What Dies in Summer

by Tom Wright

  “How come you’re not watching the show?” I said.

  “Jugglers,” said L.A. She started chording on the guitar strings and then picked out a sweet little optimistic-sounding melody. She stopped playing and adjusted one of the tuning keys.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Nothing. I made it up.”

  “The hell.”

  She shrugged.

  “Gimme,” I said, and reached for the guitar. I fingered the strings and got nothing but plunks and plonks. I tried again but it sounded the same. “Damn,” I said.

  “Well, see there,” said L.A. She bit the end off a pecan half.

  I handed the guitar back to her. So I wasn’t a music maker. You’ve got it or you don’t.

  Whole ’nother kind of quick, Hubert had said once when we were talking about it. Fingers gotta work on their own. With you it’s not in your fingers; all your speed and control is in your arms and fists. You’re a natural boxer. That’s how come Asshole Jack’s afraid of you.

  Bullshit.

  Hey, believe it, man. He’s scared of what you’re gonna be like in a year or two. If you didn’t have nothing, he wouldn’t be wanting to get the gloves on with you all the time to prove himself. He wouldn’t give a shit.

  Now I fished out the Chesterfield I’d been saving, glanced back at the house and leaned forward to light it from the candle flame. As I smoked, a toad hopped out from under the hydrangeas into the light and squatted in the grass like a flat goblin, waiting for bugs. It made me think of pictures of gargoyles I’d seen in one of Gram’s books. I found part of a gum wrapper in my pocket, wadded it into a tight ball and tossed it in front of the toad. Quick as a speargun, the toad’s tongue shot out and caught it.

  I knew there was a tarantula somewhere in the garden too, because I’d seen it this morning when Jazzy barked at it in the lantanas. It had been as big as my hand, black and hairy and apparently not the least bit afraid of Jazzy or me. I wondered whether tarantulas came out at night, and if so, whether their eyes shone like other arachnids. The word I’d heard somewhere for this red pinprick was spiderspark, and to me it seemed to condense and focus the mysteries of the night the way a magnifying glass focuses the sun.

  I offered the smoke to L.A. She took a quick puff and handed it back. I got out the blue stone the old woman had left me and rolled it in my hand. It seemed warmer than it should have been from just being in my pocket. “What do you think it feels like to choke?” I said.

  She thought about this for a while, leaning back in the chair and hugging herself. “I don’t know,” she said. There was something odd in her voice.

  I said, “I’ve heard fear can make you numb.”

  She stared at the candle, saying nothing, two little repetitions of the flame shining in her eyes.

  I felt a chill even in the dense heat of the night, seeing Tricia Venables’s dead body and the marks on her neck and wrists. I rubbed my eyes, then finished the cigarette and kicked up a divot in the grass, dropped the butt under it and pressed the sod back down with the toe of my sneaker.

  “D’you think maybe that’s how it could’ve been with those girls?” I said. “They stopped feeling anything?”

  L.A. looked out across the dark garden with the candlelight moving on her face, seeing into distances that existed only for her. After a long time she said, “They felt it.”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out, trying to organize my thoughts. I knew I understood almost nothing about evil, but once again I had a sense of it, or something like it, waiting out there, its mighty heart beating in the night.

  But thinking of it as a tiger wasn’t really right. It was something much worse. Remembering the teeth marks in L.A.’s window frame, I was suddenly certain that whatever was out there was no obvious monster at all. It didn’t need the darkness. It wasn’t afraid of the sun. And I was sure I had seen it face-to-face.

  No. More than that.

  It had touched me, skin to skin.

  9 | Skills

  RACHEL HAD been right to worry about Cam going to jail. When the cops arrived they had found her in the front room wailing and sniffling, but no Cam. A radio alert, what Don called a BOLO, was sent out, but then before anything else could happen Cam pulled up in his van. They handcuffed him, searched him, perp-jerked him around and threw him in the back of the patrol car. As I heard the story, he had a dopey smile on his face the whole time, which I knew from experience signified that he was royally pissed off but couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Knowing now what he’d done to L.A., I had no sympathy for him. So naturally I didn’t have any argument with him getting arrested either, but when the next news about him came I was on the couch with Diana in the den at the back of the Chamforts’ house, with several other things on my mind. We were babysitting her little brother Andy and had the house to ourselves for a while because he was asleep and her parents were at work. It was L.A.’s day to see Dr. Ballard, so she wasn’t around either.

  I was sitting on the couch with one of Don’s Outdoor Life magazines open to a story about trout fishing, but I was mostly still trying to sort out my thinking about Mom and L.A., the murdered girls and everything else that had happened. For one thing, I wasn’t sure what to say or how to act around L.A. anymore, and my uncertainty was beginning to generalize to other girls and women. I guess it was starting to dawn on me what a different world they live in.

  A vodka ad on the page across from the article showed a tall couple dancing on a wide balcony, which seemed strange for this kind of magazine, but it got me thinking about L.A. and Diana and how they had taken a serious interest lately in my dancing abilities. In fact, it had become one of their programs for the summer to bring me up to specifications in that respect.

