Light from a Distant Star (31 page)

She walked to Charlie’s, not quite sure what to make of it all. Maybe her father was right, and life would get back to the way it used to be, happy and simple, when everything was still possible, even Max’s innocence. And her own.

She walked around the junkyard, calling for Charlie. He wasn’t in the barn, and she couldn’t tell whether he was in the house or not because the front door was locked. Figuring he might be in the woods, checking on Boone, she followed the narrow path past rusting barrels,
junked oil tanks, half-buried paint cans, and the bittersweet vine–entangled shells of old stripped cars. She was ashamed. Charlie was an environmental menace, but she couldn’t very well report her own grandfather, could she? And yet wasn’t that what was wrong in the world, people always looking the other way, making excuses, each lie and omission shoring up the next. Afraid to tell the truth, afraid to take a stand. Like her trying to rationalize the irrational sight of Mr. Cooper huddling in bushes mere feet from the doorway to a murder. The fallout had to be considered, her father had said. The collateral damage. But didn’t every action cause a reaction? Wasn’t there always fallout? Why was Mr. Cooper’s reputation more important than Max Devaney’s? What if Charlie’s hazardous waste was seeping into groundwater that fed the very springs they’d filled their gallon jugs from? She thought of how her father had pointed up at the brilliant night sky and explained that some of those stars were dead, and had been for millions of years. You can’t tell the difference with the naked eye. But the light still exists. Though she couldn’t have explained how, she knew it was all connected in that unfathomable, unnamable way of things that exist both in and outside the realm of childhood experience.

Once she was beyond sight of the house, the going got rough. In their spindly struggle for light, trees grew closer here, some shooting straight up from the queer hummocky ridges marking decades of bulldozed debris. The weedy mounds glittered with bits of broken glass. Until the town had served him with a court order, Charlie had been dumping trash out here for years, his own and for anyone else willing to pay. No questions asked. When she finally came to the old truck, Boone was gone. Only the thick, frayed rope dangled from the truck bed.

“Hey, Boone! C’mere, boy, c’mere, Boone!” she called, waving away mosquitoes as she headed deeper into the woods. Traffic sounds in the distance meant she was nearing the outer reaches of Charlie’s property. Thinking she’d heard voices, she stopped and called again for Boone, but softly, almost in a whisper. It occurred to her then that she was all alone, and if anything happened, no one would know she’d come this far into the woods. She decided to head back but wasn’t sure of the path. No need to panic, she kept telling myself. After all, these woods
were right in the center of town. Sooner or later she’d come out onto a familiar street.

“Kun-ka-too!” came a dull shout, followed, as if in answer, by a long piercing cry, whether of pain or surprise she couldn’t tell, but every hair on her frozen body stood on end. Here it was, the very moment she’d been preparing for, and not a single hold came to mind. She could barely breathe. Footsteps. Crackling twigs. The leafy rustle of parting branches, and suddenly Boone sprang at her, wiggling and whimpering happily. Someone had been running behind him and now came to a dead, panting stop. He was tall, dressed in black with red slashes crossed across both cheeks like war paint. It was one of the twins, Rodney, and on his heels, Roy, also in black. Yellow-and-bright-green circles had been painted on his cheeks. His acne-pocked nose glistened with sweat.

“Hey!” she called with a nervous laugh. She braced her feet to keep Boone from knocking her down. They both just looked at her. She couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed, but she knew she was. She’d caught them at something strange and they all knew it.

“He got untied,” Roy said. Even in school he was always first to speak.

“We were tryna catch him,” Rodney said.

“Well, I got him now,” she said, as if this were all perfectly normal.

“Okay,” Roy said, and Rodney nodded.

“So you guys’re what, Indians?” she asked.

“Native Americans,” Roy said. “Passamaquoddy.”

“Who’re they?”

“They used to live around here,” Roy said.

