The Bright Forever

by Lee Martin

  “I can’t say I know what this is for you,” he told Junior, “but it hurts me, this trouble. It knocks the air right out of me. I feel it in my chest—this knot. Every time I close my eyes, I see her—Katie—and I’m sorry that my life is such that I feel this way about your little girl, but that’s the truth of it. I’m not ashamed to say it. I took her picture, but that’s all. I swear. Now I’d do anything—anything at all—to have her back.”

  He said all this in a way that managed to maintain his dignity. He wasn’t asking, Junior knew, for anyone to feel sorry for him. He was only stating the facts as plainly as he could. As much as Junior wanted to match his calm, to stick only to the facts, the idea of Henry Dees in Katie’s room, making off with that snapshot, angered him, and he could barely keep himself from putting his hands on him again.

  That wouldn’t help anything now, he told himself. He needed more information, so he kept his voice even. “Have you told the police everything you know?”

  “No, not everything.”

  “Will you tell it to me now?”

  Mr. Dees stood up. “Excuse me, please,” he said. “Please, just a moment.”

  He went down the hallway to his bedroom, and Junior heard a drawer open and then close. When Mr. Dees returned, he was holding his hands behind his back. “I’m not much of a man,” he said. “I keep to myself. I know people think I’m odd. I never chose Raymond Wright for a friend. I want you to know that. I was trying to patch concrete on my porch steps one day, and I looked up and there he was.”

  Mr. Dees reached out his right hand and laid a book on the table. It was The Long Winter, and Junior knew it was one of the books that Katie had been taking back to the library. He started to reach for it, his hand trembling, but then he stopped, unable to touch the book, remembering how he had scolded Katie for not returning it that Wednesday the way he had told her. She had gotten on her bicycle and ridden away. Seeing the book now was too much for him. He could barely speak.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked Mr. Dees in a whisper.

  Mr. Dees was whispering, too. “From his truck.” He cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. “From Raymond Wright’s truck.”

  “That night? Wednesday night?”

  “He came here late, almost midnight. He needed money, he said. He was in a fix. He had to go down to Florida for a while.” Mr. Dees took a breath. Junior could see that he was trying to steady himself. “‘I don’t have any money to give you,’ I said. ‘Money?’ he said, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Like he was drunk or hopped up on drugs. ‘You should go home,’ I told him. I led him out to his truck. He couldn’t walk straight. When I opened the driver’s door for him, this book fell out of the truck, and I picked it up. ‘What’s this?’ I asked him. ‘Some kid’s book,’ he said. ‘I never seen it before.’ Then he got in his truck and drove on down the street.”

  Junior let it all sink in: Katie in Raymond Wright’s truck. “Why haven’t you told all this to the police? Why haven’t you given them this book?”

  “Who do you think told them where to find that truck, where to find Raymond Wright?”

  “That was you who called that night? You’re the one who saw Katie talking to Wright on the square?”

  Mr. Dees nodded. “I guess it’s common knowledge that I pretty much hold to myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to help folks. Your Katie? She means the world to me. I couldn’t bear to let this book go, this thing of hers. But I’m giving it to you now, and I’m telling you that whatever you need from me, you just have to ask. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  Mr. Dees

  I LIED TO Junior Mackey about the way I got Katie’s library book—it wasn’t that way at all, the way I said Raymond R. came to my house and the book fell out of his truck. Now I’ve lied to you, and that’s what makes me the most ashamed. I asked you to trust me, and then I lied. I wouldn’t blame you if you left me now. After all, what can you believe? But if you do—if you close this book and walk away—you’ll never know the end of it all. Maybe you’re good with that. We all make our choices.

  You can, if you like, go to the public library in Tower Hill—

  perhaps it will be a summer day in July and you’ll think, This is what it was like that evening. It was hot and muggy and all drowsy, and there was a little girl on a bicycle. You can go to the library, find the old newspapers, and get the facts.

  But the facts don’t tell the whole story. They never do. For that, I’m afraid you’ll need me. I’m all you’ve got.

