by Vic Kerry
Alan stated the obvious. “There are no cars here. Do you think anyone is at home?”
“There’s never a car,” Josh said. “I’m not sure that they own a car.”
“How do they not own a car?” Thomas asked.
“Some people don’t own cars,” Alan said. “They may be poor. This house has seen better days.”
“And what’s up with those shutters?” Thomas asked. “Who has red shutters?”
“What do her parents do for a living?” Alan asked Josh, ignoring his other son.
“I’ve never met them,” Josh said.
“How have you never met them?” Thomas asked.
“I’ve never been invited inside,” Josh said. “Is that strange?”
“Maybe a little, but we’ve got more important things to worry about,” Alan said. “Hop out and see if she’s at home.”
Josh got out of the car. He walked up the broken sidewalk to the door and knocked. After no one came to the door, he used the heavy knocker. Still no one came. He walked back to the car and sat shotgun.
“She’s not at home.”
“All right,” Alan said. “We’ll have to go without her.”
He backed onto the street and headed toward Charlotte’s house. They passed Hickory Avenue and turned onto Fourth Street. At the next intersection was a four-way stop. As they slowly rolled through it, Josh pointed down Euclid Avenue and patted the dashboard.
“There she is. Jessica’s walking this way.”
Alan turned down the street. He almost hit the opposite curb due to being so far into the intersection, but he made it. Josh rolled down his window as they pulled to the sidewalk. Jessica stuck her head in like a carhop.
“Hey, guys. I didn’t expect to see you down this street,” she said.
“Get in,” Josh said. “Dad wants you to go with us.”
“Where to?” she said.
“My Aunt Charlotte’s house,” Alan said. “I want some folks to go with me to look at something.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re unbiased,” Josh said.
She gave him a strange look.
“He’s quoting me,” Alan said. “Please take a ride with us over there. I’ll take everyone out for a pizza afterward.”
“How about Mom?” Thomas asked.
“I left her a note,” Alan answered. “She can either meet us there or eat alone.”
“Sounds good,” Jessica said.
“Will your folks mind?” Alan asked.
“They don’t care,” she answered. “Once less thing to worry about.”
Thomas moved across the back seat, and she got in on the passenger side. Alan could almost feel Josh’s anger. He’d tried hard to get in the back with her, and it was foiled again, this time by sheer dumb luck. Still, they’d be at Charlotte’s in few minutes. After that, he could sit with her in the back and at the pizza joint.
Taking Euclid Avenue was a bit of detour over to Charlotte’s house, but Alan hadn’t been down that street in a while. They passed a faux Tudor house. He recognized one of the boys Josh had gotten into the fight with, shooting basketball by himself. He elbowed his son.
“You want to get out and take care of him again?”
“I’d rather not,” Josh said. “I didn’t even know he lived this close to Aunt Charlotte. He should know better than to make fun of her. She’s almost his neighbor.”
“He said that he’s sorry he did that,” Jessica said. “I was walking home from his house when you caught me.”
“Why were you there?” Thomas asked. “He’s a loser.”
“Marcus gave me a ride to the library and back to his house. He gives me lifts occasionally when I can’t catch one with Josh.”
“Why were you walking?” Alan said. “Is he such a brute that he wouldn’t drop you off at your house?”
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t want him to know where I live. He’s creepy.”
Josh and Thomas giggled like girls. He agreed that the kid was a creepy loser, but laughing with his sons would have been wrong.
“He was trying to convince me to help set up the Massacre Dance. I told him that he was nuts,” she said.
“They’re still planning that?” Alan asked. “When and where?”
“At the old gym on the actual anniversary of the massacre. There’s a pretty hardcore group of them bound and determined to have it.”
“Even after Corey was killed?” Thomas said. He leaned over to Alan. “He was one of the ringleaders of the committee.”
They pulled into Charlotte’s driveway. Alan kept anything else about the Massacre Dance to himself. He wanted to give the kids a clean mental slate before walking into the house. Years ago when he had taken abnormal psychology in college, he’d written a paper about a strange mental illness called folie a deux. It was a disorder where people shared psychoses. If he had hallucinated all those decorations, there was a chance, with all the strange things that had happened to him and the boys, that if he mentioned the crepe paper, it might cause them to see what he had experienced the other night. He didn’t need that.
Sim sat in a deer stand high enough in a pine tree for him to see over the hedge bushes, but not high enough that he couldn’t climb into it. The pine sat far enough back in the thicket that no one paid much attention to him unless they were looking for someone to be there. To help matters, he wore real tree camo. Mike had given it to him for Christmas despite the fact that he hadn’t hunted in nearly ten years, which might have been the last time he’d seen that ingrate of a son. The gift had come with a large-brimmed hat of the same material, which he also wore. The kids that broke into the old gym never even knew he watched them.
