Wildwood (3 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
Instead of going home she walked around the far side of the rose cloister, across Casabella Road and scrambled up the hill to the flume that had until recently carried water from the reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to the town below. She hoisted herself up and walked along until she had a clear view of the Santa Clara Valley. The calendar in the school kitchen had a view of the valley at blossom time: from Rinconada to the San Jose foothills, nothing but prune plums and apricots in bloom. Under the picture it said, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” In August all Jeanne could see were trees and green and a few streets and houses. In the distance—exactly eleven miles from Rinconada according to the sign at the town limits—she made out a half dozen medium-tall buildings in San Jose and beyond the little city the rolling eastern foothills the color of late summer gold.
The hills looked like breasts. Jeanne didn’t have any yet. She hadn’t started her period even. But she knew it would be soon. She had looked up puberty at the library and found out that the few hairs sprouting under her arms, which she carefully kept cut back with scissors, meant she was on the edge of, just beginning, puberty and pretty soon she would have to buy Kotex and a belt and remember to bring an extra one to school or she’d bleed all over everything like what happened to one of the girls in her class last year.
She would be glad to start her period even if it did mean she couldn’t swim or go on hikes or ride her bike for five days out of every month. The sooner she grew up the sooner she could go to Cal and get away from her parents. Her brother Michael had gone to Stanford and Jeanne didn’t think she could stand to walk where he had, maybe sit in the exact same classrooms as he.
No one ever said so, but Jeanne knew Michael and his buddies had been drinking when their car hit the abutment on the Bayshore Freeway. Three years had passed since he died and she still felt angry with him because he had broken his word to her. She remembered a time when she was small—only six or seven and he was in high school—and she told him he shouldn’t drink beer or he’d end up being like their father. Michael had laughed and promised her he would never do that. The lie was bitter in her memory. Jeanne had vowed she would never be more than a light social drinker. She would never be like her parents.
She lay down on warm boards over the flume and folded her hands behind her head. There were a few clouds, harmless white puffy things in funny shapes. An elephant, a face with a big nose, one looked like a penis. She started thinking about Billy Phillips again. Something dug away at the edge of her memory. She chewed on the end of her braid as she tried to think. It was important, whatever it was.
The evening of the day Billy Phillips died, Liz Shepherd tried to tell her parents what had happened. Twice she went into the study where her parents worked after dinner. She had practiced her speech, not wanting to waste their time.
A bad accident had happened. Hannah got scared. Billy Phillips did something nasty
. . . Her father read in his Eames chair and her mother sat at the desk correcting papers.
A bad accident had happened. Hannah got scared. Billy Phillips did something nasty
. . . Her father read in his Eames chair and her mother sat at the desk correcting papers.
“Yes, Liz?” She liked the way her father looked at her over the top of his glasses with his eyebrows raised a little. Long after he was gone, she remembered that look and missed him.
Her mother asked, “Are you ready for bed?”
“Can I talk to you? Both?”
Her father’s gray eyes smiled, but her mother said, “Can’t it wait, Liz? I’m going to be up late as it is.”
The incident at Bluegang lived in her, squirming and twisting and knotting her insides, invading her lungs so she could hardly breathe. She should have insisted. Liz knew it then and she knew it later, but at the time she could not override her mother’s chilliness.
“Tomorrow,” her father said, still smiling. “We have an appointment for a conversation. You and I.”
“At breakfast, Liz,” her mother said. And then, “Close the door after you, dear.”
That night her mattress had lumps and ridges she had never felt before and the fluff in her pillow bunched up and got hard. Her stomach cramped but three trips to the toilet didn’t help. She heard the screams and the crows and imagined Billy Phillips struggling to climb up out of the canyon. But he was dead, wasn’t he? She could not recall if his eyes had been open or closed, and the more she thought and worried the more likely it seemed that he wasn’t dead at all. There had been a mirror in her pack. She should have gone down and held it in front of his mouth.
On the floor below her turret room she heard her mother and father turn out the lights and close their bedroom door. For a while the sounds of something classical—her parents never listened to music with words—drifted up from below. Usually the sound of that peaceful, boring music put Liz to sleep but not this night. This night she was wide-awake as a coyote prowling backyards in the moonlight, hunting cats. She imagined a coyote sniffing around Billy Phillips’s comatose body. Maybe he’d had candy in his pocket and the sugary smell would make the wild dog burrow. She imagined Billy Phillips teetering on the brink of consciousness, trying to breathe, trying to make a sound and the dog shoving at him with its wet nose and its sharp teeth and claws.
