What Dies in Summer (11 page)

“I gotta pee,” she said. “Stay here.”

She ran behind the concrete piling. Watching her disappear, I thought of the time on one of our jaunts along the tracks a while back when I suddenly had to go, so I turned aside, unzipped and
let fly. L.A. just stood there without saying anything for a minute, then dropped her jeans and panties to half mast, leaned back slightly as she pulled up on herself somehow and shot a golden arc
down the other side of the embankment, getting about as much distance as any guy could have. All I could do was stare at her in disbelief, having had no idea any such thing was possible. To this
day I didn’t know what the hell her demonstration had been about, but it created in my mind the long-term question of whether this was a special talent only L.A. had or something girls in
general could do if they really wanted to.

I waited, feeling awkward and trying not to look at the body in the wrong places. But I couldn’t help myself, my eyes lingering on her breasts, and in spite of myself I wondered if
she’d ever done it with anybody. Then suddenly I knew she had, with the guy who’d killed her, or rather he’d done it to her, not only in front but from the back too. And it had
hurt. It had made her scream. Another thing I didn’t want to know and didn’t feel I had any right to know. Even here in the full sun a dark chill found me.

When L.A. came out she was slightly more like her usual self, and I relaxed a little. We stood and thought about the dead girl a while longer, then started back up the slope. On the way back we
worked out how we were going to tell the story. Gram would be the first to hear it, and naturally L.A., being the actual finder, would lay out the main points. But I had clear standing too because
I’d been there and checked out the body on an equal basis with L.A. I may not have actually touched it like her but I didn’t see that as neutralizing my position, because seeing the
dead girl naked was a bigger deal for me since I was a guy. This was a fairly subtle point but a significant one, and I knew it wouldn’t get past L.A.

Gram was ironing when we came in. The way she did it was sort of a production, setting the board up, or more likely having me set it up if I was around, next to the window under the floor lamp
with a big glass of iced tea on a coaster and a few windmill cookies on a small plate on the library table beside her. She had her own special braided rug that she stood on in her woolly slippers
and the radio was always on a station that played old-people music, Gram humming along with the tunes she liked. There were baskets of clothes to be ironed on her left and a rack to her right where
she hung the pieces when she was finished with them.

When Gram saw the look on our faces she said, “What is it, you two?”

“We found a dead body,” said L.A. In situations like this she never wasted her breath on the small stuff.

Gram’s mouth opened. She set the iron down on its end. Jazzy appeared and began carefully sniffing our ankles.

“It was a girl with no clothes on,” said L.A. “She was choked, and somebody cut her here.” L.A. pointed to her own breasts.

“Oh, my Lord,” said Gram, taking off her glasses. “Where was this, honey?” You had to give Gram credit, not coming back with any bullshit about whether we were fooling or
whether we were sure the girl was dead or whether we had let our imaginations get the better of us.

“By the overpass,” I said.

“You couldn’t see her from the road,” L.A. added.

Gram nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right, there was an article, last week sometime.” Gram read both newspapers every day and at any given moment knew pretty
much everything there was to know. She moved to the side chair and sat down. “Did you leave her as you found her?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, seeing the girl again on her back in the weeds, her head over to the side, her half-closed eyes unfocused and vacant, the narrow bruise around her neck
blue-gray in the sun.

Gram nodded again. “We’ll need to call the police,” she said, reaching for her small address book.

As she did this, I felt the flow of things beginning to change. There was going to be a lot of excitement, no doubt about it, but that could definitely be a two-edged sword. As we watched Gram
dial and heard her say, “Detective Chamfort, please,” I understood that this wasn’t a story now, and it no longer belonged to us. It had turned into a case. It belonged to
investigators and reporters and lawyers. By the time they were through it would all be about them, and about whoever did the murder, and the lost blue girl would gradually shrink away to
nothing.

But not in my mind. I thought about her and knew I would never forget her. And I wondered what she could have been trying to tell me during those long nights when she had stood by my bed.

