Walking Dunes

by Sandra Scofield

  “Notebook. She called it a notebook.”

  “Daddy says Mr. Crawford will say that Leland was crazy when he shot her, that she made him crazy, but that when he woke up in the morning, he was all better. It was all out of his system. Kids at school, they say she was weird. She bugged people. Daddy says Mr. Crawford can make it work. There’ll be a hearing about it, it won’t ever go to trial.”

  “That’s what the notebook shows. The way she was.”

  “But they know all that already! You’re being stubborn and stupid, David. They don’t need her notebook. It would just be embarrassing. It would make you look just awful.”

  “You’re the only person besides me who knows that it exists.”

  “So get rid of it! And yours, too.”

  “Mine?”

  “What do you need to write things down for? You’re going to go to college, you’re going to go to law school. What’s to write down? That’s all high school stuff. She’s dead. You’re my boyfriend now.”

  They heard Laurel’s soft voice calling them. “Beth Ann, David. Are you out there?”

  As they stood up, David pulled Beth Ann against his body. Over her shoulder he could see her mother standing in the open door, peering out into the darkening evening. He kissed Beth Ann quickly, hard. He thrust his tongue into her mouth. She pulled her face away. “Over here, Mommy,” she called. “We’re coming.” To David she whispered, “I want to see it. Her notebook. I want to read it.” She was panting lightly.

  “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Before you destroy it. I want to see it. There’s no reason not. I already know, don’t I? Don’t I?”

  35.

  He felt like an alley cat. When night came, he wanted to prowl. He felt he might explode. He wanted to swim at school, but he did not have an excuse anymore. The coach had moved him out of tennis practice last hour into general P.E., a class he cut repeatedly. It had been a mistake to drop tennis so precipitously. He had not thought it through. Maybe he would not have won big. Maybe he would not have won at all. But he would have looked like someone with guts, plowing on when his partner defected, and instead he looked like a tuft of milkweed. The galling thing was, nobody cared. They did not miss him. He got word about his transfer out of tennis by student messenger, a little slip of paper with numbers and times and his name on it. He literally had not spoken to the coach again. The other players acted like they did not see him. They were doing fine. Maybe not sweeping the state, not like that, but in every tournament somebody made the cut. Lasky came in fourth at the San Angelo invitational.

  I could have found my stride, if I’d kept at it. Thinking that, he ran sweating through the streets at night. When he had worn himself out—otherwise he did not know how he would ever get to sleep—he walked, sometimes slowing down so that it was a matter of one foot in front of another, like an old woman. He imagined himself as Saul, roaming these streets, escaping the house. He walked again and again to the apartments where he was certain she had lived. I would have understood, he cried out in the night to his father. If only Saul had talked to him. Then what?

  Then I would have been in his confidence. I would have said, “Good luck.”

  Back in the house, the night before graduation, the baby was screeching. Marge was not yet home from work, and Joyce Ellen was just about at her limit. She glared at David as he walked through the livingroom. “Jesus,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”

  He showered, thought a moment about going to bed, then dressed in clean chinos and shirt. The baby’s energy was amazing. He squalled for ten, fifteen minutes at a stretch, took a breather for five minutes, then screamed some more. He was named Ward, after Marge’s father. Screaming Ward.

  “Do you take him to the doctor?” he asked Joyce Ellen. She was walking around and around the table in the kitchen. The baby was seated on her palms, tucked back against her chest. He looked pleased, for the moment, drowsy and self-satisfied, the little tyrant. David knelt in front of the open refrigerator, looking for something to eat, finding only crusts of unwrapped cheese, a curled single slice of bologna, a row of eggs. He slammed the door. “Isn’t he SICK or something?”

  Joyce Ellen began bawling. The baby’s eyes opened wide, as if in amazement, then he set in yowling again.

  David stormed out the front door and around to Saul’s storeroom. There was everything, as if Saul would be back in an hour. A dark gray thread in the sewing machine, the scissors partly open, a saucer of pins. David picked up the scissors and threw them across the little room. They bounced off the wall and fell into a box of kitchen towels.

