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Bitter Sun
Beth Lewis
It all started when we found the body.Then nothing was ever the same.The Dry meets Stand by Me and True Detective in this stunningly written tale of the darkness at the heart of a small mid-Western town and the four kids who uncover it.In the heatwave summer of 1971, four kids find a body by a lake and set out to solve a murder. But they dig too deep and ask too many questions.Larson is a town reeling in the wake of the Vietnam draft, where the unrelenting heat ruins the harvest, and the people teeter on the edge of ruin.As tension and paranoia run rife, rumours become fact, violence becomes reflex. The unrest allows the dark elements of the close-knit farming community to rise and take control.And John, Jenny, Gloria and Rudy are about to discover that sometimes secrets are best left uncovered…
Copyright (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
The Borough Press
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright В© Beth Lewis 2018
Cover design by Claire Ward В© HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018.
Cover illustration В© Alexandra Gurtner/Bridgeman Studio
Beth Lewis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008145507
Ebook Edition В© JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780008145521
Version: 2018-04-24
Dedication (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
For Neen
Contents
Cover (#u8fee8de9-4428-5f50-a51e-f58876e479c9)
Title Page (#u52746a77-1dcb-5443-a4ba-2c27dd699dc7)
Copyright
Dedication
He walks broken …
Part One: Summer, 1971
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: Summer, 1972
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Three: Summer, 1973
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
Loved Bitter Sun? Enjoy another incredible literary thriller from Beth Lewis …
About the Author
Also by Beth Lewis
About the Publisher
* (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
He walks broken. Barefoot in the dust. Middle of the road, asphalt shimmering in the heat, he walks like one of the returning soldiers. The ones with plastic legs. Limp. Shamble. Limp. Shamble. He’s too young for the jungle so he’s here. On the long road to town, rimmed with cornfields. The stalks heavy with gold on one side. Mangy and rotten on the other. A good year and a bad year, shoulder to shoulder.
He’s forgotten his name.
Smoke streaks across the asphalt from burning fields. Driving away the blackfly and maggots, refreshing the soil with ash. Next year will be better, they’ll say. Next year we’ll forget this ever happened.
He’s forgotten his home.
His t-shirt flicks in the breeze. Scarlet smears across his chest and arms, diluted to pink and brown at the hems. Thick blood thinned by dirty water.
A car slows, then swerves when the driver sees the blood. Foot down hard on the gas. Gone into a cloud.
The dust coats his skin and prickles his eyes but he doesn’t feel it. The road is too long, stretching endless. Sharp gravel digs into his bare soles. Threatens to cut.
His head sways side to side with every step, a metronome without its tick.
The blood, on his arms, his stomach under his shirt, his legs down to the knees, feels tight and sticky.
He’s forgotten his family.
A horn blasts behind him. A truck sidles alongside. He never heard it coming. A man leans across the empty passenger seat and winds down the window.
�Hey, you.’
He wavers at the sound of another person.
�Hey, don’t I know you?’ the driver says. �Are you all right, son?’
The voice, the life, pulls him. He turns but doesn’t see. His vision blurred by grit and glaring sun and exhaustion. He opens his mouth but the words seem to come from another throat. The air to make them from another chest. The brain to form them from another head. An innocent head. Three simple, perfect words float off his tongue and into the truck.
�I killed her.’
PART ONE (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
1 (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
It was a heatwave summer when I was thirteen. A record breaker so they said. Momma, my sister Jenny, and me lived on a small farm a mile from town. A house of faded whitewash boards and a three-step porch in an ocean of cornfields. Oak tree in the yard with a rope hanging off its fattest limb. Used to be a tyre on it, one from the front of my pa’s tractor, but it broke last year and he was long gone by then so the rope frayed and rotted and turned grey.
Momma had let the farm overgrow in the six or so years since he left. Gone to the war, she said, and never told us more. She said the land was his and the house was hers and she didn’t give a rip about our cornfields, stunted and choked with ragweed. She made our money elsewhere, though I was never sure where. I did my best to keep the fields tidy, the corn planted and harvested, but it was only me working so the haul was always small. Still, last harvest I managed to sell the crop to Easton’s flour mill for a good price and bought myself a new pair of boots and Jenny a jump rope.
It was a Friday, a few weeks before school let out for summer, that we found it, me, my sister and our friends Rudy and Gloria. Larson had dressed up to the nines for Fourth of July on Sunday, all ticker tape and flags and red, white and blue. There would be a parade, floats and cotton candy and corn dogs, then the fireworks would light up the sky. Every year Al Westin set up a shade outside his grocery store to give out free ice cream cones to the younger kids and the Backhoe diner threw open its windows and played Elvis and Buddy loud onto Main Street.
Larson was one of a hundred small towns in the middle of the Corn Belt though it was on its way to being something more. Just last week a 7-Eleven shot up in the trodden-down, boarded-up laundromat, giving the place new life and a brisk trade that upset Al Westin. We’re a flyover town in a spit-on state, Rudy always said. But that was his daddy talking. Larson was full of good people who smiled on the street and wagged a finger if you dropped a gum wrapper. There was a carnival every year, the school just got a gleaming new yellow bus and the church had a fresh, young pastor who took the class for snow cones after Bible Study when it was steaming hot. We’re a big-heart town, Mrs Lyle from the post office would say.
Eight in the morning, before the sun revved up its engine, Jenny and me walked the mile to school. I carried her book bag while she skipped ahead and sang and then screamed when I chased her and when I caught her we laughed. Momma didn’t much like us going to school. She said it made pansies of men, made their heads soft and their hands limp. Too much holding a pen, she said, not enough holding a woman.
But school was our sanctuary, a place full of friends and learning, and there was Miss Eaves. She taught geography two hours a week, after lunch on a Monday, last on a Friday. Best part about the class was me and Jenny took it together. Jenny was a year younger but the middle school wasn’t big and both years fit in the same room. We had desks next to each other. We passed notes.
Jenny loved all those countries, languages, people, currencies; pesos, francs, dirham, lira, exotic to the ear. She was obsessed with the pictures of buildings older than anything in Larson, older than anything in our United States, and her enthusiasm was infectious. That class opened up our world, made us four want to get out of Larson, get out and see it all. Though for me, that desire to up sticks stayed in the classroom, for the others, it was constant, like breathing. I loved that class for the lessons on soil and agriculture and how they grew rice in China or coffee in Brazil. I’d be running the Royal farm one day so I sucked in anything and everything that might be useful.
Miss Eaves hushed the class, clicked her fingers for us to sit down. We called her Miss but she was a missus four times over, skin and bone but somehow soft. Jenny liked her. She said Momma was all odd angles and sharpness but Miss Eaves was a cloud of cotton candy, sweet-smelling like inhaling powdered sugar. The skin on her hands was folded and sagged like a bloodhound’s cheeks. She had been a big woman once, she’d told me after class once, but lost it all when her fourth Mister went off to war in ’68. Said she couldn’t eat without anyone to eat for. Momma called her loose and unnatural, four Misters and no babies? What kind of woman is that?
