by R.J. Ellory
“Everywhere and nowhere,” he said. He lit a cigarette then, and—just like always—Nancy asked him for one.
“Not a prayer, Miss Nancy Denton,” he replied, just as he always did.
It was a game—and a silly one at that—but there were so many such games between Nancy and Michael, and no matter how many times they played them, they never seemed to tire of it.
We heard them before we saw them. They came on bikes—all four of them. Eugene and Della had lollipop sticks wired to their spokes, and the noise they made was like a thousand children clattering sticks along a picket fence.
It was a sight to behold—Della and Eugene and Matthias caterwauling over the hill, hollering like fire sirens, whooping and squawking like banshees. And then there was Catherine some way behind, and you could just tell from the way she looked that she had been sent as supervisor yet again. Catherine would escape as soon as she could. She would return to the house alone and get back to whatever it was that Catherine Wade got back to. She was younger than Matthias, but still there was always something of the boy in Matthias. My ma told me that girls grow up faster, as if that were something to be grateful for. Seemed sad that anyone would be better by having less of their childhood.
And then it was all noise and laughter and wisecracks and bottles of soda being shaken and sprayed, and Della with her hair soaking wet and sticky and Michael just standing there watching over us all like the grown-up that he was.
“The river,” Matthias said. “We have to go to the river.”
Eugene was laughing like a mad thing. It was good to see him laugh. It made me happy.
“Come on, then,” Catherine said. “If we’re headed that way, then let’s get going.”
“You don’t have to stay, Catherine,” Michael said. “I can take it from here.”
“But my father—”
“Is off at one of the factories, I am sure,” Michael interjected, “And will be none the wiser unless someone tells him. You go off and enjoy your day. I’ll look after this lot.”
Catherine reached out and touched his shoulder. Nancy didn’t see her; otherwise Catherine would have gotten an icy look.
“Thanks, Michael,” Catherine said. “That’s really kind of you.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and then he turned and started off toward the river.
Catherine took her bike and headed back the way she’d come.
Nancy ran after Michael, and then me and the others went after her.
I walked with Matthias and Della. Eugene was up ahead a little way. He kept glancing back at us, almost as if he wanted to make sure that we didn’t drag behind.
I smiled at him. He smiled back. I felt the color rise in my cheeks.
He was such a handsome boy. He had these deep, dark eyes, and the line of his mouth was just like his mother’s. If he’d been a girl, he would have been so beautiful. I remember thinking that, and though it seemed such a strange thought, it also seemed to make perfect sense.
“You didn’t bring the record player?” I asked Matthias.
“I’ll go back and get it later,” he said. “We have food, though. We made a great picnic, didn’t we, Della?”
“Apart from stinky boiled eggs,” she said, and she wrinkled her nose.
“That’s funny,” Eugene said, “because those eggs said the same thing about you.”
She stuck her tongue out.
Eugene did the same, crossed his eyes, and Matthias sighed and shook his head like they had already tried his patience sufficiently for one day.
And then we were at the river, and Nancy was already ankle deep in the cool water. Michael was seated against the trunk of a tree, and he smoked his cigarette and watched us as we shed our shoes and socks and went on down there.
Eugene said how he would catch a fish with his bare hands and we’d eat it for lunch.
“You’d no more catch a fish with your bare hands than catch a ride on a moon rocket!” Della shouted, and he splashed her once, twice, and it was all downhill from there.
Had Catherine been there, she would have had words to say, but Michael just watched us, laughing at our foolishness, and it seemed like the happiness we felt somehow reached him in a way that he needed. Looking back, maybe it reminded him of a time before the war, before everything that happened to him out there, and it was somehow healing for him.
Half an hour later, five drenched troublemakers stumbled up the bank and lay on the grass in their sodden clothes, but the sun was high by then, and it seemed like no time at all before we were dry.
That was what was different. That was the thing that seemed so strange. Time was flexible, almost liquid. When I wanted it to go quickly, it went slowly. When I wanted it to drag its heels, it ran full tilt to the finish line.
“So, where’s this fish?” I asked Eugene.
“I nearly had him . . . I did, really,” he said, but he was kidding me, and I pushed him.
He grabbed my hand to stop himself falling, and even when he righted himself, he didn’t let go. Just for a moment, a moment while the world waited, he held my hand and looked at me. I felt my heart go bump, and even though I should have been embarrassed, I was not.
“I will get you a fish, Maryanne,” he said. “One day, I will get you a fish . . . I promise . . .”
And then the moment was gone. He released my hand, and like a record slowed down on the turntable that suddenly resumes its speed, the world caught up with us and everything came to life once more.
I glanced around, expecting to see Della and Matthias and Nancy looking at us, but they were elsewhere, laughing among themselves, oblivious to what had happened.
And then it was as if nothing had happened. We were all together again, Michael telling us to stay in the sun until our clothes dried off.
The morning became the afternoon, and Eugene and Matthias brought the picnic baskets from their bikes. We sat out beneath the canopy of a tree and unpacked everything. Michael told Della he would give her fifty cents if she ate a boiled egg, but she would not.
“They smell so bad,” she said. “I can’t bear the thought at all.”
