Читать книгу Bitter Sun - Beth Lewis, Beth Lewis - Страница 15

All through school, ignoring the gossip and sharp looks, the question after question, the shouts and stifled giggles at the cuts on my face and arms, two thoughts rolled around in my brain. First, what I’d say to Pastor Jacobs and second, how the hell I was going to solve a murder. Come three o’clock, when I finally got to the church, my head emptied of anything useful. I even thought about asking the pastor how to identify a dead person but quickly shook it away.

I didn’t like Pastor Jacobs’ office, tacked onto the back of the church like a toenail ripped but hanging on. The tang smell of damp and the uneven floor set my stomach rolling the moment I walked in. Momma told me it was a trailer from Paradise Hill a few miles out of town, that trash land where the junkies and dirty women lived in double-wides. They say the previous owner, one of those fire-and-brimstone congregants, donated his home in his will. The man slipped away in his armchair, Momma said, it was a week before they found him, took them a month of airing and four deep cleans to get the smell out.

‘Where was it?’ I asked.

The pastor, still standing at the door after letting me in, said, ‘Where’s what?’

‘The armchair.’

I scanned the room, looking for some sign of it, four depressions in the carpet from the corners, a stain maybe. Jacobs lowered himself gently into his chair, a big leather thing a kid could get lost in. He rolled up the sleeves of his black shirt, adjusted his stiff white collar. His eyes darted across the map of cuts on my face but he never asked about that.

‘Ah, the rumours,’ he said instead, warmth in his words, ‘I’ve heard several so far. A man was murdered for a pack of cigarettes and wasn’t found for a month?’

Something in me sunk. Had Momma just told me a beer-soaked tale she’d heard at Gum’s?

‘Mrs Ponderosa from the Gardening Society said a jealous wife poisoned her husband in this trailer. Left him and ran away with the Clarkesville sheriff who covered up the whole thing. Or maybe the old guy killed himself, I can’t remember. Probably he just died of disease or age, if he died at all. Which did you hear?’

I felt stung, foolish, still standing in the doorway. ‘Momma said the man died in his armchair.’

‘The Paradise Hill church man. That’s a good one,’ he smiled and it was a real smile and that sting of foolishness in me disappeared. ‘Personally, I prefer the one about the man who killed his neighbour over a can of dog food. You hear that one?’

I shook my head.

‘I’ll tell you sometime.’ He gestured to the wooden chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Grab a seat, son.’

I did and the strangeness of the trailer faded. It was just a room. Just an office, painted and decorated to the best it could be. Despite the damp smell and the heat my chair was comfortable. The pastor pulled off his white collar and dropped it into his desk drawer.

‘Don’t tell anyone I did that,’ he said and winked at me. ‘I’m meant to be on duty and in uniform at all times.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, unsure who I would tell anyway. Momma? God?

He was younger than I thought. I saw that now he was in his own place, relaxed as he could be in that black shirt. The deep lines and shrunk-back hair seemed more from hard living than long living. He studied me, tapping a pen on his desk, like he was working out how best to ask about Mora and us sleeping down at the Roost with her. The longer he was silent, the more my nerves fizzed.

‘Johnny.’ He paused. ‘Can I call you Johnny? Do you prefer John?’

Nobody had ever asked me that. Momma and Jenny and Gloria and Rudy called me Johnny but never asked if I liked it.

‘John is fine,’ I said and he smiled.

He wasn’t the same as the other day in the station. There was none of that victorious lion I’d seen with Samuels, he was calmer, relaxed. That feeling of safety came back and a deep sense of calm settled over me like a blanket on a cold night. I had my farm and my pastor and my God, and that’s a mighty army to have at my back.

I sank into my chair. ‘So …’

‘So,’ he said, fingers playing on the desk, not catching my eye like he didn’t know where to start, what to say. The clock ticked on the wall and, outside, I could hear two women chatting on the sidewalk.

