Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  Liz said, “I still think we should tell a grown-up.”

  Jeanne crouched before Hannah. “If you tell someone, it’ll be just like on Gangbusters. The police’ll want to know everything Billy said and what he did and there’ll probably be photographers from the paper and no one’s gonna care if you’re crying or embarrassed or anything like that. I bet you have to stand up and tell everything in court. With a jury and all.”

  “He said bad things.”

  “And the judge’ll want you to say ’em out loud for the jury.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “You expect a jury to believe you? You’re a girl.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “The church’ll have a big meeting and they’ll vote and you’ll have to move out of Rinconada. Maybe go someplace like Georgia or Alabama.”

  Hannah blinked and wiped her tears. A smudge of dirt and snot and tears spread from one cheek, under her nose to the other. “All I want is for it to be like it never happened.”

  Jeanne thought a moment. “Maybe it can be.” She stared down at Billy Phillips. “We could just go away and leave him.”

  “You don’t mean it. You know that’s wrong, you know it.” Liz’s plump cheeks colored. “Besides, dogs might get him. There’s coyotes around here . . .”

  “Someone’ll find him. They’ll just think he fell over.”

  “What about his mother?” Liz said. “She’s only got one son.”

  “What’re you talking about her for?” Hannah sprang up in outrage. “What about me? He said he was going to make me do something . . . nasty. I don’t care what happens to him. I wish coyotes would get him. I wish I could forget about this forever. I wish I could hit my head on the rocks and get amnesia.”

  “Like Young Widder Brown.” Liz nodded as if she now understood perfectly.

  “Yeah, well, if wishes were fishes our nets would be full. My dad says in real life people don’t get amnesia.” Jeanne tossed back her braids. “Actions have consequences and he says we have to take what we get and make the best of it.” She glanced down at her Mickey Mouse Club watch. “If we’re gonna leave we better do it before anyone comes along.

  “We’ll say you fell. We’ll say we went up to the flume and you fell off at that place where the boards are rotten. You could say you saw a snake, a big one and it really scared you and that’s how come you were crying. And you could walk through the poison oak on the way home. You’ll swell up like I do and no one’ll blame you for being miserable.”

  Half way up the hill Liz stopped and pointed at Hannah’s feet. “What about her toenails? Her mom’ll see—”

  “I don’t care!”

  Painted toenails and confession magazines and cigarettes were not important anymore. All that mattered was getting away from Bluegang and never coming back. Maybe then Hannah could forget Billy Phillips. Maybe if she lay down in the poison oak and rolled over and over, the poison on the outside would drive out the poison she felt on the inside.

  At the top of the hill, Liz and Jeanne put their arms around her in an awkward hug. She wanted to believe Liz when she said, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be like it never happened.”

  When Hannah got home her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner, a pork roast with applesauce and summer squash and bowls of Jell-O chocolate pudding with sprinkles of coconut on the top.

  “I’m not hungry,” Hannah said on her way across the kitchen.

  “You will be by dinnertime. Have you done your chores?”

  Clean the upstairs bathroom bowl, scour the sink with Bon Ami, fold the towels in the special way her mother said was the only way to fold towels.

  “I will.”

  “Come back here, Hannah.” Mrs. Whittaker laid her palm across Hannah’s forehead. She was a tall almost-pretty woman with soft curly hair and wary eyes. “You look flushed. Do you feel all right?”

  Her mother worried about polio, all the parents did. If a kid got a fever or felt stiff or had a bad headache, the doctor made a house call that very night. Mostly it was too much sun or sugar, but sometimes it really was polio. The summer before two boys in Hannah’s class had been attacked—this was the way grown-ups always spoke of the disease, like it was an enemy soldier. One of the boys would have to live in an iron lung the rest of his life. The other was half-crippled and could never lead a normal life. That was the worst thing about polio, and another thing grown-ups always said: once you got it, you could never lead a normal life.

  Hannah hardly thought about polio, or about anything going on in the world. There had been a war in Korea and when grown-ups weren’t talking about being “attacked” by polio they worried about the The Bomb and Communism; and it seemed to Hannah that being an adult meant being scared all the time. Hannah mostly thought about school and her friends and how she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. That was about as far ahead as her imagination carried her—though occasionally she wondered if anyone would ever want to marry her and what kind of a house she’d live in and what would it be like to “do it.” There were so many things more urgent to Hannah than polio and bombs and Communists.

  “I want you to take a couple of aspirin and nap a while,” Mrs. Whittaker said. She looked Hannah up and down.

  Hannah tried to curl her toes under.

  “You’ve been painting your toenails.”

  Hannah stared at her feet and the ten pink dots.

  “Oh, Hannah.” Her mother sighed and sat down at the kitchen table. “What am I going to do about you?”

  “It’s only polish, Mommy. I can take it off.”

  “I know you can take it off and you will, believe me, you will. That’s not the point.”

  The point, Hannah knew without listening, was that there would be a time and occasions in the future for painting her toes. When she was grown she could paint them green if she wanted to. But she was too young now. She needed to try to understand how it looked to people to see a little girl with painted toes; she should be aware of the kinds of assumptions people made just on appearances.