Everyone else in class was goofing off, Jenny giggling with Gloria and Maddie-May, Rudy shooting spitballs at the back of Scott Westin’s head, but I was quiet. I didn’t have the energy to horse around. It’d been too hot to sleep for the past week and we didn’t have one of those fancy central air units like in Gloria’s house. Jenny and me shared a room and a bed up in the attic where the heat stuck. We made shadow puppets and butterflies with our hands and made them dance. I told stories of far-off kingdoms, and she’d pretend to be the princess while I roared as the dragon. Momma never woke to tell us to keep the noise down. Whiskey was her bedmate and not much could rouse her. When we were too tired to play, Jenny would ask for a story, then drift off to sleep when I was barely halfway through.
That Friday, with the world turned up hotter than the Backhoe fryers, flies circled and swooped on the ceiling. We made fans of our exercise books and shifted desks to escape direct sunlight. Poor Benjy Dewitt who sat closest to the window got scorched, blisters bubbled all up his left arm. Sweat and steam rose off us, turned the chalk dust to paste and smeared ink. Even Miss Eaves was struggling. Mid-way through a talk on volcanoes, when the breeze died and the classroom started to smell keenly of sweat, she stopped, threw her notes aside and said that magic word, �dismissed’.
�Get out, the lot of you, go cool down,’ she said.
When we didn’t move, she clapped her hands together and shouted, �Hustle, hustle!’
Let out early. On a Friday. The class erupted and spilled out of the room, out of the school. Me, Rudy, Gloria and Jenny didn’t tell our parents. Momma wouldn’t care but Rudy’s dad would make him clean car parts in the salvage yard and Gloria would have to practise her piano and painting an extra few hours. I had a dozen jobs to do on the farm but we had a free hour or so to spend together and I wasn’t going to waste it on chores. We just wanted to run, arms wide like we were flying. We’d be like ducks taking off from a pond, powering their feet, getting lift and height and then up, up, up, into the blue, soaring higher where nothing mattered and nothing could touch them. That was us. That was summer.
The four of us were gone, out into the sun and through the fields to the Roost. A place that was ours and ours alone. It was a wooded valley, our dip in the world, with a narrow but deep river running through it, thick with laurel and brush and creeper vines, grown dense and high like the sides of a bird’s nest. In the Roost we’d built a shack, our Fort. We’d added to it since we were six and seven and now it was a grand structure. The roof was a square of sheet iron Rudy lifted from Briggs’ farm when the old man pulled down his cattle shed. Walls were a dozen new planks left over from when they repaired the post office after Darney Wills, sodden drunk, ran his father’s truck through the front window. Then we had a broken doorbell and handle, all ornate gold scrolling on the edges, Gloria got from her father when they replaced it last year. That gave us a touch of class, we all said.
We always covered the path down to the Roost with branches. It was a narrow opening between thick shrubs and trees so was easily concealed. It was far off the roads, in the middle of fields, but we wouldn’t take any chances. It was Rudy’s idea to keep it hidden. This is a peachy spot, Johnny, he said, and we don’t want any old yahoo knowing about it.
But that Friday, the branches were thrown aside.
�Did we …’ Gloria started, no doubt meaning to say, �Did we cover the entrance the other day?’ but we all knew we had.
�You think someone …’ Jenny trailed off too.
Gloria picked up a branch, held it like a baseball bat. �Do you think they’re still down there?’
�I can’t hear anything,’ I said, and found a stick too.
Rudy picked up a branch shaped like a club and rested it on his shoulder.
�Jenny, you stay up here.’
My sister scoffed and grabbed a stick of her own. �Hell to that. I’m coming too.’
Rudy grinned and saluted, knocking his heels together like he was in front of the Queen of England.
Rudy tested out the weight of his club, swiping at nettle heads until he cut one clean off.
�Ready?’ he said and we nodded. �No mercy!’
We barrelled down the hill into the valley, Rudy hollering out his war cry like some mad general, me right behind, branch up and catching on the trees, the girls behind me screaming.
We charged to the Fort, expecting intruders to leap out and flee in terror or put up a fight at least, but the Roost was empty. Rudy stopped dead and I crashed into him, knocking us both into the dirt. A moment, a beat, while we realised we were alone and unhurt and had just yelled our throats sore at nothing, then we all four collapsed into howling laughter. We frightened nobody but the birds.
�Check it out,’ Gloria said, the first to get up, dust herself off, and look around.
The Fort’s roof was bent, our door swung on one hinge. Inside was strewn with leaves and muck, the blanket we often sat on snagged on a nail and ripped. Someone had been here. Suddenly the laughter vanished and my chest tightened. But who knew about this place? Maybe a bum? One of those hobos who rides the rails and sleeps under trees like in the movies? Or some other kids from school, maybe Patrick Hodges or the Lyle boys, thinking this was unclaimed land? Did the fuckers wreck the place when they realised it was already taken?
It was a violation and we all felt it. The unrelenting, unending heat wasn’t enough, the world wanted us punished more. Maybe it was taking revenge on Rudy for stealing a pack of cigarettes from his father, or Gloria for skipping her piano lesson and making the teacher wait, maybe on Jenny and me for not being better at washing linens or placating Momma when she was in one of her tempers.
�We should repair it,’ Rudy said, kicking a board over, insects fleeing in the light. �Soon as. Pick that up, clear it out and go get a rock to beat out the dents. It’ll look stellar again in no time.’
Everything was stellar to Rudy. Didi’s blueberry pie was stellar. Clint Eastwood, man, him and Telly were stellar. Swimming in Barks reservoir, now that’s stellar. Rudy was the oldest by four months and that was enough to make him our leader. A flash of his straight-as-a-die teeth and a flick of his sandy blond hair, cut like a movie star’s, and you can’t say no.
I picked up the board he’d kicked. One from the post office. It was heavy, covered in mud, and he bent down to help. To most in Larson, Rudy was the bad kid, the prankster, the you-won’t-amount-to-anything boy from the Buchanan family of cons and thieves, but to me and Jenny and Gloria, he was goodness made bone and skin.
The girls set about tidying the inside, repairing the blanket, setting the cobbled-together table and mismatched chairs and tree stumps right. I found a heavy rock for knocking the dents out of the roof.
�We’ll need more nails, and a hammer,’ I said.
�I’ll get some from McKinnon’s hardware,’ Rudy said. �Got a few bucks saved up from cutting his grass last summer.’
Rudy hoarded money, his Larson escape fund. Even Jenny had a few nickels under her pillow. Seemed like every kid had one, except me. I had money saved up but it wasn’t for a bus ticket, it was for old man Briggs’ second tractor. He’d promised to sell it to me when I had the cash and could reach the pedals. I was one-for-two but that kind of money is hard to come by around here. I’d have it though, one day, you can bet your weekly on it.
