A Brilliant Death

by Yocum, Robin

  My legs began to cramp above the knees. The calves followed suit. I couldn’t move to rub them for fear of making the rafters creak and causing Big Frank to send three or four salvos into the ceiling. Eventually, the cramps subsided, but I could no longer control my bladder. It is miserable and humiliating to piss your pants when you are nearly fifteen years old, but it was such a relief that I was willing to ignore the shame. My jeans, shorts, socks and tennis shoes were now soaked, and the stench of urine was added to that of must and dust.

  I prayed to God to get me out of Big Frank’s house alive. And I made a solemn vow that if he allowed me to escape, to live and again breathe fresh air, I would repay his gracious and divine intervention by strangling my best friend Travis.

  Then my mouth and nostrils were dry and my legs were starting to spasm. Below me, Frank was farting in his sleep. I was getting woozy, like you do when you stand up too quick, but I couldn’t shake the feeling and I was forced to hold on to the crossbeam, resting my head in the crease of my elbow. I hoped that if I lost consciousness and fell through the ceiling that I’d land directly on Big Frank and render him unconscious just long enough to get out of the house.

  I didn’t know if I had been in the attic four hours or four days when Big Frank finally awoke. I think I had actually dozed for a while, or possibly passed out. Either that or I was loopy from dehydration. However long it had been, it was apparently longer than Big Frank had wanted to sleep. I heard the bed springs squeak and him say, “Oh, shit.” This was followed by both heavy footfalls and profanity. “Why did you let me sleep so long, goddammit,” he yelled at Travis as he ran down the steps. I heard the toilet flush and the back door slam. It was another minute before the truck pulled away, and several more before Travis pushed open the attic door and the beam of his light entered the attic.

  “I hope you’re not going to hold me personally responsible for that,” Travis said.

  “Just who else would I hold personally responsible?” I yelled. “This was all your idea, remember?”

  “Jesus, Mitch, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was coming back. He said he . . .” Travis shined his light over me. “Man, you look awful. Did you piss yourself or something?”

  Travis struggled to get up through the hatch but seemed to know better than to ask for my help. I lowered myself to one of the one-by-eights and sat, massaging my thighs and calves while Travis gathered up the box of treasures he had found. “Come on,” he said, slapping at my shoulder. “You can jump in the shower, and I’ll throw your clothes in the washer. Then we’ve got to hide this stuff.”

  “You better leave it up here,” I said, struggling to get back to my feet. “If Big Frank catches you with it, you’re dead meat.”

  “He’ll never find it. I know the perfect hiding place.”

  I started to ease myself down the hatch. “Where’s that?”

  “Your house.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the months that passed after my near-death experience in Big Frank’s attic, my perspective on the entire ordeal changed. Rather than viewing it for what it had actually been—another insane situation into which I had allowed Travis to con me—I began seeing it as the ultimate test of my manhood. And I had indeed passed. I was a gladiator, a fearless warrior whose incredible courage had enabled him to return home after a great battle. I had been tested, and in my mind’s eye I was better for the experience. It was amusing that I viewed myself as some kind of stouthearted war hero—Sir Mitchell the Bold—when, of course, I had been scared totally witless.

  The collection of literature and baubles that we had mined in the attic were keeping Travis busy, so he was not causing me much discomfort with Operation Amanda. For a while, I assumed that he had learned all that he wanted about his mother. He had located a photo, her diary, and newspaper clippings. This, of course, was not going to settle the mystery of her death, but I believed that was beyond our reach.

  Travis made regular trips to the cemetery to visit the memorial garden erected in his mom’s memory, dragging me along with him more often than not. At least once a month we would find fresh flowers placed within the semicircle of granite benches or lying on the inscribed stone. During a Saturday morning visit in December we found the snow had been brushed from the stone and a pair of men’s boot prints led to and from the grave. It had stopped snowing at eight o’clock the previous night, so whoever had visited the grave had done so under the cover of night. The prints obviously didn’t belong to Big Frank, and Travis found it quite perplexing that someone was making regular visits to what amounted to his mother’s grave.

