Ferris Beach (29 page)

I must have clung there an hour after they left, and then I moved suddenly, urgently, down the tree and over and around the chicken wire and busted boards; I could not move fast enough,
and I didn’t even remember having acted at all until I was halfway across my yard and heard something rustling behind me. I looked towards Whispering Pines, and I thought I saw a red spark, the winking eye of an animal, or the glow of a cigarette. Again, it sparked and in that quick glow, I glimpsed a flash of dark red, blood red, maybe Merle’s shirt there in the shadows of the cemetery. And again, I moved quickly, panicked, fearful that he would call my name, that he was like the watchman, the pimp who would give a signal—hoot owl cry or a rock against a window or his old cat call—that would send them all out into the yard, over the weeds and wire, through my yard, where they would dive, hands catching my ankles and pulling me down, catching me, flipping me over, pinning me as they traced my birthmark in that bright light; I could feel the cold silver blade of the knife daring me to cry for help, daring me to do anything other than give in to their gropes and slobbers.

I thought of the oddest thing in that moment. I thought of Mo Rhodes and the rainy day right after they moved in when she spread a quilt over the oil spots in their carport and then sat on it cross-legged with Misty and me. We played the old game
bear hunt,
our hands imitating all of the actions as we swam through the river, climbed a tall tree and then, spotting the bear, we began running faster and faster, hands clapping and slapping knees as we went faster and faster, back over the mountain, back down the tree and back through the river, faster and faster and faster, making us laugh so hard that Misty finally had to scream that we
please, please, please
take a break because she just couldn’t take it any more. Mo Rhodes was stretched out on her back, her shapely legs up in the air doing a scissor kick while she held her stomach in laughter. “Stop making us laugh,” Misty had screamed. “I’ve got to pee. Now no more laughing!”

“That’ll be the day-ay-ay,” Mo sang. That’s what I was hearing over and over, Mo’s voice, until I eased the door to and turned the lock. As I passed my parents’ door, I paused to listen. Silence. I tiptoed up the stairs and moved slowly down the dark hall.
When I touched the cool glass doorknob of my room, it almost seemed like I’d never gone outside, that none of it had happened, that none of it was real. I tried to imagine how I could even begin to tell Misty what I had seen, how would I even describe it, or should I even try? Somehow it seemed that if I didn’t tell it, didn’t think it, that it could all go away, as if I’d never seen it, as if it had never happened.

I undressed in the darkness. The floor was cold to my bare feet, and I felt a sudden shiver down my spine as I stood naked a moment before pulling my flannel gown over my head and down around me. Now the fairy-tale moon had risen high above the cemetery. I knew as I stepped closer to the window that I would see him there, the same place as always. And this time I felt certain that he saw me, too. He knew I had been there, I was sure, and again I felt that deep empty drop of my stomach.

I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Perry’s eyes wide and frightened, her face frozen in silent terror; I saw the knife on her stomach, the snap of her bra, and those breasts that were the subject of all the adolescent boys’ dreams of womanhood and sexiness, just those of a young girl, pale blue veins underlining pale white skin, breast bone as fragile as that of a chicken ripped and torn apart. I saw Mo Rhodes and the look of horror as she screamed out in that brief second, her hand reaching out for Buddy. I saw Merle begging his brother to stop, and I saw Misty clinging to the carport post and screaming for her mother to come back, her hair wild against the dark sky.

Finally, I went out on the sleeping porch. The air felt sharp as I breathed in. The light was still on, only now Merle’s father’s pickup truck was in the driveway, and I could see Mrs. Hucks bent over the sink, alone in the kitchen. I imagined she was washing that stack of dishes, crumbs and bones scraped in the trash; she was oblivious to how late it was or how her children had spent the evening as she wiped over the red oilcloth with a worn, grainy rag.

Within minutes, she turned out the light, and when my
eyes had time to adjust, the house became only another boxlike shadow like all the others, identical in this light to the one housing baby Jesus. I was finally dozing, my head dropping forward, when I heard the rustling of weeds and looked up in time to see him moving over the chicken wire. He stopped and stood there a minute, the glow of his cigarette making the picture real, letting me know that I had not imagined it all. And then he was gone. When I went back inside, it was long after midnight; it was Christmas Eve.

