by Trey Holt
By this point, both my stomach and my conscience kept me from turning my eyes to her. The last look I had managed, from the vantage point I had, I had noticed that one of her eyes was slightly open, but cocked wrong, looking across her nose. I had noticed her hands again, bloodied, especially under her fingernails, like crimson dirt.
“Baby, we gotta go if we’re goin’,”I told her.“It won’t be a coupl’a minutes till other kids start to show up. Hell, let’s just let them call them.”
By the time I talked her into us just leaving, the tears she’d initially held were making two thin but steady streams down her cheeks and then cascading down onto the collar of her blouse. Her makeup was starting to tatter, mascara following the tears down, cutting lines in the powder and the blush.
“It’s the best thing,”I told her.“Hell, some other kid’ll find her and they can just call Lucky…or Miss Riley and then she can call Lucky.”
“You really think it’s best?” she had asked me as I was moving her toward her car.
And I had explained to her how I did. How she was right, if Lucky found out that we were meeting then not only would he be likely to beat my ass but he’d also be a hell of a lot more likely to ride by every morning or have one of his men do it. And neither of us wanted that. I knew that I didn’t.
As I have done at some of the worse points in my life, I managed to sell her on choosing the easiest of ways. The path of least resistance that helps you avoid the pain in that moment but then gives it room to multiply later. Maybe exponentially. I think that’s the word.
Chapter Two
It took awhile for the smoke to clear. And I guess until it did, nobody had known just how bad it was. Maybe they’d seen the old man laying there at the bottom of the bridge, his head laid open and all the life having left him. Maybe some people even ran to him and tried to revive him or propped him up or something. But from what I know, he must not have ever said another word after the brunt of the impact, after he was thrown from the car. But Sheila was still alive and talking, is the way it’s been told to me: sitting there, her head in her hands, crying because her daddy was dead over there on the pavement.
They’d been about twenty miles north of the Alabama line when it happened. Willy, Sharon’s uncle, had been driving and, according to Sharon, drinking from early in the day when they left out from their house. They were originally from Alabama; I don’t even know how they got from Alabama to Tennessee to begin with.
The heat and the humidity that day would choke you, she told me. In that part of the country in late May, June, July and August, even September, it feels like the air just sticks to your skin and drips off you at its own pleasure. Like it’s more liquid than anything else.
Edward, Sharon and Sheila’s daddy, was pushing seventy. I’m not saying that would make it any easier, but I believe it has to comfort people that somebody lived near a normal life span. But, Sheila…she was so young it still leaves me sick to my stomach to think about it. She was seventeen. Less than a year different from Sharon.
It was Sharon’s half-brother Bobby who found her and told her. She always said she knew.”Somethin’bad happened, didn’t it?” she asked him. She’d just been sitting in the car with a boy, talking.
“Get out of the car and walk over here with me,”Bobby told her.
She says she was crying to beat the band before she even got all the way out of the car. Bobby took her in his arms, held her while she cried her heart out. Literally, perhaps. And I think it did her mother worse. She had already been through two marriages before that. Or at least one. Truth be told, I don’t know if she was ever married to the first man. Bobby’s father. Back at their little white-frame house, Ima sat down on the steps of the porch when they told her about Edward and let Bobby hold onto her just like he had done with Sharon.
+ + +
It was my idea that Lucky avoided responsibility whenever possible and often asked me to do his shit-work. When he stopped his patrol car in the corner of the parking lot, he nodded at Van and Tully then motioned for me to come over. He was always smoking a cigarette or lighting another one. He even smoked when he was on a goddam ventilator.
“Hey…hurry up. I got something I need you to do for me.”
I looked at him as I made my way across the space between us. From the age and the whiskey and the years of cigarettes, his face was already starting to get flat, fat and wrinkled. Like he was sinking into himself.
