The Bright Forever (2 page)

Mr. Dees

L
IKE I SAID,
it was a Wednesday, and I was at the kitchen table with my yellow legal pad and my fountain pen, the Parker 51 my parents gave me when I graduated from high school, valedictorian of the class of ’49. It was a well-balanced pen with a Vacuumatic filler, a simple slip cap, and a hooded, extra-fine nib. My father paid twelve dollars and fifty cents for it at Orr’s Stationery Shop. It was nearly ten o’clock when I heard footsteps on the front porch and then a knock at the door.

I switched on the porch light and peeked out between the curtain panels. On the porch, a police officer shaded his eyes with his hand, leaned over, and tried to peek in through the door glass. He wore a navy-blue uniform. I opened the door, and he straightened up, the leather of his gun belt and holster creaking as he took a step back. He was a tall, burly man, and his light-blue necktie came only halfway down his big belly.

He needed to ask me some questions, he said. I was Henry Dees, wasn’t I, the one who taught at the high school?

“Yes,” I told him. “That’s me.”

Was it true that I gave lessons to kids in the summer, school lessons? Was it true that one of my pupils was Katie Mackey? Had I been with her at her home that afternoon?

He had a pocket-size steno pad and a number 2 Faber-Castell pencil. The lead was dull, and he had tried to sharpen it with a pocketknife. It was a worn-down stub of a pencil, and it was painful for me to watch his thick fingers close around it. I offered him the use of my fountain pen, but he said no, he only had a few more questions, but it was a handsome pen, he could certainly see that. A Parker 51, wasn’t it? Yes, sir, a fine pen.

“I spent an hour and a half at the Mackeys’,” I said. “I’m teaching Katie how to solve story problems.”

“Have you seen her since?”

“No.”

“Have you been out of the house tonight?”

“No, I’ve been here. Is it something with Katie? Is that why you ask?”

June bugs batted their heads against the porch light’s globe. A freight train took the curve into town and blasted its whistle. Wheels whined against the rails. The box cars creaked and groaned in their couplings.

“That’s right,” the officer said. “It’s Katie. She left home after supper to return some library books, and now no one can find her. We were hoping she might be here.”

“Why in the world would she be with me?”

“We’re just checking things out, Mister Dees. You understand.”

“I taught her story problems,” I said, “and then I came home.”

I had walked home from the Mackeys’ even though it was too hot for walking, particularly once I got out of the shade of the giant oaks that lined the cobblestone streets in Katie’s neighborhood. I loved it there, in the Heights, where the grand Victorian homes sat back from the sidewalks and the lawns were lush and landscaped with flower beds. Who hadn’t gone past the Mackeys’ house at one time or another and tried to imagine the majestic life that surely went on in such a home? My own neighborhood, Gooseneck, was a scatter of bungalows west of town on the Tenth Street spur, the cracked macadam road that branched off from Route 59 and angled past Mackey Glass. The burned smell was always in the air, and the stacks from the furnaces at the glassworks were wreathed with smoke. Each time I went to the Heights, I loved coming up onto the Mackeys’ wraparound porch and hearing Katie bounding down the stairs. “Mama, it’s Mister Dees,” she’d call out, and my heart would fill with her bright voice.

I’ll tell you this now. Yes, I loved Katie. I loved her pug nose, the sheen of her brown hair and the way it smelled of strawberries. Sometimes we sat in the porch swing, and she scooted over close to me so I could help her with her story problems. I can still feel the tickle of her hair on my arm as she bent over her tablet. The first time it happened I felt something I didn’t have a name for, an odd mix of delight and fear. I could barely finish the lesson. I made errors, had to scratch out numbers with my pen until the tablet page was ink-stained and wrinkled. My fingers trembled. “Is it my fault?” she asked, and I told her no. I say it to her even now: “No, Katie. It was never, never your fault.” How were you to know about the dark corners of a man’s heart, a man like me, who had never married, who knew he would have no child of his own? Your surprised laugh when I told you that you had solved a problem correctly—the way you clapped your hands together and said, “Holy moly, Mister Dees”—was more than I could wish. The sheer joy of you, my pupil—dare I say it?—my child.

The police officer closed his steno pad. “You’ll let us know,” he said, “if you think of anything that might help us?” He started down the porch steps, stopped, and turned back to me. “Oh, and you don’t have any out-of-town trips planned, do you?”

