The Bright Forever (18 page)

July 5

R
AYMOND R.
crossed the White River. Fog was starting to settle in the low-lying bottom land. The truck crested a hill, and as it nosed down the other side, he could see in the headlight beams the smoky swirls of fog, and for a moment, his head electric with LSD, he imagined he was flying over the tops of clouds.

Then Katie said, “It’s almost dark.” He remembered her then, the girl.

“Dark ain’t nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “You’re a big girl, ain’t you?”

He could swear she was shrinking. Each time he glanced at her, she seemed farther away from him. Finally, she was so small he thought he could pick her up and stick her in his pocket. Like Tom Thumb, he thought. That was a story he’d always liked. Tom Thumb hidden away in places too small and tight for ordinary folks to go: a mouse’s hole, a snail’s shell. Tom Thumb swallowed up by a cow and then rescued, only to be eaten by a wolf. Tom Thumb always trying to tell people where he was.
Dear father,
he cried out,
I am here in the wolf’s inside.
How dearly Raymond R. had loved the end of that tale: the mother and father blessed again with their wee son, hugging and kissing him, telling him they would never part with him
for all the kingdoms of the world
.

When he was a boy—
Raymond
, everyone called him, never
Ray
—and he had to sit outside the school cafeteria eating his fried-egg sandwich while water from the steam pipe dripped on his head, he wished he could be as small as Tom Thumb, so small no one would see him. Then, as he got older, he started to take note of how boys could swagger through the world. Boys having hamburgs and malteds with their best girls at the Snow White Sandwich Shop, or barbecue red hots and chili at the Club Caf. Life was percolating. Couples danced in the ballroom at the Northwood Hotel and later strolled arm in arm down Mitchell Street. One night, when he was coming out of the A&P, he caught the gardenia scent of cologne as a boy and a girl passed by, and the tang of Old Spice aftershave. The girl had red lips and her cheeks were bright with rouge. The boy’s face was closely shaved, his hair combed and dressed with tonic. “Hi-dee-ho,” he said, and Raymond R. thought that was marvelous.
Hi-dee-ho
. Just like that. Just like that boy owned the world. That’s when Raymond R. decided he’d make some noise. He’d make sure everyone, by God, saw him.

So he tried to join the service, and when no one would have him, he stole the Army Air Corps uniform and went to the Northwood Hotel and danced with the girl under the blue lights, and that was what he kept trying to get back to, that top-of-the-world, money-in-your-pocket feeling. Something to last him the rest of his life.

Now the truck was moving through fog, and the thoughts of Tom Thumb and the memories of the dripping steam pipe and the boy who said hi-dee-ho and the girl under the blue lights were gone. Raymond R. lifted his hands from the steering wheel and said, “Wheeee!” He was laughing. “Wheeee!” he said again.

They were gliding through the fog, and for a good while there was only the sound of the truck’s tires bumping over the seams in the pavement and the rush of wind coming in through the open windows.

Raymond R. turned off the highway onto a gravel road. He drove another mile north and then found the old shale road that snaked back into heavy woods, the road he had seen through his binoculars the evening he and Clare had driven to Honeywell.

In the woods, all the light went out, and there they were in the dark. The road was narrow and sapling branches whipped up against the fenders and doors, squeaking as they scraped over the paint. The truck tires sank down into the muck of mud and shale. The air smelled of wet, moldering leaves. Trees rose up in the headlight beams, thick trunks laced with wild grapevine. Somewhere in the woods, a screech owl screamed.

“Mister Ray,” Katie said.

“Yes, darlin’?” The sweet tone of her voice—hushed and tender—choked him.

“Mister Ray, I’m not to be out after dark. When it gets night, I take my bath, my mother brushes my hair, and I go to bed.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“My eyes are.”

“So are mine, darlin’. Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

The road opened up to a clearing off to the right where people had long ago dumped old refrigerators and stoves and washing machines. They tilted and lay over one another. There were piles of glass bottles and tin cans, long ago gone to rust. Broken-handle shovels and rakes and hoes. Old mattresses and bedsprings. Dented-in gas cans and oil drums.

“A heaven’s worth of junk,” Raymond R. said.

He shut off the truck’s engine and the headlights, and it was so black all around him, for an instant, he thought he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.

Then Katie said, “I’m hungry.”

He remembered then where he was. “Shh,” he told her. “Now be quiet. I just want to sit awhile.”

He thought of Clare, waiting for him to pick her up at Brookstone Manor. She’d be worried. She’d probably give up and walk home. It was the thought of that, her two-mile walk to Gooseneck in the dark, that nearly broke him. He remembered the night he had started home from Mr. Dees’s, so tired he could barely tote that ladder, and Clare had come out to help him, had come out in spite of the neighbors who were watching and gossiping no doubt about that old woman and her good-for-nothing man. Together, they carried that ladder home. That was love, he decided. That should have been enough. He should have told her that night. He should have said, “Clare, I’m messed up on junk. Please help me.” But he didn’t, and now here he was, deep in the woods on a road that year by year was closing over with brush.