We straightened up the roof and rehung the door and by that point, the sun and heat had eased and we’d forgotten that anyone else had ever been here.
Rudy and Gloria were over by the lake when Jenny came out the Fort saying she was hungry.
�I’m craving some fishes, Johnny.’
I smiled at the way she said �fishes’, the way her mouth puckered up at the sh sound.
�Get the poles,’ I said. �Perch’ll be running about now.’
Jenny jumped and clapped and rushed back in the Fort to get the poles. They were nothing much, just saplings and line, but they were ours and they kept us fed. Friday meant Momma would be in Larson, at Gum’s Roadhouse, shooting pool and tequila. No dinner on the table. No one looking for us. Sometimes we stayed out here all night, lit a fire, slept in the Fort, watched the sunrise over the fields.
Summer before last we’d dammed and diverted the river a few hundred yards upstream from the Fort where the land dipped in a natural, deep curve. It was Rudy’s idea. Everything was Rudy’s idea and no matter how sky-high crazy, they always felt like good ones. It’ll be our own private swimming pool, Johnny, he’d said, ten times better than Barks because it’ll be all ours. And it was up to me to make it work. I’d read a bunch of library books to make sure we got it right. It’d taken us months, all over that winter. Even when our hands were frozen and we had to dig out the planks and rocks from under a foot of snow, we kept building. By last summer it was full and we called it Big Lake. The water was clear and you could see all the details of the forest floor, like you were looking at a carpet through a glass table. In winter it froze solid and we’d ice skate and try to play hockey and fail. It was a thing of beauty, I always said. A place trapped in time, like when they flooded whole towns to build their hydro-dams. Houses and streets and rusted-up cars, all held as they were before the water came.
Last year, Rudy and me hung a rope on a strong laurel branch. Shame on us but we were too chicken to swing into the water, too stuck to run and fly and let go then get that sickening moment of falling and splash. What if there were rocks we hadn’t seen? Or sticking up branches that’d skewer us dead? I wasn’t the best swimmer in the world and everyone knew it so never expected me to go first, but even Rudy was afraid, though he joked it off. Jenny stood close by me, said she didn’t want to get her dress wet and, despite the heat, despite the cloying, sweating hotness of the world, all we did was dip a toe.
Except Gloria.
None of us were looking for her to be the bravest, the first. We took it as certain that she would go last, she was a girly girl, rich family type. But before Rudy could turn around and tease her for it, Gloria was sprinting. A blur of red dress and red hair as she ran for the rope, kicking up brown leaves, sending them skimming the water. I remembered her swinging high, letting go, shrieking and disappearing into the lake, then popping up like a mermaid, hair dark red and stuck to her head, laughing and calling us all sissies. From that day on Rudy said you can never be sure with Gloria. Momma thought the same when I told her the story. She’ll grow up to be a quicksand woman, Momma said. Careful of that one, John Royal, she’ll have you running circles you don’t even know about. Be the death of you, she will.
Gloria always did what nobody expected.
So that Friday when we were fishing for perch in Big Lake, it was Gloria, wandering, not fishing because she thought it was boring, who found it. Tangled in the roots of a ripped-up sycamore, half-sunk in the flooded wood.
�Come look,’ she shouted, stick in her hand for prodding. �Get over here the lot of you.’
Rudy, on the other side of the lake, ran.
Jenny trailed behind me. �But the fish, Johnny.’
�It’ll just take a minute. Hook’s in the water anyways.’
Gloria pointed with her stick. It was just out of arm’s reach, the thing in the roots. But it wasn’t a thing. The closer I got the clearer I saw. Rudy stopped running. He saw it too. Gloria’s face was frowning and pale. Rudy looked back at me with hard eyes that said, keep Jenny back. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, not here. It was grey skin and hair once blonde like Rudy’s. It was bloated but not unrecognisable. Gloria’s stick left impressions in the skin.
It was a woman and she was dead.
2 (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
We didn’t tell anyone about the body, at least not at first. A mixture of fear and fascination silenced us. It fizzed inside us, this knowledge, this secret, so colossal and strange we thought it would crush us if we put one toe wrong, one word in the wrong ear.
The four of us stood silent and staring for I don’t know how long. Just as dusk was settling and the starlings began their wheel, we decided to pull the woman out of the water and roots and lay her alongside a fallen tree trunk. We thought it kinder, to have something at her back, some comfort.
The woman, in my head I named her Mora, for the sycamore tree, was the first I’d seen naked. Mora’s were the first breasts, the first swatch of hair between the legs, the first bullet hole.
Gloria couldn’t look at her. Jenny couldn’t stop.
Rudy swore in a whisper and leaned into me. �What do we do?’
But I didn’t have an answer.
�Who do you think she is?’ Jenny said but nobody wanted to guess.
�We should tell Sheriff Samuels,’ Gloria said and I heard a tremor in her voice. Usually so steady, her tone, rich like knocking on oak, shook at the sight of death. Rudy was quiet, a deep frown clouding his eyes, as if were he to concentrate hard enough, he would bring a storm rolling across the cornfields.
�Not yet,’ I said. It was a terrible secret, I realised. One that could change everything, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run home, to Momma. She’d know how to handle it, what to say, she always knew best, but I was rooted. Momma wouldn’t be home this time on a Friday night and, besides, how could I explain it?
Jenny stepped closer, looked at Mora as if she’d come upon a rat snake taking in the neighbour’s dog. The serpent’s jaw dislocating and reshaping itself so unnaturally. Something that small ingesting something far too big, you can’t help but watch, a jumble of curiosity, revulsion, an urge to help surpassed by a want to know if it would succeed in its swallowing. I’d never seen that expression on Jenny’s face before. Something happened to her that day. Changed her from the girl who would lazily kick her feet in the river, breathing in the sun and scent of evening primrose, to a girl who couldn’t sit still, as if she had electricity running through her, twitching her muscles, itching beneath her skin.
�Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.
�Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.
�Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.
Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.
I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.
�Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. �Johnny, look.’
The dead woman’s chest moved.
I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.
A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.
�She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.
Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.
�We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. �We have to get help.’
Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.
I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.
�Jenny, get back,’ I said.
But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.
A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.
The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.
Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.
�Kill it! Kill it!’ Gloria screamed.
�Quiet,’ I said, harder than I should have. She was so loud, so shrill, I feared her call would bring parents and police down on us and we’d have to explain all this.
The eel spasmed and jerked and fell into the leaf litter inches from my feet. I jumped onto the log, Rudy and Gloria cried out, ran halfway to the Fort, Jenny shuffled backward but she was slow. The eel flicked itself, landed on her bare foot. She shrieked as if stung, the spell of the body broken, and kicked out.
