Dead Low Tide (19 page)

I let up on my tongue, the pain no distraction at all. Only pain, already a kind that meant nothing at all. I said, “But couldn’t they report—”

“This is thirty-five years ago,” Unc cut in. “This is four girls against seven boys, all of them first-string seniors on the Stall team. This is North Charleston, and girls with no proof they could know of other than the feeling of it.”

He gave out a breath. “It’s only one girl, Gloria Deedham, decides she’s going to fight them,” he went on, only this time with his voice pitched in a strange way. Quieter, but given up, too. As though the words themselves had surrendered to the work they knew they had to do. “Gloria Deedham decides she’s going to report them to the police. And she does. Gets her momma and daddy to go down there with her and file the report, but this is already a month after the fact. Still, she tries to charge these boys with rape, though it means admitting to going out to that trailer, and that she knew better than to go out there in the first place, and that she has no proof. Other than the feeling. The same feeling all four of the girls said they had when they went on home from that trailer.” He paused. “Gloria Deedham won’t name the other girls with her, either, because she wanted them to report it of their own accord, and because she didn’t want to bring them down into what she had to know could happen after she started
this thing going. North Charleston police start asking questions, get nowhere, and meanwhile that girl and her family ends up with the tires slashed on the two cars they own three times in a month, somebody shitting on their front porch one night, and a word I won’t say painted in red full across her garage door. At school everything you can imagine. While the other three girls don’t say a word.”

He paused, shook his head. “One of them transfers to a different school. Another one drops out altogether. But Eugenie stays on, though she won’t file, won’t say anything to any of the authorities. And does her best to talk Gloria Deedham into dropping the charges.” He took in a breath, sat quiet a second. “I know all this because it was your daddy and me and Alton Tyler she told what happened, when what Gloria Deedham was going through was at its worst. She told us because we were her friends, and had been since we were kids in junior high. She knew she could trust us, and trust us not to tell.” He stopped, and I could hear him swallow. “She wouldn’t even tell her own momma and daddy, your grandparents. They passed never even knowing.”

“Unc,” I said. “Please. You don’t—”

“The football team,” he went on, “ends up regional champs. The police get no one who matters to the whole thing to talk. And Gloria Deedham—” He paused again, leaned his head back to where it just touched the headrest. He took in one more deep breath, let it out slow.

“One afternoon,” he whispered, “just before Christmas break, Gloria Deedham steps in front of a train out on the tracks behind Sunset Memorial, the cemetery up off Ashley Phosphate. And your momma there with her when she did it.”

He swallowed again, and I closed my eyes tight. No need now to bite down on my tongue. No need for that ever again. Because there was no distraction for what I knew now. There was no going back ever again. And I’d been the one to ask for it.

“Your momma and her was walking home after school that day,
Eugenie still trying to talk her into dropping the charges,” he whispered. “And then Gloria ended it. Eugenie’s lived with that her whole life. Her whole life, and Prendergast showing up on her porch last night.”

I saw again the reaction Tyler and Unc both gave when Mom told them he’d been at the house, the shock of it. And I saw Unc out on the dock, asking why he’d ever play poker with a man fundamentally bad.

My eyes still closed, I whispered then, “How could you?”

The words came out through clenched teeth, though I didn’t know I’d clenched them. My hands squeezed hard on the steering wheel, though I didn’t know I’d taken hold of it.

I whispered, “How could you play cards with him?”

“I didn’t know he was there, back when I started up,” he said, then went quiet, took in a breath through his nose. “All I know is that one night maybe a month after I started Warchester introduced me to a man he figured I didn’t know, we three halfway through a hand already. ‘Don’t know if you know Commander Jamison Prendergast,’ Warchester says to me, and Prendergast says before I can blink ‘I know who he is.’ His voice all smiles.” He paused. “I played out the hand. And after that first one, the next one was a little easier. And then the next one. He was easy to beat. Easy to read, like I told you.” He paused. “None of that’s anything but an excuse. A sorry one. Though it’s no consolation, the day after Gloria’s funeral, Alton Tyler and your daddy and me showed up at Prendergast’s house and beat the living shit out of him and a couple-three of those boys over there with him.” He paused again, took in another breath. “And after all that, the whole thing disappeared. Those boys all seemed to just walk away. Seemed from then on to bow their heads and swallow hard and walk away. Not a word come out of anyone after that.” He stopped again. “I don’t know what come of those other two girls. Couldn’t give a shit what happened to any of them boys. But Prendergast ends up an officer in the Navy. No charges filed, no record.” He paused. “The
Navy. I’ve known a thousand good people in the Navy. But here’s the one shows up at a poker table. The one shows up to our door, too.”

I heard him turn in his seat then, toward me. “Your momma’s had this on her heart her whole life,” he said, his voice thin and ragged. “She’s had all of it. The fact of what happened with those boys, and the fact she was there when Gloria killed herself, and the fact she still kept quiet once that girl was gone. She’s had to live with that. And it’s me brought it all back to her with these goggles, and with this poker house.”

He stopped, sniffed. He whispered, “I have to ask her forgiveness. And I will. Once this is all over. Because I have done the wrong thing. I have done the wrong thing here, and all the years we’ve been playing cards like this. To be playing with him.” He paused. “I just wanted to beat him at something, even if it was just cards. But that’s me being the selfish shit I am. It’s me doing the wrong thing all this while. But this will be the end of it.”

He took in a breath, then said, “And I need to ask your forgiveness, too. I ask your forgiveness. Because I’ve been playing cards with this same man. Forgive me for sitting across the table from him, betting against his voice for the sake of nothing other than a game of cards and the pitiful joy of a handful of cash. But I aim to end that now. And that’s why you have to stay here.”

