Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “How do you feel?” Bell asked. Trying to get along. Setting a cordial tone so that they might have a decent conversation. For once. “If you want to rest a little, we can talk later.”

  “Don’t matter.”

  Bell let some silence build up in the room. She hoped her sister might say something—anything—that would give Bell a clue about what she was feeling these days. And why she seemed determined to sabotage any attempts to make smooth her reentry into life outside of prison.

  “He confessed,” Bell finally said. “The guy from last night. He’s in jail. It was a fight over a woman. Just like you said.”

  “Figures.” Shirley’s hand twitched. She looked around suspiciously, having noticed that the objects on top of the coffee table had been rearranged. “Where’s the ashtray? Forget it. I’ll just go outside.”

  “No, hold on.” Bell didn’t want her sister to get up. Didn’t want another conversation between them to end prematurely, cut off by some dumb excuse. So she rose, retrieved it from the kitchen, returned. “Just put it in the dishwasher yesterday. Tidying up.” She set down the square glass ashtray, reuniting it with the pack of Pall Malls and the green plastic Bic lighter that seemed to have taken up permanent residence here, at least when they weren’t shoved in the breast pocket of Shirley’s flannel shirt.

  “So,” Bell said. “We need to get a few things straight, okay? I mean, I’ve tried to be patient. Tried to give you your space. But after last night—well, there’ve got to be some changes. Some give and take.”

  No response, so Bell went on. “I’m not asking for a lot here, Shirley. Just some regular hours. And a better attitude. Carla’s coming, okay? And like it or not, you’ll be setting an example. I need to know where you are at night. And the job search—how’s it going?”

  Shirley scowled. “How do you think it’s going? World’s just dying to hire somebody with a record.”

  “You’re getting help, though, right? From your parole officer? With résumé writing, job-placement assistance, things like that?”

  “Yeah. Things like that.” Shirley, restless, shifted her feet. “You know what, Belfa? After they found that old fart in his driveway, I got a call from my PO. Asking where I was. Asking if I could account for my whereabouts that night. Asking if I had witnesses. Thank God I did.”

  “It wasn’t personal.” Bell had known that call was coming. She hadn’t interfered, realizing that it was better for Shirley in the long run if she didn’t. “Standard procedure. With your felony conviction, he’s required to—”

  “Yeah. Standard procedure to make me feel like a friggin’ criminal.”

  “I know it’s hard.”

  The scowl intensified. Shirley triple-tapped her cigarette in the vicinity of the ashtray. “Anyway,” she said, “I got a job.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. You’re surprised, right? Nice. Real nice. Appreciate that.”

  Bell ignored the sarcasm. Kept moving forward. “When do you start?”

  “Already started.”

  “Then where—?”

  “It’s not some lame-ass thing at a fast food place, okay? It’s not flipping burgers.” A cold, knowing stare. “Which is what you were thinking, right? ’Cause that’s about all you expect from me. That’s, like, the upper limit of my abilities, right?”

  “I’m happy for you, Shirley. I just want to—”

  “It’s not a regular kind of job. It’s special.” Shirley scratched at the faded denim fabric that covered her right knee, picking at it, the way you’d bother a scab. She didn’t look at Bell when she spoke. “I’m managing a band, okay? Getting some gigs lined up. Putting together a YouTube video. You heard ’em the other night. Bobo Bolland. Been around awhile, but this is a fresh start. He writes these great songs. The kind you remember. The kind that get under your skin, you know? I think he’s got a shot. This could be big. Really, really big.”

  Bell struggled to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “You don’t know anything about managing a band,” she said quietly. “Do you?”

  Shirley abruptly bolted forward in her seat, as if a few thousand volts had just been delivered to her extremities. Her head bobbed up and down. “See? You see? I knew it,” she said, looking around the room, mumbling her umbrage to invisible witnesses. “I knew you’d try to piss all over it. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “I’m just asking—”

  “You’re trying to take care of me. Like I’m a baby or something. And you know what, Belfa? I don’t want your fucking help anymore. Okay? Got it? Got that straight? I have to be in this house right now—my PO says so—but the second I don’t, the second I’m back on my feet, I’m outa here. Got it?”

