Ferris Beach (35 page)

“They’re not the Mormons,” Misty said, sighed. “Anyway, if that’s true then maybe it
is
true that the good die young, you know. They die young so that they have that good body for eternity.”

“Doesn’t sound very fair.” I jerked her back around so I could recheck the measurements once more, hoping that the subject would change.

“And what about people who burn?” Misty asked, and everyone instinctively stared out at the blackened field; the kudzu was starting to reappear in sparse bits of green, starting to climb and twist around the cinderblock rubble. The Huckses’ concrete clothesline posts still stood, a sagging line connecting the two.

“Well, Cleva feels that people go to an in-between place and wait, don’t you, Cleva?” Mrs. Poole leaned forward and Mama just shook her head. “I thought you grew up a Catholic there in Boston, which has always puzzled me, seeing as how you have only one child.”

“Maybe it takes two Catholics,” I said, in an attempt to lighten the mood, and I realized I sounded amazingly like my father. Misty and I had long ago figured the Catholic angle when trying to find proof that I was not
really
my mother’s child. Misty had told me that no
real
Catholic who
could
have children would stop with one; it’s like Lay’s potato chips, she had said and fallen out laughing on Mo’s old purple bedspread.

“And the Mormons think there are lots of different parts of heaven, like neighborhoods,” Misty was saying. “You know, like maybe our neighborhood would be for pretty good people and the new neighborhood over near E. A. Poe would be for
better
people and so on.”

“This
used
to be the best” Mrs. Poole said. “And I bet if a vote was taken it still would be.”

“Kind of defeats the idea of heaven, doesn’t it?” I asked, immediately sorry since it was Mrs. Poole who wanted to latch right on to the discussion, saying it all depended on
whose
idea of heaven I meant.

Misty suggested that we take a little break, said she was tired of standing, her voice carrying over Mrs. Poole’s as she continued giving reasons why our neighborhood was superior both on earth and in heaven. Misty went to our refrigerator and opened the door. “Maybe I misunderstood what the Mormons meant,” Misty said. “That’s what it
sounded
like to me, okay?” She reached in. This,” she held out a bottle of Coke, “this is why I’m not a Mormon.”

“So what are you?” Mrs. Poole asked, inching forward on her chair.

I watched Misty turn her head from side to side as if in thought before walking right up to Mrs. Poole. I was expecting her to use Jimmy Stewart’s line from
Shenandoah
when he was asked if the boy was a Yankee or a Reb, and just give her last name, but instead she said, “I’m a majorette,” and then she did a little turn, an imaginary baton doing a figure eight in front of her.

Tony Graves had asked Misty for a date just the Friday night before, and she told him that she was washing her hair, that she hated the thought that his breath could be trapped there in her telephone wire and please not to call again. She had also turned down Dean’s old friend, Ronald, the one she had loved so madly the night Buddy was born. If R.W. Quincy’s name ever surfaced, she made a horrible face as if on the verge of gagging. “Can you even believe I ever thought about liking such a loser?” she had asked. “I mean, isn’t it incredible how much can
change
in just a few months, or in a few years really?” She had her eye on a friend of Dean’s, a boy who would graduate that spring with Dean and
the rest of the Class of 1974; he was going to Davidson in the fall. She had already been invited to a graduation party, and Sally Jean had promised that she could get any dress she wanted.

“I do not believe,” Mrs. Poole was saying, voice loud and angry, “that I will have to spend forever with this arthritis the way that it’s begun to take over my knees. Do you, Cleva?” Mama was at the window staring out over the yard. My father had become obsessed with gardening, more so than she’d ever been, and she monitored the time he spent out there, especially now that the days were dry and hot; the remainder of spring and the long summer stretched ahead of us like the Sahara. “I cannot believe that I will be stuck with this body for all of eternity and Mr. Bo Poole will have himself a nice fifty-four-year-old body. I do not believe that drug addicts who scream and holler and call it singing and kill themselves with too much medication in their veins can have a twenty-year-old body, and that I’m given this.” I had never seen Mrs. Poole so upset, her face fire red, that one eye twitching.

My mother’s voice was calm as she turned from the window. “We don’t know what waits for us,” she said, and paused. “I believe that
that
is a good thing.”

