The Bright Forever (22 page)

“I can’t,” I told Raymond R. “What in the world would I tell them?”

“Tell them, ‘Here she is.’ Say, ‘Here’s your little girl.’” He closed his eyes. “Please,” he said. “Just take her and do whatever it is you have to do.”

In just an instant, it would come to me that maybe Raymond R. was shooting straight.
Take her away from me
, he meant.
See to her. Make sure she gets home. Tell the police what you have to.

But by the time I thought this, I was already out of the truck, stumbling over the ruts in the grassy lane, wanting to get back to Gooseneck, back to my house where I could hide with my shame, because what I heard when Raymond R. asked me to take Katie, to do whatever I had to, was
You’ve been wanting this, you’ve been wanting her. Now’s your chance. Go on. Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret. I won’t tell.

That’s what I’m guilty of: being a coward, too much afraid of my own confused desires.

I turned back once, thinking I’d go back to the truck and I’d take her. Katie. I’d take her back to the courthouse square, and there her bike would be, that Sting-Ray bike with the banana seat and the butterfly handlebars and the silver streamers. I’d put the chain back on the sprocket. I’d buy a screwdriver at the Western Auto Store if I had to. I’d get my hands greasy, maybe even ruin my poplin jacket, but that would be all right. That’d be fine. Then Katie would pedal away, and it’d be like all the time the three of us had been in that truck never happened at all. She’d put her books into the library’s after-hours returns bin and then she’d go home, and the next morning she’d wake to another grand summer’s day.

Then I’d be able to say at least I did that, and in the morning, when the martins began to sing, I’d think, All right, this is my life, not so bad as I’d feared. Not perfect, but enough, not one to have to answer for.

I turned back to the truck, but it was already moving, driving farther down the lane. I ran a few steps after it, but I was too late. I bent over, put my hands on my knees. There in the grass were two of Katie’s library books,
The Long Winter
and
Henry and Beezus
. I picked them up, and then I watched the truck until I couldn’t see it anymore. I stood there a long time, hoping I’d see it come back, hoping that Raymond R. would change his mind and I’d be able to do the thing I should have done in the first place, the thing I’ve spent years wishing I could make happen: if only, when I had the chance, I’d taken Katie by the hand, got her out of that truck. If only I’d had the courage to take her home and tell my story and face the Mackeys, who by that time were surely starting to wonder whether they had any call to worry. I’ve had the rest of my life to go over it again and again. I’ll have the rest of my days to wish I’d been a better man.

Did I think that Raymond R. might hurt Katie? I spent the rest of that evening convincing myself it couldn’t be so.

If that night at the glassworks, he got what he deserved—Raymond R.—does that mean I should have gotten the same because I left Katie with him that evening in that grassy lane along the wheat field? Or Clare because she was too simpleminded, too trusting to know that her Ray was a dope fiend? Or Gilley because he tattled on Katie at the supper table and sent her off on her bicycle? Or her mother because she didn’t tell her to stop and put on her sandals? Or Junior because Katie had been complaining about her bicycle chain for days, and he’d never done anything about it?

Oh, I heard it all that day at Katie’s funeral. I heard the stories they told, the moments they kept going over in their heads. I’m sure, like me, they call them up now. How many times I’ve thought about that instant on the porch swing when I kissed Katie, or later when I walked away from her down that grassy lane along the wheat field.

And what about the ones that evening who saw us come and go—me and Katie and Raymond R.—and never for an instant thought there might be something wrong?

The problem is this: how many of us were there who could have done something to stop what was going to happen? Where does responsibility start and end?

Sure, some of us were more guilty than others. I’m not a stupid man. Still, there were people moving through our town that night, thinking they didn’t have anything to watch out for. Maybe they saw us downtown on the square talking to Katie. Maybe they saw her up on the running board of Raymond R.’s truck, or me opening the door so she could get in and then fetching her library books from her bicycle basket. Maybe they thought, What’s that little girl doing with those men?

Maybe you’re one of those people. Or maybe you saw us later driving past the public library or heading out Route 59 or turning down that grassy lane at the edge of Gooseneck, and you didn’t stop us, didn’t follow us, didn’t call the police. But what call would you have had? It was just a summer evening. People were everywhere moving through the long light, and we were just two men in a truck, a little girl between us.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. I was the last person who could have saved her. No matter how long I live, I’ll know it forever. I’ll imagine the two of us walking up that grassy lane, away from that wheat field, away from Raymond R., the last of the daylight fading into dusk but still enough left so we could find our way.

If it’s true that I did what you claim
, Raymond R. said when the police first questioned him (it’s in the court record now; you can find it there),
then you ought to put me someplace where I can get help. I’m not saying I didn’t do it
.
I don’t know
.

There’s no figuring the sorts of ragtag lives people can live, but if you want to, you can go to the circuit court’s office and read the file and try to make more sense of it all, the way I did the one time I slipped back into town, the last time before I was gone forever.

So many years had passed, no one in that office recognized me, but they all knew the case I was talking about. They knew about Raymond R., that construction worker who up and disappeared, and a woman said she remembered that there used to be an old bachelor schoolteacher in town who’d been his friend, but she couldn’t recall his name or where he’d gone. The Mackeys? Yes, they were still alive. Junior and Patsy. I asked whether they still lived in the Heights. “Oh no,” the woman said. “They moved to New Mexico a good time back, and that boy of theirs, that Gilley, last I heard he was living in Missouri. A banker. That’s what he made of himself.”

