by Ben Tripp
RISE
AGAIN
Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Ben Tripp.
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First Gallery Books trade paperback edition October 2010.
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Designed by Jaime Putorti
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-4391-6516-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-6518-8 (ebook)
For my son Ian.
This is one of the stories
I never told you at bedtime.
pity this busy monster, manunkind…
—e. e. cummings
1
Kelley Adelman hadn’t written this many words since the history final in senior year. Her fingers were cramping up. The buck-a-dozen ballpoint pen left globs of ink in its wake and the police notebook paper was so thin she could read the impression of her words three sheets below. These words were going to make an impression on Danny, too, Kelley figured. If they didn’t, it made no difference. Kelley was gone either way. But she wanted—needed, on some level—to know that she would have Danny’s undivided attention, just for once. Even if it meant not being there when it happened.
On the muted TV by the stove, news footage of foreign wars alternated with Fourth of July celebrity chef barbecue tips. The quartz clock on the wall ticked off the seconds around the printed fishing scene on its face, the mountain wind sang its lament in the trees outside, and it was a night like any other night in Forest Peak, except it was Kelley’s last one.
She realized she had stopped writing. Kelley was staring at the big black revolver that lay on the plastic kitchen tablecloth, and it was staring back at her.
Dear Danny,
When you went to war, you promised me you’d come back. But you didn’t. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. It’s over for me. I know you never much liked to read, but I wonder if you remember a play from high school by Thornton Wilder called Our Town. One of the characters says something big that I never forgot. He said the dead don’t stay interested in the living after they’re gone. “Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth…and the ambitions they had…and their pleasures…and their suffering…and the people they loved.”.
Kelley felt tears of self-pity pricking her eyes. Or maybe it was plain old sorrow. The end of the ballpoint was pretty chewed up, like she could gnaw the right words out of it. She thought of switching to pencil in case she got something wrong. Or she could write out a clean copy later. But high school was done. All she had to do now was tell Danny what Danny wouldn’t hear. No extra points for neatness.
I guess you figured you came back alive. And seeing as you’re the sheriff, who’s going to tell you different? Everybody nods and smiles when you go by, but inside they’re scared of you. When you get mad, that war in the desert comes out of your eyes. And everyone here has secrets they don’t want you to know.
She summoned the town of Forest Peak in her mind, this place she knew so well but hardly recognized, like a once-beloved grandparent gone senile. The foremost thing was the forest, dark and shaggy, the pelt of an immense animal draped over the mountains, the trees going on and on.
Then there was Main Street, halfway down the mountainside along a flat shelf of land. It was narrow at the ends and wide in the middle, like a guitar strap. There were uneven rows of buildings on uphill and downhill sides, some with concrete sidewalks, some with the asphalt road lapping at their foundations. This holiday weekend the whole place was strung with red, white, and blue bunting and cheap Chinese-made American flags on dowels. The locals had decorated the entire street (with money left over for fireworks) out of a $1,100 city projects fund. It offset the shabbiness a little, and also emphasized it. Mostly the décor helped attract a few hundred tourists. Main Street was nothing but a wide place along Route 144, the old road that once took Model T goods trucks from the flatlands of San Bernardino to the mountain ski resorts of Big Bear and Alpine Glen.
Mentally gliding down into town, Kelley pictured one particular house along Main Street, Jack Carter’s place. Mr. Carter was the local science teacher, his career spanning the ten years between Danny’s and Kelley’s attendance at Skyline High.
Mr. Carter owns more than a thousand pornos, did you know that? Not just your basic action. You could spend a week watching movies in his basement and never see the same act twice. He has a closet by the water heater full of rubber and leather bondage gear as well. Just for him. I guess he’s lonely.
Kelley thought of old Mrs. Dennison above the Junque Shoppe next door to Mr. Carter. She was known to be an avid birdwatcher with formidable ex-military German binoculars. It was less known that the bird she most observed through the binoculars was Jack Carter, into whose basement window she could see from the corner of her upstairs bedroom. The angle wasn’t very good, but she would wait for hours to catch a slice of the solo action going on down there. She kept a notebook describing what she saw. She was thoroughly scandalized and believed Carter was a pervert who should be arrested. She hadn’t missed a Carter-watching session in eleven years.
If only he knew old Mrs. Dennison is always there with him.
Kelley fed Mrs. Dennison’s cat when she was away; Kelley had read the notebooks, a dozen of them, filled with meticulous observations of Mr. Carter’s habits. Despite herself, Kelley relished revealing the shabby dark secrets of Forest Peak to Danny the cop. God knew what Danny would do with this information. Probably try to arrest everybody in town. Kelley could almost regret that she would miss all the fun.
But wait, there’s more.
Forest Peak was the same as it ever was, clinging to the shoulder of the mountain, in desperate need of new roofs and fresh paint. With her eyes shut, Kelley could see Wilson and Pine streets branching off Main Street to twist away uphill and down. The tangled ways were peppered with frame houses, trailers, and broke-down vehicles. One of the little peeling houses was Zap Owler’s. The one with the Camaro parked on the verge in front. There was a rusting 1938 Ford in the ravine out back, crashed there by Zap’s grandfather the same day Germany invaded Poland.
