by PW Cooper
“Mom's a whore, Jeff.” Alice turned her head quizzically, her lips curling. “You didn't know?”
“Just because she's... been with... a lot of guys, that doesn't mean-”
Alice laughed. “No, Jeff, she's a whore because she takes money for sex.” It had been a long time since Jeffrey had heard his sister laugh. It was an unfamiliar sound, ringing in the old church building like the cawing of some dark-feathered carrion bird. This wasn't the cowed woman he'd seen in the hotel, neither was it the girl he'd grown up with. This was a new Alice, as bitter and cold and hard as the stone church in which they sat, just as ancient somehow.
Jeffrey leaned back in the pew. He looked up at the statue above him: the Virgin Mary. The marble woman held an infant in her arms. Her stone drapery flowed like frozen water. He had a sudden horrid image of Mike's body in the gorge, freezing down there all winter long, slowly decaying in the snow.
They have not yet ruled out murder...
“Where did you think we came from?” Alice went on, “I mean, did you ever ask her who your father was? Any of our fathers?”
Jeffrey shook his head.
“That's because she didn't know, Jeff. They were just guys. She didn't care, I doubt she even remembers.” Alice leaned towards him, her small bruised fingers wrapping around the pew in front of her. “We're nothing to her.”
“You don't know that.” His voice echoed sadly in the dark building.
“Yes I do. And you do too.” Alice got up and walked back out into the sunlight, leaving Jeffrey alone inside with the Virgin Mother.
* * *
6:01 pm, July 2nd, 2002
“Kinda dry, isn't it?”
“Mine's alright.” Alice dabbed the strip of chicken in the pale yellow sauce and lifted it dripping to her lips. The meat was a dark red color, heavy with spices.
The whole restaurant suffocated in a dense aromatic haze. Jeffrey wanted to sneeze.
“Are you working?” she asked, licking her lips.
He nodded. “More or less. I mean... it's just road work.”
Alice shrugged. The tips of her fingers were oily. She licked them off one by one. “Better than nothing.”
“I guess.”
“Trust me,” she said, “it's better.”
Jeffrey shrugged.
She laughed, an awkward forced laugh. “Don't look so sad, Jeff. Things are gonna get better for us. Trust me.”
He forced a grin. There was a sickening emptiness in his gut. There was no reason for anything to get better. No matter how bad it got, it could always get worse.
* * *
3:57 am, July 3rd, 2002
Jeffrey was awakened from a terrible dream by the sound of the telephone ringing. He picked it up automatically, grateful to have escaped his dream. Something had been chasing him...
“Hello?” his voice cracked.
The numbers on the clock were burned red into the darkness of the room, digital scars burying their reflections behind the dust on the TV screen.
He could hear breathing on the other end of the line, a labored and dog-like panting. “Who is this?” he asked, sitting up against the headboard. He'd left the window open, and cool air blew through the hotel room.
“Did you touch her?” the horse voice moaned, desperately plaintive.
“Who is this?” Jeffrey asked again.
“It's Robert.” His brother-in-law's voice was faintly slurred. “Don't you know me?”
Jeffrey looked down at the receiver in his hand. The cool plastic was as white as polished bone in the dull moonlight. “Why are you calling me? It's the middle of the night.”
“What? Oh... You're right, aren't you? You're right. It's dark. I didn't think it was so late.” he laughed, “Or is it early, maybe? Is it day yet?”
Jeffrey licked his lips nervously. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what you did.”
“I didn't do anything.”
“You touched her. I know you did.”
“Robert, would you just...” Jeffrey thought of the marks on his sister's hands. He wasn't sure if he was afraid or angry. “Just leave me alone!”
“We're family, Jeff. Family should stick together.”
“Jesus.” He groaned, dragging the sheets up to his chin. “Are you drunk?”
“You're coming to dinner at Kim's house tomorrow night.... Tonight, I mean. Whatever. You're coming with Alice and Me.”
“I am?” He couldn't remember what time he'd gone to bed the night before.