  Or maybe you think you already know the end. Maybe you’ve made up your mind about who’s good and who’s evil, and if you have—if you’re one of those—God help you. Ask anyone who was living in the middle of it all and they’ll tell you: it didn’t have anything to do with good and evil; it was all about love.

  Maybe someday you’ll sit in the public library, listening to the drone of the oscillating fan, and you’ll hear a car going by. You’ll lift your head toward the window where the curtains will be barely stirring, and everyone you’ve been reading about—me and Raymond R. and Clare and Junior and Patsy and Gilley and Katie—will come alive, and you’ll feel your heart in your chest, and you’ll travel back thirty years and you’ll think, This is what it was; it was people like me going about their business while there was that girl and those two men and a queer-looking truck. You’ll wonder whether you could have made a difference. Would you have heard something, seen something, that would have mattered?

  Here, let me give you the details again: a little girl with a slipped bicycle chain and three library books; a dope fiend and his green truck with the black circles on the doors; and me, a summer tutor, a thief, a voyeur, a man who could kiss a little girl on a porch swing on a summer afternoon. So there we are, the three of us. You write the rest of the story. I’m done with it. Go on. Try.

  The Searchers

  BY NIGHTFALL Friday we’d come up with nothing. We’d put ourselves out in the rain, and then the blazing sun, and we’d come back into town covered with mosquito bites, our arms and faces scratched from blackberry briars.

  We went home and stood in showers for a long time, lay down in hot baths and closed our eyes, and when we did, we saw her. All slender arms and legs and a round face and that brown hair. We’d seen her earlier that summer riding an elephant at the Moonlight Madness Carnival. We’d seen her at the public library sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading a book. Sometimes in the afternoon she’d be in the Coach House with a friend, sipping cherry Cokes through paper straws.

  It was amazing what we remembered about Katie—small things you wouldn’t think would stick in your head. Her hair smelled like strawberries, and the girl at the Rexall said yes indeed, Patsy Mackey would come in every so often and buy a bottle of herbal shampoo. That Friday night, when we came downstairs after our showers or baths—after we scrubbed our heads with Head & Shoulders or Prell—we swore we could smell that strawberry shampoo.

  We’d seen her at the city park. One night, a group of kids on the bleachers started singing a song about her and a boy: Katie and Bobby sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. We’d seen her at the Super Foodliner pushing the shopping cart for her mother, and those of us who went to the First Baptist Church still recalled seeing her in the children’s chorus on Easter Sunday, her white-gloved hands clapping smartly together as she sang “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

  How many of us would admit now that sometime that week we drove to the Heights and parked along Shasta Drive and took snapshots of the Mackeys’ house? We got those pictures developed at Fite Photography, and we spread them out on our kitchen tables and looked at them again and again, allowing the neatly trimmed yew hedges and the blue grass that Spitler’s Lawn Service had mowed and edged and the bright house paint (Sherwin-Williams Latex Satin in a shade called Snow White, the paint man at the Western Auto told us) and the fishpond on the patio, its waterfall trickling down over blue limestone, to convince us tha
t no harm had come to Katie. Soon we would find her.

  Then that night, that Friday, a woman from Gooseneck—we didn’t know this then, but it was Clare Mains, the widow who had married this Raymond R. Wright—told Tom Evers she had a photograph she thought he should see.

  Our telephones kept ringing that night, the word spreading. It was hard to know what was rumor and what was fact. The story was that this woman from Gooseneck had taken her own pictures of the Mackeys’ house after Katie disappeared. She had carried them to Tom Evers, telling him if he looked through this magnifying glass—she brought her own down to the courthouse for his handy use—he would see through an upstairs window a figure that could only be Katie herself, her back to the camera, her hair fanned across her shoulders.