He felt it too, I could tell, the awkward silence, so he half laughed and blurted out, ‘You’re not in trouble, okay, John?’

I smiled, wanted to laugh a little at his nerves but I guess it was the first thing he thought of. Grown-ups say stuff like that when you’re so deep in shit you can’t swim your way out.

‘I know,’ I said and he went back to tapping his fingers.

My eyes went to the wall behind him, scanned a poster showing off the birds of Barks County, a Dodge car calendar stuck on April, and a map. The whole world laid out flat, every country a new colour, with strange lines and numbers all over it.

He followed my eyes to the posters, the chair creaked as he turned. I thought he’d explain the map. Miss Eaves did that when she saw a student staring, she’d go, ‘Good eye, that’s the Mississippi delta’, and launch into a talk about drainage basins and steamboats. Pastor Jacobs didn’t.

I kept staring, averting my eyes every time he tried to catch mine, suddenly thinking this was a mistake, I should be home working on the farm or in study hall with my friends. The calm ebbed away. I hoped he would take the hint and let me go, stick true to his you’re not in trouble words and forgive me for saying I’d come here. While I waited for him to speak, in my head, I reeled off the names of the birds on the poster. Such wonderful names, they rolled around my brain like snowballs. I knew them all without looking at their labels. Golden Plover. Kestrel. Redstart. Baltimore Oriole. Green-Winged Teal. And that one, the Lincoln Sparrow, I’d learned from the book Momma gave me. Name them all, Johnny, and a hundred more until this hour is all used up.

‘Hang on,’ the pastor said and his change in tone made me look at him. ‘We’re not doing this right, are we?’

Jacobs stood. He wasn’t that tall but with the trailer’s low ceiling, he was a smiling giant, ballooned into the space.

‘It’s hot as the devil’s shit in here,’ he said and whipped his hand to his mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’

He looked like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the jam, giggling, red-faced.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

He swerved around his desk and past me, flung open the door, but there was no cool relief, only more swelter, more heat, and the buzz of insects attacking a butterfly bush.

‘You know, John, the summers here are something else.’

As we walked, he took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The sheen returned a second later.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ I said, then clamped my mouth shut. Don’t go telling a grown-up what to do, Momma said, especially a pastor, or he’ll put you on a fast track to Satan.

He glanced down at me, dabbed the cloth on his upper lip. ‘Do what?’

‘Wipe it away,’ I said, pointing up to his forehead. ‘It won’t get a chance to cool you down if you get rid of it.’

I’d told Jenny the same last summer. I’d wanted to tell that joke Samuels a few days ago. Sweat’s there for a reason, the body knows what it has to do, we just have to listen to it.

‘Is that right?’ Jacobs said and I saw that kindness in his eyes I’d seen in the station. ‘I’ll bench the handkerchief from now on. Thank you, John.’

I swallowed. Unsure how to respond. But when I looked up at him again he wasn’t the looming giant sending me to Hell, he was a man who helped me and my sister by fending off the sheriff. He was a man who listened and the more I talked, the more he seemed to listen.

But I wasn’t sure I knew what to say yet. I still hadn’t unravelled it all in my head yet, not Mora, not Jenny, not the way it made me feel, because I didn’t know how it made me feel except sick. Except scared. But not of a dead body. Of my sister. Could I really tell him that? Could I let him think bad of Jenny?

Royal business stays on Royal land, Momma said. But my mind kept flipping. One moment, I’d have spilled my guts the second he asked, in the next I’d clam up and want to get the hell away from him. Maybe Pastor Jacobs was only talking to me because he was a gossip like the kids at school and wanted answers, not because he truly wanted to help. The heat, the man, the conversation, all combined inside me. Sharp fluttering filled my insides. Felt like birds on my bones.

Out of the back of the churchyard, we crossed into the fields. A path cut through the wheat and led up to Barks reservoir. Older kids went swimming there after church on Sundays. Momma said it was too deep for me and Jenny, we’d drown no question. Now I’ve told you that, Momma said with a smile, it means that if you go there and you die, I won’t be crying over either of you.

