Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  That was probably his strategy with Marie, but when I came closer, I heard her sternly say, “I’m going with someone.”

  Tim Townley turned in the direction of my wet feet slapping on the concrete. When he saw I was coming toward Marie, he looked questioningly at her. She said nothing to correct his impression, and Tim Townley shook his head and walked away. A profound gratitude instantly augmented my already considerable love for Marie Ryan.

  She signaled the kids to come out of the pool and began to gather up their towels. I asked her if I could give them a ride home, but she told me that Mrs. Linstrom would be picking them up.

  Before we parted, she said, “You know, you could have asked Gene about all this yourself.”

  Her remark sounded like a mild reproach, and I took it in that spirit. But I had never received a scolding that came accompanied with a smile like the one Marie Ryan shone on me.

  If the purpose of Marie’s observation had been to suggest that I could be a better friend to Gene, it was right on the mark. I know it now, and I knew it then, yet I couldn’t seem to find the actions that corresponded to that knowledge. I knew how not to hurt but not how to help.

  I can think of only one occasion when I did something that, in a small way, might have aided Gene during that difficult time.

  He and I were at a party at Jay Garner’s house, and though Jay’s parents were out of town, the gathering wasn’t a large or wild one—just six or seven of us, all males. The month was April, but in North Dakota that’s often nothing but a calendar page. While the temperature had been in the seventies the week before, that night a wet snow was falling, fat heavy flakes filling up the window well right outside the basement rec room where we sat drinking beer, our empty cans carefully stacked atop Jay’s father’s bar. Just below the ceiling’s acoustical tiles blue smoke pooled from our cigarettes and cigars (someone had stolen a box of White Owls). Most of our conversation I can’t recall, but I’m still certain of what we talked about: athletic skills and how they could be improved; cars and how they could be altered to run faster; and girls and how they could be induced to put out. As predictably as the belches that accompanied our beer drinking, those subjects came up whenever our group gathered. On other occasions we might also have talked about why Raymond Stoddard had killed Monty Burnham, but since Gene was present that night, the topic had to be avoided, even if the sight of Gene was enough to bring the question to mind all over again.

  On that evening, however, the taboo was violated, and while I was there to witness the occurrence, I’m still not quite sure how it came to pass. We were at Jay Garner’s house, and perhaps he believed that privileged him. Or maybe he was too drunk to observe the usual restrictions. Whatever the cause, at some point in the evening, Jay asked Gene if he had a theory about why his father had done what he’d done. Jay asked the question politely enough, and he seemed motivated, at least initially, by nothing but curiosity. For his part, Gene simply tried to deflect the question. “Sorry, I don’t.”

  We were all relieved when Gene’s shrugged apology seemed to close off the subject, and we quickly returned to our discussion of carburetors.

  But Jay got drunker, and as he did, he resumed his interrogation. At least an hour had passed since his impertinent question, but Jay picked up right where he had left off. “That’s fucking hard to believe,” Jay said to Gene. “That you don’t have a clue about why he did it. I mean, he was your dad, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Hard to believe or not,” Gene said, “it’s true. Sorry.”

  “I’m not saying you know for sure. I’m asking for a fucking hunch. A goddamn guess. A hypothesis. You sure as shit have one. Everybody does.”

  “But I don’t.”

  Jay turned to the rest of the group, most of whom were staring uncomfortably into their beer cans. “You know what we ought to do? We should torture him until he tells us what he knows. What do you say?”

  Someone, it might have been Bill Forston, said, “Why don’t you give it a rest.”

  But something—or someone, and maybe it was Gene’s passivity—had opened a vein of meanness in Jay Garner. And, typical of a drunk, he was now taken with his own sadistic idea. He scraped the ash from his cigar, then blew on the tip until it glowed red-orange. “If someone’ll hold him down, I’ll administer the pain.”

  No one moved, but Bill Forston said, “I know you’re just trying to be funny, but you’re not. You’re not fucking funny.”

  Jay continued to contemplate his cigar.

  I looked over at Gene, expecting him to tell Jay where he could stick his cigar, but Gene said nothing and didn’t move. It seemed to me, however, and here perhaps I gave myself more credit than I deserved, that his eyes were taking on the first glisten that would eventually lead to tears.

  “I have a better idea,” I said. I stood and walked over behind Jay. “How about Chinese water torture?” And with that I poured beer on his cigar.

  The cigar hissed, Jay yelped and jumped back from the beer streaming down on him, everyone laughed, and the moment’s tension, along with all talk of torture and truth-telling, was extinguished.

  As I was returning to my chair, Gene rose and walked silently past me.

  I couldn’t give myself too much credit for bailing out my friend. After all, I hadn’t directly confronted Jay on his stupidly cruel comments; instead I had tried to use a joke of my own to defuse the situation. And had it been compassion for Gene that finally prompted me to act, or a wish to save him, me, all of us, from the embarrassment that would have followed if he had begun to cry? This for a young man who should have been understood and forgiven if he broke down in tears every single day.

  Time passed and it became apparent Gene had not merely gone to the bathroom or to get another beer, so I drained the remainder of my beer, conspicuously shook the can to demonstrate that it was empty, and then left the room.