  Boxes of clothes and fabrics were piled against the wall. There might be a thousand dollars worth of goods left. David would have to go back to Fort Stockton, and make the circuit. He could make more money off this, his father’s leftovers, than from any kind of job he could find for the summer. And, item by item, he would be rid of the remnants of his father.

  Had Saul planned it carefully, over weeks? Had the two of them sat huddled on her bed (he in his tattered underwear?), laughing and figuring it out? Or had something struck him like lightning, set him aflame, so that he suddenly just had to go? Nobody had known it was happening. Saul had come home sometime late that evening, but not so late that Marge was home. He had packed a suitcase, taken some of his things, not all, clothes and War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had slipped the suitcase into the yard through the bedroom window, then strolled back through the house, not saying a word—it would look like another of his walks—and outside he had collected his belongings and walked to meet her.

  David went into the house again, banging the screen door behind him. He did not know what to do. He thought he would wait for his mother, and drink with her. He would say it was a celebration. His last night of childhood, if you thought about it. Tomorrow, graduation, adulthood. Why did it all seem to swirl around him, why did he seem to be sinking into it? He had grown up on the plains; he wanted to look out and see the future as a great undulating landscape of good fortune.

  Joyce Ellen had turned off the lights. He stepped into the living room and paused for a moment. The light on the top of the stove in the kitchen shone eerily across the two rooms. He stepped toward it. From the little bedroom came the sudden piercing wails of baby Ward, followed immediately by the sharp shriek of Joyce Ellen, who had been sitting in the dark, in her father’s easy chair. She sprang for David, and pounded him on the shoulders and neck. “He was asleep!” she screamed. “He was asleep!”

  “You’re crazy!” David shouted back, pushing her arms away, and rushing across to the kitchen. He looked back at her. “You need to be in Mother’s unit, Joyce Ellen.”

  “I need sleep!” she yelled back. “I lie in that bunk bed and the baby is six inches away, I hear his breath whistle, I hear his little poots. You don’t know, you’re off in the luxury of your private world. I WANT YOUR ROOM. At least then I can put him across the room from me. I can look at him across space. I can go to sleep!”

  David moved quickly to his room and slammed the door. He leaned against it, gasping. He had to get out of there. He could not take it, not all summer, not one more night. He had to get out of there, right away. He pulled a duffel bag out of the closet and began to stuff clothes in it, knocking his drawers onto the floor. He packed until the bag was too full to close, took out a pair of aged jeans, and drew it shut. He threw it at the back door, where it thudded and shivered still. He grabbed his pillow and a blanket off the bed and threw them onto the duffel bag, took his cash out of his sock drawer, then stood staring at the bed. He remembered that Poe story, “The Telltale Heart,” with its beating heart—and an eye? Did an eye beat too? That was what the damned notebook was like. It lay under the mattress, pounding.

  He pulled the mattress off partway onto the floor, and grabbed both notebooks and stuffed them up under his armpit. The cunning little bitch, he thought. This was why she had given it to him. She could not get to
him alive, but she had him, dead.

  He carried his things around the house and threw them into the station wagon. He backed into the yard, right up to the door of the storeroom, and began hauling boxes out and shoving them into the car. He worked in a frenzy until he could not fit anything else in, then slammed the back door shut and jumped into the car. He pulled out of the yard, his wheels whining, and hit the street with a skid.

  He had no place to go. He slowed down. He drove to Ellis’ and parked with the motor running, staring at the dark quiet house. They probably all went to bed at nine, because Ellis had to. He would be up in the dark, driving off toward Roswell or Farmington or who knows where.

  He cruised the streets, driving around the high school, then back past Leland’s house. There was a light on there. David imagined Leland’s mother sitting up with a magazine on her lap, staring off into the terrible vision of her son’s crime.