I lunged for her, pulled her close to me, wrapped my arms around her shoulders. The eel landed far from the water, then as if sensing its distance, increased its convulsion.
We all looked to Rudy but he was up on a tree stump, squealing worse than Jenny.
The eel flicked toward us and Jenny and Gloria screamed afresh.
�Kill it!’ they yelled.
Do something, Johnny boy, get your head together and goddamn do something.
I grabbed a stick, hooked it beneath the eel’s body and flicked it in a long, squirming arch into Big Lake.
A breath. A beat. A splash.
�Let’s get out of here,’ Rudy said, finally climbing down from his perch.
I looked at him, big brave Rudy Buchanan, shaking like a sissy with a spider on his hand. Rudy would take down a bully in a single punch but he was quaking in his shorts at a fish? I tried not to laugh.
�It’s just an eel. What are you so afraid of?’
He glared at me. �It came out of a dead body.’
�Johnny, come on,’ Jenny said. �We should be getting home.’
We shouldn’t. We didn’t have a curfew and Momma wouldn’t be wringing her hands for us. But when I looked around at my friends, my sister, I saw them all shaken. In truth, I was shaken too but one of us had to keep it together or we’d all be screaming on tree stumps.
I’d gotten rid of the eel but the body, the girl, she lay where we’d dragged her and all humour drained from my mind. It changed the day. Turned the blazing sun cold. Jenny’s face showed raw confusion at what we’d found, what it meant. I saw the same in Rudy’s eyes, in Gloria’s. Hooked lips and frowns.
I usually had the answers but today, I was as lost as them.
The four of us left the Fort in shuffling silence. We emerged from the trees and the sticky evening heat pressed against us. I suddenly missed the cool, sheltered air of the Roost but couldn’t face going back down there. Not now, maybe not ever.
�We have to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said. �They have to find out who she is and who did that to her.’
�Cops won’t do anything,’ Rudy said. �There’s all sorts going on in this town they don’t know about. Shit, if they did, Samuels would have a heart attack.’
Gloria scowled at him. �I think a murder is a little more important than your dad’s chop shop.’
Rudy sneered and mimicked her voice. Gloria punched him in the arm.
�What will they do to her?’ Jenny asked, looking back toward the trees, toward the valley and our lake.
�Take her away,’ Rudy said. �Put her in a morgue. Find her parents, I suppose.’
�I’m going to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said.
�We’ll get in trouble,’ I said, a knot forming in my chest. �We moved her.’
�Yeah, we will,’ Rudy said, his finger bouncing in the air. �He’s right. We moved her. They’ll think we did it.’
�Don’t be stupid.’ Gloria’s scowl deepened.
�All the detective books and cop shows say you don’t touch the body, Gloria, and you definitely don’t move it,’ I said. �Maybe we should wait until Samuels finds her himself?’
Rudy pointed at me, his arm straight out. �I like Johnny’s plan.’
�It’s a stupid plan,’ Gloria said. �I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Samuels.’
Rudy grabbed the back of his neck with both hands, his elbows stuck out like sails. �Just wait, yeah? Just a day. Maybe do one of those anonymous tip-offs and leave us out of it.’
His voice turned small. �They’ll think I had something to do with it. They’ll lock me up, Gloria. I’m a Buchanan. I got bad blood, remember, and everyone in town knows it.’
Jenny put her arm through Rudy’s, held his hand and pushed her cheek against his shoulder.
�You’re not bad,’ she said. �We’ll all tell Samuels the truth. You didn’t touch her and if they think otherwise, they’ll have to go through us to get to you. Right, guys?’
�Right,’ Gloria said and took Rudy’s other hand.
I completed the circle, put my arms over Jenny and Gloria’s shoulders, pulled the four of us into a group hug.
�We’re like a flock of birds, aren’t we?’ I said. �We stick together and we protect each other from eagles and eels, hey?’
I prodded Rudy’s stomach and he told me to shut up.
�A flock. I like that.’ Jenny patted my back. �We’ve got a Roost after all.’
Rudy finally smiled. �You and your birds, Johnny,’ he said, just as quiet, then shook his head. �If only we were, huh? We could all fly the hell out of here.’
�We will, one day. All four of us,’ Gloria said, then checked her watch. �I’ve got to go. Daddy’s taking me to the fairground in Bowmont tonight. Mom is at one of her Clarkesville society dinners and thank God she didn’t make me go to that. I’ll win you each a teddy bear.’
Gloria broke the circle and Rudy went with her, to see her home like he always did. Then he turned, walked backward a few steps.
�We’re a flock, yeah?’ he shouted, the wince, the curl, the confusion still on his face, though he tried to put a mask over it. He smiled, flapped his arms like wings. �Ca-caw, ca-caw, Johnny. See you guys tomorrow.’
They waded through Briggs’ wheatfield toward town, waist-high in gold, as if their torsos were floating free. We walked everywhere. Jenny and me didn’t have bikes. No money for scrap metal that does a job your legs can do just fine, Momma always said. Rudy was fixing up a broken, rusted-up Schwinn but getting nowhere, and Gloria had a pink Raleigh she refused to ride because we couldn’t ride with her.
I let myself smile as I watched my friends. My flock.
Jenny fidgeted by my side. The calm she’d had with Rudy and Gloria had gone with them. She glanced at me, then away, then down at her feet.
I couldn’t move. Behind, the Fort and the body. Away to the left, my house, empty and sweltering. Right, Rudy, Gloria and the cops. Ahead, nothing but fields and sky. The sun burned rich orange and bled into the clouds. A swarm of starlings, black spots on gold, pulsed between power lines.
�I’m hungry,’ I said. �There is still some chicken from yesterday’s dinner.’
�How can you be hungry after that?’ she asked but I shrugged.
Jenny squinted at me, like she did when I said something stupid. Momma did it too. Where Momma might yell at me, Jenny just turned away, sighed through her teeth, and stalked across the field. The path home was well trodden, we made shortcuts of the fields, they were our highways and backways, free of grown-ups and rules.
�Shouldn’t we go straight to the police?’ she asked. �Feels wrong to just leave her down there.’
�I know but we agreed. We’ll go tomorrow. I guess we just try to forget about it for tonight.’
We walked together, silent, until we came to Three Points, a triangle of land made by three crisscrossing irrigation streams. Momma said it’d been there since they split up the land between us, Briggs, and Morton down the track. She said that idiot Briggs couldn’t count right and ended up short on one side. Caused a rift between the families for years and the swatch of land remained unclaimed. It was twenty strides end-to-end and covered in grass green as a lime candy straight out the jar. No matter the weather, no matter the heat, Three Points stayed alive. It was a rule, one of those known somehow by everyone in town, that you could say or do anything on the Points. It didn’t belong to anyone so no one was watching, no one was listening.
Jenny slowed and stopped in the middle of the island.
�Do you think someone in Larson killed her?’ she asked.
