Silent Retreats (7 page)

I imagined that Rhonda had gone north with Kelly and that West Ridge was now aware of my foiled, clandestine date. I decided to drive around the streets of Arcola for a while. West Ridge and Arcola, they were little towns. You could stand in the center of either of them, facing north, and see the bean fields at the city limits to the left and the right; standing there at dawn you could hear the roosters welcome the day out on the farms. In both towns there were the same white clapboard houses with an occasional red brick estate, the same livery stalls down along the Illinois Central railroad where the Amish parked when they came in from the country to shop. There was a grain elevator on the railroad, too, and a lumberyard, and an old hotel downtown. All the themes of West Ridge played out in a variation in Arcola.

I passed the Arcola policeman parked in the shadows up an alley, waiting. I could see the glow from his cigar as I passed. I would turn left at this corner, right at this one, for no reason, but it was a small town and soon I was in front of Rhonda's house again. The lights were all off, except for a lamp near the fish tank in the living room. I decided to park and sit a while.

Before long Kelly's car pulled up next to mine. Rhonda looked over at me. I felt like I'd been caught doing something. Then Kelly pulled ahead of me and parked. I saw the car door open, and Rhonda was coming back my way, walking like a curb-hop in her tennis shoes.

"Is it you?" she said. No recognition whatever.

"I thought we could go south from here and catch a movie in Mattoon," I said.

Now Kelly was coming back, too.

"That's great," Rhonda said, "but it's not the plan. What about my friend?" She introduced me to Kelly, who did not quite look at me. She'd been kind of pretty at a distance, cruising by, but close up she had a hard mouth and a spacey stare. Both girls were chewing gum. I turned up WLS real loud. "What about my friend?" she said, talking over it.

"Does Kelly have a date tonight?" I asked Rhonda.

"No."

"You do, I thought."

Rhonda looked at Kelly impatiently, like I was missing the point.

"She can come with us if you want," I said.

"Now listen," she said. "I've got a problem with this. What are you doing at my house?"

I looked up beyond the trees, at the ARCOLA in big block letters on the water tower, lighted from somewhere below. I had once climbed the West Ridge water tower.

"I mean this is
real
creepy," she said. She looked back up the street, chewing her gum mouth-open style. "Did you blow this thing with my mom?"

"Blow what?" I said. "She seemed real nice." Before she could say anything, I said, "Your mom says you're supposed to be with me. Let's just have an ordinary date, wha'd'ya say . . ."

"I've got something I've got to do, that's what I say. Don't you understand that?" She looked at Kelly. "I think he blew it with my mom." Then back at me. "I've got something I've got to do," she said.

"Yeah, yeah. Do that tomorrow night. Go with me now."

"I'm busy tomorrow night."

We both laughed at that one.

"Okay, well, Kelly and me talked about this," she said. "I was thinking maybe you'd come with us."

I stared ahead. No answer.

Finally she said, "Would you do this, please? Park the car over at the Youth Center and get in with us—we'll swing by and get it later. You know the center?"

I was thinking about it.

"C'mon! I'm in a big hurry." She walked back to the car. Almost there, she turned around and gestured big. "I'm in a
hurry
."

I parked my car at the Youth Center and climbed in with them. I sat in the back seat. They paid very little attention to me as we drove around. It was clear they were up to something. Maybe they even went a little out of their way to be mysterious.

"She's supposed to be a good one," I heard Kelly say to Rhonda.

"Right. I can imagine." She hummed the tune they play on
Twilight Zone
.

"Seriously, she's got a certificate from some institute or something. What time is it?"

Kelly reached into a grocery bag in the front seat. She pulled out a jar of kosher dills and handed it back to me. "Open this and you get the first one," she said, keeping her eyes on the street. I opened it, took a pickle, and handed the jar up front. They both chomped pickles for a while.

"What time is it?" Kelly asked again. The radio answered the question.

"Slow down, Nutso," Rhonda said as we approached the alley where the cop was. "Hey, Fat Jack!" she shouted and waved as we went by. He remained where he was.