  That’s girls for you; they look at a guy and they see raw material.

  Sometimes, before the lessons, the three of us would go up to Diana’s room and I’d fool around with the Chinese checkers or a deck of cards or something while the girls messed with their hair or jewelry and kind of forgot about me. It was during these times, and on account of my ability to keep my mouth shut, that I learned things about girls that I wouldn’t have known any other way.

  Not that I understood everything. Once, when Diana and L.A. were trying on necklaces in front of the mirror, Diana said, “Jason Mackey’s going out with Melinda. I told her he was cute.”

  L.A. said, “Like a rat’s ass.”

  “I know, but I still owed her for history last semester.”

  It wasn’t just eavesdropping, though. Another time I was leaning back on the bed halfway watching L.A. and Diana doing something with hairbrushes, thinking about the pillow under my elbow, about how that was where Diana laid her head every night, and wondering whether she slept on her back or her side or her stomach. I visualized where her shoulders went on the bed, and her hips and legs too, and I wondered whether she wore pajamas at night, or maybe a big T-shirt like L.A. Or maybe nothing at all.

  Then I suddenly sat up, my salivary glands and other things threatening to get out of control. This kind of stuff was happening to me a lot lately—girls beginning to figure into every part of my life and gradually establishing control over my mind. But at the same time, and as contradictory as it might sound, it came to me that getting along with them wasn’t the impossibility most of the guys I knew thought it was. What I realized was that almost all it takes to stay in good with girls is keeping yourself at least semi-clean, being polite and actually paying attention when they’re talking. It may sound too simple to work, but I swear it does.

  Then when it was time for my lesson, we’d usually start with the fast stuff I enjoyed, like Santana or the Doors or maybe Mungo Jerry, then work our way from there up through the music they liked—James Taylor, slow numbers by the Supremes and other stuff Diana had, plus records from her parents’ collection.

  It’s important to realize that when you’re in training with girls you can’t pass off the moves you
make to a fast rock beat as real dancing. Guys tend to favor that stuff because it’s sort of freestyle and more a matter of action than grace. And they like the music better too. But in general, girls can take fast dancing or leave it. One of the things I knew because I had the skill of silence was that they like slow dancing because it’s more romantic and shows them off to better advantage.

  I was a fairly quick study with all kinds of steps, though, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, I didn’t like being disciplined for screwing up, which generally came in the form of some nasty comment on my intelligence from L.A. or a knuckle rap on the head from Diana. But really I think what motivated me most was how much I liked the feeling of these two slender, absolutely different girls moving against me, taking my lead and talking softly into my ear about what we were going to do next. And another thing that helped me was realizing how dancing well isn’t just about the steps or the music, it’s also a matter of understanding that when you’re dancing, the real center of a guy’s movement is his shoulders and arms, and everything else has to coordinate, whereas the center of a girl’s movement is her hips and her legs.

  But today was not for dancing. Diana, wearing green shorts, a white T-shirt and leather moccasins, had just come from taking a shower and turned on the stereo as she walked into the room. Jay and the Americans came low and soft from the speakers—“This Magic Moment.” As Diana leaned on the back of the couch, reading over my shoulder and humming quietly along with the music, I could feel her hair touching my neck and her breath on the side of my face.

  “What’s a Coachman?” she said.

  “A lure he’s gonna use. Looks like a bug.”

  “How’s it work?”

  “Just lays on the water until the fish grabs it.”

  “Oh,” she said doubtfully.

  It sounded a little odd to me too. We were both more accustomed to bass fishing.

  “You use a long rod that’s got a funny-looking reel at the back end,” I said. “The fishing line is really what you cast, because it’s kind of heavy, and the fly just gets pulled along for the ride.”

  “Then what?”

  “When the fly lands on the water, it floats. The fish thinks it’s a real bug, and bam.”

  “Do they fish that way in Minnesota?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure if they have trout up there.”

  I noticed the light pressure of Diana’s crossed arms against my shoulder and the smell of soap and shampoo on her, and I began losing my focus on the idea of fishing. I could even smell her Gleem toothpaste as she looked over my shoulder at the picture of a man in waders standing in a mountain stream. Visualizing her stepping out of the shower wet and naked, the way I’d seen L.A. that time, I looked up at her face and saw the window reflected in her eyes and saw how the individual eyelashes curved away from her lids. Thinking back to what L.A. had shown me, and hoping I wasn’t being in any way like Hubert or Cam or Jack, I reached up with both hands, carefully turned her head toward me and pressed my mouth to hers.

  “Mmm,” she said.

  I pushed my tongue between her teeth exactly as L.A. had done with me, and Diana invited it in. She put her hand behind my head and held my mouth to hers. The feeling was unbelievable, much more powerful than L.A.’s demonstration because it meant something so different. When we finally broke the kiss, we were both breathing hard. Diana looked at me with a serious expression, and I wondered for a second if she was going to hit me. Then she came around the end of the couch and knelt on the cushion beside me. She held my cheeks with her hands and leaned down to kiss me the way I had just kissed her. I turned farther toward her and slid my hand up from her hip toward her breast.

