Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  He went back to the house and crouched outside Fred and Elle’s room. Fred’s back was to the window as she lay in her bathrobe, a book in her hands.

  Fred began to undress. The knobs of his spine ran in a long mongrel curve to his recessed buttocks and the bulge of scrotum. He took Elle’s book and put it aside, opened her bathrobe and her legs. Her breasts shone briefly, the moonlike heart clear.

  Clay put the rifle to his shoulder. Fred’s hips were pumping — the pathetic, minute, selfish movement of a dog on a leg or an impatient masturbatory hand. Fred was staring down at Elle’s body, and she turned her head to keep his hair out of her eyes. Clay sighted at his jaw. The bullet would pop its hinges so that it hung like a broken Halloween mask. Would his mother show horror or persist in her mysterious calm?

  Snow began to flurry, a few flakes melting against the hot skin of Clay’s neck. Resisting this violent urge, he felt powerful. His rage lived in his hand, in his finger, and then, like spilled gunpowder beneath a match, it flashed into energy and flowed back through his veins.

  By the next morning, eight inches of snow had fallen, and Fred rushed around outside, staggering and slipping like a man lost in a blizzard, dumping their possessions in the yard. Family and neighbors came by to take things as he hurried about the house with the slack, rapid motion of a marionette.

  He asked Clay to sit down.

  Your father is getting out. He’s been sending you letters for years. Now he’s sent us a letter saying he knows we’ve been keeping his letters. It could be a threat.

  Clay’s mother sat, her arms loosely crossed. Clay had no idea what she believed or wanted, or whether she was happy.

  Fred finished spilling their possessions into the yard. He packed what remained into a small U-Haul and sold the car for next to nothing at a nearby garage.

  Clay loaded his backpack and walked through the house. There were tiny dents in the carpet where furniture had been: six round circles for the couch, four from most other objects, and a faint blackening of the linoleum and carpet at the doorways where people had passed.

  Elle’s father dropped by to speak to Fred. He held a cane, his hip broken the year before.

  I have a baby brother in Louisiana, down in Lake Charles. I called him. He said he’d put you up if you don’t know where to go.

  Fred’s eyes bulged, congealed with terror. He’d left Maine only for a few seminars in Boston. Louisiana was warm and far away, and had always been somewhere in his consciousness, another French part of America with distant relatives. He wrote down the address.

  With each mile, the snow waned, thinning at the same rate as Maine’s forest. By the time they saw New York Welcomes You, the gritty ice along the edge of the highway revealed the shredded rinds of semi tires.

  The father Clay barely knew had set the trajectory of his life. He pictured that broad-shouldered man striding out of prison, determined to hunt for his son across the continent.

  That night, he and his mother and Fred slept in a cheap motel, in beds hardly wider than their road atlas. They rose just before dawn to begin driving again.

  As they continued down Interstate 81 to 77, through the leafless Virginia hills into North Carolina and then Georgia on 85, the world forgot winter.

  At a rest stop, Fred came out of the bathroom and froze. Elle had changed into a T-shirt and shorts. In the South, there would be no season without tattoos.

  Minutes from Lake Charles, Elle spoke for the first time that day.

  I can’t believe you of all people would want to stay with Uncle Demetrie. Pappy used to joke that his little brother lived in a henhouse down in old Lac Charles.

  Fred didn’t reply, the inside of his lip between his teeth. Often, after bad days at work, he’d complained about his stomach or mouth cankers.

  Unlike the plantation-style buildings on the street, Demetrie’s home was a composite structure inside an undergrowth of ferns and trees. The doorbell played the intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Demetrie answered, his face dark-complected and proportionate, like a wood carving with a bit of stubble.

  He looked at each of them and then said to Elle, It’s pretty much what your pappy described, huh? Come on in.

  He led them down a corridor, part of an addition built around the wooden siding of what had clearly been the outside wall of a real henhouse. They came into a room with a few low plush couches and wall shelves of LPs. The only windows were four bubbled skylights overhung with trees. The space felt like the inner chamber of a pyramid.

