Beneath the Weight of Sadness (34 page)

“I don’t know
all
, but I know certain things. A guy with the name of Lindstrom is going to love his cows.”

“I wonder what Strom Thurmond thought about just before he kicked the bucket. Chickens?”

“Who’s Strom Thurmond?”

“Never mind, Carly.”

We were quiet for a long time. There were rumbles of thunder in the far distance, louder than before, and the wind was coming on stronger. It blew my hair around. I love the wind. Always have. When I was a little girl my dad use to say if there was a God, it was him blowing tender kisses to us down on earth. I wanted to put my hand on Truman, touch him somewhere, but we’d gotten so distant I would never do that. I was afraid he’d tell me not to or make fun of me. I wouldn’t be able to stand if he ever laughed at how I felt toward him. I couldn’t take the risk. I thought of the times we’d been above his garage kissing each other and I knew they were always the most tender times I’d ever had, the sweetness of our lips touching and my heart racing with the touch of his hands on my face, my neck, my arms and legs. Sweet, sweet Truman. I looked at his profile as he looked out beyond the lighted part of the square. He was right. I did have a thing for his dad, but only because he reminded me of Truman or Truman reminded me of him or whatever. At least when I saw Ethan he had no hesitation about putting his arm around me, kissing me on the cheek. It felt good even if it was once removed.

“I can’t wait to leave this town,” I said. I wasn’t sure why.

“Why? Being the most popular girl in the school, the prettiest girl in the school, playing softball and dating your jock boyfriend isn’t enough for you?”

“Fuck you, Engroff!” a voice said loudly in the dark behind the memorial. We both jumped a little. I’d almost forgotten I’d been with Tommy. He walked into the light. “I might be a jock but you’re a loser.”

“Jesus Christ, Tommy! You scared the shit out of us.”

He walked onto the square of concrete where the memorial stood, and the benches across from it. He stood in front of the memorial.

“What other bullshit were you saying about me?” he said angrily.

“You would know,” Truman said. “You’ve been standing in the dark almost the whole time.”

“No I haven’t, asshole.”

“Yeah you have…what is it? Tommy or Tom nowadays? I saw you out there listening. And of course you assumed we were talking about you.”

I got up from the bench and walked over to Tommy, stood in front of him so I blocked him from Truman.

“Go home, Tommy. You nearly hit me with the fucking baseball before and right now I don’t really want to see you.”

“I was joking around, Carly. I didn’t realize it was going to get that close to you.”

I could feel Truman looking at the back of my head. I felt embarrassed talking to Tommy in front of him. I looked into Tommy’s eyes and it scared me. I could see that anger that always seemed to be behind what could and should have been a blue tenderness, like the tenderness I’d just felt with Truman. I felt like I was being pulled in two different directions, one of them so frightening it was like looking down a well where you knew far down there was black water, scary and inescapable. It had taken this moment, I realized, when Tommy and Truman were both present, for me to see the incredible contrast between the two of them.

“Go home, Tommy! I want you to leave me alone.”

He peered around me to look at Truman, and I turned too to see Truman back in his original position, sitting on the edge of the back of the bench as if he wanted to have a better view of what was going on between Tommy and me. I almost laughed thinking about it. Truman always the observer, always wanting to watch something unfold, detached and entertained at the same time.

“What? So you can sit with your little girlfriend over there and talk about dead people? Jesus Christ, Carly, get real.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “You had no right to be listening in on a conversation that had nothing to do with you.”

“But he thinks everything is about him, Carly,” Truman said.

Tommy shot out a finger at him. “You shut the fuck up if you know what’s good for you.” His anger beginning to boil now. But I didn’t care at this point. I just wanted him to leave. “I was just fucking around, Carly. But can we go away from him and talk for a minute?”

“No,” I said too abruptly. “No, we can’t. I mean, look at you! You get stranger every time I see you.”