“Yeah,” Robert's voice coiled, drawing back all its sneering potency, “You're fucking coming.”
And the line went dead.
Jeffrey sat in the darkness for a long moment, holding the lifeless telephone to his ear and listening to the hum of the dial tone. He imagined an immense beast spreading through the whole hotel, stretching electric fingers down copper wires and out beneath the rain-slicked highway outside, tying everything into an immensely complex knot.
He hung up the phone and tried, unsuccessfully, to get back to sleep.
* * *
7:28 am, July 3rd, 2002
Jeffrey looked at the yellow helmet in his hands. Town of Verden, the words were stenciled across the plastic in flat black. Stamped there like a brand, a mark of ownership. Verden owns you now, it said, owns you forever. Jeffrey bent his back to the shovel. Clean sweat ran down his face.
Ted Hemingway was similarly stamped. He stood beside a pile of gravel, leaning on his shovel as he looked at the mound of broken stone, as though considering its place in the universe. Ted's pants were pale with rock dust.
Jeffrey nodded at the other man, and he nodded back.
“You alright?” Ted asked, spitting a wad of brown saliva.
“Fine.”
“Didn't see you yesterday.”
“I talked to the supervisor already,” he said, brushing aside the implied question. Ted's tone had been curious rather than accusatory, but it still put up the hairs on the back of Jeffrey's neck. He didn't want to explain himself, didn't want to talk to anybody. All he could think about was the dinner. He wasn't prepared to see his mother again, never mind Robert. Whore, the word echoed in his skull. How could he not have known?
“None of my business.” Ted shrugged and picked up his feet. Gravel rained down off the tops of his boots.
* * *
6:13 pm, July 3rd, 2002
Jeffrey watched his mother eat.
“It's so nice to be together again,” she said. Her expression was unreadable, giving nothing away.
Alice smiled. “We're so glad to be home, Mom.” She put her hand on Robert's elbow, and he put his hand over hers. They looked like two people in love. It made Jeffrey feel sick, like he'd put his hand into the cavernous warmth of an open wound. How did she do that? How did she pretend like that?
Robert looked at Sally. “Did you help cook?”
Sally nodded.
“Do you want to be a chef someday?”
“No!” she laughed.
“Why not?”
“They wear big hats!"
“They do?” Robert laughed, “Don't you want a big hat like that?”
“Nope, not me.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
Sally seemed to think about that for a moment, then she brightened and said, “I'm gonna be a senator!”
“A senator? Where did you hear that word? You heard that on TV?”
Sally shrugged.
“But you don't want to be a senator, Sally! Don't you want to do something that girls do?”
“Girls can't be senators?” Sally eyes got round.
Robert patted her on the head. “Wouldn't you rather have kids for some handsome man?”
“Oh.” Sally smiled. “I'd like that too.”
His mother was staring at them, her fingers white-knuckled around her fork. There was something between Robert and she, he knew that. He didn't really want to know, though. Some things were better lef
t a mystery.
Sally grinned her gap-toothed little grin, and Jeffrey couldn't help but smile back. The whole trailer was filled with the smell of seared meat, hot and bloody as a slaughterhouse. He looked at Robert and his smile faded.
He shouldn't have come here.
* * *
7:10 pm, July 3rd, 2002
The long pine needles beneath his shoes were as soft as a rust-red carpet. He flexed his toes inside his shoes, wishing he could take them off. He stood up on his toes, staring up at the sky. Dusk was creeping across the park, though there remained still a few rosy red rays of sunlight. It was always night under the trees.
He didn't know why he'd come back, what it was which kept drawing him towards the gorge. It seemed wider than he remembered, dark and vacuous, a wide laughing mouth of stone and water and moss. The trees above him were quivering, waving their long arms together so that they rustled like paper. They'd moved the same way that day in May when he had seen the body. What secrets did they have? Had they watched Michael falling into the darkness?
Jeffrey walked to the lip of the gorge, ignoring the yellow crime-scene tape which the police had strung up. He looked down. The light of the cool summer night had faded, and he saw nothing now but the gleam of water brushing over the rocks below.
