Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Japan,” I told her.

  “Oh my. My cousin Edith, she adopted an Asian girl.”

  “From Korea,” he added.

  “That’s right,” she told me. “You could meet her.”

  I said I’d be in town for a week or so. They invited me to stay in their house, but I already had a hotel room. We planned for dinner in two days.

  They’d mentioned Clay’s mother, referring to her as Elle, and said they’d taken her into their lives, giving her work. “Elle Hervey?” I asked. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Elle Moreau, actually,” he replied. “Clay was a Hervey. They were French, down from Maine. They weren’t Cajun. People here keep the original spelling. They say the e’s like the French but don’t bother marking them up with accents.”

  When we stood to say goodbye, the room suddenly felt too still, like an abandoned house. The dark roller bag waited in the entrance, backlit by the fading light through the door’s frosted window. It felt almost as if Justin had been there all along. His mother began to wail, and her husband held her as I quietly left.

  Back at my hotel, I found Elle Moreau online and paid with my credit card to get her address history. She lived less than five minutes away.

  After dinner, I drove to Elle’s house. It was an odd structure, addition upon addition, each new layer built around the previous, like a temple after successive waves of religious conquest. It was set back from the street and didn’t seem part of the city, landlocked by other fenced-in yards, a property parceled out from the gardens of a larger home. A path ran between two hedges into a jungle of rubber, banana, and avocado trees loud with the sounds of crickets, the house invisible until I was right in front of it.

  The doorbell played the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Clay’s mother peeked out the crack before removing the chain.

  Her black hair was cut like a frame, and her tattoos made me expect a biker husband inside, but there were just books behind her, rooms of them. The house was otherwise empty and undecorated.

  “So you’re Clay’s friend?” she said once we’d sat on threadbare couches. The planks of the walls were wide and rustic. Dirty, leaf-covered skylights revealed a few specks of fading sky.

  “I came to ask about him,” I explained.

  “I haven’t heard from him in a while,” she said. “He calls every week or two, but if he’s on a job, he misses a few weeks.”

  I struggled to take a breath, realizing she didn’t know. She kept talking. “He has my number memorized so he can call when he’s on assignment and doesn’t have his things.”

  She stopped. My throat was so dry it hurt to swallow.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head and finally got the words out. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you this. I thought you knew.”

  She lost her pallor, her face red and creased and swollen. She was grieving already, some part of her understanding. She held her hands out, her fingers crooked as if casting a hex, and she put her head back and wailed. Tears streamed into her ears and hair.

  “Help me,” she said. “Help me.”

  I moved close and put my arms around her. The expression of her emotion burned into me. I didn’t know that people felt so loudly — not quietly, the way my mother did, when she called to ask when I’d come home, but demanding that the universe respond. As Elle cried, I wondered about my own lack of grief. I held her until long after the last daylight faded.

  She spoke a little that night, then more each day when I visited, telling me Clay’s story from childhood. He didn’t have the desire to save others that Justin did, but he’d survived his family and the wilderness — his society’s chaos and indifference — and given himself a life.

  Part 5

  Maine and Louisiana:

  1976–2001

  }

  CLAY

  Elle Elizabeth Moreau, a Lewiston girl, disappeared when she was thirteen. The police learned that her kidnapper was Clement Hervey, a Biddeford bad boy five years her senior, a hulking shop rat who could build or fix anything and who spat through the student parking lot in a souped-up Yamaha.

  A relative told the police his cousin had seen Clem in South Boston, but they unearthed no clues. Two years later, a tattooed Elle stepped off a Peter Pan bus in Lewiston with Clay in her arms. The police made it to the house just after dozens of family members. Clem, an expert in locks and hot-wiring and auto-body makeovers, had been arrested under another name for grand theft auto and resisting arrest.

  Her parents welcomed her home. They’d had her late in life, their only child, and both were now in their mid-fifties. Her father was a high school janitor and her mother a clerk at Kmart. But Elle moved out again after her eighteenth birthday, when Fred Landry, the best friend of her cousin, Murray Leblanc, showed up at her door and proposed.

  Fred had also stood out. When some of his classmates were nearing six feet, he reached his skinny sum inches from seven. The height from which his glasses fell ensured their destruction. The relay from his brain was slow to reach his feet, and on the basketball court he tripped into tortured arabesques and hit the floor like a load of two-by-fours.

  Though the folding of his body into a desk made him look slouching and delinquent, he was actually scribbling notes, thinking up answers, too shy to tell others what he knew. Only once — when a teacher mentioned the national debt — did Fred raise his hand. He said that if the debt were in dollars and the bills were stood end-to-end, they’d reach the sun and back. The students found his enthusiasm hysterical; the teacher did too. Fred was swarthy — had the French coloring but not the spirit — and his cheeks resembled scrubbed iron.

  At the University of Maine, he studied programming, and though he went on to work at a computer repair shop, he couldn’t find a wife. His marriage to Elle surprised his friends and family, who discussed her like a car with too many miles and debated — often while waiting at the Shop ’n Save deli counter — whether Fred should change Clay’s name.