‘Look, John, check out that beauty,’ Jacobs said, squatting down beside me, arm on my shoulder, pointing.

A hawk, a northern harrier, one of my favourites, hovered above a spot in the middle of the field. Held there, as if on a wire straight from God. The bird stared, tiny movements of its wings kept it level in the breeze.

‘You see that white patch on its tail?’ Jacobs said and I knew he was about to tell me what it was. I kept quiet, let him tell it.

‘That’s a northern harrier. He’s spotted a mouse.’

So intent, measured, patient, and yet, with one turn of his wings, he could strike, quick as a bullet out of a gun. We watched for a few more seconds, then, as the pastor shifted, muttering about his bad knee, the harrier dove. Into the gold wheat, gone for a second, then up into the air, a twitching tail caught in its talons.

Jacobs clapped. ‘Just magnificent.’

The hawk landed at the top of a tree and ripped apart the mouse. I couldn’t take my eyes away. In seconds, tear, crunch, gone. That was all it took, a strike, a shot, and the mouse was ruin and wreck just like Mora. One second, one bullet, and she was a body, not a girl.

‘That’s a hell of a bird,’ Jacobs said, standing up and leading me away, back to the path.

‘The British just named a jet plane after it,’ I said and the pastor looked at me, one eyebrow raised. I clammed up. Momma always said no one likes a smart-ass.

‘They did, huh?’

I nodded, waited for him to question me like Momma would have. Where did you hear that? Was it that teacher who told you?

‘Well,’ Pastor Jacobs said, ‘that doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s a beauty.’

And he smiled at me and accepted what I said and that was new for me and it felt good. Really good. I kept my eyes on the harrier until we passed through a stand of trees and into the next field. Jacobs kept quiet for a while as we walked, until the hawk was far out of sight.

‘As much as I’d love to,’ he said. ‘We aren’t here to talk about birds, are we?’

Cold flooded up my bones. He picked a length of wheat and twirled it in his fingers like those baton girls at school.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked.

‘Not really.’

‘That’s all right. We can talk about something else for now. But eventually, we’ll tackle the big stuff.’

The Mora stuff. The Jenny stuff. Black worms squirmed in my gut. It felt strange to be out there with just him, despite wanting to, despite agreeing to it. I felt exposed, like walking bare-ass through nettles and poison oak. The rest of Larson was in school. Rudy, Gloria and Jenny were in study hall without me, talking about the Civil War and President Lincoln and some amendment. We had a test on Friday and I didn’t know my dates and I was here instead of there.

I squeezed my eyes shut, balled up my fists at my sides, kept walking, hoping Jacobs wouldn’t notice. Jenny needed me. She always forgot how to spell Gettysburg. Why did I have to miss school, miss her? I suddenly hated myself for agreeing to these stupid sessions. Nobody else was out of class, just me. Just the freak John Royal. And when this hour was up I’d have to go back there, to the Roost, to the lake, to that depression in the dirt where the body lay and I lay.

‘John?’ Pastor Jacobs put his hand on my shoulder. It felt wrong, too heavy, too hard, like an iron bar pressing into my skin. Then he knelt down on his bad knee, stared right into my eyes, just like in the sheriff’s station. Did he see a soul? Was that what pastors did?

‘This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I need to be at school.’

My breath caught, heart galloped. I needed to get away.

‘Calm down, count to ten with me. Come on, nice and slow, one-one-thousand,’ he nodded at me and I took a deep breath, repeated the number. ‘Good. Two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …’

All the way to ten-one-thousand. The redness cleared. My fists relaxed. Breathing came easier. Gloria knew how to spell Gettysburg. She would tell Jenny. She would make sure she remembered. I was in a field, the sweet smell of the wheat, on a well-trodden path turned to dust by hundreds of running feet. A picture of Jenny running through the dark corn flashed behind my eyes, then finding her pale and staring down by Big Lake.

