by Kim Powers
The Day of the Kites finally arrived.
Truman made Mr. Danny and Myrtle each put on one of the sun hats he kept on his wall for decoration. Mr. Danny took one look in the mirror and said he looked ridiculous, wearing a lady’s floppy hat out into the desert, but Truman said Danny was the one who needed it most, being as how he was just three wisps of hair short of a sunstroke. Mr. Danny said he was an air conditioner man for a reason; he didn’t like being outdoors.
Truman said, did he like being all alone?
That shut him up.
He put on the hat.
Truman had Myrtle fix a picnic lunch to take with them, fried chicken and potato salad and cornbread, and several thermoses of his “orange drink.” He didn’t know how long they’d be gone, and he didn’t want them to get hungry, or thirsty, while they waited.
“Waited for what?” Myrtle asked.
“A sign from Nancy, that she’s read the message.”
A sign from Nancy that the hauntings were over,Truman thought to himself, so he could move on to the even more important task with Nelle. It had come to his mind the first night he called her, after their long silence; he just regretted he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
It would be his final act of contrition, and it would take every last ounce of thinking and planning he had.
They didn’t have far to go to get to the desert. Just throw a stick in any direction in Palm Springs and you’d find one; the whole town was a desert, just flats and baked earth and an occasional palm tree or cactus sticking out. The landscape was dotted with steams and springs and mud baths that Truman would cover himself with, saying it was to stay fit, but Myrtle wondered how healthy that really was: wallow in mud that other people—other strangers—had already sat in? Heated mud?
“That’s the point,” Truman said. “It sweats out the poisons.”
“You wanna sweat out the poison, leave your ‘orange drink’ at home.”
It was the same argument they had day and night, and now they were having it again. If he wanted to go traipsing up and down the desert, trying to get a kite up in the air, then he’d better not be all liquored up. He’d take a few steps in this sun and keel over.
He looked at Myrtle. “Maybe you can get it up.”
He said it in all innocence.
“Don’t look at me,” she said, “I figure Mr. Danny’s the one to ‘get it up.’”
Together, she and Truman giggled; together, they turned to look at Mr. Danny.
Before he could say a word, Truman fixed him with a stare and said, “You want to be fixing ACs the rest of your life? Then start running.”
Start running he did and didn’t stop, catching the updraft and handing the kites off, one by one, to Truman and Myrtle.
She looked up in the sky and saw their three kites whipping in the wind, pulling taut against their strings and making a sound like they were trying to escape. They trailed one behind the other like the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, with Truman guiding their course like Christopher Columbus on his way to a new land.
I’m Sorry . . .
Forgive . . .
Me . . .
Majestic white canvases, with a message of apology shimmering against a cloudless blue sky. A whiplash of paper, and fine French bed linen.
Myrtle looked at Truman as he looked up at his fleet: he wasn’t an old man anymore, heaving and panting and sweating beet red, but a child.
She’d never seen him so happy.
“Nancy, do you see?! It’s all for you . . . it’s working! I told you!”
But the happiness didn’t last long. It never did.
The wind began to flag, and the kites to droop.
Myrtle’s first thought: Look quick, Nancy, whoever you are, we can’t keep these up for long.
Her second thought: Damn.There goes some prime advertising space.
Truman began yelling at Mr. Danny, “Start running! Grab the kites and run! We got to keep them up! She hasn’t answered yet!”
His words echoed in the desert, up to the sky and back.
Danny took a last belt from the thermos, wiped a shirtsleeve of sweat off his face, and began running yet again—Truman was right, he didn’t want to be fixing ACs the rest of his life—until he stumbled across something and fell flat on the desert floor.
His fall pulled the first kite down with him; “I’m sorry” crashed onto a rock; “Forgive” and “Me” flew away, somewhere over Palm Springs.
Truman reached down to Mr. Danny, not to help him up, but to scream at him some more: “You idiot! Now they’re all gone! We’ll have to start all over! You didn’t give her a chance . . .”