  “What if the guy she was out on the boat with lived and swam to shore, but she drowned?” Travis asked during one wintry visit to the memorial.

  I nodded. “That’s possible. He feels guilty or he’s still in love, so he keeps bringing flowers to her memorial? I like that theory.”

  “But who could it be?”

  “I don’t know, Trav.”

  “It’s not Big Frank, so who else would care?”

  I looked at him and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it you? Are you just doing this to screw with me?”

  He was serious, and I could feel my left eye start to twitch at the accusation. “You know, every once in a while your train goes completely off the tracks. Be serious, Travis, you know I wouldn’t do that. Besides, I’m only a nine-and-a-half. Those boot prints in the snow were at least size thirteens.”

  Travis squinted and rubbed his chin. “I wonder what size shoe Clark Gable wears?”

  “Clark Gable is dead.”

  “Oh sure, that’s what they want us to believe.” He laughed. “Look, when the weather breaks, we’re going to camp out at the cemetery and try to catch the person putting flowers on the grave.”

  I had never cared for camping out and cemeteries gave me the willies, so there was nothing about this idea that appealed to me. I never joined the Boy Scouts because I didn’t like camping and soggy sleeping bags, and I was deathly afraid of and highly allergic to poison ivy, which I assumed lurked everywhere around the cemetery, along with all the tortured souls whose spirits roamed the hills each night.

  In the meantime, I remained the guardian of the attic treasures, making them available to Travis whenever Big Frank was out of town. He would take the diary or a stack of letters back to his house, where he was transcribing them into some kind of notebook. He had asked me not to look at the letters or the diary, which I had no intention of doing. I wanted no part of the information inside that box. I didn’t know what intimate thoughts had been written, but I considered them too private for my eyes. It made me nervous just having the stuff tucked deep in my closet behind shoeboxes of baseball cards and my collection of Matchbox cars.

  Travis, however, shared bits of the information with me. His mother, the former Amanda Virdon, had met Frank when he was in the Navy and stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father, a career Navy man, was also stationed in Norfolk. She was eighteen and had just graduated from high school and was working at Melba’s Taffy & Ice Cream Shoppe on the strip in Virginia Beach. Frank was twenty-one, a few days from his twenty-second birthday, and in the company of a half-dozen of his Navy buddies, drinking away a three-day pass, when he tapped on the window to get Amanda’s attention.

  She didn’t look up. “I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m working.” He tapped again, and this time she looked. He smiled and waved her over to the window. “Do you want something?”

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve seen on the strip all night,” he said.

  “I’m not allowed to give you free ice cream,” she said.

  He smiled and asked, “Is your phone number free?”

  Drunken sailors on leave asked for her phone number at least a dozen times a week, and her response was always the same: “We don’t have a phone at the house, but if you’d like to call my dad at work, Vice Admiral Virdon, he can get me a message.”

  This usually sent
them scrambling. Frank said, “If that’s what it takes to get a date, I’ll call him.”

  That night, she wrote in her diary that she had met “a man from Ohio named Francis Martino Baron and he was absolutely charming.”

  “Big Frank? Charming?” I interjected.

  Travis said, “Not just charming, but ‘absolutely charming.’ She must have had some sort of youthful character flaw.”

  Frank’s hitch in the Navy ended the March after he flirted with Amanda in the ice cream shop. They were married in a simple ceremony in Virginia Beach and had a small reception in the backyard of the family home. Her parents liked Frank and were happy for their daughter. She wrote, “Frank bought me the most beautiful ring I have ever seen. It is a marquis-cut diamond with a crescent of rubies around one side of the stone. It is simply gorgeous, and I was mad at him for spending so much money on a ring, but I love it! Frank has promised me that when we have saved enough money we can move to the country and raise horses. My life is a dream come true. Mrs. Francis Martino Baron. I love the sound of it. Frank is going to take care of me forever.”