  Shirley lit another cigarette and flopped back against the couch cushion. She’d had a hard time holding the lighter still enough for it to meet up with the end of the cigarette.

  Bell waited. Whatever she said right now would be misconstrued. Whatever she did would be wrong.

  It was her sister who broke the raggedy-edged silence.

  “You know what?” Shirley said.

  “What?” Bell replied. She said it cautiously, warily, expecting another jab.

  But Shirley was smiling now. A real smile, not a bitter, ironic one. Her mood suddenly shifted; her voice was back to normal. It was as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened. Just that fast, Shirley was a different person. Ever since she’d come back into Bell’s life, she had exhibited these out-of-the-blue turnarounds. Bell found them a little unnerving—they were too much like her own quicksilver switches from rage to sympathy—but she’d learned not to look surprised. Hell. Maybe it was genetic.

  “When you were a little kid,” Shirley said, voice warming, “you’d cry up a storm sometimes. Not for any reason. You’d just cry to be crying, I guess. Daddy’d go crazy. Tell me to shut you up or else. So I’d take you outside, night or day, and try to distract you. Daytime, it worked okay—you’d see a bird or a flower, some shit like that, and you’d start pointing and get all excited and stop the blubbering. But nighttime, it was harder. Nothing to see. And you’d just be screaming and throwing yourself around. Daddy said that if you didn’t shut your mouth pretty damn quick, he was going to shut it for you.” Shirley winced “And he’d do it, too. You bet your ass he would.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Course you don’t. You were two, three years old. Just a baby.”

  “So what did you do?”

  Shirley took a minute to lift the cigarette off her lip. Her hand trembled. She aimed a jet of exhaled smoke at the ceiling. Even after the smoke had dissipated, she kept her chin tilted up; her eyes stayed on the ceiling, as if crucial parts of her story had fled there a long time ago for safekeeping, and she was reading sentences—crafted in a private language knowable only by her—right off the uniform swirls of faded white paint.

  She lowered her face. Looked at Bell, still smiling. “There was this time once in the summer,” she said. “I took you down by the creek. Being summer and all, it was real hot at night, just like now. Thought it might settle you down. Oh, you were real upset that night—screaming and crying. Man, you were something. Worse’n a siren. Daddy was more pissed than ever. Royally, royally pissed. He was back in the trailer but he could still hear you—hell yeah, he could still hear you!—so he came charging out and then he went right down to the creek after us and he hollered, ‘I told you to shut her up! Give her whatever the hell she wants—just get her to shut her fucking mouth!’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ And he said, ‘What the hell? I told you to give her whatever she damned well wants!’ And I said, ‘I can’t.’ Now, at this point he’s ready to haul off and hit me. So I explain it to him.”

  “Explain what?”

  Shirley took her time before speaking, enjoying the memory before she shared it, letting it wash all over her like a cat’s tongue, both rough and smooth.

  “I told him,” Shirley said, “how you’d seen the moon in the c
reek—the reflection of the moon on the top of the water—and that’s what you wanted. The moon. You kept on reaching for it, reaching and reaching, trying to touch it, and when you couldn’t, you were so mad that all you could do was scream.”

  “The moon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Guess I was a real dumb-ass, right?” Bell said. A rueful wince. “Even at three.”

  “You knew what you wanted. And just because you couldn’t have it—well, that didn’t mean you didn’t still want it with all your heart, you know? I carried you back inside, but if I hadn’t, I swear you’d still be down there today, trying to get at that damn moon.” Bemused smile. “Lord, you were stubborn.”

