by Beth Lewis
‘And I’ll be here too for any follow-up interviews, right, sheriff?’ the pastor said and stood up, motioned for me to follow.
Samuels didn’t see us out. Didn’t shake the pastor’s hand like he’d done with Gloria’s father. Jacobs closed the door behind us but stopped me from joining Rudy and Jenny.
‘John. Are you all right? Samuels was out of line.’
First time in a long time anyone had asked how I was. It softened the bruises, returned my sense of calm. ‘He’s just doing his job I guess. I’m okay.’
‘No offence, bud, but I’m not buying it. You’re pale as potatoes, as my mother used to say, and I don’t think you’ve begun to understand what you’ve been through. Seeing a dead body, that can mess with your head. I’d like to talk to you some more about it, if you want to. I know how close you are with your mother and sister, and your friends, but sometimes it helps to speak to someone else. Someone outside your group.’
I glanced over to Jenny, still chatting away with Rudy. I thought back to last night and how she’d acted down at the lake, the way she’d looked at Mora’s body. That strange fascination in her eyes. For the first time in my life I didn’t understand my sister and that scared me. Maybe talking would help. The pastor knew his stuff and had God on his side. If anyone could help my head sort out this mess, it was them.
‘I think I’d like that.’
‘How’s Tuesday? I’ll write you a note to get you out of your last lesson,’ he winked.
Study hall. ‘Yes, sir, that’ll be fine. Thank you, again, pastor. For sitting with Jenny too. She’d have been scared on her own and I hate her being scared.’
‘Anytime,’ he said, looked at me like he was watching a bird with a broken wing take flight.
I went back to Jenny and she jumped up. ‘Can we go?’
‘Yeah. Rudy, you coming?’
Rudy shook his head. ‘Not until dear old Dad comes to get me so I can have my turn in the little glass room. Won’t that be just stellar?’
Rudy slid down the chair, folded his arms and stared at the far wall. Wide eyes. He was trying to keep it together but fear always shows. It’s a black shape behind tissue paper. Rudy was all tissue paper when it came to his father.
‘See you later?’ I asked. Later meant after dinner, down at the Roost, with a couple of Camels and Gloria’s portable radio.
‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Rudy said. Something in his tone made me think he wouldn’t come. Made me think I wouldn’t either.
‘Don’t worry,’ the pastor said and sat two chairs down from Rudy. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him until his dad arrives.’
Jenny and me said our goodbyes and left the station. Stepped out of cool central air into thick heat and the smell of Main Street. Exhaust fumes and greasy steam from the Backhoe diner, the occasional floating scent of flowers from Al Westin’s grocery store. Noon sun prickled my scalp and the top of my nose and I didn’t realise how dry my mouth and skin had become. Shrivelled up in the cold, false air.
Jenny took my hand when we got half a block from the station. Already slick with sweat. ‘That was scary.’
Before I could respond, reassure her, I caught sight of a battered Chevy tow truck driving too fast up Main. I knew that truck. A rusted hook swung from a cable off the boom. The hood was faded yellow but the rest of it was blue. On the door was the chipped decal, half missing from a replacement back panel. Buchanan Auto Salvage. Inside, Rudy’s father sucked on a can of Budweiser, eyes on anything but the road.
‘Shit,’ Jenny said, watching the truck, and this time, I didn’t snap at her for cursing.
The truck swerved across Main, cut up a station wagon. Its horn echoed down the street. Bung-Eye flipped the driver the bird and chucked the empty can out the window. Then the truck passed us. Bung-Eye’s good eye found us. The heat disappeared from the sun and chills went up my back. He pointed out the window, right at us, and formed his hand into a gun. Bang, he mouthed and winked his milky, dead eye.
Then he took a left and disappeared into the back of the sheriff’s station.
I shook off the chill. Shook off that look in his eyes. That look that said, I know who you are. I know what you’ve been doing.
‘Should we go back?’ Jenny said.
‘No, we shouldn’t,’ I said and she didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be in the same room as that man. Everyone knew Bung-Eye and knew to stay out of his way.