Liz sat up and reached for the clock on her bedside table: 11:45. Not so late really. Sometimes she stayed awake until midnight reading and listening to
Sepia Serenade.
But she didn’t want to listen or read tonight. She could not get the image of the hungry coyote out of her head and the more she thought, the more sure she was that Billy Phillips was still alive, alive and in pain and struggling helplessly.
Sepia Serenade.
But she didn’t want to listen or read tonight. She could not get the image of the hungry coyote out of her head and the more she thought, the more sure she was that Billy Phillips was still alive, alive and in pain and struggling helplessly.
She should have checked to see if he was breathing. She should have stood up to Jeanne. She should have insisted that they get help. She should have made her parents listen to her.
She pulled her shorts on over the bottoms of her baby doll pajamas and dragged a shirt out of the pile of dirty clothes on the floor of her closet. She carried her sandals in her hand as she crept down the ladder steps from her room to the second floor of the house. The hall floor creaked under her feet but her parents were sound sleepers and it didn’t matter even if they woke up. They’d think she was going to the bathroom again.
Years later she would think about how she ran up Casabella Road that night, about how strong and healthy she had been at twelve and how she had taken stamina and energy for granted. She would remember the security of those times. The confidence. When had rape and abduction and molest entered her consciousness as more than words? They certainly weren’t there when she was twelve, not as real events that happened to girls like her.
At the vacant lot, she left the road and sped across the field to the hill down to Bluegang making a wide detour around the spooky chicken coop. She’d come this way a hundred times. She might have been able to find the path through the wildwood by starlight alone but tonight there was a half moon and that was more than enough light for her to see the break in the oaks, the worn away dusty path down the hill. Moonlight came through the canopy in dapples, like stepping-stones. When she was halfway down the hill she saw someone standing in moonlight by the rocks. She froze where she was and squinted. After a second she relaxed.
“Hannah?”
The figure looked up.
“Jeez-Louise, you scared me. What are you doing here?” Liz slipped down the hill sideways and fast, filling her sandals with dirt and throwing up dusty clouds. She skirted the saddle and roots of the great oak and half-slid down to the rocks. She got as close as four feet from Billy Phillips’s body and stopped. He lay as they had left him hours before. On his pale flaccid chest his nipples stood erect, frozen forever in a moment of terror. One arm flopped at his side; the other stretched out, palm up.
“He’s dead,” Hannah said.
His eyes were open.
“My panties—”
Liz had forgotten all about them.
“They have my name on them.”
Liz stared at the body on the rocks.
“They should be in his pants pocket.”
“You looked?”
Hannah nodded.
“You touched him?”
“His pocket.”
“And they aren’t there?”
Hannah shook her head. In the moonlight the shadows made her face look long and tired, as if drawn in chalk and charcoal.
Liz thought a moment.
“You probably got confused.”
“Where are they then?”
Liz knew where this conversation was going.
“You think they’re under him?”
“Maybe,” Liz said.
Hannah folded her arms across her chest and shoved her hands into her armpits. After a moment she said, “I can’t turn him over.” She looked at Liz. “Will you do it?”
“Me?” Her stomach rolled.
“But what if they’re under there?”
“You said you saw him put them in his pocket.”
“Yeah, and they’re not there now. I told you that.” She stared at Liz. “Someone took ’em.”
“Why?” It was an easier question than
who?
who?
“You think someone watched? Saw what happened?” Hannah looked back up the dark hillside.
Liz looked up too. She thought about Hilltop School. The boys there often broke school rules and sneaked down to Bluegang to swim and smoke and catch crawdads. For a while they kept a secret clubhouse in a cave farther up. It was possible one of them had watched Hannah shove Billy Phillips off the oak saddle onto the rocks.
“Why would they take your panties?” Liz asked.
Hannah lifted her shoulders and let them drop. She murmured under her breath.
“What?”
“Blackmail?”
Liz started to laugh, looked down at Billy Phillips and stopped herself. “There’s no such thing in real life. Only in cities. Only bad people.”
“How do you know that?”
Because Liz would rather read novels than play outdoors, because she lived on Casabella Road in Rinconada, California, because she had looked hard enough at the new world for one day.
“I bet Jeanne came down here and got them.”
“How come?”
“She probably remembered and—”
“No.”
Liz stared at the back of her friend’s head. The wild mass of blonde curls and tangles, silver in the moonlight.
“She would have told me. She would have called.”
“It’s late.”
“Not that late. Not even midnight yet.”
Jeanne loved the telephone.
“She called me at two in the morning when her dog died.”
