Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  ‘It’s the other side of the world,’ she said, her voice urgent like she had to tell us this before it was too late. ‘But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about the people. I visited Vietnam once and it is …’ she paused, found the words, ‘it is the most beautiful country and the people, the most beautiful people. They have kindness as a first response and it just breaks my heart, all this. It has to stop.’

  Eric had taught me to hate the war, hate the government, hate the soldiers, it’s all wrong and illegal, bring our boys home. He’d never talked about the country they were destroying. The people they were killing. Nobody was. It was all America this, Yoo-Ess-Ay that.

  ‘I’d like you to think about it,’ Miss Eaves said. ‘This world is a big, beautiful place. War only makes it smaller.’

  Then she took up her sign and held it high and, for the first time, I felt like standing beside her, stone-faced and steadfast. It was what inspiration felt like. It is one thing to generate anger and fear to spur a person into action but it takes something much deeper to inspire them.

  ‘I will, miss,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about that for long time.’

  I did too. In the Backhoe, with Scott Westin, I stayed mostly silent. I ate a few bites of cheeseburger, a fistful of fries and all Jenny’s pickles because she hated them. I kept quiet all through Scott’s chirping about his daddy making him do stock take this afternoon and about how miserable Al was at the moment. People had stopped coming into the store in favour of the 7-Eleven opened in the old laundromat on the other side of town. I didn’t care, my thoughts were still with Miss Eaves. A few words from her drowned out months of Eric’s speeches. It hit me how strange it was that my perspective on the war, the country, the people, could be shifted so quickly by another viewpoint. Two sides. Two points of view.

  Two truths.

  I glanced out the window to the protesters, their fervour dimmed now the returned soldiers had left with their families. I saw them differently. I thought of the GIs differently too and it felt dangerous, then, that just twenty minutes ago I hadn’t. How can you be sure you’re screaming the right words at the right people? Murderer. Killer. Hero. Saviour. They’re all the same man and he is you and your brother and your dad and uncle and cousin. Maybe one day he’ll be me.

  ‘Dad’s not been the same since Luke left,’ Scott said.

  Luke. His older brother. Drafted in ’69 and not heard from since. I’d forgotten Al Westin even had another son and a wave of guilt soaked me.

  ‘When’s he coming home?’ Jenny asked.

  Scott shrugged, played with the straw in his milkshake.

  A ding from the bell over the front door. Sheriff Samuels and Deputy Miller strolled in. Fat and thin. White and black.

  Jenny tensed beside me. Neither of us had seen Samuels except in passing since he found us by Big Lake, wrapped in a dead woman, and questioned us in the station. His investigation, as well as ours, had fizzled out. No leads. No way to identify the woman. Clearly no one missed her enough to come looking in Larson. All those feelings I’d kept down over the last year came surging up inside me like I was a shaken-up Coke bottle with Samuels popping the cap.

  We hadn’t told him about the car Bung-Eye sold off, the clue, the lead. I hadn’t thought of it in months. Rudy’s injury broke everything. It showed our amateur detective club what we could expect if we dug further. It took Gloria away from us to some fancy summer camp. When she came back it was like Mora’s body and Rudy’s shattered bones never happened. But now the sun was back, and the Challenger, bright blue and gleaming chrome, smashed into the front of my memory.

  Jenny leaned into me and whispered, ‘We should talk to him. Maybe he knows something new about Mora.’

  In her eyes, the strange hunger returned. I saw Jenny changing again under my nose, sliding back to that odd pale girl by the lake. If I could solve this goddamn murder, maybe she’d get over it, go back to normal for good. Her fingers raked the table like they’d raked at the hole in the cornfield, her nails and skin turned black with dirt. How could she change so much, so fast?

  I took a long breath and tried to quell the growing rage. A woman’s murder had gone a year unresolved. A million more went unpunished on the other side of the world. I wanted to go over there, tell Samuels all about the car and Bung-Eye, wanted to make the rumours I killed her stop for good, bring Jenny back to me.

  ‘Stay put,’ I said to Jenny and slid off my seat.

  I walked up to Samuels and Miller. Both men slumped at the bar, each with a cup of coffee and a pile of eggs and hash even though it was far past breakfast time. Samuels shovelled nuggets of scrambled egg into his mouth. Half fell off his fork on the way, tumbled down the mountain of beef and potato onto the countertop. Every now and then Didi the waitress swept by to clear them.