His head wouldn’t work right. He kept trying to figure out how this was happening. The girl had simply been there on the courthouse square, her bicycle chain slipped from its sprocket, and Henry Dees had said he wanted her gone.

“All right,” Raymond R. said now to Katie, but really he had no idea what he was talking about.

He was an idiot, a fool. All the names he could remember people calling him over the years now spun around in his head. He was a
dipshit, screw jack, numb nuts, suck wad, fuckup
.

“Come here, darlin’,” he said to Katie. The LSD kept jacking his head like he was a lamp with a short in the wire—bright and burning one minute, then blinking on and off. He had to pick up Clare at Brookstone Manor, he thought. Then he remembered the time for that had already gone. “Just come over here with old Ray.”

Katie was trying to find the North Star, the one her father had told her to look for if she was lost, the one that would lead her home. But the trees blacked out the sky. “Mister Ray,” she said in a quiet voice. “Do you know where we are?”

“We’re just here, darlin’.” He took her by the arm and pulled her over onto his lap. He could smell the strawberry scent of her hair. “Just you and me. Right here.”

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Hush,” he told her, rocking her in his arms. “Scared’s no good. It’s too late for that.”

Later, he would find himself tromping through a muddy field, crouching down on his heels, covering his ears, looking up at the sky filled with stars. He would make his way back into the woods, back to that shale road and his truck, and he would drive back to Gooseneck, stopping first for something to eat because he was starved to death.

In the days that followed, Katie’s voice would almost come back to him. It would be a sound lingering—the last fading note of a clock chiming, birdsong in the early dawn when he was coming up from the land of dreams—a stirring of air, one impossible to say he heard, one that vanished before he could call it by name.

July 9

M
R. DEES
couldn’t sleep. When he got home from Junior Mackey’s glassworks, he tried to lie down and rest, but too much was going on inside his head. He was thinking about Katie. He was thinking that if he had been a better man, he wouldn’t have kissed her on the swing—wouldn’t have let the love he felt for her get out of hand. He would have stayed to finish her lesson, and then time that Wednesday would have fallen differently. Patsy Mackey would have got supper on the table a tad later. Mr. Dees would have walked straight home instead of stopping to gather himself on the courthouse lawn. Even if Katie had come uptown to take back her library books, he wouldn’t have been there to see her, and that little difference in time would have meant that her path and Raymond R.’s more than likely would never have intersected. Maybe he would have gone to Brookstone Manor to see Clare; maybe he would have gone home to Gooseneck. Enough maybes to last a lifetime, but the one thing Mr. Dees knew without a doubt was that he was the one who had brought Katie and Raymond R. together.

Just after dawn, he went out to his garage to fetch his ladder. He’d been thinking about the fluff of Katie’s hair that the martin had snatched up and carried into his roost. He remembered the evening Raymond R. had helped him repair the broken martin house and then reset it on its pole. The Cooper’s hawk had passed over, and he thought now that he should have seen that for what it was: an omen of wicked things to come.

When he came out of the garage, he saw Clare coming up the street. The light was gray and there was a haze over Gooseneck, but he could tell that it was Clare, and he could see that she was walking as fast as she could, her arms swinging with purpose. He went out through his yard to meet her.

“I got something the police ought to know,” she said. “I want you to tell them. I come last night, but there was a man in your house.”

He didn’t tell her about Junior. He didn’t tell her what had happened at the glassworks. “It was about the girl,” he said. “Katie. It was more questions about her.”

“Yes, the girl,” Clare said. “That’s what I come to say. I know where they ought to look.”

LIGHT WAS BREAKING
when Junior drove into his garage. He and Gilley got out of the car, and together they pulled the garage door down. On the drive home, they hadn’t said a word. Now Junior told Gilley to take off his clothes. There was blood on his shirt, blood on Junior’s trousers. They had put Raymond R. into the glass furnace; the rest had been heat and chemistry—matter breaking down, something solid becoming liquid and then vapor.

Gilley did what his father told him. He took off his shirt and pants. He folded each of them, a habit he couldn’t break from his job at Penney’s, and he laid them in the plastic garbage bag his father fetched. He held the bag open while his father undressed and stuffed his shirt and trousers inside.

The two of them stood there in their boxer shorts and T-shirts. “I’ll look after you,” Junior finally said. “If this comes out, don’t worry. I’ll tell them you were here, asleep. Your mother will swear to it. You’ll be all right. No one has to ever know that you had any part in this.”

