The Bright Forever

by Lee Martin

  The night he shot Raymond R., he lowered the Colt and said to Mr. Dees, “I imagine you didn’t bargain for this, but now you’re in it. Mister, you’re all the way in.”

  Mr. Dees knew it was so. He’d been there as a witness to it all; he’d even involved himself by trying to make Raymond R. talk. Soon it would be clear that Raymond R. had vanished, that someone had come with the bail money that night, and then the man the police knew had kidnapped Katie Mackey was gone. Not a trace of him.

  If it got out to Tom Evers that Mr. Dees knew something, he’d want answers, and those answers, if Mr. Dees gave them, would lead to this night and this moment—the one burned into him now forever: Junior Mackey and his boy, Gilley, and Mr. Dees, no closer than before to knowing where Katie was, and Raymond R. dead at their feet.

  Gilley was sitting up now, rubbing at his throat, gulping breath into his lungs.

  “You wanted my life?” Junior was shouting at Mr. Dees. “Well, now you’ve got it. As close as you’re ever going to come, anyway.”

  He crouched down by Gilley, rubbing his hand in slow circles on his back, telling him to take his time, to breathe, everything was going to be all right. “You did what you had to do,” Junior said. “You went for that gun. You remember that. Whatever else you carry away from all this mess, you make sure you remember that you stepped up. You protected your family. That’s what we did here tonight, Gilley. We looked out for family, and how can that ever be wrong?”

  Soon, Gilley’s breath came more easily and Junior helped him to his feet.

  Mr. Dees was thinking that if by some chance Tom Evers never knew his part in this—if he went back to his house in Gooseneck and come September he stood at the head of his classroom and the years went on, years and years of other people’s children—there would still be Junior Mackey to answer to. Junior Mackey, who came to him now and leaned in close and whispered, “You can’t tell this. You know that, don’t you?”

  “But he was choking Gilley. You had to do something.”

  “You can’t tell it because I got him out of jail. You don’t need to know how. No one needs to know that. Tom Evers knows all about this Colt.” He held up the gun so Mr. Dees could get a good look at it. “He tried to get it away from me.”

  “I wish you’d given it to him,” Mr. Dees said. “Now look what’s happened.”

  “Listen to me,” Junior said. “I got this Wright out of jail and I brought him here under force. That’s conspiracy, Henry. Now there he is, dead. Not one bullet in him, the way someone would have shot him in self-defense, but six, the way someone would have shot him for the pleasure of it. Do you understand what I’m saying? Add it up, Henry. What’s this going to look like? Whatever they call it—murder, manslaughter—you’re in it, too. You were here when it happened. You tried to get him to talk. Is that much clear to you?” Mr. Dees nodded his head to say he understood. “Good. Now I want you to go home. I want you to forget what’s happened here. Go on, Henry. Gilley and I are going to take care of things.”

  Mr. Dees knew he would drive away. He and Junior would seal the secret between them. As full of horror as it was, he would carry it with him the way he did the martins’ dawnsong, a memory all fall and winter, until he heard them again come spring. It would be his to recall, this night when Junior traveled so deeply into his love for Katie that he came to something else, something savage and seemingly not born of love at all. But there it was: how far a man would go, a man who was powerless to turn away from the most monstrous part of himself—the man he was when he was alone in the dark.

  “I suppose you had your reasons for watching us, for taking those things of Katie’s,” Junior said. “I can’t say I understand it. In fact, if you want the truth, it disgusts me. If this was some other night, I’d show you what I think of it. I wouldn’t want to be you on some other night, Henry. If we were alone and I had a chance to hurt you, I would. The only thing I regret—I mean it, Henry—is that I still don’t know where to find Katie.” He leaned in even closer, the way boys sometimes did on graduation night to say quietly so no one else could hear, Thanks, Mister Dees. “Henry,” he said, and his voice was shaking, “if there’s a God, he’ll forgive me, don’t you think?”

  “It’d be nice to think so,” Mr. Dees said.

