by Beth Lewis
There is something raw, stripped, in someone who doesn’t know they’re being seen. People change when they notice. A mask slips on. It gets thinner, more transparent the longer you know someone but it’s always there, always will be. A barrier. A lie – white and harmless, but a lie all the same. Except in those moments between glances when the mask is gone and a kind of truth, unfiltered and free and open, shines out. Watching her made me think of something Momma said once, an old saying about a tree in the woods. If it falls with no one to hear it, does it make noise? Does a person, when there is no one to see them and their mask is fallen away, still exist? Did I still exist in those days I hid in the crawlspace? And now?
‘Hey,’ I said, startled her. The mask eased over her face.
‘Hey.’
I sat beside her, knees up like hers, and tried not to look at my room. Jenny wasn’t here and I was suddenly afraid she was gone. Really gone. But the fear was short. I felt her, everywhere.
‘I have something to tell you,’ Gloria said. ‘I wanted to tell you last night but I couldn’t.’
‘What is it?’
From the pocket of her dress she pulled out a thin scarf. My insides went cold. A white scarf with blue stars. I knew it. Gloria knew it. She had given it to Jenny for her birthday. My throat squeezed.
I took it between trembling fingers. It felt wrong, like it’d been washed in new detergent, and it smelt of smoke. Not Momma’s Strikes or Rudy’s Camels but cigar smoke. Mr Wakefield smoked cigars.
‘Where did …’
‘I found it in my father’s jacket.’
A fresh wave of hate crashed over me. He’d kept a souvenir, as if that bastard hadn’t taken enough. I wanted to scream. I screwed the scarf in my fist and closed my eyes, tried to keep calm.
‘I found it the night before Jenny …’ Gloria said, voice caught and it took her a moment to recover. ‘I didn’t know she was gone at the time. That morning, I came round here to find you, see if Jenny was all right. But the sheriffs were already going through your house and we couldn’t find you. Oh God, John, I can’t imagine … I wish I’d been here, helped, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said and she took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘I called on Rudy,’ she said. ‘His brother had heard someone in town talking about Jenny and your mom. He said people had seen you walking barefoot, covered in blood, but that you were okay. Rudy and I went up to Barks and sat on Fisher’s Point and talked it all through, all the way back to Mary Ridley. It all felt connected somehow, her and Jenny, but I didn’t know how or what it meant that my father had her scarf stuffed in his jacket pocket.’
Gloria’s lip and chin shook, losing a battle against her tears.
‘Then I remembered the blue car that you and Rudy saw that day at Rudy’s place and what Bung-Eye said about it. I’d seen a car like that before but in a bright red, same as the shutters on our house. For a long time I thought it had to be someone else’s. I never put the pieces together before or maybe I did and just didn’t want to believe it. Rudy didn’t know who the car belonged to until I told him.’
‘Your father.’
‘My father. He must have had Bung-Eye repaint it. Rudy said that what you both heard made it pretty clear that the person who owned the car killed Mary Ridley. And then I find that scarf and hear that Jenny …’
‘He didn’t kill Jenny.’
‘But he did kill Mary Ridley. And he did something to Jenny. Something bad.’
I swallowed acid. Gloria’s face, so beautiful, was pale, like she’d painted her skin with chalk. It looked all the whiter against her red hair. I took her hand.
‘Did Jenny find something? Did she find something out about my dad and that’s why …?’
‘She didn’t find out. I did.’
‘And your mother?’
I shook my head. Wings crackled inside me for the first time in days. Don’t talk about Momma. I can’t think about Momma. Her skin under my palm, soft and leathery from the sun, the warm water, the smell of strawberries.
‘You knew all this, didn’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
Her face cracked. ‘You’ve been carrying this around. Why didn’t you tell anyone?’
‘I didn’t think you’d have believed me. You’d have been angry with me. Hated me.’
She interlaced her fingers with mine. ‘You’re probably right.’