‘Do you get upset like that often?’ Jacobs said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just when …’ when I’m scared of my sister for wanting to sleep next to a dead body, ‘when I need to help Jenny and I can’t. We have a test.’

‘Next time you feel panicked, before you do anything else, count to ten, just like I showed you. Will you do that for me?’

‘Yes, sir. I will.’

The calm edged back, slowly, as if afraid to show its face all at once. I couldn’t help Jenny now, out here, while she was back there. Something ached inside me at the realisation. Sometimes I wouldn’t be there. Sometimes she would be alone. Like she was alone at Big Lake before I found her. What had she done before I got there? I shivered in the heat.

‘You can call me Frank, you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt much like a “sir”.’

I nodded and tested the word. ‘Frank.’ It felt strange on my tongue. I’d never heard anyone else, young or old, call him that. I smiled. ‘Yes, Frank.’

We carried on toward Barks but he didn’t say anything else. Maybe my panic had scared him, made him think I wasn’t worth helping, and now he wanted to use the hour up as quick as he could so he could be rid of me. John’s fine, Mrs Royal, I don’t need to see him ever again.

As we walked, I prayed not. I wanted to feel what I’d felt in the station, like I had a guardian, something like a father who wouldn’t fly away. Frank – the name sounded odd, even in my head – wanted to talk about Mora but he was dancing about the subject. I’ll talk about it, I decided, if that’s what it takes. I’ll talk, but only to you. I stared up at him, waiting for the questions, studying every bit of him.

He wasn’t an old guy, not really, though everyone is old when you’re thirteen. Much older than Momma, but she’d forced us out too young she said. His hair was still rich brown, he didn’t have all that many lines around his face, not like old man Briggs – Hayton! – or Mrs Lyle from the post office. Momma said Pastor Jacobs had a jaw that could lever open a paint can. That’s how you can tell a man is from good stock, John Royal, Momma said, I should have had you by that pastor so you’d have a jaw that could take a hit. I had a weak chin, Momma said, it’d crack like a peanut shell under a good right hook.

We reached the southern edge of the reservoir. The beach was bigger than it should have been for this early in July. The summer was too hot, too long, drying us all up to husks and draining the reservoir too quickly. A few kids playing hooky splashed about, laid out on towels, a blue cool box full of Cokes between them. I swallowed down dust and ached for one of those Cokes. Hiss and pop of the cap and wonder in a mouthful, fizzing down my throat.

‘Think they’ll share?’ Frank nudged me, sweat shining on his forehead. He didn’t take out his handkerchief, didn’t wipe it away, not even with his sleeve.

He squinted against the sun to make out the truant faces. Then he shouted, ‘Mark Easton, is that you? And Tracy Meadows? You kids have a free period or should I be calling parents?’

The four of them, all juniors a few years up from me, spun around. The two on the beach scrambled up, dusted off the sand, Mark and Tracy. The two in the water ducked down so just their heads showed. One of those in the water was Darney Wills. He wrecked his father’s truck in the post office when he was fifteen but he was on the football team and his father was mayor of Larson, so nobody much cared. Accident. Just kids larking about. No one got killed, after all.

I stepped behind the pastor as we walked down onto the beach. Wanted to hide from them. The two on the beach whispered, laughed, pointed.

‘Hey there, pastor,’ Mark Easton, the boy on the beach, called out. Even Mark Easton didn’t call him Frank. A tiny bud of pride blossomed in my chest.

Frank got close, me trailing behind. I wanted to speak up, say let’s get the hell out of here, but we were too close now. Contact made. Questions asked.

The girl, Tracy, looked right at me, not even a glance at the pastor. I was a sideshow. Rumours grew up fast and strong in Larson, then went rampaging through town in hobnail boots, leaving marks, making holes, twisting and expanding every time a new idiot jumped on its back. The girl nudged Mark. I wanted to bury myself in the sand, let me get eaten by those hawks, let me be ripped up and devoured. All better than those looks and whispers.

