So that’s all I wanted to say. I don’t want you acting all weird around me. I’m hoping we can just be friends and hang out a little and maybe you’ll watch me play. That would be something nice.
J.
From the moment of Hailey’s murder I had assumed that Guy, somehow, was at the heart of the story leading to her death. He was my contact in, my secret rival, the third point of our triangle of betrayal, and so I couldn’t conceive of his somehow not being to blame for her murder. But after hearing Guy’s story I suddenly had a different sense of it all. Guy was a pawn, so was I, and the master strategist was Hailey herself.
So my focus now was where it should have been from the start, on Hailey. The answer to her death lay somewhere in her life, and she had given me a map to its most significant moments. In her safe-deposit box she herself had chosen what I would see. The photographs and documents that she had left for me would be my lever to pry open her past. And included among them were the letters, mash notes typed or scribbled by a boy long dead, words that bristled still with raw emotion.
H.
I know you’re mad at me and you got good reason and so I got nothing to say but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I don’t know what got into me. It was for a time like the only place I felt free was with you or on the ball field and now, after the fight and the suspension, there ain’t no place left. My dad he blames you for everything and tells me I’m not to see you no more and I tell him to go to hell and that also is on the razor’s edge of blows. So it all keeps getting worse and worse and I don’t know why. We’re just friends, just friends, why can’t everyone see that? What’s going on between you and Grady got nothing to do with me and what happened between Grady and me got nothing to do with you neither. We’ve been cruising toward this for years, Grady and me, only so many times you can hear yourself being called mountain trash without doing something about it. This has been coming since our boyhoods, you was just his excuse.
But I’m not here writing to apologize about Grady. It’s the other thing, the thing that got you pissed at me in the first place. I can’t be like you want me to be, I can’t be all chatty and confessional, it’s not in me. I know plenty of folk who go around telling their life’s story to anyone who happens by but I’ve got no urge to puke my guts out on anybody’s front porch.
We all got a secret. I know you got yours, I can feel it, large and dark, but I got mine too. When I think about what I keep hidden it’s so large it dwarfs me. Whatever you see on the outside is just some sort of a lie, it’s the insides that matter and that’s got to stay inside. Sometimes the secret is so heavy I feel about to be crushed, but it’s never hard keeping it. I might as easily just rip out my insides and let you take a look as to start blatting about like a sheep. It’s me, it’s what I am, I wouldn’t want to survive without it but like a kidney it ain’t nothing I want to be showing around neither. I don’t want you getting pissed at me but it won’t do me no good talking about it, that won’t change a thing. It’s there and I live with it every day, and there’s nothing to be done. So when you say I’m not communicating well there it is. I ain’t. And if that’s gonna keep you mad at me, so be it.
I don’t know when I’ll be back in school. Coach wants me back out there soon as he can the way Delmore’s been booting the ball around short but it’s not up to him. Grady’s due out of the hospital in a few days and Chief Edmonds says I have to wait until he’s out to see if they are pressing charges. They won’t let me back in school until then so if I’m gonna see you before I’m going to have to sneak out but I’m willing if you are.
Just take a little pity on me and don’t ask too many questions cause right now things are such a mess I don’t know what I’m going to do and I don’t know how I’m going to do what I need to do if you stay mad at me.
J.
Along with the letters in the box were the photographs, heartrending because I knew how it all turned out, how but not why. There was a picture of two girls, young girls, just kids, arm in arm, blond in their shifts, frowning both. I could see her face in the picture, Hailey’s face, the cheekbones not yet pronounced, the eyebrows not yet arched, the lips not the full buds they would become, but there it was, her sad face—twice. I knew she had a sister, I never knew she had a twin. Roylynn and Hailey.
