The Bright Forever (21 page)

Clare

I
DIDN
’
T HOLD
it against her, that girl’s mama, on account she wouldn’t see me. I knew how it was to want to shut the door and not let anyone in. I thought maybe I could tell her something about that. I wish I’d had the chance.

On through that summer, I worked at Brookstone Manor. What else was left to me but what I knew: waking at dawn to the martins singing, spending my day in Brookstone’s kitchen or laundry, coming home in the evening to my quiet house.

At first, I’d go by Henry Dees’s place, and I’d think about knocking on the door because talk had already started. I heard it around town, folks saying that he knew something about what went on that night of the fifth.

I wanted to ask Henry Dees straight out if he knew anything about Ray and where he’d gone, but maybe, I told myself, it’s better not to know. Maybe there’s things in a person’s life it’s best to walk away from. Back in the winter at the Top Hat Inn, Ray kissed my hand; he called me
darlin’
. I still believe he was true. I don’t think he meant to hurt me for the world. He built that porch. He said,
Darlin’, name your paradise
. I think it was this: like most of us, he was carrying a misery in his soul. I don’t say it to forgive what he done, only to say it as true as I can. He was a wrong-minded man, but inside—I swear this is true—he was always that little boy eating that fried-egg sandwich in that dark hallway while the steam pipe dripped water on his head. I don’t ask you to excuse him, only to understand that there’s people who don’t have what others do, and sometimes they get hurtful in their hearts, and they puff themselves up and try all sorts of schemes to level the ground—to get the bricks and joints all plumb, Ray used to say. They take wrong turns, hit dead ends, and sometimes they never make their way back.

One evening, he was there—Henry Dees. He had a ladder up to a martin house and he was reaching inside. I was on my way home from work, and this time, I couldn’t stop myself. I came into his yard. I stood by the ladder, and I didn’t say a word.

“Oh, no,” he said. He was mumbling to himself, but the words were floating down to me. “No, no, no,” he said. He was pulling the nest from the house, letting twigs and straw and dried-up grass and leaves sift through his fingers.

Finally, he came down the ladder, and when he saw me there, he said, “Clare. Oh, Clare.”

I almost came apart then, hearing him say my name like he was saying he was sorry, but I kept my head up and I said to him, “Do you know anything about what happened to Ray?”

“Don’t ask me that, Clare.”

“Who else am I to know it from?”

He still had one hand on the ladder. He looked back up to the martin house where birds were coming now to roost, squawking because their nest had been messed with.

“Some folks can’t hide things. They don’t have enough, not enough money or influence or shame.” He swung the ladder down, and I had to move back out of the way. “They’ll have to answer someday. We’ll all have to answer.”

“If you’ve got the answer, you should give it to me.”

“I can’t do that, Clare. Please.”

“Then you’re not the man I thought you were,” I said. It’s still a mystery to me how Ray could just vanish away and no one ever find a trace or call to account the folks who ought to know. “No, sir,” I said to Henry Dees. “You’re no kind of man at all.”

Mr. Dees

T
HERE
’
S NO SUCH
thing as a perfect crime. You can think you’ve gotten away clean, but you always leave a clue. If you’re Junior Mackey, though—if you have enough money and sway—you can get to the right people. You can make sure they keep their mouths shut or go blind to the truth right there in front of their eyes. But you can never, ever buy back time and the things you should or shouldn’t have done.

I never told Tom Evers everything. This last thing I’ve saved for you.

It was a Wednesday evening, remember? July 5. The temperature was ninety-three degrees. Trans-Ams and GTOs were cruising around the courthouse square. People were starting to slip into the Coach House for supper. The breeze was rattling the leaves on the oak trees, and the sun wouldn’t set until 8:33. All that light, and there I was in the truck with Raymond R., and he pointed across the square to the corner where out in front of the J. C. Penney store Katie was crouched down, fiddling with her bicycle chain.

“Yonder she is,” said Raymond R. “A little queenie in distress.”

He drove over there. He pulled the truck up to the curb.

“Darlin’, you need help?” he asked Katie.

“My chain,” she said.