Liz looked down at Billy Phillips. His right arm lay awkwardly with the palm of his hand facing straight up and the fingers curved toward the calloused palm as if about to grab something. She wished they had at least closed his eyes earlier but it was too late. From books she knew his eyeballs were dry and dusty now. Pretty soon they would start to wrinkle up and fall back into their sockets. His mouth was open, and she remembered a song from third grade:
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out/ The worms play pinochle on your snout.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out/ The worms play pinochle on your snout.
“We gotta go.” Liz knew if she didn’t get away from Bluegang and fast she would be caught there forever. She imagined Billy Phillips’s hand grabbing her ankle, pulling her down to lie beside him. She clambered back up the hill.
Hannah did not move.
“We have to get out of here.” Liz held out her hand.
“It could have been a tramp, huh?”
“If you don’t come now, I’m leaving you.” It wasn’t true. She would not abandon her friend, not ever and they both knew it. It was the kind of thing tough-minded Jeanne would say. “Jeanne’s got ’em. I bet she shows ’em to you tomorrow.”
But she didn’t and early next morning when it was reported that two boys with fishing poles had discovered the body and run into town to tell Sheriff Bacci, Hannah Whittaker’s Saturday panties were not mentioned.
Florida
“W
ater walls,” Liz Shepherd said. “I’m standing on the balcony and I can’t even see the building across the street.” She held the cell phone out over the abyss. Fifteen stories down the swimming pool was a blue baguette. “Can you hear it?”
ater walls,” Liz Shepherd said. “I’m standing on the balcony and I can’t even see the building across the street.” She held the cell phone out over the abyss. Fifteen stories down the swimming pool was a blue baguette. “Can you hear it?”
Hannah Tarwater sighed from California. “Bring it with you. Please.”
“California’s got enough natural disasters without importing hurricanes.”
“Is it windy?”
“Mostly just wet.” In the bathroom Liz had hung her drenched raincoat over the tub. Her boots were in the tub leaving muddy prints. “We’ve had more than an inch already.”
“Everything’s so dry here. I’ve practically abandoned the garden.”
They made trivial conversation; the important questions hanging in the air like wash on a line stretching coast to coast.
“I’ll pick you up,” Hannah said. “Look for the woman having a hot flash.”
“Still?”
“The doctor says a few women have it bad despite hormone replacement. I seem to be one of those.”
Liz tried to read Hannah’s voice. False cheer? Hard to tell with her, even after decades of friendship.
“The up side is I’m saving a fortune on blusher.”
They could go on like this for hours. They could pirouette around and about one hundred subjects, silly and profound, twirl through menopause, family, gardens, clothes and makeup, animals, world affairs, God, and never once come down off their toes long enough to talk about Bluegang. After so many years wasn’t there something deeply, even dangerously, strange about this determined silence? Gerard said there was.
More desultory conversation and then Hannah had to go off to a place called Resurrection House where she was a volunteer. Something about crack babies. She was always taking care of someone or something. Mother to the world, that was Hannah. Liz walked back into the hotel room, closed the sliding door, and picked up her room key and purse and went out into the hall and down to the elevator.
The hotel had more amenities than most villages in Belize where Liz and Gerard lived. On a wet and windy night she could buy a wardrobe for a family, liquor and salsa and gourmet sausage, books and souvenirs and laxatives, without ever leaving the hotel’s protection. She stepped out of the elevator and fitted her dark glasses over her ears. The fluorescent midday dimmed to a murky twilight. In the drugstore she bought a plastic spray bottle, the kind used to spritz hair or sprinkle clothes back when housewives still stood at ironing boards.
A garish sign in Spanish and English in the window of a hair salon caught her eye:
NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY
. Reflected next to it she saw herself. A tallish middle-aged woman, thin and long-muscled after a tubby childhood. Her features—even her nose—seemed miniaturized in contrast to her thick dark hair like a chrysanthemum gone wild.
NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY
. Reflected next to it she saw herself. A tallish middle-aged woman, thin and long-muscled after a tubby childhood. Her features—even her nose—seemed miniaturized in contrast to her thick dark hair like a chrysanthemum gone wild.
The salon’s Cuban manager—her elided accent was easy to identify—warned Liz the electricity might go off at any time. Did she really want to get her hair done in the middle of a hurricane?
“I’m no’ workin’ by flashligh’, ya know.”
“I’ll risk it.”
Now that she had noticed it, her hair seemed like a blind, a bosky hideout, and she couldn’t wait to escape it. She was soul-sick of hiding. Besides, a haircut always lifted her spirits, gave her confidence, which she needed for what lay ahead. But later when she stared at her image in the mirror over the bathroom sink the swingy dark hair shaped to the curve of her jaw didn’t do it. She felt no more up to what lay ahead than she had an hour earlier though certainly the cut improved her appearance. And at least she wasn’t hiding anymore.
