by Lisa Alther
Nevertheless, every boy in Tidewater Estates sneaked away to Commie Killer meetings except Sandy Andrews, who was a sissy. They made their mothers rip the patches off their fathers’ old army uniforms and sew them on their jacket sleeves, and they pinned their fathers’ multicolored bars on their chest pockets. Ace had the most because his father had been a hero in the war. Jude made Clementine retrieve her father’s olive uniform jacket from the attic. It stank of mothballs, but it sported the requisite bars and patches, which Clementine agreed to stitch onto her jacket if her father gave his permission. Instead, he forbade her to have anything to do with Ace Kilgore.
Jude used to play with the neighborhood girls at Noreen Worth’s, but she was tired of diapering dolls with handkerchiefs and rolling around the playhouse floor speaking in tongues. Besides, Noreen, whose father was a Holiness preacher, claimed Jude was a bad
Baptist because at Jude’s church people just sat in their pews and kept quiet. She had also played a few times with Clementine’s daughters in Riverbend. But all they ever did was jump rope, turning two ropes really fast and chanting things Jude couldn’t understand. Whenever Jude tried to jump in, she ended up on the ground, trussed like a calf for branding. She found it hard to believe that these were the children Clementine loved more than herself. So, despite her father’s stern injunction, Jude found herself irresistibly drawn to the Commie Killers.
The hideout was dark inside, apart from the light from a white candle stuck in the clay floor. The boys were wearing only Jockey briefs, so Jude hurriedly stripped down to her white cotton panties. Ace passed out several round Quaker Oats boxes and wooden spoons. As some drummed, others danced. Watching from the corner of her eye, Jude copied their writhing, hopping movements, like an Indian war dance. Ace’s father’s colonel hat with the golden eagle above the brim kept slipping down over his eyes. So excited was Jude finally to be a full-fledged defender of the American Way that she had goose bumps all over her flesh. She thought she could hear a cat yowling from the corner of the cave.
The boys were kneeling in the dirt as Ace leapt from one to another, thrusting his hips against their briefs with sharp jabs while the drummers pounded a syncopated beat. His face was dripping sweat in the candlelight and his licorice eyes gaped like the sockets in the skull on her father’s office counter.
Jude got down on her knees, but Ace pushed her over with his foot. “Girls can’t do this,” he growled in a strange voice. “Men do this.”
Then they crouched in a circle around the candle and Ace placed a cherry bomb in his palm. Gravely, he extended it to Jude. She took it. His lieutenant Jerry Crawford, a tall, gawky boy who had smiled shyly at Jude when no one else was looking, carried a cage over from the shadows. Inside was a matted barn cat Jude had seen lurking around the neighborhood. Her eyes were flashing chartreuse. One of her ears had been ripped off during a fight and the tip of her tail bent at a right angle. Several boys put on work gloves, dragged her from the cage, and pinned her against the dirt floor. Jude stroked her forehead with an index finger.
“Don’t pet Hiroshima,” said Ace. “She’s been very bad.”
“Why do you call her Hiroshima?” asked Jude.
Ace grinned, white teeth flashing like Chiclets in the shadow cast by the visor of his colonel hat.
“Why has she been bad?”
“She’s been stealing my dog’s food. But you ask too many questions, little girl. Just shut up and shove that thing up her hole.”
Jude looked at the red cherry bomb with the green wick, then at the snarling, struggling cat.
“If you want to be a Commie Killer,” said Ace as he struck a match, “you have to do it. And you have to do it now.”
As eerie shadows danced on the walls of clay like the flames of Hades, Jude looked at him with horrified comprehension. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t, Ace. Let her go. Please.” She looked to Jerry, who was staring hard at the floor.
“Hurry up! Do it!” ordered the boys as the cat hissed and howled.
Jude scrambled to her feet and ran toward the doorway, clutching the cherry bomb.
“Go bake cookies with that faggot Sandy Andrews!” someone yelled.
“If you tell,” called Ace, “we’ll hunt you down and do this to you.
Jude stumbled through the maze of trenches, sliding on the slick orange clay. She’d get Clementine. Clementine would make them stop.
She heard a bang. Slipping and falling, she lay for a moment in the sticky mud in her underpants, too stunned to get up.
