Crowds stood against the dark wall, stuck a hand through the shadow before finding the courage to follow it, like it was a gateway to someplace forbidden.
There was awe among the visitors, talk about God and light. They took turns taking photos. Some knelt in prayer. A small line held hands and dipped their heads, chanting soft enough to keep their words from traveling to the onlookers. Noah heard they’d tripped down from Viker Hill or maybe someplace just as bleak and devout.
There were folk laughing, some on lawn chairs with sandwiches, settling in for a day of cloud gazing.
A wild-eyed black man stood alone. In his hands he held a sign: THE SKY IS FALLING DOWN.
The man glanced up at Noah and nodded. Noah nodded back.
The world was flat and Grace hung over the edge.
They walked side by side, Noah in the light of Windale, Raine in the dark of Grace. They moved slow, the ground uneven beneath their feet.
“I saw some guy with Arizona plates,” Noah said.
“I saw Colorado.”
“Jesus.”
“You reckon maybe we would’ve liked all this shit goin’ on a while back, before?”
“Maybe. I know Purv’s enjoyin’ it, he’s making a fast buck every day now.”
They walked on.
“I see you watchin’ me sometimes,” Raine said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s all right, all the boys watch me.”
“How come you’re being nice to me now?”
“I ain’t.”
He tried to take her hand. “Fuck off,” she said.
“That’s better,” he said.
They’d been to three houses the night before, watched the lady with the fire-red hair, and also a honky-tonk way out in Midway. They’d staked half the night; Purv and Raine drifting off sometimes, Noah staying sharp. At one point he’d seen a flicker of light from a basement window in a house by the old Monroe railroad. He’d crept out alone and sidled up to the window then dropped to his hands and knees, peered through and caught sight of the guy, Chester Mulharney, whacking it to some grainy videotape.
They heard yelling and they turned but couldn’t see nothing ’cause they’d walked far along the line.
“Probably a Kinley shakin’ down the wrong guy,” Raine said.
They struggled on, the ground turning to dips and waves and lumps of earth baked hard as rocks. He’d skipped dialysis again, ’cause Raine needed him, ’cause the days were passing fast.
He felt tired. Missy called and he didn’t answer. Trix stopped by and he didn’t come to the door. He’d get back on track. As long as he didn’t leave too long between each session.
“You reckon Summer’s dead?” she said without warning. “You reckon the Bird took her like he took those Briar girls?”
He stopped and turned to face her. He pulled her forward, into the sunlight, and she squinted back, eyes burning like she was daring him to lie.
“She’ll come back. She will come back. I promise.”
He knew it was a moment that’d last and haunt and keep pace till it was over. A moment taken from a summer when a funny kinda cloud shaded their lives, a summer when he made a promise he couldn’t possibly keep no matter how much he asked and how much he prayed.
He tried to take her hand again but she slipped it from him.
“My sister holds my hand.”
“Oh.”
“Can we bring her here one day? Even if the cloud has gone,” she said.
“All right.”
“All right.”
“You reckon Summer will like me?” he said.
“No.”
When they got back he bought her a cone, though she tried to stop him. Raine held it and licked the edges, trying to keep pace with the melt. They reached the Buick and climbed up onto the dented hood, leaning back against the windshield and staring straight up.
“Imagine if there ain’t no sky above the cloud. Imagine if it’s just gone,” he said.
“What will be there then, when it moves out the way?”
“Just space. It will be like we’re livin’ in outer space. The stars will shine so bright that we won’t even need the sun no more.”
“Imagine the cloud takes gravity with it too, and we can just float round. Imagine when we drive back into town, we’ll get to the border and the Buick will just take off.”
“We’d have to tie it somehow. Tie everything. Otherwise folk would just float away too, everything would just float away.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” she said.
“I want to go up there. Into space. Since I was a kid and Purv stole a rocket from that toy store that used to be next to Ginny’s. We tied it to a firework and lit it by the Red. It fell just as the fuse sparked, aimed right back at us. We hightailed it, I was laughin’ so hard and Purv was screamin’ real high like a girl.”
She smiled.
“My momma said I could be an astronaut if I worked hard at school. I believed her. Funny how it slips as each year passes,” he said.
“What?”
“Hope, maybe. Belief. That there’s better out there. Better than what I got, which ain’t all that much really.”
“I didn’t mean it, what I said the other night.”
He shrugged like it weren’t nothing. “We don’t think about that, me and Purv.”
“ ’Cause you’re brave and you’re fierce.”
“We are. Don’t stop me wishin’ though.”
“For what?”
“I sit in the station, watchin’ the real cops and maybe for a moment I feel like one of ’em. I step outta my life and into theirs. I got this need to be somebody else so bad it hurts.”
“But you can just be you, Noah. Don’t matter what you end up doin’ or where you end up livin’. You can just be you.”
“I don’t want to be me.”
“Why not?” she said, her voice quiet.
He looked up at the sky and didn’t say nothing.
“I know,” she said. “I saw you . . . at Mayland.”
