As Simple as Snow (29 page)

“If you’re going to sit, then why don’t you go sit at my desk.” He motioned toward his office, hoping that Mr. Hathorne would move away from us.

Carl’s dad didn’t even look up. “Right here is good for me.” He looked at the students working near him, studying them with apparent confusion. “What kind of schoolwork is this?”

“This is art class,” Mr. Devon said.

“I was looking for my son.”

“He’s not in this class this period,” Mr. Devon said. “If you want, we can go to the principal’s office and find out where he is.”

“That’s all right, I’ll hook up with him later.” He looked at Mr. Devon again, but with a steady, hard gaze this time. “You ever shot anybody?” (Later, some people claimed he had said “killed,” while others thought they’d heard him say “caught.”)

“I’ve been shot once.”

“By a camera? You’ve got a lot of cameras around here, right?”

“I’ve still got the bullet in my neck.”

“Let’s take a look at that.”

“All right, let’s go outside and I’ll show it to you.”

Mr. Hathorne got up to follow Mr. Devon, and as he turned he noticed Mr. Devon’s sculpture in the corner. Suddenly he ran toward it, grabbed a chair, and smashed the chair against the sculpture. Some of the girls screamed. Mr. Devon ran over and tackled Carl’s dad, forcing the chair out of his hands and knocking them both to the floor. He pinned the drunken man’s arms behind his back and marched him out of the room. He was gone ten minutes or so.

You don’t get to see a teacher rolling around on the floor too often, and probably have even fewer opportunities to see him fighting somebody while he’s down there. You would have thought that more than half the school had been in Mr. Devon’s classroom that hour and had that opportunity, to judge from the number of people who claimed to have witnessed it. The whole school was impressed with how Mr. Devon had handled Mr. Hathorne. Some people said Mr. Devon had destroyed him; others said that if Mr. Hathorne had been sober, he probably would have taken Mr. Devon. Of course, if he had been sober, he probably would have never come into the school. But Mr. Devon’s actions ranked second in most-talked-about subjects—everyone was debating whether or not Mr. Devon really had a bullet in his neck, and how it had gotten there. Some people maintained Mr. Hathorne had put it there, and that was why they were fighting. It’s funny, but the whole episode actually made Carl more popular, if that could be possible; people sympathized with him, wondered how he could be such a nice guy with a father like that. It made me wish my dad would wreck the school in a drunken fit. But I was never that lucky.

then carl

You can have too many conversations. I might have had the fewest conversations in history, and still I had one too many. I asked too many questions, or said the wrong thing too many times. All people have a line they don’t want you to cross, or a breaking point on a particular subject. Unfortunately for me, I reached my limit with Carl.

“What’s going on with you and Claire?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is there something going on with the two of you?”

“It’s true,” Carl said.

“How long has that been going on?”

“For a while,” he said. “It kind of started on Valentine’s Day.”

I was embarrassed. “Did she tell you that I kissed her?” “She told me,” he said. I could tell by his expression that she hadn’t.

“I would never have done anything, if I’d known.”

“That’s all right. We just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. It started real slow anyway, and we didn’t want to jump up and down about it with all that you were going through.”

“I’m still going through it,” I said.

 

 

 

“Why did you give that picture of Anna to Gerald Preen?” I asked. I didn’t know that he had, but I was working on an obvious hunch—Carl was the only connection uniting Anna, Mr. Devon, and
The Channel.
I had to guess whether he had introduced Mr. Devon to Preen’s people, or had gotten the photo from Mr. Devon. It was a fifty-fifty shot, and I figured that if Preen would go to elaborate lengths to fake his psychic readings, why wouldn’t he fake a photo as well?

“I sold it to them,” Carl said. “It was strictly business.”

“Does everything have to be business with you?”

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it.”

“Did Mr. Devon give you the picture of me?”

“You should ask him.”

“And how about the picture of Anna?”

