The Bright Forever Read online

  Then, before Gilley could ask him who he was or what he wanted, he let loose of his hand and moved on down the sidewalk, tipping his cap to a woman in front of Bogan’s, digging into his pocket for a dime that he gave to a little girl. He patted her head. Gilley watched him until he came to the Coach House, where a woman was waiting: a scrawny woman with short hair gone to gray, a cook’s apron still tied around her neck. She was sipping something from a wax cup, and when she saw the man, she lifted her face from the cup and she smiled. It was a beautiful smile, a smile full of joy and thanksgiving, and Gilley was grateful that he had seen it.

  He heard his name, and he knew it was his mother calling him in her loud, brassy voice. She was across the street waving her arm. “Gilley,” she said. “Look at your sister.”

  Katie was riding the elephant. She sat up high on a velvet-covered gondola with gold tassels swinging from it. A man in knee-high boots and riding pants blousing around his legs and a pith helmet on his head led the elephant around the straw-littered ring. He put a hooked pole beneath the elephant’s trunk and used it to turn him.

  Gilley followed the circle the elephant made, and as he did, he saw his father watching from the crowd. At one point, when the gondola shifted and slipped just a tad to the side, Junior Mackey made the slightest move forward, and his arms started to lift. Later, Gilley would remember that—how his father had been ready to catch Katie. But there was no need. She was fine. People were watching because how often in this itty-bitty town did you see a girl, her glorious brown hair draping her shoulders, riding atop an elephant? Mercy.

  When the elephant turned again, Gilley saw the man and woman in front of the Coach House. Mr. Dees was with them. He was wearing his plaid jacket even though the night was warm. Gilley knew the weather was about to turn. Soon there would be hot, dry days, the air still and sultry. The man with the sunburned face took off his painter’s cap and waved it in the air. He raised his other arm and pointed at Katie. “Woo-hoo,” Gilley heard him shout. “Look at that cowgirl.”

  Then he put his cap back on. He laid one arm over the woman’s slight shoulders and the other around Mr. Dees’s, and the three of them walked on up the street.

  “Gilley, I’m riding an elephant,” Katie said.

  She looked splendid. She was sitting up very straight and her chin was lifted. “Exotic,” he would tell her later when she would sneak into his bedroom, still talking about the elephant. “Oh, yes, you looked exotic,” he would say. “Like a princess. An Indian princess.”

  “I wasn’t afraid,” she would say. “Not a bit.”

  He would tell her that he had seen that. And it was true. He knew, as he watched her, that she wasn’t afraid. Later, he would have to remind himself of that fact. She hadn’t been afraid. Not her. Not then. Not on that night, on the courthouse square, in the center of this small town, where so many people, enchanted with the sight, were watching her.

  Raymond R.

  AND I STILL can’t see anything that involves me in any way in this thing other than the fact that I was a neighbor to Henry Dees.

  Mr. Dees

  IT WAS A Friday, June 30, when Raymond R. came to my house around noon. I was sitting out under the catalpa tree, just sitting there on an old metal yard chair, drinking a glass of iced tea. From time to time, a martin swooped down from the sky and perched atop one of the houses. Raymond R. squatted down on his heels just the way he had that first time when he showed me how to patch the concrete steps. He pulled snatches of grass out of the ground and tossed them into the air. When he finally spoke his voice was flat and used up.

  “They canned me today,” he said. “That hospital up in Jasper. The foreman gave me the sack.”

  He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a tin of Sucrets throat lozenges, but when he opened it I could tell that it wasn’t Sucrets that he had inside. They were pills, some of them purple and some of them yellow. He fished around with his finger until he had the one he wanted, a yellow one. And all the while he was telling me how he’d always tried to get ahead, how he got tired of all the rich bastards, those ones like Junior Mackey. Just look at him sitting high and mighty. “I build houses for people like him,” Raymond R. said. “I build their factories and their schools, and what do I get out of it? Not enough to amount to a pinch of shit. That’s for sure.”

  Story of his life, he said, and then he snapped the Sucrets tin shut.