  For a moment, neither spoke. There was so much Bell wanted to explain to her sister, so many important points she needed to make, so many questions she still had to ask. Things were going to have to change in this house, and change fast, because Carla was coming, and Bell couldn’t allow Shirley to go on this way—wild, reckless, unreliable. She had to make her see. There was a violent criminal in the area, someone who hadn’t hesitated to take a sledgehammer to an old man’s head, and she knew that her sister and her daughter were at risk, just as everyone was at risk, always.

  Those were the things that Bell needed to say to Shirley, and to say urgently: Be alert. Stay on the main roads. Don’t take chances. And more. There was always more to say.

  But right now, here in this dim room early on a summer morning, Bell was silent for a little while longer, feeling the ponderous yet somehow not burdensome presence of the past as it weighed down her thoughts, blocking everything coming in or going out, the stopper in the bottle, the stone at the mouth of the cave.

  Chapter Nine

  When her shift ended at 7 A.M., Lindy didn’t much like to drive home. She liked being finished with work, of course. But she dreaded the moment each morning when she had to turn off the highway and bump down the county road and then make a right-hand turn at the rock-dinged red mailbox marked CRABTREE and see, once again, the ugly house set back in a snarl of old trees, reachable only by this dirt lane that kept visitors away more reliably than a NO TRESPASSING sign. Perry Crum often gave her grief about the decrepit road that ran back here, telling her she deserved better. “One of these days,” he’d add, “this here mail truck’s just gonna disappear in one of them big ruts, taking a couple of big boxes of these books of yours along with it.” She knew he wasn’t serious, so she’d just smile and shrug her narrow shoulders. Besides, there wasn’t much she could do about it. Not about the road, and not about the house, either.

  The gray paint on its wood sides was peeling so badly that it resembled a skin disease. The roof leaked, and one look could tell you why: At least a third of the shingles were split or rotting and needed to be replaced. Shingles worked themselves loose at regular intervals, exposing the wavy black swaths of warped tar paper beneath. Lindy knew she’d eventually have to hire somebody to come by and put on a new roof, but delayed for two reasons: money and company. She didn’t have the first, and she didn’t want the second.

  She parked on the left side of the house, on a concrete pad that she had installed herself. She’d done it last summer. First she had cleared out a rectangular space that was roughly the size of her car, digging down about two inches, and then she leveled the dirt foundation. She bought thirty-seven bags of Quikrete. Found her father’s old red wheelbarrow, its sides so badly rusted that in some spots you could poke your finger clear through, and she mixed batch after batch after batch, stirring the thick gray clotted stuff with the wood-handled shovel she’d seen her father use so many times on tasks around the house—projects he’d done a long time ago, before everything changed. The wheelbarrow held itself together just long enough for her to finish the job. Not a minute longer. Just as she was winding it up, just as she was using the shovel tip to poke and scrape the last gooey bits of the last bag of watered-down Quikrete out of a corner of the wheelbarrow, the whole thing kind of disintegrated, the fragile filigree of its rusty sides collapsing in on themselves, red flakes showering the ground. It was almost as if the wheelbarrow knew it was the right time to go, like an old, sick animal that wanders off into the woods to die.

  The pad worked fine. It wasn’t perfect, because she hadn’t leveled it out right, and so it slanted significantly toward the house, not to mention the neuron-like sprawl of cracks that inched a little farther across the surface each time she checked. But it did the job. She had an easier time getting her car out in the winter, when the snow piled up and then froze into solid, thigh-high walls, impossible to knock down or burrow through. With the parking pad, she had a fighting chance; she could clear the snow as it fell, and then get traction—a clean running start—when she tackled the path that led out to the county road. Winter before last, she’d been trapped at home for three days before the big thaw came. She liked the quiet it brought—no cars went by until the county cleared the roads, and Lindy had lots to read, and the district manager for the Lester chain called and told her not to worry about getting to work until it was safe to do so—but she still decided, then and there, to build the pad as soon as rising temperatures made it possible. Not for that winter, but for the next one. Think ahead: That was her father’s motto. Or had been. When Perry Crum first saw the pad, he bowed low and said, “On behalf of my van and its axles, I salute you.” They both laughed.

