by Ron Rash
I pulled the tab, a soft sucking sound as the tin separated. Foam rose and covered the top. I wiped it off and raised the can and swallowed. It didn’t taste good, but I knew instantly I could get used to that bitterness. That I would get used to it. I looked through the trees toward the road and felt a spasm of panic. Here I was, underage and drinking, out in the open, and on a Sunday, and with a condom in my pocket. I drank quickly, hoping to blot out the sense of being observed from the heavens and by a grandfather who seemed as omnipresent as God. I tossed my empty on the bank, belched loudly, then went to the creek and pulled free another can. As I opened it and took a long swallow, I didn’t experience what I’d read later in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the “click” Brick spoke of. No, what I felt on this Sunday afternoon was a gliding sensation, then a soft smooth landing where the world greeted me with a warm glowing smile.
“Damn, little brother,” Bill said, still holding his first beer. “It’s not a contest.”
“I don’t think she’s coming,” I said a few minutes later.
“Doesn’t appear so,” Bill agreed.
But when we looked downstream, Ligeia was coming down the opposite bank. She paused on the rock slab and took off her flip-flops and a T-shirt with JEFFERSON AIRPLANE printed on the front. She swam across and walked toward us, the water streaming off her. The alcohol allowed me to settle my eyes fully on her. She was prettier than she’d seemed before and everything about her was more vivid—the varied hues of her love beads, the green bathing suit, the fingernails trimmed to narrow V’s. Most of all the depths of her blue eyes. I took another swallow of my third beer while Bill nursed his second.
“So where’s the happening?” Ligeia asked.
“Right here,” Bill answered, handing her the Valium.
“Just two?”
“And this,” Bill said, lifting the wine bottle from the stream. He screwed off the cap. “Strawberry Hill, as ordered.”
“Have you got a glass or cup?” she asked.
“We forgot to pack wineglasses,” Bill said. “From what your cousin Tanya says, it wouldn’t bother you any more than it bothers us.”
Her eyes hardened.
“So the word’s out that Preacher Mosely is trying to save his wayward niece,” she said. “What did Tanya say about me?”
“Not much,” Bill said. “That you live in Daytona Beach but your parents thought you needed to be away from some bad influences down there. And that you’re seventeen; she told me that too.”
For a few moments, Ligeia didn’t speak. Then the right side of her cheek flexed into a wry smile.
“Looks like the bad influences part hasn’t worked out,” she said, taking the bottle. “Haven’t you at least got a paper cup?”
“I’ve got a used one,” Bill answered. “I can wash it out in the creek for you.”
“Do that,” she said.
Bill disappeared into the mountain laurel.
“So you’ll be what, a junior this year?” she asked, and I nodded.
“Do you know Bennie?”
“Yes,” I said, talking slow to keep my words from slurring. “We’re in the same glade.”
“Same glade, like in the Everglades,” Ligeia said, and grinned. “It sounds like you’ve got a head start on me.”
“I guess so,” I said, grinning too. “You’ll be a senior?”
“Not for long. As soon as I turn eighteen I’m out of Daytona and headed to Miami.”
“Tanya said you were in a hippie commune. Is that true?”
“I was there a month,” Ligeia answered, “then the cops came and took me back to Daytona.”
“Is the commune near Miami?”
“It’s twenty miles from there.”
“But you’ll be here until you turn eighteen?”
“God, I hope not,” Ligeia said. “Do you know them, my aunt and uncle?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’ve spent the night at Bennie’s a few times.”
“Then you know they’d wig out if they knew what I’m doing right now. For them, everything from smoking cigarettes to saying ‘damn’ is a sin. And the only thing they play on their radio is Jesus music. They even get bent if I don’t wear a bra.”
“They’re strict, I guess, but they always seemed nice.”