I opened my eyes, felt the wet of them and the hot, and I turned, saw his shadow waver in the dark of the car.

I said nothing.

He leaned over to me, put his hand back on my arm, but softly, gently. “Huger, where I need you is out here,” he said. “You know I need you, but what I need is for you to stay right here and to stay put. I’m going in there and get this done.”

He sat up straight, turned to his door and popped it open, the dome light on again, self-appointed and dull. Then he turned back toward me, and here was his face hidden in the shadow of his bill
once more, inside it again those two reflections of me. Like nothing had changed between the first time I’d seen them tonight and this moment, here, now.

“You stay put, you hear?” he said, and reached a hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, pulled out his cellphone, set it in the console tray, there with the bag of golf balls. He leaned a little forward, pulled from his back pocket his wallet, set it in there too, all while I just watched, nothing making much of any sense right now. Not much sense at all.

He turned to the open door, climbed out and closed it, then opened the backseat door: darkness for a moment, then the dome light again. He reached down to the floorboard, picked up his walking stick from where it lay down there, took hold of the book bag.

He looked at me again. “You stay in here, and just stay put. No matter what. Because that’s what I need from you.”

I swallowed, nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.” Like he’d been able to see me.

He stood, started to close the door, but leaned in again.

He looked at me, said, “I love you, Huger.”

“Okay,” I said, my voice barely loud enough for even me to hear.

He stood there a moment longer, then closed the door, moved alongside the Range Rover up to the hood, crossed to the silver Mercedes. He held the book bag in his left hand, in his right the walking stick, then shrugged the book bag over his shoulder. His left hand now free, he touched the rear fender on the Mercedes, started off, the walking stick in his right hand tapping out the curb.

A moment later he was gone, hidden for the cars. Next time I’d see him from here he’d be walking up the drive of the house.

I breathed in, wiped at my eyes with the palms of my hands, then opened them wide, blinked and blinked. I took in another breath.

No wonder Mom’d leaned in close to me last night when I finally showed up. No wonder she’d held on tight, her arm crooked at my
elbow while we three stood there in the foyer of our home. No wonder she’d gone to the shooting range.

He’d kissed Mom on the cheek. And she’d taken it.

I leaned forward to rest my forehead against the steering wheel, as if that might do anything for me at all.

And saw in the side-view mirror a set of headlights again: that same dumbshit black Suburban, sweeping through from behind us one more time, as though there might have been a spot open up since the last time he drove by.

For a moment I thought of giving him this one. I thought of starting the engine, then rolling down my window and waving him in as I gunned on out, swerved up onto the Whaley driveway and crashed right through those garage doors. Then I’d find Prendergast and do my best to beat the living shit out of him.

The Suburban passed by, tapped its brakes again out front of the Whaleys’, moved on.

I stayed put.

I leaned my head against the steering wheel again, rested it there for what seemed an hour, then sat up, stared at the Whaley house for another hour. I stared for one more at the moonlit silver of the Mercedes in front of me, then leaned against the steering wheel again, closed my eyes.

I tried not to think of anything, tried only to take in one deep breath after another.

But of course I was thinking.

What happened had been thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years. And I wondered: How do you continue? How do you go on with your life after what’s happened to your life has happened? After you watch someone you know step in front of a train? After you’ve been drugged and bad things done to you, and after you’ve chosen to stay
quiet for the shame of it all, then live with the guilt of knowing you didn’t help her when she was alive or after she was gone?

How do you end up, after what Mom’d been through, anywhere
but
at target practice, and imagining the black silhouette fifteen yards in front of you is the evil shit who’d kissed you on the cheek in the foyer of your own house?

I knew where those train tracks were, just the other side of I-26 from Northwoods Mall. I knew Sunset Memorial Gardens, had seen it any number of times when for one reason or another we were driving Ashley Phosphate. There was a bowling alley we went to once or twice out that way when I was a kid, a Glass Masters I’d had the windshield on the old Chevy LUV changed out at one time. Mom used to shop at a Hamrick’s up where Ashley Phosphate hit Dorchester, back before the money came in.

But the only reason I remember the cemetery is because it was such a plain place, just a spread of grass fronting on the four-lane street while I was on the way somewhere else. A line of sago palms across the front of it, memorial plaques flat on the ground, an asphalt entry without even a gated arch above it. Just that piece of ground, the green of it.

And just past it, crossing Ashley Phosphate, the train tracks.

I thought of Unc, and Parker, my dad, who’d left when I was a kid, and Alton Tyler, the three of them teenagers with their hands in fists, walking up the driveway of Prendergast’s house in order to do to him and his friends what they could.

I thought of Mom.

I opened my eyes, sat up. I blinked a couple times, not certain if I’d fallen asleep. I pulled out my iPhone, checked the time: 10:26. Not even twenty minutes since we got here.

And because I had the same old nothing to do while I waited for Unc to come back, and because Tyler’d been one of those three to beat up Prendergast and his pals, and, finally, because it was my habit
while out here to go somewhere other than where I was, I opened once more the Maps app on the iPhone, typed in “Echaw Bridge, Wambaw Creek SC.” Where Tyler had taken off to last night, only to show up on the evening news.

Here came the gray map, a line for the road, a tiny blue squiggle for the creek, a red pin sticking up. I pressed Satellite, got the photos from space, and saw a minuscule bridge across a creek, green trees everywhere around. That red pin still plugged into the middle of nowhere.