What Dies in Summer

by Tom Wright

  One day Mr. Campion came into the den with two Pearls from the fridge—Dee’s mom fussing along behind him about what Gram would say—then popped the caps and handed me one. After calculating that there was no way I’d be seeing Gram in less than a couple of hours, I took it. It was cold and delicious, going down smoothly and warming me inside.

  “Fuckhead,” Mr. Campion said to the wide receiver on the screen. “Third and six, guy runs a five-yard hook. See that, Jim?”

  “Yes sir. It looked like he could’ve picked up ten, easy, with the corner playing that loose.” I burped. It was late in the second quarter, the Cowboys down 17–3 against the Cards, no letup in sight.

  “That’s the trouble with these assholes anymore,” Mr. Campion said. “Their mind’s on their contract and their endorsement money, they forget to play the goddamn game.”

  “I heard the other wideout had a groin pull,” I said.

  “Yeah, delicate bastard. But he walks on out there and lines up just like everybody else, so I guess he earns his pay. Just too bad about them wooden hands.”

  It was different when Dee and I talked. For instance, after he found out about Tricia Venables he fretted over how L.A. and I felt about it and whether it was going to continue to bother us, and he worried himself sick about how Tricia’s friends and family were taking the loss. He even speculated about the right way to dress a girl her age for burial. That’s how he was, always thinking about other people and always putting their feelings ahead of his own.

  It was around this time that Mr. Campion decided to send Dee down to Halberd Academy, a military school outside Austin. It must have come up suddenly because one day Dee told me about it, and the next thing I knew I was riding down to the bus station in the rain with Dee and his parents to see him off. Mrs. Campion was crying and so was Dee. At the station he got me aside and told me he didn’t want to go, could I talk to his dad and maybe get him to change his mind?

  “You know he’s not gonna listen to me, Dee,” I said.

  “But I want to stay here—I just want to be with you, James, please . . .”

  I told him I’d try, but when I spoke to Mr. Campion a little later I didn’t. I couldn’t think of a way to bring it up. A few minutes after that the bus hissed and rumbled as it pulled out carrying Dee, his white face framed in the dark window, sliced into wavy sections by the rain streaking down the glass.

  The call came while Gram and L.A. were out, and the second I heard the ring I knew what it was about. I had to force myself to touch the phone. When I picked up, all I could hear at first was a man crying. I wouldn’t have been able to tell who it was from the sound, but of course I knew, and it sounded like the sobs were tearing his chest apart.

  He said, “Jim, this—this is Joe Campion. It—oh, Jesus—it’s Dee, my God, he’s dead, Jim—”

  Then nothing but more sobbing.

  I slowly hung up the phone and stood for a long time looking at it. It didn’t seem to be an electrical or mechanical thing. It was like a creature from some unnatural place, alive and dead at the same time, poison to the touch.

  Later I learned that Dee’s squad leader had gone into the mess hall early that morning ahead of everybody else and found him slumped against a table, thinking at first glance that somebody had left a duffel bag or something behind. But then he saw the blood. The dress sword Dee had stolen from the sergeant major’s quarters was rammed completely through his chest. I knew where the idea for that had come from: Dee had once shown me a book about ancient Romans with an illustration of a general in a little dress falling on his sword.

  “We lost him, Jim,” Mr. Campion said the next day, wiping at his eyes with a folded handkerchief. “How’d we do that?” He’d sent Dee to Halberd to make him different, not to have to leave Mrs. Campion sobbing helplessly on the porch and drive two hundred miles down there on a normal-looking day to claim his son’s body.

  He told me later that the flags were still at half-mast when he got there. The cadet corps had turned out in full dress on the parade ground and a four-man honor guard met him in the quad and escorted him to the commandant’s office.

  Later Mr. Campion, looking across at me from inside some other reality, said, “Military’s got good ceremonies for death.” Wiping at his nose with the handkerchief, he circled back to the center of his pain as if being pulled by some irresistible gravity, saying, “Sergeant major told me Dee had to’ve made at least a couple of runs at it. Didn’t think he could’ve gotten that much penetration in one try.”

