The Bright Forever Page 6

  The stories came out, and when they did, we had ways to explain the dying: too duty-bound, too fast, too careless, too drunk, too desperate. We died in the war in Vietnam. We took the S-curve west of town with too much speed and smashed into the bridge abutment or left the road and crashed into a tree. We went joyriding, didn’t take care at the crest of Sugar Hill and ended up smashing into a gravel truck just then turning onto the highway. We left cigarettes burning and died in house fires, ignored weather reports and got hit by lightning, went swimming at the quarries and got in too deep. We got up on kitchen chairs, tied ropes around beams in our basements, looped nooses around our necks, and then kicked the chairs away.

  All these things happened in our small town.

  The Dog ’n’ Suds across from the hospital had an old wreck of a car—its hood crumpled, its windshield cracked—arranged so it looked like someone had driven it into the side of the building. It was one of the first things anyone saw when they came into town from the west—that optical illusion of a horrible accident and a sign reminding us to take care: This is not a fairy tale! It’s the truth! It’s a tragedy!

  We found ways to forget the warning, to think of the crumpled car as a cartoon. We imagined that as long as we lived cautious lives we were safe.

  That evening, after he had fixed my glasses, Raymond R. opened his glove compartment and took out an envelope. The flap was tucked in, and he undid it and held the envelope open so I could see what was inside: the fluff of Katie’s hair that I kept in the drawer of my night table. Sometime, and this knowledge sent a chill up the back of my neck, Raymond R. had been in my house.

  I didn’t say a word. What could I say?

  “I don’t know whose hair this is.” He closed the envelope’s flap. “But I know it isn’t yours. For a price, I’ll forget all about it. I won’t tell a soul.”

  Something gave way inside me, not because Raymond R. was threatening me with blackmail, but because here, at last, was someone who knew about me.

  It had become too much to hold the secret to myself. My love for Katie was something I couldn’t keep quiet forever, and surely I’d been waiting for this chance a good while. I would have paid Raymond R. what he asked just to have him listen. So I told him the whole story. I told him the truth.

  Gilley

  ONE EVENING that summer—it was the day Katie got her new bicycle—a man came to our house. He was a man who worked for my father. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know why he had come. We were on the patio, where my father was cooking steaks on the grill. My mother and Katie were inside.

  The man was no one I could describe, the sort you see and then can’t call to mind. Dark hair parted on the side and combed over the way so many men then did. I recall that he was neatly dressed, a blue sport shirt tucked into his tan slacks.

  He stepped up onto our patio, and he said to my father, “Junior, I ought to have something for those days I worked last week. You can’t just let a man go and not pay him for days he worked. I’ve been with you a good number of years. I thought you’d do me better than this. You’ll make things right, won’t you, Junior? You know I’ve got my little girl sick right now. I need that money.”

  “This is my home.” My father was holding a barbecue fork. He waved it in front of him as if swatting gnats. “For Pete’s sake, I’m here with my family.”

  “Junior, you’ve got to listen to me. You and I, we go back a ways. My daddy and your daddy were friends. I’m trying to be as decent as I can, but damn it, you’ve got to listen.”

  “I don’t have to listen to a thing you have to say. I don’t keep drunk men on my payroll.”

  “You know I’m not a drunk, Junior. You know it’s just I’ve had a tough time with my girl being sick and all. If you want to let me go, I can accept that. But still, I did the work those days, and I ought to be paid.”

  “I’m sorry about your girl,” my father said. “I truly am, and I’m sorry things have to end like this between you and me. But I can’t pay you for time when you were laid up on a pallet sleeping it off.”

  The man rubbed his hand over his face. “It’s true what you say.” He pushed back his shoulders and lifted his chin, owning up to whatever he had to face. “I won’t deny it. You’ve always been good to me in the past, but I guess you don’t believe I deserve a second chance.”

  I could see that my father was thinking it over. “Do you need help with your girl’s doctor bills?”

  “I do, Junior.”

  “You come in tomorrow,” my father said. “We’ll talk about it then.”

