Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  I knew him. All of Larson knew him. Charlie Meaney. One of Bung-Eye Buchanan’s men. One of those figures who seem to persist in the town’s consciousness without being seen, someone everyone had a story about.

  ‘I warned you both,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I do that? Didn’t I say you keep your mouth shut, we’ll keep ours. Huh? Well, who’s been talking?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Mr Wakefield cut in. ‘It doesn’t matter. Samuels is a fool, he won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘He’s a fool with a badge, rich boy,’ Meaney said. ‘A badge and a gun and now a name. You want to explain that to me? Or you want to explain that to my employer?’

  Bung-Eye. I shrank back. Rudy. Gloria. Jenny. They’d gone to Samuels. They told him everything we found, including Mary Ridley’s name. That meant Frank hadn’t, despite knowing it before us. My throat tightened.

  Mr Wakefield sighed. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Mayor Wills, pacing around the marble hall. ‘I can’t have this splashed on the newsstands, Leland. You assured me this business was taken care of a year ago. This cannot happen. Fuck. Fuck.’

  Gloria’s father lunged at the mayor, grabbed his shirt and pulled him close.

  ‘Keep your goddamn voice down, Vern,’ he said. ‘I did take care of it. I always take care of it. I gave up my fucking car to keep the Ridley family quiet, didn’t I? You know what that car was worth?’

  He shoved the mayor away. And finally, a full year on, I remembered where I’d seen the car, why it was so familiar and yet not all at the same time. I’d fetched popsicles from the chest freezer in Mr Wakefield’s garage last summer. The Dodge, newly waxed and gleaming, sitting proud on polished black tyres. Bright red, not blue. The Buchanans ran a chop shop and re-sprayed cars all the time. You idiot, John, red car, blue car, same damn car. No one else in Larson could afford a car like that, I knew it, always had. How could I have forgotten? How could I have missed it? Seeing it in the garage had been just a second, just a moment, then a week later we found Mora’s body and she consumed everything. But wait … that meant …

  Gloria.

  I looked at her bedroom door. Pictured her sleeping behind it. Oh God.

  ‘Money talks,’ Mr Wakefield said. ‘And it keeps people quiet too. Don’t worry about Samuels. All he cares about is crullers, coffee, and a wide chair to park his ass. All three are cheap. It’s taken care of. There’s nothing to get in the way of our arrangement.’

  ‘See that’s true, or you and Mr Mayor here are out in the cold. If we go down, we’re riding your asses down with us,’ Meaney said. ‘We got long arms in this town. Long, long arms, boys.’

  Then he laughed and the front door opened, closed, and he was gone. The silence sunk down the stairwell and lay heavy on the two remaining men but their tension tore it up. I felt I could hear Wakefield’s teeth grinding, taste the salt of the mayor’s sweat.

  ‘This is such a mess. Such a mess,’ the mayor kept saying.

  The grape juice stung my insides, pushing down and down, wanting to release but I couldn’t let it. Not yet. Just a few more minutes. I couldn’t breathe or move. Couldn’t risk a sound.

  ‘What she do, Leland?’ the mayor asked, wretch in his voice.

  Mr Wakefield stood, half turned away, obsessively flattening his moustache with two fingers. ‘What?’

  ‘I won’t say anything, but I have to know. What did the girl do?’

  I held my breath. Held every bone and muscle still. Told my blood to stop pumping.

  I heard Mr Wakefield’s leather shoes squeak on the marble, felt him tense even from way up here on the landing.

  ‘Come on, Leland. Just tell me. Goddamn it, just spit it out!’

  Mr Wakefield didn’t say anything. It felt like the whole house squeezed me, squeezed the grape juice, squeezed the implications deep into my brain. My bladder, my head, my whole body ached and throbbed.

  I still didn’t know why or how any of it was tied up with Charlie Meaney and Bung-Eye Buchanan. What did Mary Ridley do to get killed? How did they know her? Frank had something to do with all this but what? Why would Gloria’s dad help if he hadn’t done anything? Oh, God, Gloria. She couldn’t know, I couldn’t tell her. God damn them for doing this. Why did they? Why, why, why? Still so many questions and no answers. Everything swam, too much had happened for me to make sense of. This was just the start, there was so much left to unscramble and piece back together. I couldn’t look at them any more. The weight of it, that accusation, that confession, that … whatever that was, pushed me off my knees, onto my side. A floorboard creaked beneath my hand.