I didn’t glimpse the pictures once and quickly, like moving through a friend’s photo album. Instead I thumbed through them often, obsessively, time and time again. It was a strange sensation, this examining of the photographs, unseemly in a way, like pawing through the dresser drawers of some other family’s memories. But they were a part of my route into her past. Roylynn had stayed in West Virgina and Hailey had left, Roylynn was still alive and Hailey was dead. How had that happened? They had shared each other’s features, but what else, what history? I wondered if the pictures would provide a clue. I stacked them and restacked them, I shuffled them randomly and went through them again, trying to find, in the differing orders, a sense behind them, trying to divine the story.
Here was one, the nuclear family, twin girls, still just babies with their mother and their father, their poor doomed father, short, swarthy, his forearms thick and meaty. What little girl wouldn’t feel safe in those forearms? They were smiling, the parents, in that picture, and the babies had that satisfied contempt on their shapeless faces that marked them as happy. This was the “before” picture. Another, burned into my memory, Hailey dead and bloody on the mattress thirty years later, was the”after.”
A photograph of the father, alone now, in a uniform of some sort with a peaked cap, his truck driver’s uniform. Smiling, cocky, gladiator of the road, master of his destiny, hero of country-and-western song, off to haul his cargo of lumber until a load shifted and a brace failed to hold and he was gone.
Where was the sense in the order?
I shifted them around, and now the father was replaced by another. It was a picture of one of the girls holding the hand of a man, not the father, a tall, rawboned man with a grizzled beard. Oh, I recognized him, yes I did. Lawrence Cutlip, younger and harder, not a man to be messed with for certain, but there, holding on to that girl when she needed him most. Who was the girl, Roylynn or Hailey? I couldn’t tell, but there she stood, the girl in the picture, her father gone, squeezing, as if for dear life, the hand of the man who now was her sole protection against an oblivious world.
H.
I am flying, I am floating through the air and I don’t never want to come down. Never. I always thought when it came it would be heavy, leaden, that it would clutch me at the throat like it did before, but this is like drinking freedom pure. I am soaring, held high by something so magical it has no name. The moment we left apart I ran home, to my room, to my desk, so I could write all the things I found it impossible to say in the moment.
I know I’m still in a world of trouble but that don’t have grip on me no more. When you hit a ball solid on the meat of the bat there is an instant when the whole force flows though you like an easy wave. It’s why I love the game so, the feel of that easy wave that flows through you for the instant it takes to finish the swing and send the ball a flying. But now I feel like I am riding that wave, surfing it like a Beach Boy’s song all sweet and sure. All I can think about is you, your smile, your soft hands, the red of your lips, the silver tang of electricity I tasted in your mouth. How did this happen, I keep asking myself, how? One moment we’re in the quarry, talking about something that happened in the past, huddling on the rock, talking as friends, leaning close, our knees butting up one against the other like friends, talking in near whispers, and the next moment I am overcome with something so powerful that it starts me to shaking and has me shaking still. There was a switch and I don’t know how it turned or why but suddenly everything changed and the world was lit with a light I didn’t know existed and I am flying. I don’t know how it happened, I only know I have never been happy before, never, not like this, no, never.
I was wrong when I sa
id there was no use talking. I can’t find the words to say what it felt like to finally trust someone enough to tell it all to, to tell it all and to see a reaction so different than ever I expected. There was no disgust or hate or even pity, you was just listening and nodding like, yeah, okay, and then what. You weren’t sitting there like a judge, you were there like a friend and that meant so much even before the wave hit. And I was wrong when I said I was nothing but the secret because this is so strong, what I’m feeling now, and so outside what I had ever felt before that it makes me doubt whether it was so dark a secret in the first place. Maybe it was like you said, maybe we was young and feeling things we didn’t understand and ended up doing things that meant nothing except that we loved each other in the best way. Maybe like you said it’s common, it happens, and then you move on. And maybe we would have if Leon hadn’t gotten so scared like he did and then played that game with the train that he knew he’d lose. Or maybe it wasn’t just the talking that cured me, maybe you chased it out too, chased it with your kiss, like an angel chasing out something evil in my soul.