  The first time he tried to get a leg up, he told me, was when WWII was on. He was eighteen, and boys in his hometown in Minnesota were going off in bundles to fight in the Pacific and North Africa. He saw them downtown on Mitchell Street, jazzing with their best girls before they shipped out. He saw them at the Snow White Sandwich Shop, playing records on the countertop jukeboxes, snuggling up to Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls,” or Bing Crosby’s “You Belong to My Heart,” or Vaughn Monroe’s “There I Go.” The girls wore plastic flowers in their hair; the boys had on neckties and smelled of Bay Rum Aftershave. They went out into the night, got into cars, and drove up Mitchell Street, turned west on Chestnut, angling along the north shore of Silver Lake, heading to the Rocks Cabins.

  Raymond R. followed them in his father’s Buick 90. He saw the girls with their heads laid over on the boys’ shoulders. He fought the urge to keep following them, to sneak up to a cabin and get a peek at what was going on.

  The Army wouldn’t have him, nor would the Navy or the Marines. He even tried the Coast Guard, and they told him the same thing. Go home, they said. You didn’t pass the physical. It’s your leg. Sorry, bub, but you understand.

  A broken leg when he was a kid, he told me. It never healed right.

  He watched the boys home on leave after boot camp. They paraded down Mitchell Street in their uniforms. Man, they were sharp. All spit and polish. Everything crisp and neat. They strutted around and let everyone give them the glad hand. Men dragged them into bars and bought them drinks. Girls gave them their scarves, their lockets, their bracelets, their stockings—anything for good luck. Then the boys went away, and the girls wrote them letters, and each week in the evening newspaper there was “News of Our Boys in Service.” If you were a soldier, you were by God somebody.

  So he stole an Army Air Corps uniform from a surplus store and wore it up and down Mitchell Street until he could work up the nerve to saunter into the ballroom at the Northwood Hotel and ask a girl to dance. She wore a red felt hat with a sloped brim and lace netting that fell over her eyes. The band was playing “Moonglow,” the clarinets all sleepy and whispery, the muted horns raspy and slow. The girl had small hands, and he liked the way his palm covered hers. She laid her head on his shoulder; the netting of her hat tickled his neck. They danced under soft blue lights until a policeman tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to please step outside.

  That was the first time he’d been arrested, he told me, and he wasn’t sorry. That girl. That dance. The gardenia scent of her cologne. Those small hands. It had all been worth it. Every day he spent in jail.

  He stood up. He took the glass of iced tea from my hand. He popped the yellow pill in his mouth and drank it down with the rest of my tea. “I’ve beat men before.” He let the glass drop to the ground. “It’s no skin off my nose. Teach, I’m in a pinch. I figure you can help me get a leg up on those pricks like Junior Mackey. How about it? What’d you say?”

  Clare

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when Ray came into the dining room at Brookstone Manor. I was on my break, just sitting at one of the tables, drinking coffee. A couple of the girlie-girls who worked in the kitchen were sitting across the room, sipping Cokes through straws. They were talking with loud voices. “God,” one of them said, and she drew it out—Gawd—like now she’d heard it all.

  Ray sat down next to me. He kissed me on the neck. “I’m sorry, old girl.” He whispered it in my ear. “They gave me the heave-ho. ‘Grab up your tools and don’t come back.’ That’s what the boss man said. That son of a bitch.”

  I
whispered back. I didn’t want the girlie-girls to hear. “Ray, was it those cement blocks? The ones you took? Was that why they let you go?”

  By this time, he’d finished the porch and then hauled home more blocks and built that garage out behind the house. He’d put on a tin roof and hustled up some doors from the salvage yard. One evening, he backed his truck into the garage, closed the doors, and fastened them with a chain and a heavy Yale padlock. He pulled on the lock, and the chain rattled. Now he could shut up his truck at night, he told me, and not have to worry about someone breaking into it on the street and stealing his tools. “There it is,” he said. “Everything safe and sound.”