We sat in silence for a long time. A square of sunlight on the floor stretched and shifted before we spoke again. There was too much for our minds to work out, talking about it only did so much. Gloria cried once or twice and I held her. I’d lost my family and she’d lost hers too. Two great betrayals – my momma and her father – and now here we were together, orphans adrift.
‘What about your mother?’ I asked, softly in the quiet.
Gloria gave a half-hearted smile. ‘I tried to talk to her about it. I told her that Father had seen other women, girls my age. She slapped me and told me to stop telling lies. My mother has always treated me like a princess. Act a certain way, look a certain way, perform on cue, curtsey and twirl in your pretty, pretty dresses in front of Daddy’s senior partners.’ She sighed, tugged on a piece of her hair like she wanted to pull it out, destroy that prettiness to spite her mother. ‘As long as the apple is shiny and red, it doesn’t matter if it’s rotten.’
‘What about Mandy?’
She laughed. ‘And have it all over town by dinner time? No thank you.’
Jenny stood in the sunbeam arching across the floor. First time I’d seen her since waking and I almost jumped up, greeted her with a hug and a where have you been, when I remembered Gloria didn’t see her. Jenny looked at me with an answer written across her face but I couldn’t read it. I didn’t have the code to crack it. It said, you know what to do, but I didn’t. I had no idea. I was swimming through a black pit of grief and Gloria had just dived in behind me. I felt a pull on my legs and saw the dead white hand of Mary Ridley, of Jenny, of Momma, and then the shark-like face of Mr Wakefield.
‘What are we supposed to do now?’ Gloria said and her voice cut through the dark. The tug on my ankle disappeared.
‘School starts in a few weeks,’ she said. ‘God, can you imagine going to school? Sitting in those classrooms, everyone staring. It doesn’t seem real.’
Nothing seemed real any more.
‘Everything’s changed. Ever since that day at the Roost. Then when Mark and Tracy … and the mill.’ She let out a bitter laugh. ‘You know, my dad said a few months ago that the war was winding down and he’d bet a month’s salary that Mark would never even have been called up to serve. How awful, huh? They died for nothing. Sometimes I wonder why him and Tracy didn’t just run away, you know, Canada or someplace. I guess they didn’t have the money.’
Because Bung-Eye was bleeding Roy Easton dry. A dull, inevitable darkness lodged in my belly. There was no escaping that man’s reach, nothing he didn’t have some hand in, however indirect. You may not see the claws but you’ll still feel the scratch.
And he’ll never suffer for it. It made me want to scream.
Gloria shifted, a floorboard creaked. ‘What is this town any more? It doesn’t feel like home. Doesn’t feel safe. What’s left now?’ she asked.
My farm.
What farm? Dead soil and an empty house, no money for food let alone a tractor or seed or fertiliser. And what would be the point now? Without them?
‘I should go but I’ll see you later for Rudy’s big surprise,’ Gloria said and slid off my bed. She didn’t look at me, just flattened down her dress and went to the door.
She stopped. ‘I wish we’d never found that body. I wish we’d never gone looking. I made us, I know I did, and I’m sorry. I’ll always be sorry.’
Gloria walked back to me, kissed me on the cheek, then left.
I heard every movement. The landing, a pause outside the bathroom, then her flight down the stairs, through the family roo
m and outside. I went to the window and watched her pick up her bike, stop for a moment, look from the house to the track, as if she was deciding which route to take, which future to pick. After another minute, she got on her Raleigh and pedalled away.
Jenny, on the bed now, smiled at me. The world was so quiet. The heat didn’t bother me any more. I didn’t even hear the buzz of insects. I saw birds, the occasional hawk, mostly blackbirds, but I never heard their calls. There was a haze over my world, like I was trapped in a glass case watching and hearing only muffles. Endless golden cornfields stretched out on all sides, stabbed with clumps of trees and strung about with telephone wires and barbed fences. To the west, the land dipped into our valley, our Roost, where we made Big Lake and where all this hurt began. In between the Roost and my home, out there somewhere, in a place my mind knew but tried to block out, was that triangle of no-man’s-land, the Three Points.