“What about Mister Dees?” There were bruises on Gilley’s throat where Raymond R.’s fingers had dug into his skin, and his voice was hoarse.

“I told you. He’s in it, too. He can’t afford to say a word.”

THE FOG
was lifting from the lowlands by the time Mr. Dees started toward Georgetown. Clare had told him about a place called Honeywell and the old shale roads snaking back into the brush and woods. Go across the White River on Route 59, she told him. He wrote down the directions with his fountain pen. Turn down the first gravel road that heads back north. Look for a road that goes off into the woods, one of those shale roads. He wrote down the directions and then capped his pen. His fingers were trembling so badly he couldn’t get the pen clipped to his shirt pocket and had to let it slip down into the pocket and lie in its pouch.

“I might be crazy,” Clare said, “but I got reasons to think that’s where Ray took the girl. You tell the police that. You will, won’t you?”

“I’ll tell them,” he said, but he didn’t. After the episode at the glassworks, he didn’t want anything to do with the police. He almost told Clare he couldn’t go where she was telling him to go; he thought about locking his doors and opening them for no one. Then he thought of Katie, and he knew he would do what Clare was asking of him.

He got in his Comet and drove down Route 59. The highway to Georgetown dropped straight south for fourteen miles and then angled to the west along the curve of the river. It was just after dawn, and the only traffic was a single set of headlights coming from the south, a farm truck, an early bird headed who knew where. Other than that, the only signs of life were the pole lights still burning in barn lots and the occasional lamp in a window at a farmhouse. For the most part, there were the long stretches of prairie, and the white stripe down the center of the highway and the flashing yellow caution light at Alinda, a sleepy little wink-you’ll-miss-it town nine miles north of Georgetown. Mr. Dees slowed the Comet, gliding past a Texaco station, and across the street, a grocery store with a neon Kool cigarette sign flickering in the window. Then he pressed down on the accelerator, and the Comet gathered speed. The rush of wind through the open windows carried the sharp smell of cut hay curing in the fields.

Just east of Georgetown, he crossed the river bridge like Clare said he should. Then he turned down the first gravel road, and soon he was in Honeywell. He drove past the run-down houses, following the road as it turned from gravel to shale and then dirt. He pulled off to the side and got out of the car. The heat was coming on. Not a breath of air, the locusts chirring, and the sun full up, and somewhere in the distance a woodpecker drilling at a tree, the
rat-a-tat
carrying a good long ways.

Mr. Dees walked down the road, not knowing where he was headed, not caring that his shoes and the bottoms of his pants legs were getting muddy. The road swung out wide of the woods and opened onto a piece of bottomland where a farmer had planted corn.

It was there, in the soft ground, that Mr. Dees saw the footprints and a ragged patch of black cloth he feared had come from Katie’s T-shirt.

INSIDE THE HOUSE
, Patsy Mackey heard the garage door come down. She was upstairs in the bathroom, drying herself after stepping out of the shower, the first time she had bathed that week. She’d worn the same pair of golf shorts and sleeveless blouse she’d had on that Wednesday evening when she’d stepped onto the patio and called for Gilley.

Now, to her surprise, she felt no need to hurry. She waited a few seconds, hoping to hear the sound of the door opening to the kitchen and then Gil calling for her as he bounded up the stairs with news—good news—about Katie. Water dripped from the showerhead. Patsy slipped into a robe and moved out into her bedroom. The clock on the night table ticked. When enough time had passed and there was still no sign that Gil had come in from the garage, she picked up a comb from her dresser and ran it through her hair. She watched herself in the mirror, and it was as if she were watching some other woman; it was the way she had felt that night in Indianapolis when she had let Gil lay his hand against the small of her back and nudge her across the doctor’s threshold.

Now she took her time getting dressed. She laid out fresh underclothes and went to the closet, thinking she should put on something beside golf shorts and those bright summer blouses she favored, something more somber, something more in keeping with—and here the truth hit her, the thing she had been fearing all night while she waited for Gil to come home, and her legs went weak and tears came to her eyes—something more appropriate for a woman who had lost her child, a mother in mourning.

She was sitting on the bed, threading a needle, when Junior came into the room. She heard his footsteps, but she wouldn’t look at him, taking comfort instead in the concentration it required to sight the thread through the needle’s eye. She meant to reinforce the hem in a pair of dark-gray slacks she hadn’t worn since winter. The hem had come loose one night at the country club and she’d thought, Well, there’s something to see to, but she’d put the slacks away in her closet and then spring had come and she’d never gotten around to her mending.

Now she tied off the thread, her fingers nimble and quick. Her robe had fallen away from her leg, and the needle, dangling at the end of the thread, tickled her knee.

“I could sleep,” Junior said. “I swear, Patsy. I wish I could sleep for a million years.”