  Mr. Campion was never the same after that. When he hugged me at the funeral I could feel that he was old and broken now, his voice thin and his hands shaking. I knew he could never really believe in himself again, his courage lost forever.

  As for me, I kept wondering about odd things, like whether they’d given Dee’s painting stuff back to Mr. Campion along with the body, and why it seemed like such a strange joke that the funeral home had fixed Dee up to make it look like nothing was wrong with him. And how Mrs. Campion had won the battle over how to dress Dee; he was in the shiny blue suit he wore for church instead of his Halberd uniform.

  In the chapel Mr. Campion brought me up to sit with him and Mrs. Campion in the section reserved for the family, leaving Gram and L.A. and Diana in their pew two rows back. As I sat beside her, Mrs. Campion gave my hand a squeeze and touched a tissue to the corners of her eyes. I tried to get my tie straight and concentrate on the service, but all I could really think about was how things had worked out, and how I didn’t belong up here with Dee’s parents. I thought about losing Dee this way and about having no father of my own. I thought about how it must feel when your only son dies.

  Now Dee had stopped everything. Set it in stone. Now nothing could ever be repaired.

  “What’s it like to be an orphan?” he had once asked me. He is sitting in the swing next to me at the park looking off into the distance where a bunch of small kids are kicking a soccer ball around on the open green.

  “I’m not really an orphan,” I say, a little irritated for no reason I can understand. I eat a couple of animal crackers from the box we bought at the 7-Eleven on our way here.

  “I know. But in another way you are. Do you ever dream your dad’s alive?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “Like everything’s okay again? Like him being dead was a bad dream, and you woke up from it?”

  I look at him. “How do you know about stuff like that?” I say.

  He shrugs. “No reason.” He bites his thumbnail.

  “C’mon, there’s always a reason.”

  “I dream sometimes.”

  “That your dad’s dead or something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  He stares at his thumb. “Me,” he finally says. “I dream that I’m the dream.”

  “You? What do you mean?”

  “I’m the dream everybody wakes up from.”

  That was what I was thinking about as I looked for the last time at Dee in his casket, understanding clearly now that his story and mine could never be separate again, that he would live forever in my mind, and die there forever too.

  7 | In & Out

  THE DAY AFTER Dee’s funeral I was sitting with L.A. in the living room, pretending to be interested in the Cubs-Giants game on TV, but it was really L.A. who had my attention. She was sitting in the green chair reading The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, so I knew her mind was in Siberia. The family showdown at Gram’s was still echoing in my mind, and I wondered how L.A. had gotten herself back together like this already, having no understanding yet of such things or even of how little I knew about them.

  The frizzed ends of her cutoff jeans were fluffy blue bands around her brown thighs, and her hair, which looked wilder than usual, was fringed with a halo of sunlight from the window behind her. Hundreds of hot-looking little specks of dust drifted slowly in the air between us. She turned a page, and the flecks floating in front of her moved a
round a little faster for a while. But they still weren’t going anywhere.

  On the television screen the center fielder came trotting in and took an easy fly to end the inning. As I looked at L.A.’s smooth skin I thought about Cam’s white fingers and how they moved like spiders over the strings of his guitar when he practiced, usually in his bare feet as he sat on his living room couch, his toes spreading and curling in sympathy with the fingers. I remembered how skillful his hands were and how the nails on his picking hand were long and slightly bent, orange with nicotine, grooved like horn. I imagined those hands on L.A.’s skin, everything Mom and Aunt Rachel had said coming back to me in a choking rush, and I began to wonder if going crazy worked on the same principle as burning out a fuse by plugging in too many appliances at once. It occurred to me that if you were smart enough, maybe you could somehow learn to turn off your thoughts temporarily when the circuits got overloaded, which could be a big help to me in some situations.

  Like right now.