“A long time ago,” Rodney said, and she asked how he knew. Because of all the artifacts they’d found, he explained as they began to walk with Boone trotting behind. She followed them over the rise, then down the densely wooded incline that ended behind their house. At least from here she’d find her way home.

“Wanna see some?” Roy asked, sliding open the black metal door of their garage. Cars hadn’t been parked in here for a long time. But there were two odd-looking bikes covered with homemade gadgets and gizmos. Each bike had a small motor attached to the hub of the back wheel. The garage was filled with unrecognizable metal contraptions.
Some resembled modern art structures with gleaming pylons attached to metal discs by coiled springs. Others seemed to be wacky machines with moving parts, levers, chutes. Rodney was demonstrating one fashioned from a car battery, clock face, radio innards, and a narrow circuit board connected by thin wires to a series of spur gears that, turning, produced a deep robotic voice that droned, “Warning, warning. Security has been breached. Warning, warning. Once unleashed, the force will destroy you. Warning—”

“Cool,” she said as Rodney aimed a remote that clicked it off.

“It works off of infrared beams,” Roy said. “But the detection range is still too short.”

“Yeah,” Rodney agreed.

“Cool,” she said.

Sweat beaded on their fuzzy upper lips. She tried not to look at it.

Now Roy was showing her the weather instrument he’d been working on. Not only did it measure humidity, but could detect changes in air pressure hundreds of miles away. She was pretty sure such a device had already been invented but didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Elbowing each other out of the way, the twins moved excitedly from gadget to gadget, pushing buttons and turning wheels. Lights flashed, motors hummed, bells rang as their voices overlapped with eager descriptions. It was like being inside the belly of some huge mechanical beast, and she was their first guest. Boone sat by the door, clearly used to the cacophony.

What about the artifacts, she asked, and Roy slid a large flat box from under a workbench that was covered with tools and cans of spray paint. Inside were dusty arrowheads, chips of earthen pottery, and oddly shaped stones that he said were used to make digging implements as well as hunting tools. To Nellie it all looked like a bunch of rocks, but the twins treated it with great respect. Roy was talking about Chief Passaconaway and the Great Spider Mother. Rodney kept interjecting facts and elaborating on Roy’s details. They’d been digging for years, they said. The artifacts were so easy to find because most of the junkyard had never been disturbed.

“In fact, we just found a whole new place,” Roy said.

“Yeah, down by the willow trees,” Rodney added.

“Just scoop your hand in the muck and there it is,” Roy explained.

“All kindsa stuff,” Rodney said.

“C’mon, we’ll show you.” Roy lurched for the door.

When she said she’d better bring Boone back to her grandfather’s, their faces fell. They’d found the dog last week, roaming the woods, so they’d been feeding him. He’d been hanging around ever since. That was nice of them, she said, but she had to give him back. Charlie was taking care of him for someone else.

“Taking care of him!” Roy sputtered. “Poor dog, he never even had water.”

“So we did, we filled his bowl,” Rodney said. “Brought him treats, too.”

“I know, but his owner, he wants Charlie to have him,” she said. “That’s what he said.”

“He’s the one in jail, right?” Roy asked, and she said yes.

“He killed our dog,” Rodney said. “It was in the paper. My mother saw it.”

“That was your dog? The white pit bull? He bit my brother. He, like, almost killed him, but Max saved his life. I was there. I saw the whole thing. Believe me, that was not a good dog.”

“He broke off his chain!” Roy said.

“Max was a hero,” she said.

“We used to see him. He didn’t think we did, but we did. We weren’t s’posed to talk to him. My mother said he was strange.”

“She thinks everyone’s strange,” Rodney interjected, grinning every time she looked at him.

“He followed us,” Roy said. “We’d look around and he wouldn’t be there, but then he would. He’d be, like, hiding.”

“Yeah, like, behind a tree or something.”

“That’s weird,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe he wanted to kill us, too, that’s what my mother thinks anyway,” Roy said.

“And that’s
really
weird,” she scoffed.

