Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  “Is Clay worth it?” Carla had asked her.

  “Yes,” Bell said, after a pause. “Yes, I think he is. But we’ll see.”

  Carla looked around. She was alone on the little square pad now. The other people who had been on the bus with her and disembarked here in Blythesburg had drifted away. Including the woman with the gross-looking arm and the lie that went along with it.

  Lies.

  That was the issue, right? Carla had been knocked back by the possibility that Travis Womack used illegal drugs. That he had only pretended to be clean that night to throw her off the trail. Maybe he even had an arrest record. She would be seeing him again when she went to Thornapple Terrace tomorrow. And she absolutely had to know: Did he have a record? If he had a record, she’d never be able to introduce him to her mom.

  Or to consider pursuing—Carla could not even think the word without blushing—a relationship. God, no. Not possible.

  She pulled her cell out of her backpack and sent another quick text to her friend Brad. Brad Turim. She had already texted him twice during the bus ride.

  Brad was the absolute best tech guy on the planet. Carla had gotten to know him when she worked in Web design at a start-up last year. One day the bosses came in and fired the entire design staff. Boom. Just like that. Some venture capitalists they’d been counting on had turned out to be not so adventurous, after all, and withdrew their offer. But Carla had kept in touch with Brad—who did not get fired, of course, because the techies never got fired. Somebody had to keep the computers up and running. It couldn’t all be about social media marketing and PR. Somebody had to know how to actually do something.

  She had asked Brad to check out the name Travis Womack. Run it through some databases, the ones that were easy to access—and the not-so-easy ones, too. See what came up. If he had a record, Brad would find it. And then she would know what she was dealing with.

  She texted: Just checking back. Anything yet?

  His instant reply: Bosses everywhere. Getting 2 it soon

  Carla heard the toot-toot of a car horn. She looked up. Kayleigh Crocker waved at her from behind the front windshield of her white Scion, mouthing the words, “Come on!” Carla jumped up, slinging her backpack strap over her shoulder. Despite all that she had gone through in the past several days—hell, the past several months, if you counted the panic attacks and the sleepless nights and the crying jags and the complicated wodge of emotions—she was aware of something stirring in her heart right now that surprised her, frankly, with its simplicity, something that felt an awful lot like happiness.

  She was home.

  Three Boys

  April 9, 1942

  Lying was a lot easier than Harm had thought it would be.

  Lying itself was a snap—he lied routinely to his gullible teachers, and to his even more gullible parents, and he lied to his girlfriends and to his little sister, Rosemary—but lying to an official representative of the federal government? That, Harm had assumed, would be difficult.

  It wasn’t. It was the same. He stood in front of the man at the recruiting station in Charleston, who gave a quick, bored look at the form Harm had just filled out. “Okay,” the man said. He was wearing a uniform, but he did not seem much like a soldier to Harm; he had a belly on him, for one thing, and Harm was pretty sure that a real solider would not have a belly. “Okay, you’re fine, kid,” the man added. He reached for the knobby black handle of a chunky rectangular stamp. He brought the stamp down upon the top sheet of paper. Thunk. He re-inked it on the moist red pad, and stamped the second page and then the third. Thunk. Thunk.

  “Okay,” the man said again.

  On that paper, Harmon Arthur Strayer had scribbled this in the blank for AGE: “16 yrs.” Alvie and Vic were sixteen, but Harm was only fifteen. He would not be sixteen for another three months.

  Harm’s heart was beating fast and loud, so loud that he was pretty sure other people could hear it. He had been told that lying to the government meant you could go to prison. What if that was true?

  I don’t care, Harm thought. To hell with it.

  The man stood up. He motioned for Harm to join him in a corner of the room. He measured Harm’s height—six feet, one inch—and then he weighed him: 157 pounds. “It’s a little low, but you’ll fill out,” the man said. He chuckled. “Once the Navy gets hold of you.”

