Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

  Bob brought his rough hand to his forehead and turned away from me. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or just hiding from us.

  Again I found myself in the middle of Culler’s Lake, crying out. Wait for me! Wait for me! But this time, as the memory echoed through me, I finally understood that I had been utterly irrelevant to Jay and Robbie. They were never going to wait for me. In my heart, I had known it since my eighteenth birthday, but I couldn’t admit it. I hadn’t come to the Blisses’ to protect Ceola; I’d come for revenge.

  I stood up abruptly. “I should go,” I said. Bob still had his back to me. Margery nodded and gave me a smile so queasy, so pained I will never forget it. It was horror and pleasure all in one. For a moment, I saw myself in her, and my heart sank.

  I crossed the room toward the front door. Before I reached for the knob, something on the stairs caught my eye. Sitting on the top stair, her hands gripping the wood plank beneath her, was Ceola.

  To this day, I’ve never recovered from the look on her face. It was dark, petulant, and accusatory, but it wasn’t a childish look. It couldn’t be easily dismissed. She saw through me. We both knew I had just set something horrible in motion. She rose and started down the stairs, her eyes fixed on me. I fled.

  The door to Jay’s lair was ajar, and I gently pushed it open. Despite the glow of sunshine through the windows, the shaded lamp in the corner was on. Jay was curled up on his cot like a boy, fast asleep. His blond hair was swept forward across his forehead, and his lidded eyes twitched when I came close. I sat near his feet and watched him for a few minutes. I wondered what he was dreaming about. The war? Robbie? Lily? Ceola and me?

  Peeking out from under the bed, I saw the Ferragamos, one of which was on its side, the sole turned toward me. The initials FL L were visible. What did that mean? Was it a person? Who was FL, and why did she or—I had to consider this possibility—he mark the shoes left and right? Perhaps I was correct: the shoes belonged to someone in show business. Teddie? George? But none of the initials matched.

  Jay stirred, and I placed my hand on his leg and shook him lightly. He jerked awake and propped himself up on his elbows. “What are you doing here?” he asked, wiping the bleariness from his eyes.

  I had planned to be angry with him, to demand the truth or else, but I couldn’t summon the energy. Already, my anger had begun to collapse in on itself. Despite all I knew, when I was with him, when I could see him and touch him, I was still in love with him. I could only hate the idea of him, not the man himself. I never was a coldhearted person, despite what Ceola thought.

  “I’ve been to DC,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t been honest with me.”

  “No.”

  “I know what you are. I know what you did there. I know Lily is alive and well. I met her, and she told me how you helped her.”

  Jay was sitting up now. He blinked several times, astonished but calm. “So you know,” he said.

  “I went to Croc’s. I met Teddie and Henry and a fellow named Tim. Billy Witherspoon showed up with a bunch of sailors and tore the place apart. He threw me against a wall and threatened me with a knife.” I didn’t want to tell him about my ripped dress or what Billy had said to me.

  “Are you all right? You look all right.”

  “Nothing that won’t heal.” I kept my tone flat.

  “How did you find Croc’s?”

  “I snooped around your room and found the first page of the letter Lily wrote to you, the second page of which you oh-so-cleverly tried to pass off as a clue …” When he didn’t respond, I asked, “Jay, why did you do it? Why did you lie to us?”

  “For Cee.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It was my way of trying to explain it.”

  “What?”

  “Everything. The truth. But it was useless.”

  “The truth about what?”

  Jay frowned and said nothing. I wanted to grab him and shake him. I wanted to slap him and pull his hair. I remembered my dream of him, my blows bouncing off him as if he were made of hard rubber. I want him to just say it—whatever it was. After all, didn’t I deserve the truth?

  “Who’s in those photos, if it’s not Lily?”

  “A friend.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Terry Trober—but in that outfit, he was Foxy Loxie.”

  I laughed. Jay remained grim.

  “He died in London, during a bomb raid,” he continued. “The photos are of his body.”

  “The shoes are his,” I said. “F for Foxy and L for Loxie. He was a performer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like Teddie.”

  “Much better than Teddie.”