“They had‘em a bad wreck down south’a here today,”he told me. He drew on his Lucky Strike and stared out the front windshield at the line standing at the order window. He cleared his throat hard, coughed a couple of times.“County called me, said that they’d got a call about a man that had died. Old man. But then they called again and said that they got another call from the same wreck and that the goddam car had rolled off the embankment half a’hour after the wreck and pinned a little girl underneath it.”
He stared harder toward the Gilco Dairy Dip, at nothing in particular this time. Maybe just the white-washed cinder block wall. He bowed his back a little and pulled his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his brow, covered with sweat. He folded it and used the other side to daub at the water in the corners of his eyes.
“Well, hell, I guess it didn’t pin her under the car. It cut her head off. Or damn near. I don’t know. I guess it don’t matter…she’s dead.”
Rambling, he went on to tell me that it was Sheila Bishop and ask me, didn’t I know her? Didn’t Van and I go out with her and her sister? Hadn’t she been the one I went out with? Weren’t they them poor people who lived over in the mixed section? Wasn’t there a bunch a’them that used to live in the same house? He didn’t know why in the hell the county had called him in the first place; it was their responsibility. Basically, he talked every way in the world around the fact that a seventeen year old girl had died when a car rolled off an embankment almost an hour after a wreck and over her. But, would I go tell them? He didn’t know‘em from Adam and they didn’t know him. And shouldn’t they at least have somebody who knew tell them that an hour after the father died the seventeen year old girl died too?
+ + +
When I got to their house, Bobby was still on the front steps of the house, a cigarette in one hand and a fruit jar in the other. I’d always heard about him that he ran whiskey from down in Alabama and a town a little south of us, a wide spot in the road called Peytonsville, up to Franklin. Was tied up with moonshiners down there, had been in and out of jail a couple of times already.
“Hey,”he said, when I stepped from the Indian.
“Hey.”
“Sharon’s inside with Mama, but I ain’t sure this is a good time to visit,”he told me. I wondered for a moment if it registered in his head that he had seen me around for awhile and then I had disappeared.
“Yeah, I know,”I said.
“You heard?”
“Yeah.”
I started to search for what I’d say next. What you tell somebody who thinks they’ve had bad luck but it’s worse than they knew. I didn’t know whether to tell Bobby and then let him go in and tell them. Or go in myself and tell them. I figured the right way to go was to tell the mother, Ima. To let her tell Bobby.
“My daddy sent me down here to relay another message,”I said. Bobby was still staring through me like he might get up and kick my ass just for being on the property. And even though I didn’t have much respect for Lucky, I realized invoking his name would likely get me past Bobby Moonshiner. Truth be known, Lucky probably let him run through Franklin…probably bought some of the shine from him himself.
Bobby’s last run-in with the law must have still been close in his memory. Without saying a word, he got up and climbed the three concrete stairs up to the porch and rattled the front door. A few seconds later I saw Sharon come to the door and open it then disappear back into the house. Bobby motioned me to go in.
When I made my way past Bobby and through the front door, S
haron was sitting in a chair to the left. She got up and hugged me hard. I could tell her eyes were red and tired from crying. Shadowed underneath from mascara that had run.
“Thank you for coming,”she said.
I wanted to ask her if she didn’t remember anything that had happened, but knew this wasn’t the time.
“Yeah,”I answered.
Next, I wanted with all of myself for her to believe that I was there like she thought, to comfort her in this terrible time. Not to make it worse. Goddam Lucky, I thought, over and over and over. He was probably out behind some building in Franklin smoking Lucky Strikes and sucking on that bottle he hid under the seat. Or out arresting somebody for doing the same thing. Or down at the filling station shooting craps.
Sharon’s eyes about did me in anyway. Even from the first time I saw her, they were eyes that seemed in a strange way like they held everything. They were focused on you; and they weren’t. They were jaded; they were innocent. They were full of joy. And sadness. On this day they had been set adrift in a river of grief. Full of shock. But knowing themselves that the shock would soon turn itself into emptiness. They were also eyes into which I couldn’t bear to speak the words I had to.