  “Mmmm,” she said again.

  At the other end of the house the front door opened, and in my guilty mind it was nothing less than the crack of doom. Diana jumped back from me as if I’d suddenly turned red-hot, and Andy started yelling in his crib.

  “It’s Porkchop!” Diana hissed, a rabbit in the spotlight.

  “Oh, goddamn,” I said. I took a couple of deep breaths, aching, feeling like an overinflated balloon.

  “C’mon,” said Diana, and we went into the other room to get Andy. “Hey, Fubb,” she said as she gathered him up. “You’re wet.” We heard Don go into the kitchen.

  While Diana started changing Andy, I looked down at myself to make sure I was safe to be seen, then walked into the kitchen. I was feeling remorseful over what I’d just been doing and wanting to do with Don’s daughter, but I’d lived with worse. At least with Don I never got the feeling he could hear what I was thinking the way Gram and L.A. sometimes could.

  “Hiya, Jimbo,” he said.

  He turned from the refrigerator with a bottle of root beer in his hand and held it out to me as he reached for another one. His jacket was hanging over the back of a chair and he was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and tie. His short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 in its dark leather holster was still clipped to his belt. His hands were wide and clean, with short nails, and his strong arms were lightly covered with hair the same color as Diana’s. What hair was left on his head was a little darker and lay more or less as it pleased instead of how he’d tried to comb it, with a few gray loners salted in along the sides. He got a bottle opener from the drawer and popped both caps off. We sat at the table.

  “Where’s the rest of us?” he said.

  “Andy’s getting a retread.”

  “Yeah, the little late arrival—he does go through those diapers. By the way, we got that uncle of yours booked in. I dropped by lockup right after they got through taking his mug shots and prints, and I gotta say he didn’t look too amused. You pretty sure he did what they said?”

  “L.A. says he did.”

  Don drank root beer and thought about this. “Then he did,” he finally said. “But I can tell you it beats the hell out of me how a guy does a thing like that. How’d we find out, exactly?”

  “Gram did. She called the police.”

  “Do you know who it was caught the call?”

  “A tall serious-looking guy with a big ring, and a sort of chubby one who took off his hat in the house.”

  Don nodded. “I know who they are. I’ll make a chance to talk to ’em, see what they can tell me.”

  “L.A. had to tell them what Cam did to her.”

  “Poor kid. Too bad there wasn’t some other way. We need more female officers.” He shook his head. “And it’s not over yet. But Lee Ann’s tough, isn’t she?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, Cam’ll probably bond out pretty quick now, if he hasn’t already—not a damn thing we can do about that. But with these judges we’ve got up there now, this is gonna go hard on him if it sticks. I’d hate to be him or his lawyer.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “If he’s convicted, which it looks like he probably will be, he’ll go to prison. The judges have guidelines on the sentencing, but they don’t have to follow them, and this is the kind of case where they’re likely to go the max.”

  This caused me to imagine Cam sprawled in some forgotten cell with a long gray beard and spiderwebs strung out from his knees and elbows to the walls around him.

  “He may be your uncle and all,” said Don, “but if it was up to me I’d throw away the key on a guy like him myself. But hey, you looking forward to the big trip?”

  I nodded. “Sure am,” I said. “It’s gonna be the farthest I’ve ever traveled. Gram says my folks took me to Ruidoso for the races when I was little, but I don’t remember it.”

  “Yeah, this’s a little farther. North country’s way different too—gets cold up there even in the summer sometimes. Marge’s daddy told me he saw it snow on the Fourth of July one year. I remember the mosquitoes being pretty bad last time I was up, what was it, five years ago I guess it’s been. But you can put stuff on for that. Old-timers up there get so they don’t even pay attention to ’em anymore. What I’m wanting is for Diana t
o get to see the place, and that country. It was her granddaddy built the cabin, but she’s never been there the whole time we’ve had it.”

  I tried to imagine what the place looked like but got only a mental picture of a little log house half hidden in the woods, which didn’t seem to fit at all with the way Don was talking.

  He pushed his root beer bottle a couple of inches to one side, then back, thinking. “We’re gonna try something new on these damn killings when I get back,” he said. “Ferguson’s gonna be setting it all up while I’m gone.”

  “What is it?”

  He picked up the root beer, saying, “I’ve got this crazy theory that if you add up one and one and one the right way, you just might get more than three.” He smiled at me and took a drink from the bottle. “Anyway, as long as Marge’s little sister doesn’t back out on keeping Andy, I guess we’re about set. Ought to be a real field day for you, Jimbo,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and hang a muskie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Muskellunge. Like a pike, only bigger. Mean-lookin’ fish. Always been talk about eighty-pounders coming out of that lake, but the Indians say there are some in there a whole lot bigger than that. They even tell stories about them—or something—grabbing off kids and dogs.”

  “Have you ever caught one?”

  “No. Well, I mean yeah, but nothing like that size. I caught one on the last trip that went eleven pounds, but it was just a fluke. I was after walleyes.”