  ‘Sheriff Samuels, sir?’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Come to the station on Monday.’ He sprayed yellow specks as he spoke.

  ‘It’s about the dead girl we found last year. I need to tell you something,’ I said.

  Sausage fingers forced a toothpick between his back teeth. Whatever it dislodged, he ate.

  ‘What is it? Have you been withholding evidence?’

  Then he turned to Miller. ‘Kids, huh?’

  I felt eyes on my back. Dozens of them. I glanced back at Jenny, her mouth hanging open in disbelief then stretching into a smile. She nodded for me to keep going, her fingers scratching at the Formica.

  ‘Can we go somewhere else?’ I said.

  Samuels huffed, dropped his fork. ‘Like the station? Jesus, kid, I’m in the middle of my lunch and you want to talk about some year-old Jane Doe case right this minute instead of coming to the station on Monday, like I told you to not five goddamn seconds ago.’

  I shuffled closer, lowered my voice so nobody else could hear and made a decision I knew would haunt me. ‘I know who killed her.’

  He laughed and whispered with me, humouring the kid. ‘Who’s that then?’

  I was being stupid. Foolish. Stop talking, John, this is useless. Bung-Eye will find out and he’ll kill you. What are you doing, boy?

  ‘The previous owner of a new Dodge Challenger,’ I said.

  Samuels grabbed me by my collar and pulled me right up to his pig face. Forks clinked on plates, conversation hushed.

  ‘How the hell could a little shit like you know something like that?’ Samuels whispered. A crust of ketchup in the corner of his mouth opened and closed like a fresh wound.

  ‘I–I …’ but I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could say. I’d done it, I’d killed myself and for what?

  For Jenny.

  ‘I thought so,’ he sneered and threw me a foot backward. ‘Lying to a sheriff is a crime, kid. One more word and you’re spending the weekend in a cell. Get lost.’

  Miller leaned backward so he could see me around his boss’ bulk. Instead of playing the Officer Friendly card, he jerked his thumb toward the door.

  ‘Piss off, you little freak.’

  I stumbled back to my seat, stung and red-faced. I shook my head at Jenny’s questions while Scott kept eating, oblivious.

  What the hell had I accomplished by doing that? I glanced up to Samuels. He was still shovelling eggs and hash but now he had a deep frown creasing his forehead. He wasn’t joining in the jokes between Didi and Miller any more. Maybe I’d got through. Maybe he’d go looking. Maybe he was just pissed that a kid knew more than him about all this.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ Jenny whispered to me and some of my panic eased. She offered me a French fry, one of the crispy thin ones she knows I like, and started talking about Mr Frome’s biology class.

  Scott laughed. ‘You guys see how grossed out Rudy was by those sheep eyeballs Frome brought in?’

  ‘He almost blew chunks into Maddie-May’s book bag,’ Jenny said and laughed too.

  I grabbed a few more fries and smiled at the memory of Rudy gagging when
Frome picked an eyeball out of the jar and pretended to eat it.

  Then the sharp ding of the Backhoe doorbell and my smile drained away.

  Darney Wills, chest first in his red-gold Lions letterman jacket, ginger hair cut to a flat-top with fenders, a style a decade out of date, walked into the diner trailing some dough-faced girl. Then the two darlings of Larson, Mark Easton and Tracy Meadows. Darney was the fullback to Mark’s quarterback, one helluva team the pundits squawked. The Backhoe hushed. Eyes turned to plates, mugs of coffee, plastic tablecloths. Anywhere but them. Those shining smiles and loose swagger I remembered from Barks reservoir and my first session with Frank were gone. Mark had been drafted in February’s pull, so had Darney but you wouldn’t know it from his behaviour.

  Mark was pale, still and silent. Tracy’s eyes were red-rimmed. I felt for Mark then, the way his world had flipped from light to dark. So easy for that one moment, those far-away officials pulling out a blue capsule, those two or three words spelling out your birthday, to change your life. Samuels finding me and Jenny by Big Lake did the same. Our friends had thrown stones, turned us bloody. Mark’s stones were disappointed glances, avoidance in the street, pity. By the look on his face, they hurt the same.