L
.
A
.
AND I
both had to answer a lot of questions from the police and reporters about the girl—it
turned out her name was Tricia Venables—and of course every kid we knew had to come by to hear the story firsthand. But most of the excitement had worn off by now and I was ready for a break
from all the fuss.

“Going for a walk,” I said to L.A., grabbing my Red Sox cap and pushing through the front screen door, not even thinking about where I was going, just wanting solitude. L.A.,
grooming Jazzy’s fur with a hairbrush, glanced up at me as I went by but didn’t say anything.

Walking and thinking, mostly about Tricia Venables, I eventually found myself passing the church, dark and silent now on a weekday, and it deflected my thoughts into the hopeless mental thicket
of godliness. Gram never used the word herself, but it was the only one I could think of to describe her sub-intense and inexact requirements for doing the right thing, which seemed to mean
behaving at all times as if the Sunday school teacher were watching. The concept was easy enough to talk about but amazingly tricky to put into practice.

Church was an every-Sunday thing under Gram’s rules, but she could be a little perverse about holiness. She had this thing about insisting on actual right conduct, almost like it mattered
as much as going to services. Not to say the sermons had a reverse effect on me, but they did sharpen my awareness of how confusing and tiresome doing the right thing can be and caused me to have
doubts about even being saved in the first place. I knew if it was something you could directly feel, like long underwear or a toothache, I wasn’t.

I thought of all the times I’d sat in the polished oak pew between Gram, who was a believer, and L.A., who wasn’t, and I wondered—had Tricia Venables been saved?

It sounded like a horrible joke to me.

Tricia had probably prayed herself cross-eyed, but there she was, dead just the same. I pictured her standing naked in front of God with her head swaying on her ruined neck and her arms and legs
gangling around like a puppet on strings, trying to point to where her nipples were supposed to be and asking God what happened, was He off duty that day or just out for coffee or what, and could
He please put her back together again, thank you very much.

What it came down to was that I had a hard time seeing prayer as a practical tool in the face of real danger.

On the other hand, I remembered when I was just a little kid back in Jacksboro, walking out between two parked cars into the street, a strong hand grabbing my sweater to yank me back, a second
later a truck bombing right through the space I’d been about to step into. But when I looked around there was no one behind me, nobody anywhere near me. Nobody on the whole block. I had no
explanation for this, but for me it raised possibly the trickiest question of all: Why save me and not somebody else? There had to be thousands of candidates who were more deserving than me.

I had a new mental image of Tricia, in her damaged state, standing side by side with me while some ghostly hand pinned a blue ribbon on me instead of her. Which for the first time ever gave me a
feeling I hadn’t even known was possible—it made me angry at my own mind.

But then came another idea. Maybe the big plan didn’t call for people being entitled to explanations. Maybe all you got was the chance to think about things and try to figure out for
yourself what’s true and what’s not. Maybe not explaining everything, all the whys and why-nots, was a form of respect for human intelligence.

The thought almost made me laugh out loud.

I had once asked Gram about talking in tongues the way some people did in church, and she said, “We do not scorn other communions.” Okay, but did that cover drinking poison and
picking up snakes to dance with? And what kind of store would you go to for the poison, some kind of anti-pharmacy? Would you need a prescription to make sure it was safe and effective? What would
it taste like? Did it come in small quantities like eyedrops or in bulk like Epsom salts, or some other way? And the snakes—either you’d have to catch fresh ones for each service or
have them on hand all the time, like communion wafers, meaning somebody would have to clean their cages and keep them fed. Or if they came from some kind of supplier who stocked the poisonous ones,
possibly as a specialty item, would it be a matter of buying them outright or just checking them out for the day? Maybe paying a fine for late returns or any damage to the snake? Did you get your
money back if the snake bit somebody and they died, or was it if they didn’t die?