I’d thought about it while we were walking but pushed away the idea almost as quickly as it came.
�I don’t want to think about what that would mean.’
�What about the Fort? Could the person who wrecked it have killed her?’ she said; her voice had an edge of fear to it, a tremor I recognised. Her eyes darted left, right, into the trees, over the fields. �Could … could they still be around?’
I put my hands on her shoulders. �No. Whoever did it is long gone. And even if they aren’t, you’ve got me and Momma and we won’t let anything happen to you.’
The tension in her eased, her shoulders dropped. �I know you won’t, but her? She’d probably offer me up to the killer for a bottle of bourbon.’
It needled at me when she spoke of Momma like that. I’d tried for years to be peacekeeper between them, but the barbs kept flying, the hate kept growing and resurfacing no matter what. Now my days were all about maintaining the uneasy calm.
�Let’s go home,’ I said, straightened up and took Jenny’s hand. �Momma won’t be there anyway.’
Twenty minutes and two more fields brought us to the edge of our yard. We both stopped and Jenny’s grip on my hand tightened, turned my knuckles white and sore. Faded red truck parked skewed against the side of the house with two deep tyre scars in the dirt. Fresh dent in the door. The frayed rope on the oak branch swayed but not by the breeze. Momma always flicked the rope with her finger when she got home. Her mindless habit.
The sound of footsteps throbbed from inside the house. One-two, one-two, a stumble, a crash, the picture frame in the hall, dropped and broken twice this month already. A low moan, something monstrous in it, thick and slurred. A clatter of metal on enamel, the pan that cooked yesterday’s chicken, pushed into the kitchen sink.
Jenny sighed. �Looks like you were wrong, Johnny.’
3 (#u295ebc36-b17e-5497-a43a-22cf1b066097)
There weren’t many reasons Momma would leave Gum’s before midnight on a Friday. It likely wasn’t to give us a new pa this time, as I couldn’t hear anyone else in the house. A Pigeon Pa, Jenny called them. They fly in, shit all over the place then fly out again, none the wiser. Momma alone in the house meant Ben Gum, owner of Gum’s and one of our years-ago Pigeon Pas, had cut her off. When that thought hit us both, Jenny’s grip on my hand turned iron.
�I don’t want to go in there,’ she said.
�It won’t be so bad. She’s just drunk. You know what she’s like when she’s drunk. You go straight upstairs and I’ll bring you dinner.’
Jenny kicked at the dirt. �Like that’ll help.’
I tried to stifle my sigh. �Just try not to sass her.’
We could turn around, run back to the Fort or go to the west field and sleep between the corn while Momma slept off hers. That would be better than seeing the anger and snarl on Jenny’s face a moment longer. But we stood by that rope swing too long. The crashing inside stopped for a sickening moment. Then the slam of the back door flung wide, the screen’s rusted spring whining. Then the slapping steps of her shoes on the dirt. Then the voice.
�There you are, my babies,’ Momma said, slurred and breathy. �Look at you both, skin and bone. You hungry, my babies?’
Momma’s hair, thin curls turned white-blonde instead of gold like Jenny’s, flared wild on her head, like a storm brewed on her skull. And it did. On it. In it. She was a tornado, my momma.
�Hi, Momma,’ I said and nudged at Jenny to say hello but she wouldn’t.
�Come inside now.’ Momma swayed on her spindle heels and spindle legs wrapped up in tight blue jeans, her red camisole cut a half-inch too low.
She caught herself on the side of the house. �I’ll fix you both a plate. Get in, get in.’
She pounded her fist on the whitewashed boards with every word, then hurled up her arm, half sick of us for being there, half gesturing which way to go.
I felt my sister’s heartbeat thrumming through her hand. I took a step toward the house, tried to pull Jenny with me but she wouldn’t move. Her face set in a dark frown. A prickle went up my back, I knew what was coming.
�Please, Jenny,’ I whispered but she shook her head.
�Not when she’s like this,’ she said.
Momma saw Jenny’s expression and matched it. All her slur and swagger disappeared and she turned pin-sharp. Momma stood tall and straight, her back like rebar, and set toward us. Careful steps turned ragged fast. Red whiskey heat rose in her cheeks and filled up her throat, turned the sweet words sour.
�Look at you,’ she sneered down at Jenny. �That dress. Showing off those legs. You’re so dirty. Get in this fuhking house. I made you dinner and you’ll damn well eat it.’
Then she was in front of us, her hand on Jenny’s arm, pulling her toward the porch. Her eyes, blue and bloodshot, flared up bright despite the dark, red lips pulled back, lipstick on her teeth, smeared on her chin.
�Let me go!’ Jenny tried to pry Momma’s fingers but her grip was iron.
�I am your mother and you will mind me.’
Jenny’s shoes cut furrows in the dirt, her nails dug into Momma’s wrist. �I wish you weren’t. I hate you! Let me go!’
Momma recoiled like those words were a slap across the cheek. I put myself between them, one hand on Momma’s hand, the other on Jenny’s, tried to prise them apart.
�She didn’t mean it, did you, Jenny?’ I said, keeping my voice level, calm, anything not to throw gas on the fire.
�I meant it,’ my sister snarled. �I wish you weren’t my mother.’
The sharp sobriety in Momma crumbled and her slur returned. �You ungrateful little witch.’
She yanked on Jenny’s arm again, harder, fiercer, I thought it might pop out the socket. I was invisible to them. They sniped through me, around me, trading hurled stones and scratches one for one.
Momma’s elbow dug into my side, pushed me, and suddenly her and Jenny were away. Momma dragged her around the house. Jenny cried out, scratching, swearing and saying the most awful things about our mother, calling her ugly, fat, a bitch, and all sorts else. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. The noise, the hate, it all hurt too much to hear. Then I followed them around the house, begging them to stop but they wouldn’t. It felt like they never would.
At the step up to the back door, Momma finally let go and Jenny fell, landed hard on a rock, but Momma didn’t see.
�You stupid, stupid girl,’ she hissed and went to grab her but Jenny scrambled away and I was between them again. Behind me, Jenny whimpered, clutched her knee.
�Momma, please.’ I took her by the shoulders and held her wavering gaze. Same as Jenny, the best way to calm them both. �Jenny’s just tired, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t mean it.’
Momma’s eyes, red-rimmed with drink, welled with tears. �She breaks my heart, that girl, just breaks my heart.’
�I know. Please go inside, Momma. I’m so hungry and I’d just love some of that chicken. I’ll talk to her, okay? She’s sorry, she’s really sorry and so am I. Please?’
Keep it calm, John Royal, keep the eye contact, keep the tone light, keep the platitudes coming.
Momma wasn’t Momma when she was drunk. She was a beast of ups and downs and harsh words she didn’t really mean. At least, I hoped she didn’t. I prayed neither of them did, else what hope was there for us?
