Excessica Anthology BOX SET Winter (93 page)

“Wrong.
A life is boring only if you make it that way. We all have
something
interesting in our past. Something that would make a terrific story. Look at
what you’re doing now—you’re a radio DJ, something that a lot of kids
dream of. You go on the air every night and talk, with no fear at all.”

“To
an audience of dozens,” I said dryly.

Another
giggle, and I fell a bit more in love. “You’re more popular or better than you
know.”
Please say more, please stroke my ego, show me you care about me,
that you think about me as much as I think about you
. “Take something like
adversity, or something that changed your life. Like your brother—

“I
can’t. It’s still too fresh.” The Marines in their blues showing up at the door
with the chaplain, the hushed tones, Mom knowing when she saw the
government-issue Plymouth pull up at the curb and fighting back tears until she
broke down, Dad (a Marine who took a Jap bullet on Okinawa) taking the news
stoically, even at the funeral with the honor guard, but later turning against
the war and damned near getting into a fistfight with some blowhard at the VFW
hall who had voted for Wallace and Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. Seen through the
eyes of an eleven-year old, it was very adult and mysterious.

“I
know,” she said softly. “My best friend Becky lost her older brother in the
war. It was ’68, during Tet. She never got over it. Still hasn’t, I imagine. I
listened to her cry over it so many times. I did, too. I kind of had a crush on
him.”

“Did
you write about it?” I was a little sarcastic. Danny’s death was still a raw
wound, and her advice was a little too pat, too Little Miss Sunshine.

“Of
course. But I never sent it anywhere. It was still too fresh. No one wanted to
talk about it rationally. You had to side with the hardhats or the hippies. But
just getting the words and thoughts and love and hate all out of my head and on
paper made it better. You’re still really sad over it, I can tell. I’d love to
help you.”

“So
come by here.”

“I
can’t.”

“Why
not?”

“I
just can’t.” Cagey and evasive.

“Why’s
that?”—
is the Royals on radio
.
Punch click turn
, Hal’s
voice gave out the call letters and frequencies, pot down, game back on.

“It’s
difficult to explain.” Flighty and tense, ready to bolt.

“Oh.”
I let it drop. Change the subject. “So, what’s your last name?”

“Stop
it.” Firm and unyielding, all softness fled.

“You
just said –”

“Sorry,”
a little firmer now. “I have to go.”
Click. Bzzzzzz
. I sat there for the
next few hours, knowing I’d blown it, that she’d never call back, and that the
best chance at finding companionship was gone.

The
next day, I ran a good hard four miles along the dusty county roads. My route
took me past the high school, an Eisenhower-era orange brick and glass box. It
was on the edge of town, the parking lot separated from wheatfields by a
sagging chain-link storm fence. The classrooms were empty. A reedy clarinet
echoed down the hallways from a music room.

The
doors were open, and I entered through the front. I walked down the
linoleum-floored hallway, lined by metal lockers, looking at the signs above
the doors. Math, Home Ec, Driver’s Ed, History—finally, ENGLISH AND
JOURNALISM MRS. CAIN. The door was open, the room empty. I poked my head in,
saw a room with twenty metal and wood desks, and in the back, a wall-to-ceiling
shelf lined with textbooks and paperbacks in identical groups of twenty, and on
a bottom shelf, volumes with no lettering on the spines. I picked the latest
one out, dark green with embossed gold lettering. CHRONICLE ’79, the last
yearbook. I turned to the class photos, and began skimming the names beside
them.

Futile?
Sure. She could have been lying about her name, in which case this was a fool’s
errand. But I didn’t think she was. She said she wasn’t in school anymore, and
I didn’t think she’d dropped out. I checked the senior pictures—no Kyria.
I did the juniors and sophomores for good measure—nothing. I replaced the
book, took out the 1978 volume. Again, a blank. Back I went, 1977, 1976, the
girl’s hair getting longer and straighter, the guy’s getting wilder and
bushier. The clothes going from polyester disco fashion to more hippie
leftovers. Farther back, to my era, ’72 to ’76, again a blank. A few Carries, a
Kerry, a Kara, but no Kyria. Nothing in ’71, either.

