by Beth Lewis
‘You don’t call out a man like that,’ Bung-Eye said, ‘and not have the cojones to throw the first punch.’
That dead, milk-white eye saw my insides and saw their squirming cowardice. It could see my soul and it was laughing at me. Weeks of hauling vegetable sacks alongside my chores had strengthened my back, turned my skinny arms to thick muscle and broadened my chest, but I wasn’t a man when I stood next to Bung-Eye Buchanan. Nobody in Larson was.
He moved close to me, whispered right in my ear. ‘What you want to say, John? Come now, your momma can’t hear you.’
‘If you ever hurt them,’ I said, my voice shaking, ‘I’ll kill you.’
The grin widened, puckered his eyes. He slapped me gently on the cheek and laughed. ‘Atta boy, Johnny.’
Then he pulled back, stared me right in the eye. All my anger withered under his gaze and I was suddenly the weedy runt sizing up the alpha male.
‘Atta boy,’ he repeated and spat a glob of brown saliva at my feet. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and swaggered into the family room, still grinning, still laughing.
I was weak and angry and full of shame. How could I protect Jenny from this? What was I compared to him? I retreated to the table as Momma busied herself with dinner. Bung-Eye lounged in Momma’s armchair watching football on the TV set, only speaking to ask for another beer.
‘Do you need help? Does your arm hurt?’ I asked Momma.
‘No, baby, you go on now and check on your sister. Tell her dinner’s coming but she doesn’t have to come down if she’s got homework.’
She met my eyes, nodded, and I didn’t question it.
Bung-Eye let out a hacking cough then shouted, ‘You two must have something mighty important to talk about if you’re gabbing all over the first quarter.’
‘Go,’ Momma whispered to me, then called to Bung-Eye. ‘Sorry, hon. Fat’s just heating up for the chicken, be there soon.’
‘What did I just say, woman?’ he yelled back, wet gravel in his voice. ‘Shut your damn mouth.’
Momma tipped her chin toward the stairs. I didn’t want to leave her, not with him, not hurting and bandaged over a spitting fry pan. But then she smiled at me. Small, but enough. My momma had a core of steel running through her. Don’t fret over me, those eyes said, no man would dare touch Patty Royal.
‘Yes, Momma,’ I said, too low for Bung-Eye to hear.
At the top of the stairs, I stopped. I could still smell him. Leather. Camels. Sweat. All over the air, the walls, invading our home. I pressed my ear against my bedroom door and there, beneath the muffled sounds of the TV downstairs, beneath the hot summer wind groaning at the windows, my sister was crying.
‘Jenny?’ I tapped on the door.
She didn’t open it. ‘Go away.’
‘What did he do?’
The crying turned into a long sigh. ‘Nothing. Go away.’
But her voice lacked energy. She really said, come in, I need my brother. I heard it in the tremor and the quiet.
I turned the handle and closed the door silently behind me. There she was, sitting on our bed. She’d taken down my poster of the Stones, replaced it with Janis Joplin, the dead-too-young rocker woman. She’d laid her favourite bedspread, the one stitched with fat, gaudy sunflowers, over my side of the bed as well as hers. She knew that blanket made me itch. She knew the weather was too hot for it. It was a tiny act of spite but her tears and her puffy cheeks and her red eyes took the sting away. Keep the nasty bedspread, I thought, just please stop crying, please don’t be sad any more.
‘What happened?’ I said and sat beside her. Her math homework lay untouched on the floor, the answer boxes empty.
As I sat down, she grabbed one of my t-shirts from the floor and pulled it on over her sundress. The shirt drowned her, took her shape away, as if she was trying to fade into the pale colours of the world, turn invisible in plain white cotton. With her shorter hair, she could have been one of those feral children from Paradise Hill, the trailer park outside town. One of those girls who don’t know how to be a girl. They only know dirt and swearing and ratty hair. They run like their brothers, throw like them, fight like them, look like them. No sunshine and fluttering eyelashes, no dresses or flowers or playing tea party.
‘Talk to me,’ I tried but it felt like talking to a block of ice. ‘What did he do?’
Jenny sighed again and wiped her cheeks on the t-shirt. ‘He didn’t do anything, just said hello.’
