Walking Dunes (31 page)

The man lived and worked in a small town in Europe—France? Italy? He was a craftsman. On his own time—and there was not a lot of leisure in his life—he painted canvases. He played with color. He fell in love and was married. Then his troubles began, because his wife, who was herself only a peasant girl, had fallen in love with the man who painted. She imagined that his experiments in color would become great paintings, that they would hang in museums and galleries. He would be famous. She told him the parable of Jesus about the man who did nothing with what he was given. Like your talent, she said. God expects you to paint. The man laughed at this; he thought his wife was young and foolish, tender and dear. He liked his work at the pottery factory. He painted flowers and herbs on china plates, for people to take back to their fine homes. He thought of families seated at the grand table, eating from the china he had adorned. But his wife thought his work was beneath him. She wanted him to paint. So he told the owners at the china factory that he had to quit. He could not explain to them. He went home, and began to paint. First he painted blocks of primary colors, then he painted windows and doors. He tried to paint his wife's portrait—she loved sitting for hours—but he could not capture her beauty or petulance. Then he began to paint pictures of china dishes, and the dishes were painted with flowers and herbs. The wife had to work as a laundress, because their money was gone. He painted bowls and platters on dark plank tables. He worked all the hours there was light. He painted cups on window sills drenched with sunlight.

David's heart was pounding so hard he thought someone in the room would have heard it. He read what he had written. He wondered if he should show Mrs. Bodkins. He wondered if he should give the man a name, and if it was important to find a village for the story, or if it was enough to tell the tale, simply.

He fell back on his bed and tucked his hands behind his head. He smiled at the ceiling. He had forgotten Sissy's notebook. He had forgotten Beth Ann's coy demands. He was seeing the paintings, stacked against the cool stone walls of the man's cottage.

You can make the world anything you want, if you make it up, he thought. It's like Patsy said, you use everything. He laughed aloud. Obviously he had used her in this story; she was the heckling, pushy wife, he the reluctant painter.

Did the paintings sell? Did the man stay with the wife?

He did not know the answer. He could not see that much of the story. He could not know what lay ahead.

32.

A car was parked on a little road near the stock pond. A girl and boy sat in it for a while, talking, then got out and walked down to the edge of the pond. It was a clear, cool, starry night, and they had no problem making their way. The girl was dressed in pajamas and slippers. The boy was carrying a shotgun.

At the edge of the pond, the girl paused. She seemed to be studying the shallow, muddy water. She said something, then ran back to the car and took out a sweater—a pale blue lambswool cardigan—and put it on. She went back down to the pond. She stood on her tiptoes to give the boy a quick kiss on the mouth, then took her slippers off and waded into the water.

David would have liked to stay home the next day, to work on his story, but he would have to give his mother some explanation, and she would scowl, and his sister would be around all day, too. Besides, during his library hour he could see if there were any books about china, something he could look at to help him describe what the painter did.

He was in first period about fifteen minutes when the vice principal came to the room and asked for him. This was unusual, not sending a student, and David wondered wildly what it was about. You did not get collected by the vice principal if you were not in trouble. Unless someone had died. Maybe his father had had a heart attack in the shower. Maybe his mother.

The administrator, Mr. Calloway, stopped a few steps from the door to his office and spoke in a low voice to David. “This isn't anything you've done, son. Don't be scared. But there's a problem, and they're hoping you'll know something to help them.” Mystified, David followed Calloway into his office.

Two policemen were standing there. The principal was seated at Calloway's desk. He motioned for David to sit across from him. David did so, gulping air.

“They want to ask you about Cecelia Dossey,” the principal said.

David blinked and looked at the policemen. They moved closer to him, so that he had to crane his neck and look up at their faces.

“Sissy?” he said.

“Sissy Dossey, yes,” a policeman said. He had a pad and a pencil, and he seemed to have checked something on a list. As if “Sissy” were an alias.

She had disappeared from her house sometime in the night. Her parents called the police when the mother went to wake Cecelia for school and found her missing.

They wanted to know if he had seen her.

Reluctantly, he said, “For a few minutes yesterday afternoon. About four.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. Nothing I can remember. She just dropped by to say hello. I said I was sleepy, I was going to take a nap, so she went home.” He did not think they needed the notebook. What would it have to do with anything?

“And then? After that?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Her mother said you're friends.”

“I don't go out with her. I don't see her very much. We live near each other. We worked on a play together. Why are you asking me!”
Where was she?

“We're going to talk to everyone we can think of.”

“I don't know where she is.” The policeman with the pad wrote something down. David coughed. They all continued to look at him. “Sometimes she went out with Leland Piper.” He spoke so softly, they asked him to repeat what he had said. “Piper,” he said. “You ought to ask Leland Piper.”

Because it was Monday, his mother was home after school. He found her napping on her bed. He said, “Mom? Mom, I need you,” and as she turned over, he sat on the edge of the bed. “I think something has happened.” He was scared, but he didn't think it showed.

His mother sat up. “Oh no. Not again.”

They heard it on the news at 5:30. They had taken Cecelia “Sissy” Dossey's body from a stock pond. They had arrested Leland Piper, 18, who had admitted to the shooting and had taken officers to the site. David and his mother sat up until after two in the morning, drinking. They watched the same news on the ten o'clock broadcast. There was film of Leland being taken into the police station. He did not look like anyone David had ever known. Saul came home as the news was ending, and went to bed without speaking. “Just as well,” Marge said, when they heard the bedroom door shut. Neither she nor David had much of anything to say. David stumbled to bed quite drunk. He dreamed of Leland and Sissy. He saw them sitting parked in Leland's car. They weren't doing anything. In the dream, he knew he ought to talk to them. They needed advice. They needed somebody to remind them of what was sensible. He did not know where he was in the dream. He did not know how to reach them.

