by Lee Martin
I knew then, with a certainty that didn’t make me feel any way at all—didn’t make me happy or relieved or sad or full of guilt; it was, as so many things would be in my life from that moment on, a fact—I knew that we would get away with what we’d done.
Mr. Dees
TOM EVERS came back to the courthouse, where the fat-fingered policeman had been holding me, and he told me to go home.
“That wasn’t your pen,” he said.
“Tom, I can tell you the truth about that pen and how it came to be in that grave.”
I was prepared to tell him how when I found Katie, I covered her with my shirt and then realized I couldn’t be the one to go to the police. So I took the shirt off her and laid her back in that grave and shoved the dirt over her as if I’d been the one who’d done the killing. I’d thought it all out while I waited for Tom to come back to the courthouse, and I was ready to tell the story.
But he held up his hand. He told me again, his voice dead and sad, to go home. I could see how the life had drained right out of him, and I knew he’d barely slept since that Wednesday evening when the call about Katie had come. He’d done everything he could imagine to find her; he’d done everything by the book except the night Clare’s snapshot of the Mackeys’ house sent him there to do another search and he let it slip to Junior that Raymond R. was in the jail at Georgetown. How much guilt Tom carried with him over that I can’t say, but it still pains me to think about what that guilt may have caused him to ignore or the things Junior Mackey somehow forced him to overlook, a good man like Tom Evers, who finally knew the truth—I have no doubt of this—but never had the evidence to bring Junior Mackey or anyone else to answer.
Gilley
HE CAME TO the funeral, Mr. Dees, but he didn’t say a word to my mother or father or me, and we didn’t speak to him, as if he were a stranger. How could we ever look at him again without thinking of that night at the glassworks when my father killed Raymond Wright?
It broke us; I believe that. Not just the grief we fell into because Katie was dead, but also what my father had done and the way it became something we never spoke of, acting like it hadn’t happened while all along knowing it had.
You can pretend that your life is going on when really, all along, you’re trapped in a moment you’ll never be able to change. For me, it’s that Wednesday night at the supper table when I said, Katie didn’t take back her library books. For my father, it must be the recoil of that Colt Python—six shots, one coming steadily after another. And Mr. Dees? Well, I won’t speak for him.
He’s the one who found Katie. Even now, when I think of him in the woods that morning, digging with his hands, I don’t know how to feel. The only thing I know now is that we’re all connected, every one of us, even people we don’t know. Raymond Wright saw Katie riding that elephant at the Moonlight Madness Carnival and he said, Look at that cowgirl. A few minutes before that, he’d stepped up to me on the sidewalk and said, Bub, I want to shake your hand. I didn’t know him from Adam. I didn’t think he had anything to do with me at all. Not him or even Mr. Dees or the gaunt woman with them in front of the Coach House, sipping coffee from a wax cup—Raymond Wright’s wife, Clare, who, when I’m alone at night and I have to admit the truth, is the one I feel sorry for. She was just a woman, plain-faced and simple, who got in the way of trouble.
The day after the funeral, she came to our house. I can still see her on our porch, waiting there when I opened the door. She was wearing a plaid cotton dress, just a cheap wash-and-wear dress, the sort we sold to farmwives at Penney’s. The dress had a thin cardboard belt covered with fabric, and it was worn and crinkled. The top button, at the vee of her collarbone, was broken in half.
“It’s your mama I’d be wanting to see,” she said. For a moment, she looked me straight in the eye; then she bowed her head and stared down at her feet.
She was wearing new shoes, a pair of black pumps that were too elegant for the cotton dress. She didn’t have on hose, and when she brought her right foot up on her toes, letting her heel slip free from the shoe, I could tell that it had already rubbed a blister.
Even now, when I think of this, it’s the memory of those black pumps that breaks my heart. I imagine, as I did that day on the porch, Clare walking all the way from Gooseneck in shoes she hadn’t had the chance to break in. I think of her raw heels, and how she must have thought she needed those pumps to make her look respectable. By this time, people were already starting to talk about her and how surely she knew what had happened to her husband, the one who had a hand in kidnapping that little girl.