  Why were you living in a henhouse? Fred asked.

  I had some questions, Demetrie said, chin to his neck as if suffering from whiplash, his movements stiff and deliberate. I can’t say it was anything mighty, but I wanted to be alone. Then I won the lottery, and I had all the additions built.

  If it’s all right with you, Fred told him, maybe Clay can stay here for a few days. Elle and I will find a motel. Once we get our own place, Clay can move back with us.

  Demetrie agreed, and as soon as Fred and Elle left, he showed Clay to his room. The ceiling was low, the vertical planks of the walls sanded and stained, reminding Clay of a manger — Part of the original structure, Demetrie said, and explained that the property had once been the gardens of a larger home. He’d renovated and expanded the henhouse, bought the land, fenced it, and planted the jungle.

  Demetrie’s life, though strange, seemed good. He was only thirty-eight, the youngest of thirteen children — Of my brood, he told Clay — and each morning, he climbed out of bed, put an album on the turntable, and blasted Motörhead or Iron Maiden as he fried eggs, nodding stiffly in rhythm.

  A man, Demetrie said, has got to live by his standards, even if it means seeming crazy. If you don’t, you end up hating yourself. People just do the same things and say the same things, and forget they said them yesterday. I woke up one day and was tired of listening to all that.

  Why do you like this music? Clay asked.

  It’s angry. It’s telling the truth. There will come a time when people will think it’s obvious. But it wasn’t. It isn’t. Anyway, I don’t need the message anymore. It just gives me comfort. That’s all.

  Because Clay had been raised by untalkative parents, Demetrie’s stolid demeanor seemed normal. Together, long after the grungy sky had faded behind the leaf-strewn skylight, they stayed up, flopped on the couches inside the Stonehenge of speaker cabinets, reading heavy metal biographies to the hushed thunder of music.

  One afternoon, Demetrie took Clay to a crawfish shack and, while waiting at a red light, got out of his pickup and stood in the street to take off his jean jacket. Behind him, a Mercedes-load of teenage girls pointed and laughed. Clay slid down in his seat.

  Later, over the platter of crawfish, he asked Demetrie if he was happy.

  I don’t know exactly what to say. I do what I want. I’ve been asked why I left Maine and the family. I wasn’t one of them, and they couldn’t take it. They were waiting for me to change.

  So what matters then?

  I gave that question lots of thought. That’s why I was in the coop. It’s funny letting go. It ain’t easy, but if you can do it, you can make a better life. I think your mother’s like me. She doesn’t want to be part of it all. She won’t even talk about it. Imagine having everyone judge you for something that happened when you were a child. That was one hundred percent your father.

  My father? You knew him?

  We were in school together. Both of us dropped out about the same time. It ain’t bad to strike out on your own. Only problem is there’s this fragile thing in us, like an egg, and we all think it won’t break. I don’t know if he was bad the way people saw him. He was angry, and what he should have been protecting he destroyed. He probably thought he wanted it that way.

  That evening, Clay wandered the flat boggy town, trying to exhaust the restlessness and anger that rose
in him for no clear reason. Unsure of the person he’d be here, he walked street after street, some with large old homes overhung with immense trees, others with boxy houses, barred windows, small fenced-in yards, and barking dogs rushing the metal links. He spoke with the fishermen by the lake and listened to their stories, realizing that unfairness had no limits; it permeated all things, like decay.

  When he decided to get a job, Demetrie told him he knew someone who hired for standby shifts at the docks. Demetrie made Clay the necessary fake ID, taking a small laminating machine from a drawer.

  I once thought I’d be an artist, he admitted, but I discovered I didn’t like artists.

  The man who hired Clay was tall and rawboned with silver temples, and avoided eye contact as he spoke in a gravely whisper. He said that a lot of the union guys wanted time off for Christmas and New Year’s.