  He drove to Patsy’s, parked and cut the motor. The house was dark. Across the way, there were lights at Ari’s. Maybe she was there. Maybe they were drinking wine and listening to jazz. She had reason to sit up, reason to celebrate. He had heard from Mr. Turnbow, not from her. She never spoke to him. She had taken the bus to Dallas to a regional competition, and had placed first. There were people there from drama schools. Afterwards, she sent tapes and photographs and Turnbow called directors. She was going to California—Pasadena, wasn’t it? A drama school. Going where her mother was, wonder what she thought of that.

  Last he went to Glee’s. He parked down the block and walked to her house. He crept down the side, to the back, and stood beneath her window, as he had done before. He was careful not to make any noise. There was a faint light in her room, not enough to be a reading lamp. He thought it was probably one of those lights you plug into the wall because you’re afraid of the dark. Had she always done that? Had she always dreaded night? Or was it something that had come over her this spring, something to do with ending her days as a girl? Was she afraid, too?

  Beth Ann would be sleeping soundly, afraid of nothing, rosily confident of her pampered future.

  He headed to the Kimbroughs’.

  He pulled the car along the curve of the street in front of their house, a car-length short of the arched open gate. He climbed out and walked onto the drive. There was an ornate gas lamp near the gate, smaller than a street lamp, and the porch light was on. In between, there were pockets of dark along the driveway, and his feet crunched gravel and sent bits of it off to make a pinging sound.

  There were several lights on in the house. One, near the front, was probably in the entryway. Upstairs a light shone through a tiny window, perhaps a bathroom, and two rooms farther, a lamp in a window showed clearly, for the curtains were drawn back. Someone reading in bed, he thought. He had never been upstairs in the house. The bedrooms ran along the top on one end of the house; the rest of the house was a single story, sprawling in an L that cut around the courtyard in back. He did not know where Beth Ann slept.

  He thought he would drive to Fort Stockton that night, or as far as he could go before he was sleepy. He could pull over anywhere and sleep in the front seat of the station wagon. In the morning he would go to see Teresa’s grandparents, see if the beauty parlor was empty for the summer, see the preacher about tables, eat at the Brite Spot. Maybe he would ask how Teresa was doing, maybe not. He would stay a week, then drive to some of the other little towns. Maybe he would go farther south this time.

  Missing graduation was nothing. It was like not picking up your receipt when you bought a shirt. You had the shirt, what did it matter?

  He had been watching the front of the house, while slowly walking backward, as if to take in as much of the house as possible in his view. He backed out of the drive, and his heel caught against the slight rise of the curb, so that he slid and had to shuffle and throw his arms out to keep from landing on his buttocks. His maneuvering sent gravel in all directions. He landed on both feet, backed against a rose bush, caught his breath, and realized what jeopardy he had put himself in. He had to get out of there.

  The front door was suddenly flung open and there stood Hayden Kimbrough, a pistol in his hand. He was wearing a plaid bathrobe over long-legged white pajamas. “Who’s there?” he barked. David didn’t think the light shone on him. He stood in silence, hoping Kimbrough would go back in, but the man stepped forward, making an arc with his body to search the yard. “Who the hell is there?” He stepped out, in David’s direction. David’s heart clunked.

  “It’s me, it’s David Puckett,” he said as calmly as he could. He took a single timorous step forward, but it was enough to find the light.

  “What the hell?” Kimbrough’s arm fell, and the gun pointed down along his thigh.

  David walked toward him. He was mortified and desperate, too flustered to think of anything to say. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  Kimbrough’s anger faded. He reached out and put his hand on David’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with you, son?”

  David felt tears welling, felt his chest tighten and burn. He put one hand up in front of his eyes. “This is awful,” he said.

  Kimbrough pulled him into the house. David heard voices and movement in the house. They went into the kitchen, Hayden flipping light switches as they passed through other rooms. He motioned to the table. “Sit,” he said, and left the room. Tears spilled over onto David’s cheeks. Hurriedly he wiped them with the back of his hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. He would rather be dead than caught like this, spying and lurking. Why had he done it?