He put his hands on my arms and started to walk backwards, trying to pull me with him. His hands were squeezing me so hard it hurt. I wrenched myself free from him. “Stop it, Tommy! I don’t want to talk right now. If you want to talk tomorrow, we can do that, but what I want you to do right now is leave!”

He let out a laugh. “Me strange? You wanna talk about strange? Look behind you.” He leaned around me again and looked at Truman.

“You’re pathetic, Carly. I knew you’d changed, but I didn’t know how much until right now.”

Those words coming from Truman shocked and hurt me. I turned to him and he looked at me like he didn’t even know me.

“How long have you been with this guy?” Truman said to me, his voice full of disdain. He came down from the bench and stood there smiling, but it wasn’t a smile I’d ever seen from him before. I realized that if I let him walk away, it would all be over between us. I knew he felt the same way I did at that very moment. Some beautiful something had been broken between us in that instant, the intimacies we’d both loved for so much of our lives together.

What was it? Ten minutes at the most, but in those few minutes we’d been the old Truman and Carly. Best friends, and I knew Truman had felt it, too. Yes, we’d smoked weed together occasionally, but this had been different. This had been like before. And then Tommy had walked in and it was like taking a needle on one of those old records my dad still listened to and scratching it across some beautiful piece of music. It was abrupt and ugly.

“Long enough to know how fucked up you are, pal,” Tommy shouted. He grabbed my arms again and pulled me around to look at him. “Carly! Look at me.” He shook me as if he were trying to bring me out of a trance. “Look at me! Let’s get out of here. Leave the weirdo over there to commune with the dead.”

I wrenched away from him again. “Leave me alone! Just leave me alone, Tommy!”

“Go with him, Carly. You deserve each other. I don’t want anything to do with either of you.”

I looked at Truman and I couldn’t believe he was saying this to me. I felt completely betrayed. How could he not see that I wanted nothing more to do with Tommy? For a moment I’d felt free, but now with Truman looking at me like I was some stranger, my anger made me suddenly scream, and I did.

I think it was one of those moments that I will look back on and wonder for all the time I’m alive why I did it. Or why what happened next happened. Suddenly Tommy pushed me out of the way and walked toward Truman.

“I told you to shut your fuckin’ mouth.”

Truman stood looking at him without the slightest fear, with almost an amused look on his face. Tommy reached him and pushed him so hard Truman went backwards over the bench. Tommy went over it, too, and landed on Truman, getting his arms around his neck in a wrestling hold I’d seen him perform in competition. Truman never said a word, didn’t try to defend himself. He just lay there as docile as if he were dead. I ran around the bench and grabbed Tommy by the arm and tried to pull him away.

“Stop it, Tommy,” I screamed. “Get off him, you asshole!”

Instead of listening, Tommy released Truman’s neck and slammed his fist into his stomach. It was an awful sound and still Truman said nothing. He looked at me for a moment and then rolled onto the ground and curled into a ball.

“You fuckin’ faggot pussy,” Tommy said and then hit him again, this time on the side of the head. I hit Tommy with my open hand on the side of his head, but it didn’t faze him, it only intensified his next fist that caught Truman in the neck.

I went over to the bench where the bat was and slid the gloves from the bat. “Stop it!” I screamed. “You’re going to kill him!”

Tommy hit him again, again in the neck.

“You son of a bitch!” I screamed. I pulled the bat back and hit Tommy squarely in the ribs. He turned over and away from Truman and leapt to his feet. His look was that of some wild and crazed animal. He wrenched the bat from me and pulled back to hit me and then stopped.

“See!” he screamed, saliva spraying from his mouth, tears rolling down from his eyes. “See! All you had to do was come with me. All you had to do…”

He was shaking as if he’d just stepped out of cold water, his eyes filmed over with some hatred I’d never seen in a person before. He turned and looked at Truman, who was still in a ball, his hands protecting his face. Tommy walked over to him and lifted the bat and for a moment I thought he was going to do as he’d done with me. Stop the action. But he didn’t. He brought the bat down and hit Truman directly on the crown of his head. The sound was sickening.