  I put my hands together. Using my powers of deduction had given me a rush. “I still don’t understand why you made up a fake story to fit the photographs. What was the point?”

  “Boredom.”

  I leaned toward him and took his hand in mine. Looking in his eyes, his irises like rings of cool blue neon, I said, “I don’t believe you. It’s more than that.”

  There was a flicker, a brief acknowledgment, and then a door, imperceptible but instantly recognizable, slammed shut, like a secret hatch snapping back into place in one of Ceola’s detective mysteries. He wasn’t going to tell me any more. He didn’t trust me.

  I let his hand go and rose to my feet. “I’ve just come from the Blisses’. I told them about you and about the sort of people you cavorted with in DC. I told them about what happened to me. I thought they should know. They need to protect Ceola from you.”

  Jay lurched forward, his right arm back, his chest forward, as if he were going to hit me. “Why would you—?”

  I steadied myself against the picnic table; a stack of books toppled to the floor.

  “How could you do that to her?” he shouted. “Bob Bliss is a drunk and a goddamn bastard. He sent his only son off to war because he was in love with me. And he beats Cee. Who’s going to protect her from him now?”

  I just stood there, speechless.

  “You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?” he continued. “You’ve been blind from the beginning. When you look at Cee or me or anyone, all you see is what you want. But do you even know what that is, what you really want?”

  I tried to speak.

  “You want someone to fuck you. You want someone to end the pretense. Well, I’m not that guy, Bunny. I’ll never be that guy. So just move on and leave me the hell alone.”

  With that, he spun around and was out the door.

  I slumped on the edge of the picnic table and stared at the books scattered across the floor. On a scrap of paper beside one of the books was the encryption—XF XJMM LFFQ B TFDSFU. “WE WILL KEEP A SECRET.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself and wept.

  I heard a noise behind me. Letitia was there, her shotgun wedged in her armpit, aimed at me, her blue-veined claw on the trigger. I jumped to my feet and backed away from her, wiping tears from my face, tucking away my self-pity like a dirty handkerchief. Her thin jaw was set and her eyes furious black slits. She came forward, the heavy shotgun swaying unsteadily. “Where is he? Tell me. Tell me.”

  “He went to the Bliss farm, I think. He thinks Ceola’s in danger.”

  “Why can’t he leave those people alone?”

  She lowered the gun, and I said, “Do you know about him? What he is?”

  She nodded her head. “I know him best.”

  “Do you approve?”

  “What does it matter if I approve? He’s all I have.” At that, she turned her back to me, said, “Get out,” and left the room.

  I was alone again. I wanted to scream and shatter the conservatory, but I wasn’t going to indulge myself. I wasn’t going to lose control. Instead I just sat there, forcing my guilt back into the corners of the room, back under the bed, back in the trunk, trying to resist the terrible revelation about to surface …

  The engine of a
car started, shaking me from my stupor. I was confused. I thought Jay had taken his grandmother’s car. I went to the door and flung it open. Letitia was driving away in the station wagon. My mother’s Oldsmobile was missing. Jay had stolen it.

  19

  CEOLA

  Change, it seems to me, happens in one of two ways, Robbie. Usually it just inches along, visible only in the proverbial rearview mirror. Most things in the world change this way. Massive glaciers, grinding away, sculpt entire regions. Rivers hollow out canyons over thousands of years. The Appalachians, once as tall and impressive as the Rockies, so I’m told, crumble into the mossy, tree-covered slopes we grew up on. Humans grow taller and sturdier—and plumper!—than their ancestors. The low doorframes in colonial homes remind us a smaller, more compact people lived here before us.

  But in some cases, change happens, well—just like that. A tree is struck by lightning and split in two. A house buckles and slides into a sinkhole. A man is vaporized by a bomb. There, and then not there. Only violence can bring about this sort of change. Maybe that explains why Jay turned on Terry Trober and beat him. He had reached the point at which anger had to flow out, not in. It was a force of Nature, a change that would lead him to me, to Mama and Papa, to his own fate.