That morning on the porch, I wanted to tell her what we had done that night at the glassworks. I wanted to tell her not to hope too much, not to wait, not to pin her future on the chance that someday she’d hear footsteps and there he’d be, her husband. I wanted to tell her all of this, but, of course, I couldn’t.
What I did do was tell her to sit down on our porch swing. I even touched my hand lightly to her elbow and led her over to the swing. I wanted to get her off her feet, maybe even kneel down and help her slip out of those pumps.
“You’ve had a walk, haven’t you?” I said.
She took a handkerchief from a pocket of her dress and used it to dab at the tears that were running down her cheeks. “I have,” she said. “Child, I surely have.”
“You just sit here then while I get my mother,” I said. “It’s cool here.”
“It is that,” she said. “And lands, look at your mama’s flowers.” She reached a hand out to the pots of petunias. “Don’t they smell sweet? I’ve always thought a front porch about the best place to be on a summer day. You can just swing back and forth and watch the world go by. You can rest a bit.”
In the house, my mother was in the living room sorting through the cards from the flowers at Katie’s funeral. The church had been full of them, arrangements from people we didn’t even know, people in Kentucky and Ohio and Illinois and as far north as Michigan who had heard about what had happened and had sent flowers because, as they said in their notes and cards, it was all they could think to do.
“Who was at the door?” my mother asked me.
“It’s Clare Wright,” I told her. “She wants to see you.”
A jumble of cards slid from my mother’s lap. “I couldn’t, Gilley, really. What in the world would I say?”
When I stepped back out to the porch, Clare had her shoes off, but when she saw me, she quickly slipped them back on.
“My mother’s resting.” I sat down on the swing. “But I’ll be sure to tell her that you came.”
“Yes.” Clare’s lips pressed together in a tight line, and she gave a sharp nod of her head. “The burden she’s carrying. You tell her I understand. You tell her I’ll pray for her. I’ll pray for all of you.” She got up from the swing and she hobbled down the steps. Then she stopped and turned back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know enough soon enough. I’ll be hurting a long time because it’s all come to this. I’d change it if I could.”
Clare
I DIDN’T HOLD it against her, that girl’s mama, on account she wouldn’t see me. I knew how it was to want to shut the door and not let anyone in. I thought maybe I could tell her something about that. I wish I’d had the chance.
On through that summer, I worked at Brookstone Manor. What else was left to me but what I knew: waking at dawn to the martins singing, spending my day in Brookstone’s kitchen or laundry, coming home in the evening to my quiet house.
At first, I’d go by Henry Dees’s place, and I’d think about knocking on the door because talk had already started. I heard it around town, folks saying that he knew something about what went on that night of the fifth.
I wanted to ask Henry Dees straight out if he knew anything about Ray and where he’d gone, but maybe, I told myself, it’s better not to know. Maybe there’s things in a person’s life it’s best to walk away from. Back in the winter at the Top Hat Inn, R
ay kissed my hand; he called me darlin’. I still believe he was true. I don’t think he meant to hurt me for the world. He built that porch. He said, Darlin’, name your paradise. I think it was this: like most of us, he was carrying a misery in his soul. I don’t say it to forgive what he done, only to say it as true as I can. He was a wrong-minded man, but inside—I swear this is true—he was always that little boy eating that fried-egg sandwich in that dark hallway while the steam pipe dripped water on his head. I don’t ask you to excuse him, only to understand that there’s people who don’t have what others do, and sometimes they get hurtful in their hearts, and they puff themselves up and try all sorts of schemes to level the ground—to get the bricks and joints all plumb, Ray used to say. They take wrong turns, hit dead ends, and sometimes they never make their way back.
One evening, he was there—Henry Dees. He had a ladder up to a martin house and he was reaching inside. I was on my way home from work, and this time, I couldn’t stop myself. I came into his yard. I stood by the ladder, and I didn’t say a word.
