by Tom Wright
But I didn’t catch the rest. Being in church brought back words and phrases I’d heard here over the years, like “the blood of the lamb” and “washed in the blood,” and even though I knew I didn’t truly get the meaning of this any better now than I ever had, it was enough to catapult me backward in time, back to L.A. and me washing the bedspread and the knife in the hottest water we could stand, mopping the hardwood floor of her room and the hallway with pine cleaner and hosing away the splatters of blood on the porch and walk and driveway, praying to finish before Gram came home. The blood was everywhere, no visible difference between Cam’s and mine, and for a crazy few seconds it seemed to me there wasn’t enough water and soap in the world to wash it all away. And in a way I was right. It was still no trick at all for me to half close my eyes when I looked at, or even imagined, the floor or the sidewalk at Gram’s and see it all again, bright and evil and in its own way absolutely unerasable.
After the service, as we walked out the double doors of the church into the white blast of afternoon heat and down the steps onto the blazing sidewalk where the long death cars waited at the curb, Gram, L.A. and I got separated. Gram and L.A. ended up with Mom in one car, and I rode with Diana in another.
The sun had overheated her in her black funeral dress, bringing out a little shine of sweat on her upper lip. A glow, I guess it was. Looking at it, I remembered the way her bare skin had sparkled with water on the island that day in Minnesota, and suddenly, in the middle of all this seriousness, I wanted to lick the sweat off her lip. But having that completely insane and undoubtedly sinful thought right here in front of the church, with Cam’s dead and mutilated body so close by, caused a chilly shadow of guilt to pass over me. I tried to keep from thinking what I was thinking, which of course only made it worse.
What finally distracted me from that was the unwanted memory of Don telling us about the other stuff they’d found in Cam’s toolboxes and duffel bags in the van after the wreck. The camera and the uniform shirt hadn’t been the end of it, not by a long shot. There were cords and ropes and blindfolds, surgical scissors and clamps, knives, rolls of duct tape, pulleys and other equipment he used, and a lot more stuff like that in the men’s restroom inside the old Conoco station, which was where he had kept the girls locked up. Before he killed them. In the freezer of the little refrigerator he used for his beer they found the girls’ nipples, wrapped in foil with several snips of dark hair. I could hardly believe I’d been as close as I had to all of it, even within touching distance of what was in the van, without feeling it.
And then it got even worse. When Don had to go take a phone call I managed to sneak a look at the pictures Cam had taken, and what he had written on them. In several of the pictures I recognized Tricia Venables, and you could see at least part of Cam in some of them too. In one picture, Tricia was tied in a chair naked and blindfolded, and a hand was holding a box knife against her left breast. At the bottom was written in black grease pencil, SHE WAS READY! In some of the photos, the girls were standing naked on a box with blood on their breasts and thin ropes around their necks, the way I’d dreamed of them. On one of these, Cam had written, SHE COMES AND SHE GOES! and on another, MAKING HER WAIT IS THE BEST PART.
The long black cars rolled silently away from the curb.
“What’d L.A. tell you?” I asked Diana.
“He did stuff to her, Bis, for a long time, like he did with those girls, except he didn’t kill her and he only cut her a little.”
“A little?” I stared at her.
“She’s still all there,” said Diana.
“Why did she wait so long to tell anybody?”
“He said he’d kill you and Gram if she did.”
My head was thumping and I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. L.A. had kept her mouth shut to save us. I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to hold that inside herself every day.
“So what changed?” I asked. “Why’d she let on when she did?”
Diana looked hard at me for a minute, then said, “You really don’t know?”
I shook my head and wiped at my eyes.
Diana said, “She started believing in you more than him.”
And the weight of complete inadequacy settled on my shoulders like sacks of cement.