  Mr Wakefield hissed at Mayor Wills to shut up.

  I couldn’t see them any more. My chest wanted to crack open, my heart the hammer.

  ‘Gloria?’ Wakefield’s friendly father voice floated up the stairs.

  I held my breath.

  A step on the marble. ‘Gloria, honey, is that you?’

  A sharp pain in my groin and then, oh no, please, please. No, no, no. A river, a flood, a waterfall. Hot and wet and all over me. I clamped my hand over my mouth and my eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Why, Leland?’ the mayor tried again.

  I couldn’t see them but I heard Mr Wakefield move, maybe to the front door.

  ‘Get the hell out, Vernon,’ Mr Wakefield said. ‘Don’t make me remind you what’ll happen if you run your mouth. I like our set-up and I know you do too.’

  Everything muffled. My head roared. The front door opened and closed, the mayor gone. Mr Wakefield stood below me. I imagined him listening, waiting for the eavesdropper to reveal himself.

  Then his footsteps, a door somewhere, and silence.

  I struggled up. Tears streaming from stinging eyes. My body shook, my legs could barely stand to support me. A dark patch on light carpet shouted my shame to the world. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think. I was numb and wet and trembling all over. I couldn’t go back to Gloria’s room, not like this. She’d wake up and she’d see my pants and she’d see my face and she’d read my expressions and my eyes. She’d see that whole conversation with Mayor Wills and Charlie Meaney and she’d know her father was a killer. I couldn’t do that to her.

  I had to go. That’s all I knew. Go. Get out. My body acted without my mind. I don’t remember making decisions. I went down the stairs and out the front door in my bare feet and ruined pants. I walked through town. Through fields. Through muddy ditches. Nobody around at this hour to stop me.

  Jenny found me lying naked outside our back door the next morning. My feet were bloody, a shard of glass in one so deep Eric had to take me to the doctor. I’d walked all the way home in the dark, stripped off at some point along the way. I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember anything after the mayor’s words and Mr Wakefield’s silence, after my body betrayed me. Jenny found my clothes. They were at the top of the pile of rotten corn, feeding the maggots, ready to be burnt.

  20

  For days, what I’d heard in Gloria’s house swam around my head and never settled. Tell. Don’t tell. Samuels wouldn’t believe me, that ship had sailed and sunk, but my friends would. They’d listen.

  But Gloria.

  My chest ached at the thought of her face if I told her. She’d be broken. We’d all be broken. Pretend it didn’t happen, Johnny boy, that’s the safest way. What Gloria doesn’t know can’t crush her.

  I went through those days in a fog, watching lives happen all around me but never quite living one myself. I thought if I was around people they’d see it on me, see the secrets scratched into my skin. It felt as if, as soon as you find something out, everybody knows you know it. All those bad men whose crimes I’d discovered were suddenly aware of me. They could see me, knew where to find me, what I might do or say, and they couldn’t have that. They couldn’t have a loose cannon like John Royal running around, shooting his mouth off.

  I kept telling myself I was being stupid, they couldn’t possibly know I’d heard them o
r I’d spoken to Jack Ridley about the car. I had to keep my cool. Keep my head on straight, Rudy would say. But God, I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to spill my guts to my friends and have them pat me on my back and say, shit, John, what a mess, let’s sort it out together.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to Gloria. She needed her father. No matter what kind of monster he really was, he was still her father. Same as Momma, despite her own demons, was still our Momma.

  I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to put it all together but it was too much. Too many things had happened and my head ached, split open, when I thought too hard on it. Mary Ridley. Jack Ridley. Mayor Wills. Charlie Meaney. Bung-Eye Buchanan. Mr Wakefield. And Pastor Jacobs. Frank. My friend. I still couldn’t imagine he was involved in whatever the others were. He must have listened to a confession, or overheard Wakefield and Bung-Eye, seen something he shouldn’t have and was now in as deep as I was. Maybe they’d threatened him too. My mind kept circling back to that and the certainty that came with it was a comfort. I wanted to speak to him, tell him what I knew, and we could puzzle our way out together. But maybe that’d get him in deeper trouble with Meaney and Bung-Eye. Maybe it’d get me in more trouble. I didn’t want to risk it. Didn’t want to risk telling anyone what I knew in case it put them in danger too. So I lay on my bed, stared at the poster of Joni Mitchell and closed my eyes against the world.

