Dust Devil (15 page)

“
No,
I’ve got a ride.” Krystal had latched on to the band’s
drummer and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to let go.

“
She’s
going to wind up pregnant or worse,” Liz declared softly as
they walked toward her parents’ car. “She doesn’t
even know that guy. It was one thing to flirt with him at the prom.
But going off by yourself with a strange boy is just asking for
trouble.”

“
Yeah,
especially since he’s Italian.” Dody spoke up,
pronouncing it “Eye-talian.” “Why, my daddy’d
just skin me alive if I brought home a dago. He says they’re
all mobsters. He says there’ve been rumors going around the
coal mines for years that the real reason the Feds’ll never
find Jimmy Hoffa’s body is because after the Mafia whacked him,
they trucked him out here, and Papa Nick had the corpse ground up at
the dog-food factory.”

“
I
thought Hoffa was supposed to be buried on the fifty-yard line of
some football stadium,” Liz drawled as she unlocked the car.

“
Naw.”
Dody shook her head as she heaved herself into the backseat, stuffing
another leftover cookie from the prom buffet into her mouth. “He
was turned into a couple of cases of dog food...probably wound up
getting fed to some old lady’s poodle. That’s why Daddy
won’t let me | go swimming in the quarries, either. He says
everyone in town knows that when the mobsters in the big city hit
somebody, they send the corpse down here so Papa Nick I can fit it
with cement shoes and pitch it into one of the abandoned quarries.”

“
Well,
I’m surprised your daddy continues to work at the coal mines if
that’s what he thinks about Papa Nick and Italians, Dody,”
Sarah said stiffly as she fastened her seat belt. “They’re
not all like that.”

Dody
shrugged. “Sure they are. Why, they even assassinated JFK
because he and his brother Bobby were going to blow the whistle on
organized crime. Just imagine! Getting away with shooting the
president! That’s why Daddy don’t hold with unions and
all, causing trouble at the coal mines. He says that if the Mafia can
get away with murdering the president, they can get away with
anything. I guess if Daddy had his druthers, he’d rather work
anyplace but the mines. But everybody’s gotta work somewhere,
don’t they? And in this town, there just aren’t that many
jobs besides those at the mines and at Field-Yield, Inc., and Daddy
said he guessed he’d rather shovel coal than shit.”

Sarah
didn’t answer. And although she felt guilty for being so
mean-spirited, she was secretly glad when, on the way home, after
downing two cheeseburgers, three orders of onion rings and a
chocolate shake at the Sonic, Dody moaned that she felt awful queasy
and begged Liz to pull over on the side of the road so she could
throw up.

“
If
I were Dody, instead of worrying about Italian hit men, I’d be
more concerned about choking to death on a plain old ham sandwich,
like Mama Cass Elliot did,” Liz remarked coolly as she lit a
cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke rings. “Hey, Dody!”
she hollered out the open door of the car, grinning wickedly. “I
wouldn’t go too far out in those bushes if I were you.”

“
Why—why
not?” Dody gasped, groaning and clutching her stomach as she
stumbled along the dirt road’s dark verge, wildly overgrown and
as yet uncut because of the spring rains.

“
You
might trip over Jimmy Hoffa’s decaying corpse!”

A
spasm of retching greeted this announcement. “You’re bad,
Liz,” Sarah observed, shaking her head at her friend’s
antics. She had always liked Liz. Of everybody in town, Liz was the
one, Sarah thought, who would understand about Renzo.

“
Yeah.
I’d be the perfect gangster’s moll, don’t you
think?” Liz struck a glamour-girl pose in her seat. “Diamonds
dripping from my naked body—and one of those little
pearl-handled guns in my evening bag. What do you think my chances
are of making Al Pacino an offer he can’t refuse?”

“
Al
Pacino’s an actor, Liz, not a mobster.”

“
Oh,
well, a girl can’t have everything, I guess.” Liz paused
for a moment, then inquired archly, “Do you suppose Dody goes
to bed every night expecting to wake up beside a bloody, severed
horse’s head in the morning?”

O
Love, O fire! once he drew

With
one long kiss my whole soul thro’

My
lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

Fatima

—
Alfred,
Lord Tennyson

That
summer following her junior year in high school altered the course of
her entire life, Sarah was to think afterward, bringing both pain and
joy, destroying something infinitely precious to her—yet giving
her something equally as precious in return. And in the end, that
was, perhaps, a fair trade.

It
was a scorcher of a summer, the kind in which the bright yellow sun
shines so fiercely, burns so relentlessly and endlessly that the
trees wither, the grass parches, and the earth bakes hard. Only where
there was water was there also life—in the town itself and in
the woods, where the shaded creeks had not dried up and the old,
abandoned quarries were still full of water born of the winter snows
and the spring rains. It was one of these quarries that the bolder
and more reckless of the town’s youth frequented as a swimming
hole.