  Unfortunately, “forever” turned out to be about eighteen months, the best Travis could tell. By the time they had been married two years, the tone of the diary entries had turned from dreamy to nightmarish. The one true Francis Baron had surfaced, and he was considerably less charming than the version she had met at Melba’s Taffy & Ice Cream Shoppe. Travis said he didn’t want to reveal everything he had read, which he described as “nauseating,” but Frank had apparently knocked her around, punched her several times, and each time apologized and promised that it would never happen again. But it always did. One of the letters from her dad revealed that he knew Frank had hit her, and he volunteered to drive to Brilliant and move her back home.

  “I wonder why she didn’t go,” I said.

  “Who knows? She wasn’t much older than us, and she was already married. She was probably still living this fairy-tale dream—figured she could change him or something.” He flipped through the pages of his spiral notebook. “Listen to this: ‘I went to see Dr. Adams this morning. I’m pregnant. I am so excited. I stopped on the way home and bought material so I could start making a baby quilt. I told Frank, and it saddens me to write that he wasn’t very happy about my pregnancy.’” Travis looked up from the book, grinned, and said, “And almost fifteen years later, he’s still isn’t happy about it.”

  Travis flipped to another page, where I could see he had made a list. He said, “Here are some of the things I learned. She taught first grade Sunday school at the Church of Christ. She volunteered two afternoons a week at the library. She liked oatmeal-raisin cookies and hot apple cider. Her favorite color was blue, but green was a close second. She was a cheerleader and her senior class secretary. She wanted to go to school to become a court stenographer and, according to her diary, Big Frank described this as ‘a royal waste of time and money.’”

  “Even then, he was such a charmer,” I said.

  “Yep. That’s my dad. Always encouraging people to chase their dreams and better themselves.” He rolled his eyes. He looked back down at the notebook. “Oh, yeah, she was five-foot-six, a hundred and fifteen pounds, brown hair and . . . check it out.” He put an index finger to the skin below his right eye and pulled down, revealing most of his lower eyeball. “She also had green eyes.”

  “Did she have grotesque red veins in her lower eye, too?”

  He ignored me. “I love going through her stuff,” he said. “I love touching the things that she touched. Holding the things she held. I’ve read that diary cover to . . . well, she never got it filled out cover-to-cover, but I’ve read it all three times. I wish I knew what she sounded like. I wish I could hear her voice saying the words.” He closed his notebook and fought back tears. “I wish I could.”

  While I was not personally reading the letters or diary, I was getting a pretty good idea of the mental image Travis was creating of his mother. He believed that she had been sweet and caring, the kind of person who smiled and laughed a lot. He was certain that she’d had happy eyes, always bright. And, nothing against Mrs. Malone, he said, but he was sure his mom would have been the best in the world. He was painting the picture of the perfect woman. What he wanted was to believe he was the product of at least one person with some redeeming qualities.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Our freshman year and following summer passed without further progress in Operation Amanda. Travis had gotten a job bagging groceries and stocking shelves at Kennedy’s Market. I had a lawn-mowing business and was playing baseball for the Brilliant American Legion. We had spent three Friday and two Saturday nights that summer camping at the cemetery. My parents thought we were somewhere on Tarr’s Dome. I lied to get out of the house, as I’m sure my mother would have been apoplectic at the notion of her son hiding behind tombstones trying to catch the mystery bouquet deliverer. Fortunately, I had no encounters with poison ivy or apparitions. Unfortunately, we had no encounters with the mystery man, either.

  While we had been unsuccessful in catching the mystery man, the flowers continued to show up periodically at the memorial. I got my driver’s license that October, which helped considerably with our ability to keep surveillance on the cemetery. While we didn’t know what time of day the flowers were being placed on the grave, they most frequently appeared between Thursday morning and Friday evening. During the first week of November, we found no flowers at the site on Thursday night but discovered a bouquet of six yellow roses when we returned Friday evening. “That’s it,” Travis said. “All we need to do is camp out on a Thursday and we’ll find out who it is.”