Which was when it came to me that things like these probably weren’t as important as they seemed. They were only ceremonies. They had about as much to do with God as lighting birthday
candles did with the passage of time, and most of them were probably made up by people as confused and ignorant as I was.

Two days later we went to church, just like always.

To my surprise, Colossians Odell was standing by the white steps that led up to the heavy carved double doors of the sanctuary, holding an imaginary broom and sweeping the paths of certain
worshippers as they came abreast of him, shouting, “Hark! Hark!” in his huge voice as they passed.

His eyes were blood-red and he didn’t seem to recognize me at first. But then suddenly he did, and for just a second he looked right into and through my eyes and all the way to the back of
my skull. Then the recognition was gone and he went back to his sweeping. It had been at least a year since I’d seen him doing the mummy-shuffle that went with the medication I knew he was
supposed to be taking, and at the moment it was obvious his mind was in the grip of some irresistible power that didn’t affect the rest of us. I started to tell Gram this was the basso
profundo we’d talked about, but she was already halfway up the steps, and after another glance at Colossians I decided to let it go.

The steps were made of white marble, smoothly worn down in the center from all the hopeful feet that had come this way, and they were my idea of the way into heaven. Except for the clouds that
would probably be scattered around and the golden light playing across the scene, this must be what it would be like, with the saved people in their serious clothes climbing on up and filing in
through the sacred gates with nods and smiles as they took their places in eternity, which at the time I thought of as being constructed primarily of varnished oak and stained glass.

Gram was wearing her white hat and blue Sunday dress with the small white dots, and L.A. had on her A outfit, the cream-colored dress with red circles and her black patent-leather pumps. Diana
was with us today too, dressed in a light blue skirt and white blouse, looking so perfect it made my throat hurt. Both of the girls carried white Bibles with gold lettering on the covers. The
transformation they went through in an hour or so on Sunday morning was amazing. But it wasn’t just the clothes and hair—this was what Gram referred to as a sea change, the girls moving
and talking differently and somehow altering the gravity and atmosphere around them, changing the significance of everything.

Shepherd Boy Shepherd greeted us at the top of the stairs, standing there by the doors in his black suit, with his hands and heels together like a mortician. As usual, and unlike Colossians, he
didn’t look anybody in the eye. Making him a greeter seemed like a strange idea to me, Shepherd Boy being about as welcoming as a muddy grave, but you could tell he took the job seriously by
the deep sober way he tried to talk when he greeted you.

Shepherd Boy was his real given name, or names. Gram’s theory was it might have been the result of some confusion with the birth certificate at the hospital, maybe because his parents
didn’t have a name thought up yet when it was filled out. He wasn’t very old as adults go, but he was earnest. He was also soft and white and had big sleepy gray eyes with long lashes
and one of those damp, super-limp handshakes. He never had any friends that I knew of and wasn’t married, but he was youth and music director at the church, which as far as I could tell was
the only job he ever had.

A girl we knew named Lisa Childress had told me that back when she went to Vacation Bible School, Shepherd Boy had offered her five dollars to let him spank her. His idea was to wait until the
other kids had left and then he and Lisa would go into the bathroom and do it. The five dollars was going to be for ten licks—seven if she’d lower her panties. He had the five dollars
out and a Ping-Pong paddle ready and everything. She said he had clothespins too, but she didn’t ask him what they were for.

Looking at her expression, I just had to ask. “Did you let him?”

“Not that time,” she said.

Shepherd Boy had had himself crucified in the church basement for Good Friday last year. The worshippers all gathered down there for the “special blessing,” and when they pulled the
cotton sheeting aside, there he was in a white diaper, with ketchup on his hands, feet, forehead and side, standing on a little box in front of a cross cobbled together out of four-by-fours with
his arms out wide like Jesus on Calvary. There were a couple of turns of dried grapevine around his head, and they’d rigged some fake nails for his hands and feet. His eyes were closed, but
you could see that his eyeballs were moving around behind the lids.