We arrived at the cemetery and bumped our way back to the Rowe plot. There were a few black locusts and some crape myrtles back here but not much else to keep the sun off. The grave, along with a big gray pile of rocky dirt covered with a phony green rug that I assumed was meant to look like grass, was shaded by a blue-striped awning. Four rows of folding chairs had been arranged under the awning facing the casket, which was supported on a kind of frame draped with the same green material that had been thrown over the dirt. Sunlight reflected off the marble headstones all around us. From one of them a blue jay watched the movements of the people with a glittering black eye. In the distance, I saw Colossians Odell standing near the edge of the trees with his panama in his hand. He looked calm and focused, and I hoped the terrible storms that sometimes raged through his mind had let up at least for a while. There was no sign of Caruso, but I somehow felt sure he was sleeping safely in Colossians’ pocket.
“I don’t think we should make her talk about it too much until she’s ready, Bis,” said Diana into my ear.
I nodded, taking a last swipe at my eyes and trying to straighten my tie, hoping nobody would get the idea I was shedding tears over Cam. I wondered how much talking was too much and how you were supposed to tell and why there wasn’t a damn rulebook you could look things like this up in. For some reason I remembered what Dr. Kepler had said to me about true enemies, and thought of Jack in a coffin like Cam’s. I wondered if an enemy was still an enemy after he was dead. Or had his teeth knocked out.
As everyone stood around waiting to be told where to sit, I saw L.A. standing stiffly next to Gram in her darkest blue dress and shiny black shoes, her hair tied with a black ribbon. I noticed a couple of the men from the church looking her up and down, their eyes full of hungry curiosity. I walked over and stood by her side for a second, wanting to offer her some kind of support but unable to think of anything to say or do that seemed the least bit helpful. I could smell the perfume she’d borrowed from Diana and the wine she’d been drinking. She stared at the casket with eyes like black diamonds. The power she was radiating was almost visible, but I didn’t know what was in her mind. Maybe it was hate. Maybe satisfaction. Or something else entirely. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to ask her.
Diana took my hand as we sat in the third row of chairs, behind Gram and L.A. Mom, Rachel and Jack were in the second row, Jack looking like a sore thumb in his neck brace. For a few seconds I was lost in thoughts about right and wrong, justice and paybacks.
“. . . and in bringing Camden Lee Rowe here to this place of final farewell,” said Brother Wells, “we humbly acknowledge our inability to fathom our Creator’s will, or to truly know any man’s heart. Camden walked in God’s sunshine even as you and I do; he drank of the water God gave us and ate of the bread of the fields our Father prepared for us. We cannot know what separate country of the spirit he may have passed through while he was among us. That is between him and the Maker before Whom he now stands. As ever, we trust not only in the mercy but in the wisdom of that Maker, our Lord, the Ruler of heaven and earth.”
I visualized Cam, not free to just lie down and be dead but cobbled and stitched back together like a chewed-up doll, standing in front of the great desk in God’s office. But this time He looked bigger and more dangerous. This was the Maker of universes and Judge of judges, with world-breaking thunder in His face. Everything His eyes touched glowed and snapped with blue voltage.
Outside the windows behind Him strange violet lightning veined across a blue-black sky and I saw tall muscular figures armed with heavy swords gathering out there—dark angels empty of mercy. They began materializing one by one beside and behind Cam, their lion breath filling the air, t
heir eyes as unbearable as the flames of arc welders.
I felt my hopes of getting a word in for Dad and Gramp and Dr. Kepler, not to mention the dead girls, slipping away, my tongue and my words locked down by the monstrous gravity in this place of ultimate judgment.
“Amen,” said Brother Wells from somewhere far away. I felt the blood returning to my face, and I breathed again.
And the last thing I heard as I came back to the moment was the long, despairing scream that ripped its way out of Cam’s ruined throat as the irresistible blood-crusted hands of the dread angels closed on him and, as the old woman had promised L.A., he vanished into eternal night as the darkness took back its own.
10 | Other Dreams
A COUPLE OF DAYS later I threw the knife off the Cadiz Viaduct into the Trinity as the sun was going down behind the city. L.A. and I hadn’t spoken about what had happened that day but what we knew about Cam’s death naturally made for an extra weight between us, another thing we carried together in the world, the way Mr. Campion and I would always carry Dee’s death.