  When I made it back to the house after leaving Jay, it was well past midnight. Papa was passed out, snoring up a storm in the guest bedroom, and Mama was in the kitchen, sipping some cold coffee, reading the Bible. When she saw me, she started in on me. Who did I think I was? How could I be so thoughtless, so cruel? She said they’d been searching high and low for me, that Papa went over to the Greenwood place two or three times, but no one would come to the door. He even went to the police and reported me as a missing person. Later I discovered that wasn’t true. He had been too drunk and embarrassed to go to the authorities. Mama sent me to bed and told me they’d discuss a suitable punishment for me when Papa was awake.

  The next morning, I woke up to Mrs. Prescott’s Olds pulling into the driveway, its long green hood and polished chrome reflecting the sunshine. I crept to the top of the stairs and listened to Bunny betray Jay and me. I heard every coldhearted word of it, but I was too scared, too speechless to stop it. I just sat there, biting my lower lip, feeling like a coward. When she left, she saw me, and I gave her the meanest eyeball I could. I wanted to run her over with the car, or push her off a cliff, anything gruesome. Maybe a pit of vipers or an iron maiden or some clever deathtrap from one of your magazines. But as much as I wanted revenge, my experience with Jay had made me doubt him too. I didn’t know what to believe.

  After Bunny was gone, Papa found me and dragged me downstairs by my arm. He started cursing me, calling me “stupid girl” and “little slut.” I braced myself, flattening my spine against the wall, turning my head away from him, hoping he would hit me so it would end. Mama just stood stock-still, her eyes hot and red like coal embers.

  “What have you done?” Papa demanded. “You were with him after we told you not to be. You encouraged him. You know what he did to Robbie. How could you, Cee? How could you be so goddamned stupid?”

  He didn’t hit me. Instead he went on, threatening me and shaming me until he ran out of things to say and left the house.

  I wanted to hide. I wanted to escape from the room and the house. I took a step, but Mama caught me by the arm and bent over me. All I could see was her skin drawn tight over her cheekbones, her thin, mouse-fur eyebrows, and the deep creases lining her mouth. It was an old woman’s face, though she wasn’t even fifty.

  As she leaned in closer, the locket she’d worn since I could remember slid out of the top of her dress and dangled in front of me. When I was a little girl, she’d let me hold it and open it. Inside, there were baby photos of you and me. “That’s you,” she’d said. “Just a little thing. You were such a happy baby. You were both happy babies.” I wanted to grab the locket right then and yank it away from her.

  “Ceola Elizabeth,” she said, pressing her fingers into the fleshy part of my forearm and gritting her teeth like a wild animal. “It’s a terrible thing to disappoint your father. It’s ugly and selfish.”

  I shook her grip and made a beeline for your room.

  As always, everything was just so. The red cowboys on the wallpaper. The beat-up dresser. The twin beds draped with those thin, threadbare bedspreads. The keepsakes. Postcards from the beach. Academic awards. Photos of friends. It was a shrine to Mama’s idea of who you were, Robbie, and I tell you, I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to set fire to it and watch her scream. It’s not him, I would tell her. Don’t be sad. There’s no reason to be. I’m burning a lie. Deep in the drawers, under his underwear, between the pages of detective magazines, that’s where you’ll find the real Robbie, lusting after handsome boys and caught up in the intrigues of his own imagination. That’s him, Mama.

  I approached your bed and pulled back the dusty linens. I paused and stared at the place where you had slept. I took off my shoes and got in, covering my head with the bedspread.

  I dreamed of you again. You were there, sitting on the edge of your bed, writing as you used to do. I didn’t know why, but I was worried about you, worried that something in the house, some unknowable something, was after you; we needed to leave. I grabbed your arm, and we began searching for a way out, but our house had grown. Every door opened to another hallway, endless. Then, just like that, we were outside, lost in the maze of a fairy-tale forest with large mushrooms and silver flowers and insects the size of dogs. As the dream went on, I grew more and more frustrated. And then you stopped dead in your tracks. You heard something, heard it coming for you. I looked up at you and—

  I woke to the sound of wheels crunching in the gravel. I went to the window and again saw the Olds as it came to a stop around the edge of the house, just out of sight. Had Bunny come back for round two? I heard a car door open and close, then voices. Papa was shouting. I heard another voice, not Bunny’s, a voice that first sounded angry, then, after a couple of words, was frightened like a whipped dog.