He told her, “Oh, that ornery chain. Dang it all, anyway. Hon, we’ll give you a ride home.”

She reached into her bicycle basket and took out a stack of books. “I have to take these back to the library,” she said.

“Sure, we’ll take those books back,” Raymond R. told her. “Then we’ll run you home. We’ll throw your bike in the back of the truck, and you can hop up here with us. You can sit right here between us, and we’ll take care of you. You live in the Heights, don’t you? On Shasta Drive?”

“How do you know where I live?”

“Your friend here told me. Your teacher. You know Mister Dees, don’t you?”

Katie climbed up on the running board of Raymond R.’s truck. She curled her fingers over the lip of the window frame and said, “Hello, Mister Dees.”

I could barely stand to look at her because I was ashamed of that kiss I had given her on the porch swing. I stared straight ahead at the J. C. Penney display window, where someone had dismantled a mannequin and left it lying in the corner: torso, head, legs, and arms.

“Katie,” I said, “this is Ray. Mister Wright. He’s my neighbor.”

She rose up on her tiptoes and leaned through the open window. Her hair fell across my arm, and I smelled the faint scent of her little-girl sweat—the smell of talcum powder and a towel fresh from the dryer. A breeze had come up from the south, and it was a blessing—that stir of air—after a day of sun and heat.

“Hello, Mister Ray,” she said. “I’m Katie.”

“K-K-K-Katie,” he sang, and she giggled and then smiled at him and said, “I know that song.”

“I bet you do, darlin’,” he said. “I surely do.”

I felt like things were the way they should be. I was out of the picture and it was just the two of them—sweethearts. Oh, it was easy to see. They adored each other, and I thought I might as well have been that mannequin in the J. C. Penney window—a heap of bones snatched and tossed away.

I told Katie to please hop down from the running board, and I started to open the door. All I wanted was to go home. You have to understand: I had no idea then that Raymond R. had any intent of doing her harm. I’m not even sure he knew that himself.

“I’m going to walk,” I told him.

The air was cooler now. The leaves rattled on the courthouse lawn’s oaks. Cars roared down High Street—sporty cars all jazzed up with cherry-bomb mufflers and lifters and racing stripes. Teenage boys honked their horns—
Shave and a haircut, six bits.
Their tape decks played loud rock-and-roll music. People went into the Rexall, came out of the Coach House. Couples strolled around the square, looking in the store windows. I wished I could be like them: a man with a woman who had known him for years, a man just killing time, comfortable with who he was.

“Take it easy, Teach,” Raymond R. said. “I told you I’d give you a lift.”

“No. Please,” I said. “Just let me go.”

“Henry.” It was the first time that he had called me by my Christian name, and I couldn’t help but face him, look him in the eyes. What I saw amazed me—left me, though I was loathe to admit it, delighted. Raymond R. Wright was afraid—fearful, I imagined, of something torn loose inside him, some howl screaming through nerves and veins. That’s how it happens with people at the end of misery. All the torment builds up and then lives explode, and there they are, broken forever. I was happy—oh, I know it was a horrible way to feel—but it was the truth. For a moment I was happy because, when I looked into Raymond R.’s eyes, I knew that he was in trouble. I had given him that money, and it hadn’t been enough to buy him peace. Now, as I stood witness to his anguish, it made me believe that things weren’t so hopeless for me. I could walk away, join the people strolling around the square, nod and say hello, and then head out Tenth Street to Gooseneck, just a man walking home on a summer evening. “Henry,” Raymond R. said again. “Please.”

I got out of the truck so Katie could get in. I fetched the three library books from her bicycle basket, got back in the truck, and held the books on my lap while Raymond R. drove away, down Fourteenth Street past the public library.

Katie squirmed around on the seat. She came up on her knees. “Hey, the library,” she said.

Raymond R. told her, “Don’t worry, darlin’. We’ll get there, but first let’s just ride around some. Let’s enjoy the breeze.”

He drove down Fourteenth Street, the library disappearing behind us, until he got to Taylor. He turned left and went a block east to Thirteenth. We were just driving, he said, just lollygagging.