“I guess they’re nice enough, Bennie too,” Ligeia said. “A hell of a lot nicer than my mom and old man, but, damn, every five minutes they’re praying or reading the Bible. It’s Jesus this or Jesus that morning to night. It is so nowhere. Even Jesus freaks need to mellow out once in a while. And their idea of fun is going to the Dairy Queen. There and church are the only places they’ve taken me since I got up here. I started coming down here just to get away from it for a while.”
Bill came back. He went to the creek and washed out the cup, filled it with wine, and handed it to her.
“You guys aren’t into these?” she asked, showing the pills before she swallowed them.
Bill shook his head.
“How about pot?”
“We like a straight beer buzz,” Bill said. “Right, Eugene?”
“Damn straight,” I said and grinned.
I finished the beer with a long swallow and leaned to set the can down. As I did I lost my balance and fell to the ground. Bill helped me to my feet.
“I think you’ve drunk enough, little brother,” he said, and turned to Ligeia. “His first time.”
“No shit,” Ligeia said.
“She really was in a commune,” I told Bill, and when he didn’t say anything I asked her what it was like.
“Plenty of drugs and music, nobody telling you what to do, that was the best part. If it feels good, you just do it. And you shared everything, and I mean everything. There was this abandoned farmhouse we all crashed in, and the ocean was only half a mile away so you could go there any time. One of the guys had lived in San Francisco and he’d rigged this far-out speaker system in the trees. That was so cool, because it was like the trees were making the music, and all day and all night. Quicksilver, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane.”
I nodded at the shirt on the rock slab.
“That’s a music group?”
“You haven’t heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“How about the Grateful Dead, or Quicksilver, or Moby Grape?”
“No,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” Ligeia said. “This place is like going back in time. All I’ve heard on the radio is hillbilly music and preachers.”
“There are a couple of top-forty stations,” I said.
“They won’t be playing these groups, though,” she said. “Maybe at night something hip might come on. Of course, Uncle Hiram and Aunt Cazzie won’t be listening to it.”
A rod tip quivered and I reeled in a foot-long rainbow trout. After a couple of ham-fisted attempts, I pinned it to the sand, the fish throbbing against my palm. I freed the hook, gilled the trout onto the stringer, and placed it in the shallows.
“Do you eat them?” Ligeia asked after a swallow of wine.
“Our grandfather does,” Bill said. “Our mother cooks them for him.”
“The grandfather who’s the doctor?”
“Yes.”
I rebaited the hook and cast but I missed the water and snagged a rhododendron limb on the far bank.
“Oops,” I said, and laughed.
I jerked the hook free and recast, missing where I aimed but at least hitting water. For a few minutes I watched the rods as Ligeia and Bill stood behind me. Then Ligeia gave a soft umm.
“Damn, I’ve missed having a buzz,” she said. “Uncle Hiram told me he drank alcohol only once. He said he liked being loaded so much he never drank again. I thought that was the point, to feel good.”
“Hell yeah, to feel good,” I echoed.
“So how are you feeling?” Ligeia asked my brother.
“Very good,” Bill answered, and set his can by the tackle box.
“Me too,” she said, her voice as dr
eamy as her eyes, “though being a mermaid I’d feel even groovier in the water. How about you? Feel like getting wet with me, Bill?”
For a moment my brother didn’t say anything.
“Well,” he said, “it might scare the fish away.”
Ligeia smiled.
“I don’t mean here,” she said, picking up the wine bottle, “downstream.”
“Yeah,” Bill said, blushing slightly. “I guess that’s better. If we swim there, we won’t scare the fish.”
“That’s right,” she said. “We don’t want to scare the fish.”
When they got to the downstream pool, Ligeia refilled her cup and, drink in hand, she waded into the water. I freshened the bait on the second rod and made another sloppy cast. Soon the rod tip dipped. I reeled in a nice rainbow and raised it for Bill to see. But he wasn’t looking my way. He and Ligeia were closer now, not an arm’s length apart. I placed the trout on the stringer and dropped it back in the water. When I looked downstream again, the plastic cup was drifting into the tailrace. Bill and Ligeia were up to their waists in water, face-to-face as Ligeia reached behind her and the green bikini top fell free.