“Oh, no,” he said. He was mumbling to himself, but the words were floating down to me. “No, no, no,” he said. He was pulling the nest from the house, letting twigs and straw and dried-up grass and leaves sift through his fingers.
Finally, he came down the ladder, and when he saw me there, he said, “Clare. Oh, Clare.”
I almost came apart then, hearing him say my name like he was saying he was sorry, but I kept my head up and I said to him, “Do you know anything about what happened to Ray?”
“Don’t ask me that, Clare.”
“Who else am I to know it from?”
He still had one hand on the ladder. He looked back up to the martin house where birds were coming now to roost, squawking because their nest had been messed with.
“Some folks can’t hide things. They don’t have enough, not enough money or influence or shame.” He swung the ladder down, and I had to move back out of the way. “They’ll have to answer someday. We’ll all have to answer.”
“If you’ve got the answer, you should give it to me.”
“I can’t do that, Clare. Please.”
“Then you’re not the man I thought you were,” I said. It’s still a mystery to me how Ray could just vanish away and no one ever find a trace or call to account the folks who ought to know. “No, sir,” I said to Henry Dees. “You’re no kind of man at all.”
Mr. Dees
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a perfect crime. You can think you’ve gotten away clean, but you always leave a clue. If you’re Junior Mackey, though—if you have enough money and sway—you can get to the right people. You can make sure they keep their mouths shut or go blind to the truth right there in front of their eyes. But you can never, ever buy back time and the things you should or shouldn’t have done.
I never told Tom Evers everything. This last thing I’ve saved for you.
It was a Wednesday evening, remember? July 5. The temperature was ninety-three degrees. Trans-Ams and GTOs were cruising around the courthouse square. People were starting to slip into the Coach House for supper. The breeze was rattling the leaves on the oak trees, and the sun wouldn’t set until 8:33. All that light, and there I was in the truck with Raymond R., and he pointed across the square to the corner where out in front of the J. C. Penney store Katie was crouched down, fiddling with her bicycle chain.
“Yonder she is,” said Raymond R. “A little queenie in distress.”
He drove over there. He pulled the truck up to the curb.
“Darlin’, you need help?” he asked Katie.
“My chain,” she said.
He told her, “Oh, that ornery chain. Dang it all, anyway. Hon, we’ll give you a ride home.”
She reached into her bicycle basket and took out a stack of books. “I have to take these back to the library,” she said.
“Sure, we’ll take those books back,” Raymond R. told her. “Then we’ll run you home. We’ll throw your bike in the back of the truck, and you can hop up here with us. You can sit right here between us, and we’ll take care of you. You live in the Heights, don’t you? On Shasta Drive?”
“How do you know where I live?”
“Your friend here told me. Your teacher. You know Mister Dees, don’t you?”
Katie climbed up on the running board of Raymond R.’s truck. She curled her fingers over the lip of the window frame and said, “Hello, Mister Dees.”
I could barely stand to look at her because I was ashamed of that kiss I had given her on the porch swing. I stared straight ahead at the J. C. Penney display window, where someone had dismantled a mannequin and left it lying in the corner: torso, head, legs, and arms.
“Katie,” I said, “this is Ray. Mister Wright. He’s my neighbor.”
She rose up on her tiptoes and leaned through the open window. Her hair fell across my arm, and I smelled the faint scent of her little-girl sweat—the smell of talcum powder and a towel fresh from the dryer. A breeze had come up from the south, and it was a blessing—that stir of air—after a day of sun and heat.
“Hello, Mister Ray,” she said. “I’m Katie.”
“K-K-K-Katie,” he sang, and she giggled and then smiled at him and said, “I know that song.”
“I bet you do, darlin’,” he said. “I surely do.”
I felt like things were the way they should be. I was out of the picture and it was just the two of them—sweethearts. Oh, it was easy to see. They adored each other, and I thought I might as well have been that mannequin in the J. C. Penney window—a heap of bones snatched and tossed away.