  Hayden returned with Laurel. She had a worried expression. She knelt in front of David and took his hand in hers. “Whatever is going on?”

  David shook his head. “This is awful,” he said again, and he began to babble about the baby, and Joyce Ellen, about going to Fort Stockton and skipping graduation. Laurel rose and filled a kettle and put it on the stove. Hayden pulled a chair closer to David and sat in it, facing him, their knees almost touching.

  “I know how late it is, I don’t know what I was thinking,” David said.

  “Shush about that,” Laurel said gently. “I’ll have coffee in a minute.”

  “Are you hungry, David?” Hayden asked.

  David realized he was starving. He was shaky with hunger. He did not answer, but his eyes widened. Laurel moved to the refrigerator and began to pull out food: a platter of sliced roast beef, some pieces of chicken, a block of cheddar cheese, mustard. She opened cabinets and suddenly there was bread, all this food spread out on the table in front of him.

  Hayden took a small slice of meat and began to chew it vigorously. He told his wife, “I’ll take a cup, too,” and in a moment the coffee appeared, steaming, in front of them. David ate.

  “I didn’t know it was so bad for you,” Laurel said, sitting across from him at the table. She leaned on her elbows, her soft silky robe falling away from her arms.

  David chewed and nodded.

  “I’ll put you in the guest room. It’s down here, you’ll have your own bath. You stay here tonight, David. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  He shook his head and swallowed a big lump of bread and meat. “I couldn’t.”

  Hayden clapped him on the bicep. “You can’t go prowling around any more houses,” he said jovially. “And you don’t want to go home.”

  Beth Ann appeared in the door of the kitchen. She looked sleepy, but she had dressed in cotton pants and blouse and had combed her hair.

  “Are you okay, Davy?” She leaned against the door. “Did something happen?”

  He put his hands on the edge of the table, as if to shove it away. “I’m okay, except for making a fool of myself.”

  Laurel touched his cheek with her delicate fingers. “We’re family, David.”

  He stood up quickly. “It’s hot,” he said. He had worked up a sweat, eating. He surveyed the mess he had made, the empty cup. He had not even taken time to put sugar in his coffee.

  “W
e could go out on the patio,” Beth Ann said. She glanced at her parents. They looked at one another, then rose.

  “I’ll put fresh towels in the bathroom,” Laurel said. “Beth Ann can show you where the guest room is.”

  Hayden said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” David wondered where the gun was, then saw it lying on the corner of the cabinet, near the breadbox. Hayden was not angry. David wondered if he pitied him, or if he thought he was mad.

  “I need to show you something,” David said to Beth Ann. Her parents paused in their exiting. “Could we—” his eyes flitted to Laurel, Hayden, then back to their daughter. “Could we go for a ride? It’s like summer.”

  “It’s late,” Laurel said.

  “I’d like to, Daddy,” Beth Ann said.

  Hayden glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Not yet midnight,” he said. He put his hand on his wife’s arm. “Let’s go to bed and leave them.” He remembered the gun then, and picked it up tenderly, as if it might easily bruise, and took it with him. “Not too long,” he said as he left the room. “And lock the front door when you’re back.”

  David gulped. “Thank you sir. Thank you both.”

  Beth Ann took his hand. The moment her parents were out of sight, she said, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Do you have some matches?” he asked her. “Get some matches, and I’ll show you.”

  36.

  He thought he remembered the place where he had pulled off the road to pee that August afternoon when he had first seen Sissy, but everything looked the same in all directions, once he was off the highway.

  Beth Ann acted a lot more concerned about what he had done than her parents had. When she got in the station wagon, she made a big fuss about all the boxes. “What is all this stuff?” she said, getting on her knees and pawing at what she could reach. “What are you doing?”

  He told her to sit down. The notebooks were on the floor at her feet. She said, “What’s wrong with you? I like to died, seeing you in my house at that time of night. You’re lucky my daddy didn’t shoot you.”