So Michael ate three. He had his cheeks all full of boiled egg, and Della couldn’t even look at him.
Michael laughed so much, he nearly choked.
“So disgusting,” Della said. And then she looked at Nancy like a disapproving aunt and said, “Such a disgusting man, Nancy.”
And Michael nearly choked again, because Della was so serious, and she said it like she really meant it.
After we were done eating, we lay on the grass, and Michael made up stories about a man so tall he could reach the stars from the sky and put them inside his hat. He carried some in his vest and some in his shoes, and one special star he kept tucked behind his ear in case of emergencies. And he used the stars to light the way for lonely travelers and ships lost at sea, and sometimes he used them to help people find what they were looking for. It was a beautiful story, but ever such a little bit sad, and now I can’t remember how it ended.
I just remember that when he was done we were all quiet, and it seemed like an eternity before anyone said a word.
And when someone spoke, it was Della, and she said that she wanted to dance.
Matthias said he could take the picnic baskets back and fetch the record player. Della said she didn’t want to go home, but we could all see how exhausted she was. She was barely able to stand.
“I’ll come too,” Eugene said, and I didn’t know whether he was leaving to make Della feel better, or leaving because he didn’t want to be with us anymore. It could have been either. Eugene was both considerate and lonely, compassionate and a little sad. He was sensitive, it seemed, to all things and all people. The death of his mother had caught him unaware, kicked him off balance, understandably of course, and the quiet moments that swallowed him seemed to swallow him whole.
Eugene looked at me. Perhaps he saw that flash of disappointment in my eyes.
&nbs
p; He mouthed something. Was it Sorry?
My imagination, I guess.
Eugene no more loved me than I loved . . . well, I don’t know what.
I tried to smile, but there was a lump in my throat. Perhaps there was a premonition there, a sense that not only was I saying goodbye for the evening, but that I was saying goodbye to something a whole lot more significant. It was only August, the second week, and summer stretched out ahead of us like some endless road. We would just keep on walking toward that sunset, but that sun would never really set, and it would always be hazy and warm and beautiful, and beneath everything there would be the sense that here we were witnessing the best time of our collective lives. It could never be better than this. Better than this was not possible.
But this moment was a punctuation mark, a hesitation, a scratch on the record.
I watched Eugene as he took Della’s hand and started toward the bikes. Della looked back and smiled. She gave a little wave, as if to let us know that even though she could not stay, she wished she could stay more than anything in the world . . .
I raised my hand. I looked away, and then they were gone.
Michael said we’d walk down to the field at the end of Five Mile Road, the last field before the trees started, and we would meet Matthias there.
And so we walked—Michael and Nancy up ahead, me trailing behind, pushing my bike, already feeling the weariness of the day in my heart and in my bones. Evening was threatening the horizon. The cicadas were warming up for their nightly performance. We all knew the day would soon be closing, but no one wanted to think about that.
I had so wanted to dance with Eugene. I had so hoped he would ask me. I had already decided that I would wait for two songs, and if he didn’t ask me, then I would ask him. But he had gone home, and I would have to dance with Matthias, and though I didn’t mind, it was not what I had wished for.
I had felt so bold and brave. Maybe it was seeing how Nancy looked at Michael and wishing that one day I would be able to love someone that much. I would have to feel bold and brave another day. And there would be other days just like this one. I believed that then. I really believed it.
It seemed that living could not have been easier or better or more fun.
It seemed to me that being fourteen years old was the best thing in the world, and I never wanted it to end.
It would end, of course. I knew that. But had I known how it would end, I would have run a thousand miles from that riverbank at a hundred miles an hour, and I would have kept on running until I burst right open and fell stone dead to the ground.
But I did not know, and so I stayed right there and kept on smiling as wide as wide could be.
There is no way you could have known, they say, but you do not believe them. You believe you could have known and you should have known.
Ignorance is bliss, they say, but only in the moment.
Ever after, what you did not know is the greatest single burden the human heart can bear.