  Darney dropped his fist on the bar, a fat grin on his face, and ordered four chocolate shakes and cheeseburgers, then slapped down a twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘Coming right up.’ Didi didn’t hide her impatience.

  A fog of distaste filled the diner, like everyone’s meal turned rancid at once. A collective clink of set-down forks, a dozen nervous coughs and shifts on chairs. We all felt the same. Sorrow for the Eastons. Something else for the Wills. Those blue capsules didn’t know good from bad, rich from poor, a star from a nobody. The Light of Larson was off to the jungle and Darney Wills was strutting around like a prize bull let in with the heifers.

  Darney stood at the bar, a few feet from Samuels, waiting for Didi to ring up his change while Mark and the girls had taken the booth by the window. There was something about Darney I hated. Something instinctual like those zoo monkeys who have never seen a snake being dead scared of a plastic one thrown in their cage. Somewhere deep in their blood they know it’s an age-old enemy they have to run from.

  ‘What’s the hold-up, Deeds?’ Darney snapped his fingers at Didi. ‘You having trouble counting such high numbers?’ Then a sickening hurr hurr laugh.

  Darney didn’t have all that much spice in him. He wore the smug smile of a bully with Daddy’s money and position to back him up. Carrot-topped and heavy-set, a covering of fat over hard muscles that he could never shift. As soon as he stopped playing football that muscle would turn to lard, those pecs would sag and droop, the puffed-out chest would turn into a paunched-out gut. I couldn’t wait to see it, the rolling mound of flesh he’d become, wheezing through town in his truck with a wife he hated and who hated him. He’d die young, diabetes or heart disease or swerving drunk off the Talega Bridge.

  Didi slapped the change on the counter. The nicest woman in Larson, was Didi Hensher, so if she was pissed at you, you know you’ve done something terrible. The diner turned pin-drop silent.

  ‘Oh come now, Deeds, you know I’m just playing with you,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘Please may I have my change?’

  ‘Come on, Darney,’ Mark called from their booth.

  But Darney was the snake and Didi the mouse and he wasn’t done playing. Everyone in the diner, even Samuels and Miller, kept their heads down. You don’t go messing with the mayor’s boy.

  Didi scooped up the money and put it in Darney’s hand. Thought I saw her flinch when her fingers brushed his skin.

  ‘There now, that weren’t so difficult was it?’ he said, then he teased a five-buck note from the tangle of coins and handed it to her. ‘There’s your tip, beautiful.’

  He air-kissed at her as she took the money. A five-buck tip was worth the churning stomach any day. That was all Darney was good for it seemed, money and mouth.

  Darney made his way over to the booth and slid in next to his girl. The diner breathed out, the chatter returned. February’s draft had sent a bubble of joy through me. I’d thought Darney was going away, thought he would probably die out there and I hadn’t felt a lick of guilt at being happy about it. Then a few weeks ago, the rumours began.

  Scott Westin leaned close to me and I smelt onions on his breath. ‘Heard Darney’s dad got him out of it. Paid them off.’

  ‘I heard it was Doc Wyndham who got paid off,’ Jenny whispered, her eyes on Darney. ‘His daddy gave the doc two hundred dollars to tell the army Darney was sick and couldn’t sign up.’

  It was heartbreak and fear and all kinds of anger when that news spread through Larson. Ours was a proud, close town. So many young men had gone, fought, never returned or come back broken, and we took care of them because they were brave, serving their country. Darney took a steaming shit on all of that but nobody dared call him out. Draft-dodger. Pussy. Traitor.

  ‘He’s a coward,’ I said. A little too loud. A little too clear.

  Darney’s head snapped up and I wanted to shrink, disappear under the table. The word hung in the air, coward. I hadn’t said his name but Darney knew, of course he did, a guilty conscience hears everything. He scanned the diner, dull brown eyes, twitching ruddy cheeks. He stood up, slamming both hands on the table, knocking over the sugar pot and sending a cascade of white over the floor.

  ‘Someone got something to say to me?’ he shouted, eyes darting, a sheen of spit around his mouth. Lips growing red and shiny like a two-cent drag queen.

  ‘Calm it down, Darney,’ Samuels said but he didn’t even turn around, didn’t get up.