  Tom said later that he only meant to humor Clare by taking a look through the magnifying glass (“She was eat up with what was happening,” he told us years later when he finally started to talk about that summer. “You should have seen her. She’d been blindsided, poleaxed. I felt sorry for her. Still do”), but to his surprise, when he did, he saw what she meant: there seemed to be a figure behind the lace curtains of that window that looked enough like Katie that he had no choice but to drive over to the Mackeys’—it was nearly ten-thirty by this time—to speak to them about it. “I was just doing my job,” he told us later. “My God. We were desperate.”

  At the house, Junior Mackey opened the door, a gun in his hand. It was a Colt Python, a .357 Magnum with a two-and-a-half- inch barrel. “I knew that gun right away,” Tom will tell you now. “It was no cap pistol. I’ll say that. It could have let in some air.”

  Junior hadn’t shaved, and his hair, normally well-groomed, was mussed. A television was on somewhere in the house. The volume was very low, but occasionally the sound of an audience laughing swelled, and Tom knew that Junior had Johnny Carson on, the way he would on any ordinary Friday night. “That television just about did me in,” Tom said. “That laughing, and a couple of times I heard Ed McMahon punching up Johnny’s jokes with that thing he did, that Hi-yooooo. ‘Junior,’ I said, ‘I need to look through the house again.’”

  By this time, Tom and his officers had been in and out of that house more than once: first to take the Mackeys’ story that Wednesday evening when Junior called the police to say that Katie hadn’t come home, and then again later that night—and on Thursday—on the off chance that they might find something that would turn out to be a clue. “It was SOP,” Tom told us. “Standard operating procedure. A kid turns up missing, the first thing you do is check the home. I stand by that. Even if the kid was Katie Mackey and most everyone in Tower Hill thought Junior and Patsy hung the moon. I was just doing things by the book.”

  The book told Tom that a grief-stricken father, who was more than just a little pissed off—and didn’t he have a right to be?—shouldn’t be sporting a .357 Magnum.

  “You ought to let me have that gun, Junior,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t want there to be an accident.”

  Junior let the Colt lie across his palm, and for a moment Tom thought he was going to hand it over. Then he closed his fingers around the grip and said, “I’ve got a permit. I’m not breaking any law. Tom, if I have to use this, I guarantee you it won’t be an accident. I want you to let me see that son of a bitch, that Raymond Wright. If you can’t make him talk, I will.”

  “Junior, you know I can’t do that. You’ve got to let me do my job. Like I said, I need to have another look around.”

  Tom couldn’t bring himself to tell Junior about Clare and that photograph because once he was in that house, the notion that Katie was there and her kidnapping a hoax—a cover-up for something more hideous (here, we could only speculate, and we did so with great shame at the fact that we couldn’t stop ourselves from imagining it)—seemed ridiculous, the sort of National Enquirer tabloid crap we saw while standing in the checkout line at the Super Foodliner. All right, we can say it now: more than one of us bought a copy now and then and took it home and got a kick out of stories about alien abductions, bigfoot sightings, and women having monkey babies. We thought they were good entertainment, the sort of stories we talked about over after-work beers at the Top Hat Inn or after eighteen holes at the country club, never admitting that yes, sometimes in our most private moments, we got sucked in and could believe that almost anything might be true.

  We were reading those tabloid stories when we should have been paying attention to what was really happening in the world. When we look back through newspapers from that time, as we’re all apt to do on occasion (we frequently see one another hunched over microfilm readers at the public library, looking again at the news articles about Katie’s disappearance), we note what we didn’t then—the catastrophes of nature that were all over the globe: the thousands and thousands of people dying (100,000 in North Vietnamese floods; 300,000 in a Bangladesh cyclone; 5,000 in an earthquake in Managua; 4,000 in a blizzard that ended a four-year drought in Iran). We hadn’t thought that we were part of that world, this planet bursting and convulsing with calamity, until that summer when Katie vanished.

  “What is it you think you’re going to find out?” Junior asked Tom.

  “I’m just covering all the bases,” Tom told him.