  Junior nodded. “Just tell me. You would have done it, too, wouldn’t you? Killed him? If she were your little girl and you were sure he was the one who took her, and you were sure . . .” His voice died away, and he couldn’t finish. Mr. Dees knew that. How long would it be before Junior would be able to say the words? How long before any of them would be able to say them? So many days had passed now, it was unlikely that Katie was still alive.

  “Yes,” Mr. Dees said, knowing that he was lying, that the lie was necessary. As soon as he said the word, something opened inside him, and he knew it was his heart filling with a love unlike any he had ever felt: the truest kind, selfless and tolerant and enduring, the love a father had for his child. “Yes,” he said again. “I would have done it, too.”

  July 5

  RAYMOND R. crossed the White River. Fog was starting to settle in the low-lying bottom land. The truck crested a hill, and as it nosed down the other side, he could see in the headlight beams the smoky swirls of fog, and for a moment, his head electric with LSD, he imagined he was flying over the tops of clouds.

  Then Katie said, “It’s almost dark.” He remembered her then, the girl.

  “Dark ain’t nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “You’re a big girl, ain’t you?”

  He could swear she was shrinking. Each time he glanced at her, she seemed farther away from him. Finally, she was so small he thought he could pick her up and stick her in his pocket. Like Tom Thumb, he thought. That was a story he’d always liked. Tom Thumb hidden away in places too small and tight for ordinary folks to go: a mouse’s hole, a snail’s shell. Tom Thumb swallowed up by a cow and then rescued, only to be eaten by a wolf. Tom Thumb always trying to tell people where he was. Dear father, he cried out, I am here in the wolf’s inside. How dearly Raymond R. had loved the end of that tale: the mother and father blessed again with their wee son, hugging and kissing him, telling him they would never part with him for all the kingdoms of the world.

  When he was a boy—Raymond, everyone called him, never Ray—and he had to sit outside the school cafeteria eating his fried-egg sandwich while water from the steam pipe dripped on his head, he wished he could be as small as Tom Thumb, so small no one would see him. Then, as he got older, he started to take note of how boys could swagger through the world. Boys having hamburgs and malteds with their best girls at the Snow White Sandwich Shop, or barbecue red hots and chili at the Club Caf. Life was percolating. Couples danced in the ballroom at the Northwood Hotel and later strolled arm in arm down Mitchell Street. One night, when he was coming out of the A&P, he caught the gardenia scent of cologne as a boy and a girl passed by, and the tang of Old Spice aftershave. The girl had red lips and her cheeks were bright with rouge. The boy’s face was closely shaved, his hair combed and dressed with tonic. “Hi-dee-ho,” he said, and Raymond R. thought that was marvelous. Hi-dee-ho. Just like that. Just like that boy owned the world. That’s when Raymond R. decided he’d make some noise. He’d make sure everyone, by God, saw him.

  So he tried to join the service, and when no one would have him, he stole the Army Air Corps uniform and went to the Northwood Hotel and danced with the girl under the blue lights, and that was what he kept trying to get back to, that top-of-the-world, money-in-your-pocket feeling. Something to last him the rest of his life.

  Now the truck was moving through fog, and the thoughts of Tom Thumb and the memories of the dripping steam pipe and the boy who said hi-dee-ho and the girl under the blue lights were gone. Raymond R. lifted his hands from the steering wheel and said, “Wheeee!” He was laughing. “Wheeee!” he said again.

  They were gliding through the fog, and for a good while there was only the sound of the truck’s tir
es bumping over the seams in the pavement and the rush of wind coming in through the open windows.

  Raymond R. turned off the highway onto a gravel road. He drove another mile north and then found the old shale road that snaked back into heavy woods, the road he had seen through his binoculars the evening he and Clare had driven to Honeywell.

  In the woods, all the light went out, and there they were in the dark. The road was narrow and sapling branches whipped up against the fenders and doors, squeaking as they scraped over the paint. The truck tires sank down into the muck of mud and shale. The air smelled of wet, moldering leaves. Trees rose up in the headlight beams, thick trunks laced with wild grapevine. Somewhere in the woods, a screech owl screamed.

  “Mister Ray,” Katie said.