That made Katie laugh. “Did you hear about the fight in the candy store?” she asked. “The lollipop got licked.” She giggled and squealed and toppled over until she was leaning against me. “What did the chocolate bar say to the lollipop?” She rattled off the punch line. “Hello, sucker!”

Raymond R. tooted the horn. “That’s the ticket,” he said. “Now we’re cooking.” He turned back west on Cherry. “Let’s air things out. Let’s get up some speed.”

He reached into his shirt pocket, fished out a pill, and popped it into his mouth. The truck went south on Tenth and soon we were passing Junior Mackey’s glassworks and Gooseneck. The air rushed into the cab. Katie’s hair came undone and whipped around her face. I tried to help her brush it away from her eyes, and one of her hair clips came loose. It fell to the floorboard, and when I reached for it, my foot came down on the metal clasp, snapping it. I picked up the thin, gold bar and closed my hand around it, knowing I would keep it for myself.

Katie patted the top of her head. “My hair clip.” She crouched down, looking for the clip on the floor of the truck. I moved my feet, nudging away a crescent wrench, chewing gum wrappers, an empty Pepsi bottle. Katie found the metal back of the clip. “My mom will kill me,” she said.

“Forget that hair bob.” Raymond R. grabbed Katie’s arm and jerked her back up onto the seat. “Hey, little doll. Do you know what the snail said while he was riding on the turtle’s back?”

“I know that one,” she said. “My dad told it to me.” She threw her arms up over her head and shouted, “Wheeeeeee!”

I’d turn that moment over in my head a good while after—Katie’s voice ringing out so clear and gay. “Wheeeeeee!” she said again, and Raymond R. took his hands from the steering wheel. “Wheeeeeee!” he said. “Come on, Teach. Join the fun.”

So for an instant there were the three of us, silly with the air rushing in and Katie’s hair flying about and the road stretching out toward the horizon.

Raymond R. put his hands back on the wheel and kept driving, not slowing down until we were a few miles out of Tower Hill. Nothing but farmland, a haze hanging over the fields. For a while, none of us said anything. We’d laughed ourselves silly over those jokes and then gone quiet, and I knew we were at that point where we felt strange to one another, when we knew we couldn’t keep driving forever. Soon something had to happen.

Raymond R. turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. He stopped the truck and let it idle. Quail were bunching together in the middle of the road, a sign of rain coming, he said. Then his head lolled back and his eyelids drooped. “I’m give out,” he said. “Jesus in a basket. I’ve been on the move all day.”

Katie said, “Mister Ray, you promised you’d take me to the library.”

“Shut up about that library,” he said. “Jesus shit.”

I snaked my arm around behind Katie and snapped my fingers close to his ear. He opened his eyes. He turned his head very slowly and looked at me, his face going hard.

“Please don’t talk like that,” I said. “She’s a little girl.”

“She’s a sweetheart.” Raymond R. took a strand of her hair in his fingers and very gently tucked it behind her ear. “Lordy, Lordy,” he said. “Lookit all that pretty hair.”

I couldn’t bear to watch him touch her hair. I had to look away. I stared straight ahead down the gravel road past where the quail ruffled their wings, taking dirt baths in the dust. I kept my eyes on the point where the road dipped and then began to climb. I stared at the top of the hill where the gravel blanched white in the sunlight and land seemed to meet sky. I thought of the day, back in spring, when I’d been patching the cement steps, and the airplane flew over and I tipped back my head, wondering what I looked like from such a height. It was the moment just before I introduced myself to Raymond R.

Now I took a breath. “Katie,” I said, “we’re going to get out of the truck. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

“But the library,” she said, and I could tell she was starting to worry just a little.

“Give me your hand,” I told her. “I promise you’ll be all right.”

That’s when Raymond R. put the truck into reverse and started backing up toward the highway. The engine whined. The quail lifted with a riffling of wings, their white tail feathers flaring as they flew. The truck moved back into the dust that its tires kicked up, and I put my handkerchief to my nose and mouth. For a moment I thought about throwing open the door and tumbling out. I’d pull Katie along with me. Together we’d roll down the slope of the ditch. But Raymond R. was having a hard time keeping a straight track. The truck was skating over the gravel, and I couldn’t take the chance.