  The work, heaving hundred-pound bags of rice from trucks onto pallets, shocked Clay. His hands chafed through borrowed gloves, blisters forming and bursting.

  The older men had gnarled arms that looked harder than muscle. They noticed Clay’s determination and nodded when he didn’t stop after tearing off a fingernail. The pain mirrored the pleasure he felt at overcoming weakness.

  In the weeks that followed, he grew stronger, downing containers of potato salad and strawberry yogurt, grilled Cornish hens from oven bags, two at a sitting, and granola bars between pallets. His fingertips healed, a shiny blaze of scar on each one.

  The morning that Fred and Elle picked up Clay and took him to visit the temporary place they’d found, they were driving a rattling Toyota sedan. Fred told Clay that once he had a job, they would move somewhere bigger and sign a lease.

  When Clay saw the carriage house, he knew he’d be spending most of his time with Demetrie. Though his mother didn’t appear concerned about the accommodations, Fred was tense and focused, his expression that of someone forcing himself through a choice he’d made.

  The boy was more or less Clay’s size and build, though the reflection of the sky and pecan tree on the window softened his traits, like a double exposure. Clay pretended he didn’t notice he was being observed from the edge of the drapes. After a few days, he looked at the boy straight on, letting him know he’d been seen.

  And then, at the lake with the fishermen, he caught the boy watching him, on his rollerblades with his friends, clearly confused, as if Clay’s presence didn’t make sense.

  When school started, they were in the same homeroom, and the students had to stand and introduce themselves. The boy’s name was Justin, and he was excessively polite with teachers, a little stern otherwise, and sat in the second row.

  Demetrie was right. People were predictable, even controllable, but only if the puppet master — Demetrie told him — could control himself and pay attention. Though Clay had never been at ease in school, he decided he could master the situation.

  So he took down Dylan on the basketball court, whispered inventions into Melody’s ear, and cowed Dylan in the hallway, aware that Justin was watching. For all Justin’s robotic discipline — his spine straight in class, his precision in sports — he wobbled when Clay passed. Then, as Clay expected, Justin began to walk home with him.

  Clay chose his words carefully, calling Dylan soft, mocking the lunches his mother packed him, as Justin flinched. And later, after they’d become friends, Clay delivered his judgment on Justin’s bedroom. He wanted it all — the model planes and comics and books — and his envy infuriated his voice.

  Afraid he’d been too severe, he rapped his knuckles against the army recruitment poster — a soldier stalking through the forest, face painted in camouflage — and let Justin tell him about his family’s war history. Alternating between harshness and praise gave better results than Clay could have planned. Feeling in control was addictive. At times, though, he wished they could have met as boys and shared Justin’s innocence, his sense of belonging. He thought of his own father, the impression he had that his relatives weren’t fully American and had yet to shed a trace of their French pasts.

  When Fred left, Clay was happy to see him go, but he hated the idea of Justin watching his family fall apart and the words being spoken in that big house. Whenever Justin’s parents passed Clay, they said hello but were slow to smile, clearly assessing a threat.

  Only Melody mocked the moralism in Lake Charles. She’d slipped a note into his locker telling him to meet her thirty minutes after school, and so he walked a bit with Justin, ditched him, and found her on the street corner she’d named. As they wandered, she asked about his family, and when he gave brief, hesitant answers, she told him about how her parents hadn’t let her be a cheerleader because it was prideful. She asked why, if God was love, there were so many rules. She said her parents were real estate agents who, when drawing no lines at making a sale, quoted Jesus: Give unto Caesar …

  Clay and Melody met again the next day, and she took him to her favorite place, an old Buick in the woods overlooking a bayou. Its paint was flaking off, and she used the windshield’s net of broken glass as a seatback, stretching her legs on the hood.

  They sat side by side. A silver fish jumped three times, and dozens of long, tubular gars glided past, their small, prehistoric beaks skimming the surface.

  Melody took Clay’s big hand and traced its scars. She kissed him, pulling herself close. Her dark hair was unexpectedly fine, airy against his fingers, and her skin made him self-conscious about the roughness of his body.