He swallowed. “I saw you too.”
“It’ll be all right,” she said.
“It will, just not for me,” he said.
*
Black sat beside Bobby on the wood bench in the cemetery. Lights burned in the church and dropped color through the stained glass.
Black sipped his beer slowly. He’d bought a six-pack from Ginny’s then came to sit awhile. He’d been surprised to find Bobby there, even more when he’d taken a beer for himself.
“How come you ain’t home?” Black said. “It’s gettin’ late.”
“I’m not sure really. I sit out here sometimes. Makes me feel closer to death.”
“Closer to God then.”
“Maybe.”
Black glanced over at him. Bobby looked beat, like a man that didn’t ever rest no more. Black could relate.
“Do any pastors ever give up, just walk away from it and join the rest of us down here?” Black said.
“That what you reckon? I exist on a higher plane?”
“Maybe you’re less flawed. I was brought up like that, respect the church and all.”
“I knew this guy . . . a pastor over in Hattiesburg. He seemed to love it, I mean, he was a decent speaker, warm and compassionate and funny.”
“What happened?”
Bobby ran his finger around the can. “He woke one mornin’ and stopped believin’. Suddenly it was all lies, all nonsense. Just like that. He carries all this guilt with him. For wastin’ his life, for wastin’ people’s time.”
“You ever worry that’ll happen to you?”
Bobby nodded.
“I get that, kinda like losin’ your mind.”
“Or findin’ it.”
Black smiled.
“I used to come out here after church, when I was a kid. I used to read the gravestones. I’d look for the oldest, then the youngest,” Black said. “I still do it now. I got a thing about t
he messages on the stones.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s hard to get it right. People try and say too much, flower it up. It bugs me.”
“So what’s the perfect script?”
“Somethin’ that means somethin’ to someone.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just somethin’ so simple, but it gets you right here,” Black said, tapping his chest with his fist.
“Like Mitch Wild?” Bobby said. “I’m always drawn to that stone.”
Black nodded. He could make out the grave from where he sat, the marble shined ’cause Noah tended it often, the script proud against lantern light. Brave and fierce in his service to the people of Grace.
“They got that one just about perfect,” Black said as he lit a cigarette. “You ever hear of the Boyington Oak?”
Bobby shook his head.
“It’s an oak tree in a cemetery over in Mobile. So there was this guy named Charles Boyington, he was a printer, lived in Mobile in the 1830s. He was also a gambler. One time he was seen with another guy, Nathaniel Frost, who folk reckoned owed money to Charles. Later they found Frost’s body, all stabbed up and robbed, near the cemetery on Church Street.”
Black passed Bobby another beer.
“Now Charles Boyington was the obvious suspect. He was executed and buried in that same graveyard. Before they hanged him Charles kept sayin’ a mighty oak would spring up from his heart and prove he was innocent.”
“Did it?”
Black nodded. “Grew right out his grave. Now that’s gotta beat a headstone, right?”
Bobby smiled.
Black set his beer down and rubbed his eyes. “Fuckin’ cloud.”
“I can hear Pastor Lumen from here some nights. When he’s got the microphone. I tried talking to him –”
Black waved him off. “He don’t listen to no one. Never has, never will. We were all glad when you and Savannah came to town. I mean, I ain’t wishin’ the man ill or nothin’, but he’s always had a cruel tongue. I got the press here, the dark sky and the girls.”
“I helped search, went to Joe and walked with his men,” Bobby said, staring down at the dirt. “I think of Summer out there and it kills me.”
“He’s preyin’ on church girls, you know that?”
“I do.”
“That’s the kinda world this is now. I wonder if things will get better in the future. Religion . . . makes you wonder about it. The gains and the losses.”
“What do you believe, Black?”
“I got a cross tacked up in my kitchen.”
Bobby nodded.
“How do you do it?” Black said. “That compassion, for people that ain’t good, a lot of them, askin’ forgiveness when you know they’ll do it again.”
“It’s not on me to forgive. How many faces do people have, Black? I don’t have the empathy I need anymore. I see people round me, people close to me, and I see what they want to see. But it don’t make it real. I died years back, the part that goes on does only that.”
“Your boy?”
Bobby nodded. “If I stop believing then where’s Michael now?”
“Blame is a game you ain’t never gonna win, Bobby.”
Bobby saw lights in the sky. “This guy you’re lookin’ for.”
“The Bird.”
“I really hope you stop him soon.”
*
Noah lay in his bed but sleep didn’t come.
Raine didn’t need his problems ’cause she had her own.
They’d driven back to her place after, the Buick bumping along the track roads in the kinda silence that made Noah wonder if they were the last people left out there, the rest just sucked down and swallowed by air too heavy now, sky too dark and too sad.
He’d watched her walk up her street then blend into shadow without a glance back in his direction.
He rubbed his eyes till there were colors, then he sat up quick when he heard tapping on his window.
Raine’s face pressed against the glass, the world behind her cut to a single cloud. He opened the window and she climbed from the flat roof into his bedroom.