I woke in the morning with a start, and saw the blanket I had wrapped around me as I sat on the sleeping porch. It was all real. Suddenly everything else in my life seemed so minimal, just worthless worries. The memory of Perry’s face sat on my chest like a rock. I got back under the covers, closed my eyes against the light at the window. I think I would have stayed there all day had my mother not been in the doorway calling for me to get up, she needed help, packages to wrap, food to prepare, gifts to deliver to neighbors and the rest home.

Every year she headed up the rest home project for her Junior League, and I hated going there most of all, delivering gifts and food to people who stared blankly from their wheelchairs, halls and doorways, these people at the very end of their lives, their food blended to the consistency of soup, their rooms smelling of urine, workers rummaging through their belongings when no
one was looking, some perfume, some candy, a wedding band twisted and pulled over an aged swollen knuckle.
Yes, it’s been there since my husband put it there in 1922.
Helpless, they were helpless, and yet this was now their home. The most frightening part was the realization that they
had
adapted, had gotten used to it all, had come to think of the smelly hallways as their homes and the people who stole from them, their families. I hated to think of what we could be reduced to when stripped of our own free will; it was scary to think of what we were capable of doing just to stay alive. It was horrible to even try and think what Perry must have felt when she saw them come for her, and there I sat, doing nothing about it, absolutely nothing.

“Katie, are you okay?” my mother asked over and over, her cool broad hand feeling my forehead. “I hope you don’t get sick, honey. It’s a holiday.” I wanted to remind her how
dramatic
things happen on holidays, but the thought was not as funny as it would have been had I been safely shrouded in ignorance. She kept me busy all morning, loading and unloading our station wagon, and all the while I watched the cemetery and Merle’s house for any movement that would send me running into my house to hide. There was a Christmas tree propped against the side of his house that I not seen the night before. I could see the tip top branches of the magnolia tree, the overgrown path I had taken, benign enough in the daylight.

“Katie, come see,” my mother called, and I grabbed the last grocery bag and slammed the tailgate before she called attention to me there in the middle of the driveway. She met me in the doorway, a huge pink poinsettia in her arms. “Look what was delivered while we were gone,” she said. “Read this.” She thrust a note forward and I looked first to see the signature—Angela.
This is my formal apology for all the times I have let you down. You have been like a mother, a sister, a very dear friend and I hope that you will give me another chance.

“That’s what I needed to hear,” she said. “It’s her handwriting,
too.” She carefully placed the card beside the flower. “I mean, I am probably going to get a bill for that poinsettia, I know that, but she
did
write this.” She was in an unusually good mood after that, though I couldn’t help but be suspicious when my father returned from his
shopping
with nothing whatsoever to show for it.

“I don’t know what you said
this
time,” my mother told him when he came into the kitchen. “But you may have finally gotten through.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he said, and sat down to wait for lunch, lit a cigarette. “Must have been an elf. Must be the Christmas spirit.” I looked out the window to see Merle Hucks lifting the tree and carrying it around to the back door, his little sister running along beside him.

My mother worked twice as hard that day, making everything, decorations and food, look like something out of a magazine. She had searched all over Fulton in the crowded supermarkets for exotic fruits to dip and swirl in chocolate sauce. It was mid-afternoon when she headed out once more to the one store she hadn’t visited in search of kiwis and mangos. I went outside, fully intending to go over to Misty’s and unload the whole horrible story, but taking my time. She was going to be upset that Dexter and R.W. were no longer boyfriend choices, but more so that I had gone without her. She would say that I had betrayed her, or even if she didn’t say it, would certainly think it. Or worse, she would say,
Why didn’t you do something, Kate? Why did you just sit there and watch?
The phone rang, and though I yelled for my dad to pick it up, it kept ringing and ringing. Judy Garland’s voice came from his study as I ran through the hall to answer.

“May I speak to Kate Burns?” It was a boy, the voice deep and slow. I took a deep breath, sat in the ornate Victorian chair, the
throne
we’d always called it, by the telephone table.