“Me?” I said. “Where would I go?”

“Good. I’m sure the chief will want to talk to you. So stick close.”

Little by little, the story would unfold. Everything would become public knowledge, verifiable facts that anyone could retrieve from newspaper articles, court documents, eyewitness accounts. But all that anyone knew that night was that Katie had gone to return books to the library and hadn’t come home.

At the kitchen table, I sketched out this story problem, the one that still haunts me: “If a girl leaves home, pedaling her bicycle at a speed of 5 miles per hour, bound for the public library, which is 1.4 miles away, how long will it take her to arrive?”

Gilley

A
FTER SUPPER,
I went out into the backyard to practice chip shots. I was on the golf team at school, and in the summer, I tried to keep my game sharp. I had a tendency to scull my chips, short-arming my swing and catching only the top of the ball. That’s what I was working on that night, brushing the grass with the blade of my wedge instead of chopping at the ball. I tried to make my mind quiet, to see only the ball, to live in that moment of backswing and follow-through. Weight on my front foot, my hands ahead of the ball, sweeping it off the grass. I kept at it for well over an hour. I hit shot after shot and watched the balls arc and drop in the gathering dusk. The fireflies came out, hovering and flickering, and I expected, at any minute, to see Katie and Rene Cherry chasing after them with Mason jars. “Got one,” Rene would say, and Katie would answer, “Got two.”

Then our patio lights came on, and my mother stepped outside. The screen door slapped against its frame. “Gilley.” She had a loud voice. She and Katie. They were the talkers. “Gilley,” she said again. She leaned over to snap a dried-up bloom off a geranium. “I want you to help Dad look for your sister.”

We didn’t think anything was wrong, not then. We thought Katie was just being Katie—scatterbrained—just doing what nine-year-old kids did. She’d probably stopped off at Rene Cherry’s on her way back from the library, or ridden over to the city park to go down the curlicue slide. Any minute we’d hear her bike, chain rattling against its guard, coming up our drive.

“Let’s check uptown,” my father said when we were in the car. “Trace her route. Okay? Then, if we don’t find her, we’ll split up, go to her friends’ houses. You know. Like that.”

Here’s what I didn’t know: my father was a dangerous man. I’m not sure he knew that himself, but I can’t say that I blame him. He was doing what we all do—I’m sure of this now—living blind. He thought he had his life right where he wanted it, thought he knew who he was—Junior Mackey, civil and gracious even if given to being quiet and brooding from time to time. He liked corny jokes. Here’s one:
Two men walk into a bar. The third man ducks.
Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it. I didn’t either the first time my father told it. He had to explain it to me. “Two men,” he said. “A bar. Think iron. Think steel. Doink. Right in the noggin. The third man ducks.”

We drove up High Street toward the courthouse square. “Keep your eyes open,” my father told me, and I remember thinking with satisfaction, Well, now she’s done it. Now she’ll get it good, and that’ll serve her right for scratching my album.

Even when I think back on it now, I remember the way the night air felt coming in through our open windows and how my father turned on the car radio so he could keep up with the Cardinals game in St. Louis. It was pleasant, really, being in that car, and listening to Harry Caray doing the play-by-play from Busch Stadium. At the Christian Church, a bride and groom were coming down the steps while the wedding guests showered them with rice. I could see the grains flash and sparkle as they slanted down. Uptown, some kids I knew from school had parked their cars in the Super Foodliner lot and were sitting on their hoods, boys and girls flirting and laughing, just killing time, really, because that’s what we all thought we had in a small town in summer. Long hours of light. Lots and lots of time.

I thought I knew what this all meant, this coming and going. It was just life moving the way it did and yet seeming to stand still. That’s how it felt when I was seventeen, satisfied with the long summer days and my senior year stretching out ahead of me, but at the same time eager for it all to pass so my real life, the one I would live in earnest, could begin. I was, like all seventeen-year-olds, sure of too many things. I thought I knew what it meant to be a family, but really I had no idea, not until that night when my father turned onto Fourteenth Street, along the west side of the courthouse, and we saw Katie’s bicycle.

It was leaning against a parking meter in front of the J. C. Penney store. The front wheel was cockeyed, turned sharply to the right, and the bike had slid down the meter pole just enough to make it seem that at any second it might fall.

My father pulled into the parking spot so the headlights were fully on the bike, and I saw that the wire basket was empty.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said, and his voice was a different voice than I had ever heard from him: tight and too loud with what I now know was fear. “That’s Katie’s.”