She’d been praying that he wouldn’t say a word. She wanted there to only be the needle and the thread and the stitches she’d make through the cloth. If he didn’t speak—if she only sat there and sewed that hem—she’d at least have that small moment of time, that grace, before she knew for certain how their lives would move on from that point.

But he said what he did about wanting to sleep, and there was such misery in his voice that she couldn’t help but look up at him, and that’s when she saw that he was in his boxer shorts and T-shirt.

“Your clothes,” she said. “What’s happened to your clothes?”

He slipped off his wristwatch and laid it on the dresser. “Clothes,” he said with a smirk and a shake of his head.

“Junior,” she said. “What’s happened?” she finally asked. “That man. Did you .  .  .  ?”

“We got him. We got him and he wouldn’t tell us anything.” He told her how Mr. Dees had refused him. He said the name of the man who had done the job instead. It was a man Patsy knew, the man she’d seen earlier that summer on their patio arguing with Junior. That man who worked at the glassworks. The one who came to ask for his pay. Patsy couldn’t even remember what he looked like. He was that kind of man, someone who could bail a man out of jail in the middle of the night and disappear, leaving the ones who had seen him scratching their heads as they tried to describe what he looked like. He wasn’t a bad man, just someone like them, Patsy thought. Someone who’d hit some back luck. He had a little girl of his own, a little girl who’d been sick down at St. Jude’s in Memphis. He needed money. So he’d been the one. Junior went on to tell her that Gilley had come to the glassworks, that he’d been there when Junior had that Colt under Raymond Wright’s chin. “Then Henry Dees showed up. Good Christ, Patsy. It was a mess.” He told her about Raymond R. knocking the Colt from his hand and how Gilley tried to grab it, but Raymond R. had it, too, and the two of them wrestled for it. “Then I had it, Patsy, and that son of a bitch was choking Gilley, so I had to do something.”

“Did you kill him, Gil? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“He didn’t deserve to take another breath. That’s the way I look at it, Patsy. Not after what he’s done. It’s been four days, Patsy. Four days. Good Christ.”

She felt that she might faint, and not wanting to slip away, she took the needle and she stuck it into her leg and watched a drop of blood bead up. “What do we do now?”

“What we’ve been doing, I guess. We wait.”

“Only we know now, don’t we? That’s what you’re saying. We know Katie isn’t coming back.”

For the first time, Junior felt how hard everything was going to be from then on. He could barely speak. “Yes,” he said in a choked whisper. “We know.”

“What about Gilley? Is Gilley all right?”

“Gilley’s fine.”

But he wasn’t. He was in his room, naked now, wrapped up in his bedclothes, his knees drawn to his chest, shivering, colder than he had ever been.

MR. DEES
picked up the patch of black cloth and followed the footprints through the cornfield. Whoever had left them had tromped on the young corn plants. They lay broken over and pressed down into the mud. Mr. Dees stepped carefully over the rows, finally coming out on the other side of the field where the woods took up again.

He followed the prints as best he could, and he found an old road crowded in by brush. It was cooler in the woods—so cool and still in the shade of beech and oak and hickory and sweet gum and ash—and it was nice to be out of the sun. He could hear his footsteps on the roadbed of shale. It was that quiet, only an occasional crow call or a squirrel scrabbling around in the trees.

“So quiet, you’d hardly think it was a place for such a thing,” he’d later say to Junior Mackey, and then immediately feel like a fool because by then he would have told the worst of it—how he followed the road deeper into the woods to the old junk pile where people, years ago, had come to dump their used-up refrigerators, couches, kitchen stoves, freezers, tires.

At first, the splintered handle meant nothing to him. He nudged it with the toe of his shoe. It was just another piece of junk someone had got rid of, a wooden handle from a shovel or a hoe. Then he saw a rusted sheet of tin roofing, lying over a mess of dead leaves. The ground was bare outside the cover of the tin, and he could see where the gray dust of the powdery topsoil gave way to clods of darker dirt, the rich loam from years and years of rot. He knew then that the handle belonged to a shovel and that someone, not long ago, had used it to dig in the spot the tin now covered.

He lifted the tin and moved it away. He scraped back the leaves and pressed his hand to the ground, feeling for soft spots where the dirt hadn’t filled in. Someone had to do this, he decided. Eventually it had to be someone, and it was better that it was him, who had loved Katie—who was used to being alone with sadness—than someone who would run now from the woods, run to a telephone to call the police, to tell them to hurry, quick.

Soon enough, there would be police cars and sheriff’s cars and state patrol cars, and an ambulance. There would be men tromping in and out of those woods, carting away the broken shovel handle, an old galvanized bucket with a brown hair across its bail, a hickory stump stained with blood. But for now there was only him and the quiet and the cool shade and the dirt and his fingers pressing down into the soft spots, digging with his hands, taking his time.