“All right now,” Raymond R. said. “We’re done playing games.”

“Please,” I said.

“Stupid man.” Raymond R. snapped his fingers in front of my face. “What ever made you think you had any say in this?”

He drove back into town. He drove by the Little Farm Market, and he honked his horn at a woman sitting on a bench. She was wearing a flowery summer dress—all oranges and purples—and nylon stockings rolled down to her ankles. A big woman with a transistor radio held up to her ear. “Him,” Emma Short would later say.

“It’s funny,” Raymond R. said. “There she is, a woman in a tutti-frutti dress, just watching the world go by. She doesn’t have a clue, does she?”

“A clue?” I was holding Katie’s hair clip in my hand, rubbing my fingers over the smooth metal. “That woman with the radio?”

“She doesn’t know there’s people in the world.” Raymond R. honked his horn again. “People like us.”

He drove to the edge of Gooseneck and pulled down a grassy lane that ran along a wheat field. He cut the engine and the truck coasted to a stop.

The wheat field stretched out to the horizon. To the south, a wooded grove rose up. It was quiet there, away from town. Locusts chirred. A combine had cut a few swaths around the edge of the wheat field, and grasshoppers leaped up and stuck to the truck’s fenders, its windshield, making faint ticking sounds.

“You’re a darlin’.” Raymond R. took Katie’s bare foot. He cradled it in his hand. “Yes, sir. A real sweet potato.”

He let go of her foot, and he reached across her and took my hand. He laid it on her knee, made me touch her like that. “A doll baby,” he said. “Just what you’ve always wanted, right, Teach?”

Katie’s skin was hot from the sun. I lifted my hand as if I had stuck it into fire. A noise came from the woods, a hawk taking flight, and I recalled the evening when Raymond R. and I put up the martin house, and the Cooper’s hawk hid itself in the catalpa tree, just waiting for its chance at one of the martins.

“You know I’m in the dope, don’t you?” Raymond R. was whispering now. “You know that’s my story, right? I’m not afraid. People? They stopped meaning anything to me a long time ago. You know that too, don’t you?”

I thought about the hawk, filled with hunger and greed, and yet so glorious. It was gliding now, banking and turning in widening circles, and I watched, mesmerized by that gentle float and spin, the hawk lifting higher and higher with each pass until it was a dark speck wheeling through the sky.

“Don’t you think about Clare?” I asked Raymond R. “Such a sweet, good woman. Don’t you think about how you hurt her? Me? I don’t have anyone to be accountable to. But you .  .  .  Clare .  .  .  Ray, she’s had enough heartache in her time.”

That’s when he looked down at his hands, studied them as if they weren’t his anymore, belonged to a stranger. He reached into his pocket and took out the Sucrets tin. He opened it and started to fish out a pill. Then he stopped. He closed the tin and tossed it on top of the dashboard. “I never had a woman to love me until her,” he said.

There comes a time when you have to believe in the goodness of people. “You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?” I asked him.

“You’re right. I’m a lowlife kind of man. Always have been.” His voice shriveled up to a puny thing. “You shouldn’t be here with me. You shouldn’t have anything to do with me at all. You ought to get out of this truck. Take this little doll baby with you. Take her back home. Go on. Take her back to her mama and daddy.”

Katie scooted over closer to me, and I heard her sniffling, trying hard to fight back the tears. I felt a panic flare up inside my chest. I tried to imagine taking her home. How would I explain to Junior and Patsy Mackey how she’d come to be with me? I imagined ringing their doorbell and then standing in the glare of the porch light as the front door opened and Junior or Patsy waited for me to explain. How would I tell them the story? What would I say that would ever be enough for them to forgive what I’d done—the kiss, the time we’d spent with Raymond R.? Worse yet, how would I be able to stand it if Katie went running into the arms of her mother or father and I had to listen to her sobbing, telling them how frightened she’d been? How could I, who loved her, ever face something like that?