But what he saw on the ground silenced him.
The only sound was “I’m sorry,” thrashing against the rocks.
Mr. Danny had tripped over a snake carcass, big and plump and sad and dead. It was a green Mojave diamondback rattler, shorter than most, and thus female; Truman had been bitten by a snake as a child and almost died, so he knew his snakes. It was gray-green, the gray now overtaking the scales on its back because it was dead. Curled into a ball, but with its triangular head jutting out, it looked as if it had been trying to escape when it sensed footsteps. Jutting its head out, ready to run, it had been shot, just like Nancy Clutter.
Truman fell to his knees and crossed himself.
It was the sign he had been waiting for.
Nancy had answered.
There was no other way to interpret it.
“OhJesusGod, ohJesusLord, now I can sleep, now I can rest, now I can finish what I started with Nelle,” Truman said, crying so quietly you could barely hear it.
Myrtle cried, too, loud enough for everybody to hear it: “Now I can sleep with that damn ghost gone! And good riddance to bad rubbish!”
They’d gotten what they’d come for: a sign from Nancy. She was letting them know she’d heard their prayers, and this was her answer:
They could go home, and move on to Nelle.
Chapter Five
Last night, Nelle dreamed about the tree.
It filled the entire perimeter of her brain, nothing but bark and long, groaning branches and leaves in their sad transition from summer to fall. In the one part of the dream she could remember—she thought it must be near the end, but she had no clue what had come before—she felt her hand desperately reaching up for the squirrel hole she knew was there, just above her fingertips. But even though she was her current age in the dream, and taller by a good foot or two than the child who had originally stood on tippy-toes to look inside, she still couldn’t reach it.
But just when she was about to give up, her forearm magically extended and began to snake its way into the receptacle. Now, height wasn’t the problem, girth was: her big meaty hand was just too big to get inside. As she tried to force the fit, stabbing her fist at a shape that refused to give, the bark around the hole scratched at her flesh—that mound where her thumb and index finger circled together, her knobby, arthritic knuckles, and the side of her little pinky, all by its lonesome. Those areas bore the brunt of the old chinaberry’s roughness, as she continued her square-peg assault on the round hole, and thus it was a complete mystery to her—and no mystery at all—that she woke up with her hand scratched white, the layers of suntanned skin scraped off to reveal ashy pink underneath. These days, there was very little separation between day and night, between dream and doing.
She had probably just clawed at herself during the night, in sympathy with the frustrated dream-woman who couldn’t get what she wanted; she wasn’t about to begin thinking she had actually risen from her sleep to visit the tree.
How could she?
It wasn’t there anymore.
The tree had been chopped down when the old house was sold, and the lot turned into Mel’s Dairy Dream. She wasn’t a sentimental woman, but she had taken a small branch from the tree when the ax hit its trunk; she kept it, still, underneath her bed. She heard someone else in town bragged about having “a piece of that tree�
� from The Book; it was God’s tree, anyone had a right to it, but still, that didn’t sit quite right with her. The practical side of her said she could use the limb on an intruder; the other side of her wondered why there was a tree branch tucked under the bed whenever the vacuum cleaner hit it. But other than that—and how often did she actually clean under the bed?—she rarely thought about the tree. That is, until now, when the dream brought it back to her for the first time in years.
Now, she was on her way to see it—a tree that was no longer there, just as her mind was no longer there. It had snapped the minute the equally crazy Truman had said, “You’ll know what to do.You’ll know where I’m sending it.” She didn’t know what he was sending, but where—their old tree house was the one and only place he could have meant, even if it wasn’t there anymore. It had been so long since Truman had come to town he wouldn’t know it had been torn down. That’s why she hadn’t told Alice where she was going; as much as Alice loved her, she would have been on the phone to the men in white jackets the minute Nelle let the screen door slam behind her.