It was known, a town legend, that you could say or do anything on the Points. It didn’t belong to anyone. Maybe Jenny thought she would be safe there. It hurt to think about so I turned away from the outside and toward my angel of a sister, sitting on our bed with my book of North American birds in her hands. A gift from Momma. One of my favourite things.
It’s okay to love her, Jenny said, and I cried into the pages.
Jenny tapped me on the shoulder and I realised I’d fallen asleep, the book splayed open on my chest. The light dimmer but still there. Mid-afternoon. That strange expression on her face again, the one with the answer, the one I couldn’t understand.
She looked to the left, toward the landing. A second later, someone knocked on the front door.
There’s your answer, she said and urged me out of bed.
Rudy stood on the porch with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Big movie-star grin on his face. He wore blue jeans and a black t-shirt, a pack of cigarettes folded into the sleeve, with a denim jacket threaded through the handles on the bag. He hopped about, that smile reaching past his mouth, into his eyes and all through his body.
‘It’s time,’ he said, voice jumpy like the rest of him. ‘It’s finally time, Johnny.’
‘What are you on about?’
He dug into his back pocket, gave me a piece of card. ‘Surprise!’
A bus ticket. A ringing sound in my ears, piercing like feedback on speakers. Then it passed and I heard the birds, chattering in the trees. And the wind through the corn, the familiar rustle of the dried husks. And the creaking of the house, breathing in and out, just like it always had.
‘A bus ticket?’ was all I could think of to say.
‘St Louis then down to Kansas City, then all the way to San Francisco.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘We’re all leaving, man. There’s one for you, one for me and one for Gloria.’
Jenny swung on the tyre in the yard. That expression on her face had changed. I knew the answer now. I could read it clear in her smile, wide enough to match Rudy’s.
You can’t stay here, Johnny, she said. This isn’t home any more.
I knew she was right. Could I really walk through town again, see all those faces who knew every detail of what happened to my family?
Every inch of Larson was drenched in memories of Jenny and Momma and the life we had. The Backhoe where we’d shared shakes and hamburgers and Didi’s blueberry pie. Al Westin’s where we’d bought ice creams and exchanged Coke bottles for spare cash. Barks reservoir where we’d gone swimming and dared each other to jump Fisher’s. The school where we’d cheered on the Lions to playoffs. The woods behind Gloria’s house where we’d learned to smoke and made such grand plans. The Roost. Big Lake. Three Points. My house where Momma danced around the kitchen in her bare feet, where she painted her toes cherry red, where she sang and used a wooden spoon as a microphone, where she played dress up with Jenny when we were little, made her a flower, a princess, Carmen Miranda with the fruit bowl on her head. Where she carried me upstairs when I was five when I fell asleep after chores, where she held me in her arms and called me her special boy. Where she loved us. Where she destroyed us.
Could I look at all that every day? For the rest of my life? Could I walk past that church and hear the echoed sermons of Frank Jacobs and not run in there and shoot him dead? What about that gurning monster Darney Wills? And when his mayor father comes up for re-election and promises to ‘Clean up the town’ and pledges family values? Could I keep my tongue? And what if I saw Gloria’s father on the street? How would I stop myself grabbing him, squeezing my hands around his throat until the kicking stopped? I suddenly wished the pastor and Sheriff Samuels had locked me up, that would be a lesser punishment than living here with all this. I’d never truly wanted to leave my home, my town, until right then.
‘What do you say?’ Rudy nudged me, dropped the duffel onto the porch.
‘I don’t have much money,’ I said. The ninety-four dollars from the AMX matchbox was still in the evidence bag, in the crawlspace. ‘Just a little.’
‘I got you covered. I’ve been sneaking change from my old man for months and then I found Perry’s stash. Dumbass kept it all under his mattress. Every cent is in here now.’ He kicked the duffel bag. ‘Gloria and me have been planning it all week. She tell you about her dad?’