Halfway
through the ’70 CHRONICLE, though, there it was, page 65, second row, far
right, black and white senior pictures. KYRIA McLEAN. Long straight hair, light
brown or red (hard to tell in black-and-white), falling to her shoulders.
Willowy, delicate features, high cheekbones, a pointed chin, a pert little
nose, giving her an elfin cast. Her eyes were dark, luminous, and burning with
intelligence. The smile—the smile was slight, but not from sadness, from
satisfaction, a happiness, fulfillment—like she was finally happy to be
leaving the small, cloistered town of her birth.

Underneath
was a list of activities. Kyria had been in the band, in choir, all four years,
also in Future Homemakers of America (maybe her mom made her; she didn’t strike
me as the housewife type), debate, pep squad, and foreign language club.

Another
game that night, with the Twins up 6-2 in the sixth. I was flipping through a
Playboy,
admiring Miss April and fantasizing about her exhibitionist tendencies in the
text, when the phone rang. I hastily hid the magazine, strangely guilty.

“Hi,”
she said, as if nothing had happened last night. “Did you get around to writing
anything?” I had, a couple of pages, before I had to quit.

“I
did, Miss McLean.” I was through screwing around. Her teasing had become
torture. I heard a gasp over the line, and silence.

“How
did you—”

I
told her about my search that morning. “I wish you hadn’t,” she said.

“Why
not? You call me, we talk all night long, and you keep running away and hanging
up on me when I get too close. What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t
chase me,” she said. “You’re going to get a surprise. It’ll change everything.”

“You
keep saying that. What is it? Why don’t you tell me? Are you afraid?” My fear
was she was married to some hot-tempered redneck who would show up at the
station one night with a shotgun.

“No,
I—I can’t, I—she hung up. I slammed the receiver down. Damn her.
Forget all the artsy-fartsy pretension, the snooty literary talk. She was a
goddamned cock tease, no different than every other girl in this Podunk
village, with their Bible Belt morality that was one big cultural Mad Lib, THOU
SHALT NOT
( verb )
.

I
was more than a little put off the next day, and it showed. Hal, back from
another sales call, tried some small talk in the break area before I went on.
He mentioned the request calls I’d been getting from Kyria.

“That’s
probably over,” I said bitterly. “She keeps calling back and requesting songs
or talking, and then hangs up on me. She wouldn’t even tell me her last name,
so I had to look it up in some old yearbook.”

“Get
her last name?” Hal asked.

“Kyria
McLean.”

Hal’s
face froze, his eyes widened. “Someone’s playing a joke on you. A really bad
one.”

“How’s
that?”

Hal
sat down, his boyish face got a sad look. “Kyria McLean was a couple years
behind me in high school. She died out on the 5
^th
Street bridge nine
years ago. Car went off the bridge into the creek, two days after her high
school graduation. It was a real tragedy. She had a lot of promise.” He glanced
at the clock above the door to the booth while I just stared at him
openmouthed. “Almost three. Better get in there and relieve Ron.” I nodded
numbly, still digesting what Hal said, went into the booth as Ron, exited,
signed in on the log, and put a couple 45s on the turntables. I walked through
UPI World News, tried to fake enthusiasm while reading the weather forecast and
current conditions, and let Willie Nelson and Whiskey River take my mind.

A
prank? I didn’t think so. Why, and who? No answers sprang to mind.

No
call that night. Nor the next. I passed the time reading the magazines in the
booth. And tried putting a pen to paper in a Mead notebook, reaching back ten
years to remember how I felt when my older brother came home in a box from a
pointless war. Ten pages, then fifteen, double-spaced, and I was drained. But
not ashamed.

It
was a full week before the red light flashed as I was coming back from bathroom
and the aftereffects of a Frito chili pie at the diner (a payday splurge), a
marathon live Frampton track on the turntable. The Royals were off after
sweeping a three-game series with the Blue Jays. I let it ring a few times, not
wanting to seem too eager to pick up. Five, six, seven, then I lazily picked up
the heavy Bakelite receiver.

“WFY,
AM fourteen seventy, FM one-of-five point three,” I said languidly.

“Hi,”
said a small voice. “It’s Kyria.”

“No
it’s not,” I said. “It can’t be. Kyria McLean is dead.” As dead as my voice
sounded.

“You
found out.”

“Someone
told me. So what’s your real name?” I asked testily. “This is getting pretty
sick. I’m not laughing.”

“It’s
the truth!” she wailed. “I’m Kyria McLean –“

“And
I’m talking to a ghost, right?”