  ‘Who’s got the problem? Huh? Who wants to say something?’ Darney didn’t see the law, didn’t acknowledge it. His life had no consequences.

  Finally, excruciatingly, his empty eyes found me.

  ‘A little pussy voice calling me a coward,’ he sneered. ‘Must have been the sissy.’

  The diner looked at me as if ‘the Sissy’ was, and always had been, my real name. A cold blade of fear sliced through my stomach. The snake turned on me, a weak rodent, the runt of the colony. Yes, they were all silently urging, fall upon him and let us be spared.

  I couldn’t look at him as he swaggered over. My fists clenched and unclenched in my lap. My eyes picked out every nick and scratch on the table. There was no way I could take on Darney. He’d smash me to a pulp and leave me twitching on the sidewalk and yeah, you know what, I was scared of him. Shit scared of how far he might go if anyone ever stood up to him.

  Darney reached my table. A mountain in a lettered jacket. My body wanted to move, put myself between him and Jenny, but I was rooted.

  ‘You got something to say, sissy?’ he said, slamming both hands on our table.

  ‘No,’ I said but I didn’t hear my voice above the raging blood in my ears.

  ‘Back off, Darney,’ Jenny said, stood up, faced him down.

  My mouth went dry and Scott’s dropped open.

  Jenny glared. ‘I said back off.’

  Darney straightened, raised his ginger eyebrows, and crossed his arms. ‘Look at this, little pussy needs his sister to fight for him.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ I said but I wasn’t convincing anyone.

  Darney’s mouth widened into a gaping hole, a sour stink wafted over me. ‘Oh. Oh. That’s right. Ain’t this them? Hey, Mark, this is them, right, Patty Royal’s two? Heard you like sleeping with dead chicks, hey, boy? Heard you mighta even killed her, but I don’t think a sissy boy like you’s got the stones for that.’

  ‘Stop it, Darney,’ Mark’s voice floated over from the other side of the diner.

  Darney leaned close to me, ran his slug tongue over his lips, once, twice. I felt sick. ‘That dead girl as good in bed as your momma?’ He nudged me, laughed. Then he rounded on Jenny. ‘Jenny Royal. What a woman you’re turning out to be. Pretty, pretty, pretty.’

  He slid closer, went to tak
e her arm, but Mark came up behind him, slapped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back. ‘That’s enough, Darney.’

  A sting to the ego deflated him. ‘Yeah, that’s enough,’ he said, raised his hands as if innocent and backed away. Then his eyes went to Jenny, up and down her body. His thick tongue licked a fresh sheen over his lips. ‘Shame, me and Jenny were just getting acquainted, ain’t that right, doll?’

  Then he winked, another hurr hurr laugh, and sauntered off, back to his booth.

  Mark met my eyes and gave a half smile. ‘Sorry about him, he’s not usually like this.’

  Then he dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of quarters, tipped them onto the table. ‘Let me get your lunch, least I can do.’

  I murmured thanks and Mark went back to his booth. Jenny picked up the coins.

  ‘Time to go,’ I said to her.

  I had fury in me, filling me up, sharpening to a sword tip pointed right at Darney Wills. How dare he look at my sister, talk to her, insult her, insult my momma too. Fuck him. I wanted to rip the fat red lips off his face.

  He watched us leave, not caring about me or Scott. All his attention was on Jenny. A new look on his face, like he was doing math in his head and coming up Grade A. The girl beside him, I thought then, with a sharp drop in my stomach, looked just like Mora. Dull blonde hair. Slim. Just his type? I shuddered, pushed Jenny toward the door.

  The girl, narrow shoulders hunched under the weight of his arm, picked up her burger. Darney turned to her, yanked the burger out of her hands, and ripped out half of it in one bite, smiling while he chewed.

  Jenny, Scott and me left the Backhoe quick as we could. It was Mark and Tracy though, who disappointed me most. A year ago, Mark would have shouted Darney down if he’d talked to anyone like that, now he was making excuses and paying off Darney’s mistakes like everyone else. Mark was the lawkeeper of the senior class and everyone walked his line, even though there were only a few more weeks of school. But Mark did it kind. He did it good. Tables had been flipped since February. Mark was broken and beaten and Darney had stolen his shining crown.