It was up in that tree, in the backyard of the old Lee house, that she and Truman had first become writers. Each of them provided an essential ingredient (besides imagination and loneliness): Nelle, a beat-up old Underwood typewriter that her father had donated to the cause, and Truman, a waterlogged Webster’s dictionary that he carried everywhere, practically bowed down by its weight. It was his pride and joy, as precious and crucial to him as a teddy bear might have been to another needy child. Remembering that, Nelle had to stop and catch her breath: maybe it was the sugar overload of the caramel cake, so early in the morning, but more likely, it was the memory of a six-year-old boy whose best friend was someone’s discarded dictionary. The memory of a child who loved words so much, he slept with them under his pillow so they would burrow into his head at night: it took her very breath away.
It was up in that tree house—reached by a few weather-beaten boards and the squirrel’s hole that served as an extra foothold—that she and Truman swore, whatever happened to them, they would always stay together. (The heartbreak of a child, at six years old, already knowing that change would come, and making plans for the future. He knew, even then; she didn’t. That took her breath away, too.) They swore a promise of forever and a day, on blood they’d let from their little fingers. Nelle used the Swiss Army knife she’d stolen from her brother Ed to break the skin; she went first, poking at the tip of the index finger on her left hand. She even sucked at it to get more of a flow going. She had to keep sucking so it wouldn’t dry up during the five or six tries it took before she struck gold with Truman; he kept pulling his finger away at the last second, so it was sliced up, like the gills on a fish.
There had been no thought of him pricking his own finger; he kept his eyes clinched shut during the whole process, until she told him it was safe to open them and look. At that, he’d become wide-eyed and mesmerized, as if he had expected his own blood to run blue, just as it looked under the surface of his albino white skin. And the sight of that blood shook something loose, something unafraid and inspired, in him: he immediately spit into the mixture and told Nelle to do the same; that’s what made true blood brothers, he’d read in Huck Finn. He roughly jammed his index finger onto hers and ground them together, as if he knew he had to do it fast or else he’d change his mind and go get himself cleaned up.
And it was in that same tree that Boo Radley had been born.
That took her breath away, too.
For the third time on this morning sojourn, she had to put out her hand on a neighbor’s mailbox to steady herself.
His real name was Son Boular, and even as children—especially as children—they had known he was different. Nelle and Truman thinking somebody else was different; that was rich. Nelle smiled at the thought now, a sad smile, on her way to the tree.
Son, already in high school when Nelle and Truman were just children, lived a few doors down from them, and never came out of his house except at night. That was the result, it was whispered, of a bargain his father had made with the local judge to keep Son from being sent to jail after his teenage high jinks got out of hand. It was also whispered that, under the cover of darkness, he killed and ate neighborhood cats for sustenance and peeped in windows, for a different kind of sustenance. Of course, Truman and Nelle had never seen any of these nocturnal actions; they had never seen Son at all, except for once, at a party that had almost been the end of them all.
Truman, seven years old at the time, had decided to throw a good-bye party for himself, the likes of which the people of Monroeville would never forget. Lillie Mae Faulk, his flighty mother, had gotten remarried in New York, and was bringing him north to live with her; this party would be the farewell to end all farewells. It would fall on Halloween, Truman’s favorite holiday, and costumes would be required as the price of admission. He and Nelle spent weeks planning their outfits: she would come as Tom Swift, her favorite literary hero, in a pair of overalls that were no different from those she wore all the time, and Truman would do himself up as Fu Manchu, complete with yellow makeup and a skinny black pigtail he braided from a pair of his cousin Bud’s dark silk socks. Of course, a dangling pigtail on Truman was an open invitation that said “Snatch Me,” even if he was the party’s host, but that would come later.