But for L.A. the weight pulled a different way and seemed to reposition something in her heart. She didn’t pay attention to every little sound and movement around her like she had before. I don’t think she ever covered herself with pillows anymore, and she never hit me or got that wild look on her face again. She taped school pictures of the three murdered girls to her mirror. There was a changed light in her eyes now and she was somehow more beautiful, but older, and in a way you knew wasn’t entirely good.
Something had changed in me too. Somehow the strange hungers I had never been able to satisfy left me. I almost never drank with L.A. anymore, and when I’d lit a Chesterfield in Gram’s back yard the other day I hadn’t liked the taste at all, crushing it out unsmoked.
Then on a Sunday afternoon Don, dressed in loafers, khakis and a yellow pullover and not looking the least bit like a cop or a boss, visited Gram and me at home. Gram fixed him a big glass of iced tea, then poured cold buttermilk into a tumbler for herself. She got her pepper mill from the freezer, ground a little black pepper onto the buttermilk and sat down at the kitchen table. Then Don sat down across from her, and they talked about the heat and the government for a while, Don saying, “Yes ma’am” and “No ma’am” to her, exactly as I did.
After a few minutes he excused himself, stood up and said, “Come on, Jimbo, give me a hand.”
We walked out to the front porch, where he set his sweating glass down on the porch rail and glanced up at the tinkling wind chime near the corner of the porch. He stretched, then reached into his pocket and brought out a small matchbox, opening it to give me a look. In the box were three yellowish teeth with blunt brown prongs at the bottoms. One of the teeth had a silver-looking filling.
“Cam’s,” said Don.
We walked around back to what had been L.A.’s window, and Don fitted the teeth one at a time to the dents I’d found in the wood of the sill. He let me feel how when you held the tooth down in the right impression and tried to twist it there was no movement at all.
“Proves what you figured out—Earl wasn’t our guy,” he said.
I nodded.
“But when you found these marks you didn’t think it would do any good to call us . . .”
I swallowed hard.
“. . . and you were afraid of the possible consequences, am I right?”
I nodded again.
“You didn’t want to scare your Gram or Lee Ann unnecessarily or take a chance on busting up your family.”
He looked at me for a while. I cleared my throat.
He said, “Next time I’m thinking you’ll know better.”
“Yes sir.”
SOMETIMES Gram would stop in at the gas station where Jack worked now to get the Buick gassed up, always saying something like, “Jack, I wonder if you might just check the tires and see if you can get that little spot you missed back there on the window? Thank you so much.” At this point Jack would usually give me a homicidal glare, but the time when I was afraid of him was over. It wasn’t just that his neck and eye were messed up, or that you could tell his reflexes and nerve were gone. It was realizing that it had never really been me he needed to destroy—it had been his own weakness. One time at the station when I got out of the car to go inside for a Coke, standing up in front of him just as he approached the car door, he flinched and brought his arms up to cover before he could stop himself, exactly as I had done with him so many times. At that moment I saw him as he experienced himself—a lost boy too scared to cry, knowing there was no help for him anywhere and understanding that in the ways that truly counted he was the worst things there are in the world for a man to be: helpless and alone.
When Jack had been caught in the raid with Hubert and Shepherd Boy at the Triple-X Bookstore downtown, Gram said all it cost him was a fine. But Shepherd Boy didn’t come to our church anymore, his name disappearing from the bulletins and newsletters and never again being mentioned by Brother Wells, or anyone else as far as I knew.
Hubert landed in juvenile court for the bookstore thing but just got remanded to the custody of his parents. I saw him around sometimes, wearing black clothes and letting his hair get shaggier and longer. He showed me a gun he said he’d stolen from somebody’s car, a small chrome-plated .25 automatic with black plastic grips, and told me he’d started carrying it in his pocket everywhere he went.