I nodded. He went quiet for a moment, as if in respect.
‘It’s time to go,’ he said. ‘Perry and the old man are at a car show in Bowmont, they’ll be back tonight and I got to be three states clear by the time they find all this missing. Bus is in an hour. Then we get the red-eye from St Louis. Besides, what you said … before … about them finding out about me and … and Scott … You were right. I got to leave. They’ll kill me if I stay and this town has had enough of that.’
I bit my lip. Stared down at the ticket. Then to Jenny, on the tyre swing, lit up gold in the afternoon sun. All their lives, they’d wanted this ticket when I never had. Everything they did, they did for this thin piece of card. Everything Jenny did. Now it was in my hands and it was like holding a baby bird. Too afraid to grip it tight that I might hurt it and yet scared to hold it too loose that it might fly away.
‘Is this for real?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Bought them yesterday. Had to tell the old goat at the ticket office they were for me and my mommy and my daddy and they were waiting in the Backhoe for me to hurry back. Last man in Larson who don’t know who my old man is, thank God. You in?’
‘I don’t …’ I shook my head. Good memories washed over the bad, flooded me inside and out. I’d be leaving them too but at least I’d have Jenny with me. On the swing, she smiled, nodded, shimmered in the sun.
‘What’s left here for you?’ he said. ‘What’s left for any of us?’
I met his eyes. My best friend who I trusted more than anything. Jenny would be with me, no matter where I went. This would be my chance to finally do what I promised, to get her out of Larson. To show her the world and I would. I’d show her everything. Behind me, the house was just a house, the fields just fields. It would all decay and wilt and break. I could stay there, wilting and breaking along with it, or I could follow my friends, have a brand new life.
Rudy asked his question again.
‘Nothing,’ I said and felt Jenny’s hand in mine. ‘Nothing is left that I can’t take with me.’
Rudy whooped and pulled me into a fierce hug, slapping my back and shouting, right into my ear, to get packed.
I found a rucksack in Momma’s closet, covered in sewn-on peace badges, faint smell of pot inside. Eric’s. It was perfect. I lingered there for a moment, in amongst her clothes, her scent. I found a shawl she wore sometimes in the winter. I remember her wrapping me up in it with her while we watched Family Circus one time. It was soft and held onto her perfume. I put it in the bag then went to mine and Jenny’s room. I folded up the scarf with the blue stars and put it in my pocket. Then I packed clothes and my bird book and a few other bits and pieces. I went down to the crawlspace and shoved the evid
ence bag in the rucksack. I took a jacket from the hook, my warm one with a red chequered pattern, and forced that in too.
‘Are you ready, Buff?’ Rudy said in his best John Wayne cowboy voice.
I smiled. We’d snuck into the Clarkesville movie theatre a few years back to see the Duke in Hondo.
‘I was born ready,’ I said and Rudy winked at me, slung his duffel over his shoulder.
Gloria met us at the bus stop opposite Al Westin’s grocery store with her suitcase and two fat rolls of cash she’d taken from a box in her father’s closet. It was the same stop where they’d dropped off the army boys fresh back from the jungle. Back then, people had been holding protest signs across the street, now the sidewalks were empty, half the shops still boarded up after the Easton mill explosion. This town wasn’t my town any more. That darkness, like a mushroom spore, had taken root and spread. Now poison popped up on every corner, infecting everyone who walked close. The sun still shone, the birds still chirped, but the people walked with hunched shoulders and grim eyes.
Jenny linked her arm in mine and rested her head on my shoulder. Gloria seemed nervous, fighting with herself over her decision to come with us, but I took her hand with my free one, told her everything would be okay, and she seemed to calm. Rudy whistled at us both and made smooching noises but it didn’t bother me like it would have last year. I was different. They were different. Everything was different. My world had altered its axis and spun in a new rhythm. On my back I carried the only important pieces of my old life. In my hands, by my side, were all the pieces to build my new one. My Jenny. My best friend Rudy. And Gloria. The girl I loved.