He crossed his arms. It would be so easy to let himself fall. He felt himself sway on the edge, felt himself getting dizzy.
“I know that I shouldn't come here.” A woman's voice came out of the darkness behind him, and Jeffrey spun around. The soft earth on the lip of the gorge crumbled under his heels.
Patricia Conner stood behind him wrapped in a long gray fur coat the color of ash. Her thin face had been aged by more than years, heavy lines had inscribed themselves on her features in the last two months, carved there as deep as letters in rock. Patricia Conner, her skin pale as ivory, insubstantial as any ghost.
“What do you mean?” He asked, after a moment's hesitation, “Why shouldn't you come here?”
She didn't look at him. Her eyes, like flecks of polished black stone, were locked on the gorge. “This is where he died.”
“I'm sorry.”
She moved like a spirit drifting above the ground, moved towards the edge. “It's worse not to come.” She looked at him. “I know you.”
“I'm Jeffrey Burke.” He thought about extending his hand to shake hers, but it didn't seem quite appropriate.
“You're the one who found him.” Her voice was brittle, as though she were on the drowning in a fiercely restrained emotion.
Jeffrey nodded.
“I wish you hadn't,” she spat out, and all the breath seemed to rush out of her when she said it. She turned her face away from him, eyes glittering with gathered tears which never fell. She said, “I've come here every night. Every night since you found him. I thought... I thought not knowing was worse. When he was missing, I used to think that it would be better to know, once and for all, what had happened. That if I just knew then maybe I could get on with my life.” She laughed, wiping her eyes. “Guess not.”
“It must be hard for you.”
Patricia didn't seem to hear him, didn't see him. She stared down at into the gorge and spoke, her voice a forced monotone dragged from deep inside and directed at no one. “There were things about Michael, you know... In a lot of ways he was the perfect son. We thought it was such a blessing when he came into our lives. It was like...” she smiled glibly then, “it was like God was finally apologizing for what he did to Emily. He was finally making things right.”
Jeffrey watched her lips move. They were blue-black, like her mouth was smeared with blood. He'd never heard anything about the Conners having a daughter before. No one had told him. He wondered what had happened to her. He was used to children dying. Most of his brothers and sisters had died, some of them inside his mother, some before they even had names. Some had lingered just long enough to make him love them. Whore, he thought again. Goddamn Alice for telling him!
Patricia seemed quite blind to his inner conflict: “There were things, though... I knew that something was wrong, but I just... couldn't bear to know... I think about asking him, you know. Finding out for myself, even if it is too late.”
Jeffrey bit his tongue, but he spoke anyway. “...You've thought about asking... Michael?”
“No.” Patricia Conner's voice was cold, devoid of emotion. “Your brother-in-law. He's the one. He'd know.”
“Robert? What would he know about your son?”
Patricia looked at him, and it was like she was seeing him for the first time. Her eyes were black as jet. “You shouldn't be here,” she said, “It's dangerous.”
And, with that, she returned to the park, pushing her way through the thick pine boughs barring her path. Needles showered the ground in her wake.
Jeffrey looked once more into the gorge. A thin mist had risen with the night; it filed the gorge like the tattered robes of the long dead. He could see them moving in the depths, darting playfully in the shallow stream.
* * *
1:13 am, July 4th, 2002
Jeffrey stared at his reflection in the sliding glass door. His arms were wrapped around his knees. The posture of a frightened child, he thought. His reflected eyes were two white points peering from a surrounding darkness. There was nothing in him but shadow.
He couldn't sleep.
What had happened to High Gorge Park? He tried to remember it as it had been, an exciting place full of secrets and adventure. When he was a child the woods had seemed to go on forever. There had been no ugliness in the world when he was young.
Michael's parents gave him a bicycle on his twelfth birthday.
