You Only Get Letters from Jail (29 page)

“Maybe animals stay away from a place where one is dead,” I said.

Debbie took a swallow from her beer and continued walking down the incline. “Maybe it's not an animal,” she said. “I want to find it.”

“I thought you wanted to go swimming,” I said. “C'mon, it's hot.”

“I'm not sweating anymore,” she said. She finished her beer and tossed the bottle to the ground, where it landed with a soft hollow thump. “Are you?”

I could feel a tightness in my stomach, something more than cheap warm beer, and I thought about how we should have made it to the water by now, that we should be standing on the shoreline, pulling flat rocks out of the wet ground and seeing how far we could make them skip, counting their hops across the surface. I thought that by now I should be shirtless, with lake water around my shoulders as I swam out from the shore to try to see how far I had to go before I could turn around and see Kenny's car on the hillside. I thought that by now I should be swimming with Debbie, seeing how long we could hold our breath, and she would be stripped down to maybe only panties and a bra, maybe, and she would be swimming with me and we would forget about the things that didn't mean anything out here.

“It smells like something big,” Debbie said. She had picked up a crooked stick and she was walking with it, poking it into tangles of grass, swinging it against trunks as she passed them so that I could see dust and particles of bark rise up and hang in the sunlight.

“It could be a deer,” I said. “Besides, dead animal smells like dead animal. I don't think size matters.”

“Really?” Debbie said.

“I'm going back to the car,” I said.

I turned around and started walking up the incline, toward where the trees thinned out and went back to grass and rock. I noticed that there were three trails in the grass—mine and Debbie's and one that I hadn't noticed before. It could have been a game trail, my dad had pointed some out that one time that we had been camping and we had gone for a hike, Kenny, me, and our dad, and he had pointed things out to us, things like game trails, but nothing else that was useful. I could hear Debbie behind me, knocking her stick against trees. “I thought we were going swimming,” she said.

I looked up at a gap in the overhang of branches and leaves and there was more sky than sun above us. “We don't have enough time,” I said. “I guess it was farther than we thought.”

I tried to walk slowly in hopes that Debbie would catch up with me, but she just hung back and swung her stick and didn't speak. The sky was changing color and the air had taken on the damp weight of humidity and now there were a few clouds, though they were flat and nonthreatening and far away in the distance. I could hear the music before I could see the car and I tried to hear the sound of voices and I knew that Kenny and Ricky would be drunk since they had had most of the beer for themselves. I had no idea as to how long we had been gone, and there was
probably a way to tell time by looking at the shadows, but that was something I had never learned. I felt Debbie's hand on my arm, it was warm and rough and she caught me just above the elbow, on the bare skin below the sleeve.

“Wait,” she said.

I stopped and looked at her. I knew that in a few more yards we would leave the stand of trees and be back in the grass that led to the clearing and whatever we had been talking about would be forgotten and I would not think any differently of Ricky despite what I knew.

“He wrote me letters,” she said. “That's what you wanted to know, right? Why I'm out here with him?”

She was breathing hard, as if she had had to hurry a little bit to catch up with me. I wondered if she had planned it, waited for me to reach this point on the path before she stopped me, or if it was just an impulse that got to her, and she gave in to the urge to tell.

“He wrote me letters from jail,” she said. “I had never gotten a letter from anyone before, you know? And then these letters started showing up—he had some friend of his mail them to me so that my parents wouldn't see the return address—and I know he's crazy, but he can write. There's something about his words. And he said that the truth of it was that he was really in love with me. He just couldn't tell me, except in his letters.”

She said all of this in a rush, in a run-on set of sentences that came out like a breath held too long, and even in the weakened light I could see that her face was flushed.

“Now you know,” she said.

“You don't love him back, do you?” I asked.

She let go of my arm and I realized that the whole time that she had been speaking, her fingers had been digging in and I could still feel the pressure even as I watched her hand fall away and drop to her side.

“I don't love him,” she said. “But if Suzy Eberhardt ran off, I know why she might do it.” Debbie shifted her eyes away from mine and she stared off over my shoulder, in the direction of the car that we could hear but not yet see. “It's something to do,” she said.

When we got back to the car, Ricky and Kenny were standing by the open trunk, moving things around, pulling out gas cans and setting them on the ground. The sun was low and the sky had gone from blue to violet, with a thin band of green that bled into purple and red as the color leaked toward the foothills. From the car we could see the lake again, untouched and dark now that the sun was setting. I was sorry that we hadn't made it to the shore to swim and I wondered what it would be like beside the lake now, if there would be the sound of frogs calling, the steady low hum of mosquitoes, the splash of fish as they rose from the water to take bugs off the surface.

“If you guys had been in the war, you'd be dead now,” Ricky said. “You made a fuck lot of noise as you were walking up here. I could hear you for the past twenty minutes.”

Debbie took a beer from the case and opened it, drank half in one swallow, took a breath, and finished the rest of it. She tossed the empty into the weeds. “This isn't the war,” she said.

“How do you know we aren't being watched?” Ricky asked.

“Just stop, okay?” Debbie said.

I looked at Kenny to see if he was listening, but he was bent into the trunk, still moving things around even though most of the contents had been pulled out and were scattered around him in the grass.

Ricky grabbed Debbie and put his arms around her and pulled her against him, hard, and buried his head in her neck so that his hair covered his face and I couldn't tell if he kissed her or not. I watched the expression on Debbie's face, but she was as shadowed and blank as the lake in the distance.

He lifted his face from her and tucked his hair back and surveyed the setting sun, the grass around us, the pile of rocks near the car. “It's getting to be time,” he said. “We can't wait too much longer.”