�She needs to learn respect,’ Momma said, voice like a dry kettle on the heat. �She needs her momma’s teaching, she can’t be dressed so loose.’
�I know, Momma. I know.’
Momma put her hand, soft and warm and trembling, on my cheek. �You’re such a good boy, John. My perfect boy.’
Her hand fell away and her gaze drifted. �You look hungry. I’ll fix you a plate.’
Then she went inside and let the screen door bang. The only sound left in the world was Jenny’s anger, her sharp breaths and tiny scratches of her nails in the soil. I went to her, knelt down beside.
�Jenny,’ I said, soft as cotton, put my hand on hers. �Are you all right? Let’s go inside now.’
Tears mixed up with dust, streaked down her face. Her hair, gold blonde and perfect, was rucked up and twisted. She shook. Hands on her knee, a trickle of blood down her shin.
�We have to,’ I murmured, distracted, eyes on the blood. The image of the girl, the body we found, hit the back of my eyes.
Jenny wiped her face hard with the heel of her hand. A bruise blossomed on her arm.
�No. I won’t go in there.’
And she broke, wept hot tears into her hands. I wrapped my arms around my sister and sat until her sobs eased and the last of the evening light faded to night. I teased my fingers through her hair, tamed it down best I could without hurting her. A speck of rage grew in me that Momma had let this happen and Jenny had let this happen and a few stupid words had blown up into a fight that would linger for days. I wished I could say to Jenny, it wasn’t all Momma, was it? You said some nasty things too. You hurt her feelings too. You made her cry too. Why can’t you both just get along? Why do I have to be stuck in the middle all the time? But I clenched my jaw, swallowed down the blame, and tried to soothe my sister.
�It’ll be worse if you don’t go in,’ I said. Then, as if it made it all right, �You know she’s only like this when she’s drunk.’
I met Jenny’s eyes, raw and blazing. �I meant every word.’
She slapped away my hand and scrambled to her feet.
�Please, Jenny, just come inside,’ I said but she wouldn’t hear it.
�You go, Johnny, you go be with her, she’s got your stupid chicken.’
Before I could say I’d share, she ran. Just turned and ran.
�Jenny!’ But she was away, into the night, into the fields.
I whipped around to the house and to those three steps up to where my mother waited, wrapped in her own hurt. I heard her move inside, the clinking of glass as she poured another drink. Those sounds mixed with the rustle and crackle of Jenny’s footsteps running through dry grass.
I was stuck in the back yard, between Momma and sister. I didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Jenny but I knew where she would go. She was like those starlings, darting and weaving, the best runner in our class. Mr Escott, our phys-ed teacher, said it was a good job I could read and work a corn huller because I wasn’t much good for anything else. The rest of the class had laughed. I’d stared at my skinny arms and legs, my too small gym shorts, and watched the others cross the finish line.
�John?’ Momma said, gently from the back door. �Come on inside, baby.’
She smiled, that full smile that lit up her face and eyes, rosy and glowing with whiskey. The snarl and sneer was gone, like it had never been. A flipped switch and there was my momma again, reaching for me.
�Dinner is on the table.’
This wasn’t the woman who’d said those things to Jenny and dragged her across the yard. It just wore her face, spoke in her voice. It was the drink. It was the sickness. Not my momma, not really.
I went inside and sat at the kitchen table. Jenny would be fine. I’d never been able to truly calm her after a fuss like that, I’d never be able to get her to come home if she didn’t want to. Besides, if she was still riled up the fight would start fresh soon as she walked in the back door. It was best for them and me to wait it out, let the anger subside and then find her, cradle her, let her sob it all out onto me instead of watch her beat it out of herself. I knew where she’d go, I’d find her.
Momma sat down beside me at the kitchen table, smoking a Lucky Strike. She reached to me, brushed my hair back, then flicked out her ash into a chipped cup.
�How was your day, baby?’
�Fine.’ It wasn’t fine. We found a dead body. But I wasn’t ready to say that. It was still too mixed up in my head.
Momma went quiet as I ate. Her eyes flickered every now and then, like she was thinking of something, wanted to say it, but chickened out. She bit on her lower lip. Jenny did that when she was worried.
�Is your sister all right?’
�I don’t know. I guess,’ I said. �She will be.’
Momma stubbed out the Strike and rubbed her forehead, tucked her hair back, laid her hand over her neck, fidgeted like she had ants crawling all over her skin.
�That girl makes me so mad sometimes, the way she talks to me. If I’d have spoken to my mother like that, ooh she would have kicked me out of her house so fast it’d make your head spin. You heard what that girl said, didn’t you?’
She shook her head, finally her eyes went to mine, eyelids drowsy with drink. �You’d never talk to me like that, would you, baby? You’re my prince. What a good boy you are.’
She cupped my cheek with her hand. Soft skin. Sweet smell of tobacco and old perfume on her wrist.
�My temper sometimes, I don’t know,’ she said, waving her arm, dismissing it as nothing.
Then she snapped back to me. �Oh! I almost forgot.’
Momma went to the family room, to the cabinet behind the couch. She pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. A rectangle, about two inches thick, tied up with string.
�I got this for you,’ she said, skipping back over to me and setting it down on the table. She moved my still full plate and pushed the package closer.
�I saw it in the thrift store on Lexington a month ago and I thought, my John will just love that, so I had them wrap it up and then I went and forgot all about it, can you believe it?’
A fire lit in my chest. A present. For me? It wasn’t Christmas and my birthday was way back in March and we didn’t have the money for throw-away spending.
�What is it?’ I said. I traced the edges with two fingers, felt a ridge on the right side and a fizz of electric went through me. A book.
Momma made a dopey face. �Open it and see, dummy.’
I untied the string and ripped the paper away in one tear. My eyes went wide and my mouth dropped open and I couldn’t quite believe it.
The cover, a pale beige cloth, said, Birds of North America, then smaller at the top, A Guide to Field Identification. Below, three vivid, multi-coloured birds perched on a bright green branch.
�Do you like it?’ Momma said, her hands clasped below her chin. �You used to love watching the crows steal the corn and you’re always out gawking at those starlings.’
�I love it,’ I said.
I flicked through. Pages and pages of exact, perfect drawings and information on habitat and nesting and migration. I couldn’t stop staring. Some birds I recognised immediately. Wrens. Tanagers. But there were so many more. So much more to learn. I wanted to devour it then and there and go searching for them in the fields and trees.
�Are you sure, baby?’
I looked up at Momma, her eyes on me like she was nervous. Scared she’d got me wrong, that I’d hate it, hate her, but I never could. I went to her and threw my arms around her neck.
�Thank you, Momma. I love it. I love you. It’s the best thing.’
She hugged me back, hard, and held on for a few seconds before releasing me. She grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead. �I love you too, my little prince.’