“Tommy!” I screamed. But it was too late. Tommy raised the bat and hit Truman again, almost in the same place.

“Oh my God!” I shouted. “Oh my God. Truman!”

And then I saw Tommy raise the bat again, and then I ran. I ran over and around the bench and around the memorial and into the grass and toward the street that led to Main Street. When I got to the edge of the grass, I stopped and took off my sandals and then I ran again. I ran all the way to my house. I ran and ran and ran, thinking all the time that, if I ran fast enough, I would run right out of this nightmare and it wouldn’t have happened and I would wake up and my world would not be like it is going to be for the rest of my life.

The first spatters of fat rain hit my face like the fingers of God as I reached the door to my parents’ house. I practically ripped the door off its hinges, as if getting inside would take me away from a kind of evil I’d never known existed before that early Sunday morning.

Carly

Thirty days after Truman’s death

I came so close to telling him, his body so close to mine and his eyes so sad that I knew he was dying. I felt his hardness and I knew it was only because he was crazy with emptiness for Truman, and all I had to do was tell him, and I couldn’t. I could not. It had nothing to do with self-preservation, because there was only one thing that kept screaming inside my head.

How am I to tell these grief-stricken people that the reason their son is dead is because I was sleeping with a brutal murderer? And how am I to tell my parents?

My father is racked with pain over my inability to smile or laugh with him. He is puzzled and I know he went to see Ethan and I know he wants them to see me, to ask me to come to their house. But I can’t. I can’t walk into that house and see where Truman lived, where he walked and talked and laughed and kissed me and touched me.

When I see his image in my mind I begin to cry. And Tommy keeps coming to me in school and I know what he thinks. I know he thinks we’ve conspired, because I haven’t gone to the police. I watch him in the hallway and he acts as if he never picked up the bat and killed another human being. I see he is becoming more confident as the days pass and I haven’t said anything. At first he would come up to me in the hallway, and as I’d walk past him he would whisper, “Please, Carly. Please say something.”

But now he’s begun to come to me when I’m at my locker, and actually, once, put his hand on my shoulder. I wrenched away from him.

“Don’t you even touch me,” I whispered fiercely.

He pulled back, shocked, and then, like Tommy, he smiled as if that would make me relent.

“We need to talk,” he finally said.

I slammed my locker shut and walked away. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head and realized I was relieved he’d finally touched me. It was a turning point, and it was that same day that Ethan followed me to the park and we hugged. I had this throb of desire and I confess I wanted to do something to make that poor man feel better. I could see this great sadness in his eyes, his face sagging with the weight of his boy gone from his life for good. I wanted to take him into the woods and pull his pants down and take his cock in my mouth and relieve him. And I know that sounds weird, but I couldn’t think of what else to do, and I thought of all the times I’d gone into the study when Ethan was there and plopped on the leather chair, my legs draped over the arm of the chair, and I could tell, at times, Ethan was looking at my legs. And I liked his eyes on me. I liked the heat of his eyes.

“You’ve always wanted to sleep with my dad,” Truman would say. And I didn’t know if it was true or not. He was so hot for an older man and I would laugh at Truman and think,
No, Truman, I’ve always wanted to sleep with you but you’re not exactly available.
And I remember laughing with Truman one time, Truman saying that Ethan was the sacrificial lamb because he, Truman, knew what I wanted and he couldn’t do that for me.

And I know what everyone would be thinking if they knew: How could I not have gone to the police right away? How could I let that monster of a boy walk around in his new suit of clothes, thinking we shared a conspiracy and that I would eventually come back into his arms—or even if he doesn’t think that, being confident I’ll never say a word? But why does he think that? How can he imagine I would not think what he did was the vilest of actions? Is he so stupid that he thinks I can continue walking around with him in the same school, the same town, the same biosphere as me?