Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town

by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

  Her brother was sobbing facedown into his pillow, and she recognized it for what it was. She knew that kind of crying, that curling into a fetal position. The way a person’s body holds grief and fear, and the shaking that comes from keeping it all inside until it’s just too much. It finally spills out and cannot be contained, even by the most expensive cotton pillowcases in the house.

  She lay down beside him, matching the question-mark shape of his body with her own in silent acknowledgment. In recognition.

  “He has a list,” her brother said after what seemed like hours of just lying next to each other. “It’s inside his Bible. A long, long list, as if he’s so proud of himself.”

  His voice was like ice cracking on a frozen pond.

  “Your name is in there. But I believed you from the first, Delia. I really did. I just knew it was pointless to say anything. And then it was me, and what would people say, how could that happen to a boy who was ranked first in the state in pole bending and barrel racing? I just hoped maybe he wasn’t hurting you anymore. And then you came down in your snow pants, and I knew.”

  So he had noticed.

  She tightened her arm around his chest, breathing into his wide back that smelled of hay and horses. Her beautiful, broken rodeo star of a brother. He had found his own way of coping, and she had to admit, it looked a lot saner than clinging to a gum chain.

  He’d also fooled her. He’d fooled everyone.

  But even the best contortionists can fit into those tiny boxes for only so long.

  His record had recently been shattered by a total unknown from Kansas whose horse had the most impressive hind end Delia had ever seen.

  Her brother and Maverick had been expected to win easily, but they hadn’t even placed at this year’s National High School Finals Rodeo.

  She thought he’d just run the patterns too often and Maverick had grown bored by the time the event rolled around. But now she knew the real reason: her brother’s mind had worked and reworked a pattern of its own; nothing to do with a rodeo.

  Delia knew that pattern.

  She knew how it made you question everything else about yourself, even things you were good at. It could destroy you.

  He was right that it was pointless to talk because nobody listens to boys who seem untouchable or little girls who speak up.

  But the thing about little girls is that one day they aren’t little anymore.

  So Delia began to plan.

  She disguised her voice and made phone calls to men who were higher and higher up in the church. She praised her missing priest for guiding her on the right path, she wanted to send him a card of thanks, how might she find his address?

  It was almost too easy.

  Her praise was like oil, greasing the wheels of information on the other end of the phone line. “Oh, he’s been many places,” she was finally told one day. “Let’s see: Alaska, Minnesota, Wyoming…but we’ve moved him again. One moment, dear.”

  Delia didn’t understand why she was the one who had to act. Why hadn’t anyone protected them or stood up for them or at the very least believed her when she spoke out years ago? Waiting for help had been her first mistake. But Michelle was right about one thing: Delia was a fighter. She wasn’t waiting anymore.

  She heard a file cabinet being opened, papers rustling.

  “Most recently Granville, a tiny mining town in Colorado. He’ll be so happy to get your card, Miss—what did you say your name was?”

  Click.

  Delia scribbled “Granville” on the inside of a matchbook.

  She slept all night on the bus with her hood up and a switchblade in her boot, between her sock and shin. Inside her backpack, her gum chain was now forty feet long. It was a stupid, simple thing, but it was a part of her, like a beating heart she carried outside her body. She wanted to keep it close. For now.

  Her plan went as far as getting herself to the door of the Granville Catholic church, but after that she didn’t have a clue. It was time to act, and still she was unsure—until she saw the schedule tacked to the door.

  Father Lazaria was hearing confessions from noon to one.

  Oh, the irony!

  She slid into the pew closest to the door and looked up at the stone walls, the stained-glass windows with the midday light cutting across the etched faces of disciples and followers of Christ. She wondered whose daddy had paid for these windows and what else had they cost? The church had meant so much to her, until it hadn’t.

  Was there a little girl here in Granville who was feeling like the chosen one? Did that little girl have a brother? Or a mother who cared more about what people thought than about keeping her children safe?

  Delia knew that on one side of the confessional was the priest, waiting to hear the sins of his sheep.

  The wolves have been in charge long enough, she thought, slipping into the box. She was supposed to say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned….”

  She didn’t say anything. She waited.

  “My child,” said the voice that had haunted her, that had driven a wedge between her and her parents, that had broken her brother. The voice she wished she could forget, now a long fingernail running down the chalkboard of her spine.

  “How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “How long has it been since yours?” she said, pushing her hand through the hole that had been placed right above the kneeler, just like she knew it would be. But this time she was armed. She flipped the blade open with an ominous click and pressed it hard against his crotch. She hoped it was the last time she would ever get this close to him.

  “Don’t move,” she warned. “Or you will regret it.”

  She thought about the little girl Michelle had known, the one who would fight back against anything.

  “This is what being helpless feels like,” she said.

  He wheezed, disgusting nose hairs whistling with fear. He did not want her to hurt him, and she realized now, that wasn’t why she’d come. She just wanted to make him afraid of what she might do.

  “If you ever threaten another child or even think about threatening another child, I will hunt you down. I will find you. Give me your robe.”