  “Yes, darlin’?” The sweet tone of her voice—hushed and tender—choked him.

  “Mister Ray, I’m not to be out after dark. When it gets night, I take my bath, my mother brushes my hair, and I go to bed.”

  “Are you sleepy?”

  “My eyes are.”

  “So are mine, darlin’. Don’t worry. It won’t be long.”

  The road opened up to a clearing off to the right where people had long ago dumped old refrigerators and stoves and washing machines. They tilted and lay over one another. There were piles of glass bottles and tin cans, long ago gone to rust. Broken-handle shovels and rakes and hoes. Old mattresses and bedsprings. Dented-in gas cans and oil drums.

  “A heaven’s worth of junk,” Raymond R. said.

  He shut off the truck’s engine and the headlights, and it was so black all around him, for an instant, he thought he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.

  Then Katie said, “I’m hungry.”

  He remembered then where he was. “Shh,” he told her. “Now be quiet. I just want to sit awhile.”

  He thought of Clare, waiting for him to pick her up at Brookstone Manor. She’d be worried. She’d probably give up and walk home. It was the thought of that, her two-mile walk to Gooseneck in the dark, that nearly broke him. He remembered the night he had started home from Mr. Dees’s, so tired he could barely tote that ladder, and Clare had come out to help him, had come out in spite of the neighbors who were watching and gossiping no doubt about that old woman and her good-for-nothing man. Together, they carried that ladder home. That was love, he decided. That should have been enough. He should have told her that night. He should have said, “Clare, I’m messed up on junk. Please help me.” But he didn’t, and now here he was, deep in the woods on a road that year by year was closing over with brush.

  His head wouldn’t work right. He kept trying to figure out how this was happening. The girl had simply been there on the courthouse square, her bicycle chain slipped from its sprocket, and Henry Dees had said he wanted her gone.

  “All right,” Raymond R. said now to Katie, but really he had no idea what he was talking about.

  He was an idiot, a fool. All the names he could remember people calling him over the years now spun around in his head. He was a dipshit, screw jack, numb nuts, suck wad, fuckup.

  “Come here, darlin’,” he said to Katie. The LSD kept jacking his head like he was a lamp with a short in the wire—bright and burning one minute, then blinking on and off. He had to pick up Clare at Brookstone Manor, he thought. Then he remembered the time for that had already gone. “Just come over here with old Ray.”

  Katie was trying to find the North Star, the one her father had told her to look for if she was lost, the one that would lead her home. But the trees blacked out the sky. “Mister Ray,” she said in a quiet voice. “Do you know where we are?”

  “We’re just here, darlin’.” He took her by the arm and pulled her over onto his lap. He could smell the strawberry scent of her hair. “Just you and me. Right here.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Hush,” he told her, rocking her in his arms. “Scared’s no good. It’s too late for that.”

  Later, he would find himself tromping through a muddy field, crouching down on his heels, covering his ears, looking up at the sky filled with stars. He would make his way back into the woods, back to that shale road and his truck, and he would drive back to Gooseneck, stopping first for something to eat because he was starved to death.

  In the days that followed, Katie’s voice would almost come back to him. It would be a sound lingering—the last fading note of a clock chiming, birdsong in the early dawn when he was coming up from the land of dreams—a stirring of air, one impossible to say he heard, one that vanished before he could call it by name.

  July 9

  MR. DEES couldn’t sleep. When he got home from Junior Mackey’s glassworks, he tried to lie down and rest, but too much was going on inside his head. He was thinking about Katie. He was thinking that if he had been a better man, he wouldn’t have kissed her on the swing—wouldn’t have let the love he felt for her get out of hand. He would have stayed to finish her lesson, and then time that Wednesday would have fallen differently. Patsy Mackey would have got supper on the table a tad later. Mr. Dees would have walked straight home instead of stopping to gather himself on the courthouse lawn. Even if Katie had come uptown to take back her library books, he wouldn’t have been there to see her, and that little difference in time would have meant that her path and Raymond R.’s more than likely would never have intersected. Maybe he would have gone to Brookstone Manor to see Clare; maybe he would have gone home to Gooseneck. Enough maybes to last a lifetime, but the one thing Mr. Dees knew without a doubt was that he was the one who had brought Katie and Raymond R. together.

