Can you at least do that?”

He looked sick, his face all caved in and his eyes sunk way back in his head. “I’ve had the sweats,” he said. We were sitting in a little room on two straight-back chairs. Our knees were touching. Tom Evers was outside the door. I could hear him talking to someone. “Clare, I’ve been in trouble with dope.” Ray held out his hand, and his fingers were trembling. “I’ve had the shakes, but Clare, I’m getting myself clean. I haven’t been able to hold anything in my stomach, but I’m getting better. I’m almost at the end of this thing. You’ll see. I’ll be right as rain when they finally see they’re wrong and they let me out of here.”

“They’re not wrong, Ray.” I could barely say it. The words stuck in my throat. “Ray, that little girl.”

He put his hands up under his arms and tried to keep them from shaking. “So that’s the way it is?” he said. “You’re ready to hang me?”

“No one’s going to hang you,” I said. “They just want to know what you did with the girl.”

That’s when he smiled at me. It was a crazy grin, like any second he’d start bawling. “I told you, Clare. I’m going to get myself right. Darlin’, maybe it’s a good thing I’m here. Now I can get off the dope and come home a whole man. Oh, won’t that be something? Name your paradise, hon.”

I couldn’t do it. I didn’t say a word. In a shaky voice, he started to sing that old hymn, the one I sometimes sang around the house. I didn’t know that he’d been listening, had taken it into his heart.

But the night will soon be o’er;

In the bright, the bright forever,

We shall wake, to weep no more.

I almost reached out and touched him then, but I didn’t. I knew if I sat there another minute, I’d never be able to get beyond everything that was going to happen from that day on. My life would disappear inside of his. So I got up. I didn’t even say good-bye. I left him sitting there. From the hall, I could hear him calling my name; that’s the voice I still hear calling,
Clare, Clare.

When I was finished with my story, Henry said, “He didn’t tell you anything?”

“No,” I told him. “Nothing.”

We sat there awhile longer. A cuckoo clock on the wall struck midnight, and the little redheaded bird came out his door and made his noise.

Then Henry said, “Clare, you can stay here if you want. If it’s too hard right now to be in your house. I could make a bed up for you on the couch.”

I can tell you it was tempting. All those lights were so merry, and the teacup was warm in my hands. I could imagine then what I would one day have—a life of hiding. I won’t even tell you now where I am, only to say I’m not in that place anymore, not in Gooseneck. That place is gone. The glassworks has been torn down, and without it to work at, no one needed those houses. The last time I was there—you didn’t even know it, did you, didn’t know I’d snuck into town?—I went down that Tenth Street spur and saw the empty lots grown over with honeysuckle and wild blackberry. I had to look close to see any sign that those houses had been there at all: a patch of concrete step at Leo and Lottie Marks’s, a few cement blocks left from where Ray had built that porch, a single purple martin house, leaning over on its pole at Henry Dees’s.

The purple martins come each spring where I live now, and when I hear their song, I think of Henry and that night when he offered me his couch. I thought for a minute about staying there and waking in the morning to the martins’ singing. But what would that have been like? Me, sleeping the night there? What if someone knew it? Wouldn’t that make for talk? Me and Henry Dees.

So I told him, “No, thank you. I just come to say my piece. I thank you for listening to it.”

“You come anytime,” he said. “I mean that.”

I told him, “I know you do.”

So I was back on this night. Actually, it had got so late, we’d turned into Sunday morning—the ninth day of July. I’d come to tell Henry what I’d seen plain as day in the dream I’d woke up from. It was me and Ray in Honeywell, and the quail was in the grass, and Ray had his binoculars up to his eyes and he was looking out on the hills and the old roads snaking back into the woods. It came to me in the dream that he wasn’t spying for those smokestacks at that power plant in Brick Chapel at all. “Ray,” I said, “what do you see?” “Junk,” he told me. “A dump back there in the woods.” He let me look through the binoculars, and when I did, they turned into one of those kaleidoscopes. All I saw were whirling colors—pieces of bright glass. Then everything cleared, and a blinding light came into the kaleidoscope, and it was like all the trees in the woods had fallen and every bit of color had gone away. There was just this light, so bright I swore Heaven must have opened up, and I knew it had to mean something—that place, that Honeywell—so I came to tell it to Henry. I couldn’t tell it to the police myself, not after the fool I’d made showing Tom Evers that picture.

But there was that man in Henry’s house, and pretty soon he was coming out the back door. I was afraid that he might see me, so I slipped back into the shadows. I turned around and went back home, thinking that what I’d come to say could wait till morning.