Buddy’s dark delicates weren’t the only familial contribution: Truman’s gentle cousin Sook—at seventy more childlike than Truman was at seven—would make one of her famous fruitcakes a month or so earlier than usual, as well as elderberry lemonade to be served in a cut-glass punch bowl; his cousin Jennie, the stern, humorless head of the household, would make divinity and cobbler—or instruct the cook to make it; and Jennie’s younger sister Callie—pulled away from teaching to help run the family millinery business, and bitter the rest of her life because of it—would be drafted to keep the Victrola cranked up all evening long, pulled as close as it would go to a back window inside the house, so music would spill out into the yard. Sook, who lived for Truman, would even sacrifice a bushel of the apples she’d ordered special from up North, for apple bobbing in the old washtub.
The likely reason Truman’s relatives were so accommodating was that they already knew the heartache that awaited him in New York. Going to live with his mother was all Truman pined for, but she was as likely to send him back on the first train as keep him. Lillie Mae—who’d now christened herself Nina, in preparation for the sophisticated new life she hoped for—was full of quicksilver ideas and spontaneous enthusiasms, but working a strange, delicate child like Truman into her new marriage was a little too spontaneous, to hell with guilt and good intentions. Anybody could have told her that. So if a party made Truman happy, at least for a while, then the relatives would give him the party he wanted, one he’d never forget. If they cried a little during the party, then they’d be quick not to let Truman see. If the yellow watercolor it took to turn his face into a Chinaman’s rubbed off on everybody’s nice clothes, then so be it.
But the real trouble wasn’t Lillie Mae, it was Old John, one of the Negro field hands who’d been drafted to watch over the apple bobbing. Truman insisted he wear an all-white suit—another item of clothing filched from cousin Bud—so his jet black skin would blend into the night sky and make him appear to be headless. The guests would see just the white suit, and the starched white collar of his shirt inside it, bobbing up and down every time he swallowed, like the apples. Old John was so proud at having been invited to Mr. Truman’s party—even if it was, essentially, to work at it—that he blabbed about his invitation far and wide. Too wide. The Klan heard, and decided to storm the proceedings in protest, with or without invitations.
Ah, yes; a party in Monroeville, Alabama—in the thick of the Depression and the Scottsboro Boys trial.
A party Monroeville would never forget.
For a time, it was going along just swell. Children lined up for rides on a giant toy airplane that was the lone contribut
ion of Truman’s missing-in-parental-action father, a long-distance gift from where he lived in New Orleans. The other men of the neighborhood pulled the metal-and-wood contraption up a ramp, then let it “fly” back down, a distance of all of three feet that seemed like three hundred feet to the flyers, who were more than willing to suspend their disbelief.
They were also willing to play make-believe—and squeal even more—as they touched the dead man’s body parts Truman had selected and laid out with such delicacy: peeled grapes for his eyeballs, cold spaghetti for his innards. Even the grown-ups temporarily forgot the Depression, as they played Rook and sipped from the occasional flask, even stood in line for airplane rides themselves, when a scream came from the front of the house.
It was Sally Boular, yelling her head off that the Klan had her baby brother.
Everyone raced around to the front, fastest of all Nelle’s daddy, Amasa, to see the Klan done up in their own Halloween costumes, ones that were all too familiar. In their white robes and peaked hoods, they had surrounded some strange and exotic creature who was trying to escape. For once, the strange and exotic creature wasn’t Truman, but someone else—dressed up like a robot or an alien, crash-landed on this planet, and covered in cardboard boxes that had been strung together and painted silver. The Klan assumed it was a Negro, disguised for the party and emboldened by Old John’s presence.
Amasa Lee strode through the Klansmen, knocking their torches left and right, and yanked the top box off the head of the spaceman: underneath was the sweaty, shaggy-haired face of Son Boular, wild and scared—a shy young man who just wanted to be part of the dance for once. He made what sounded like the cry of a crow—caw, caw—as he tried to beat his wings and fly away, pecking at Amasa in his terror.
Thereafter, his nickname would be “Caw”—but this only from strangers, because no one who heard him that night ever dared to make fun of the unearthly and desperate sound they had heard.
They hadn’t known a human could make a sound like that.