  “I’ll do that, Junior. I surely will. And I’ll be sober. You can count on that from here on.”

  My father put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “There’s nothing more important than family,” he told him. “You have to remember that. No matter how rough things get, you’ve got to do what you can to take care of your wife and kids.”

  You have to understand, because I didn’t then, that even as far back as high school days, my father was deliberately and carefully choosing the life that he would one day have. It would be a life of comfort and distinction. He had learned as much from his own father, who had passed the family business to him—had let him “see the future,” my grandfather always joked, and left my father, if he “kept a good head on his shoulders” and made all the right moves, “set for life.” So much of the world was made of glass, my grandfather said. Windows, doors, dishes, mirrors. That didn’t begin to account for it all. A man who made glass would always have as much business as he wanted.

  But my father’s dreams of the future went far beyond the money he would earn, all on the strength of glass. Not long ago, I found a list of ambitions he had made when he was just a boy. A sheet of stationery slipped from between the pages of his senior-year Hilltopper. On it, in the precise and elegant handwriting that men used to have, he had noted that he intended to marry Patsy Molloy, that they would have two children, a boy and a girl. The girl, they would name Katie; the boy would be Gilbert, but they would call him Gilley.

  “Gilley,” he said to me that evening after the man had thanked him and gone. “Go get your mother and Katie.” He speared a steak and held it up on the fork. He winked at me. “Get ready for some good eating, Gilley. Now that’s a fine hunk of meat.”

  A house in the Heights, he had written on his list. A new car—a Lincoln—every two years. Vacations in the summer: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood, New York City, Canada. I’ve often imagined him daydreaming as he made his list. Maybe he was sitting in class—physics, let’s say—and instead of listening to the teacher talk about matter and energy, he was moving on through the future, creating Katie and me and the life we would all one day have as a family.

  I believe he needed this dreaming because, despite his family’s wealth, he imagined that he had farther to reach than most men. “Short men have big dreams,” he told me once when we were talking about what I would do after I graduated. Like me, he was barely five-foot-seven. “We’re bulldogs, you and me. When we get our jaws around something, we don’t let go.”

  When I went into the kitchen to tell my mother and Katie that the steaks were ready, Katie was crying. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and my mother was standing in front of her, using nail-polish remover to take the red polish off Katie’s toes.

  “It’s Gotta Go?” I asked.

  Katie rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She sniffed back a few last tears. Then she nodded her head and told me, “The nail polish or the new bike.”

  Just to play the devil, I said, “You should have given up the bike.” Although there was no logic to my claim, it was enough to make her doubt her choice and start her crying again.

  My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the howling about?”

  “It’s nothing,” my mother said. “Are we ready to eat?”

  Katie wouldn’t stop crying.

  “Someone tell me what’s going on,” my father said.r />
  “It’s Gilley.” Katie pointed her finger at me. “He’s mean.”

  “Shut up, dimwit,” I told her, and the heat in my voice surprised me.

  “Oh, he’s just being a big brother,” my father said. “That’s what big brothers do. They try to get your goat.”

  “My goat?” Katie said, still sniffling. “I don’t have a goat.”

  “Sure you do,” said my father. He stooped down and put his face next to hers. “Just listen.” He made the gruff baaing noise of a goat, and then he chanted a rhyme. “There’s an old billy goat. Where’s that old billy goat?” He traced his finger down Katie’s chin. “Right here, my dear. Right here, in Katie’s throat.”

  Katie giggled then, and just like that my father had made her forget that just a few moments earlier she’d been upset. We all went out to our patio to eat, and my father said with a big smile, “Well, here we are,” and I could tell at that moment he was, like the rest of us, in love with this life we had.

  Later that night, when I was in bed, I heard my mother talking to my father. Her voice, low and even, drifted up from downstairs, and the last thing I heard her say before I fell asleep was this: “Junior, how well do you know Henry Dees?”

  It was a question that I would forget by morning, and only remember later. I’ve never been able to put it out of my mind, any more than I can forget my father’s senior quote from his Hilltopper: “The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.”