Whatever it is I am ready to face what comes next. I know Grady’s been talking about me, talking out of that wired jaw, and so he’ll try something. I know that I even so much as cough in class I’ll be out on my ear. I know that the only reason I’m back on the team is because I was hitting .467 and that if my average drops or I start fumbling at short coach will bench my ass and smile when he does it. I know all that, but I’m not afraid, I’m excited. I can’t wait. I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight so I can wake up tomorrow and see your face and then after school and after practice run to the quarry so I can cover you in kisses till it’s dark and we have to go home and then do it all again the day after and then again and then again.
J.
Another photograph. The two girls again, older now, young, good-looking girls, high school girls.
Is there is something primordial in the attraction of high school girls for the male of the species? When we are younger, say, in junior high, they are the unavailable avatars of desire. What would Juliet have been in the Verona High School, a sophomore? We can barely wait to grow older, to gain confidence, to take our turn with them. But when we ourselves are in high school, most of us find, to our shock, that the years did not bring the confidence or skills we expected to have come as our due. They are there, waiting for us, the high school girls, and yet we fumble our way into disaster after disaster and leave them unsatisfied and confused and looking for college boys. And then later, when we are old enough so that our skills and confidence have caught up with our desires, the high school girls are once again unavailable. We give them their own slang, jailbait, and prudently cross them off the list of possibilities. But does the desire ever die? Do we ever see a pretty high school girl walk by with her pleated skirt and young high breasts and not sigh in disappointment?
And now here, in the photograph, we have the orgasmic fantasy of every red-blooded heterosexual male on the planet earth: two great-looking high school girls who happen to be twins. But instead of desire, this picture provoked curiosity in me. One was dressed prim and proper, books held in front of her body like a shield, smiling shyly. The other stared straight at the camera, arms on hips, hip cocked, leaning slightly forward, defiantly, but without a smile. It was a sad defiance. Look at what I am, it said, look at what I have become. Oh, yes, two girls, twins, but now I could tell them apart. I knew nothing about Roylynn, but this girl, this girl staring with sad defiance at the camera, this girl was my Hailey. And so the question: Why the difference? What had come into their lives and pressed them in so very different ways?
One other picture grips at me. A boy in a uniform, a baseball uniform. He’s on one knee, arms leaning on his bat, posing like a major leaguer. Solid, handsome, either serious or sad, it’s hard to tell in the old black-and-white. Jesse Sterrett, I presume.
In the letters it was clear what had developed between Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix, something strong and indelible, passionate enough to have its great joys and great troubles. On a fragment of paper, a ripped portion of envelope, written in a hand overcome with some long-vanished remorse, he pleaded with her from the bottom of his soul.
It’s killing me ever day, ever damn day that we’re not together. My heart weeps in the wanting. I’m less than a man without you, a carcass already near dead, dying of lost love. You done this to me, you stole my world like a thief. Don’t listen to what they are saying, it’s nothing but lies, lies and damn lies. I’m sorry for what I done but I never had no choice, I only done what I had to. Never a love been so fierce or fearsome, never has it cost so high or been worth the entire world. It’ll kill me, it will, and damn soon. I’m dying for damn sure without you. Yes, I surely am.
The love was fierce and fearsome, seemingly worth every sacrifice, and I hoped so, because I knew how it ended, knew where Jesse Sterrett breathed his last breath and where he died. But why? What secrets had torn them apart? Jesse had a secret, something between him and Leon, his friend, something that dragged at Jesse’s soul and drove Leon possibly to his death. It wasn’t too hard to figure it out, two boys, two best friends, down by the tracks, the changes happening to their bodies, to their thoughts, waking up with strange sensations, two boys experimenting. Oh, it wasn’t too hard to figure it out, Jesse’s dark secret that wasn’t so dark, his strange encounter that was less strange than he could ever have imagined. But Jesse also mentioned Hailey’s own secret, large and dark. What was that, and how did that turn her in the direction of her life? Were the two deaths two decades apart linked in any way? Could learning the truths behind that death shed any light upon Hailey’s? And why had Hailey, with a ragged line of pencil, slashed a brutal zig-zag-zig through the last of of Jesse Sterrett’s letters, as if she were a deranged Zorro trying to deface the words?