“Where’s your mama?” I asked her.
“In the bedroom,”she answered. She motioned her arm toward a room off the main room of the house, one I had always assumed was her mother and father’s bedroom. The doorway between the two rooms was covered with a sheet tacked to the wall above it.
I moved toward the doorway not because I was invited and not because I wanted to go, but simply because that’s where Ima was, and I wanted to get this the hell over with. As I pushed back the sheet and crossed the wood floor toward the bed where Mrs. Bishop lay, I could feel her sadness overtake me…wrench itself in my own gut. She lay on her side, a wash rag covering the side of her face.
“Mrs. Bishop?” I said.
She made a sound that sounded like an acknowledgment I had spoken her name.
“Mrs. Bishop?” I said again.
“Yeah?” she mumbled.
“Mrs. Bishop?” I said.
“Don’t tell me anything else bad,”she said.
“Ma’am?” I asked.
“Don’t tell me anything else bad,”she said. And that was all.
She never looked at me.
“Goddam Lucky,”I mumbled.
“What?” she said.
I heard noises behind me. Bobby and Sharon had come to the doorway, were holding the sheet back so they could see, could hear what was happening.
“It’s Sheila,”I told her.“She didn’t make it.”
She didn’t say a word. She just lay as still as if I had told her about her own death.
“What’d you say, you son of a bitch?” I heard Bobby say from behind me.
I turned and looked him in the eyes. Normally I would have been scared of somebody like him but right now I wasn’t scared of him at all. What I was scared of was part of the nature of life that I didn’t understand then and not come to since. As Sharon and he looked me in the eye and their mother cried behind me,I spoke the words that told them that Sheila, seventeen, had been killed when a car, a car she was riding in at that, rolled off a south Tennessee hill after the old man had been killed himself by being thrown from the damn thing half an hour before. Willy, though, the one who had been drunk, was fine. Fine and damn dandy. Sitting on the side of the road after he sideswiped another car, hit a concrete pole and ran up the embankment. He sat there and watched the coroner pronounce Edward dead and then come back in thirty minutes to tell them that Sheila was not only pinned under the goddam car but was nearly decapitated. Or for all practical purposes, like a fine open casket funeral where everybody talks about how nice you look, she was decapitated.
In that moment, I was simply scared of the vacuum that sometimes pulls life into it, never again a trace to be seen. And I know this, what I’m talking about doesn’t just happen to people who die. Sometimes it visits the living.
Chapter Three
The first two hours I was at school I tried to talk about anything to keep that woman’s face out of my head and erase the memory of what I had done. Like a lot of things, even though it had seemed as right as rain at the time, the reasons it was wrong now flew through my head at the speed of sound. As did reasons to justify it.
As I watched Sharon pull the old Ford from the parking lot a second time, I told myself that there was nothing wrong with it because the woman was already dead. As she took a right onto Columbia Avenue, I thought about the fact that I had convinced Sharon that there was really no other way out except the one we were taking. By the time I met Tully and Van in the parking lot behind BGA, daylight had come full enough that I was sure somebody would find her, laying there, waiting, like she had been for us.
A sophomore girl, Peggy Williams, stumbled on the body as she walked between the gym and the back of the school building because it was the easiest way from her house. Daylight had completely come by that time and I guess the sight was gruesome enough that she screamed loud enough that it caused several other kids to come running. At the same time, Tully and Van and I were in the parking lot at the Academy, shooting the shit.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Van asked me when I grimaced.
Maybe I had been the only one to hear the scream. Perhaps I had been the only one listening. I wondered where Sharon was.
“Nothin’, I just don’t feel too good this morning,”I told him.
“Shit, if I started my morning like you did every day, I’d feel pretty damn good all day.” He elbowed me in the ribs in the backseat of Tully’s granddaddy’s car.
“Goddam, it’s cold in here,”Van said.“Roll that fuckin’window up.”