  Clare

  RAY TOLD ME later. It was after the sun had gone down, and we’d come in from outside. He was at the kitchen sink washing his hands, and to this day, whenever I smell that soap—that Lava soap, strong and clean—I think of that night and the way he told the story so la-di-da as if it was nothing at all, just a little piece of chitchat he’d carried home in his pocket.

  “He’s one of them,” he said. “That Henry Dees. He’s a kid fruit. He’s got short eyes.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. I was at the counter dumping the Kentucky Wonders into a drainer so I could rinse them, and I said, “Short eyes? Sounds serious. I thought he just needed his glasses straightened up.”

  Ray turned off the tap and shook water from his hands. “He’s a puppy lover, Clare. An uncle. A chicken hawk. Do I have to say it plain?” He dried his hands on the dish towel. “He gets his jollies from being with those kids. He’s a pervert.”

  “Henry Dees? I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s hard to know someone,” Ray said. Then he said the rest of it, told me that Henry Dees snuck around in the dark and kept his eyes on those kids, one in particular, a little girl who lived in the Heights, a little girl named Katie Mackey. One night, he took a snatch of hair from her brush.

  “Ray, did he go into that girl’s house?”

  “I believe he’s capable of doing that, Clare. I really do.”

  “He told you all this?”

  “Darlin’, do you think I’d make it up?”

  I didn’t even wonder then how Ray knew all those names for what he claimed Henry Dees was, and when I finally got around to asking, he said, Well, you know, it’s just things you hear. It’s just talk.

  Mr. Dees

  WHAT I TOLD Raymond R. was this: I didn’t think of Katie Mackey, or any of my other pupils, with lust. I loved them the way I would have loved my own children, had circumstances allowed me a family. I loved them because I had no one else to love. My parents were both dead. I’d never understood the art of courtship. I wasn’t like the purple martin who could sing his croak song and attract a mate. The only affection I knew came from children. They found me to their liking. I prefer to think there was a kindness to me that they trusted, that made them overlook the fact that I let my hair grow too long, wore crooked glasses, sewed patches on my clothes. My students at the high school took note of such things, and sometimes I overheard a cruel comment or saw a piece of graffiti written on a desk, but the children like Katie were at an age when they could still see beyond a person’s oddities to the real person inside, and there, I believed that I was good-hearted and above reproach. I gave thanks for those children. They were all there was between me and the rage I felt because I was, at heart, a lonely man.

  But then they started to come to me in my dreams, Katie most of all. One night, I dreamed we were on her porch swing and she took my hand. Sweet child. What father hasn’t dreamed like this and woke feeling the joy of his love for his daughter? But when I woke I felt ashamed because, of course, I had no right to this dream.

  I told Raymond R. all this because it had become too much for me—too big, too frightening—and he was the one who had patched the cracks in my porch steps. Work the point in deep, he’d told me. Tamp in that mud. Fill that crack all the way up so the damp won’t get in and set in the cold and cause that concrete to heave open. He’d patched those cracks and now I could barely tell that they had ever been there.

  Sometimes all you can do is tell the truth. That’s what I was thinking when he showed me that fluff of hair in that envelope. I couldn’t have explained this then, but now I suspect that I had started to sense that he carried his own secrets, that he was expert in covering them over, that we were bound together by the dark lives we tried to hide.

  “You came into my house,” I said to him that evening. “I thought you were my friend.”

  “I fixed your glasses, didn’t I?” He folded the envelope and put it in my shirt pocket. “You loan me some money—like I said, a thousand, two if you’ve got it. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone your secrets about that little girl. Teach, you give me that money, and I’ll be your friend all the way to the sweet by-and-by.”

  The Heights

  IT WENT WITHOUT saying in the Heights that Junior and Patsy Mackey were blessed. One look at their house, that Queen Anne with its gingerbread trim and its dramatic roof gables and its bay windows and that marvelous wraparound porch, said it all. Everyone anticipated the Holiday Parade of Homes that took place each Christmas so they could have a peek inside and, if they were lucky, perhaps a word or two with the Mackeys themselves.