  Eric stuck around, for a while at least. He was a good man, deep down. Momma didn’t know what she had but Jenny did. After the Easton mill explosion, the town sagged. Those broken windows, even with the glass replaced, the frames mended, remained broken. The heart’s been ripped out, John Royal, Momma said, the heart and soul, torn up and stamped on. And what do men do, Momma asked me after dinner one night, when their lives are busted up? They drink, oh baby do they drink.

  Business boomed at Gum’s and Momma started tending bar five nights a week. Someone had to earn a living, she’d snipe at Eric. She heard the mill workers’ stories over two fingers of bourbon then refilled and refilled, slid that last dollar out of their pockets for them. And it was their last, no more mill, no more money. Momma said they could spend it on a shot of whiskey or on a hamburger at the Backhoe, and better she get the tips than dried-up Didi Hensher.

  Eric did odd jobs, earned a few bucks here and there, but it wasn’t enough. All he had left to give was the little nest egg that would take him to Washington for the protests. He and Momma argued about it. He was holding out, she was gold-digging, the anti-war movement needed him, she and us kids needed him, and round and round it went, for weeks.

  One night, in the final days of August, it ended.

  ‘You go then,’ Momma said. She was drunk, her tone rollercoastered up and down. I heard it through the floorboards from our bedroom. Jenny beside me, kneeling on the floor over a book, hands clasped in her lap.

  ‘We can all go,’ Eric said, ‘the four of us.’

  Jenny’s eyes widened and she turned to me, a smile growing. There it is, your get-out-of-Larson ticket, every corn kid’s dream and my nightmare. What would become of the farm?

  Momma laughed. A sick sound, no humour in it. ‘To Washington? A one-bedroom hole in a block of fifty? What kind of man are you?’

  ‘Patty, don’t do that,’ Eric said, weak, tired. I suddenly hated him, all mewling voice and sighs. What kind of man are you, Eric? Huh? No kind.

  ‘Patty don’t do that,’ Momma whined back at him. ‘Get some balls you fuhking pussy, you ain’t a man. You ain’t a man for me.’

  ‘Patty, come on now.’

  A harsh sound, like spitting. ‘Patty, Patty, Patty. Get the hell out of my house. Go find some slut girl in Washington to bed. Not that she’ll like it,’ another laugh, full of bile. ‘You don’t know what the fuhk you’re doing with that needle dick.’

  Eric shouted something, something so full of rage I couldn’t hear it. A smash. Glass or china. I’d have to clean it up in the morning. The shouting grew in power like a tornado touching down, roaring through the fields, coming right for us. I flinched at every word, the tremor reached up through the house, through the floorboards, through mine and Jenny’s knees and into our chests. It was like being taken by the shoulders and shook and shook and shook until everything hurt and everything wanted to burst apart. I clamped my hands over my ears but it didn’t help. The noise, the rage, was muffled but still there, even closer like I’d pushed the worst of it into my ears and held it there. My hands a cage, keeping a storm trapped inside my head.

  I don’t remember when it stopped. I don’t remember climbing into bed or holding Jenny until she fell asleep.

  Eric was gone when I woke up. I could tell from the way the house felt. His jacket was no longer on the hook, his boots gone from the door, his dozen records taken but for a Joni album he left for Jenny with a note. For my favourite girl. I tore it up before Momma saw and blamed Jenny for it.

  They’d broken two plates in their fight the night before. Shards of white littered the kitchen. A spray of them by the fridge, another by the back door. A small scratch in the fridge told me the plate had been thrown high and hard, not dropped by accident. Momma had been aiming for his head.

  When Jenny came downstairs, realised he was gone, she ran back up to our room and played the Joni Mitchell record over and over and cried. I couldn’t comfort her. She wouldn’t hear me. I left her for a while to calm as I made myself breakfast. I filled a plate with hot, thick-buttered toast and took it upstairs.

