Whitechurch (2 page)

“If your life was a movie, who would star in it?” Lilly asks me as she passes the tortilla chips.

I’ve only thought about this a hundred thousand times, but that doesn’t make the answer come any quicker. The players keep changing, most of them.

“Sean Connery would play my father,” I say as I pass her my Coke.

Lilly slaps me on the arm and says, “That’s not a real answer,” while she laughs.

“Well they’re both bald, aren’t they?” I say.

“All right, Connery plays your father. Who plays you, then?”

I nod confidently. “Pierce Brosnan,” I say. “It’s perfect, ’cause we’re already like a father-son pair of double-oh-seven action types.”

Lilly snatches the chips back from me. “Interesting, when you think about it, Oakley,” she says. “Maybe we should explore your family dynamics a little more.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “So who’s in
your
movie?”

“Audrey Hepburn,” Lilly says. “But when she was alive, of course. Like in
Wait Until Dark
, where she was blind.”

Lilly isn’t blind. Unless she really believes she looks like Audrey Hepburn. She’s more like two Audrey Hepburns, but that isn’t important at all. The stuff that makes her someone you want to get next to is mostly invisible, Lilly stuff.

Lilly #31

If Violence is blue

and my lilly is pink

which Motion

would move her

which Potion should I drink?

“What about him?” I ask, pointing across the room, over the window seat, through the window and out into the backyard where our Pauly dances up and down for our amusement. Pauly’s forbidden to enter the Reverend’s house. He’s got a good soul in there somewhere, the Rev says, but he’s never going to cross
this
threshold. Whatever that means.

“So who plays him?” I ask again.

Pauly rushes up to the window, climbs up on the woodpile, and presses his face to the glass.

“Pauly’s not going to be in my movie,” Lilly says seriously.

I wave to him. “Hey, Pauly,” I say.

“Go ahead,” he calls, muffled, through the glass. “Go on and kiss her if you want to.”

“I never said I wanted to,” I reply, all indignant. I’m not fooling anyone, though.

“Hey,” Lilly snaps. “What do you two think you’re doing? Trading at the farmers’ market or something? I’m a
human
, Pauly-the-Pig. Get out of here.”

“No, wait,” he says. “I want to show you something, Lilly. Come here.”

“I don’t want another poem. They make me ill.”

“Hey, I said I was a poet. I never said I was a
gifted
poet. Anyway, it’s not a poem. It’s something better, even.”

“I don’t want
that
, either. I
especially
don’t want that. And if you try to show it to me again, I’ll call the Reverend.”

“It’s not that either,” Pauly says, exasperated.

I’m starting to get a little embarrassed. “Maybe I should go.”

“No, you absolutely shouldn’t,” she says to me.

Pauly. “Just come to the window, Lilly.”

Lilly. “Ignore him, Oakley.”

Me. “How can you ignore Pauly? How can anyone ignore Pauly?”

Lilly. “Easy.”

Pauly. “Not anymore, it ain’t. I’m going to be unignorable. C’mere.”

Lilly sighs, turns up the sound on the TV with the remote.

“Well, I’m going to go look,” I say. She shrugs.

When I’m almost to the window, and Pauly is reaching down into his pants, the sound of the Reverend’s car on the gravel driveway pulls Pauly’s attention like a scared deer listening on the wind. And like a deer, he is gone in an instant, into the trees and out of sight.

“He’s been getting weirder and weirder since I told him about the college,” Lilly says, shaking her head at the silent-again television.

Lilly #50

Girl sits with boy but doesn’t never

really talk

Like her mouth’s been all taped

and stuffed

with a sock

she’ll think of him well though

when he’s outlined

in chalk

or when some body’s brain cells

are splashed

on a rock

“Think she’ll like it?” he asks me.

I don’t know what to say. Everybody always says that, but here I am totally true about it. I have no idea what to tell him.

“You mean the poem?”

“No, stupid, I know she’s going to like the poem. It’s my best work.”

In that case, he must mean the other thing.

“So, what do you think?”

What I think is, I think I might fall down right here, my knees are so weak.

“I think, get that away from me, Pauly, that’s what I think.”

“Ah, ya big baby. It’s not gonna hurt you. Look, she’s cocked and locked here, so she looks ready to fire, but she won’t.”