‘Then why are you crying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it that Darney Wills? Did he try something with you?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
I put my arm around her shoulders but she flinched away from me. That was a whip crack on my hand. She stood up, crossed her arms tightly over her stomach. Wouldn’t look at me.
‘Jenny,’ I said, my arm still hovering in the air where she had been as if holding a ghost. ‘What’s going on? Please, tell me.’
‘Oh, John. What can you do?’ She shook her head, eyes on her feet. ‘We’re all trapped in this town, you, me, Gloria, Rudy. Even Momma.’
‘I have money,’ I said. ‘I’ve been saving everything. Soon I’ll have enough for two bus tickets.’
Jenny’s raw eyes met mine. The pink bloodshot dulled the blue, made her seem far away. Disconnected. They weren’t her eyes. I hated them.
‘How soon?’ she asked. ‘Sooner than tonight? Sooner than ten minutes ago when that man came in here? Sooner than last week? Or last year when she cut off my hair? How soon, Johnny?’
I opened my mouth but had no answer.
‘It’s already too late.’ She leant against the wall and tried to smile. ‘But you should go, get on a bus and get as far away from here as you can.’
‘What did he say to you?’ I wanted to shake the answer from her. Tell me, tell me, tell me, and I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.
‘He said …’ She shook her head and her eyes glistened. ‘He just asked me if I had a good day at school. That’s all. Now please leave me alone, I have homework.’
‘Jenny …’
‘Go!’ she screamed suddenly, out of nowhere, out of nothing.
The calm sadness in her a second ago now blazed white-hot. ‘Get out!’
Her eyes, first red from tears, were now red with anger. Her voice a banshee’s, not my sister’s. What was this creature, standing in the corner of our bedroom? Jenny flashed before my eyes, sweet sunshine in a yellow dress into gnashing teeth and nails.
I blinked it away. Rubbed my eyes. She was Jenny again, in my clothes, tired and upset but still telling me to go. She screamed it at me again and again until I got up, opened the door, left her.
I stood outside our bedroom, her voice ringing in my ears, muting every other sound. The smell of fried chicken reached up through the house but it turned my stomach. I saw Bung-Eye mashing that tender white meat between tobacco-stained teeth. I saw him smiling, staring me down, walking into Jenny’s room. I heard him and my momma and their fucking. Smelt the pot. Smelt the stench of him everywhere. He was an infection in our house, the maggoty corn pile all over again, and he had done something to Jenny to make her cry.
I turned to go back into the bedroom, confront her, make her tell me, but I heard her voice in my head again.
Go. Get out.
I stumbled down the stairs, through the kitchen. Momma asked if I was okay and I said I was going out but I don’t remember saying it. I heard it inside my head as if it was a question she would ask, and the answer I would give. All my edges were fuzzy, all the noises muffled, the memories blurred.
Dry grass sliced against my shins. The summer turned everything to husks, every sound was a snap or a crack, every smell hot and sweet as smoke. There was tension in the air, like the sky was a balloon blown too large. It stretched and paled and any day, any second, would explode, fling us wide and clear and into nothing.
I wanted comfort. Familiarity. A place where I
could breathe and sit and pretend everything was as it had been when Jenny was normal, just my sister, before Mary Ridley and her obsession, when she called me Johnny and asked me to go fishing, when she held my hand and didn’t shout and didn’t cry and looked at me like I was her big brother, not some annoyance, a jagged stone in her shoe.
As soon as I stepped over the low rise from the fields into the trees leading down to the Roost, Big Lake and our Fort, I felt a sharp prick of guilt. This place had been our world, the four of us. My sister. My best friends. Our home that we built for ourselves. But circumstances and time and all kinds of horror had left it to wither and grow distant inside my head. Jenny and Momma and Bung-Eye took up all my space, shouted for my attention. Big Lake, Rudy, Gloria, they shrank into my corners, tiny chirps in a nest of screaming cuckoos.
Big Lake wasn’t as big as I remembered it. Even in the half-light of the evening, my eyes took in the whole body of water. Maybe the sun had dried up the stream that fed it, maybe it had sucked up the surface water and I was only seeing half of what it used to be. But there were no dark lines around its edge to show its depth. No grey leaves or patches of mud once submerged and now revealed. It was as it always had been but to me, then, it was little more than a pond. Pointless. Childish.