  Harm was embarrassed. He had always been on the skinny side, and his chest was a narrow cage of curved bone. After supper that night, when he had told his mother what he’d done, she had cried out, “But you can’t! Look at your legs!” His legs, it was true, were like toothpicks, thin and white. Harm’s father told her to shut up. “He’ll be fine,” he said. Growled, really. “He’ll leave a boy and come back a man.” His father had read that phrase somewhere, or overheard it, and he repeated it several times that night before Harm was able to slip away, finally, to go be with his friends. Harm’s father was very big on the whole becoming-a-man business. His own father—Harm’s Grandpa Sam—had, Harm’s dad had told him, served in World War I. When he came back to Norbitt, nobody recognized him. The gentleness was gone. He was a brute, and people feared him. Harm’s father said that with admiration.

  In a few days, Harm, Vic, and Alvie were going to get on a bus and travel to the Naval Station Great Lakes in Lake County, Illinois, for basic training. It was near Chicago. That was all they knew. When they asked for details, that was all they were told: “It’s near Chicago.” As if invoking the name of a big city—a city out in the great world beyond Norbitt, beyond West Virginia—made all other information extraneous.

  Well, maybe it did. Because that was why they had decided to join up and go. They wanted to get the hell out of town. Naturally they did not say that—they talked about patriotism and duty, like everybody else did—but there was no future in Norbitt. There was only the past. Teachers in school talked about how old those mountains were, about how many thousands of years had gone into their making. Every time he heard that, Harm thought: Well, yeah. You only have to look at them to know. Old. Old, old, old. Everything’s old around here, and used up. The roads were old. The buildings were old. Jesus. Nothing ever changes here. Especially the people.

  Frank Plumley confirmed it: People never changed. That was what he had told them, the single time he talked about what happened along that dusty road just outside Caneytown.

  The conversation happened in 1938, about a month and a half after the death of the old lady and the kid. The three boys were sitting on the back porch of the Plumley house, in the same general configuration they had formed on that other day: Vic leaning back against the top step, his legs stretched out in front of him, and Harm and Alvie seated on either side of Vic, like palace guards surrounding the king.

  Summer dusk had settled over the town, purpling the world, staining the sidewalks with shadows. From down the block came the squally sounds of the Boykin kids, hollering their way through a game of hide-and-seek—or hide-and-shriek, as Harm had heard Vivian Plumley call it once, irritation in her voice, because the Boykins played it every night, at the top of their lungs. From another direction came the distant sound of a train whistle, a sound that always made Harm a little bit sad, no matter how good he had been feeling before.

  All at once Frank Plumley came crashing out of the back door. The smell of alcohol clung to him, as if he had rinsed his clothes in it. His movements were loose and unsteady. A big grin was smeared across his face, like the residue from a jelly sandwich. Harm’s stomach clenched in fear. Vic’s dad always made him apprehensive, even when the man was cold sober. Drunk was much worse. Drunk made him a monster.

  Before Vic could react, before he could move aside and let the old man go down the steps, Frank Plumley nailed him with a vicious, leg-swinging kick that caught him between the shoulder blades. Vic never had a chance. He crumpled up and tumbled down the steps. He landed at the bottom on his hands and knees.

  “Get up,” Frank Plumley yelled down at him. Hi
s voice was loud and sloshy. “You look like a damned dog, you know that? Bow-wow! You gonna bark for me, boy? Bow-wow! Lemme hear you!”

  Vic slowly got to his feet. By this time Harm and Alvie had joined him at the bottom of the steps. They were scared, but they wanted to make their allegiance clear. Their friend Vic had been totally humiliated. Normally, such humiliations came in private. But this one—well, Alvie and Harm knew full well that Vic would take it out on them later and they didn’t see anything wrong with that. Just as his father bullied him, Vic would go right on down the line and bully them. That was how it worked. It was a progression, a journey, a certitude, and it was utterly predictable, like the route of that train whose solemn whistle had chastened the world just seconds before Frank Plumley’s assault.

  A few seconds passed before anything else happened. In that quick interval, something caught Harm’s eye. It was in the second-story window, up over the porch. Harm knew whose room that was: It belonged to Frank and Vivian Plumley. The window was open. The motion he had seen was the twitch of the curtain. Somebody was up there. Listening. Watching. He saw the curtain move again. And because there was a faint light up there, from a small lamp on a bedside table, he was able to see her face. It was Vivian. Her face was fluid and shiny. Both of the Plumleys had been drinking. Drinking, and doing other things, too. The idea of that inflamed him.