Pedaling her tricycle fast toward home, she could hardly see the sidewalk through her angry tears. She had saved herself and left the cat to die. She was not a Commie Killer, she was a coward. And if she told, Ace would do that to her next. She couldn’t jump rope, and she couldn’t speak in tongues. The Commie Killers were not champions of democracy, they were murderers. She would always be alone forever and ever in this horrible place where bullies tortured the weak just for fun. If only she could be safe in heaven with her mother. She stopped pedaling to wipe her wet cheeks with a muddy forearm.
“Don’t cry, Jude,” said a husky voice beside her. “I’ll be your friend.”
Jude opened her eyes. Molly was standing there, barefoot, shirtless, smoky eyes troubled, hand on Jude’s handlebars.
“You better not,” said Jude. “I’m in big trouble. I may be killed.”
“I don’t care. I’ll help you.”
AS JUDE STOOD IN the aisle leading to the altar, the adult choir in their white robes and red cowls were singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” The dreaded Ace Kilgore was directly in front of her. His brown hair had been furrowed like a plowed field by the teeth of a comb, and he was wearing a red polka-dot necktie. It matched that of his father, who was the usher assigned that morning to lead the children to the Sunday school building.
Ace and his father also had matching black eyes that seemed just to absorb the rainbow light through the stained-glass windows rather than to reflect it as everyone else’s eyes did. The other adults tried to avoid Mr. Kilgore’s stare just as the kids avoided Ace’s. He was always buttonholing Jude’s father outside the church, trying to argue about Senator McCarthy. Mr. Kilgore’s voice would grow louder and louder and his face more and more red as he described the agents of evil who were infesting the country like vermin.
Spotting Jude in line behind him, Ace leaned back to whisper, “We gonna get you, Goody Two-shoes.”
Jude flinched, picturing the cat cowering in the dirt.
Molly, standing beside her, said, “Just shut up, goofball.”
Ace looked at her, startled. “Who are you?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Well, we’ll get you, too, ugly. And lynch you with those long black braids of yours.”
The choir was singing: “…red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.…”
“You and what army, cat killer?” asked Molly, whose irises had shifted to a dangerous battle gray.
Ace narrowed his eyes and glared at Jude. “Don’t you worry, little lady. The Commie Killers know how to take care of rats, and friends of rats.” Grabbing his tie, he pulled it upward, nooselike, mouth lolling open and tongue hanging out.
“Why don’t you go eat a vomit sandwich?” suggested Molly as their lines parted before the carpeted steps leading to the altar, on which stood a golden cross with Christ writhing in agony. Jude was impressed by her new friend’s courage. No one ever talked like that to the Kilgores.
“MAYBE THERE’S SOME WAY to make a tunnel fall down with the Commie Killers inside it,” mused Molly as they sat at a long table coloring pictures of Jesus tending baby lambs.
“I think we should ask Sandy Andrews to help us,” said Jude. “He’s a child progeny.” She selected a fat ocher crayon for Jesus’ hair and beard.
“What’s that?”
“He taught himself to read and write when he was four, so they let him skip f
irst and second grade. My dad says he’s so smart that they may have to send him away to school. I’m glad I’m not that smart.”
“Do you think he’d help girls?”
“Maybe. He doesn’t have any friends. He doesn’t like to kill things.”
“WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE SO mean?” Jude asked Clementine, licking chocolate frosting off a beater while the morning sun through the kitchen window turned the red linoleum to orange. When she woke up that morning, her stomach had clenched with dread. The Commie Killers were going to get her. They were going to do to her what they’d done to that cat. Then she remembered her new friend, Molly, who had promised to help her, and she began to feel a faint flicker of hope.
“The good Lord made them that way so the righteous could be tested.”
“Like a test at the hospital?”
“Like a test ever day of the year. You gots to be kind to them what treats you cruel.” Clementine was spreading the frosting with swirling strokes of her spatula, making chocolate waves.
“How come?”
“Cause one fine day they gets ashamed of acting so ugly and they turns to Jesus. And then you wins yourself a golden crown.”
Jude studied Clementine, picturing a golden crown atop her red bandanna head cloth. “But what if it’s not you they’re ugly to? What if they’re ugly to something else?”