Rudy didn’t come to the Roost that evening but we all four met up at the Backhoe first chance we could. Sunday afternoon. The diner windows were thrown wide and the streets lined with people watching the parade, waving flags, blowing whistles, cheering as the Fourth of July floats slid down Main Street. The high school marching band following behind the last float – the Larson Lions, decked out in blue and gold uniforms and shining helmets – tooting ‘Oklahoma’ and twirling batons. The fireworks were set to go off from the football field at nine but the four of us didn’t feel much like banging the drum.
Rudy showed off a shiner and a limp from his father so Gloria bought us two milkshakes to share as apology for telling Mandy about the body. Our momma, when she found out, didn’t much care, never even scolded us. I felt for Rudy, always did when he turned up bruised. Momma could make a slap sting to high heaven and her words could crack bones, but Bung-Eye was something else, some horror kicked right out of Hell for bad behaviour. We got through it. We didn’t talk about it, not really, and that was for the best.
It didn’t matter, not in Rudy’s big-picture thinking, because it wouldn’t last. The four of us were on a fast track out of Larson, that’s what Rudy, Gloria and Jenny kept saying. Few more years and it’d be sayonara to all those fists and snipes. Only snag in Rudy’s great escape plan was me. I didn’t want to leave.
The diner was jammed. The four us squeezed around a two-person table, Jenny and Gloria sharing a chair, Rudy on a stool.
Gloria said something but it was lost in the noise from the band passing.
‘I said we should do something!’
‘About what?’ Rudy shouted back.
We leaned over the table, heads almost touching, the only way to be heard.
‘You know …’ she said, leaned further in, ‘about her.’
‘What can we do?’ I asked. It felt wrong to be talking about this. Here.
The person who killed her was probably in this diner, or on the street, or in the parade. I choked back a mouthful of milkshake.
‘We could …’ Gloria’s words were lost as a dozen mill workers poured into the diner singing and spinning football rattles.
Behind them, Gloria’s mother appeared in a tight red dress. The mill workers whistled, spun their rattles faster. She ignored them. Her eyes found Gloria and she waved, holding a paper flag, her hand laden with rings and bangles.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Gloria said, stood up then ducked back down to whisper. ‘Come to my house tomorrow after school, I have an idea.’
6
School on Monday buzzed with talk of the body. Whispers filled the halls and corners of the yard at recess. Even the teachers were gossiping between classes. The four of us were attacked with questions soon as we stepped through the doors. What’s a body like? Did you touch it? Does it smell bad? Who was she? How’d she die? And on and on. The worst though, was the one they murmured behind our backs, the one that changed the way they looked at us; did they kill her?
Through the day, the rumours swarmed, gained life and solidity, they grew into full-blown accusations and theories that, somehow, Jenny and me had killed the girl, dumped her body and then gone back to admire our handiwork before the cops found her. At the final bell, the doors to school flung wide and we poured out onto the front lawn where parents would be waiting. Some kids ran but slowed down to pass me and Jenny. They stared. I stared back.
‘Freaks,’ someone shouted and everyone laughed. A collective roar of giggling and jeers. Freaks, losers, weirdos.
‘Johnny, let’s go,’
she said, grabbed my arm.
Then I saw little Timmy Greer, runt of the class, try to make his name. He picked up a rock, wound back his skinny arm and hurled it at Jenny. I grabbed her, turned her away, and the rock struck my back. I cried out. The little shit had power. But the pain disappeared when I saw, across the lawn, away from the doors, Rudy and Gloria staring at us. They’d left by the side door, right where Gloria’s locker was.
Another rock hit the back of my leg and with it a chilling cry, ‘Killer!’
That stung the worst, the first time it’d been said out loud, given breath and life. Then Jenny screamed as a rock caught her shoulder. They all joined in. Laughing and shouting.
‘Freak!’
‘Perv!’
‘Murderer!’
Tears burned my eyes. They threw stone after stone and Rudy and Gloria didn’t move, like they didn’t believe what was happening. Neither did I.
Jenny dropped to the floor and me on top of her, covering her, protecting her best I could. It was hail. It was storm. Crack after crack. Sticky feel of blood in a dozen places. My head, my hands, my legs. Make it stop. Make it stop. Every time Jenny yelped, heat rose in me. Rage. Anger. The rocks kept coming, handfuls of gravel from the path, every strike cut my breath short.
Then mercy. The voice.