She kicked off her sneakers.
She told him to lie down, then she lay beside him, her head on his chest, rising and falling with each of his breaths.
She moved up and kissed him hard.
She sat up and took off her T-shirt and bra.
He looked away.
She reached for his hand and brought it to her breast.
“Why are you doin’ this?” he said.
“Pity.”
“I’ll take it.”
She smiled.
“I think I love you,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said.
*
It was as the square slowly woke, as weary eyes opened to morning dark, and as the two warring sides of the green readied for another long day, that the network vans came to life. Reporters got into position, makeup was hastily applied, and cameramen roused from makeshift beds.
Joe got to his feet and walked over, leaving Tommy sleeping on the bench beside. He asked one of the reporters what was going on and might’ve got nothing if it weren’t for the look on his face.
Joe kept even as he was told.
Before long the news ravaged the town like wildfire.
Another girl had gone missing.
37
Summer
I lay my head on Bobby’s golden chest and listened to the mechanical function of his heart, and I wondered about love and the intricacies and imbalance of emotion. I thought about the Greeks and agape and eros, how maybe there’s too much play in that particular four-letter word.
At the start, before I knew, Bobby’s soul was a winter garden and my body was the first color of spring. I didn’t know death so leaden, so endless, and so despairing.
I wondered about sex and its forms; fingers and tongues and fevered tears. And afterwards, when the action had reaction and he saw me with empty eyes.
I had sat in the library and looked up that boys’ home in Arnsdale where Bobby was raised. There was lots of pieces, more than I could read, all tellin’ the kinda tales that scored out divine providence. They shuttered it in 1984 and brought charges against the soulless; those dead-eyed men that took silent to the stand ’cause remorse, even feigned, was a trait too human.
“Will you hurt me?” I said.
He stared at me and I smiled.
“Is that my role, Bobby? Impressionable innocent.”
“Yes.”
“I think Savannah suspects somethin’.”
“I know,” he said.
“You know?”
“I can’t see her hurt.”
“Will you just stop things one day when I ain’t expectin’ it? I reckon it’s best if I don’t see it comin’.”
He nodded.
“That’ll be a bad day.”
“Yes, not just for you.”
“You’ll have to do it ’cause I wouldn’t never leave you, Bobby.”
“I know, Summer.”
I squeezed his hand so tight the blood stopped flowin’.
“Your interview is tomorrow,” Bobby said.
“I know.”
“Are you nervous?”
I shook my head ’cause I knew I weren’t going.
“I played Fauré, the Élégie. There was people there, Savannah’s friends from the school in Maidenville, and they stood there and stared and after they clapped.”
You can mourn somethin’ that weren’t never yours, like those teenyboppers that cut themselves when one of the pretty boys tires of sainthood. It still hurt though, right then, what could’ve been, it still hurt.
“Did you finish your paper?” he said.
“They’re out there,” I said.
“The Briar girls?”
“I see them buried in shallow graves, coughing dirt and clawing at wood.”
“Summer.”
“You reckon he raped them?”<
br />
“Summer.”
“He must’ve. That’s what they do, the monsters that live so deep that when they surface it’s all or nothin’. Perfect pleasure is perfect pain. Why’s the line so fine, Bobby? God made it that way. It’s another apple.”
“Summer.”
“What?” I said, sharp, turnin’ up to face him.
“Why are you cryin’?”
“Sometimes there ain’t nothin’ else to do but cry.”
He stroked my shoulder gentle.
“People crane their necks so far back to look at you,” I said.
“They don’t see me.”
“Do you still think about the Briar girls?”
“I pray for them.”
“What am I to you?” I said.
“Life is a line. The things we do might alter the route but the end is still the end and nothin’ will change that.”
“And you stay fixed on the end.”
“Yes.”
He kissed the top of my head and I was glad my hair smelled of oranges that day.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t care,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Summer.”
“But you will.”
“I will.”
“I look at you and you look sad, Bobby.”
“I am sad.”
“Do you want to have another child one day?”
“No.”
“No.”
“If there is a heaven, and if I go there, I’ll find my boy and he’ll see I lived only for him.”
I wondered about honesty in all its forms—blunt and brutal and beautiful.
*
That night I walked past the Kinley field with the devil sign and I thought of the Briar girls immortalized. Bobby reckons people’s biggest fear is being forgot. We all know this life ain’t eternal, what we leave behind outlives us by a distance that can’t be measured.
I could break from myself, that’s the way I saw it when I decided to do it alone. I could be that question mark for a while. Who ain’t never thought of their own funeral? Who ain’t turned on by the outpouring of grief and the size of the hole left behind?
Maybe I wanted Bobby to feel it, a stretch of that ache I lived with since I first met him. Maybe I did, but that seems too neat now, too oh-I-get-it, ’cause truth was he’d lived enough hurt for all of us.
There ain’t a reason for everythin’, some things just were and are and will be.
All the Wicked Girls Page 24