She
being the Colt.

“I thought Colt 45 was a drink,” I say as I take a few steps backward, toward the cider press.

Pauly follows me, chuckling. “You’re funny, Oak. Here, check it out.”

As if I could
avoid
checking it out. It is the same shape as the state of Texas, with the barrel pointing north, the hammer pointing west, the handle sticking down into Mexico’s side, and the shooter’s knuckles scraping along from Louisiana to Oklahoma.

Nearly as big as Texas too. When skinny old Pauly waves the thing around, it pulls his arm along like he’s not in charge of it at all.

“That’s okay,” I say, “I can see it fine.”

“You can’t see it. You gotta
feel
it, is the thing, Oakley.”

He grabs my wrist and works the monster into my palm. My hand closes around it, and it nearly pulls me to the ground.

“She’s gonna go ‘wow,’” Pauly says.

“She’s gonna go
something
,’” I say. I can feel my free hand shaking as I examine the Colt up close.

But Pauly is right about this: It’s unignorable.

It’s like, every line is in place. Every straight is straight, every curve is
schwoop
, it’s cool to the touch but feels so comfortable in the fleshy innermost of the palm that you feel as if it knows what it’s doing, and it probably belongs there. The barrel is polished blue-gray, almost the same color as the late-afternoon light behind the hill, and the brilliant stainless steel body catches every chip of that light and forces you to pay close attention.

Automatically, like a five-year-old, I raise it up, close one eye, and point it. At an apple tree. At a squirrel.

“Where’d you get it?” I ask.

“Really want to know?”

I look up at my friend’s face, to see whether in fact I do. He smiles crookedly. I don’t.

“Borrowed it from the Rev’s collection that he doesn’t want nobody to know about. He knows
I
know, though.”

I knew I didn’t want to know.

“She’s leaving because of me, because I’m boring her,” Pauly says.

I aim at the little rusted rooster twisting on top of the cider-press house. “Pauly, you are many things—in fact, you’re
most
things I can think of to call somebody—but one thing you could never be is boring.”

“Well, we know that, but I think Lilly is bored with me, and that’s why she’s leaving Whitechurch.”

“She’s leaving Whitechurch to go to school. If the university was here, she wouldn’t be leaving.”

“That’s just an excuse,” he says.

Lilly is where she’s supposed to be. Pauly told her to meet him. I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be here at all. But when Lilly told me he wanted her to meet him at our spot above the prison yard, I decided I should be here. It’s Wednesday afternoon, and as we wait for Pauly, we listen to the fife-and-drum-and-bagpipe corps. They’ve been getting better. They’ve got “Loch Lomond” pretty well nailed.

But they’re not supposed to be here. It’s not Thursday.

“Sounds so pretty,” Lilly says. “How come you guys never told me about this before? This is sweet.”

I nod. She looks nervous, no matter what she says.

“Did he tell you what he wanted you up here for?”

“Said he wants to show me something. But he’s always saying that. To tell you the truth, he hasn’t really shown me anything in a long time.”

I let out a low, steady whistle, the kind that everybody knows means “Oh, boy.”

“Well what can I say, Oakley? You understand, I know you do. There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.”

Of course I understand. The Lilly-Pauly relationship was always the type of thing that practically brought “Booooo” calls from the whole town. The Reverend, for one, would carry her on his back to Boston, with all her luggage, to get her away from him.

“He’ll be okay,” I say, and I have never said a more outrageous thing. “In fact, you probably don’t even have to wait for him now. I’ll talk to him. He’ll be—”

“What the hell are
they
doing down there,” Pauly says, popping up behind us quiet as a catamount. He walks right on past us and points down at the prison yard with the Colt.

“My god, Pauly,” Lilly gasps. We both jump to our feet. “What is that?”

“They are not supposed to be there,” he insists. “This isn’t Thursday. Is it? Oakley, is this Thursday?”

I start to answer, but he cuts me off.

“And
you’re
not supposed to be here, either. This was supposed to be a special moment between me and my girl.”

He is gesturing at me with it now. But he doesn’t mean anything by it.

“Don’t call me your girl, Pauly. I don’t like that.”