“This is she,” I said, carefully choosing the pronoun my mother had spent years drilling into me, and then there was silence.
“I’m Kate,” I added, fearing the worst, a prank call, a broken connection.

“This is Merle.” Another pause. “You know, Hucks.”

“Yes.” I stared across the hall, where my mother had Blue Boy and Pinky hung side by side, an arrangement of pink silk flowers on the table below. “Hi.”

“Hey. I was wondering if we could talk.” He stopped again. There were background noises, pots clanging and what sounded like classical music, though I couldn’t imagine that being true. I knew that he had seen me running across the yard; that’s what he wanted to talk about. I used my other hand to hold the receiver steady. There
was
music in the background, Beethoven’s 9th,
Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I think I know and I’m ...”

“Not on the phone, though,” he said hurriedly. “Hold on.” He put the phone down and I could hear muffled voices, his hand over the mouthpiece, I was sure. “Look, you know the little house in the cemetery where the gardener keeps his junk?”

“Yes,” I said, about to add
but,
the thought of being in the cemetery sending a rush over me.

“Be there in thirty minutes.” Then the connection broke and I sat there just holding the receiver and listening to the buzz. Blue Boy and Pinky had always depressed me, and they had no different effect right then. I had to think through everything, how to get there without Misty or anyone else seeing me. And then there was the worst, what was he going to do with me when I got there. I imagined Merle waiting, Dexter and R.W. behind him, a knife in his open palm, slapping, slapping.

Like my mother, my father was also a bit out of his regular groove with the holiday and the knowledge that Angela was coming. He had already cracked open a bottle of brandy and was smoking great big smelly cigars like the ones Mr. Tom Clayton used to simultaneously smoke and chew until the two ends met. He had been working on a memory piece about Mr. Clayton and
said that he wanted to use what I had told about the peeing Confederate statue. All of a sudden, he stopped Judy right in the middle of “What’ll I Do?” and put on my mother’s Bing Crosby record.
Have yourself a merry little Chirstmas.
He was in there singing along, wrapping paper rustling as he wrapped whatever surprises he
did
have stashed.

I called Misty to kill time and to make up a reason
why
I wasn’t coming over, but she was in a rush, said that she’d have to call me later, that she had to do some shopping for her dad. “Sally Jean has her heart set on these really
eloquent
pajamas that are in the window of Ivey’s,” Misty whispered. “Just what we need, another speaker in the house.”

It had been twenty minutes, so without saying anything to my father, and checking to make sure my mother had not just that minute pulled up, I went out the back door, looked back and forth—no Misty or Dean or Sally Jean. Then I ran into the cemetery. I got to the little house, no bigger than a child’s playhouse, and waited. I had only ventured in this direction a couple of other times, once with Misty on one of our dares and once with my father when he came to rub an etching of a nearby headstone where the poor man had listed every single detail of his life. My father thought it was hilarious; my mother thought it was very sad.

Thick fuzzy moss covered the ground around the house; the vines were thicker, trees taller than when I’d been there before. I was looking around for that tombstone when I heard the bushes moving behind me. I turned suddenly and he was right there, not more than three feet away.

“Hey,” he whispered. He leaned against the little house and slowly slid down until he was sitting, back pressed against it. He had a plastic bag with two wrapped gifts inside and he put it down beside him. “I know you saw last night.” He looked up then, not a trace of the anger that I had expected to see. “I didn’t have a whole lot to do under that tree except look up.” His right
eye and cheek were swollen and bruised. “Did you tell anybody?” I shook my head, leaned against a big pine tree, my palms pressed into the rough sticky bark.

“Good.” He sighed, stretched his legs out. “Promise me you won’t?” He stared, waiting for my answer. “Even Misty. I know you guys are best friends and I like her, she’s okay. I just don’t want anyone knowing.”

“Okay.” I slid down just as he had done and sat on the damp mossy ground. “I guess your brother would really be in big trouble if people found out.” I looked off towards the sound of the highway, heard the whoosh of cars traveling north to south and south to north, all passing us by without a thought. “R.W., too.”