“Yeah, he even talked to his dog. Sometimes we’d hear him: ‘So what d’ya think, gonna rain today or what?’ ” Rodney said, and his almost pitch-perfect imitation of Max’s deep voice gave her the creeps.

“Well, I better get going. C’mon, Boone!” she called from the doorway, holding out the packet of meat loaf, but the dog remained rooted at Roy’s feet, looking at her. She called again, this time with more urgency, but he didn’t move, and it made her sad. It seemed as much a rejection of Max as of her. Boone knew Max wasn’t coming back, and he knew she hadn’t tried to help him, and he knew Charlie didn’t care, so he’d made his choice. Her face grew hot as she stood there. “Just so you’ll know—Max—he never killed anybody. The only reason he was watching you is because he used to have a brother, too. He said that, how you reminded him of him and his brother. That’s all he was doing.” And with that she marched off, but down their road. She might be afraid of going back through the woods. But she wasn’t going to be afraid of speaking her mind.

Charlie was sitting on his front steps, bare chested and reading the newspaper. She gave him the meat loaf, then sat next to him, but he raised the paper higher and kept reading to the end of the article. He said he thought he’d heard the doorbell, but he’d been napping and didn’t want to come all the way downstairs. Hillman County Jail, he said when she asked for Max’s address—that’s all the letter would need. What about a cell number or something so he’d be sure and get it, she asked, and he chuckled. Don’t worry, they’ll find him; he’ll get it, he said, but she’d better ask first. He didn’t think the star witness should be writing to the accused, especially with the trial so near at hand. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t even answered Max’s last letter.

“How come?”

“I got enough problems without being some killer’s pen pal,” he chortled, liking the way that sounded.

“You mean you think he did it, killed her, Dolly Bedelia?” She was stunned.

“Well, lemme put it this way. I don’t think he just went and, you know,
killed
her. I think it was something that happened. I mean, the man had one helluva temper.” Charlie snapped his fingers. “Quick as that and he’d turn. Like that time with the dog. Made my blood run cold. Smashing that dog’s head like that.”

“But he was tryna save Henry. The dog was biting him, chewing
his arm. It wouldn’t let go.” Her voice quavered, and she took a deep breath. She knew better than to say whose dog it had been.

Right then Charlie did something strange, looped his arm over her shoulder. “Hate to be the one to tell you, kid, but some people’re just born bad to the bone, and that’s all there is to it. Nothin’ you can do.”

And some’re just born ignorant
, she wanted to say, but didn’t, couldn’t; instead, she hunched over her knees with an intensity of anger and aversion until he lifted his arm.

N
ELLIE SAT ON THE FOOT OF HER MOTHER’S BED, GROWING
more bothered as she watched her in the mirror. What was the point of the makeup? She looked perfectly fine without it. She dipped her pinkie into a tiny glass jar, then rubbed a smear of blue onto her eyelids. Now she was putting on lipstick that was way too bright, too red for a mother to be wearing.
Why? Why is she trying to look different from who she really is?
The last time Nellie’d had these feelings was the first morning she’d gone off to work with a feathery new hairdo and a black smock over her arm. Capping the lipstick, she turned her head this way and that, smiling into the mirror.
My God, who is this person?
She pinched lipstick from the corners of her flaming mouth, and Nellie had to look away.

“When’s Ruth coming home?” Nellie knew but felt the need to make some point, though wasn’t sure what.

“Nine or ten, depends how long the takeout window’s open.” She leaned closer to the mirror and ran her tongue over her teeth.

“What if Dad’s late?”

“He won’t be. He knows when they’re picking me up.” It was the birthday of one of her girlfriends, so they were taking her out to a dinner theater in Georgetown.

“How come you have to go?”

“I don’t
have
to go.” She was teasing the hair at the crown of her head. Nellie’d never seen her do that before. “It’s just a nice break, that’s all.”

“Break from what?” The way she’d said it made Nellie feel bad. Break from her family, that’s what she meant. From Nellie.