When the evening train whistle sounded from out north of town, Kelly turned around in an alley and headed back toward the downtown. By the time we got there, the train was through and the Oak Street crossing gates were going back up to let people pass, except nobody was waiting. We drove down a lane along the railroad, a sort of alley. We went alongside the steel quonset-frame warehouses of the local broomcorn factory, passed the railroad depot completely closed down and boarded up, and pulled up in front of an old trailer. Dogs were barking off in the dark.

"Where are we?" I asked them.

"We're at," Kelly said, "a . . . dark . . . old . . . house trailer."

"Wonderful."

She laughed nervously, stared at the place, snapped her gum. Nobody came out. "Looks pretty dark," she said in a loud whisper. The nervous laugh again. "Shall I honk?"

Kelly lightly tapped the horn a couple of times and blinked the lights. The neighborhood dogs intensified their barking. The trailer had burned at some time and had scorch marks above the windows. Several were completely out.

Kelly turned around in her seat and asked me if I would go check in the trailer to see if the woman was in there. She reached down under the dash. "It's worth another pickle to me." She handed me a flashlight.

"What woman?" I asked.

"Jesus! Just go see if anybody's in that trailer. Okay?"

So I went to have a look. The only thing not burned inside the trailer was one overstuffed couch. On it, sure enough, was a woman dressed in black. She was staring straight ahead and the flashlight did not seem to startle her. "Ah. You're here," she said. "Are you Kelly?" she asked.

"No, ma'am. Kelly would be a girl."

"What's that?" she said, coming to the door.

"Kelly would be a girl, ma'am," I said.

"She would, would she? If what?" With my help she stepped down from the trailer to the ground.

"She's in the car, ma'am," I said. She was dressed in a black flowing robe. She smelled like scorched mattresses.

"So. Kelly's a girl is she? Where is she, then?"

"Right, ma'am. She's in the car." I pointed toward the car, and we walked that way. She breathed hard as we went. We had to step over junk.

"Who're you?" she asked.

"I'm a friend of Rhonda's."

"A friend of who?"

"Rhonda." I shined the light ahead so she could see the clear path to the car.

As we were getting there, she asked me, "So how far's this barn?"

"What barn would that be?" I asked.

Kelly heard the question. "Hi," she said. "It's about six miles out."

"Are you Rhonda?"

"Kelly," Kelly and I answered simultaneously.

The woman bent down and looked into the car on Rhonda's side. "Never mind names." Her eyebrows seemed unusually heavy. "I need to be back here in time for the Panama Limited—10:52. Is that going to be a problem, you think?"

"No," said Kelly.

"What's that?"

"No, ma'am," I said, for some reason acting as Kelly's interpreter.

The woman sat in the back seat with me. She was maybe sixty and wore a dark paisley bandana in her graying hair. She was very serious. Kelly started the car, and we headed out.

"Did the train thing work okay?" Kelly asked her.

"It worked very well. I thought it would. It's a whistle-stop, real chancy, and sometimes they don't stop and you end up in Carbondale. But I knew they'd stop for an old woman. I come from the age of trains. We speak the same language." She was smiling as she said this. I tried to picture her, all in black like this, attempting to be a typical passenger on the Illinois Central.

Now that we were heading out of town, the woman said, "Girls, I usually am paid in advance."

Kelly looked over at Rhonda, who rummaged in her purse. She came up with a leather bag of change which Kelly reached over and took and started to hand back. No telling how much. Rhonda stopped her.

"You know Kelly's mother, right?" Rhonda asked.

"Yes," the woman said.

"And we don't want her or anyone else to know about this. You know that?" Kelly said.

"Yes."

Rhonda handed over the bag.

It disappeared into the black flowing clothes. "Onward, ladies," she said, satisfied.

After we left the lights of town, there was very little talk in the car for a while. Occasionally Kelly and Rhonda might confer on the right direction. Out on the country road there was a roar of crickets and frogs. The air was almost hot coming in the back window. I slumped down. We were starting to get far enough north that we were in familiar parking territory for West Ridge. We turned, sure enough, onto the Black River Road, crossed the old iron bridge, and went down into the bottoms. We turned onto the predictable tractor path, went along the river and then across the field toward the barn,
the
barn, the great monument in West Ridge parking lore.