I told Katie to please hop down from the running board, and I started to open the door. All I wanted was to go home. You have to understand: I had no idea then that Raymond R. had any intent of doing her harm. I’m not even sure he knew that himself.
“I’m going to walk,” I told him.
The air was cooler now. The leaves rattled on the courthouse lawn’s oaks. Cars roared down High Street—sporty cars all jazzed up with cherry-bomb mufflers and lifters and racing stripes. Teenage boys honked their horns—Shave and a haircut, six bits. Their tape decks played loud rock-and-roll music. People went into the Rexall, came out of the Coach House. Couples strolled around the square, looking in the store windows. I wished I could be like them: a man with a woman who had known him for years, a man just killing time, comfortable with who he was.
“Take it easy, Teach,” Raymond R. said. “I told you I’d give you a lift.”
“No. Please,” I said. “Just let me go.”
“Henry.” It was the first time that he had called me by my Christian name, and I couldn’t help but face him, look him in the eyes. What I saw amazed me—left me, though I was loathe to admit it, delighted. Raymond R. Wright was afraid—fearful, I imagined, of something torn loose inside him, some howl screaming through nerves and veins. That’s how it happens with people at the end of misery. All the torment builds up and then lives explode, and there they are, broken forever. I was happy—oh, I know it was a horrible way to feel—but it was the truth. For a moment I was happy because, when I looked into Raymond R.’s eyes, I knew that he was in trouble. I had given him that money, and it hadn’t been enough to buy him peace. Now, as I stood witness to his anguish, it made me believe that things weren’t so hopeless for me. I could walk away, join the people strolling around the square, nod and say hello, and then head out Tenth Street to Gooseneck, just a man walking home on a summer evening. “Henry,” Raymond R. said again. “Please.”
I got out of the truck so Katie could get in. I fetched the three library books from her bicycle basket, got back in the truck, and held the books on my lap while Raymond R. drove away, down Fourteenth Street past the public library.
Katie squirmed around on the seat. She came up on her knees. “Hey, the library,” she said.
Raymond R. told her, “Don’t worry, darlin’. We’ll get there, but first let’s just ride around some. Let’s enjoy the breeze.”<
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He drove down Fourteenth Street, the library disappearing behind us, until he got to Taylor. He turned left and went a block east to Thirteenth. We were just driving, he said, just lollygagging.
That made Katie laugh. “Did you hear about the fight in the candy store?” she asked. “The lollipop got licked.” She giggled and squealed and toppled over until she was leaning against me. “What did the chocolate bar say to the lollipop?” She rattled off the punch line. “Hello, sucker!”
Raymond R. tooted the horn. “That’s the ticket,” he said. “Now we’re cooking.” He turned back west on Cherry. “Let’s air things out. Let’s get up some speed.”
He reached into his shirt pocket, fished out a pill, and popped it into his mouth. The truck went south on Tenth and soon we were passing Junior Mackey’s glassworks and Gooseneck. The air rushed into the cab. Katie’s hair came undone and whipped around her face. I tried to help her brush it away from her eyes, and one of her hair clips came loose. It fell to the floorboard, and when I reached for it, my foot came down on the metal clasp, snapping it. I picked up the thin, gold bar and closed my hand around it, knowing I would keep it for myself.
Katie patted the top of her head. “My hair clip.” She crouched down, looking for the clip on the floor of the truck. I moved my feet, nudging away a crescent wrench, chewing gum wrappers, an empty Pepsi bottle. Katie found the metal back of the clip. “My mom will kill me,” she said.
“Forget that hair bob.” Raymond R. grabbed Katie’s arm and jerked her back up onto the seat. “Hey, little doll. Do you know what the snail said while he was riding on the turtle’s back?”
“I know that one,” she said. “My dad told it to me.” She threw her arms up over her head and shouted, “Wheeeeeee!”
I’d turn that moment over in my head a good while after—Katie’s voice ringing out so clear and gay. “Wheeeeeee!” she said again, and Raymond R. took his hands from the steering wheel. “Wheeeeeee!” he said. “Come on, Teach. Join the fun.”