23
Caroline arrived at seven. She did not ask about Gaines’s mother; nor did she ask about the Denton girl. The words Gaines had shared with her had served to quiet her on the subject, at least to Gaines himself, though he knew she would be sharing rumors and hearsay with friends, with her own parents, with the townsfolk she knew. There was nothing Gaines could do about it. All he wished for was the official charge, arraignment, bail application and refusal, and then Webster would be shipped up to Hattiesburg, maybe Jackson, to wait on remand while the rest of the investigation was pursued. Gaines was optimistic that such a sequence of events would be rapid and straightforward. There was more than sufficient circumstantial evidence to warrant the charge and arraignment, and there was no doubt in Gaines’s mind that Mississippi attorney general, Jack Kidd, would move very swiftly. Such a case would be reviewed at circuit court level here in Whytesburg by Judge Marvin Wallace, and Wallace would drive on down from Purvis to hear it as soon as Gaines needed him. The trial itself, however, would go up to the county seat at Branford to be heard by Judge Frederick Otis. Wallace wouldn’t give bail, and Otis wouldn’t give anything at all. Otis was as tough as they came, way past the point of no return on anything resembling the new attitude toward criminals. It had begun in the early sixties, the viewpoint that men should first be considered men and only secondly as lying, murdering, cheating scum. A political and ethical shift, perhaps best exemplified by the official closure of Alcatraz by Robert Kennedy, the viewpoint being that people who perpetrated such crimes as rape and murder were victims themselves, that rehabilitation was a more humane consideration when it came to confronting the grim and terrible truth of who these people really were. Gaines did not possess a viewpoint worth mentioning. He fulfilled his legal requirement as an officer of the law and left such decisions to the lawyers and the courts. His sole duty was to deliver Lieutenant Michael Webster into the hands of the attorney general of the state, and his job would be done until he was called to testify. Kidd would waste no time in jury selection; he would bear no laxity in the defense preparation; Kidd would want Webster tried, sentenced, and on up to Vicksburg as soon as was realistically possible. Such a case would be inflammatory and volatile. Had Nancy Denton been a black girl, it would have been a different matter, but she was not. She had been white and pretty and vulnerable and sixteen. She had been strangled and butchered. The crime had been perpetrated twenty years before, but Webster would hang for it, and Mississippi would hang him as slowly as was possible.
His mood notwithstanding, Gaines felt it right to share a few words with Caroline. He asked her about the date.
“Got my own way,” she said. “We saw The Sugarland Express.”
“Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” Gaines said.
“That’s mean,” she said. “I’m very considerate. Why do you have to say a thing like that?”
“You’re a girl,” Gaines replied, smiling. “Ultimately, whichever way you look at it, you always get your own way.”
“And you’re basing this on your vast personal experience with the female sex, I suppose?”
“Now who’s mean, eh?”
“You know me. I give as good as I get.”
“Anyway, you had a good time.”
“And you, sir, are changing the subject.”
Gaines audibly sighed. “Seriously, Caroline, I am not having another conversation with you about my love life.”
“Wouldn’t say there was enough of a love life to have a conversation about,” she retorted.
“My, my, we do have our claws sharpened today, don’t we, young lady?”
“Hell, John, even my mom asks about you. She says it’s not normal for a man of your age to be single for so long. She says she has a friend—”
“Enough now,” Gaines replied. “I am not having your mom set me up on a blind date with some fifty-three-year-old widow from Biloxi.”
“She’s not a fifty-three-year-old widow, and she’s not from Biloxi. She’s less than forty, and she looks like Jane Fonda.”
“Does she, now?”
“She does.”
“Well, if she’s less than forty and looks like Jane Fonda, what the hell is she doing single and getting set up on a blind date by your mom?”
“You are an ass, John Gaines. Sometimes you are such an ass.”
“Watch your mouth, or I’ll have you arrested.”
Caroline smiled. She shook her head resignedly, once more disappointed with the lack of enthusiasm Gaines demonstrated for her mother’s matchmaking efforts.
“One day I will get you out on a date with someone, John.”
“I am sure you will, Caroline. Like I said, girls always get their own way in the end. Now I have to go to work. Call me if you need me.”
Caroline went in to see Alice. Gaines collected his hat and headed out to the car.
Gaines was into the office at ten past eight. He found Hagen and Victor Powell in the lobby. Powell wore the church-suit expression.
“What you delivered last night . . . ,” Powell started. He looked at Hagen, as if for moral support.
“Far as I’m concerned, we’ve got enough to get him charged and arraigned,” Gaines said.
“Wallace will do that here?” Hagen asked.
“Wallace will do the arraignment and the post-indictment, but the trial will go on up to Otis at Branford,” Gaines replied.
“You think he’ll plead?” Powell asked, a nod toward the stairwell that led down to the basement.
Gaines shrugged. “We shall see.”
“Well, let’s get it done, then,” Hagen said. “No reason to wait.”
“I’m gonna go speak to him awhile,” Gaines said. “I’m gonna tell him what we’re doing, see if he has anything to say. I’d like to know if he’s going to enter a plea. You call Wallace in Purvis, let him know we’re going to need him in a little while, and get a public defender down here as well. Try Tom Whittall, and if he’s not available, get Ken Howard.”
“He hasn’t asked for one yet,” Hagen said.
“He hasn’t been charged yet,” Gaines replied. “Regardless, I want someone down here.”
“Will do,” Hagen replied. He turned and headed toward his own office.
“Helluva mess you got here,” Powell said.
“We got what we got,” Gaines replied. “I just need it to go by the book, no problems, and Webster out of here as soon as possible. Right now, there seems to be a lot less noise than I anticipated, but I’m expecting trouble.”
“Couldn’t blame anyone,” Powell ventured. “There’s people here who knew her. Her ma still lives here, for Christ’s sake. It’s gonna be a big deal, no two ways about it. Right now, the only thing that Webster’s got going for him is that he’s white and a war vet. He’d have been a black fella, then they’d have burned this place down to get to him.”
“You don’t think I know that?” Gaines asked, a rhetorical question.
“Well, rather you than me,” Powell said. They shook hands. Powell left. Gaines went to check on Hagen. Hagen had spoken with Wallace but had failed to reach either Whittall or Howard.