Then she let me go, said something about her programmes, and disappeared into the family room. A moment later I heard the television blare out The Partridge Family. I cleared my plate while pawing through my book. Stopped when I got to the cardinal. A striking red bird, Jenny’s favourite. We’d seen one, a year or two ago, when we’d gone camping with the Bible Study class down at Fabius Lake.
A sharp prick of guilt hit my chest and I closed the book and took it upstairs, hid it under my side of the bed. I didn’t want to tell Jenny about it. She’d be upset that Momma hadn’t got her anything and it would spiral into another fight. As I came back downstairs, I listened for Momma’s movements but just heard David Cassidy’s warbling, then I snuck outside.
I found Jenny down at the Roost, staring into the tiny ripples on Big Lake. With her golden hair and in her pale yellow sundress, she shone in the dark.
�I knew you’d come after me. Eventually,’ she said, but she didn’t seem sad or angry, just glad I was there. Her voice was calm as the lake, quiet as the water. She stared, trancelike, as if red-eyed on Mary Jane. Blood streaked down her shin so I ripped a swatch out of my t-shirt and dipped it in the cold water.
�Here,’ I said, �let me clean that.’
The blood diluted and ran down to her foot, soaking pink into her bobby sock. Jenny didn’t look at me or seem to notice what I was doing, her eyes fixed on a point across the lake.
�It’s so quiet here,’ she murmured.
Only chirping crickets and the soft lapping of water. No shouting or screaming or hurt feelings. No whiskey slur in Momma’s voice. Just us and our breathing and the darkness. It was like the feeling you get when you duck underwater, everything muffled and thick. The water holds every part of you, keeping you buoyed and enclosed, safe, for a time. You know the world is still out there but it can’t touch you except when you come up for air.
�Do you think she’s lonely?’ Jenny said and I wondered if she meant Momma.
Then I saw where she was looking.
Something shifted in that moment. Jenny turned to me, our eyes met. The moon and starlight broke through the canopy enough to highlight the water, define the shapes of the trees, and her, pale against the black. Jenny took my hand and we went to Mora.
�It’s so strange. She looks like she’s sleeping,’ I said, and felt something squirm inside me.
You shouldn’t be here, Johnny boy. It’s a goddamn dead body and you’re, what, visiting with it?
My dinner, chicken and mashed potatoes and carrots, churned and swirled in my stomach.
�We should go home,’ I said.
Jenny knelt beside Mora and pulled me down. �We can’t leave her here alone. Look at her, she’s beautiful.’
She picked a scrap of dead leaf from Mora’s forehead and flicked it aside.
I don’t know how long we knelt there, staring into those dead eyes. I’d never seen a smile like that on Jenny’s face before and it scared me. That change, that jitter in her bones that Mora sparked had fanned to a dark flame and I didn’t know what it meant. I checked around us, suddenly aware of what this picture might look like to anyone watching. And a creeping cold in my bones that whoever did this to her, this poor girl, could still be around. But it was empty, silent, I saw everything through moonlight, all silver and black and not quite real. This wasn’t quite real. How could it be?
�Death is special, isn’t it, Johnny?’ Jenny said. �It’s like the way the Pastor Jacobs talks about God. Death is a kind of god. It’s terrible and powerful but if you treat it right and have faith, it’s love. Behind the fear, death is love, isn’t it, Johnny?’
I swallowed burning bile.
Jenny lay down beside Mora and I had no choice but to lie down too. I couldn’t leave my sister here, alone, with a killer on the loose, and she wouldn’t go home yet. So I stayed, despite the nausea, despite the strange, sour smell, despite the gnawing pain in my head.
But Jenny seems calm, John.
She seems happy.
And that’s good enough for now.
Jenny fell asleep quicker than she had in weeks but I couldn’t. I lay on the ground, stones and twigs poking into my back, replaying every word of the argument until the movie reel reached the gift Momma gave me. The bird book. Light beige cloth. A dozen shades of blue, red, green, every colour filled my head, blotted out the pale white body beside my sister. I fell asleep in those colours, to the sound of cooing birds and gently ruffling feathers.
Jenny and I woke to warm sunlight and a fuzzy voice on a radio. I opened my eyes, squinting. We didn’t have a radio at the Fort. Could have been a dream or some kind of birdsong, I didn’t know. Then it came again. Then a close, clear, hundred-per-cent real voice said something back, bzzt ten-four. My eyes adjusted to the sun and my insides turned to snow. Jenny woke too and immediately tensed and clutched my arm.
Standing over us was Sheriff Samuels and a dozen of his deputies. The way they looked at us. Their eyes wide, their mouths set in grim frowns. One was chucking up his breakfast far off and I hoped it wasn’t in Big Lake because it would make swimming gross.
Samuels made Jenny and me get up. Made us stand there and wouldn’t talk to us. Would barely glance our way. Most of the deputies looked away. A few of Larson’s lookie-loos up at the top of the valley were fixated. In front of the police tape, far upstream, Rudy and Gloria stood with a skinny cop taking notes. They weren’t looking at us. Maybe didn’t see what the cops saw. Maybe saw everything. Jenny and me got one last look at Mora before they laid a tarp on her.
That’s when the rumours began, starting almost before they took us down to the station. Murmurings of �freaks’ and �perv kids’ floated through the valley. The radios crackled and came alive, descriptions of the scene were repeated, again and again. Responses came: you shitting me, Miller? Say what? There were kids with the body? Jesus Christ, the missus’ll never believe that. And so it went. Through the fuzzy connection, the news of what the sheriff’s men found by the lake spread to all of Larson.
4 (#ulink_215055ba-b750-5dcf-9c69-0c4eba0c4ecc)
They put Jenny and me in the back of Deputy Miller’s patrol car. An old Plymouth with rust blooming at every join and a cage between us and the front seats. Three bolts were missing from the left side and I reckoned I could kick out the rest, get into the front, get us free and clear if I needed to. The radio crackled. A shotgun stood upright, locked to the dash. Ripped seats spewed out dusty yellow foam. A bare spring pressed into my back. Make sure you got a plan, John Royal, my momma once told me, if you’re ever snatched by the pigs. Make sure you’ve got your story right in your head and, if you don’t have a story, make sure you tell your lie before the other guy tells his.
I held Jenny’s hand. We had no need for a lie but adults sometimes see a different truth in what kids tell them.
It was barely past eight but the sun was spinning up its wheels, getting ready for another record high. Miller had left the windows open front and back but there wasn’t a breeze. The air inside the car was thicker than outside, full of dust and old cigarette smoke, so dense the fresh air couldn’t get in. Criminals aren’t fit to breathe clean.
Jenny squeezed my hand. �I’m scared.’
�We haven’t done anything wrong.’ I turned to her, smiled. �They just want to ask us some questions because we found her. That’s all.’