  I said, “Okay, first of all, the flowers don’t show up every Friday. Secondly, it’s probably just someone from the church. And, thirdly, I am not camping out in the cemetery in November on a Thursday night. It’s a school night and my parents will have none of that, and friendship has its limits.”

  “Fair enough. Can we keep doing the drive-bys—keep trying to see which nights are his favorites?”

  “No problem. It’s virtually impossible to get frostbite in a Buick.”

  While this seemed to suit Travis, he had little else to do in regard to Operation Amanda. He had pored through the contents of the box retrieved from the attic several times. Consequently, he had a lot of time to speculate on the identity of the mystery man, which he did continually throughout our first-period American Government class. This was bad for me because I actually had to listen to absorb information, which was difficult with Travis’s continual bantering about the mystery man, who interested him far more than any lecture on the Bill of Rights.

  One of the things you should know about Travis is that he was smart. I mean, really smart. Off-the-charts smart. His intelligence was intimidating. There wasn’t a mathematical concept that he couldn’t grasp in seconds. He would do crossword puzzles in English class, read the paper during biology lectures, pester me about Operation Amanda in American Government, never take home a book, and ace every test. We were studying the human anatomy in biology class and Travis was reading the sports page, making no attempt to hide it, when Mrs. Fristick said, “Travis, would you identify this organ, please?” She whacked at a spot on the human diagram on the pull-down screen.

  Travis looked up and said, “It’s not an organ. It’s an adrenal gland.”

  He went back to his paper and she smirked. “Wrong. It’s the pancreas.”

  Travis jerked his head up, squinted, and said, “No ma’am, the pancreas is down and to your right a smidge. That’s an adrenal gland.”

  That was another thing about Travis. Even if he was wrong, he made statements with such conviction that you started questioning yourself. In this case, however, he was right. It was an adrenal gland, which Mrs. Fristick was forced to concede after further inspection. However, it so infuriated her that she made a show of walking to the back of the room and snatching away the newspaper.

  There was a certain danger in being clo
se friends with Travis. Teachers can be vindictive, and I couldn’t afford to lose guilt-by-association points simply for being his friend. In American Government, however, I was safe, as Mr. Hamrock had grown to appreciate Travis’s knowledge of national and world affairs. Most of us never read anything in the paper except the sports section and the comics. But Travis read the newspaper front to back. This allowed him to engage Mr. Hamrock in lively debate, which they both relished.

  We were in Mr. Hamrock’s class the winter of our sophomore year when Travis decided to expand Operation Amanda beyond his attic and the cemetery. Mr. Hamrock paced the front of the class, shaking a piece of chalk between cupped hands, and said, “Today, we’re going to discuss the importance of public documentation, open meetings, and Ohio’s open-records law. Most citizens would be astonished to learn that information they believe to be private is actually quite public. Anyone can go look at them: tax records, voter registration, police and fire reports, land records, birth certificates, death certificates, and autopsy reports, just to name a few.”

  I could feel Travis’s eyes boring in on me.

  “How about that?” he whispered. “I’ll bet there’s some kind of police report about my mom’s drowning.”

  I shrugged, and whispered, “So, what’s the big deal? If there is a report, it isn’t going to tell you anything about your mother. The only thing in that report will be about the accident.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although my bedroom was infinitely safer than Travis’s as the headquarters for Operation Amanda, it could still be a dangerous location, as my mother never knocked before entering. I was sprawled across my bed, propping up my head on my left palm; Travis sat at my desk chair, sideways from the desk, with Mr. Hamrock’s book on public records on his lap. My mom had already made one trip into the room with a load of clean clothes, but Travis paid her little mind. When she asked what we were doing, he told my mother that we were working on a project for American Government. Actually, the question had been directed at me, but Travis answered before I lied and my Adam’s apple started its frantic dance.