Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (2 page)

Chapter 2

That was the summer I was crazy for
movies and spy stuff. I loved anything to do with detectives or secret
agents—my favorite television show was
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
, and I
wanted to be the female James Bond. I’d spend my afternoons alone in the house trawling
all four of our local stations for mystery movies, although I’d settle for
monster movies or science fiction if the spies were all out in the cold.

Three days after we all thought
the moon had blown up, CJ came running into the house, excited again about
something.  It was three in the afternoon, and
Journey to the Center of the
Earth
with James Mason and Arlene Dahl was starting on Channel Nine’s
Million
Dollar Movie
. I was just settling in with a bag of Fritos and a glass of
chocolate milk when the back door banged open, and CJ hurtled in like something
was nipping at his heels.

I tried to ignore him, intent
on our heroes’ discussion about an Icelandic volcano, but when he picked up the
phone and said, “I need the police,” Professor Lindenbrook suddenly became less
interesting.

“I want to report a dead body,”
he said. I got up and turned down the volume.

I realized that CJ was as white
as a proverbial sheet, and his hands were shaking; this was no joke.

“There’s a dead girl in the
wash behind my house,” he said.

That was all I needed to hear—a
dead body, right behind my house? This was like living inside a detective show!
I had to see for myself. I set down the Fritos and headed out to the backyard. In
the far fence was a gate that opened onto the dirt road beside the wash. I knew
that CJ sometimes walked home that way from his girlfriend Vicki’s, because he
could sneak out the back if her parents came home unexpectedly.

CJ looked up from the phone,
saw me in the backyard, and deduced my intention. “Wait a second,” he said into
the phone, then put his hand over the mouthpiece and yelled at me, “Joey,
DON’T!”

“But I wanna s—”

“Trust me, you do
not
want to see this.”

“Yes, I do.”

I walked away, knowing he
wasn’t about to hang up on the police to come after me.

I opened the gate and walked
out onto the dirt road. It was a narrow, gray-brown strip bordered by the
wooden fences of houses on one side and a chain-link fence keeping intruders
(meaning kids) out of the wash on the other. The wash was pretty uninteresting
most of the time—at least 350 days a year it was a bone-dry concrete ravine
with nothing in it.

But today, I looked down and
saw something a short distance ahead. I walked forward, my heart thumping in
excitement and nervousness. Finally I reached the point where I stood directly
opposite it and looked down from maybe thirty feet away at:

It was a dead girl, but not
like any dead girl I’d ever seen in a movie or television show. I thought of
the murdered woman from
Goldfinger
—the one Bond finds on the bed painted
gold—and how elegant she’d looked in death.

The dead girl in the wash
wasn’t elegant, though. She was sprawled in a strange position, one leg bent
awkwardly under her, one arm akimbo, hair partially obscuring her face. Her
clothes—a simple, button-down blouse and a skirt—had been torn away from her,
as had her undergarments. One breast was exposed, and her panties were down
around her knees. Somehow I knew that hadn’t happened in a fall.

And there was blood—a lot of
it, mostly around and beneath her. She was lying in a pool of her own blood,
although it took me a few seconds to realize that was what I was seeing—it
looked darker than I thought it would. It almost looked more black than red,
especially under the odd light cast by the smog.

I tried to imagine how she’d
gotten down there and could only figure that someone had thrown her body over
the fence and into the wash to dispose of it.

After they’d raped her and
murdered her.

No, this certainly wasn’t like
a movie. My stomach was churning, my heart still pounding…yet I couldn’t stop
staring.

I didn’t look away until I
heard CJ shouting at me. “Joey!” He came running down the dirt road until he
reached me. “The police are on the way. You probably shouldn’t be here when
they come.”

“How could somebody do that?
They killed her and then…threw her away…”

CJ put a hand on my shoulder
and tried to steer me back to our gate. “You shouldn’t have seen this. Let’s
get you home.”

I allowed him to direct me, but
my eyes wouldn’t turn away from the dead girl. “Do you know her?”

CJ shook his head. “I can’t
really tell with her face covered by her hair.”

“Me either.”

As we reached the house, we
heard the first approaching siren. “Stay here, Joey, okay? Promise me you’ll
stay here.”