H.
I am so angry I could strangle a porcupine, and scared too, so scared, impossibly scared. I love you so much, want you so much, but now I have learned that secret you’ve been hiding, my anger burns least as bright as the love.
I don’t know what to do, but I got to do something and there is only two answers that I can see. One is to stay and fight. Take my word on this, if I do stay there is no way it won’t turn to blood. My rage is so murderous now I couldn’t stop with one blow here or there. Remember how I was with Grady on the ground that time, how I couldn’t stop myself from slamming his grinning face, how the only reason I didn’t kill his ass was that you stopped me? The way I feel now is ten times worse, twenty times, a hundred, and nothing, no power, not even what I feel for you will stop me. I’ll kill him, I will, and they’ll lock up my ass even though the bastard had it coming, and that would be fine by me because I would have done right by you which is all I care about.
But there is another answer, to run, to leave, to up and get the hell out of this town, this state. I know we got nothing, you and me, nothing but the burden of our pasts, but we can make a go of it. What we feel one for the other will get us through. The scouts have been sniffing. I’ll be up in the next draft and till then I can play semipro somewhere or in some unaffiliated pro league where they’ll sign anyone, no questions asked. I’ll talk my way into a tryout and smack the apple all over the yard and they’ll sign me, I know they’ll sign me. And if they find us and come after us we’ll go down to Mexico and change our names and I’ll play down there. They got leagues down there that play all year. And when I’m seasoned enough I’ll make the bigs, I know it, and we’ll be so rich we’ll have a swimming pool the size of this entire county.
All I’m asking is that you trust me. All I’m asking is that you put your faith in my feelings for you. I got a truck from my cousin Ned, a beat-up old thing but it runs, and I’ve packed what I need and I’m ready to go. But I ain’t going without you.
I’ll be at the quarry tonight, I’ll be waiting for you. If you trust me enough to come I’ll dedicate my every waking hour of the rest of my life to making you ha
ppy, I will. I swear. But if you don’t come, if you won’t run away with me, then I’ll do it the other way. I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and whatever consequences that come my way I’ll bear gladly because I’ll be bearing them for you. Tonight, I’ll be waiting. Tonight.
J.
30
PIERCE, WEST VIRGINIA, was a county seat, and to prove it, on a hill smack in the center, they had set the county courthouse, a blocky brown building with a single turret, built of sandstone quarried out of a ledge of rock at the far end of the town. To one side of the courthouse the city climbed the slope of the mountain, to the other it fell gently toward the river and then reached across to the far bank, where scattered houses sat in the shadow of another steep rise. The main street, imaginatively named Main Street, jogged around the courthouse. It was built up with brick buildings, squat and aged black, all pressed together along the narrow street as if real estate had once been a prized commodity in the county. The buildings had signs from the middle of the last century, stylized neon banners advertising gifts and flowers and the Courthouse Hotel, signs that hearkened back to a prosperous past. But Pierce didn’t look prosperous now. It looked as if nothing had been built in fifty years, except for the modern and unpleasant Rite Aid that sat just before the turnoff. Something had slipped away from Pierce, some vitality. In its buildings and slumped posture you could sense the vaguely disturbing notion that Pierce was at the heart of an American dream that had suddenly shifted.
We drove around a bit to get our bearings and then took the Hailey Prouix tour of the city. Our first stop was the high school, stretching out on the banks of the river, home of the Fighting Wildcats. It was big for the town, too big, and the buses in the lot told us that children from all over the valley attended. This was where the likes of Hailey Prouix could mix with the wealthy Grady Pritchett as well as mountain trash like Jesse Sterrett.
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