I’ve thought this many times since then. For all of us, that Wednesday evening in July, there was something in the way the light caught the undersides of the maple leaves and set them to shining, some false promise in the way the river water held the sheen of the sun going down and the way the air cooled. We thought we were all free: free from work, from chores, from one another. The courthouse clock chimed the hours and folks could hear it in Gooseneck and the Heights, and for a time there was twilight’s grace—that muted light just before the final turn to dark. I think of Patsy Mackey stepping out onto her patio, worried because Katie hadn’t come back from the library, and Gilley and Junior retracing her route, up High Street to the courthouse square, where they saw that bicycle, her bicycle, leaning against a parking meter. At the time, I was walking from the grassy lane along the wheat field to my house. I was walking through the fading light, and Raymond R. was driving away with Katie in his truck.

“It’s a wonder something like that went on,” the woman in the courthouse said when she was telling me what she remembered about “that ugly business with the Mackey girl.”

“Henry Dees,” I said to her. “That was the schoolteacher’s name.”

“That’s right.” She snapped her fingers. “Henry Dees. He always looked like he was carrying the world on his back. I’d see him around town, and my heart would break.”

“Did you ever tell him that?” I asked her. “Tell him that you saw him, that you felt something about what it was to have his kind of life?”

“I can’t recall ever saying a word.”

“He might have liked to have heard it,” I told her, and that was the last word I ever said to anyone who lived in Tower Hill.

TOWARD THE END
of August that summer, Junior Mackey pulled into my drive. I let him in my house, and he stood in the kitchen just as he’d done the night he’d come to ask me to drive to Georgetown and bring back Raymond R.

“I can hardly bear to look at you,” Junior said. He paced around the kitchen. “Every time I see you around town, I think of what you did, the way you watched us. I think about what you know.” That was his life now, and always would be—a fearful life. I frightened him because I knew he’d killed Raymond R., and even though I couldn’t afford to say anything because of my own part in it—I’ve barely been able to tell the story to you—he must have wondered whether someday I’d go to Tom Evers and tell him what I knew. “Do you have someplace to go?” He looked at me. “Somewhere away from here?”

I thought to myself then that it didn’t matter where I ended up; I’d always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I’d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn’t. I’d never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you’re happy about that. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I’m not. I’m just the one to tell it, at least my part in it—this story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It’s an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise.

“I guess one place is as good as another,” I told Junior Mackey.

He nodded. “Then maybe you could be thinking about going.” He took five bills from his wallet. They were thousand-dollar bills, a sight I’d never seen, and he reached them out to me. “To take care of yourself for a while. To get you back on your feet.”

I pushed his hand away. “You live with your own regrets,” I said. “I’ll live with mine.”

That was the end of it. He got back in his car and drove away, and a few weeks later, toward the end of summer, I closed the door to my house in Gooseneck for the last time. I left the furnishings there, left the martin houses atop their poles in the backyard. I wouldn’t be there in spring when the birds came flying back. They’d sing their dawnsong, but I wouldn’t be there to hear it. I got in my Comet, and when I turned onto the Tenth Street spur, I didn’t look back.

The day was clear. I remember that, one of those bright days when it’s still summer but we’ve already made the turn toward autumn, and the sky is blue. Here in the flatlands of Indiana you can hit a straight stretch of road, and you can see all the way to the horizon. If it ever happens to you, you might swear, as I did that day, that if you can just keep moving—keep driving long enough, fast enough—you’ll come to the edge of the world, that point where land rises up to meet sky, and you’ll have no choice; you won’t be able to stop. You’ll just float out into all that blue—call it Heaven if you want—and just like that, you’ll be gone.

Acknowledgments

M
ANY THANKS
to those who offered advice and encouragement along the way: Phyllis Wender, Sonia Pabley, Susie Cohen, Amy Bloom, Steve Yarbrough, Ladette Randolph, Hilda Raz, Karen Shoemaker, Gerald Shapiro and Judith Slater, Paul and Ellen Eggers, Bart and Melanie Adams, Harry and Mildred Read, Jim and Maria Duncan, Ron Read, Lynda Clemmons, Brenda Boganwright, Amanda Dean, Christine Bonasso, Kathleen Finneran, Doug Johnstone, and Amos Magliocco. The Ohio State University has been generous with its support, as have my colleagues in the English Department and the creative writing program. The fates have blessed me with Sally Kim, an editor of great courage and grace. My eternal gratitude to her and to everyone at Shaye Areheart Books who believed in this novel.

About the Author

L
EE MARTIN
is the award-winning author of the novel
Quakertown
; the memoirs
From Our House
, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 2000, and
Turning Bones
; and the short-story collection
The Least You Need to Know
. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Also by Lee Martin

~~~

Turning Bones

Quakertown

From Our House

The Least You Need to Know

Copyright 2005 by Lee Martin

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Shaye Areheart Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martin, Lee, 1955–

The bright forever : a novel / Lee Martin.

1. Girls—Crimes against—Fiction.    2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Missing children—Fiction.    4. Kidnapping—Fiction.    5. Illinois—Fiction    6. Revenge—Fiction.    I. Title.

PS3563.A724927B75    2005

813'.54—dc22                        2004023758

eISBN: 978-0-307-23816-0

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