  And then, as he was about to lower his gaze—Harm was afraid that Frank Plumley might see him looking, and might somehow guess his thoughts—Vivian opened the curtain just the slightest bit more. Just enough for Harm to see the pink silk robe she was wearing. She stared down at him. She put a finger to her lips, and she licked it. The next thing she did—God help him—was to touch her left nipple with that finger, and move the finger in a slow insinuating circle. Harm thought he might explode.

  “You know what?” Frank Plumley said. Harm was forced to refocus. “Guess what. Guess what.” His words were slurred—Gethwad, Gethwad—and they were all on one string. It would have been funny, Harm thought, if it weren’t so scary. Drunks on radio shows were always funny: They knocked things over with a crash and a bang, they hiccupped and they sang songs. They were hilarious.

  Frank Plumley was not hilarious.

  “You’re worse than a damned dog,” he said to Vic. “You’re a murdering sonofabitch. You know that, right? You’re a goddamned killer.”

  Vic stood there and took it. He had no choice. Frank Plumley wavered on the top step of the porch, swaying and listing at a dangerous angle, teetering on the edge, and Harm wondered: If Frank Plumley fell and hit his head, if he was bleeding and dying, would they help him? Would they pick him up? Or would they just leave him there to die?

  We’ll just leave him there to die. The thought shot across Harm’s mind like a bolt of electricity. It was exciting and dangerous. And freeing.

  Frank Plumley didn’t fall. He hitched up his trousers with the heels of his hands and he said, “All I ever wanted was a son. A good, strong boy. And what’d I get? I got a miserable stinking sonofabitch like you. A pantywaist.” He pointed down at Vic. He was not shouting anymore. His voice had dropped into a dark running mumble. “Think I like cleaning up your damned messes? Think I like that? Gonna be paying off that goddamned deputy and that goddamned magistrate for years, you know that? No such thing as favors, boy. Only trades. Bargains. And I made a bad one. Tell you that.”

  And then Frank Plumley’s voice dropped even lower, and he uttered the words that would forever alter the destinies of the three boys, but in a way that would not manifest itself for years. In fact they would not, on their own, ever have been able to mark this moment as special, and it was only in relation to each other that they would finally understand its significance:

  “You ain’t never gonna change,” Frank Plumley said with a savage snarl. “Because nobody does. Nobody changes. You’re gonna be what you are right now for the rest of your goddamned life. I got your number, boy. Don’t you think I don’t. Not for one goddamned minute.” He leaned over and spat in the yard, sending forth a gooey wad of phlegm that ended up—or a good part of it did, anyway—on his chin. He was not aiming at Vic, but Vic still ducked, which made Frank Plumley laugh. Then he turned around and lurched back into the house, letting the screen door smack shut behind him. Harm’s dad once told him that Frank Plumley specialized in the fuck-you exit. Harm’s dad even used the word itself. He did not say, “F—you.” He said the word.

  The three boys were completely still. A dog barked in a yard on the next block over.

  Everything was exactly the same as it had always been.

  Everything was different.

  June 7, 1944

  A story had come through the ranks, passed along from hand to hand, soldier to soldier, like a baby rescued from under the rubble. These days, stories always came that way—stories, jokes, rumors, gossip, slogans, dirty rhymes. Harm noticed that. One person gave the story to the next person, and then the next to the next. Stories were passed from shore to ship, from ship to shore, from officer to enlisted man, from one service branch to another, up and down, back and forth. It reminded Harm of how gossip made its way around Norbitt. Person to person, with things added along the way. Things to spice it up.

  The story was about Eisenhower. Harm heard it that morning and immediately had to tell Vic and Alvie, because how could he not? It was a great story. And it had Eisenhower in it. So, of course.