“Well, I know what I
think”
Mrs. Poole’s bottom lip trembled, and she looked away until she could toughen up.

“And no one can take that away from you, Theresa,” my mother said, while Misty and I stared in amazement at the weak side of Theresa Poole.

“Whoever would’ve thought we’d
really
get there, Katie?” Misty asked me again late that afternoon as we sat on the front steps, the trees of the Samuel T. Saxon schoolyard within view. The main part of the school building was still standing. “You going with Merle Hucks and me a full-fledged majorette. I wish,” she paused and I knew in that second what she was thinking, /
wish my mother could see us now,
“I wish that
we
could be like this
forever. These youthful bodies. I wish—” She turned towards me as I anticipated the familiar, the wish that Mo was watching us, Mo looking just as she had looked the night of the fireworks, but then she elbowed me and laughed. “I wish Mrs. Poole would move. I wish she would have to spend eternity in a split-level.” We laughed, still marvelling at Mrs. Poole and the way the whole neighborhood was talking about how she was beginning
to fail

There was a warm breeze, causing the leafy branches of the tall oak tree in Whispering Pines to move back and forth against the clear blue sky. It had been a long time since Misty and I had sat on that low-hanging limb, and I was about to suggest that we walk over when Sally Jean pulled up from work and asked Misty if she still wanted to go shopping for a new bathing suit. Mr. Rhodes had said that he’d never seen anything like it, that Misty and Sally Jean would buy
anything
if it was on a sale table. “You are two peas in a pod,” he had said, and smiled proudly at the two of them with their arms full of shopping bags. “I don’t buy anything that doesn’t pass mustard,” Sally Jean said. Now, Misty was off and running across Wilkins Road, greeting Sally Jean with a peck on the cheek as the two of them walked across the thick green carpet of grass to the front door. “See you later,” Misty called to me, Sally Jean joining her with a wave. “I’m going to buy the green and purple Hang-Ten suit we saw in
Glamour.
What do you think?” I nodded, turning back to the tree and its tip-top branches; it had been there for hundreds of years.

E. A. Poe High was more of a greenhouse than my father could have ever hoped to construct, and all during the month of April when the air-conditioning system was broken and the heat was unbearable, we got to leave at noon. Willow Pond was not far from the old Samuel T. Saxon Building, and on many afternoons, after parting ways with Misty, who had majorette practice, that’s where Merle and I walked; we usually carried a bag of stale bread or some popcorn to feed the ducks. My father had taken me there
a lot when I was growing up, but we had stopped going after one particular trip when we witnessed a duck attack and kill a sea gull who was going after the same piece of bread. The scene kept him awake for nights after, and he still referred to the day as the Great Gull Massacre, refusing to take me back to the pond for that reason. “This from the man so interested in death and murder,” my mother had said, gathering up some bread crumbs and bringing me herself.

Now it seemed that whole part of town was in a sad slow decline, as if it were the remains of a war zone, old homes stripped for their flooring or hoisted up and moved across town, leaving big empty spaces like craters. For years it had been my mother and Mrs. Poole’s biggest fear, and now with the steady stripping away of Samuel T. Saxon the end seemed inevitably close. As much as they had complained about the row of little pastel houses where Merle had lived, the fire had left the property up for bidding, and very soon there was going to be an Exxon Station;
Close enough to hear folks drive over that bell, I bet,
Mrs. Poole had said countless times. My mother was already talking about a nice tall fence; my father, pencil in hand, was eager to draw a plan of her desires.

Merle’s family was still living in the Econo Lodge, which he said made the high school feel cool and comfortable. His father had already started working in Clemmonsville, and as soon as he found a place to live and school got out, they’d be moving. “I’m gonna try to stay here, though,” Merle said, and squeezed my hand. “I’ve got good reasons to
stay
here.” He spoke the word as if there were serious doubts about his destination. “Of course, I’ve never been anywhere else, never been where people don’t say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a Hucks.’”