  “You never want anyone to think you’re not a lady, Hannah. A young lady now. A grown lady soon enough.”

  Hannah wondered if her mother would ever understand that she did not care about being a lady any more than she cared about polio and Communism. She wanted to yell out how much she hated gloves and girdles and those hats with dinky veils. But the way her mother bent her head and passed a hand over her face, the dejected slope of her shoulders, stopped her and filled her with shame. She thought about Billy Phillips lying dead on the rocks at Bluegang and about the terrible things he had said to her, and she had to believe that what her mother had said was true. She had painted her toenails and tied up her Brownie blouse and Billy Phillips . . . assumed. It was her fault. The police would say so, the judge too.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said and meant it.

  Upstairs as she lay on the bed with a washcloth across her forehead and a glass of cold water—her mother was a loving nurse—Hannah could not stop her mind from going over and over what had happened. And then she remembered her Saturday panties.

  Jeanne sat in the kitchen eating the slice of peach cobbler the school cook, Mrs. Phillips, had left for her. It felt very peculiar eating the cobbler and thinking about Mrs. Phillips making the crust and all and her son lying dead, probably. She was glad Mrs. Phillips had gone home for the day and Jeanne didn’t have to look at her face and answer her questions about what kind of a day she was having.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Billy looked lying on the rocks, but instead of trying to put the image out of her mind, she went over every detail. She saw the way his legs were sprawled and the zipper down on his pants. Maybe someone would find him and think he fell when he was peeing. She had watched the boys from her parents’ school having pissing contests and could just imagine Billy Phillips arcing his pee out over the oak root saddle like a fountain. When she watched the boys, she never saw th
eir you-knows but she’d once seen her father’s when she walked in on him in the bathroom, and he was so stewed he barely saw her. The next day she went to the library after school and looked up penis in a medical book. There were about a dozen pictures of men who had venereal disease and one had the elephant’s disease and the underneath part of his thing had swollen up so it looked like he was sitting on a basketball. Jeanne had decided the penis was the ugliest of any body part and she was really glad she didn’t have one and that she hadn’t seen Billy Phillips’s. She finished her cobbler, washed her dish and left the dining hall. Bells rang every hour at Hilltop so she knew it was after three. Too soon to go home.

  Jeanne’s mother had fallen off the water wagon again so she had a pretty good idea what awaited her at home. Mrs. Hendrickson would be sitting in the little den with a book open on her lap and a tall glass of water beside her. It wasn’t really water; it was vodka, only Jeanne wasn’t supposed to know that except one time she had sneaked a taste.

  Instead of going home she walked around the far side of the rose cloister, across Casabella Road and scrambled up the hill to the flume that had until recently carried water from the reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to the town below. She hoisted herself up and walked along until she had a clear view of the Santa Clara Valley. The calendar in the school kitchen had a view of the valley at blossom time: from Rinconada to the San Jose foothills, nothing but prune plums and apricots in bloom. Under the picture it said, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” In August all Jeanne could see were trees and green and a few streets and houses. In the distance—exactly eleven miles from Rinconada according to the sign at the town limits—she made out a half dozen medium-tall buildings in San Jose and beyond the little city the rolling eastern foothills the color of late summer gold.

  The hills looked like breasts. Jeanne didn’t have any yet. She hadn’t started her period even. But she knew it would be soon. She had looked up puberty at the library and found out that the few hairs sprouting under her arms, which she carefully kept cut back with scissors, meant she was on the edge of, just beginning, puberty and pretty soon she would have to buy Kotex and a belt and remember to bring an extra one to school or she’d bleed all over everything like what happened to one of the girls in her class last year.

  She would be glad to start her period even if it did mean she couldn’t swim or go on hikes or ride her bike for five days out of every month. The sooner she grew up the sooner she could go to Cal and get away from her parents. Her brother Michael had gone to Stanford and Jeanne didn’t think she could stand to walk where he had, maybe sit in the exact same classrooms as he.

  No one ever said so, but Jeanne knew Michael and his buddies had been drinking when their car hit the abutment on the Bayshore Freeway. Three years had passed since he died and she still felt angry with him because he had broken his word to her. She remembered a time when she was small—only six or seven and he was in high school—and she told him he shouldn’t drink beer or he’d end up being like their father. Michael had laughed and promised her he would never do that. The lie was bitter in her memory. Jeanne had vowed she would never be more than a light social drinker. She would never be like her parents.

  She lay down on warm boards over the flume and folded her hands behind her head. There were a few clouds, harmless white puffy things in funny shapes. An elephant, a face with a big nose, one looked like a penis. She started thinking about Billy Phillips again. Something dug away at the edge of her memory. She chewed on the end of her braid as she tried to think. It was important, whatever it was.

  The evening of the day Billy Phillips died, Liz Shepherd tried to tell her parents what had happened. Twice she went into the study where her parents worked after dinner. She had practiced her speech, not wanting to waste their time. A bad accident had happened. Hannah got scared. Billy Phillips did something nasty . . . Her father read in his Eames chair and her mother sat at the desk correcting papers.