  ‘I bet you’re hungry,’ I said but she wouldn’t even look up at me. Her face buried in her pillow, her back heaving in time to the sobs.

  ‘Come on, Jenny,’ I said, set the plate down on the bedside table. ‘We could go swimming in Big Lake.’

  Big Lake wasn’t what it used to be, since the body, since the cops churned it up, but anything would be better than this. Jenny didn’t respond.

  ‘How about milkshakes at the Backhoe? We could go for burgers too.’

  ‘Go away!’ she screamed into her pillow.

  A sting but I brushed it away. I sat beside her on the bed. ‘It’ll be okay, Jenny. Maybe he’s just cooling off somewhere and will be back for dinner. Meanwhile it’s just me and you. Come on, sure you don’t want ice cream? What about a slice of Didi’s chocolate pie?’

  ‘I don’t want you! I don’t want pie! I want Eric! Go away!’

  The sting turned to a bite. A gash right through my chest. So much pain and venom in her voice. Her first touch of heartbreak and all I had to offer was ice cream.

  You’re an idiot, John.

  I told her I’d fix her something else to eat when she was ready and left her alone, went back downstairs. Her words needled me, like thorn pricks too small to pull out. They’d burrow deeper, they’d swell my skin, they’d turn red and angry if I let them.

  I cleaned up the kitchen with Momma’s whiskey snores through the ceiling as my music.

  I tidied the house alone.

  I swept the front porch alone.

  I washed the dishes and scrubbed the floors alone.

  The house felt wrong, like I was living in a show home, one of those perfect snapshots of the life you could have if you lived here. Come on in, folks, look at that shiny linoleum, sign here and here and it’s all yours. Everything was clean, in order, a big empty bowl on the table ready to be filled with fresh fruit or bread rolls but it never would be. It would be wax fruit, plastic bread, nothing beneath the surface but dust and air.

  I edged upstairs to try to get Jenny out of bed when I realised she’d stopped crying. When I reached the top of the landing, I heard why.

  She was speaking. To Eric. But the conversation was one-sided, like a phone call but there was no phone in our room. She’d speak, pause, then respond.

  ‘Why didn’t you take me with you?’ she was saying. ‘… But I can help. I could get a job … I’m grown up enough … but … Oh, I love you too … Where did you go?’

  A shiver ran
down my neck and turned my blood to ice when she said, ‘Mary would want me to be happy. She wants to go to Chicago too … but she’s older and can take care of me …We’re like sisters you know.’

  I backed away, fear and disgust lodged deep in my throat, stopping my breath, making my pulse throb in my ears. She was talking to them? Out loud? I stumbled back down the stairs and her voice cut off at the sound. A few seconds later, she started playing a Joni record and called out my name. I didn’t respond. I was too freaked to hear her out. What could she say? Oh, Johnny, sometimes I talk about dead strangers like they’re my friends, I hold conversations with people who aren’t there, nothing to get bent out of shape about.

  With worry thrumming through me like blood and Momma still sleeping it off, I didn’t want to be around when she or Jenny finally emerged. I left the house around nine thirty and headed through the west field, concentrated on the farm. I understood the farm. I could control the farm. Despite how terrible this year had been, I knew why, I knew how. Corn doesn’t like rain. Rain causes blight and maggots, simple cause and effect.

  We’d lost the whole crop of corn over the rest of this sick summer and it hurt to look at the barren earth. Needs weeding, needs turning, chaff needs burning, I told myself. That’d keep me busy over the next few days, my mind off Jenny and what I’d heard. But today, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a shovel, I wanted to walk, clear my head.

  I took a loop, through a stand of stunted trees, and came out beside the narrow river that led down to Big Lake. But Big Lake wasn’t sanctuary any more. I felt lonelier out here than I did at home. Without Jenny, or Rudy, or Gloria, there was no point in it. Who could I share with? Who could I swim with and smile with and laugh with?

  I kept walking, right to town. I had a few nickels in my pocket, maybe I’d get a slice of that chocolate pie for myself and bring one back for Jenny, cheer her up a bit.