  Harm told it when the three of them were standing on the deck of the USS Arkansas, strung out along the rail, looking at the choppy gray ocean. They were as seasick as it was possible to be—Alvie had thrown up three times already this morning, Harm and Vic once each. No matter how many days they had been at sea, they still got seasick. They may have been officially designated as seamen second class, but they were boys from a landlocked state and the sea was like a germ against which their bodies had built up no tolerance. His Eisenshower story, Harm thought, might take their minds off the woozy dip and rise of the big ship, the chop and bounce and heave. So he motioned them into a ragged little circle.

  Harm tucked into his tale like a hungry boy with a plate of pancakes in front of him—although if anyone had proposed that analogy to him right then, if anyone had even murmured the word “pancakes,” Harm would have been sick all over again.

  It had happened two days ago, he told Alvie and Vic. The night before D-Day. The night before anybody knew how it was all going to work out, when a million things might still go wrong.

  General Eisenhower was reviewing the 101st Airborne. The Screaming Eagles, they called them. Parachutists. Each man draped with so much equipment—three knives, one machete, two bandoliers, two cans of machine gun ammo with over seven hundred rounds, one Hawkins mine, four blocks of TNT, one Gammon grenade, and that was just for starters—that they looked like fat waddling bears when they went by, holding their arms out from their sides in stubby arcs.

  Eisenhower went up and down the row. He stopped in front of a fresh-faced, beefy kid, a kid who wore all that heavy equipment like it was nothing, like it was scarves and feathers instead of ammo and TNT blocks. He asked the kid—and when Harm told the story to Alvie and Vic, he hammed it up, making Eisenhower’s voice booming and stern—where he was from.

  “Pennsylvania,” the kid stammered back. The kid was nervous, don’t you know, because this was, after all, the Supreme Allied Commander. God himself would probably salute General Eisenhower.

  “Oh, is that so?” That is what Eisenhower said to the boy. And then he said this: “Well, did you get those big shoulders from working in a coal mine?”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid replied, confident again, sure of himself. “Yes, sir.”

  When he finished the story, Harm punched Alvie’s arm. Alvie winced and punched him back, but Harm did not care, the story was good: Eisenhower and a coal miner. “Can you beat that?” Harm said. “The night before it all happened. The kid could just as easily have been from West Virginia as Pennsylvania. Think o
f it—Eisenhower. And, with the shift of few hundred miles, somebody we might’ve known. Might’ve grown up with.”

  Vic and Alvie liked the story, too. Not quite as much as Harm did, but that was okay. The three boys did not always share the same tastes. Vic liked bourbon, for instance, and Harm could not abide the stuff. Too sweet, he said. Alvie smoked Kools, while Vic went for Lucky Strikes. Harm was not particular; he would smoke Camels, Old Gold, anything cheap and handy.

  Telling stories was a good way to keep the anxiety down. True, the major assault was over, and the Allies had landed in a sweeping fury of guns and rushing manpower and clever technology and the propulsive power of sheer abundant hope and youth, but that was just the beginning. This battleship, the USS Arkansas, all twenty-seven thousand tons of it, was still busy, its Bofors guns and its Oerlikon cannons still firing at German positions on Omaha Beach. The Arky had orders to stay right here for another six days, helping to finish what the Allies had started on D-Day. And Vic and Alvie and Harm were a part of all this now. No one could take that away from them, ever: They were here. They were part of this great thing, this magnificent mission.

  The motive that brought them here had not been pure—but what motive really is, ever, when you take it apart and examine it, piece by piece?—and yet here they were, the three of them. In history.

  They had only wanted to get the hell out of Norbitt. Put it all behind them: the town, Frank Plumley, the strictly sequestered memory of the accident. But gradually, as they trained and as their bodies grew hard and as they did what they were told to do, and as they lifted their eyes from what was right in front of them and concentrated on the horizon, they changed. They began to realize just how momentous this truly was. They had always understood how high the stakes were—you could not read the newspaper or listen to the radio and not be aware of that, God knows—but this was different. Now they were in it. They were part of it. No matter how lowly their rank, they were in the center of something immense. They wanted to live up to that, to be commensurate with the wonder and peril.