“I don’t wanna stink up Mr. Shafer’s car with cigarette smoke,”I said.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t be too mad about that…compared to you all runnin’the thing off in the river.”
Tully checked his hair in the rearview mirror then looked at Van.“It wasn’t in the river,”he said.“It was just in the bushes. And there was another car that ran us off the road. Don’t you remember it that way, Henry? You remember that car, don’t ya?”
For the second or two that I laughed I was able to forget what I had seen. What I had done.“Yeah, I remember.”
+ + +
It took the news an hour or so to spread to BGA. It was between first and second period that Van came up behind me, rapping on my shoulder. I dropped all my books when he touched me. It was eight-forty five and the halls were full of assholes, seeing that it was mostly assholes I went to school with. It took four attempts and about fifteen feet before I was able to gather all my books after a few of them kicked them.
“Did I scare ya?” Van cackled.
Sometimes when he made this noise—and it’s hard to describe, mostly like a laugh that said you’re stupid, I’m not—I just wanted to bury my fist in his face, like I’d done once before.
“Why are your hands shakin’?” he asked before I could answer his first question.
“Let’s get movin’, gentleman,”Mr. Nedler’s voice called from up the stairs as he descended them.“This is no time for loiterin’. You’ve got another class to get to.”
Mr. Nedler was your typical coach. Thick torso, tight butt over muscular legs. His britches hiked up to so high that I wondered how he walked. I hadn’t looked him in the eye for going on three months. I didn’t know what I’d say…what he’d say. It was simple, I guess: we were both stuck avoiding looking at each other, trying to keep from being reminded that the other still existed. There was a tone in his voice now that served to remind me that I wasn’t his glory boy anymore. He’d have never said anything like that to me in September.
“Manor, Hall…get yourselves moving before I put some demerits on you that you won’t serve off for a month,”he said.
Demerits were the Academy teachers’way of keeping us straight. Or trying to. Every one they could pi
n on you meant an hour you had to spend at the godforsaken place on Saturday morning, doing yard work and maintenance and other stuff they were too cheap to pay more than one or two people to do. They had other ways of torture as well. Grabbing you by the hair. Kicking you in the ass. Pinching you on the shoulder or the gut so hard it would raise a half-dollar-size blood blister.
“Manor…Hall…I’m gonna give you boys one more chance and then—“
“We’re moving, we’re moving,”Van kissed up. Something he was damn good at. He motioned me to start walking beside him, talking to me out of the side of his mouth.
“They found some woman up behind Franklin High School, have you heard?”
I forced my head to wag back and forth, squinted my eyes to look interested. Tried to avert the guilt banging at the back of them.
“They said her fucking head was nearly cut off. They said her throat was slashed like ten times. Laid open big enough that you could lay your fucking arm in the hole. They said blood was all over the place.”
By this time we had reached the top of the stairs and were getting ready to push ourselves into English History, a class taught by Mr. Langley, as grouchy a son of a bitch as I’ve ever seen. When he was mad—as he was as Van still talked to me as we entered the“sanctum of a classroom,”describing what the woman had looked like—the veins in his head and neck looked like they were going to explode. His bald head and face turned as purple as any sunset. And he breathed like a mad bull: drawing air in through his nostrils that rattled like gravel in a can and then blowing it out, growling from his chest like a dog. We, for as long as I could recall, had called him Fester. Van had mentioned one time that he looked like a festered soar getting ready to burst. The name, fittingly, had stuck.
There was blood all over the fucking parking lot, Van told me. She was some woman who lived down there with the niggers. I knew her, the one who wore those funny damn britches. Looked like she might go ride a horse. But she was too poor to own a fucking horse. He laughed when he told me this, as did a couple of guys around us. Dickheads. The police were all over Franklin High School. Lucky, working his charmed magic, the great detective that he was. I knew how he’d be working the case; the same way he had told the Bishops about Edward and Sheila. He’d likely be sitting in the car while he had one of his lackeys do something about it, collect the evidence, do the dirty work.