“What ugliness you seen, Miss Judith?” She paused to study Jude, who was winding her tongue around a beater blade to get at the frosting in back, which was still gritty with sugar.
“Nothing. I’m just wondering.”
“A good person will put up with ugliness coming at themselves. But you gots to fight for them what’s small and weak.” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Jude.
To escape her X-ray vision, Jude dropped the beater in the sink and dashed out the kitchen door. Molly was riding Stormy down the sidewalk. She had attached playing cards to the spokes with clothespins to make a whirring sound, and she was wearing sunglasses and a winter cap with earflaps. She landed her airplane on the sidewalk in front of Sandy Andrews’s house, elaborate whooshing and sputtering sounds emitting from her mouth.
Sandy was watering the foundation shrubs with a hose. Jude noticed that he was wearing socks and sandals instead of the black high-tops required by the Commie Killers. The shrubs had been clipped into triangles and cubes, like dark green building blocks.
“Hey, Sandy,” called Jude from her tricycle, which she’d decided to name Lightning. “This is Molly. She’s moved into that new house next door to mine.” Molly was hanging her cap by its chin strap from her handlebars.
“Hi,” said Sandy, not looking up.
“We’re in trouble.” Jude dismounted from Lightning. “Will you help us?”
He glanced at her irritably. “How can I say when I don’t know what it is?”
“It’d be dangerous for you if we told you.”
Sandy put his hand on his skinny hip and said nothing, studying the stream of water from the nozzle, the sun backlighting his blond head and casting a shadow over his face, which was freckled like a permanent case of the measles. He had a cowlick like the thumbprint of a giant to one side of his hair just above his forehead, which gave an interesting lilt to his crew cut.
“Ace might kill you,” added Jude.
Sandy looked at her. “That fascist? Just let him try.”
“What’s a fascist?” asked Molly, tying Stormy to a yew branch by the fringe on his handgrips.
“Never mind. Come up in my tree house, where no one can hear us.”
Sandy had never before let Jude visit his tree house. It had a retractable stairway that could be locked, and only Sandy knew the combination. It also turned out to have beige carpeting, a shelf of the World Book Encyclopedia, and a shortwave radio with as many dials and switches as Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Sandy said he’d built it from a kit. The walls were papered with postcards bearing the call numbers of ham radio operators he’d talked with all over the world. Half a dozen chessboards with games in progress were set up along one wall. A telephone sat on the rug.
“Come over here,” said Sandy. He showed them a telescope on a tripod, pointed out the window. Through it, Jude could see right down into the Commie Killer trenches across the street, a grid of red clay gashes and hillocks stretching the length of the field. When Sandy moved the tripod to another window, she could see Mr. Starnes down in the valley, mowing the alfalfa by the river on his ancient wheezing tractor. He was wearing a battered felt hat low over his ears and was spitting tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth. Downriver, his wife was breaking off blossoms in the tobacco patch, the weathered wooden curing shed behind her. And beyond them stretched the mountains, range after range, separated by deep coves and valleys where creeks were flowing and farmers were mowing and a train mounded high with tree trunks and coal chunks was crawling along like a fat, lazy caterpillar.
“BUT I CAN’T DO IT myself,” concluded Sandy after explaining his plan to the girls, who were sitting cross-legged on the carpet by the phone. “My mother won’t let me out of the house after dark.”
“Mine won’t, either,” said Molly, “but I can sneak out.”
Jude’s father rarely noticed where she was after dark because he was so busy changing dressings on patients in his office, or counseling them on the phone about their sunburns and ingrown toenails, or writing up their records at his desk, or rushing to the emergency room to stitch up their wounds from knife fights and motorcycle wrecks.
“Maybe you can spend the night at my house,” said Molly as they climbed down the tree-house ladder, “so we can sneak out together.”
As they stepped onto the lawn, Sandy raised the ladder behind them, like the drawbridge of a castle.