I hated it. Hated the memories it brought. The nameless girl, tangled up in that sycamore. The one who became Mary Ridley, the one killed by Gloria’s father with Frank and Bung-Eye and Mayor Wills all involved. Nobody had been punished except me and Jenny and Rudy and Gloria. We were suffering for finding her, for caring, for wanting justice. I was out of school and going to leave the home I loved. Jenny was changing into something harsh and unkind. Gloria and I were friends but not more. No more kissing down at Barks. No more stolen smiles and blushing cheeks. Rudy was mostly his normal self. We talked, we laughed, we hung out, but there was a new desperation to him. He and Jenny only ever spoke of Mary, of leaving Larson, of what next, what next. And I couldn’t join in. I had too many secrets squatting inside me. They trapped my tongue and seized my brain, threatened to spill out if I opened my mouth to say, ‘Hello.’ So I was silent, distant, and they didn’t know how to fill that kind of quiet. Now Bung-Eye had his claws in Momma and Jenny, and I couldn’t pull them free. Everything was dying and rotting away because of that girl and the men who put her in the water.
Deep breaths, Johnny. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. That was Frank’s technique but now his words felt hollow, after what we found in his basement, after that terrible conversation with Charlie Meaney. Was he still my pastor, my almost father?
Count, the voices scoffed, count to a thousand and it won’t change what’s happened.
I thought of Jenny. Of two-years-ago Jenny when the sun cascaded down her back, through her hair and when she still smiled, no matter Momma’s words. That stilled my heart, more than numbers ever could.
I turned away from Big Lake. Spotted our Fort further down the valley. A new, gleaming piece of sheet iron for a roof. As I got closer, I saw new boards patching up the walls and a strong door with a lock.
I heard voices. Soft, each word murmured close, as if within an embrace. Two people. Together. A quiet, warm laugh.
I knew the laugh. Knew the voices.
I stepped between dry leaves, dead giveaways Rudy called them, to a crack in the boards. In the light from an old storm lantern, I saw them. Rudy and Scott Westin. Tangled up together in a nest of blankets. Speaking sweet words, laughing sweet laughs. Rudy must have patched up the walls, fixed the roof, made himself a hidden place.
I didn’t know what I was seeing, not really. They were boys, but they were kissing. They were touching. They were acting like girls and boys act and I didn’t know why. Rudy the charmer. Rudy the boy with a hundred hearts carved in trees. Rudy the ladies’ man.
Rudy the queer?
I turned away, left silent as I’d arrived, ashamed I’d even been looking. But as I got further away, I realised I was annoyed at Rudy. Really damn annoyed. The feeling scratched around my guts like rats in a dumpster. Why hadn’t he told me? Why had he flirted with all the girls when all the time he wanted something else? All those times he’d spoken about us running off to LA together. You write the movies, Johnny, and I’ll star in them. I felt tears on my cheeks, angry burning salt tears, why didn’t you tell me? We’re best buds, aren’t we?
Oh boy, oh boy. My chest tightened. Bung-Eye’ll put Rudy in hospital again if he finds out, or maybe this time it’d be six feet under. He’s good as dead, Johnny, and you know it.
I wanted to rip out the voice in my head, pitch it into Big Lake and watch it disintegrate.
I’d wanted somewhere to sit and think and clear the fog from my brain but Big Lake, the Fort, it was not that place any more. It wasn’t what I’d remembered, where we’d gone fishing and swung on a rope and smoked a Camel between the four of us and dreamed and made all kinds of plans. I’m going to be a model. I’m going to be a movie star. I’m going to be an astronaut.
No.
It was where we met Death for the first time, sitting on the banks of our lake. It was where kids go to fool around with sex and stolen beer.
My head filled with pictures of Rudy and Scott. I slammed my fist against the side of my skull. Each hit changed the picture.
Rudy and me.
Smack.
Rudy and Jenny.
Smack.
Jenny and that fucker Darney Wills.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
The side of my face blazed, hot and tender, like hellfire itself had risen up inside me. Everything was going wrong. If anyone found out about Rudy and Scott, they’d be run out of town. If Bung-Eye found out … The thought made my stomach spasm. Our lives hung by one arm off the edge of a cliff. Something dark had overtaken my sister and was grinding its boot against her fingers. Soon she’d fall and I didn’t know if I could catch her.