Mark joined Tracy in staring, smiling, a look out to that beast Darney Wills and whatever poor girl he’d dragged into the water.

‘You should all be in class,’ Frank said, ‘and you sure don’t look sick.’

‘Aw come on,’ Mark, said, ‘we’ve only got a week of school left, finals are done.’

‘I tell you what, you give me one of those Cokes and I’ll forget I saw you.’

‘Deal,’ Mark said, reached down into the cool box. So slow, his eyes always on me. Stop it, stop looking at me. I wanted to be home. I wanted the farm, the isolation of the fields, the silence of the corn.

Pastor Jacobs accepted the bottle, twisted the cap and handed it straight to me. I took it but didn’t drink it, not in front of them. In the water, Darney stood, started wading to shore. The girl still cowered beneath the surface.

‘Coach Ray got you back in practice for the summer?’ Jacobs asked Mark.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You boys best keep that defence tight next season. God loves football but he loves a state champ more.’

Darney whooped on his way from the water. ‘We’ll destroy Trenton next year, pastor.’

Mark smiled, held Tracy’s hand. Mark was a modest hero to the town, never brash like Darney or wild like Perry Buchanan. He was all things to all people. The Light of Larson they called him. Football star. Baseball star. Star grades. Star smile. Star fucking attitude. My teeth ground together the longer I was near him. Larson treated Mark like a god, as if touching him or getting his attention would somehow bless their narrow lives. He was like a son to me, they’d crow, and everyone would listen slack-jawed and gawking.

Mark Easton, the boy with a hundred fathers. John Royal, the boy with none.

Until now. I looked at the pastor.

They kept talking, Mark and Pastor Jacobs. Mark showed off his throwing arm and his form. The pastor lapped it up and I felt my insides shrivel.

‘You boys work hard this summer,’ Frank said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Mark said. ‘We’ll sure do our best to get to playoffs next season. Maybe you can have a word with the man upstairs for us.’

Jacobs nodded, winked, told the four of them that he didn’t want to catch them there again during school hours. I strode ahead, every step away was one less clenched muscle, one less tight heartbeat. I looked back once. The four of them were on the beach, talking, looking, smaller and smaller until we turned and entered the fields again.

My mood lightened the further away we got. The day’s heat cooled and clouds grew over the sky. A few spots of rain hit my forehead, puffed up dust on the path. My teeth clenched. Rain. Nothing worse for corn than too much rain. I checked the sky. No black storm clouds bleeding their load, no taint of ozone in the air. Just a shower.

And with that, the rain stopped, beat back by the sun. Frank wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and I with my sleeve.

I gave the Coke back to Frank, untouched, and, after frowning at it, he couldn’t resist long. He gulped down a quarter of the bottle and handed it back to me. I took a sip. Wonder. Fizz. Cold on my tongue. Soon the bottle was empty and Jacobs let me keep it to return to the store for the nickel. I held onto that bottle like it was a gold bar.

‘You got nervous around those kids,’ Frank said halfway through another field.

I didn’t say anything.

‘People like to talk in this town, don’t they?’ he said.

‘There’s nothing else to do.’

He let out a small laugh. ‘You’re not wrong there. But hey, those guys are gone now. Just you and me. The talk will die down eventually. I’ve heard some of it myself. Like the kind of questions Samuels was asking you.’ He paused, raised an eyebrow to see if I knew what he meant and the gossip echoed in my head, I heard John Royal killed that girl.

I flinched and tried to smile.

‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows you didn’t do anything.’

I’d have to prove it. Rumours were as good as a signed confession in this town. I clutched the bottle. A mix of feelings inside me, like when you throw too many colours together and get muddy brown. I was full of different measures of relief and embarrassment and sadness and guilt for thinking bad of myself and Jenny for what we did and something close to admiration for this pastor, even a dash of enjoyment at being here and talking to someone who talked back to me like a grown-up and painful anger that anyone thought I could have killed Mora. All those colours churned up in my stomach and made me feel sick.