It is my turn to gasp. “Do you
see
what he’s holding, Lillian? Maybe you could save this conversation—”

“I’m very worried about you leaving,” he says. “You need me, Lilly, we all know that. I can make you happy, Lil.”

Lilly shakes her head.

“Listen,” I say. “She’s not even leaving for months, yet. Why don’t we save all this, okay? We have the spring and the summer still and it’ll be the same … it’ll be better, even, than all the others. Then, next year when Pauly and me graduate, we’ll come down and join you and everything will be back—”

“I can make you happy, Lilly,” he repeats. “We all know that. You’re just a little bored with things right now, you want a little—”

“Pauly,” she says calmly, but not without a little tremor in there. “Pauly …” She doesn’t seem to know how to finish.

Pauly wheels around to face the small figures down in the prison yard again. He’s staring. I hear the distinctive
click-click
of the hammer pulling back.

“Cocked, Pauly, huh?” I say. “Locked?”

He pauses for a long time. He nods. “Cocked and locked.”

Pauly doesn’t want to hurt anybody. I know Pauly doesn’t want to hurt anybody. Lilly knows it too. We’re probably the two people in town who know. In the fall, there’ll only be one.

He turns back to face us, and as he does he aims straight up into the cloudless azure blue of the sky. The Colt blends with it, with the blue, as if it were a siphon, drinking blue down out of the air, down through the polished blue muzzle, through the faded blue arm of Pauly’s old fleece-lined denim jacket, and into the blue body of pale Paul himself. Feeding into him, so much bigger than him.

“Do you see this?” he asks her. “Don’t you
see
this, Lilly?”

“I do,” she says. “Does it lead us to something, Pauly?”

We all wait on that. We wait more out of courtesy than fear, to give him a chance to withdraw with dignity.

“You need me” is all he can manage. He uncocks.

With that, Lilly turns and walks away, leaving Paul with his hand still stuck in the air. He stares at her back for an awfully long time.

I don’t turn to watch Lilly leave, because I don’t stop watching Pauly. But I can see by the draining of his face when she has cleared out of light.

“You’re not leaving me, though, are you, Oakley?” he asks, lowering the Colt finally.

“Of course I’m not leaving you.”

He turns back toward the prison and sits down cross-legged in the dirt.

I sit next to him. “Somebody would notice,” I remind him. “And it wouldn’t be a good notice.”

Pauly finally smiles. He leans a shoulder into me, tipping me over onto the ground.

“Ah, autumn’s still ages away, huh, Oak?”

“Ya,” I say, propping up on one elbow. “Ages away.”

“Ages away,” he says.

Then Pauly puts the nozzle of the Colt in his mouth. He has to open his jaws all the way to fit the thing in there.

I stay frozen to the ground. While I do, and while Pauly remains likewise still, he rolls just his eyes in my direction. When he’s had a good look at my stricken face, the smile comes back to him again. He looks like a skeleton with the pistol in his teeth.

“Almost looked sick there, buddy,” he says as he pulls it out.

“Almost was,” I say.

“That’s good,” he says. “That’s good.” He stands, and offers me a hand. “We can go home now,” he says.

When he’s got me halfway to my feet, he drops me. I’m on the seat of my pants. He comes right up close to me.

“Put this in your mouth,” he says coolly.

I say nothing. I feel the blood-warmth run out of my face like a flushing toilet. The big hole at the tip of the Colt is now pressed like a cold mouth against mine.

“Go ahead now, Oakley. Do what I tell you.”

I open up, and my friend doesn’t hesitate before easing the barrel in, the sight scraping along the roof of my mouth. Pauly pulls back on the hammer, and it sounds like the mechanism is clacking and clacking, tumbling like the lock on a gigantic steel vault.

“What does it taste like?” he asks. “It tastes blue, don’t you think?”

Of course, I can’t answer.

“Not nervous, are you? Oak? Of course not. Cocked and locked, right?”

There is another click.

“Cocked … unlocked,” he says, grinning. “Did I tell you how sensitive the Colt .45 semiautomatic is? I didn’t? Oh, let me then. When it’s cocked and unlocked, this piece will fire if you
tell
it to fire.”

There is nothing for me to do, then, except keep on looking up into Pauly’s tired, watery eyes. So I keep on. Until finally I see, in there, where
my
Pauly is, and he looks back at me.