Kelley could picture the kitchen of the Owler house, conveniently located well out of sight in the back: the precision scales, the skillets, coffee machines, double-boilers, a sea of bottles and boxes and plastic packaging materials: Contac tablets, codeine, acetone, iodine, heaps of batteries. Hanging over it all a metallic smell, like rotten garlic.
Zap Owler cooks speed in his kitchen and sells it down in the flatlands at go-kart tracks. Including that place by the freeway you took me for my seventh birthday.
That would settle Zap Owler’s lecherous ass. Danny was crazy for sure, but a powerful instrumen
t of vengeance. Kelley had an insight as the ballpoint hung above the page: She was confessing the collective sins of Forest Peak to ensure she would never, ever change her mind about what she had to do. There was something religious about it. What the hell, Kelley thought. While I’m at it:
Jimmy Dietrich killed a man in 1975 and the body is under his garage.
Kelley had seen the irregular oblong patch in the oily concrete floor with her own eyes, right at the foot of the gun cabinet. She dreamed for weeks afterward of the horror festering beneath the patch, a sightless, lipless thing in the dirt with skeletal hands still raised in supplication.
Betty Mills uses roadkill down at the Wooden Spoon Café to make the hamburger go further. Wolfman Gunnar brings it to her. That’s why I never ate at the Wooden Spoon. Maybe I should have told you.
She scribbled out another half-dozen samples of the unpleasant doings that went on under the skin of Forest Peak: perverts, criminals, shameful secrets, and wrongs done. Then Kelley was staring at the gun again, its muzzle a black disk like a shark’s eye. With the tip of the pen, she nudged the barrel around until it pointed away from her heart. She glanced up at the clock on the wall, without absorbing what time it was. She looked over at the framed picture of Danny and Amy as teenagers, sitting together on a horse. Then she looked back at the clock. Twenty minutes past midnight. Might as well lay it all out there.
Even your best friend Amy Cutter: She’s a lesbian, did she tell you? I guess she didn’t. How come I know all this and you don’t? Because nobody knows I’m here. I’m the invisible girl. I’ve seen everybody do everything, and nobody’s seen me do anything, because I haven’t done anything. You’re the big war hero with your Purple Heart and Silver Star. Key to the Mountains and all that. I’m only the accidental kid sister. You went off to war and I spent four years in foster homes and learned all the dirty secrets.
Twenty feet away, Danielle Adelman quit pacing back and forth in her narrow bedroom and thumbed up the volume on the police scanner next to the bed. The blat of chatter between cars and dispatchers down in the flatlands could sometimes drown out the noise in her head. The scotch helped, too, and the little yellow pills. Danny shook a drift of them onto the nightstand and pulled up the button on the alarm clock. It was set for eight in the morning, which meant Danny would wake up at six to beat the bell. Or five, or four. She didn’t need the alarm, but if it wasn’t set, she’d stay up all night to make sure the morning didn’t catch her off-guard. Tonight could be especially bad, because of the frigging holiday with its crowds of illegally parked, littering, jaywalking, shoplifting, vandalizing tourists. Not to mention the ceremony in which she was supposed to take part.
Danny pulled the tan uniform shirt off over her head, necktie and all. No need to unbutton the entire shirt, only the top two holes. She tossed it on the rocking chair, along with the side-stripe pants. She would iron the whole rig in the morning before she went into town, set some kind of an example for the trogs of Forest Peak. Especially her three shambolic deputies. Danny glanced in the tall boudoir mirror that had been her mother’s. Arched an eyebrow. Dark, rusty hair, strong features, and a firm womanly figure with an ass you could cut steaks off, as Harlan used to say before he rolled over that bomb in Sadr City. Yes, indeed. Hell of a woman. Then she turned her back to the mirror, fetching a come-hither look over her shoulder. She caught sight of the scars. Someday she would turn the mirror around to face the wall.
For now, a couple of pills, washed down with the watery remains of the last whiskey of the night. Second-to-last. She slopped a little more in the glass, a finger or two, or so. Did she need more ice? Kitchen a mile away, Kelley probably sulking on the couch watching some dipshit cop show on TV—because the cop show right in front of her wasn’t suitable to her tastes. Forget the ice. Knock back the shot, neat, splash it down the throat without hitting the tongue. Burn, baby, burn. Her bedroom seemed to be slipping sideways, gravity moving out of plumb. Pretty soon she could catch some sleep. Danny fell back on the bed to watch the ceiling revolve. It was her favorite show.
I thought things would change when you came back. Instead you spend your days being a cop and your nights fighting the war again, and I’m still the invisible girl. You keep that police scanner on all night, but I can hear the things you yell in your sleep. Post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t make you a bad person. But it sure makes you a crappy sister.