We were about two hundred yards from the barn, on a tractor path serving as border between head-high corn and hip-high soybeans, when Kelly and I spotted something at exactly the same moment.

"Oh God, Rhonda, don't look," she said, "don't look," and she actually groped to cover Rhonda's eyes. We were quietly passing the tail end of the white Starfire, partly hidden in the corn. Rhonda stared straight into it as we passed.

"It can't be."

"Don't look," Kelly said.

"What's the deal, ladies?" the old woman said. "You're giving me the heebie-jeebies. What's happening?"

"Nothing," Rhonda said. "We thought we saw somebody, but we didn't."

"Out here?" the woman asked.

"We thought so," Kelly said. "Wrong again, though." She tried to almost sing it.

"Wrong again," Rhonda muttered. "Is that dumb, or what?" she said to Kelly. "Coming here? Is that goddamned stupid, or what?" She was saying this real quietly, her head down almost on her knees. "How could this be happening?"

I sat frozen. I realized something amazing. Just as surely as the summer sky was blue, Rhonda's mom was an Arcola girl, too.

We went on down the tractor path toward the barn, Rhonda staying low in her seat and saying nothing. Once she squirmed up and looked out the back window, but there was nothing to see.

"You wanna forget this?" Kelly said to her, referring to the woman in the back seat. "No big deal."

"Oh
come
now, ladies . . ." the woman said.

We parked the car at the side, and all of us went into the barn. The woman selected a spot on the dirt floor in the middle of the dark, musty space, and Kelly produced six candles from the same bag she'd gotten the pickles from. The woman lit them. Kelly and Rhonda sat and the woman sat next to them, a triangle.

Suddenly the woman looked at me. "He will have to join us or get out," she said.

"Sit down here," Rhonda said to me. She was stricken, very tense. I sat down.

"My boy, this is a seance, what we call a 'circle.' We're here to call forth the spirits, and I'm not kidding, the good spirits of departed friends, Karen Ann Kreitzer and Marie Beth McClain. Can you handle it?" She read the names off a small card in her hand, slipped it back into her robe.

I looked at Rhonda.

"They were our friends," she said to me, her voice actually trembling.

I pictured their car in the wreck lot, the blood in the seat, and the shoe in the white gravel. The woman was bowing forward, toward the ground, staring down, changing postures from moment to moment. The candles made the whole barn jump. Gray webs dangled from the crossbeams.

"What happens if somebody drives up in the middle of this?" I whispered to Rhonda.

"We won't be here real long or anything," Kelly said.

The woman's arms were out, embracing us as a group. "Is there someone who can tell us of Karen and Marie?" she asked the night air. The night air was very quiet. "We wish for only good souls to speak to us, friendly souls and no bad souls. Satan lives and we want none of that. Does anyone know of Karen and Marie? And if you do, can you, will you, join our circle?"

The river-bottom sycamores rustled. I realized I could hear the river.

"We join our hands here to form a circle. We invite you to be with us here. We are all concentrating, thinking toward you, remembering you—your eyes, your smile . . ."

Her arms reached out on both sides, and she took the hands of the girls. Then they took mine.

In the candlelight the woman was alternately very soft and friendly looking, then hard and witchlike. It depended on the candlelight, her movements. I realized there was an old red Farmall not far off behind Kelly, an old red hay baler attached to the back.

"Now, ladies, I want to tell you," the woman said, "that these young girls might well not be ready to talk. It may not be easy for them right now."

Rhonda and Kelly said nothing. I was wondering if they had a money-back guarantee. Rhonda's hand was cool and damp, Kelly's hot as fire.

"I suspect that could be the case," the woman said. "That they aren't ready." Again she bowed forward, her arms out, her hands joined to ours. Again she moved side to side, staring off. "We require the help of a friendly soul, a good soul," she said, "in order to speak with Karen Kreitzer."

"Or with Marie," Kelly said very quietly.

"Marie?" the woman said, suddenly tensing up. She held herself very straight, upright, rigid.

Kelly looked at me and rolled her eyes.

"Marie honey, are you sad?" the woman asked. She held herself rigid for several long moments. Amazingly, the woman's eyes teared up.