  A cry split the air, rattling the panes of the dormer windows—or at least that’s how it seemed. I forced the window open. I couldn’t see a soul—they were toward the front of the house—but I heard the second voice clear as a bell.

  “You sent him to die! How could you?”

  It was Jay. I froze for a second, trying to think what to do.

  I heard another cry and bolted from the room, flinging the door open so the knob banged the wall, jangling the hardware loose. Mama was standing at the bottom of the stairs, observing the scene out front through the screen door. She spun around and blocked my exit. “You’re not going out there. Stay in your room.” I gave her a furious look and dashed down the stairs and out the back door. “Don’t you dare!” she screamed like a banshee. “Come back here, Ceola! Don’t go out there!”

  I jumped from the top step of the porch to the ground but lost my footing and fell. I rolled on the dry grass and got up again. The voices were louder and clearer now, but I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. My anger was so deep, so tangled around the roots of my soul that I didn’t understand what I was doing. I scrambled across the yard, grabbed a rusty clothesline pole, swung my body in the right direction, and rounded the edge of the house. My heart was in my throat, and my body—so slim and boyish then—felt like a bullet whizzing through the air toward the two of them.

  Jay crouched near Papa’s most recent sapling ditch, his back toward Papa, head tucked under his arms. Papa towered over him, the trench shovel he used for planting cocked over his right shoulder. The red blade whipped through the air like a catapult released from its catch and made contact with the center of Jay’s back. Thunk. Jay moaned and curled tighter into himself. Again there was red against the blue sky, just a flicker, and then the flat of the blade connected with Jay’s shoulder and his neck. Thunk.

  I barreled toward Papa and threw my arms around his waist, trying to pull him away. He jabbed his elb
ow at me, hitting my cheekbone hard. I tumbled to the ground.

  Papa kept on striking Jay from the side, Lou Gehrig with a shovel, the blows coming faster and harder. Jay kept trying to stand, like he wanted to open himself up, like he wanted to be an easier target. I failed to find my feet and, rolling to my side, became aware of another car in the driveway. The station wagon.

  Standing straighter, Jay took a few steps forward. Thunk. The shovel caught the side of his head, and he twisted toward me, his arms swinging out like a ballerina going into a spin. His eyes were so sad and blurry. The next blow came, and it threw him off-balance. He stumbled sideways to the edge of the hole Papa had been digging.

  I forced myself up and belted out, “Stop! Papa, stop!”

  Over my shoulder, I was aware of movement. The glint of metal. I heard Mama scream from the front porch, “She’s got a gun!”

  Behind me, about twenty feet away, Letitia stood, her raggedy housecoat hanging off one shoulder and her shotgun aimed at us, the end of its barrel making little shaky circles in the air. Her face was horrible, like a bull lowering its head. “Move out of the way,” she said to me. “Move!”

  I recalled her words from the night before. No more disgrace, Jay. Everyone was attacking him; everyone wanted to tear him to bits.

  I moved quick as I could—toward him, not away—thinking I could knock him out of danger. But Letitia wasn’t aiming at him, so when I stepped out of her sightline, she fired. There was a loud pop. I planted my feet so I wouldn’t fall over.

  The shovel fell to the ground with a clunk.

  I turned again. Jay was in front of Papa and then against him. Papa held him from behind, his hands under his armpits. The fabric of Jay’s shirt was shredded on the left side, near his rib cage. His lips were lined with red, like he’d been eating cherry pie, and his eyes flickered with pain. Papa supported him for a second and then released him, refusing to help him.

  Jay hit the ground and rolled over the hole Papa had been digging, his face away from me. His left foot twitched. I heard him moan. Letitia lowered the shotgun, her eyes as large as spotlights and her boney body shaking like a skeleton on a string. Papa moved past me and snatched the gun from her.