“Wanta go out to the tracks and shoot it?” he said. “I got shells.”
“Nah,” I said, knowing that a few weeks ago I would have gone without a second thought.
L.A. and I hadn’t seen Fangbaby in weeks, finally admitting to ourselves she was gone for good. But I’d been wrong about her. She had let L.A. touch the tip of her nose the last time we saw her. Maybe it was the cheese L.A. was holding.
Dr. Kepler had died three weeks after the day of the applesauce, and the funeral home cremated her according to the instructions in her will. They put her in a fancy silver jar that Gram called a funerary urn, which to me didn’t look big enough to hold a cat. Since she had no family and there’d been no funeral service, Gram said putting her on our mantel beside the picture of Gramp in his black suit would have to serve as her last rites. I wondered what the ashes looked like but somehow couldn’t bring myself to look. It was no problem for L.A., though. She took the lid off the urn, peered inside and said, “Just looks like dry dirt.”
We gathered in front of the mantel and Gram read a poem called “Our Saviour’s Other Sheep” from one of her books while L.A. kind of stood at attention and looked very serious, even though she was like Dr. Kepler herself in having few if any supernatural beliefs. On a sheet of blue paper from the stationery box I printed the quotation Dr. Kepler had written inside the cover of the copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea she’d given me. It read:
—if you have seen the sparrow
almost blown from its branch
by the sweet winds of spring,
you have seen my true heart.
Folding the paper carefully, I put it under the urn. Then Gram made L.A. and me bow our heads with her for a moment of silence, and that was the end of it.
At first it was eerie having her up there on the mantel like some silent witness to our comings and goings, but eventually we all pretty much got used to it. Sometimes when nobody else was around I even talked to her, which seemed to help me sort out my thinking and gave me the feeling she was still with us in some way.
In spite of not wanting to be away from Diana and spending more and more time with her at the end of that summer, I still kept going to the pool with L.A. whenever I could. Out there it was like the air was her real element and gravity didn’t apply to her. When I watched her at the pool it seemed to me she was trying to fly away from what had happened to her, and I hoped the air was having some healing effect, because of course she was flying for me too.
After the newspaper did a photo series on her a diving coach from the university came down
to watch her one Saturday, later visiting the house to talk to L.A. and Gram about the Olympic trials the year after next.
“She has tremendous talent,” the woman said. “It would be criminal to let it go to waste.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “You gotta do it,” I said to L.A. when the woman had gone.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Shit, L.A., I’m serious! You gotta!”
She shrugged.
She kept visiting Dr. Ballard occasionally for a while, but as time went by she gradually drifted away from us. I kept looking for some altered awareness in her, some sign that she was going to be all right, but there was nothing. We saw less and less of her, and she would never talk about where she’d been. A couple of times I’d seen her hanging out with Hubert after school and I knew she went down to Beauchamp’s almost every day now, sometimes staying until Froggy locked up. Once when Gram was away for the weekend with some friends in Fort Worth I found L.A. passed out drunk on the floor in the bathroom and helped her to her bed. She seemed to have almost no weight. Sitting on the side of the bed, watching her sleep, I smoothed her wild dark hair back from her face and tried to think of a way to pray for her, but no words came to me.
Whoever or whatever had stood by my bed through so many nights never came again, and now when I dreamed about Dee or the dead girls, more and more often I saw them lying down peacefully in some safe place, their eyes closed and their hands folded. The girls were whole again, covered instead of naked and cold, and Dee no longer grieved for the father and the life I’d stolen from him. Somewhere in a diamond-clear dimension of truth Dr. Kepler forgot cancer and the ovens and the brownshirts, and under some forgiving sun Gramp laid down the terrible weight he carried and at last stood straight again. And on the deserted midnight highway that ran through the center of my heart, my own father finally walked free of the endless flames, his face fresh and unscarred.
Once or twice I even imagined that all of them, shining with a pure soft light, stood together in some high and blessed place, held out their hands to me across the dark universes and forgave me.