  The way Fred felt about her tattoos was no secret. He begged her to dress in long sleeves and jeans, but she watered the flowerbeds in shorts, a ring of hellfire dancing up her thigh, burning — they imagined — her tender parts.

  Winter was a blessing to him, but even then, with Elle covered up, her every gesture displayed the black writing on her wrist — the name Fred hated: Clem. Once, when he complained, she stretched the writing and veined flesh toward him and asked if he’d like her to cut it off. For her birthday, he bought her a gift certificate to a tattoo parlor and she returned with another Celtic circle, in the form of a bracelet.

  That same year, at his company Christmas party, Elle took off her cardigan to dance, hiked up her skirt to move her knees. Fred’s coworkers gawked, but he failed to recognize their envy.

  Your wife’s a great gal, they said. Life of the party. Sure can dance.

  They’d have dropped cash for a second of her shimmy, but Fred feared they were discussing her markings among themselves as if she were a kind of trout.

  On a warm October day when Clay was eight, he was walking the short distance from school when a pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder.

  Clay, the man called. His forearm rested against the steering wheel, dwarfing it, his knuckles thick and square. He had on a half-unbuttoned red-and-black plaid shirt, and above his chest hair there was a tattoo of barbed wire strung across a clouded heart.

  Come with me, his father told him and opened the door. Let’s go for a drive.

  Clay climbed in, and his father accelerated past the street where Clay lived.

  I’m your dad.

  I know. You’ve got Mom’s tattoo.

  His father squinted ahead. His dark hair was cut close to his skull, like the spines of a cactus. He had a thin mustache an
d goatee, the kind bad guys wore in movies, but his stubble was coming in around them.

  Goddamn, he said, you’re a smart kid.

  The truck picked up speed, its engine knocking and the body rattling with each bump. The roadside trees made a tunnel, red leaves drifting down with gusts from passing cars.

  I guess you don’t remember me. That’s normal. You were really little. But I used to play with you when we lived in Boston.

  He slowed and entered the highway where the sign said South. Clay had never called Fred Dad, and when he’d asked his mother why, she’d said that his real father had had to go away and that she’d explain when he was older.

  A semi charged past, shaking the truck. His father told him he’d loved Elle, and that if she’d waited, Clay could have gotten to know him. He described his own childhood, how everyone in his family was big — Not tall like Fred, he said. I remember that guy. But big and tough, the way people used to be.

  He talked until sunset, driving through the blazing striations surging between the hills. Rain-streaked dust glowed against the windshield.

  He told Clay they were heading to the islands off the Georgia coast. He’d learned about them from an inmate. That’s where slaves had escaped to over a hundred years ago, he said. He didn’t mind black people and would scout out a small island, separate from the others, where he and Clay could live and fish.

  You like clams? he asked. Lobster?

  Clay’s stomach ached. The taillights ahead rose and fell in slow undulations, as if the highway were shifting beneath them.

  Damn, his father said as the knocking under the hood got louder. He exited onto a road through hilly forest and passed a gas station with a long yellow car parked in front of the pump. Inside, the clerk spoke and gesticulated to a bald man who leaned against the counter.

  Clay’s father made a U-turn, pulled onto the shoulder, and switched off the ignition. The engine ticked, the cooling metal creaking and popping, the way Clay’s house did at night during winter’s first hard cold. His father took a container of motor oil from under the seat. He lifted the hood and a few seconds later tossed the container in the ditch.

  That’ll buy us some time, but it ain’t enough. Once we’re on the island, we won’t need money anymore. In a world without money, I’ll be a model citizen, he said and laughed.

  The gas station door swung open, and the bald man shuffled to the car and drove off.

  You stay here, Clay’s father told him. He went in, his right hand in his pocket.

  Clay’s bladder hurt. He yawned and his thoughts moved like feet through mud.

  He lifted the door handle and climbed down, went to the glass door and pulled it open.

  His father and the wide-bellied clerk — his nose a fat thumb and his mustache like a dead mouse — were staring at him. The clerk’s right eyelid twitched as if to jump off his face. Clay’s father was pointing a small pistol, and Clay suddenly knew his mother had no idea where he was.

  What’s up? his father asked.

  I’m hungry.

  His father reached down and peeled a bag of salt and vinegar chips off a metal clip.

  Go eat these.

  Clay returned to the truck. He undid his pants and peed against the tire. He got in, and as soon as he opened the bag, saliva flooded his mouth.

  His father jogged back and swung open the door and jumped inside, throwing five containers of oil on the seat between them. He jammed the gearshift, and they sped off, the engine knocking with the sound of a hammer on stone.

  Goddamn it. I knew I shouldn’t of trusted this thing.

  He swung onto the highway and accelerated.

  This seems like a safe speed, he told Clay. Next major turnoff and we find a Greyhound station and get tickets to Atlanta.

  Blue and red strobes lit up the night behind them.

  Motherfucker, his father said and stomped on the gas. The knocking got so loud the truck shook.

  Over the next rise, two police cars came into view, blocking the highway, officers waving other vehicles to the shoulder.

  I’m sorry, son, his father said, slowing down. I’m so goddamn sorry. But you know me now. That’s the reason I did this. No boy should grow up knowing nothing about his father.