  Two days after she’d finished the pad, her father had one of his good days. Part of one, anyway. The clouds cleared out of his brain. He stood on the porch and he nodded. “Nice job, my girl,” he said. “You’re good with your hands, and that’ll do well for you. Long as you can use your hands, you’ll never lack for work to do or a place to live.” Just a few hours later, the clouds came back, and when Lindy tried to talk to him about undertaking another project around the house, he roared at her, waving his arms and telling her to go to hell. There was no recognition of her in his eyes. No light.

  It was an ugly house, but once she was inside, Lindy didn’t notice that anymore. She closed the front door behind her and immediately felt a simple, familiar wash of relief. Of satisfaction. And, on a still more fundamental level, of peace. This was her space, filled with her books. She knew what she’d find around every corner. There was a meager living room, a skimpy kitchen, a ratty bathroom dominated by a cast-iron tub with rust stains that flared dramatically around the drain, and two minuscule bedrooms, which Lindy had combined into one. Her father didn’t need a bedroom on the first floor anymore. Besides, the two bedrooms had originally been one room, anyway.

  Her father had put up the wall when Lindy was eight years old. She remembered that day, remembered him setting the studs and then screwing in the Sheetrock and applying drywall tape to the seams, talking to her the whole time, narrating his actions, and even though she hadn’t been able to comprehend much of what he was saying, she loved listening to him anyway, absorbing a wisdom that was beyond her years, because wisdom was wisdom, whether you understood it or not. It got into your bones, howsoever it could. Found its own way in, her daddy liked to say. And then one day, when you were old enough to use what you knew, you realized all the knowledge that was already there inside you, waiting.

  Her father was a good teacher, except when he lost his temper, which he did one afternoon when they were almost finished with the wall. She was watching him countersink a nail. “How come,” she asked, “you didn’t have any more kids? Why’d you just have me?” He was facing the wall. He stopped what he was doing, but didn’t turn around. “Don’t you worry ’bout that,” he said, and it came out hard, as did his next sentence: “You mind your own damned business, girlie.” He grunted. A few minutes later, he turned around and rubbed the top of her head. His way of apologizing, without having to say the words. Words were difficult for him, then and now.

  Lindy kicked off her shoes and dropped down on the couch, sinking into the flaccid cushions. She had two days off, and she knew precisely how she’d spend the time
: reading. She wasn’t sleepy, even though she’d been up all night.

  Just before she’d driven away from the station that morning, Jason Brinkerman sidled up to her car, right next to the driver’s-side window that she’d rolled down to let out the accumulated hot air. Jason didn’t have a car. His brother Eddie usually picked him up after his shift.

  “You want to, like, go get some breakfast, maybe?” Jason said. Acting casual. But Lindy knew better than that. “Eddie can drop me off,” Jason went on. “I mean—like, he don’t have to come along or nothing.” He used the long tail of his flannel shirt to rub at a spot on the door of her car. Killing time. Cool. Like it didn’t matter to him, one way or another, if she accepted or not.

  “Nope. Got things to do.” She, too, kept her voice casual, so that it didn’t reflect what she really felt: No freakin’ way. It wasn’t that she disliked Jason; she had no strong opinion of him at all, pro or con. He was a coworker. That was all. She’d barely spoken to him back in Acker’s Gap High School.

  Hell. She’d barely spoken to anybody.

  “Okay,” he said. “Later.”

  “Yeah. Later.”

  And then she backed up and drove away, lifting her eyes to the rearview mirror only once, and then only for an instant, because she knew he’d be watching to see if she did just that: looked back at him. Even a glance might encourage him. Give him hope. She’d met his brother, knew a little bit about his family—you couldn’t live your whole danged life around here and not know somebody’s family—and so she knew that Jason came from a rough bunch of people. Emotionally, he was fed on scraps, and then told he ought to be full.