  I got up, turned off the set and walked into the kitchen. I looked in the fridge and the cabinets without finding anything I could get interested in. Then I suddenly understood for the first time that the emptiness I felt had nothing to do with actual hunger, that it wasn’t in my stomach but somewhere in space behind me, just out of sight. I went back into the living room and switched on the stereo without looking to see what was in the slot. It turned out to be an old Johnny Mathis Greatest Hits collection, and his light, smooth voice started in about “The Twelfth of Never,” a number that somehow always caused a tightening in my throat. I walked over to the couch and sat down.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re gonna use up your brain with all that reading.”

  L.A. looked up at me. “Still be ahead of you,” she said.

  “No shit.”

  “You tired of baseball?”

  “I’m thinking about Dee.”

  “What about him?”

  “I just keep remembering how he was.”

  “You mean about liking guys?”

  “Yeah. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to feel that way.”

  “So ask a girl.”

  Johnny Mathis sang about the poets running out of rhyme, and the end of time.

  “Wouldn’t help,” I said. I took a deep breath. “What’s really on my mind is, it’s like all those times when Dee was with me it was one thing for me and something else for him. Like the world was completely different for the two of us.”

  Until the twelfth of never, sang Johnny.

  “Okay,” said L.A., tilting her head to the side and watching me. She put a folded Baby Ruth wrapper in the book as a marker and laid the book on the end table beside her.

  “What I mean is, what the hell difference does it make what he thought, right?” Tears were coming up in my eyes again, and I tried angrily to stop them.

  L.A. waited.

  “Like if he put his hand on my knee the way he did that time, it didn’t really have anything to do with me. Because he was still in his world, not mine.”

  I guess L.A. had given up on my sanity by this time because she didn’t say anything, just stared at me like you might at some foreigner who won’t stop yakking at you even though it’s obvious you don’t understand a word he’s saying.

  “It didn’t change anything about me at all,” I said. “It didn’t matter who Dee was seeing when he looked at me. It wasn’t really me he was touching.”

  At least this seemed to make some kind of sense to L.A. “Yeah,” she said. “So?”

  “So everything about you that really counts is still okay.” I caught a flash of her back off expression, and swallowed dryly. “No matter what happened,” I said.

  There was something different in L.A.’s face now. Today was her day to see Dr. Ballard, and I hoped I wasn’t somehow setting her back in her treatment. But I just couldn’t shut myself up. I brushed at my eyes.

  “Some things they can’t touch,” I said, and swallowed again.

  For a long time it was so quiet I could hear the small whirring between the ticks of the clock on the mantel across the room. I looked down at my hands, then back up at L.A.

  I’m not sure, but I think she nodded.

  8 | Night Things

  WE HAD FINISHED the supper dishes and L.A. and Gram were in the living room watching TV. After wiping the table down I dug around in the junk drawer at the end of the counter by the back door until I found the stump of a citronella candle and two wooden matches. Then I cracked ice cubes from one of the metal freezer trays into a big glass, filled it with sweetened sun tea from the pitcher in the fridge and walked out to where the wrought-iron chairs were arranged around the patio table beside the garden. It was almost full dark. I set the candle in the little dish on the table and scratched a match on the flagstones to light the bent black wick.

  As the candle pointed its short yellow flame straight up and filled the still air with a soapy smell a couple of birds woke up and flittered around for a minute in the pecan branches above me. I looked carefully around the yard for any sign of an intruder, and when I saw nothing out of place decided it must have been my arrival, and maybe the lighting of the candle, that had awakened the birds. I sat down to watch the lightning bugs as they circled and glided over the grass I’d cut with the old Sears push mower that morning. I breathed in the watermelon smell of the St. Augustine, thinking about Dee, the girl L.A. and I had found and the other two, and wondered what it felt like to die. What it would be like to have a sword through your chest or to choke to death.

  The green lines and loops of the fireflies in the air gave the impression that some slow invisible hand was trying to write an important message on the darkness but kept getting puzzled and stopping in the middle of letters. I remembered the days when L.A. and I had chased lightning bugs together and filled jars with them to carry through the darkness like magical lanterns, but that time seemed as long ago to me as the Mesozoic right now. I thought about how the world had looked and smelled and sounded then, wondering if this was what it was like to be old.