  No, he told me, it wasn’t those blocks. He got the heatstroke again. He was on the scaffold wall when he felt it coming, that spin in his head, and soon he saw the black spots swirling in his eyes, and his knees gave way. He heard a voice—one of the other men—and it seemed to be coming at him from a long way off. It was like he was in a tunnel and the openings were closing and the light was going out. “It’s Ray,” the voice said. “Jesus, he’s gone again.”

  When he came to, he was in the shade with the men crouched around him, and he said, “Well, hello there, boys. Long time, no see.”

  They gave him a cold drink. They took off their shirts and fanned his face. They went back to their work and left him there in the shade.

  It wasn’t but a little while when the foreman come to tell him he was through. That’s how it happened. That’s how he ended up, middle of the summer and no job.

  I tried to think about what it meant. Where would we get the money to let us stay through winter? Florida was no good for Ray. All that sun and sticky air. And we were already in debt, only I didn’t know that then. I thought Ray had been putting money back—leastways that’s what he’d been telling me. I didn’t know about the dope then. Didn’t know about the yellow jackets and the pep pills and the LSD. Didn’t know he was putting out twenty dollars a day for all that junk. Some nights he came home sleepy or chatty, and I thought it was the beer. Call me stupid, and you’d be right.

  Or, really—and I think it was this—I just wanted to hold fast with love. I’m not afraid to say it, not even now. There was a time when I loved Raymond Wright. Nothing that happened can change that fact. I’m not even sure I’d trade it if I could. Don’t ask me. Just know there are days when you thank your lucky stars, when the world doesn’t seem quite so old and used up. I lay in bed those mornings and listened to the martins singing. Sing, sing, sing—just like Mama said, all over God’s Heaven. Now, these last summers—my last summers—when I hear them, I think back to those mornings, Ray in the bed beside me, and my heart balls up so tight I can’t tell what’s love and what’s misery. It’s all the same, always will be. That’s what I’d tell those girlie-girls now if I could somehow travel back to that afternoon at Brookstone Manor—that lazy afternoon when one of them said, “God,” not like a prayer but like there wasn’t a thing left to surprise her. I’d tell her there’s always something around the corner, no matter how old you get, no matter how much you’re sure you’ve got a handle on things. Sooner or later you live long enough—I hope that girlie-girl got the chance—and the love and the heartache get all mixed up, and that’s what you’ve got.

  Once upon a time, there was me and Ray and Henry Dees and a little girl named Katie and her mama and daddy and brother. That’s the way it was, always will be. Nothing we can do to make it different. It’s a story now, and stories have endings even when you don’t know—fools like me—that you’re already in the middle of one, and you’re already making choices. “Let’s go for a ride tonight,” I said to Ray, trying to cheer him up. Choices that will bring you to places you never thought you’d be, places in your heart you’ll mourn and love the rest of your life. I’d tell that to the Mackeys if I thought it’d do any good. But then I really don’t have to. I’m sure they know it. At least in that one way, they’re like me.

  Gilley

  I WENT TO Rene Cherry’s mother because that night of Moonlight Madness I had a dream. I dreamed that Katie and I were riding an elephant—not just any elephant, but Dumbo from the Disney movie. So we really weren’t riding. We were flying. Dumbo was flapping his ears, and we were rising past the courthouse clock tower. We were soaring over the carnival, over our mother and father waving good-bye to us. “Good-bye,” Mother called. “Good-bye.”

  My father threw his arms up above his head, reaching, but we were gone. We were flying over the square, over my father’s glassworks, and Gooseneck. Then we were so high, there were only clouds—all that white nothing—and Katie said, “It’s cold up here.” I put my arms around her, and then out of nowhere, the way things happen in dreams, there was Mr. Dees. He wasn’t flying. He was just walking along—walking through the clouds. He was wearing that plaid jacket.

  “How can you do that?” I asked him.

  “You’re riding an elephant,” he said. “Explain that.”

  “It just happened.”

  “Here’s the secret.” The vapor of the clouds was swirling around him. “I’m invisible. No weight.”

  “But I can see you.” I stretched out my hand to touch him. “You’re right here.”