  I couldn’t find him anywhere, not in the bathroom, not in the laundry room, where the beers chilled in a cooler, and not in any of the upstairs rooms, generally understood to be off-limits to us. I would have assumed he’d left the party altogether, but his coat was still draped over a kitchen chair.

  As I turned to go back downstairs, I glanced out the back door and saw him.

  Gene was standing on the small porch, unsheltered, the adhesive spring snow cloaking and capping him.

  I opened the door and stepped out, and he didn’t even turn to see who had joined him. Maybe he assumed all along that I’d come after him.

  “Hey, Garner’s an asshole,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  Gene nodded. If I was looking for an expression of gratitude, it was not to come.

  “I thought maybe you’d take that cigar and put it out on his forehead.”

  We both knew how out of character that would have been, and he didn’t bother responding to my suggestion. Instead, he turned to me and through the veil of the falling snow said, “I don’t know anything. I don’t.” The tears that I believed I saw forming in his dark eyes earlier were now in his voice. “If he doesn’t stop, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  If there was a threat behind his words it wasn’t intended for Jay Garner but for Gene Stoddard himself.

  “Okay,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder and then bringing it back cold and wet with snow. “Okay. I’ll say something. Now let’s go back inside. I’m freezing my ass.”

  We both went back into the house, but Gene didn’t follow me down the stairs. Behind me I heard the door open and close again. Gene was not driving that night, but I felt certain that if I checked on the direction of his footsteps in the snow, they wouldn’t track north, toward his home and mine, but south, toward Marie Ryan’s, only three blocks away and where he’d find comfort that he couldn’t in the company of his oldest friend.

  As a way of honoring my promise to Gene, I said to Jay, upon rejoining the party with a fresh beer, “Lay off Gene, why don’t you.” I might have added but didn’t—Besides, wha
t makes you think you can conceive of a torture more painful than his daily life?

  This happened, as I said, in April, months before Marie delivered her mild reprimand at the swimming pool, and though I didn’t bother trying to defend myself to her, I might have pointed out that the distance between Gene and me had been increasing for some time. He soon had an entirely new set of friends, and between those companions and Marie, he probably didn’t have much room left in his life for me.

  Adolescents have always been adept at categorizing (even as they resent it being done to them), and nowhere are systems of classification as rigorously imposed as upon high school populations. Over the years there have been jocks, preps, greasers, and hoods, nerds, brains, foxes, and studs, gearheads, metalheads, losers, and geeks—and that’s without even venturing into the innumerable sub-genres. Yet Gene Stoddard’s new friends were a kind of featureless mix that defied designation.

  Today they might be characterized as slackers, but back then we had no term for them. They were heavy drinkers, and if drugs had been available then, I’m sure they would have been among the first users. They were poor students yet did enough to get by. None was on an athletic team or belonged to an extracurricular organization. They lacked the dark-hearted malice of the hoods, yet they were in and out of trouble mostly because they were inattentive or not clever enough not to get caught. Most of them worked, but only so they’d have money for gas, booze, or cigarettes. They lived in their cars but did nothing to customize or personalize them. Their usual gathering spot was the gravel lot behind a Mobil station on the east end of the city, and from there they drove endless circuits of Main Avenue. A few girls, plain and anonymous, hung out with them, but I think Gene was the only one who had a steady girlfriend. Gene’s cousin, Del Shumate, provided the entrée to the group, and a similar family connection, Del’s father and Gene’s uncle, arranged for Gene’s summer job with Harbring Construction.

  From my perspective they seemed an apathetic bunch, but perhaps that was precisely what made them attractive to Gene. Your father was a murderer?—We don’t care. You found him hanging in the garage?—Who gives a damn. You caught your mother with another man’s hands on her?—It doesn’t matter. Your past looms so hugely and darkly over your life that even the light of the future can’t find its way in?—Shut up and have another beer!

  I had never shunned my friend, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that a certain relief flowed in to fill the widening gap between Gene and me. There’d be no further possibility of confusion between us, and no more uncomfortable questions that assumed I had some insider’s knowledge of the Stoddard family.

  But while the diminution of a friendship didn’t concern me greatly, something else did. Without Gene I’d have fewer opportunities to get close to Marie Ryan. No more double dates (there had been only a few), no more tagging along with them to a school function or sporting event, and no more hanging out with them at a party. After my swimming pool meeting with Marie—ostensibly about my unease over Lee Mauer—I couldn’t manufacture another reason to call. Gene, however, just as he had on the occasion of his father’s funeral, unwittingly provided a means by which I could have access to Marie Ryan.

  It was close to eleven o’clock on a hot summer evening when the telephone rang. My mother and I were the only ones up—we were watching Lost Horizon—and after she answered the phone, she handed it to me with a disapproving twist of her eyebrows.

  It was Marie, and her first words were, “Is he with you?”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? Gene.”

  “He’s not here. I haven’t seen him today.” Or this week and maybe not even this month, I might have added. I’m not sure why I couldn’t admit that I seldom saw him. Hadn’t Gene told Marie that our friendship had dwindled to almost nothing?