“I promise.”

I felt cold in the middle of
the afternoon heat, and I had no desire for any more dramatic events. The dead
girl was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

That would change soon enough.

Chapter 3

Mom arrived a few minutes after the
cops. They were out back with CJ when she came rushing into the house, panicked
over the police cars with flashing lights parked outside her home.

“Joey! Oh my God, baby, is
everything all right? Where’s CJ?”

She hugged me so hard I had to
pull away to talk. “He’s okay, Mom. He’s just out back talking to the police.”

“What happened?”

“CJ found a dead girl in the
wash.”

Mom pulled away to look at me
in shock. “What…?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty weird.”

“Did you see it, too?”

I nodded, and Mom pulled me
into her again, and it felt good, warm, safe.

“Oh, my poor baby.”

“It was awful, Mom. There was
blood and she was…she was…” I broke off. If I said anything else I was going to
cry, and I didn’t want to cry while there were cops around my house.

Mom got me settled down on the
couch and then went out back in search of CJ. I knew she was worried about him,
but I also knew he was going to catch a little hell for letting me see the
body.

I almost told Mom not to go
back there, not because it hadn’t been CJ’s fault that I’d seen the corpse—I
was always happy to let CJ take a little heat—but because when Mom had hugged
me I could smell alcohol under her Doublemint gum.

My mom wasn’t exactly an
alcoholic, but she did like her afternoon cocktails with “the ladies.”  A lot
of the moms on my street were members of the San Diablo Women’s Club, which met
every weekday afternoon, either at their own clubhouse (yes, they had their own
clubhouse), or—if it was Thursday—at the bowling alley. Their meetings were
supposedly in part about fundraising—feeding starving children in Africa or
some such thing—but what they were
really
about was a bunch of
frustrated, bored, middle-aged housewives getting together to get sloshed.

If you’re under 40, you may not
realize how different things were back then. The women’s movement was still
nascent, and most women were expected to just have kids and stay at home
keeping things clean and organized for their hardworking husbands. A few
cocktails everyday didn’t mean someone had a drinking problem; it meant they
were
social
. My mother was good at being social.

Which is not to say she was bad
at being anything else. I actually thought she was a pretty great mom, and so
did my friends. She talked out problems with us, she was fair when she had to
discipline us, she was proud of my little accomplishments (like when I’d won an
essay competition for fifth graders), and at 40 she was still attractive, while
some of the other moms were getting a haggard, used-up look (due in part to
cigarette smoking, which was still chic).

My dad was the
mystery—literally. I knew he had something to do with rockets, but I wasn’t
really sure what. He wasn’t a cruel or uncaring man, but he was always kind of
distant, as if his mind was already up there with the stars. Sometimes after
he’d been gone at Edwards for a few weeks, he’d come home and bring me amazing
stuff—little models of space capsules or signed astronaut photos. I wish I
still had all that; it’d probably be worth a small fortune now. I think I gave
some of it away to friends at school, but I have no idea what happened to the
rest.

The week of the dead girl, Dad
wasn’t at Edwards, but wherever he was working (some aerospace company—there
were a lot around here), he was pulling nonstop late nights. I heard Mom on the
phone to him, telling him what had happened, but halfheartedly ending the
conversation with, “No, we’re okay. I can handle it.” She looked a little lost
when she hung up.

An hour later, she and CJ and I
sat down together to watch the local news. There was a mention of the dead girl
found in the wash. Her name was Mary Ann Wilson, and she was a year ahead of CJ
at San Diablo High. Mom asked CJ if he knew her; he said he thought maybe he’d
seen her around, but he didn’t know her beyond that.

I just thought about how Mary
Ann Wilson had been somebody’s daughter and probably somebody’s sister and
somebody’s best friend, and she certainly didn’t deserve what had happened to
her. Nobody did.

The news report ended by noting
that police were “still investigating,” which I knew meant they had no
suspects. Whoever had done this to Mary Ann was still loose.

There was a killer in our
neighborhood.

Chapter 4

The next day, Debbie’s mom, Marge,
took us to a matinee:
The Sound of Music
. I think she was trying to
cheer me up, but I hated musicals, and I don’t think Debbie was nuts about
them, either. Marge left the theater singing, though, so I guess she was happy.