  But he wasn’t. My fingers closed around his jacket sleeve, and there was no arm in it. I flailed about with my other hand and caught the jacket by its collar. It was like I was grabbing it off a hanger. It collapsed in my hands. I was holding the jacket, and I realized then that Mr. Dees, wherever he had gone, had meant it for Katie, who was so cold. Only she was no longer there with me. I hadn’t even felt her slip from my arms. “Katie,” I called out, but there was no answer. Only the sound of wind, and this is the ridiculous part—the nutty stuff of dreams that leaves me stupid, no way to explain it—Dumbo said to me, “Holy moly.” He sounded like Katie, but of course he wasn’t, and it was like she was there and not there all at the same time, and when I woke, I was shivering.

  “My sister,” I said to Margot Cherry a few days later. “When she was born, I didn’t know what to make of her. She was the most amazing thing. I wouldn’t even hold her. I couldn’t. I was afraid.”

  I hadn’t meant to say any of this. I hadn’t intended to confess that there were times when I didn’t know how to love Katie enough. She was our sweetheart, come when I was eight years old. “She’s our little girl,” my mother told me when she and my father came home from the hospital. Katie’s face was my face in my baby pictures displayed on our fireplace mantel, hung from our walls, set on my mother’s dresser. “She’s your sister,” my mother said, and the word amazed me, as it did even that day in Margot Cherry’s living room. Sometimes, to this day, I hear myself say it—my sister—and I feel this trembling inside me.

  That dream was still in my head, that crazy dream about Katie and me on Dumbo the elephant and Mr. Dees walking in the clouds. When I opened my mouth, the dream was on my tongue, as was the feeling that I’d had ever since—the sensation that sometimes life was so wonderful it was scary, not to be trusted. Maybe that was what I learned the first time I held out my finger to Katie when she was a baby—“Go on,” my father said, “for Pete’s sake, Gilley, she’s your sister”—and she closed her hand around it, and she looked at me with those green eyes, and she smiled. Maybe I learned then that I’d never be able to love her as much as she deserved.

  Now I’m a parent myself. Each night before I go to bed, I step into my son’s room and then my daughter’s, where moonlight comes through the windows and falls over their faces. I stand in the shadows and watch them sleep, register each rise and fall of breath in my own chest, and each time I do, I think about that summer. How many times did my father, climbing the stairs at night, do the same? How many times did he look in on Katie and think himself a lucky man?

  “Is it too late?” I asked Margot Cherry that afternoon. It’s been more than thirty years and still I can remember how my voice shook. “How do we know when we’ve loved someone all that we can?”
r />   We were sitting in her living room on a green sofa. A painting of a red barn hung from the wall across from us. I thought what a perfectly ordinary house this was. Throw rugs littered the floor, put down in front of chairs and doors. The rugs were green with yellow daisies on them. A vase shaped like an ear of corn sat on the coffee table, a bouquet of lilies gathered in it. The room smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish. Margot Cherry had a red bandanna tied around her hair. She held her dust rag in her hands.

  She told me about the light that was coming. She said I would be chosen.

  “Love,” she said. “It finds you. Be ready.”

  Clare

  SO WE WENT for that ride. We rode through the long evening light on that Friday when Ray lost his job. He had his binoculars, the ones he used to scan the horizon for the tall arms of cranes and the frames of steel girders when he went out looking for construction sites he’d read about in his union bulletin. The tilled fields flashed by, flat and brown, stretching back to woodlots. The corn was nearly knee-high, and the bean plants were getting a hold and growing up from the clay dirt. Orange tiger lilies swayed in the fence rows. Quail gave their cheery, two-note call: bob-white. The air smelled sweet from clover hay, cut in the pastures and curing in windrows. We met a car now and then, but for the most part we didn’t see anyone, maybe a farmer climbing off his tractor in his barn lot or a woman scattering feed to her guinea hens. They gave us a wave, and we waved back, and I liked the way that made me feel, like we were regular folks on this summer evening when we didn’t know how anything would work out for us. We were just driving.