Ricky pulled a plastic bucket out of the trunk—a white five-gallon one with a twist-off lid and a wire-bail handle. “How do you know I didn't follow you down to the lake? Make sure you two didn't do anything that I wouldn't like,” he said.

I thought about the three paths I'd seen, but the third one had been older and fainter than the two that Debbie and I had made. I looked at Kenny again, but he just shrugged and kicked at a faded Schlitz can in the grass.

“You remember that time we stalked those two nurses all night, Kenny?” Ricky said. He had flipped the bucket over and was sitting on it. “Remember how fucking good at it I was? I told you, I was the best guy on patrol—they used to
call me Whisper—I could walk across a wide open space without a sound.”

Kenny just nodded, but I couldn't tell if it was in agreement or not.

“You remember that one nurse? What was her name? That younger one. Nancy?” “Diana,” Kenny said.

“Yeah, yeah, that's right. Diana. Man, she was a cocktease.” Ricky picked up a beer from the ground, twisted the cap, checked the puzzle, and started drinking.

“You scared her half to death,” Kenny said. “You broke into her car that time, remember? You were in her backseat when she got off shift.” He was smiling and grinding the toe of his tennis shoe into the dirt.

“She liked it, don't you get it? Man, she just thought she was mad. She liked the attention. That's what girls want. A little attention. A little love.” He stood up and it took him a second to get his feet under him and I thought he was going to fall, go down on the leg he claimed had been shot up in the war, and I couldn't help but think about what Debbie had told me, how he had hurt his leg falling out of a tree, and how she had said it was partly her fault. Ricky put his arm around my shoulders and pulled himself against me so that we were both unsteady and then I planted my feet and pulled him upright and I could feel his hot breath in my face and smell the beer and hear the words he was saying before they even left his mouth.

“You have to learn how to give a girl the right kind of attention, you get it?” He swayed backward and his left
foot swung out and hit the bucket and sent it sideways and rolling across the grass. “You did everything wrong.”

I could see spit bubbles foaming in the corner of his mouth and I wanted to look away but I knew that there was no help to make him stop talking. That I just had to wait for him to stop. Kenny was staring down at his toe in the dirt and Debbie had wandered toward the front of the car and was sitting in the passenger seat with her legs out and that was all I could see, her tan legs sticking out from the side of the Plymouth.

“It's time to do this, Kenny,” Ricky said. “Turn the headlights on.” He loosened his grip on my shoulders and stepped away and he was surprisingly quick and steady and sure on his feet. He grabbed a gas can in one hand and the rim of the bucket in his other and he walked around to the front of the car and set both in the grass, then came back and picked up another gas can and took his beer from the bumper where he had left it.

Kenny reached into the car and there was sudden light and everything that had been dissolving into shadows was pulled back into place. The sun was still visible on the horizon, a thin white band between the hillsides and the violet dark above, and the few scattered clouds that I had seen before had thickened and become heavy as a wedge on the far side of the lake.

Ricky pulled Debbie from the car and she stood up and he shuffled her against him in an awkward hug and I watched to see if her muscles would tense and pull him close in return, if her hands would move, slide the distance
of his back, if she would bury her head in his chest and hold on to him, but it was all over before I had enough time to read the signs.

“Okay, the only way this is gonna work is if everybody clears their heads and gets rid of fear. You can't be afraid. No matter what. No screaming and no fear. Got it?” Ricky asked.

He put his index finger under Debbie's chin and lifted her face up so her eyes could meet his. “Got it?”

She nodded and then he let go of her and she sat back down in the seat and I watched a red line form under the frayed edges of her cutoffs where her shorts cut into her thighs.

“So what's the plan?” my brother called over to Ricky.

“Just follow my lead. No screaming and no fear. Keep the bucket close, okay? All I need are three. That's what the Holy Roller told me. He'd give me a hundred bucks for three.”

“What is he talking about?” I whispered to Kenny. Ricky was climbing up the rock pile with a gasoline can in his hand.

“Holy Roller homecoming tomorrow out near the Foursquare church and some guy offered Ricky good money to get him the snakes. He's giving me twenty bucks for the ride.”

“Snakes?” I said.

In the distance the sky lit up, a sudden flash that turned the clouds the color of ripe plums and reflected the hillsides on the lake. “Jesus,” I said.

“Heat lightning,” Kenny said. “Listen.”

I wanted to know how many times Ricky had been out here before—he knew the way without hesitation—I wanted to know if he had ever brought a girl with him. I thought about Suzy Eberhardt and whether or not she knew the way out to the emptiness of this dead yellow grass, too, if she had ever taken off for the lake, and if Ricky was with her, if he stayed two steps behind her and kept falling back until his footsteps didn't make sound and he watched her walk while she tugged at the hem of her shorts and crushed a path for him to follow.

I strained my ears but all I could hear was the radio turned down to a mumble, and the sound of Ricky climbing up the side of the boulder pile, shoes scraping rock, and the occasional metallic ping of the gas can banging into jutting edges. “I don't hear anything,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “No thunder. That storm is miles away.”

“Man there's a lot of flowers up here,” Ricky said. “It's strange how something like these would try so hard to stay alive when it seems impossible for them to live.”

When Ricky reached the top of the boulder pile he unscrewed the lid on the gas can, tipped it upside down, and started pouring. “Let's hope it only takes one can,” he said. “Fucking government and their gas prices.” Even from the distance I could smell the gas, sweet, wet, and heavy. I could see the yellow rocks darken as he pointed the nozzle in the gaps between the boulders and tipped the can over and over again.