The last day that Merle and I walked to Willow Pond was in late May, summer vacation only two weeks away, so close we could all feel it, an energy that pulsed through the sterile halls
of E. A. Poe. It was a Friday and neither of us carried books; we got a ride with Misty, who now had her driver’s license and was forever borrowing Sally Jean’s Toyota. She dropped us off in front of the stone soldier, and then we walked along the bumpy sidewalk, sometimes holding hands, always trying to stay in the shade of the huge oaks and elms growing there.

We stopped in front of Samuel T. Saxon; the main part of the building with the office and auditorium was all that remained. I could see the roof of my house in the distance, the top of the gates to Whispering Pines. I hesitated when Merle asked me to go in with him, partly because my parents had already told me a zillion times not to hang around there, but more so because there was a big NO TRESPASSING sign on the door. Still, I was easily persuaded that day, the sky a cloudless bright blue. “We shouldn’t be doing this, you know,” I whispered, while he looked around and then pulled open the big heavy door, just far enough for us to squat and slip under the heavy black chain.

“Forgive us our trespasses,” he said, then laughed, and I suddenly thought of him gripping my wrists, begging my secrecy that day in Whispering Pines. The ancient flooring creaked with every step we took, and it was eerie to look in the old office, with the wavy pane of glass still in the door, and see it bare, a clutter of empty boxes stacked in one corner. “I sat in there often enough didn’t I?”

“And you should have.” I leaned in close. “Anybody who pees on the radiator.”

“Never.” He shook his head and then raked his fingers back through his straight hair, streaks of it already sun-bleached. “R.W. did it, but I never did.” He said R. Double U just like the teachers had always tried to make us do. He laughed at first and then stopped almost suddenly. “Old Frankincense didn’t turn out too good, or
well,
or whatever, did he?” I shook my head, wondering who corrected his English often enough that he had formed the habit of catching his own mistakes. “It’s hard to believe
that
that
R.W. who was my friend for so many years is the same R.W. who was in Dexter’s club.” He shook his head as if to rid the bad thoughts. Misty had spotted R.W. working at a gas station when Sally Jean had taken her way out in the country to practice driving.

“Yeah.” I was uncomfortable in the school, jumped with every sound, but Merle just leaned back against the wall, traced his finger where someone had carved “B.G. loves J.M.” in the door facing, and it seemed so amazing to me that there had been that moment when some junior high student took a pocket knife or nail file and formed those letters, probably jumping with every sound for fear of being caught, and yet it was so
important,
urgently so, that those initials be put there.

“What did you think of me when we were in school here?” he asked. “You know, like before we met in the cemetery that day, what did you think?”

“I don’t know.” I turned and peeked into the drafty old auditorium, those faded moss green velvet drapes still hanging there.

“Were you scared of me?” He was still leaning, rolling his head from side to side against the white plaster wall that had had to be washed down or painted every semester because of the pencil marks and names that ended up there. E. A. Poe had smooth cinderblock walls that were hard to write on.

“I guess,” I said. “Maybe a little.”

“Why?” He was wearing an emerald green shirt, with a tiny hole where it looked like there
had
been a logo that he or someone before him had ripped away. His eyes looked just as green as the shirt.

“I don’t know,” I said. His quizzing was making me uncomfortable; usually we just talked about school, or still easier, we just talked about how much we really liked each other.

“Well, at least you stopped hiding under your house when I walked by.” He smiled and stepped closer, opening the door to
the auditorium and propping it with a brick. The thick musty air escaped like from a tomb. “Do you remember that? And your dad came out there on the porch?”

“Yeah, I remember. I was afraid you were going to get my cat.”

“And stuff a firecracker up him?” He shook his head, squeaked the toe of his sneaker along the old scuffed-up floor. “The bottom line is that you were scared of me because I was a Hucks.” He pulled on my arm, gently twisted. “Right?”

“Yes.” I looked at the wavy glass of the office door and further out the front window where the principal used to stand and watch us come up the big stone steps. The trees were thick and green; a breeze was blowing, and shadows swept like brooms across the dusty yellow ground. Merle cupped his hands and lit a cigarette, then lifted his eyebrows, motioned for me to enter the auditorium, and then he followed, hand on my elbow as if ushering me to my seat. The old hard wooden seats looked like a sea of initials, carved, Magic-Markered, chalked; now after all those years, these attempts of immortality would be ripped away and discarded.