  Junior stepped back and let Tom come through the door. “All right. You have a look.” Junior waved his arm about, the Colt heavy in his hand. “Why don’t you invite the whole town? Maybe even sell tickets. That’s what folks want, isn’t it? A good look? I’ve seen them driving by, taking pictures. Peeping Toms.” It was here that Junior broke down. He laid the Colt down on a table by the door. He put his hands over his eyes, and his shoulders shook.

  Tom described for us how he put his hand on Junior’s back, and when we listened, we imagined ourselves doing the same, forgiving Junior for calling us Peeping Toms, forgiving him for that Colt Python, forgiving him for his rage.

  Tom didn’t find Katie anywhere in that house, of course. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? But Junior and Patsy, who had come downstairs in her robe, let him look. He looked through all the rooms upstairs, searched the closets. He went from room to room downstairs, and by the time he was done, Patsy had gone back upstairs.

  Junior was waiting by the door, calm now, and that’s when he showed Tom that book, The Long Winter, and he told him what Henry Dees was claiming—that Raymond R. Wright had showed up at his house late Wednesday night, and that this book had fallen out of his truck.

  “You’ve got your man,” Junior told Tom. “Now, you better get something done.”

  Tom held out his hand, and Junior gave him the book. “Don’t worry,” Tom said. “I’ll get Raymond Wright to talk. I’m on my way to Georgetown right now.”

  These days, he comes into the Top Hat Inn toward evening and he orders a highball, and if someone gets him talking about that summer, he’ll tell this story of the Friday night he went to the Mackeys’ house. Just before he finishes that highball, he’ll say, in a small, ghostly voice, “I showed that book to Raymond Wright, and I said, ‘All right now.’ He still wouldn’t tell me squat. ‘Prove it,’ he kept saying. Then I went to Henry Dees, and I asked him why he hadn’t told me about that book and how he got it when I questioned him that first time. He said, ‘Tom, I . . . I didn’t want to let it go.’ I didn’t know what to make of the way he felt about Katie, but I could tell he was hurting. His voice was trembling, and I could see the tears in his eyes. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I knew you had the man who took her, who took’—and he paused, his lips working to get out the name so hard for him to say—‘who took Katie, and I knew what I had to tell you wouldn’t make any difference, you already had your evidence, and I just wanted to hold onto that book because it meant something to me. You see, it was hers.’”

  Without fail, someone always asks Tom who it was in that snapshot Clare took. Who was sitting at that window?

  “It was just the light making a shadow,” he says. “That’s all. Just too much light.”

&n
bsp; Then someone will say, “I remember we used to talk about coming down to the courthouse some night and getting that Raymond Wright and making him talk.”

  “He wasn’t there,” Tom tells us. He shoves his highball glass back at the bartender and orders another. “He was down in Owen County, locked up in Georgetown. I thought he’d be safe there.”

  SATURDAY MORNING, the heat was back. The heavy, damp air closed around us when we stepped out of our houses. It was still, and there were dark clouds in the west and the distant rumble of thunder. As much as we wanted to go back inside and pretend this thing wasn’t happening, we were still a town, and Katie Mackey was one of ours, so we got in our cars and trucks and we drove down to the courthouse, where each morning the search parties formed, and we hoped that this might be the day we found her.

  The rain came. We tromped through it down by Georgetown, stepping over rows of soybeans, mud sucking at our boots. By the time we came to woods, our feet were heavy with the mud. We scraped our boots on stumps and fallen limbs. We shaved away mud with the blades of our pocketknives. Then we went on through the woods, and when we came out of them, we could see the White River, and beyond it the smokestacks they were building at that power plant near Brick Chapel. We saw boats on the river and men dropping grappling hooks into the water. We stood there a moment, frozen. We were foremen at the glassworks, sales managers for the local beer distributor, insurance agents, Realtors, owners of all manners of business. We were this town; we made things run. We were members of the chamber of commerce, the Jaycees, the school board, the city council. We got things done. But now all we could do was look down on that river and the men in the boats, and imagine those grappling hooks and what they might bring up to light and air.