If Alan ever found about this clandestine operation, he would blame it on the paranoia related to his condition. Ever since scuttlebutt started going around that some stupid smart-alecky kids from the high school were planning to throw an anniversary dance, Sim had been staking out the place. At night he could park at the very edge of the parking lot secluded behind some old privet hedges. When Johnny’s grandson died and school was canceled, he started staking out the place in broad daylight. Now his plan was working. For the first time since his surveillance began, some kids were breaking into the building.
These kids were stupid, too. They went in the side door that led into the old boys’ locker room. All four of them walked by as plain as day, not even trying to be stealthy. They even parked by the door. He jotted down their license plate numbers. The teachers at the school were doing a bang-up job teaching those kids common sense.
Sim perched in the tree, waiting. He expected more to show, especially since the football game was canceled. The hoodlums would have nothing better to occupy their time but to vandalize the old gym for their stupid idea.
Another car pulled up. It was an older model Chevy, something from the 1980s. For a time, Sim had owned one himself, a dark blue Caprice Classic. The black kid who was good on the football team got out. His Pinehurst High School baseball cap in the blue and white school colors was on backward. Sim hated that trend. The white kids had picked it up. Even his grandsons were prone to doing it, Thomas more than Josh.
The running back strutted to the door that Sim watched. A deep loathing welled up inside the old man. There was no reason something like that should be good at sports, but he could run like a bunny—a jungle bunny.
Sim laughed out loud. The boy stopped and looked toward him. For a brief moment, he thought he’d been caught, except the sun hung at an angle that seemed to blind the boy. He put his dark hand over his eyes to shield them and strutted into the building.
“Stupid coon,” Sim whispered to himself. “Doesn’t know what that ball cap was for.”
He snorted again, this time purposefully. While he waited and the sun drew closer to the horizon casting more shadows, he jotted down the names of the boys who had broken into the gym. Every one of them was connected to someone he knew, even that jungle bunny. It made identi
fying them easier. It would make getting back at them even sweeter, because he couldn’t stand most of their people.
In his quivery handwriting, Sim jotted down: Arnold Smithson’s grandson—Marcus? Next, he struggled to write out, Jeremiah Black, Deacon Black’s grandson, Neal Otis, jungle bunny football player, Thad Tucker’s grandson by his daughter and that Foreman boy, and Jamie Morris, who used to deliver my paper. He needed the notes to help solidify the names and faces. His Parkinson’s disease made it harder to remember details.
Sim schemed in the tree until sundown. Only when they had to turn on the lights in the building did the boys leave. Sim didn’t come to himself until the deep bass from the Otis boy’s car thumped through him. The two vehicles left
He climbed down from his seat in the tree as best he could in the dark. Everything worked like he’d wanted it to. Right now, he needed a drink, and not the watery stuff he kept at home to satisfy Alan. He needed to visit with Johnny and then head over the county line for some stuff off the tap.
It was deep sunset before Sim got to Johnny House’s place. After knocking on the door for a long time, he found Johnny sitting alone on his back porch.
“What are you doing out here?” Sim asked, walking up the whitewashed steps.
“Watching the sunset,” Johnny sounded someplace between reality and a dream.
Sim sat down in the wooden rocking chair beside his friend. “Why aren’t you over at your daughter’s house with your family?”
“No reason to be.” The other’s voice remained dreamy. “They aren’t doing jack squat about that boy’s death. My no-good drunk whore of a daughter isn’t even planning a memorial service.” He finally looked at Sim. “Can you imagine that? The boy’s a crackerjack football player. The whole town knows his name, and she’s going to throw him in a hole.”
“A shame. What’s happened to those kids we raised? My smart-alecky grandson told me off yesterday after Marshall’s funeral. Told me stuff no boy should tell his grandfather. Why? Because his daddy didn’t raise him no better. Today that boy of mine told me as good to shut up in front of a nigger nurse at the ER.”
Johnny looked at him again. The pink light of the sunset made his wispy silver hair look like cotton candy. “Why was you at the ER?”
“That’s part of why I came over to talk to you. I heard about how your grandson got killed.”
“Hit and run driver. The sheriff says he hasn’t got any idea how the other car kept driving after splitting Corey’s jeep in two. He said he’s never seen anything like it.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“The condition my grandson was in. He said it was one of the worst wrecks he’d ever worked. Sheriff told me he hasn’t seen anything like that since Vietnam.”
Johnny turned back to the sunset. His expression went soft and blubbery. Sim hated seeing a hard man cry. Although he could barely stand to see his friend cry, he’d shed a tear if something like that happened to his grandsons, especially Thomas. His hand shook as he put it on his friend’s shoulder. Ever since climbing down from the tree, his palsy shaking had worsened, and the face in the rearview mirror had grown clearer. Now the face had a fuzzy body below it.
Sim took his hand back and clasped it over his knee to prevent Johnny from noticing how badly it quaked. “The sheriff called me out to Harrington Road bright and early this morning,” he said.
“What for?”
“They found Charlotte’s car out there all torn up to the point they couldn’t figure out how it was still driving.”
Johnny looked back him. “You don’t mean it was the car that killed Corey, do you?”
“They think so.”
“Did they find the driver?” Johnny asked. By his tone, he was asking if Charlotte had gone off her rocker again and run his grandson down.