The
town did boast a public swimming pool, but it was small and old, its
Gunite coarse and cracked, its paint flaking and peeling. It reeked
of the chlorine that was employed in such strength that it turned
hair green and eyes red. Its two brick-and-concrete bathhouses
smelled of mold and mildew, and the white towels provided were dingy
and scruffy from usage. The rules posted were strictly enforced, so
there was no horsing around. For all these reasons, the public
swimming pool principally attracted elderly couples, young mothers
with toddlers, and children not yet old enough to swim without the
supervision of a lifeguard.

Those
in high school and college scorned the public swimming pool in favor
of the quarry. It was off the beaten track, surrounded by woods and
meadows, a long, deep, jagged scar in the earth. From it, coal and
stone had once been gouged, but once they had played out, the quarry,
like so many others in the region, had been forsaken, the earth left
to recover as best it could from Man’s invasion. Tall grass and
wildflowers covered the quarry’s high banks; cattails and
willows clustered at its edges, long leaves and weeping branches
trailing in the cool, murky water. At one end, a series of rugged,
exposed chunks of rock, remnants of what had years ago been hewn away
by huge machinery, rose, forming natural platforms for diving. It was
these that made the quarry so exciting, dangerous—and
forbidden. And so of course, everybody between the ages of fourteen
and twenty-five went there.

Periodically,
Sheriff Laidlaw or Deputy Truett drove out to the quarry to issue
stem warnings and run everyone off. But this chore proved about as
successful as waving away flies from a garbage can. Every summer, the
town’s young people flocked to the quarry, and every summer,
the town’s old people predicted darkly that it was only a
matter of time before somebody was killed out there—which was
exactly what happened that summer, although not quite in the way
anyone had ever expected.

Sarah
awoke that morning to what she thought would be a day like any other,
having no inkling of how, in a matter of hours, her life was to
change so drastically. In later years, she was to recognize that
dreadful things often had their roots in ordinary beginnings. But at
seventeen, one is both invincible and immortal—or so one
thinks. She was too nervous and keyed up to eat any breakfast and,
after finishing her chores, instead spent her morning showering,
dressing and grooming herself carefully. She was to meet Renzo at the
tree house, and he had told her yesterday that upon her arrival, he
would have a surprise for her. He was going to take her someplace, he
had said, so she should look her best. He had also instructed her to
bring along her bathing suit and beach towel, so he and she could go
swimming afterward.

Despite
how she had teased him, he had refused to give her any further clues
about what he had planned for their day together, so the mystery
added to her excitement. Once she was ready, she slipped from the
house, waving goodbye to Daddy, who was mowing the yard and so, to
her relief, didn’t question where she was headed. Mama had gone
into town to do the weekly grocery shopping. Sarah knew they both
would believe she was spending the day alone at her tree house,
writing and sketching, as she so often did. She bit her lip guiltily
at the thought. Soon she must tell them about Renzo, make them
understand, somehow, the fact that she was going steady with him,
that she and he planned to get married next year. Her parents were
bound to be upset, which was why she kept postponing telling them her
news. They wanted her to attend college, to obtain her degree so she
could get a good job and have a better life than they had. They would
fret, too, about Renzo being five years older than she, and about his
bad-boy reputation and background, the fact that his father had been
not only a mobster, but also one who had been gunned down on the mean
streets of the big city. It would take time to convince her parents
that Renzo wasn’t following in his daddy’s footsteps, but
rather in those of Joseph Martinelli, who had reared him and who had,
in truth, been more of a father to him than the real father he had
hardly known had ever been. Still, although strict, her parents were
fair. Surely once they came to know Renzo, they would realize he was
nothing like what the gossip that circulated about him proclaimed.
They would see how hard he worked and how much in love he and she
were, Sarah reassured herself.

With
that thought to lighten her spirits, she sang as she tramped along
the dusty path she had worn over the years from her home to the tree
house. And she swung gaily at her side the big straw bag in which she
had packed her bathing suit and beach towel, her notebook, sketchpad
and paints, and some fruit and cookies.

“
Whenever
I hear that song, I always think of you,” Renzo, who was
already at the meadow, said in greeting, his eyes glinting with both
desire and pleasure as they took in her appearance. She had arranged
her hair in a French braid, tying it with a green ribbon to match the
green sundress she wore, which made her green eyes stand out
startlingly like glowing emeralds in her face.

She
smiled at him brightly, in a way that made his heart turn over, his
groin tighten. “I like it. It’s a happy song, I think.
Daddy used to sing me to sleep with it.” Reaching into her
straw bag, she drew forth a banana, tossing it to Renzo. He caught it
deftly. “So, Mr. Tallyman, get busy. Daylight’s coming,
and I want to go home.”

Peeling
and eating the banana, he sauntered toward her. “Now, is that
so?”

“
No...”
she breathed as, tossing the banana peel over his shoulder, he took
her in his arms and kissed her deeply. “I want to stay here
with you, forever and ever.”

“
Hmm.
I’d like that.” He kissed her again, lightly this time,
then reluctantly drew away. “But today I have a surprise for
you.”

“
So
you said yesterday. Are you going to tell me now where we’re
going?”