I was still thinking about the
murder victim—Mary Ann Wilson. I couldn’t get the image of her torn, exposed
body out of my mind, no matter how much Julie Andrews sang and pranced about.
Marge offered to take us out for ice cream after the movie, but I lied and said
I wasn’t feeling well, when I really just couldn’t stand the thought of being
around Marge while she kept humming those songs. I liked Marge okay most of the
time—she was a small, chipper woman who smoked too many cigarettes and had bad
teeth as a result—but today I just wasn’t up to her perpetual cheerfulness. I
wanted to be in my bed with a pile of comic books.

When I got home, I made myself
a glass of chocolate milk and was on my way to my room when I heard strange
sounds coming from behind CJ’s closed door. I paused to listen, and instantly
knew this was something I wasn’t supposed to hear: He had his girlfriend Vicki
in there, and they were both kind of moaning and gasping. I could also hear an
odd, rhythmic creaking sound, which it took me a minute to place as bedsprings.

 A jolt of disbelief shot
through me as I put it all together: CJ was having sex. With Vicki. In his
room. Right now.

I had only the faintest idea of
what was involved with sex. For one thing, I was a little behind the other
girls my age—Debbie, for example, had already been having periods for a year (I
knew this because one day at school a sanitary napkin had fallen out of her
book bag), and she even had actual
breasts
. Her breasts were big enough
that the boys at school paid a lot of attention to her, and I sort of envied
that. Even though Mom had bought me a training bra, I was still as flat as a
pancake and didn’t wear it most days.

Mom had explained a few basics
to me, so I knew that men had parts women didn’t have, and that sex started
with kissing and ended with babies, but I was still kind of uncertain about
what happened in between. That’s why it took me a few seconds to place the
sounds coming from behind CJ’s door.

I stood in the hallway, the
glass of chocolate milk forgotten in my hand, and listened, feeling both guilty
and excited. I was confused, too, though—it sounded like they were hurting each
other. The sounds continued for maybe another minute—their cries sharper, the
creaking faster—and then it died away.

Next they giggled, and then I
heard CJ saying something about going out to the kitchen. That was my cue to
make like a banana and split. I started to run for my room, but then I had a
better idea, and headed out to the kitchen, where I plopped myself down at the
dining table just before CJ walked in.

He was shirtless and his hair
stuck up in a zillion different directions, but at least he’d pulled some pants
on. He literally froze for a second when he saw me. “Oh…I didn’t know you were
here,” he said, as he tried to pretend to casually amble over to the
refrigerator. “I thought you’d be out all day with Debbie and her mom.”

“No, I got home about twenty
minutes ago.”

He tensed at that but got two
cans of Coke out of the fridge. He elbowed the refrigerator door shut, then
leaned against it, eyeing me warily. “So, you…uh…”

I started to moan, doing what I
thought was a pretty good impression of Vicki.

It must have been a
great
impression, because CJ gritted his teeth in anger and then caught himself. “You
gonna tell Mom?”

I took my time answering,
letting him squirm a little. “I might…but I could maybe be persuaded not to…”

“What do you want?”

“A dog.” It was true; I’d been
bugging Mom for months now for a dog. She always said that dogs were a lot of
trouble and she didn’t think I was responsible enough to help take care of it
and so on. I knew that if I could get CJ to promise to help with it, though,
she might reconsider.

CJ rolled that around in his
head for a minute. “A dog, huh? Would I have to help take care of it?”

“Maybe a little at first. Just
long enough to convince Mom to let us keep it.”

“And you won’t say anything
about…?” He jerked his head towards his room.

I ran a finger twice across my
chest. “Cross my heart. Of course Mom might figure it out on her own when Vicki
shows up with a baby that looks like you.”

“Not gonna happen, twerp.” He
reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a little square foil packet. It
looked like candy to me. Was there a candy that could keep a girl from getting
pregnant?

CJ turned then and went back to
his room. I heard his door close behind him and some low giggling. But I wasn’t
really listening anymore—I was already trying to think about what kind of dog I
wanted.

It turned out to be a good thing
we never did get that dog. There’s no way it would have survived that summer.