  Yes, that little girl was still in there, even if her voice was rusty and shaky from lack of use.

  She heard him struggling to disrobe in the tiny confessional while also trying to avoid the switchblade. She pulled the fabric through the hole, feeling like a magician tugging on an ever-growing silk scarf.

  She knew he would be transferred again, that the church would always cover for him. But he deserved to be afraid.

  “Don’t hurt me. Please,” he begged.

  She had done what she came to do.

  She told him to stay in the confessional for at least an hour after she was gone. Somehow she knew he would stay much longer than that.

  She set the robe on fire behind the Piggly Wiggly on the edge of town and threw it into the dumpster. It was white, not the purple one he’d worn all those years ago. She remembered how he’d raised his purple arms and it had made her think of a phoenix, the mythological bird that burns to ash and then rises from the flames. She hoped nothing evil would be reincarnated from these ashes.

  She wouldn’t need her gum chain anymore. She threw it on top of the smoking robe, thinking of how many painful hours she had spent making it, days upon days, years upon years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  From a pay phone she made one more call to the archbishop’s office, the same one that had naively given her Father Monster’s address. She told the nasally voice to stay on the line, because she wanted him to hear the names of Father Lazaria’s victims, one by one, from his own Bible. It was a horrifically long list.

  Minnie, Jasmine, Mary, Michael…

  She heard the breathing on the other end o
f the phone grow distant and said if he stopped listening before she was finished, she would call the police.

  And if the church let Father Lazaria near children again, she would do so much worse than that.

  She read each name slowly and clearly, trying to give every person the dignity they deserved. She didn’t know all the names, but she recognized some of them, remembering what her mother had said about these things not happening in their world.

  She stumbled only once, not on her own name, but on her brother’s: Silas.

  Afterward she walked for about a mile away from town before sticking out her thumb, barely noticing the faint scent of smoke in the air.

  BASKETBALL TOWN

  The world is on fire. The summer of 1995 will go on record as the first summer in history that folks in Lared, Montana, finally have something besides basketball to talk about. The skies are clogged with smoke billowing in from Colorado and Wyoming, an apocalypse of ash and soot. It’s so dark, streetlights come on in the middle of the day. Weather advisories warn against exercising outside because of the inordinate amount of harmful particulates in the air. Nobody has taken a real breath in days, and everybody is cranky.

  For Kelsey Randolph, not being able to play basketball ten hours a day on the outdoor court is basically the end of the world.

  She pushes through the doors of the U-Pump-It, bracing for her usual reception from Jimmy Jeffs. But for the first time, JJ doesn’t notice her. Nobody notices her. A small group is clustered beneath a television set mounted over the candy aisle, watching the news.

  “Goddamn lunatic,” JJ says, not taking his eyes off the screen.

  Two men in funny tall hats are leading a confused-looking priest out of a rectory and into a waiting black car. The volume is too low to hear the reporter, but words scroll beneath the image: “Colorado Priest Accused of Accidentally Starting Blaze That Has Grown to Over Seven Thousand Acres.”

  “Burned his robes up in a dumpster and started the wildfire,” Jimmy says. “Crazy as a loon.”

  Kelsey feels an unexpected wave of sympathy for the priest, who looks shaken and disoriented. She doesn’t know anything about Catholics but figures the bigger the hat, the higher the rank. Those men on either side of him must be in charge.

  Kelsey’s stranger gauge isn’t well honed. Having grown up in Lared, population 750, she finds that her default is usually to trust people, even if there is the odd Jimmy Jeffs to contend with.

  “If that was anyone else, they’d be going to jail,” JJ says in the authoritative voice of someone who has been faced many times with the prospect of going to jail. “Now they’ll just take him to some comfy retirement home to live out his days.”

  “He doesn’t look dangerous, just old,” Kelsey says, without thinking.

  JJ turns to look at her.

  “What do you know about dangerous? And how’s him setting fire to the world gonna help your jump shot?”

  “I’m at pump three.” She waves a ten-dollar bill in his face.

  “You know, if you’d just taken that shot from the top of the key, we would have won.”

  She grabs a Snickers bar off the rack and stuffs it into her pocket as soon as he turns his back. (Everybody does it: payment for having to deal with JJ.) He’s oblivious to everything once he’s up on his soapbox, ranting about Kelsey’s jump shot or accusing her of not shooting enough. Or insisting that because of her, they’d lost a game last year for the first time since anyone can remember. One game. You’d think she’d killed someone and hidden the body, the way everyone was acting.

  “I know you think it’s your job to feed your forwards, but guards also need to know when to take the shot.” He emphasizes every word with a finger punch to the register.

  “Assists are nice, but nobody wins a game because they got one more assist than the other guy.”

  After a long pause and a longer lingering glance at her boobs, he adds, “Or gal.”

  He takes her money and waggles his tongue back and forth through the space where his front teeth should be.

  Why, oh why, isn’t there another gas station in this town?

  “Thanks, JJ.” She waves at him, using the Snickers bar as her middle finger. The bell ding-dongs overhead, and she pushes through the broken doors, crisscrossed with masking tape and cardboard, because why fix them? Jimmy Jeffs’s customers will just break them again; they’re dependable like that.