“She gave it to me.” I guess that was supposed to be his payback for my kissing Claire. “She kissed me back,” I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. I walked away and thought that I would never talk to Carl again. I couldn’t talk to him, not after what he had done. I imagined I would just walk past whenever I saw him, treat him like wallpaper, something I wouldn’t notice. Then, after we graduated, he’d move on to Alaska or wherever, like we had talked about when we were kids. I wouldn’t go, even if he still wanted me to. Maybe he’d changed his mind; he was full of secrets. He kept Claire a secret from me, and then he sold that picture simply because he could, and didn’t say anything about it. What kind of friend is that?

 

 

 

I still talked to Claire, but it wasn’t the same. She said that Carl was sorry for what had happened. “You should talk to him,” she said. “He wants to talk.”

“Then he should talk to me.”

I was done with Carl, and I saw Claire less and less. She stopped coming by in the morning to talk to Billy and me, and with no news to discuss, Billy and I had nothing to talk about. If I wasn’t called on in class, I could pass the entire schoolday in silence. It was almost the way it had been before I met Anna. I would see Carl in the hall or outside school, shaking hands and talking with people, and think that maybe he didn’t even notice that he and I hadn’t said one word to each other in more than a week. Why would he? Nothing had changed for him, he was still friends with everybody else in town, and he was with Claire now anyway, the two of them together, so what did they need me for? In a few days he did need me, though, and I wish that he hadn’t.

I was walking down Valley View Road after school, and was almost home, when Carl emerged between two houses, sneaking along like a cat in an alley. “Hey,” he said in almost a whisper.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to talk to you. Can we go to your house?”

Carl was nervous. I don’t think I’d ever seen him nervous before. It didn’t suit him. We went into the house through the front door, avoiding my mother, and up to my room. Carl closed the door and unzipped his backpack. He took out a package, a little larger than a shoe box, wrapped in brown butcher paper, and a yellow envelope that was stuffed with cash.

“I need you to hang on to this for a while,” he said.

“What for?”

“I have to go away.”

“Where?”

“Just hold on to this.”

“Tell me what’s going on, Carl.”

“I can’t. There’s no point anyway.”

“When are you coming back? Does Claire know?”

“I can’t tell her. She wouldn’t approve. You’re the only one, and I can’t even tell you the whole thing. It’s going to be all right, though. I’ll be back as soon as I can. If not, you’ve made yourself a tidy sum there.” He opened the envelope and handed it to me. I counted it.

It was almost $5,000.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on, and we can figure out another way.”

“This is the best thing. I’m sorry about before. Thanks for helping me.”

“I’m not helping you. I’m just taking your money. Let me help you.”

“You are,” he said, and then he was gone.

 

 

 

Two days later Carl’s mother reported him missing to the police, and a few days after that Mr. Hathorne wandered into the police station and confessed to Carl’s murder. “I killed that boy,” he shouted when he came through the doors. “I’m telling you, and you can go tell his mother—I killed that boy.” He told the police a detailed story about how he had taken Carl across the river into the woods of Mumler and killed him, and then dumped his body into the river. He described the exact spot in the woods and the precise place in the river. He went on to confess to the murder of Anna Cayne. He wrote out his confession and signed it. There was, of course, only one problem. He was drunk at the time.

When he sobered up, he denied everything. “I’ll say anything when I’ve been drinking,” he claimed, and there wasn’t anyone in town who wouldn’t have attested to that. The police kept him locked up all the same. Walking to school, you could see the yellow boats in the river, and on them men in red jackets dragging long poles through the water, or peering down into the darkness, looking for Carl. I hated the sight of those boats. Day after day they sat there, moving a few yards up the river or a few yards down, the crews looking where the old drunk had told them his son was. He couldn’t be in that water, I thought, but what did I know? I wished they would drain the damn river and leave it dry.