A fat tear plopped down on Kelley’s notebook page. She shoved the wet out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. There was something deliciously tragic in writing a note of such finality. All those bottled-up feelings, all those things left unsaid, they could all come out now, just as long as she could keep writing. And always assuming Danny didn’t emerge from her bedroom down the hall in one of those escalating rages, starting off with the irritable trip to the fridge for more ice, then the trip to the bathroom, then the circuit around the house to turn off the lights (muttering about the price of energy measured in blood, and so on), and finally pacing up and down the length of the place, ranting and shouting about anything there was to shout about. Often as not, Kelley.
Kelley’s boyfriends (any male under the age of fifty who looked in Kelley’s direction) were a favorite subject, and how soft and spoiled her generation was, as well as anyone else that had not served in combat; Danny was also fond of ranting about how nobody knew what it was like to be a cop, how hard it was, even if it wasn’t as hard as serving in combat. Sometimes Danny would stand there in her plain cotton panties and olive drab tank top and yell about the horrible brown-gold upholstery on the couch or the awful nicotine-colored wood-print paneling on the walls. Anything that took her fancy. She’d wind down around two in the morning, or sooner if Kelley left right away to sleep on the pull-out bed at her friend Ashleen’s house.
Why was she even writing to Danny? Because it felt good to put it on paper? There was so much else to say, so many things to slap her sister in the face with. But on some level all Kelley could blame Danny for was leaving her, who had no more choice in the matter than did Kelley. There was supposed to be some military rule regarding sole guardianship that could have gotten Danny out of the three tours she did over there. But the military machine was bending all the rules to keep boots on the ground without a draft, and in any case Kelley wondered sometimes if Danny would have waived the right, simply for another chance to get out of Forest Peak for a while. Maybe Kelley would have done the same. Danny had become a parent to her little sister far too early in life, head of the household at age eighteen. Maybe she had preferred patrolling death’s door to watching over a moody kid who wouldn’t eat the local hamburgers.
And yet, despite it all, Kelley felt a tug of sympathy in her heart for Danny, even pity. Losing Kelley was going to be hard for her sister. Probably. Maybe. Kelley wasn’t entirely sure.
She thought about crumpling the note up and burning it to ashes out on the driveway. Where Kelley was going, there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in having been cruel to her sister. But that was only part of the reason she was writing. She also needed Danny to know, going forward, that all was not right in her world.
Tomorrow on the Fourth of July, Danny would be receiving the so-called “Key to the Mountains” award, an idiotic publicity stunt dreamed up by the town council. Every year, the one person in town who accomplished anything beyond putting up the window screens was given an oversized, yellow-chromed churchkey. Congratulations, and by the way, it don’t open shit. Danny was dreading the presentation, as Kelley knew, but in some way it probably validated Danny’s dream-state of “okayness.” She might not be great, but she was okay. She got the Key to the Mountains, didn’t she?
Danny needed far more than a chrome-plated key, a prescription from the VA, and a couple of annual interviews with a shrink, though. She needed to reinvent herself from front to back. Maybe get out of Forest Peak. This house, this town, was full of ghosts: those of their parents, their ideals, their threadbare thrift-store lives. Dann
y might finally figure it out when even Kelley was only a ghost.
But I won’t be a ghost, Kelley thought. I’ll just be free.
So for the sake of Danny, Kelley kept writing.
She wrote more about their neighbors, what she had discovered during her years as the Invisible Girl, staying with people she hardly knew from whom Danny had extracted the favor of a few months’ houseroom, putting up with being a burden and an object of pity in equal measure, hiding herself in plain sight. When she ran out of local dish, Kelley turned back to the subject of being the younger sister to a modern-day Spartan. She wrote about her yearning to have Danny back while she was on tour in the distant desert, and how sad she was when Danny returned on leave and seemed even more distant, right in front of her eyes. She wanted to write about how Danny seemed to love her stupid Candyapple Red 1968 Mustang with the 302 V-8 more than she loved her little sister. But it all seemed petty, given the matter at hand; the car was probably easier to love.
Kelley found herself staring at the clock again, watching the second hand lurch around the face. It was time to finish this. She turned her attention back to the note, searching for the right way to end it.
Kelley pushed the pen along for a few more lines, swallowing the knot of grief in her throat. Then she signed her name at the bottom, squared up the pages of the letter, and blinked back another flood of tears. Enough. Kelley reached across the table and dragged the big, ugly gun toward her.
Danny watched the ceiling turn and listened to the scanner as the highway patrol took a drunk driver into custody down on the 10 Freeway. Maybe she should call the Forest Peak Sheriff’s Station to make sure everything was shipshape. Deputy Dave was on night shift tonight, and he had no problem with insomnia, on duty or not. Could be asleep at his post. But Danny didn’t think she could speak without slurring her words. The empty glass bumped up and down on her chest in time to the beating of her heart. The whiskey must have evaporated. Only a splash more, and she was definitely done for the night. She reached for the bottle on the nightstand among the pills. The bottle slipped out of her fingers and hit the plywood floor—