None of them had ever owned a bike before, except Trevor once – but that had been stolen before he'd even had the training wheels off and his parents couldn't afford to replace it. So when Michael got a bike, they were all excited. A bit jealous too, but they were used to being jealous of Michael. After all, he was the rich one.
They never talked about the fact that Mike lived in the big house on the hill while the rest of them were stuck in the cramped trailers scattered below. It simply didn't occurred to any of them to question it, Mike was in the big house and they were below and that was just the way it was. Jeffrey couldn't quite remember when it was that he'd started to wonder why there were people out there with more than him, but he remembered very clearly the way it had made him feel: like he'd shrunk in the world. He knew then that he was not important. Not as important as Michael Conner was, anyway. Would anybody care if it had been Jeffrey Burke dead in the gorge? They would have been upset, but most of them probably would have forgotten by now.
Of course, he couldn't blame Mike for any of it. Mike had always been sensitive to the fact of his superiority. If you wanted to fluster him, all you ever had to do was make a joke about it: Hey Mike! You're rich, why don't you buy it for us! And Mike would flush red and stammer angrily while the rest of them laughed and dug down into their pockets for loose quarters. Mike was acutely aware of the fact that he was an outsider in the group, and been perpetually worried about being set apart. It was a feeling Jeffrey was all too familiar with, being the only black kid. None of the others ever brought that up, but they didn't have to. He could smell it on them. So he had understood the way that Michael acted during his birthday party. It was at the big house that year. They never played at the house, Michael had always made sure of that. Nobody ever told them they couldn't, but he'd always had an excuse if somebody suggested it. Eventually, they all accepted the fact that it was a one-way street: Mike came down into the park, they didn't go back up.
But that changed on his birthday. Jeffrey remembered how awed they had all been when they went inside. They'd stared up at the high ceiling, watched the sun streaming down through the skylights as though directly from heaven. Michael's expressions were guarded, but he was obviously irritated by their reactions. He'd been subdued, never laughing, never really joining in. He blew out his candles ve
ry solemnly, and accepted each gift with a quiet little thank you. And when his parents brought out the bicycle he went white as a sheet and buried his face in his hands, seeming near to tears. Nobody else even seemed to notice, they were all busy fawning over the shiny red vehicle. Mike had given Jeffrey a pained look, as if to say: I don't mean it, I don't want it.
He looked sick. Patricia laughed and said that he must have eaten too much cake – though in fact he'd barely touched his first piece. Molly and Scott insisted that Mike try out the bike right away, and more or less pushed him out the door. Jeffrey had never seen anybody look so unhappy about a birthday present.
After the party Michael shoved it in the garage and left it to languish there, rusting and gathering dust. He hardly ever rode it, not until Trevor and Gena both got their own bicycles, almost three years later. Their bikes were second-hand of course, but Mike's had been in the garage so long it didn't even look new any more. He rode his bike practically every day after that.
That was the sort of person he was.
At least, it was the kind of person he had once been. He was dead now.
No matter how he tried, Jeffrey couldn't figure it out. Why had it happened? Something must have gone wrong, he was sure. Life wasn't supposed to be like this: You were a child, then you grew up and everything which had once been frightening and confusing made sense – that was how it was supposed to work. You weren't supposed to get lost like this. You weren't supposed to be so afraid. Life wasn't supposed to be like this, now his, not Michael's, not anybody's. Jeffrey was sure of it.
But he didn't know how to change any of it. He couldn't think of any way to make it better. So he sat. And he stared. And he wondered.
* * *
2:36 am, July 4th, 2002
Jeffrey woke with a start only moments after having drifted off. Someone was knocking on the door. It was a hesitant sound, barely there.
He opened the door a crack. The still-fastened chain rasped as it pulled tight. His sister's face was pressed up against the door frame. Her lipstick was smeared across her mouth like a bloodstain. There was water dripping through her clenched fingers. Her voice was hardly more than a breath. “Can I come in?”
Jeffrey undid the chain and pulled open the door, and he saw that she was not, in fact, wearing lipstick. It was blood.
She slipped inside and sat on the edge of the bed.