Every day I wondered whether I should go tell the police about my conversation with Carl just before he disappeared. They should know about it, but what did I really have to say? All he’d said was that he was going away—well, the police already knew he was gone. He hadn’t told me where he was going, or why, or anything else. And I couldn’t tell them about the money. And how would my story stack up with Mr. Hathorne’s? He’d given the police pages of information, plenty of details, two murders, exact directions and locations. He’d led them somewhere. I had only one sentence, and it didn’t take them anywhere. There was nothing for me to say.

How is it that the truth can seem so flimsy, so scant, and that lies can be so detailed and solid? It was obvious that Carl’s father had been lying in some drunken rant—he kept telling the police that from his sober cell—but they continued to comb the woods and sit in their boats on the river. “It’s a waste of taxpayer money,” my father said, “keeping those boats out there and those guys in the woods. A lot of good money thrown after the bad words of a drunk.”

“They have to look for the boy, anyway,” my mother said. She had refused to acknowledge that it was Carl, my oldest and only friend.

“It’s Carl,” I said. “Not ‘the boy.’ ”

“They would have to do the same thing for any boy,” she said, meaning it was the same thing.

the difficulty of forgetting

I had a dream that they found a body. Their search finally yielded something. The rumors had been swirling around school, and when I caught up with Billy Godley he told me it was true. “The body’s in bad shape,” he said. “They have to send it out for tests.”

In the dream there was some confusion and arguing about whose body it was, between those who insisted it was Anna and those who were equally convinced it was Carl. The question was put to a vote. Everybody showed up at the town hall; people came with signs and buttons, and some of the people who thought that it was Anna who’d been found in the woods insisted that Carl was responsible for her body’s being there in the first place. Before anyone could vote, however, Carl walked calmly into the hall where people were assembled, his blue visor pushed back casually on his forehead. He smiled and waved and shook hands, like a politician. He went to the front of the hall and spoke into a microphone at the lectern there.

“This is what I want to know,” he said. “Did she know she was naked in the woods? Did she know that they found her in a shallow cup of earth, and could she have told us if it was an unfinished grave or just an indentation she laid in or was laid in? Did she know that her black coat was folded on the ground nearby, her ten-eyelet Doc Martens placed side by side, with the socks rolled and tucked neatly into the places where her feet should have been? Did she know that she had been there for months, just patiently lying there, waiting for someone to find her?” He held up a photograph of the frozen river, the hole, and her empty dress left on the ice, the last remains of a melted witch. It hadn’t fallen to the ice haphazardly, however, but had been arranged carefully, the arms pointing down, the body straight behind, a black arrow pointing to the hole, or somewhere else.

 

 

 

When I woke up I called Billy Godley and asked him whether he knew anything about the dress. Had his father said whether the police considered it a clue, an arrow? I asked him whether there were any photos from the scene that I could see, showing which direction the dress was pointing. He said he would check on it.

By the time I got to school, Billy was already there. On a map, his father had drawn where he thought the dress had been. The police hadn’t thought about the dress as an arrow. “He said that was an interesting take on it,” Billy told me. Just a few months too late, I thought.

I took a ruler and drew a line across the map, starting at the dress. It was guesswork; it may not have meant anything, and if I was off by even a degree, it would change everything, and if you followed the line from the ruler out far enough, you’d wind up somewhere in Alaska, but the line went right through Mumler. I felt stupid for not thinking about Mumler before. I should have gone out there; I should have been thinking harder, working harder at trying to find Anna, or what had happened to her. Mumler meant something; it seemed so obvious.

Between classes I spotted Claire, and told her about Mumler and asked if she would go there with me.

“I didn’t know you guys went there,” she said.

“She wanted me to see a ghost.”

“Did you?”

“We just got cold. It’s not cold now, at least.”

“This is going to sound stupid,” she said, “but I don’t want to go there until Carl gets back.”

“I understand. He’s going to come back, Claire. Don’t worry about that.”