  The truck was barely moving. The officers stood, black guns aimed. The engine tapped, and the seat springs creaked as his father looked around.

  Roll down your window, son.

  The knob kept slipping from Clay’s palm. The glass squeaked. His father had lowered his and put both hands on the wheel. They came to a stop.

  My hands are on the wheel, he yelled. I ain’t resisting.

  The door opened, and he got out as men shouted. The lights surrounded him like hovering alien eyes. His arms were behind his back. Handcuffs clicked.

  Not in front of my son, he shouted. Goddamn you.

  A beam flashed over his strong, tear-streaked face.

  Clay became more observant. What people did and did not say had consequences. Stories were building even when he didn’t know it. Neighbors watched. Kids at school repeated their parents’ gossip about his criminal father and the kidnapping. His mother never spoke of what happened. She just hugged him longer than usual and let him go.

  As the years passed, he thought often of the islands off the coast of Georgia. He would never wear shoes. He would wade in the shallow water, digging up clams or catching fish in his hands. And then he’d remember the drive with his father. They could have abandoned the truck on a back road and walked through the forest. They didn’t need to hold up the store.

  At school, Clay realized that what he liked in books — a simple life in the wild, the treks of Jack London — didn’t appeal to his peers, that his disregard for fashion, gossip, and rivalries made him a liability. He studied them, their talk the chirping of a different species, and they shied away. No one in his home spoke more than to communicate basic needs. His mother read all day, and he called her Elle because her parents did. Occasionally, she sang, Alouette, gentille alouette … alouette, je te plumerai, and when he asked what the words meant, she said she didn’t know.

  From his mother’s second cousins — all at least ten years older than Clay — he learned to shoot. They taught him with a BB gun, setting up targets or playing war games in the forest, once coming upon a Christmas tree dumped in the ditch, the decorations still on it. They attached them to their shirts and hid, hunting each other.

  That fall, he killed his first buck, butchered it at their camp in the shelter of a stony incline, and they cooked the pieces over the fire, rubbing chunks with handfuls of Morton salt.

  Billy, the oldest cousin — square built, his big jaw going soft — was Clay’s mother’s age.

  Even at thirteen, he said, your mother was the hottest thing in town. I saw her. She was just like a woman. Everything. The ass. The tits. It was wicked crazy. I swear only the thought of jail kept men away. But your father knew if he waited until she was legal, she’d belong to someone else. You ever hear of a catch-22?

  Yeah, Clay said, resenting his cousins. The four of them clutched their beers, grinning and shaking their heads as they remembered his mother’s glory days.

  That’s what it was, Billy said. You break the law or you lose the woman. Nothing in between except vain hope.

  He adjusted his chew with his tongue and spat into the fire.

  In Boston, your father had to go underground. He’d have gone straight if she wasn’t underage. You get me?

  Billy glanced around, and the others nodded.

  Your father was the best mechanic any of us ever seen. We thought he’d have his own shop or he’d be one of those Formula One hotshots. But because of your mother, he was a criminal. He did what he did to give you and Elle a good life. There ain’t nobody in this town who was pulling in more or working harder or smarter. But somebody
ratted him out, and ten years was more than she could wait. He got out on parole after seven for good behavior, but seven inside and all that heartbreak, it changes a man. The father you met wasn’t the man we knew.

  What about his family? Clay asked, bracing himself against more anger and humiliation.

  Your father was in a foster home. His people are from the north, somewhere near Frenchville, up in Aroostook. We don’t know a thing about them.

  Clay glared at the fire, its light aching in the nerves of his eyes.

  Each weekend, he hunted, packing the freezer with game meat that Fred gave away as quickly as he bought Styrofoam trays of chicken and sausage. Fred warned him to hunt with his cousins, but Clay went alone. He read the forest. Other hunters waited close to the road, cracking beer after beer. He prowled, gliding onto a rock where he knew the buck would pass below a ridge. He wasn’t quick to shoot. The bucks died before they’d finished startling.

  Often, he just lay beneath the trees as leaves fell.

  Control, he decided, was the line an individual drew within himself to limit the pleasure of release. His father took a thirteen-year-old and ruined his life. Clay forgave him and would go now to those islands and live off the bounty of the ocean. But he didn’t want to be his father. If Clem hadn’t panicked at the knocking engine, they’d be on that unspoiled coast.

  Fred wanted to move somewhere urban. The computer industry was booming, Boston the Silicon Valley of the east. He was ready to earn more, buy a bigger house, and have children of his own. He asked Elle to read less and consider their future. His voice filtered through the heating vents and reached Clay’s bed. She said almost nothing.

  The week after Clay’s sixteenth birthday, the day he got his license, he came home just as the police were leaving. Fred wouldn’t say why they’d been there. Through the wall, his voice frantically rationalized against Elle’s silence: he would soon be forty and was tired of people laughing behind his back.

  The sun was on the horizon when Clay left the house with his gun and walked through the forest. The leaves were damp and quiet underfoot, and he paused, watching the sky darken. He had no reason to be out. Deer season was over.