She walked out onto the balcony, unscrewed the spritz top of the bottle she had bought and held it out beyond the balcony’s shallow overhang. The hard rain almost drove it out of her hand. For several moments she stood with her arm outstretched, getting wet to the shoulder, filling the plastic bottle with rainwater. Afterwards she screwed the top back on and put it in her purse, standing it upright so it wouldn’t leak.
She lay on the expanse of bed that faced the window, folded her hands across her stomach and thought about the week ahead.
Liz had been back to Rinconada fewer than a dozen times since college graduation almost thirty years ago. Her parents had retired from the state university system and moved to La Jolla in Southern California where Liz had visited them only twice before they died, within months of each other. But despite distance and time her friendship with Hannah and Jeanne had endured. They met two or three times a year on more neutral territory, spoke often on the phone; and now they had long, searching conversations electronically. Rinconada had become a kind of destination of last resort, a place she went to only because she knew it was expected of her occasionally. The town of her childhood was gone—the blossoming trees and one-lane roads, vacant lots alight with wild mustard—smothered in silicon, buried under new houses and chic stores up and down the main street where once she and Hannah and Jeanne had been known by every proprietor.
The Three Musketeers. Battle, Murder and Sudden Death. The Unholy Trinity.
Gone utterly yet she knew that behind and beneath the new architecture, the widened roads, she would encounter the geography of her childhood. A thousand matinees and Friday nights at the movie theater on Santa Cruz Avenue, the high school’s wide lawns, Overlook Road where they went to neck and drink beer. And Bluegang. Bluegang right in Hannah’s backyard.
Her eyelids grew heavy staring at the steel-colored wall of water, but she did not want to sleep. She sat up and turned on the bedside light. Where was her novel? Was it too early to order room service? Why did they always hide the menu?
She walked back to the window.
Somewhere, between the two buildings across the street, there was a view of the ocean; but she had only glimpsed it for an hour before the rain began. She shouldn’t have left Belize at all with a tropical storm in the forecast. This one, Claudette by name, had been promoted to a hurricane while she was at the doctor’s office that afternoon. By the time her plane took off tomorrow, the worst would be over.
She liked hurricanes in the same way she half-enjoyed earthquakes when she was a girl and the house shook and grumbled and books fell off shelves in her father’s study. There was nothing she could do about natural disasters except live through them. She wasn’t expected to take responsibility for anything so she needn’t feel like a failure for doing nothing.
If there had been a way to avoid this trip to Rinconada she would have taken almost any detour before confronting the path down the hill through the wildwood’s bay trees, gums and oaks to Bluegang. But Gerard had said, “You cannot run the rest of your life.” He knew what she was going through. Mornings when he walked into the kitchen and found her seated at the big worktable drinking her third cup of coffee, sitting where she’d planted herself in the middle of the night because dreams had awakened her as they did several times a month, staring at the whorls in the worn surface of the worktable as if by following the lines they would lead her to a place where Bluegang wasn’t, on those mornings he saw the struggle knotted in her. He would kiss the top of her head and leave her alone. He cared but what could he do? She might have endured the dreams if they were the only disturbance; but Billy Phillips, his grieving mother, and she and Hannah and Jeanne hugging at the top of the hill had become her daylight companions too. Walking down to the quay to buy fish, Bluegang was with her; browsing at the booksellers the memory came in and all at once she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think of anything but that dead boy.
“Something’s eatin’ at you,” Divina the fortune-teller said. “Best get it out, like a worm, ’fore you waste.”
There were details she recalled clearly now, which she did not remember noticing at the time. A line of dirt around Billy Phillips’s neck. His mouth open a little, as if death had caught him in midcry. That was what she heard in her dreams. That cry. That plea for help. What she saw was a coyote.
Gerard said it was impossible that she was the only one having a reaction to the Bluegang experience. “You cannot put such things from your mind forever,” he told her, sounding very much like his psychiatrist father. Under different circumstances she would have noted this aloud and he would have sputtered defensively. But why tease when she knew he was right? He said Hannah and Jeanne would probably be grateful for the chance to talk about what happened to them. Liz didn’t think so, but she’d let him talk her into flying out to California. She had to come to the United States anyway for the other business—which she also didn’t want to think about. It was hard work, not thinking.
Had she hit on a new definition of middle age? Was it the time when the secrets of the past and the mistakes of the present came together and made life miserable and sleep impossible? Maybe this was why some people died early. Middle age took so much energy to survive they had none left for old age.
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