  The sky in the west wasn’t completely black yet but the night was already so thick with the sound of crickets and tree frogs and cicadas that the air seemed almost solid, and I could hear a mockingbird singing its night songs in the top of the cedar elm behind Mrs. McReady’s house. The candle flame cast a wavery circle of light on the flagstones and carpet grass around me, and beyond that I could just see the silvered redwood fence covered with frangipani and white jasmine at the back and along the south side of the yard. At the other edge of the garden was a mossy concrete birdbath with a bronze figure of a round-bellied little boy standing on goat feet and playing a funny-looking harmonica. Looking out from the candlelight, I could make out the shapes of some of the plants, the showy blue irises, pink and yellow verbenas and lantanas, gladiolus in a dozen colors, the sentinel hollyhocks at the back of the garden, some of them taller than the fence, their pale blooms like ghosts against the darkness behind them. Along the fence to my right were the big hydrangeas that Gram sometimes dosed with coffee grounds or old nails or baking soda to adjust the color of the blooms.

  But no matter how hard I tried to keep my mind on thoughts like these, I kept coming back to the subject of dying. I pushed against my throat with my fingers until I couldn’t breathe in, then took the pressure off. It didn’t take much of a push at all to stop the flow of air. For years I’d been unable to get the idea of burning to death out of my mind, and now this.

  I’d once managed to hold my breath for over sixty seconds without even getting mentally fuzzy, which taught me something about how long a minute could be. When the man had first taken Tricia, I knew, without understanding how I knew, that she’d tried to tell herself she was only being raped, and thought, This is what it’s like. But she’d really known better. Later, when she’d realized what he was about to do to her breasts, she’d hoped and prayed that would be enough for him, even felt a little bit relieved, and said in her
mind, Okay, do that if you have to and then please be satisfied, please let me live, let me go home, because she’d wanted to believe that surely he wouldn’t have to do anything more awful to her than that. But then it couldn’t have been long before she’d understood that doing that to her wasn’t going to be nearly enough for him, and she must have wondered why this man she’d probably never seen before hated her so much.

  I remembered her dead, sleepy-looking eyes and peaceful expression. I’d heard that when the policeman told her mother what had happened she’d shaken her head like the deal wasn’t necessarily done yet and gotten down on her knees on her living room floor, taken the officer’s hand in hers, kissed it front and back and asked him to please stop saying her only child was dead.

  How someone like the killer could just walk around in the common world in the middle of everybody and not be noticed, I still couldn’t imagine. It seemed unbelievable, like having a tiger in your bathtub without knowing it. This thought reminded me of something Gram had once read to L.A. and me, a poem about a burning tiger in the forests of the night and an immortal eye.

  Were there beasts that could only be seen in darkness? Or by an immortal eye?

  One thing that never got far from the center of my thoughts was the image of Hot Earl with his gap-toothed grin, like a human jack-o’-lantern. Not a pretty picture, but at least Earl was no tiger.

  But I couldn’t completely shake the idea that there really was something out there. I gathered my courage and tried to open myself, to extend my senses out into the night, to feel the tiger as it burned. It was nearby, I could tell, breathing softly, waiting. Somehow knowing me, knowing all of us, hungrily accepting the touch of my thoughts, purring like distant thunder with anticipation.

  I heard the back screen door open and close behind me, and L.A. and Jazzy came out. L.A. was carrying a plate of roasted shelled pecans and the small guitar we’d found last month next to the trash barrel behind a house where the people were moving out. She was wearing Levi’s and an old short-sleeved white button-down of mine that had a big lopsided ink stain at the edge of the pocket, right over her heart. She put the plate on the table and sat in the chair beside me, Jazzy circling herself down into a ball by her feet. The pecans were from the trees we were sitting under, and Gram had roasted them with butter and salt and a little red pepper. They were still warm from the oven, and I crunched down a few, then took a drink of tea from the sweating glass.