  “Shoot the damn ball!” he shouts.

  Inside her car, Kelsey turns on the wipers and watches a thin layer of ash swish across her windshield like gray snow. This summer is a disaster, and not just because of the fire.

  She really misses her cousin Lillian, who has only sent two postcards and has not apologized for leaving without saying goodbye.

  Lil loves Alaska, says it’s just like Montana but bigger in every way: bigger mountains, bigger skies, bigger belt buckles, as if that’s possible. She doesn’t know that fires have choked all the life out of the wide Montana sky; she’s too busy writing poetry and plucking freezing-cold children out of a glacier-fed lake.

  She hadn’t even asked Kelsey to go with her when she applied to be a counselor at Camp Wildwood, but of course they both knew it was impossible. No way could Kelsey miss two months of basketball. Still, Lillian could have asked. It was their inside joke, that even weirdos like to be invited. Although normally the joke referred to Lillian, who had not inherited the basketball gene like almost everyone else in Lared.

  Lillian was not part of the inner circle that revolved around practices and away games and huge parades every year, that celebrated the Lared Lynx and their many, many state titles. Parades on Main Street were so prevalent, they were boring (according to Lillian), punctuated by balloons and marching bands and the players riding in Cal Worthington’s pink Cadillac, waving their state trophy—year after year—while a sea of maroon-and-gold supporters lined the streets.

  That’s what it meant to be born into a town drunk on basketball. Everyone, in some way, was blessed, touched, or, at the very least, obsessed with basketball.

  Everyone except Lillian.

  There must have been others like Lillian over the years, but if there had been, Kelsey didn’t know them. The ones who couldn’t catch on, no matter how many “little dribbler” camps their parents signed them up for. If someone didn’t have talent, they found other ways to ride the maroon-and-gold wave, usually as scorekeepers, managers, cheerleaders, or band members, or even just by being really, really loud in the stands.

  It might not seem possible that everyone in one town was a basketball fanatic, but it was the God’s-honest truth in Lared.

  So much so that Lillian had to transfer to the high school in the next town over just to get away. But she’d been born into a basketball family, and unless she emancipated herself and moved to another country—or Alaska—there was nowhere to hide.

  Kelsey loved her cousin to pieces, but she also feared for her. And secretly—until recently, anyway—had thanked her lucky stars that she was one of the blessed, because she didn’t want to live her life like Lillian, a seal floating out to sea on a rapidly melting iceberg.

  Although when she had said that to Lillian, her cousin had spurted soda out of her nose and howled with laughter.

  “Careful, Kels. Your very own metaphor is going to sneak up and bite you in the butt.”

  Kelsey had been confused by the laughter and thought perhaps Lil just hadn’t understood what she’d meant. Since they lived in landlocked Montana, anything involving the ocean was a bit of a stretch. But metaphors were more Lillian’s terrain, to be fair.

  They were at the Frosty Freez, the halfway point between their two schools, looking forward to the free food that was owed to someone of Kelsey’s stature. So many unspoken rules, it would be a difficult place to understand if you hadn’t been born here. Or in Lillian�
�s case, even if you had been, but at least she understood what she didn’t know, if that made any sense.

  “Hot-fudge sundae for my cousin?” Lillian said, smiling sweetly at the skinny waiter who gave Kelsey’s maroon-and-gold warm-up jacket a cold look. He was from the rival school, the same one Lillian had transferred into. They had never won a state title, although they’d come closer than any other team in the past four years. But the Plateau High Buffaloes still weren’t the Lared Lynx, because nobody was. Even a mere waiter at Frosty Freez who had no stake whatsoever in the game would know what was what. He squirmed visibly but tried to sound like he couldn’t be bothered.

  “Like I care about the Lynx point guard?” he muttered, setting two sodas on the table.

  Lillian’s elbow knocked over the soda nearest to her. Nobody could say it wasn’t an accident.

  “Oh, I’m so, so sorry,” she said as Kelsey tried not to laugh. Soda dripped onto the floor and seeped into the brown shag.

  “I’ll bring you another one,” he said, in a tone that implied he absolutely would not be bringing another one, as he wiped his arm on his apron and kicked ice cubes into a corner to melt under a potted plastic plant.

  “Don’t forget the sundae,” Lil called after him, “or we could just get a manager…”

  Behind his back he flipped her the bird.

  “There’s a gentleman for you,” Kelsey said, pouring half of her soda into Lil’s glass, since he obviously wouldn’t be coming back.

  “My one little bit of athleticism at work there,” said Lil, wiping her sticky jeans with a napkin and giving Kelsey an impish grin.

  “Whatever would I do without you?” said Kelsey.

  “I guess you’ll find out soon enough.”

  And that was when Lil had told her: Alaska. Summer camp. Three months away, where she wouldn’t have to hear one goddamn word about basketball. At least, she hoped not.

  “But you still fit in here, Lil,” Kelsey had said. “Look at you with the soda.”