“Right.
I guess. I don’t know how the rules work here. The last thing I remember is
telling Billy Holden to slow down on the Fifth Street bridge, hitting a
guardrail and having his beer hit me in the face before—” Her voice
trailed off. The guardrails
did
look like newer than the rest of the
bridge, and it was a good fifty feet down to some really big rocks in the river
and along the banks, and going fast enough on a washboard road late at night
with a beery teenage boy at the wheel would do the trick nicely.

“The
radio was playing a song when Billy lost control,” she said. “It was –”

“’Let
it Be?’” I asked. What had been playing when she first called.

“Right.
It just came out, the last album, after the Beatles broke up. I loved it, had
just bought the album in Hays a couple days earlier with some graduation
money.”

“Who
was Billy? Your boyfriend?”

She
snorted. “No. He was nobody, just some jerk who thought he could fuck me if I
got drunk enough at a graduation party. He got mad when he whipped out his
thing in the car and I wouldn’t touch it.” Mad and drunk. A bad combo behind
the wheel.

“Did
he—make it?”

“I
don’t know. I don’t remember a lot between then and the night I called you.”

Then
had been May 27, 1970. I ‘d jogged three miles out to the small cemetery and
walked along the rows of granite until I found her small red stone. Kyria
Eleanor McLean, born December 5, 1951, died May 27, 1970. Next to a stone for
Rachel McLean, her mother, born in 1924, died in 1964.

“Why
me? Why this? Why now?”

“I
guess it was the song that brought me back. It was the last thing I
heard—well, other than Billy screaming as we went over. I didn’t hear it
again until that night, and it drew me back. My whole world was that radio by
my bed. I’d listen to it at night, would go to sleep with it on, and it would
still be playing when I woke up. That and the things I wrote –”

“Girls
with dreams too big for small towns.”

“Right.
I had a scholarship, you know. Full ride to Kansas State. I was admitted, was
going to make a trip and enroll in a couple weeks. I was going to major in
English, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“It
never happened. That’s why I’m here. With you. I had so much I was going to do.
So much to write, so much to tell. And I never could.” She began to sob.

“I—I’m
sorry. I guess. I don’t know what to say. I’ve never talked to someone who
was—someone like you—.”

“Dead,”
she said, stifling another sob. “Say it. I’m dead. And I can’t come back, and
the wonderful things I planned won’t happen. Unless—” She brightened.

“Yes?”
I actually believed her. From doubt to certainty in a minute. She must have
been a hell of a writer.

“I
had some notebooks in my room. In a box. I don’t know if my Dad still lives
there, or if he kept them, but if he did, I want you to get them. Read them. If
they’re any good, keep them, and publish them some day. I don’t care if you use
my name or not. Just let the world know me.”

“I
can’t—” I began to protest.

“They’re
my gift to you, if they still exist. In a box, my work is useless. With you, it
can live. I can live.”

“How
do you propose I lay my hands on this box?”

“You’ll
think of a way. You’re resourceful. I can tell that. And I also know that
you’ve got the need inside you.”

“The
need?”

“The
need to sit in front of a typewriter or Big Chief tablet with a pen and open a
vein and bleed all over the page. You have to write. You won’t rest until you
do. You may not sense it yet, but I can. It won’t be tomorrow—you’re
going to need some college. But it will happen. I know it.”

“You
can see the future?”

“No.
I’m just very intuitive. The box was in my closet. There’s a manuscript in
there, too. About two hundred pages. Second draft. It’s yours, too.”

“Kyria,
this is madn –”

“Shhh.
Take what’s left of me, Steven. Cherish it, nurture it. Use it.”

“Kyria,
I love you,” I blurted out. And immediately realized how pathetic that sounded.

She
paused. “I know. I love you too, Steven. It makes me so sad that I can’t be
there with you.”

“I
want to hold you, to touch you –”

“You
can. Not in the way you think, but go outside.” I threw a Humble Pie album on
the turntable, waited for Led Zepplin to fade out, hit the switch, and darted
out of the booth. I ran out of the station, into the muggy night. I didn’t see
a thing, except a moon-lit stubble-covered wheatfield. Gently, almost
imperceptibly, my mind began tickling, growing to a quick crescendo and
knocking me over dizzy as words and images and ideas swept—