‘You know,’ he said after another long silence. ‘I saw a dead body once, when I was about your age. My father.’

He waited for my reaction but I didn’t know what it should be. I barely remembered my real pa. I wished I’d seen him dead, at least then I’d know for sure where he was.

‘He died of liver cancer when I was twelve,’ the pastor kept going. ‘Back in Virginia, where I’m from.’

I turned to him then. I knew where Virginia was. Miss Eaves quizzed us on all the states. I didn’t do all that well, though Jenny and Gloria aced it. Jenny would have been fifty for fifty but she mixed up the Dakotas. The pastor didn’t have the voice of Virginia. Virginia was tobacco and moonshine and you could hear both in their words. Frank spoke carefully, each syllable said as it was written down, didn’t cut off any ends or soften his Ts. I wondered if he was lying but as soon as I thought it, guilt shot through me. Frank was a man of God and the Bible and people like that don’t need to lie. I wasn’t sure, at thirteen, if I truly believed in Heaven or Hell but I believed in Pastor Jacobs. Believed his goodness and accepted his help, his attention. Bathed in it, soaked it in.

‘John, are you listening?’

I nodded and he resumed. The body looked like his father but it wasn’t truly him. His soul was with God. Death is just a journey. He looked so peaceful at the end. My head filled up with pictures of Mora, forever sleeping by Big Lake. I saw the way Jenny had looked and smiled and calmed, the electricity in her bones dulling for a time, like the lights in a thunderstorm, dimming and flickering out, then flaring wild when Samuels woke us. Seeing the body brought my sister peace, like seeing his father had given the pastor peace. Hadn’t it?

‘Why were you in the valley?’ Frank asked and I only then realised we were almost back at the church.

‘It’s where our Fort is.’

‘Why were you there so late?’

I shrugged. I couldn’t say it, not out loud, not to a grown-up, not yet.

‘Do you sleep there often?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘When things are bad at home?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. To a question like that, a moment of hesitation meant yes. I wouldn’t let him think badly about my family. Things weren’t roses and cream but that didn’t mean he could take guesses and think the worst.

Jenny thought the worst, thought Momma would hurt her one day.

I shuddered, and shook my head.

‘Momma sometimes gets a temper. It’s just the drink, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s always forgotten about the next day.’

I was telling myself, and Jenny, as much as I was telling the pastor.

Jacobs nodded, picked another length of wheat from the field. ‘Does she hurt you?’

‘She just shouts sometimes is all. She gets mad at Jenny if her dress is too short or if she gives back-talk or sass, but Momma just tells her off.’

She’d never really hurt her, I knew it like I knew my name. I’d agreed with Momma a few times in the past. Jenny’s dresses and shorts were sometimes too high on her legs, especially after we’d been swimming. She had Momma’s lip that was for sure and didn’t have to be drunk to use it. Besides, Momma was being kind, tending wounds and kissing foreheads and driving us to school. Any hurt or darkness was gone for now.

I put aside thoughts of Momma, changed the subject back to Mora, which suddenly felt more comfortable. Besides, Gloria would kill me if I didn’t find out all I could.

‘Do they know the girl’s name yet?’

Jacobs narrowed his eyes at me before answering. ‘No. The sheriffs are doing all they can to find out who she is.’

‘I don’t think she was from Larson. We’d know her face.’

Pastor Jacobs tilted his head to the side like he was considering what I’d just said. ‘You’re right. Cross your fingers and toes, John, we’ll catch whoever did it.’

‘Do they have any ideas? Could it have been someone from here?’

‘I’m not all that sure. But they’re working on it. We have to let the sheriffs do their job and keep out of their way.’

I scuffed my shoes in the dirt, didn’t move when he started walking again.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ he asked.

I looked up at him, squinting against the sun. ‘They don’t really think I did it, do they?’