‘Stop it! Hey! Cut it out!’ Rudy. Charging in. A god in middle school. ‘Leave them alone!’
The laughing kept going but the rocks stopped. Caught doing something wrong, the pack scattered, a few parting shots but nothing hit hard. Just another school day done. An act of violence giggled through, it’s okay to throw stones when the targets are freaks and weirdos. Ain’t that right, Mom and Dad?
Make me a bird, I thought, that I may drag them all sky high and let go. Who would be laughing then?
Rudy helped me up. Gloria helped Jenny. My face stung in a hundred places. Jenny had cuts about her arms and legs but, mercifully, her face remained untouched.
‘They’re saying all sorts about you both, the bastards,’ Rudy said. He tried to sound older, like a pa telling off his boy, but the worry on his face at the blood on mine gave him away.
‘I heard,’ I said, my ears ringing with killer, murderer, my eyes boiling with tears. ‘They don’t know shit.’
Gloria picked out a piece of grit from Jenny’s arm with one hand and held her hand with the other.
‘Mandy will clean you both up,’ she said.
On the walk to Gloria’s house, a mansion by Larson standards, she asked the question I’d been dreading.
‘Why did you go back to the body?’
I stared at her, stunned, and then my eyes darted to Rudy. His were lowered. He knew I’d think he told her and he hadn’t. Unless he had and they didn’t believe me.
Jenny, limping from a deep gash in her knee, answered.
‘Because it was a hundred times better than being in that house.’
The harshness in her tone shocked me and our friends. I don’t think either Rudy or Gloria knew how bad it was for Jenny until then. In truth, neither did I. Sharp, drunken words were one thing but since when was a cold dead body better than a warm bed? Better company than a real live mother? I swallowed down grit and tried to understand it but I couldn’t.
Gloria put her arm around Jenny, Rudy didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. He’d spent nights in the Fort on his own when his dad got heated. Better a dirt floor than Bung-Eye’s backhand or belt.
Rudy put his arm around my neck, a friendly headlock. Gloria and Jenny walked in front, entwined, their heads resting together.
They never asked about that night again. Plenty of people did, over and over, rumours sprouted like weeds after the first rain, but between us four, there was nothing more to be said.
We waited in Gloria’s kitchen. One single room bigger than my whole house. Gleaming white and red tiles, like a picnic blanket draped on the walls. Mandy tutted and shook her head at our injuries. Rudy leant against the cabinet holding but not drinking his glass of lemonade. Ice clinked. Condensation beaded and ran. Gloria fretted in the corner, pacing, talking about mess, impatient to tell us her big idea, only to be hushed over and over by Mandy. Jenny sat with Mandy at the table, getting cleaned up while the woman muttered about who did it and why and if Jenny were her daughter, oh you wouldn’t be sniffling over nicks like this if you were my girl, she said. I waited my turn, standing awkwardly in the middle of the tiled floor, like a statue put in the wrong place.
Mandy had all but raised Gloria and the pair had a tense, parent–child relationship the like Gloria never had with her real mother. Mandy was the one telling her to pick up her shoes, clean her teeth, eat her cabbage. Real Mother dressed Gloria in bows and made her twirl. I doubt Gloria’s mother knew a thing about her daughter other than what colour dress best matched her eyes. Mandy didn’t care about any of that. She was ruddy-faced, skin scorched and bloomed from years over a steamer iron, her thin blonde curls made lank from the heat. Her body was a pillow lined with steel. Tree-limb arms, stump legs and hips spread wide from six babies of her own.
Jenny hissed, cried out.
Mandy dropped a chunk of stone onto the table. Red, ferrous streak in the granite. My sister’s blood. My blood.
‘Hush your whining, whey girl, just a scratch,’ Mandy said. Thick, Ozark accent. Straight down from the mountains Mandy came, like an avalanche.
Jenny sat at the kitchen table, leg on the big woman’s lap, while Mandy dabbed and cleaned the cut on Jenny’s knee. Deep. About an inch long. Every time Mandy took a cotton wad to it, took off all that red so the edges of the cut were clear, Jenny’s blood would well up again, spill down her leg, drip onto the floor.
‘You ain’t got no sticky in you,’ Mandy said, talking more to the blood than my sister. ‘Idiot body of yours, needs the sticky to gum all this up and stop the running. Here,’ she handed Jenny a folded-up kitchen towel, ‘hold this against that hole long as you can while I tend your shoulder.’