“No, Charlotte’s in the hospital. She has been for days.” Sim shook his head, mostly to hide the strong trembling. “No one could have survived that wreck, much less driven that car from the high school to Harrington Road.”
“What are you saying?”
“Why do you think Marshall killed himself?” Sim asked.
“Guilt.”
“Is that it?”
“I suppose. I’m not a mind reader, Sim.”
The growing clarity of the face in his reflection scared him, worse than seeing that Mercury Monterey sitting like it had forty years ago. It frightened him more than what happened the night of the massacre. The face staring over his shoulder in his reflection scared him worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
“That car was in the exact spot it was the night you shot out the tire. The same tire was even flat. The trunk was up when I arrived, and a black deputy leaned into it,” Sim said. “Gave me the heebie-jeebies so bad I passed out.”
“That’s why you were at the ER? They must have thought you’d had a heart attack.”
“Exactly. Let me tell you something. That car didn’t end up there by sheer luck.”
“Are you trying to tell me a ghost drove the car there, and a spirit killed my grandson?”
“You tell me,” Sim answered as coolly as he could.
A steely calm descended on him for the first time that day. Perhaps it was the first time he’d felt that way for a while, if he was completely honest with himself. Johnny looked very uncomfortable.
“Have you seen him?” Johnny asked.
“Who?”
“Ben Harris.”
“No, I ain’t seen him since his funeral. He looked pretty rough back then.”
“His ghost looks a lot worse now. I take Lasix every night, and I have to go about two times most nights, maybe three, depends on what I drink. Anyway, for the last few months, he’s been staring in my bathroom window while I take a piss.”
“You can tell it’s him? He didn’t start out fuzzy and get clearer?”
“The first night scared more than the piss out of me. It was like his corpse stood there plain as day.” Johnny squinted his eyes at him. “What have you seen?”
“Nothing. Except that car this morning sitting like it had that night.”
“Marshall said he heard Sheila Deleon’s screams every night for two years. He told me not long before killing himself that he’d not slept a whole night in three weeks. Apparently she started appearing at the foot of his bed, glowing blood red and screaming too loud for him to sleep.”
“My son claims to have seen Tommy Jones the other night at the school.”
“Does he know?”
“Do I look like an idiot? Of course he doesn’t know. Did your grandson know?”
Johnny shook his head. “I’ve never told anyone.”
“Why him?” Sim asked.
That particular question had been burning in his mind most of the day. Why had Johnny’s grandson been killed in such a horrific way? That led him to think about what might be in store for others, especially himself.
“Some high school kids are planning on having a Massacre Anniversary dance. What you reckon about that?” Johnny asked.
“My son works over at the school. He mentioned it, but he told me that the principal shot down the idea, for good reason.”
“Principal Chapman shot down the idea of them having it at the school, but some of them still planned on putting it on. Corey was one of them.”
Sim entwined his fingers and stared out into nothing. Johnny did the same thing. The two gray-haired men sat on the porch saying nothing until well after the sun slipped behind the pine trees. Even the purple halo of the setting sun was gone before Sim even recognized that he was thinking. He looked over at Johnny. His old friend appeared trapped in a catatonic state like Charlotte had been long ago.
“I reckon I’ll be heading out,” Sim stood. “Don’t drive well at night these days.”
“Thanks for coming by.” Johnny’s voice had taken on that dreamy quality again.
His friend ruminated over his lost grandson. He left, not bothering to say another
word. The only good thing about driving at night was that the darkness kept him from seeing the reflection in the truck’s mirrors.
Chapter Eighteen
1956
Two days before Homecoming
Charlotte sat on top of Connie Dearborn’s desk while her math teacher tried to grade freshman test papers. She popped her gum, which she wasn’t supposed to chew but it was overlooked because of her special relationship with Miss Dearborn.
“Sim told me that he proposed,” Charlotte swung her crossed leg in and out to the rhythm of her chewing.
“Yes, he did,” Connie answered with curtness in her voice.
“He said you didn’t give him an answer.”
“That’s right.”
“Why not?”
Connie put her red grease pencil down and looked at Charlotte. “Because I don’t know if I want to marry him.”
“You’ve been going with him for a year,” Charlotte said. “Don’t you think you ought to?”
“I don’t know if I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”
“Why not? He’s got Alan and Mikey. They’re sweethearts.”
Connie nodded. “I like the boys a lot, but they’re part of the reason for my worry. Your brother has been married before. He’s got children. That’s a lot of baggage to drag into a marriage. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
“But y’all have sex, don’t you?” Charlotte asked.
“Do you and Tobias have sex?” Connie asked, not lowering her voice.
Charlotte hopped off the desk and looked around the room as if someone had come in without being seen. The nerve of her teacher asking such a question, even if she was about to marry her brother. Indignation welled up in Charlotte. No one had the right to ask her that question. Yet it seemed to be coming up frequently. Sim himself had asked her that the other day.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Same to you. Remember there are questions too personal, even in our modern times.”