The heat rose with the sun, ticked up a degree or two every minute, multiplied by ten for sitting in a metal box. The sweat popped from my skin. My shirt, my legs below my shorts, the backs of my arms, stuck to the seat. We’d been in the car half an hour. Another half and we’d be fork-tender. They’d be able to pull us apart with a spoon.
I hung my head out the window, breathed out the dust and in the scent of the elders. Thought about all the chores I had to do on the farm. Weed the west field, tend the corn, check the fences near Morton’s boundary, and a dozen others. In the trees, a wren or maybe a warbler sang, undisturbed by the scene on the ground. Birds don’t care. We’re big, slow lumps to them, always looking up while they’re looking down.
�John,’ Jenny tugged on my shirt, pulled me back inside the oven and nodded out of her window.
Emerging from the track down to the Roost, we saw them. The skinny deputy with Rudy and Gloria. The cop had hold of Rudy, tight by the arm, like he was chief suspect and they’d caught their man. Gloria walked freely alongside. Rudy had a black scowl on his face, red-eyed and resigned to the treatment. He’s a Buchanan, I imagined the sheriffs saying, course he’s got something to do with this mess.
�Hey,’ I shouted, climbing over Jenny to get to the window. �Hey, you guys. What’s going on?’
Gloria jogged over, got halfway before the deputy barked at her but she kept running. �They want to take our statements. That’s all.’
She came right up to the window as the skinny deputy put Rudy into another car. He called her again but she paid no attention.
�I thought we were going to wait,’ I whispered, �we were going to tell them together.’
Gloria looked down, wincing apologetic. �I know, I’m sorry. I got home, changed and went out with Daddy but Mandy had my laundry. She asked why my dress was so muddy and why it smelt so strange. She kept asking and asking and it just all came out.’
�It’s okay,’ Jenny said and reached out, took Gloria’s hand.
Gloria took the comfort for a moment then frowned. �They’ve made a real mess down there.’
�Miss Wakefield,’ the skinny cop shouted from the other car.
�See you at the station,’ Gloria said, then ran over to the skinny cop who opened the car door for her. She got in the back seat with Rudy.
Rudy waved, held up his hands and shouted, �They didn’t cuff me this time!’
The skinny cop banged on the roof to shut him up, then got in, cranked up the engine. The tyres chewed the ground as they tried to get a grip, chunks of dirt flew up behind. A flock of birds exploded from the nearest tree. Skinny cop punched the gas and the car popped out of its dustbowl, skidded over the grass. He swerved, wild to the left then the right before getting control, then snailed the car onto Briggs’ farm track. They disappeared into a dust cloud and left Jenny and me staring after.
It was another half hour of swelter before Samuels and Miller trudged up the valley. Samuels with his light blue shirt turned dark from sweat, red-faced like a cartoon pig, said something to his deputy. Took out a handkerchief, wiped his forehead, his cheeks, under his chin, back of his neck, then started again from the top. Miller, loose roll-your-own hanging out his mouth, dropping flakes of tobacco and ash, hitched up his belt and spoke around the joe, puffing out smoke and losing more strands.
Samuels’ round little eyes met mine. I felt headsick from the smell of the car. Headsick from the smell of death and dirt on my skin. Headsick from the mutterings of �freak’ and �perv’. From the grim, disgusted looks. And from Jenny. From that strange, serene expression she wore last night when she lay down beside the body.
Gloria and Rudy would be at the station by now. Answering questions. The skinny cop would be telling everyone what they found. The rumours of weird kids sleeping next to a body would spread through Larson like locusts through corn. Come on, sheriff, waddle that gut over here and take us to the station, get this over with. But Samuels kept staring. Kept wiping.
Samuels nodded along to something Miller said, chins appearing and disappearing with every bob of his head. Rolls of flesh. A shiny, pink ocean of it, wave after wave, nod after nod.
�What’s taking so long?’ Jenny threw herself against the back seat and pulled her knees up, tucked into her chest. The red scratch livid on her shin.
�I don’t know,’ I said. �But they’re going to ask us a lot of questions.’
�So? We didn’t do anything wrong.’
I shifted on the leather seat, arms and legs sticking. �They won’t see it that way.’
�They’re idiots.’
�They are. But we need to agree what to tell them.’
�What’s to tell?’ Jenny’s arms tightened around her knees. She did that when she was embarrassed, held herself close like she would split apart if confronted. Momma used to do it too, before Pa left, before the Old Milwaukees and the whiskey, but Momma didn’t get embarrassed any more. No sense in shame, John Royal, she said, shame comes from other people and who gives two sweet fucks about other people?
Jenny elbowed my side. �Johnny?’
�Sorry.’
A few more deputies appeared at the top of the valley, crowding behind Samuels. One, his uniform soaked through with sweat, held a handkerchief over his mouth like he was going to hurl. Samuels turned to him, patted him on the shoulder, and the cop turned and retched into the dry grass.
Jenny nudged me again. �What do we tell them?’
�We tell them the truth but we don’t say anything about you and Momma arguing. That’s family business. We say we were worried about foxes or dogs getting to the poor woman before the police could come so we went down there to keep watch. We fell asleep. That’s it.’
�That’s not the truth, Johnny.’
Outside, Samuels’ voice boomed. �Wrap it up, boys.’
He slapped Miller on the back and lumbered toward us.
�It’s close enough,’ I whispered. �You remember it?’
Jenny nodded, arms tightened up around her shoulders.
Samuels and Miller both got in the car, the axles groaning under their new weight. The sheriff inched the Plymouth out of the field. As soon as we got onto the track, he put his foot down. Fresh air flooded the car, prickled my skin, blew away the stink of cigarettes and leather. It would take about twenty minutes to get to the station. Jenny held my hand as I hung my head out the window.
The wind and sun pulled at my eyes, stung tears from them. I let them blur, enjoyed the haze. The world had become too real. Too stark and bright white, all sharp edges and hard stares, and I didn’t know what would be waiting when we arrived at the station. For a few more minutes, at least, it was just a car ride.
I heard a rumble of a big engine on the road behind and turned against the wind, hair flicking in my eyes. I blinked the tears away but the haze didn’t lift. The heat transformed the asphalt to water, shimmering, wavering like a mirage, made the car almost invisible. The car, a light blue or grey, kept its distance, too far away to see its details, but close enough to hear the engine, feel the thunder of it in my chest. I could tell a car’s badge from a glance but nothing much else. I knew it was a Ford but didn’t recognise it from around town or school pick up. This was a back road, a shortcut into Larson locals used. Outsiders didn’t know it. My chest vibrated with the roar of the engine, like I stood too close to a booming speaker. The shimmer grew. The grey paint job, so pale, like no colour I’d seen, didn’t reflect the light, seemed to absorb it. Seemed to pull the colour out of the world, suck it up and devour it.
�Johnny?’ Jenny’s voice.
The grey car swerved, took a right and disappeared.
�John! My hand.’
I turned to my sister. I’d been clutching her fingers, my knuckles white.
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