CHAPTER SIX
Cases like this can be difficult to solve, but we’ve received more forensic information, and some input from the community. We’ve also been reviewing the original missing person’s report from 1969. Unfortunately, the uncle and aunt who filed the report are deceased, as are the victim’s parents. The burial site’s proximity to the interstate is being considered. We know of at least one serial killer in the region at that time. Of course, we ask anyone with information to contact the sheriff’s department.”
These are Robbie Loudermilk’s words in the next morning’s paper. The story has been relegated to page two, but near the article’s end the reporter asks if Loudermilk knows of other cases in Jackson County where human remains had been found. One, he answers, almost certainly a suicide, had been identified in 1962. Then Loudermilk mentions a case in 1921 that I already know about. “Not a whole skeleton but a femur,” the sheriff notes, “found by a dog on the banks of the Tuckaseegee.” A cloud covering the sun on an otherwise clear day—something of that same darkening chill passes over me as I link what was found in 1921 to Ligeia.
I can no longer simply sit and wait, so get in my car and drive out of Sylva and then north on I-40 until I come to the second Asheville exit. The medical center rises into view. I haven’t been here in fifteen years, and then not to Bill’s office but to the hospital recovery room where my daughter lay.
Three events, each decades apart, merge. Coincidence, or something more—blood connected by blood.
I’m early so expect to be flipping through magazines until Bill arrives, but the receptionist takes me straight to his office.
“Dr. Matney said he’d be here within the hour.”
I sit in the leather armchair opposite Bill’s desk. Despite the personal touches, the office has an antiseptic feel, as if minutes earlier each item was lifted and sterilized, then reset exactly where it had been. A laptop’s on the huge oak desk, as well as photographs of Leslie and my nephews, Lee and Jesse, and a photograph of Sarah at her college graduation. Bill’s AOA certificate and Bowman Gray degree hang on the wall beside the desk. Below are two photographs of Bill. One is of him in his high school baseball uniform. In the other my brother is outside a tent in Haiti with two Red Cross workers. He’s in a stained blue smock and clearly exhausted but smiling, as are the Red Cross workers.
Behind me, though, and much less cheerful, is the print of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, which once hung in our grandfather’s examination room. Considering their antipathy, I’d been surprised when Bill accepted this inheritance. It’s hung where most patients won’t notice it and that seems wise. To see a man performing an autopsy would be unsettling for someone anticipating surgery. The weighty mahogany frame makes the scene darker, more ominous. “That painting is a reminder,” Bill had answered when I’d asked why it hung in his office, “of why I can never be complacent.”
On the bookshelf, thick tomes of the trade. No novels or biographies, but on the row beside Menezes and Sonntag’s Principles of Spinal Surgery and Kaye and Black’s Operative Neurosurgery is the copy of my M.A. thesis on Thomas Wolfe, which I gave Bill thirty-six years ago. It’s a wonderful piece of scholarship, Eugene, Bill said after he’d read it. You perceive so much, things I wouldn’t have noticed. I’d had the disorienting sense that my brother was truly proud of me, even a bit envious. My thesis appears thin and insubstantial amid the medical books, but it is still here, as is, I now notice on the shelf, our mother’s Bible.
My thesis, our mother’s Bible, the painting—all bespeak a humility so unlike the brother I’d grown up with who was so certain of what was best for him and me. It was easy for Bill to see himself as above the rest of us. In school the smartest student, on the field the best athlete, handsome and popular, and, all the while, Grandfather assuring him and everyone else in Sylva that Bill would become a great surgeon. Who would dare argue against our grandfather’s decree? How could Bill even imagine himself as anything but the golden boy?
When Bill married Leslie, I was skeptical that this new version of my brother would last. So many people, seemingly transformed by spouses, revert to their old ways. Your mate believes you’re better than you are, and for a while you actually believe it too. But a day comes when you don’t believe it anymore and soon your spouse doesn’t either, and you might remind her of where she’d met you in the first place, and the tumbler of whiskey that lay on the bar between her and you, and she’ll say, Yes, I met you in a bar. I just didn’t know you’d live your life as though you’d never left it.