  “Yes, Liz?” She liked the way her father looked at her over the top of his glasses with his eyebrows raised a little. Long after he was gone, she remembered that look and missed him.

  Her mother asked, “Are you ready for bed?”

  “Can I talk to you? Both?”

  Her father’s gray eyes smiled, but her mother said, “Can’t it wait, Liz? I’m going to be up late as it is.”

  The incident at Bluegang lived in her, squirming and twisting and knotting her insides, invading her lungs so she could hardly breathe. She should have insisted. Liz knew it then and she knew it later, but at the time she could not override her mother’s chilliness.

  “Tomorrow,” her father said, still smiling. “We have an appointment for a conversation. You and I.”

  “At breakfast, Liz,” her mother said. And then, “Close the door after you, dear.”

  That night her mattress had lumps and ridges she had never felt before and the fluff in her pillow bunched up and got hard. Her stomach cramped but three trips to the toilet didn’t help. She heard the screams and the crows and imagined Billy Phillips struggling to climb up out of the canyon. But he was dead, wasn’t he? She could not recall if his eyes had been open or closed, and the more she thought and worried the more likely it seemed that he wasn’t dead at all. There had been a mirror in her pack. She should have gone down and held it in front of his mouth.

  On the floor below her turret room she heard her mother and father turn out the lights and close their bedroom door. For a while the sounds of something classical—her parents never listened to music with words—drifted up from below. Usually the sound of that peaceful, boring music put Liz to sleep but not this night. This night she was wide-awake as a coyote prowling backyards in the moonlight, hunting cats. She imagined a coyote sniffing around Billy Phillips’s comatose body. Maybe he’d had candy in his pocket and the sugary smell would make the wild dog burrow. She imagined Billy Phillips teetering on the brink of consciousness, trying to breathe, trying to make a sound and the dog shoving at him with its wet nose and its sharp teeth and claws.

  Liz sat up and reached for the clock on her bedside table: 11:45. Not so late really. Sometimes she stayed awake until midnight reading and listening to Sepia Serenade. But she didn’t want to listen or read tonight. She could not get the image of the hungry coyote out of her head and the more she thought, the more sure she was that Billy Phillips was still alive, alive and in pain and struggling helplessly.

  She should have checked to see if he was breathing. She should have stood up to Jeanne. She should have insisted that they get help. She should have made her parents listen to her.

  She pulled her shorts on over the bottoms of her baby doll pajamas and dragged a shirt out of the pile of dirty clothes on the floor of her closet. She carried her sandals in her hand as she crept down the ladder steps from her room to the second floor of the house. The hall floor creaked under her feet but her parents were sound sleepers and it didn’t matter even if they woke up. They’d think she was going to the bathroom again.

  Years later she would think about how she ran up Casabella Road that night, about how strong and healthy she had been at twelve and how she had taken stamina and energy for granted. She would remember the security of those times. The confidence. When had rape and abduction and molest entered her consciousness as more than words? They certainly weren’t there when she was twelve, not as real events that happened to girls like her.

  At the vacant lot, she left the road and sped across the field to the hill down to Bluegang making a wide detour around the spooky chicken coop. She’d come this way a hundred times. She might have been able to find the path through the wildwood by starlight alone but tonight there was a half moon and that was more than enough light for her to see the break in the oaks, the worn away dusty path down the hill. Moonlight came through the canopy in dapples, like stepping-stones. When she was halfway down the hill she saw someone standing in moonlight by the rocks. She froze where she was and squinted. After a seco
nd she relaxed.

  “Hannah?”

  The figure looked up.

  “Jeez-Louise, you scared me. What are you doing here?” Liz slipped down the hill sideways and fast, filling her sandals with dirt and throwing up dusty clouds. She skirted the saddle and roots of the great oak and half-slid down to the rocks. She got as close as four feet from Billy Phillips’s body and stopped. He lay as they had left him hours before. On his pale flaccid chest his nipples stood erect, frozen forever in a moment of terror. One arm flopped at his side; the other stretched out, palm up.

  “He’s dead,” Hannah said.

  His eyes were open.

  “My panties—”

  Liz had forgotten all about them.

  “They have my name on them.”

  Liz stared at the body on the rocks.

  “They should be in his pants pocket.”

  “You looked?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “You touched him?”

  “His pocket.”

  “And they aren’t there?”

  Hannah shook her head. In the moonlight the shadows made her face look long and tired, as if drawn in chalk and charcoal.

  Liz thought a moment.

  “You probably got confused.”

  “Where are they then?”

  Liz knew where this conversation was going.

  “You think they’re under him?”

  “Maybe,” Liz said.

  Hannah folded her arms across her chest and shoved her hands into her armpits. After a moment she said, “I can’t turn him over.” She looked at Liz. “Will you do it?”

  “Me?” Her stomach rolled.

  “But what if they’re under there?”

  “You said you saw him put them in his pocket.”

  “Yeah, and they’re not there now. I told you that.” She stared at Liz. “Someone took ’em.”