  Just after dawn, he went out to his garage to fetch his ladder. He’d been thinking about the fluff of Katie’s hair that the martin had snatched up and carried into his roost. He remembered the evening Raymond R. had helped him repair the broken martin house and then reset it on its pole. The Cooper’s hawk had passed over, and he thought now that he should have seen that for what it was: an omen of wicked things to come.

  When he came out of the garage, he saw Clare coming up the street. The light was gray and there was a haze over Gooseneck, but he could tell that it was Clare, and he could see that she was walking as fast as she could, her arms swinging with purpose. He went out through his yard to meet her.

  “I got something the police ought to know,” she said. “I want you to tell them. I come last night, but there was a man in your house.”

  He didn’t tell her about Junior. He didn’t tell her what had happened at the glassworks. “It was about the girl,” he said. “Katie. It was more questions about her.”

  “Yes, the girl,” Clare said. “That’s what I come to say. I know where they ought to look.”

  LIGHT WAS BREAKING when Junior drove into his garage. He and Gilley got out of the car, and together they pulled the garage door down. On the drive home, they hadn’t said a word. Now Junior told Gilley to take off his clothes. There was blood on his shirt, blood on Junior’s trousers. They had put Raymond R. into the glass furnace; the rest had been heat and chemistry—matter breaking down, something solid becoming liquid and then vapor.

  Gilley did what his father told him. He took off his shirt and pants. He folded each of them, a habit he couldn’t break from his job at Penney’s, and he laid them in the plastic garbage bag his father fetched. He held the bag open while his father undressed and stuffed his shirt and trousers inside.

  The two of them stood there in their boxer shorts and T-shirts. “I’ll look after you,” Junior finally said. “If this comes out, don’t worry. I’ll tell them you were here, asleep. Your mother will swear to it. You’ll be all right. No one has to ever know that you had any part in this.”

  “What about Mister Dees?” There were bruises on Gilley’s throat where Raymond R.’s fingers had dug into his skin, and his voice was hoarse.

  “I told you. He’s in it, too. He can’t afford to say a word.”

  THE FOG was lifting from the lowlands by the time Mr. Dees started toward Ge
orgetown. Clare had told him about a place called Honeywell and the old shale roads snaking back into the brush and woods. Go across the White River on Route 59, she told him. He wrote down the directions with his fountain pen. Turn down the first gravel road that heads back north. Look for a road that goes off into the woods, one of those shale roads. He wrote down the directions and then capped his pen. His fingers were trembling so badly he couldn’t get the pen clipped to his shirt pocket and had to let it slip down into the pocket and lie in its pouch.

  “I might be crazy,” Clare said, “but I got reasons to think that’s where Ray took the girl. You tell the police that. You will, won’t you?”

  “I’ll tell them,” he said, but he didn’t. After the episode at the glassworks, he didn’t want anything to do with the police. He almost told Clare he couldn’t go where she was telling him to go; he thought about locking his doors and opening them for no one. Then he thought of Katie, and he knew he would do what Clare was asking of him.

  He got in his Comet and drove down Route 59. The highway to Georgetown dropped straight south for fourteen miles and then angled to the west along the curve of the river. It was just after dawn, and the only traffic was a single set of headlights coming from the south, a farm truck, an early bird headed who knew where. Other than that, the only signs of life were the pole lights still burning in barn lots and the occasional lamp in a window at a farmhouse. For the most part, there were the long stretches of prairie, and the white stripe down the center of the highway and the flashing yellow caution light at Alinda, a sleepy little wink-you’ll-miss-it town nine miles north of Georgetown. Mr. Dees slowed the Comet, gliding past a Texaco station, and across the street, a grocery store with a neon Kool cigarette sign flickering in the window. Then he pressed down on the accelerator, and the Comet gathered speed. The rush of wind through the open windows carried the sharp smell of cut hay curing in the fields.