  In the meantime, unless someone was lucky enough to be a close family friend, glimpses would have to suffice. Anyone driving past could slow just enough to get a glimpse of the house and the wreath on the front door, which changed according to the seasons. Sometimes a car would turn onto Shasta Drive and then down the alley that ran behind the Mackeys’ house all for another look at the patio, its pavers cut from blue limestone shipped in from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, at least so word had it at Burget’s Sand and Gravel. Along the edge of the patio a fishpond caught the water trickling down over a wall of that blue limestone. The lawn was always freshly mowed and edged, and Patsy Mackey’s rosebushes were glorious in the summer. No one could raise roses like Patsy, and why shouldn’t that be so? Just take a look at her children. Handsome and full of vigor. Everything about the Mackeys—their children, their roses, their patio, their house, the luminaries that lit their driveway during the Holiday Parade of Homes—announced that they were golden.

  Sometimes people stopped their cars and took snapshots. It was that kind of home. They were that kind of family. Nearly nine years had gone by since President Kennedy had been assassinated, long enough for the shock to fade, but not so long to make people forget what it had been like to have a family like the Kennedys, who captivated a country with their charm, their wealth, their good looks. In Tower Hill, that was the Mackeys.

  In the days after Katie disappeared, Pete Wilson, who took care of film developing at Fite Photography, said he couldn’t begin to count the number of rolls that came in with shots of the Mackeys’ house and yard. “It was like we’d all gone away,” he said. “The whole damned town of us, and all that was left was that house.”

  What no one knew was that in the weeks leading up to Katie’s disappearance, Junior Mackey, at moments when there was nothing to keep him on the sunny side—no canasta part
ies, or basketball games at the high school, or home-staged talent shows featuring Patsy and Katie—found his heart seized and aching. He was the sort of man who, by nature, brooded over his mistakes; often the smallest, most commonplace things set him to sulking: catching his reflection in a window as he passed, hearing an owl calling in the night, or the creak of bedsprings as Katie or Gilley or Patsy turned over in their beds.

  He crossed over then—left the life he thought was his and found himself, poleaxed and weak-kneed, stumbling about in a place where he saw himself, his true self, and he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, look away.

  It was then that he thought of the moment—all those years ago—when he and Patsy, both of them only eighteen, stood in the alleyway behind the doctor’s office in Indianapolis on a night when snow was dusting their heads, and she turned to him and said, “Gil,” said it like a plea, and he squeezed her hand and told her, “You can do this. Jeez, Patsy. It’s the best thing.”

  That was the moment he now wished he could change. He wished he had said, “All right. Yes, we’ll go home. Yeah, sure. We’ll go home and we’ll get hitched and we’ll have this baby.” If only he’d said that. If only he hadn’t given a hang about what his father would say. His father, who had told him, “You’re going places, Junior. You don’t want to get tied down with a wife and a kid.”

  Junior knocked on the door, three deliberate knocks as the doctor had requested. When the door opened, a smell of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol and fuel oil from a heating stove washed out into the alley. Junior put his hand on the small of Patsy’s back—he could barely bring himself to touch her there now—and pressed until she stepped from the alley and up the back stairway to the doctor’s office, where he asked Junior for the money.

  “Stupid boy,” his father said when Junior told him that Patsy was in trouble. “You think with your head, not from down here.” He grabbed Junior’s crotch and squeezed. “Stupid boy,” he said again. “I’ll only bail you out of a jam like this once. If it happens again, you’ll have to own up to it.” Money, he told Junior, could buy whatever they needed, but above all else it could buy them convenience. What he didn’t say was that it could also buy secrets, enough secrets to last Junior and Patsy a lifetime. Secrets that reared up late at night, or sometimes, without warning, in the middle of the day. A gargle of Listerine, a swab of alcohol, a sniff of kerosene from a heater. All these things were enough to make Junior close his eyes and swallow hard because he had caused the child—their first child—to be taken away.