The next morning the paper's headline was: BASIN GIRL PAYS THE PIPER WITH HER LIFE. The details were spelled out: the pond, a few cattle nearby, the pumpjack. Her slippers on the ground, her father's gun in the water with her. They quoted the Piper boy. “I didn't think how much it would upset my mother. It wasn't my idea. I didn't think about it enough.”

David did not go to school. Terrified, he hid Sissy's notebook under his mattress. He slept fitfully through the day. Once, jerked out of a dream, he jumped from bed because he thought it was on fire. He thought the notebook had ignited. He wished it had. He was afraid it would ruin his life.

“I knew she was weird,” Beth Ann said later that day on the phone. “Both of them, really weird. Your friends.”

“I need to talk to you,” he said. “There's something I need to show you.”

He went to her house after supper. They sat on the couch in the family room and he took out Sissy's notebook.

“What's that old thing?” Beth Ann asked.

“It's a notebook, like a diary. It belongs—it belonged—to Sissy.”

“Why do you have it?”

“She gave it to me Sunday afternoon. She wanted me to read it.”

Beth Ann shook her head in disgust. “You shouldn't have taken it.”

“I didn't know she was going to get killed! She had a reason, it wasn't a very big favor. Beth, there's stuff in here about Leland. She asked him to do it. It was her idea. It might be important for his lawyer to see it. It might show what really happened, that it wasn't all his fault.”

Beth Ann made a noise, something like a belch.

“I have to decide what to do with it.”

She saw right to the heart of the matter. “Are you in there too, David?”

He nodded miserably.

“I don't know why you wanted to hang around with somebody so pitiful. So notorious.”

“We were friends, in an odd way. Maybe because we both wrote things down.”

“Oh God. You mean, you've got stuff written too? About her?” She looked horrified. “About
me?
”

“She wrote for herself, a way to let things out. But when she decided to—do it—she must have wanted somebody to read what she had written. She wanted me to. Maybe she wanted to leave something.”

Beth Ann's beautiful eyes narrowed. Her mouth twitched. “My father would never stand for it.”

“I'll get rid of it,” he said quietly. All along, he had known he would. Now, though, it was partly Beth Ann's idea. He had not decided all by himself.

Driving home, he thought about what happened to the painter. He became obsessed with the paintings of china dishes. No one bought them, of course. They wanted portraits, and landscapes. His wife became pregnant and could not wash laundry anymore. The painter went back to the china factory and begged for work. They had replaced him, but they gave him a lower job, glazing the raw pots. Where once he had been happy at work, he was now desperately unhappy. He stopped painting at home. He put the paintings around the cottage. At night he sat with them. One night he realized he could reach into the painting, he could take out the dish. He threw it against the wall. He took a platter from another painting, a bowl and saucer, he took all the dishes, and one by one smashed them. When he was done he sat in a rubble of china.

On Wednesday they let him see Leland at the jail. Leland wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt. He looked tall and haggard, but he said, “Hey, man, you came to see me!”

“This is a mess, Piper.”

Leland shook his head. “She was driving me crazy, David. She begged me. Practically since our first date. At first I thought she was joking—

“Sure, I know. She said nutty things all the time.”

He wondered if Leland knew about the notebook. “She was unhappy.” Surely Leland would say.

Leland put his head in his hands and said something David could not hear.

“What? What did you say?

Leland looked up again. “My dad's getting me a good lawyer. I'll probably get out of here by the weekend. It's not—murder.”

“Guess not.”

“They act like I'm the crazy one. They act very careful with me.”

“They probably don't know what to think.”

Leland bobbed his head. “That's probably it. It's not like what they usually have to deal with.” A deputy said it was time. Leland stood. “Hey, David. Did you save the newspaper?”

He could not bring himself to destroy the diary. He kept it under the mattress. Late at night he took it out and read it again and again.
They watched
. Who were they? What did they watch? He dreamed about Jerry Cooper on the high board. He thought, good for him, he's going to try it again. He did not assume that Cooper would flop this time. Saul used to say, “An example is not proof.” Next time, Cooper might glide through the air like a bird. But in the dream, he stood there motionless, he did not dive. David wondered why he waited, what he saw. There was only water below. He only needed to leave the board.

33.

Leland's father (and Marge) had gone to school in Monahans with a boy who had become a rich and famous lawyer. His name was Carroll Dale Crawford. He had practiced in Basin, then moved on to Houston. He came to Basin for Leland's arraignment. The paper said he would spend several days in town, laying the groundwork for a defense. He was able to arrange Leland's release.

David went to see him at the Alamo Hotel. His suite was at the top, seven stories up.

“Have you been to see the Pipers?” Crawford wanted to know.

“No sir.”

“Not a close friend, then?”

“I went to see him in jail.” Crawford was a large, tidy man, very well-dressed, with the shrewd look David had expected. His perusal made David very uncomfortable. “Maybe he didn't have close friends,” he mumbled.

“
Doesn't
, young man. It isn't Leland Piper who's dead.”

“We all know that,” David said. He felt fourteen.

“And the girl? You were her friend, too?”

“No special friend. I knew her. We lived near one another.”

“Leland says she asked him to shoot her. It was her father's gun, she had brought it along.”

“That sounds right. I can believe it.”

“Why so?”

“She was long-faced. Sad.”

Crawford considered that for a moment. He had been about to make himself a drink when David arrived, and he went ahead and did it now. He gave David a glass of ginger ale and ice, and motioned for him to sit at a small round table. He sat down across from him. “Walking down the hall, say you're on your way to—physics? English?—and you see Cecelia Dossey, and you remark to yourself—
long face?
”

David's own face was turning red. He was sorry he had sat down. “Something like that,” he managed to say.