I walked home slower, trying to cool myself. It wouldn’t be long now until I had the money to get me and Jenny away but with so much darkness in our town, so much darkness already in my sister, it might be too late.
When I got home, stepped through the back door into the kitchen, a cold mite of fear burrowed itself into my gut. I knew my home, knew its air and smell and weight, and I knew when something had shifted, like when Jenny ran away.
Bung-Eye was gone, his stink fading. No sound from upstairs.
On the couch in the family room, Momma snored, blood soaking through the bandage on her arm. On the kitchen table, her once-hidden, half-full jar of whiskey was empty. Upstairs, Jenny was gone.
25
Jenny never told me where she had gone that night but she came back changed. She stopped brushing her hair and ate like the end of the world was at her heels. I should have known then that it had started, that unstoppable force that I set in motion with my anger, my loose tongue, my misplaced trust.
I found her one evening, in our – her – bedroom, taking a pair of scissors to her favourite sundress, the one with the yellow flowers. The door was open an inch and she didn’t see me. She tore the dress to ribbons then started on another, and another, until the floor disappeared beneath shredded cotton. All the while she was babbling to Mary, to Eric, to Mark and Tracy.
Inside my head, I screamed at her. Tell me what’s going on. Let me help.
I counted the money that night. Ninety-four dollars and a handful of pennies. Enough for bus tickets but not much else. Another two weeks and I’d have cash for a place to stay, a few days’ food. That was it. Just two short weeks and no more Bung-Eye, no more crying and fear and secrets.
I kept the money in a matchbox toy carton Eric had given me before he left. I’d lost the car, a lurid green AMX Javelin, but somehow kept the box. I hid it behind the loose baseboard in the family room, beneath a cabinet full of books and ornaments nobody even glanced at any more. The weight of the box and the heavy slosh of coins inside kept my spirits up as I went into another day hauling sacks at the grocery stor
e.
‘John,’ Al Westin called from the back room when I was cleaning out the onion trays. A moment later he appeared through the plastic curtain, pulling off his apron.
‘I’ve got to bust out for a few hours,’ he said. ‘That numbskull Del, the fruit guy, he’s gone and got his truck stuck in Early Creek. Arches deep he said on the phone. Damn idiot.’
‘Want me to come and help?’ I said. It was Thursday afternoon and we hadn’t had a customer in over four hours.
He ducked down behind the counter and reappeared with a jangle of keys. ‘Del’s got his boy with him. You stay here. Stay open. Fix up those onions and then take stock on the tates.’
‘All right.’
He clapped my shoulder as he went past me to the door. ‘If Scotty comes by, give him a dollar out the register and tell him to fix his own dinner.’
My gut twisted. Scotty Westin and Rudy Buchanan, wrapped up in each other, hidden away in our nowhere valley.
‘Will do, Mr Westin,’ I said, forcing the words through the images of his son and my friend. Al rushed out and let the door slam behind him. I wondered what Al would think, how he would react if he found out. Couldn’t be worse than what Bung-Eye would do, that’s for sure.
I was paralysed, holding a handful of onions by the stalks. Is that really what I saw the other night? I’d seen couples making out at Barks reservoir, on the beach, in the trees. I knew the movements and sounds and small, private looks they shared. I’d had the same with Gloria, so long ago now. The Fort that night was full of that passion, maybe even love. Bung-Eye would kill Rudy if he found out. Mr Wakefield wanted to kill me when he found out about Gloria and me. It didn’t matter who you were kissing, there would always be someone wanting to kill you for it.
I desperately wanted to see Rudy, talk to him, tell him I knew and it was okay, I’d never tell Bung-Eye or Perry or anyone, no matter what. But I couldn’t leave the store and we were hours from closing.
Straight after work, I told myself, the second the lock clicked in that door, I’d find him. I’d run all over Larson if I needed to. Every minute in the shop from then made me itch. I couldn’t stay busy enough, couldn’t count enough apples or cauliflowers or tates. Couldn’t clean enough trays or sweep enough floors and not one person came in.