WHILE JUDE WATCHED FROM the kitchen doorway, Mr. Starnes, in faded overalls and clay-caked work boots, got out of a rusted red pickup truck and lifted a burlap-wrapped ham from the back. Jude grimaced. Clementine would take slices off it and soak them in water to get the salt out, and Jude and her father would have to eat it with grits and biscuits for the rest of their lives. Mrs. Starnes, wearing a floral housedress and leather oxfords with thin, white socks, carried a foil-wrapped cake. Since Clementine had already gone home to Riverbend for the night, Jude went out on the back porch to greet them.
“My dad’s on the phone right now. He’ll be out presently.”
“My gracious, Jude, haven’t you grown up, now!” said Mrs. Starnes. Her hairdo looked as though she’d removed her rollers and forgotten to comb out the hair.
“Yessum.”
“I declare, if you don’t look just like your daddy,” said Mr. Starnes, propping one boot against the bottom porch step.
Jude frowned, preferring to look like her mother, since her father was nearly bald. Mr. Starnes’s boot smelled of manure.
“Where’s your shirt at tonight, honey?” asked Mrs. Starnes.
Jude shrugged, crossing her arms over her scrawny chest. “It’s too hot.”
“I’ll bet you a dime you won’t run around without no shirt in a few years here,” chuckled Mr. Starnes. His eyes were as washed-out as his overalls, like clear cat’s-eye marbles.
It had rained at the end of the afternoon, forked tongues of lightning striking the distant mountaintops as though the sky were a lake swarming with angry cottonmouths. Then, as the sun shone through a gap in the banks of black clouds, a rainbow had appeared, arcing across the river right down into Mr. Starnes’s tobacco shed. At Sunday school, the preacher said a rainbow was God’s proof that, even after trying to drown everybody for being so wicked, He forgave them. Sometimes God acted like a big baby.
But now the sky had cleared and the sun had set, turning the faraway mountains the color of grape jelly. Bullfrogs had started to croak in the reeds along the riverbank and fireflies were flickering like birthday candles among the leafy branches of the sweet gums in the valley below.
“That daddy of yours,” said Mrs. Starnes, “we think h
e’s pretty special.”
“Yessum,” said Jude. Now she’d have to hear about each stitch her father and grandfather had sewn in these people’s mutilated bodies, each ancestor whose life they’d saved by operating by lantern light with a carving knife on a kitchen table in a remote mountain cabin during a thunderstorm, after a journey across a swollen creek on horseback in the middle of a midwinter night.
“Yessir,” said Mr. Starnes, “I recollect the day my paw lost his arm in the combine.…”
Jude’s father appeared in the doorway in his usual white dress shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Sighing with relief, Jude picked up the foil cake from the porch floor. “Thank you, Mrs. Starnes. My daddy and me loves your cakes.” Sniffing the foil, she detected caramel frosting, her favorite.
Her father looked at her with a raised eyebrow to indicate that she’d made a grammar mistake. As she carried the cake into the kitchen and cut herself a large slice, she tried to figure out what it was. Shrugging, she went into the back hall, where she’d been playing Ocean Liner, which Molly had taught her that afternoon. They’d pasted numbers on all the doors for cabins. Striding down the hallway munching her cake, she lurched from side to side on her peg leg. A storm was brewing in the nor’west and it was time to batten down the hatches, whatever they might be. She steadied herself with her free hand against the cases that held her father’s arrowhead collection. On his days off, they drove the jeep down into the valley and dug up the moist black silt by the river. As they sifted the soil, he told her about the people who had lived in the valley long ago—the Mound Builders, the Hopewells, the Copena, the Cherokees, each tribe replacing the previous one, all the way back to the dawn of time, when the valley had formed the floor of an inland ocean full of bizarre sea creatures. When the ocean dried up, the Great Buzzard swooped down from heaven to scoop out the mountain coves with its wing tips.
The arrowheads and grinding stones had been made by the Nunnehi, the Cherokee Immortals, Jude’s ancestors who lived underneath the mountains and at the bottom of the river and who came to help their descendants when they were in trouble. In autumn, when the whining winds from the north whirled the leaves off the trees, you could sometimes hear them murmuring to one another in the Wildwoods. And in the summer when you cast your line into the river for fish, if it got snagged, you knew the Nunnehi had grabbed it just to remind you that they were always there. And sometimes when the water was really calm and the breeze stirred tiny corduroy ripples across its surface; you could catch a glimpse of the roofs of their houses on the river floor.