The mound of cotton wool, clean and white on one side of the table, shrank and transformed into gore. Wool stained red and wet, slapped every time Mandy threw a used piece on the wood. Despite her grumblings, she was gentle. Carefully sluicing away the grit, responding to Jenny’s wincing and yelps. Every time I heard Jenny’s pain it was an electric shock through me, a tiny charge that made me want to leap forward.
‘Lemme see that hole,’ Mandy said, placed her hand over Jenny’s and pried the ruined cloth away from her knee. The old woman smiled. ‘Ah, there it is, the sticky done gummed it up. No more running away with you.’
Jenny smiled along with Mandy’s words, the music in them, so quick and up and down and lulling. Gloria said she’d sung her lullabies as a baby and my insides turned green. I didn’t know any lullabies. Momma wasn’t the singing type, unless it was on a table in Gum’s or humming Patsy Cline in the bath.
Bandaged up, limping but mostly undamaged, Jenny was on her feet. She took the untouched lemonade from Rudy and drew down half the glass.
Then it was my turn with Mandy and her thick, hard hands.
‘You telling who did all this to you chickies?’ she said as I pulled my ripped-up shirt off over my head and sat down.
Gloria stopped pacing and locked eyes with Rudy and Jenny. Then me. A minuscule shake of her head. Mandy was a talker, we all knew, and no one liked a snitch.
‘We were up at Barks,’ Rudy said before I could think of a lie. ‘The cliff side, you know Fisher’s Point? The Evel Knievel twins here got too close to the edge. Scared the shit out of us.’
‘Hush your nasty tongue,’ Mandy snapped, ‘don’t be cussin’ in my ears.’
Rudy met my eyes, winked. If there was anything Mandy hated more than a torn sock she had to darn, it was foul language. Piss, shit, fuck, all would shut her up quicker than a drunk can pop a bottle cap.
Dozens of small cuts and bruises covered my back and shoulders, but none as bad as Jenny’s knee. It took Mandy most of an hour to
clean me up. Wet wool, dab dab, then the sting of Bactine. It pulled tears from my eyes and I couldn’t stop it, I tried, but it was tiny spikes all over my body, stabbing, piercing, deep down into my muscles. Be a man, John Royal, I heard Momma’s voice in my head, but it hurt, all kinds of hurt. Each spike was a reminder of the stone that made it, the hand that held the stone, the kid that threw it. Classmates. Friends.
‘You all done, mister man.’ Mandy gathered the soiled wool in one arm and the bowl of red water in the other.
‘Shoo shoo shoo,’ she said until Gloria moved away from the sink. ‘Go on now, go play outside.’
Gloria wasn’t allowed boys in her room. The only place me and Rudy could be with her was outside.
The house was a great whiteboard castle with red shutters and columns at the front pulled straight out of a Roman history book. Gloria said her father had the shutters repainted every year. Nothing like a fresh coat of paint to make you forget the troubles of the past year, he said. Sand them down, paint them over, good as new, it’s like those rain storms never happened.
The house sat in private gardens, surrounded on three sides by thick trees. Rose bushes ringed the front grass. A gazebo in the back. The back lawn was pristine, as if nobody had ever stood on it. Table and chairs on the patio. Pots of plants that had no business growing in this part of the world dotted all over. Going to Gloria’s house was like going on vacation. We’d be brought lemonade. We’d be cooked dinner. Me and Jenny never wanted to leave but Rudy never wanted to stay. He shuffled and fidgeted until we were outside. A bad kid in a good house never quite felt comfortable, he’d say. He always said he was bad. Bad stock, bad blood, bad name. A Buchanan through and through. A name isn’t anything, I told him once at the edge of Big Lake, you can change it like you change your shoes. You can be anybody. He liked that but he didn’t believe it.
On the far side of the back lawn, the trees crowded, came together like secret agents protecting the president in one impenetrable line. We weren’t allowed on the lawn, Gloria’s mother was particular and Jerry, her gardener, would take the blame if we rutted the grass. We went slowly, Jenny still limping hard on that right leg, across the flagstones to the edge of the trees and through. Gloria strode ahead, kept telling us to hurry.