But by all appearances Bill remained transformed. A good man, compassionate, generous, helping with all manner of good causes. I’d seen articles noting such in the Asheville newspaper, seen my brother interviewed on WLOS for some charity or cause. Bill was disappointed when I’d left the Ph.D. program and settled for teaching at a community college, disappointed once more when I’d stopped writing fiction. But he had kept encouraging me, urging me to use my “gift.”
After the drinking got out of control, he came to see me, brandishing the thesis. You have a rare abiltiy for writing and understanding literature, Eugene, he told me. If you get your head right, you can turn things around. You can teach at a university; you can write books. I’d responded with a drunken tirade. He finally left, but not before nodding at the bedroom’s shut door where Kay had taken Sarah. Life’s a gift, Eugene, he’d said. Don’t squander it.
After the wreck, Bill hired the best trial lawyer in western North Carolina to defend me, but the anger once directed at Grandfather now was directed at me. You have no idea what you’ve been given and now thrown away, but damn it, I’ll not let you waste another person’s life. Two days later Kay and Sarah left to stay with Bill’s family. They remained there until Bill found them an apartment in Asheville. Your brother’s as fine a man as I know. How many times had I heard that over the years, and with it the sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct, indictment of me? Always the better brother. But now everything seemed helter-skelter.
I waited for a man who’d lied to me for forty-six years. Something terrible had happened to Ligeia at Panther Creek and my brother had done it, but how to believe Bill capable of such a thing, toward anyone. Murder. An ambulance wails in the distance but is coming closer, as if bringing that word toward me, increasingly louder, shriller. The ambulance turns into the hospital entrance and red light washes over Bill’s window. The siren dies and a memory of a high school baseball game fills the silence. Bill had hit a deep ball to right field and decided to stretch a triple into a home run. The catcher took the throw at the plate, too late for a tag, but as Bill slid, he stabbed his metal cleats into Bill’s knee, a cheap shot that could have ended my brother’s baseball career. Bill got to his feet and picked up the bat, gripping it like a club. The catcher stepped back, a
nd kept backing up as my brother limped after him until teammates wrestled Bill into the dugout. Would Bill have swung that bat? And if so, at a knee or a rib cage or the catcher’s head? All I know is that the rage made anything seem possible.
I hear my brother speaking to his receptionist. In a few moments he comes in, closes the door, and sits down in his desk chair. His hair is thinning and a few more crow’s-feet crease his eyes, but his regimen of exercise, eating well, and moderate drinking makes him appear a decade younger. He looks at me as he might a patient about to receive an unwelcome diagnosis.
“Believe me, Eugene,” he says softly. “You’re better off not knowing about this, better off in a lot of ways.”
“And why is that?”
“It didn’t involve you then,” Bill says, “and it doesn’t now.”
“It did, and it does.”
“Just let me—”
“Tell me what happened, damn it.”
“Listen to me,” he says, less gently. “Think about the decisions you’ve made in your life and how they’ve turned out. Let me make this one for you. Trust me enough to do that.”
“Trust?” I answer. “You told me you took Ligeia to the bus station. You told me you saw her leave.”
“I lied for your own good.”
“Tell me what happened. I’m not leaving until you do.”
Bill raises a hand to his brow, holds it there briefly as if confirming a fever. He sets the hand on the armrest.
“Okay,” he says.
“When I went to meet her that morning, I didn’t see her, not at first. But then I started looking around and saw a red suitcase in the creek. Ligeia was lying on a sandbar downstream. I didn’t get a pulse but I did CPR. I did it a long time. There was blood and a bump on the back of her head. She probably slipped and hit her head on a rock. Carrying that suitcase could have caused her to lose her balance, but she might have been drugged up too. That could have caused her to slip.”