  “That figures. I should have known. He told me that you two were doing something together and then he’d be here before ten. Well, guess what. He missed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He didn’t even bother talking to you first so you’d cover for him? Stupid bastard. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “You called his house?”

  “Twice. Even though his mother gets pissed off when I do. Your mom probably isn’t too happy I called either.”

  “No, it’s okay.” From the kitchen I could see into the living room, where my mother sat on the couch. Anyone else might have believed that all her attention was focused on The Channel Twelve Late Show, but I could see signs that indicated otherwise. She exhaled cigarette smoke with a little more force than usual, and one tanned leg bounced impatiently. “Look, do you want me to go down to his house and see if he’s there? Maybe he went in the side door, and his mom doesn’t even know he came home.”

  “Don’t bother. I know where he is. Out drinking with those low-life friends of his.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that. It’s not your fault. Don’t apologize for him.”

  “There must have been some kind of mix-up. . . .”

  Her laughter came through the telephone line as if it traveled on its own impulse of energy. “He doesn’t have to set up anything with you beforehand,” Marie said. “You make excuses for him all on your own.”

  When I returned to the living room and Ronald Colman’s dilemma, my mother said, “Rather late for telephone conversations, isn’t it?”

  “Sorry. That was Marie Ryan. Gene stood her up, and she wondered if he was here.”

  “Is she worried?”

  “Just hurt, I think. And mad.”

  “Are those two serious about each other?”

  “I think it’s mostly one way.” And then I added, as if clarification were necessary, “Marie for Gene.”

  So much time passed before my mother spoke again that I thought she was entirely engrossed in the movie. Then she leaned forward to stub out her cigarette, and said, “Plenty of that going around.”

  The next day Marie apologized for having called so late, but over the coming weeks we had a few more similar conversations about Gene’s whereabouts, though they were usually held after the fact. If she saw me on a Saturday morning, for example, she might ask if Gene had been with me the night before. I couldn’t lie to her, yet I still felt some residual loyalty to my friend. Or maybe the loyalty wasn’t to Gene but to my gender, an allegiance still strong in adolescence. “Was he supposed to be?” I had learned to ask.

  She would return my smile. “You just answered me.”

  But on a night in August this matter took a turn that neither of us could joke about.

  I was sound asleep when I heard my name being called, but rather than wake me, the sound insinuated itself into my dream, and in that dream I strained to hear who was summoning me. It seemed as though the voice were faint because it had to travel over a distance not of space but of time, as though someone far in the past or in the future were trying to gain my attention. The voice’s persistence finally cracked my slumber, and I woke with the realization that someone was outside my bedroom window.

  It was Marie, hissing my name and scratching the screen.

  I slept in nothing but my briefs, so I dragged the sheet with me as I got out of bed and crouched down by my window.

  More than her presence at that place and time, her somber expression and tear-spangled eyes told me that something was seriously wrong.

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Gene . . .”

  “Is he—? What happened?”

  She shook her head violently. “I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s . . . I don’t know where he is!”

  Behind her, every window in every house was curtain-drawn and dark, and the street down which police cars had once careered was empty and quiet. The night was hot and still, and Marie’s urgency and distress seemed one with the steamy air.

  I glanced back at the clock. It was almost two o’clock. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  We both l
eaned forward, and as she began to whisper to me, her lips were barely more than an inch from mine, but of course the screen was between us.

  Gene and Marie had gone out that evening, one of their first dates in weeks, first to a movie and then to Teen Canteen, where they danced until the lights were turned up and the club closed. Her father and mother believed Marie was sleeping at Donna Petracca’s house that night, and since Donna’s parents wouldn’t notice or care when—or if—Marie came in, she and Gene could stay out as late as they liked.

  They drove around for a while and then parked behind the museum on the capitol grounds. She didn’t tell me what they were doing there, but she didn’t have to. I no longer had reports from Gene on how far he was getting with Marie, but I had no reason to think his sexual progress had slowed or halted. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse that fastened up the back.

  She shrugged her shoulders forward, the blouse fell onto the floor of the car, and Gene tossed it into the backseat. He reached behind her and unclasped her brassiere with a deftness that surprised her. Usually he groped clumsily for so long that they both had to make a joke—Mr. Fumble Fingers!—before Marie went ahead and did the job for him. Was it possible that being drunk made him more dexterous rather than less?

  So she was naked to the waist as she lay back across the front seat, and that was often enough for him, but this time his hands dove almost immediately for the waistband of her shorts, and rather than try to squeeze his hand inside, he tried to tug them down. She decided to allow it, though when she felt her panties slipping off with her shorts, she reached down to grab them and keep them on.

  “Those too,” Gene said, his voice so husky the words almost seemed croaked.

  In the future when Marie Ryan thought or felt or said she was ready for sex, she would almost always mean nothing more than physiologically ready, and in the front seat of that Ford her body was certainly as ready as it would ever be—her own panting breaths came echoing back to her from the little cavern under the dashboard, and she was moist everywhere with her own heat and the night’s. But at sixteen she was not simply a body.