  In their pauses, she asked questions. Without planning to, he told her about the time he was kidnapped — that autumn afternoon in the battered truck, his father’s desperation and lack of control — and he described the islands off the Georgia coast.

  She kissed him again, and he held her breasts as she moved her tongue along his teeth and sucked on his bottom lip. Then she lay against him as he reclined on the windshield. The sun was low over the forest, illuminating the yellow water and the fish below.

  Do you respect me? she asked. It’s just — I know what you heard from Dylan.

  No one has any business judging you, he said.

  He didn’t have the courage to tell her she was the first girl he’d kissed, that in his old school he’d been a loner.

  Clay resented Justin: the way he and his father tramped through the forest murmuring as if the deer wouldn’t hear, or introduced him ceremoniously to the gun room next to their garage. His father taught them how to dismantle an M16, and they stood around the assault rifle with the demeanor of men conducting an autopsy. The bones of their hands seemed to click.

  To get through school, he restrained himself daily, taming his impulses even as his frustration at his life — its constraints and the roles he had to play to be accepted — grew into rage. When he and Justin ran together, Clay craved obstacles, not the dutiful pounding of asphalt but the precise step through roots and stone.

  He found release with Melody, at her house before her parents got home. All day, he thought about those thirty minutes on a blanket on the floor for silence, the window open so he could escape. Afterward, soaked in sweat, they lay watching the clock.

  It was at the Buick that she told him she was two weeks late. She cried as he held her, his arms an enclosure in which she moved, testing its strength.

  At the docks, Clay stood in for a half-shift, inexhaustible, his shoulders burning as he swung sacks of rice like pillows.

  He finished at midnight and walked. High, thin clouds blew in, lit by the red flashing lights of radio towers and the distant sulfuric glow of the refineries. His gaze roved to find one thing at which to aim. He passed the cemetery. Across it, Broad Street glowed like a frontier. To the north, beyond Interstate 10, a train chugged, blaring its horn, coming out of Texas.

  He made his way to the tracks. The moon was up, the wind steady from the gulf, and tatters of newspaper fluttered in the grass. He pictured himself cr
ouching on the roof of the train, instantly an outlaw as he rushed into an unknown landscape. He’d have that kind of courage once he knew what he wanted.

  When he got home, someone was playing guitar as Demetrie sang “Patience.” By the entrance, a pair of tooled cowboy boots were toed in next to Demetrie’s black ones. Fingers squeaked on strings.

  In the living room, Demetrie sat next to a wiry man with a mustache shaved to a faint line and rings in both ears. He wore a sleeveless undershirt, a tattoo on each biceps: a yin-yang and the earth with the Americas showing. He stopped playing.

  Hey, Clay, Demetrie said. This is Nash.

  Nice duet.

  Hi, Clay. Nash shook his hand.

  Clay, Demetrie said, his tone grave. There’s something I got to tell you.

  Nash lit a cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled. He raised his eyebrows to say, Don’t mind me.

  Your father called. He’s in Boston, but he wants to come here.

  Clay interlaced his fingers behind his head and released them.

  How did he sound?

  About as you would expect after so long in prison. But he wants to know his only son. He asked me to arrange a meeting.

  Yeah, Clay murmured. Yeah, I want to meet him.

  He went to the door, intending to wander some more, but glanced back. Nash was looking off, legs crossed and one elbow propped on his knees as he smoked. For once, Demetrie had lost his impassivity, his face furrowed and sad.

  The flea market tables held obsolete electronics and clothes, and the sellers wore outmoded dress, as if modeling their wares — a mix of plaid, paisley, bolo ties, and denim.

  Clay stood before a heap of books edged or speckled with mildew, their spines cracking when he opened them. The seller had a blue jay feather in a mesh hat and a curved nose as spotted as a newt. He nudged a book in Clay’s direction, saying, This one’s good. See here. It’s a national best-seller.