That afternoon, I’d crouched on the platform behind the store’s front window, arranging a display of women’s summer shoes: red vinyl sandals, black canvas sling-backs, white Keds sneakers. I’d watched the people passing on the sidewalk: clerks who worked in the courthouse offices, window-shopping on their afternoon coffee breaks; lawyers carrying briefcases, their suit coats hooked on a finger and draped over their shoulders; farm families who’d come to town on business, their faces scrubbed and bright. So when I saw Katie’s bike, I got the queerest feeling to think that all night, since the time she had left it there and gone off wherever she had gone, people had walked by and never once thought that anything might be wrong.

My father and I got out of the car and stepped up onto the sidewalk. He took the bicycle by its handlebars, straightened it, and put down the kickstand. By this time, shortly after eight o’clock, there was little traffic downtown, but from time to time a car drove past, and I saw the people inside looking our way, wondering, I suppose, what we were doing there with that bicycle.

When I was arranging the shoe display that afternoon, a woman stopped to watch me and I was embarrassed to be handling the sandals and sling-backs and sneakers, the way I often turned shy when I had to help someone press her foot into a pump or buckle a sandal strap around her heel. To this day, I can’t watch a woman slip her foot into a shoe without feeling that I’m seeing something I hadn’t ought to see. Call me crazy, but you don’t know my story yet, not all of it.

That night I didn’t either, but as I stood there with my father, I sensed that I was moving into something—something hard. We all were: my father and I, and my mother, who waited for us at home. I wanted to be the third man from my father’s joke. I wanted to duck under whatever we were walking into, and just keep moving through that summer—working at Penney’s, going to church on Sunday mornings, and then out to the country club for a round of golf. I wanted to go home and listen to Katie coming down the stairs from her bath, her bare feet hopping from the second step to the floor, her Josie and the Pussycats nightshirt billowing out around her when she threw her arms around my waist and I told her good night, good night, don’t let the Heffalumps and Woozles bite. “Heffalumps and Woozles,” she’d say, marching off to bed. “Oh, my. What a terrible sight.”

Raymond R.

T
HEY SAY I
kidnapped a girl in broad daylight off a street corner in Tower Hill.

Mr. Dees

I
WAS WATCHING
—I was always watching—and you, you people who now can’t even remember my name, you thought you knew exactly who I was.

Gooseneck

N
O ONE
in Gooseneck knew why Clare Mains had taken up with that Raymond Wright, that peckerwood no one could bring themselves to tolerate. No one but Mr. Dees, who lived down the road in a bungalow going to ruin. He knew it was two folks coming together so they wouldn’t have to be alone. If anyone had asked, he would have told them. It was as simple as that.

Mr. Dees taught mathematics at the high school, and summers he offered tutoring for little pay, sometimes none at all if the parents were down on their luck. Although folks were pleasant to him—after all, he was a kind and patient teacher, always eager to lend a hand—he had no real friends since it was commonly assumed that he preferred to keep to himself. “Anything for a quiet life,” his high school
Hilltopper
quote read, and, as if fulfilling this prophecy, he had lived alone without incident or scandal in Gooseneck, this curved road set off from the rest of the town, this grass widow of houses, twenty-three of them, that survived when the Mackey Glass Company bought land for its factory and lots back in the twenties. No one went to Gooseneck, folks said, unless they lived there or they were lost or they had a boy or girl who needed Mr. Dees.

Teach
, Ray called him. “Hey, Teach,” he said that first time. “Do you mind a little friendly advice?”

Mr. Dees was patching cracks in his concrete steps. It was a Saturday afternoon in April, and he liked the way the sky opened up, high and blue above him. A single-engine plane, its prop humming, flew over, and Mr. Dees, kneeling on the grass, tipped back his head. The sun was warm on his face. He shaded his eyes with his hand and wondered who was in the plane and where he was going. How magnificent to be flying on this day when there were no clouds, no wind, looking down on the town where trees were leafing out and the yellow daffodils were in bloom—looking down on him, Mr. Dees thought. For a moment he wondered what he looked like to whoever was in that plane. Surely, from that height, no one could see that he had cut his own hair that morning—he’d rather rag it up than have to make conversation at the barbershop—or that his ears were too big and stuck out too far from his narrow head. No one in that plane could tell that his poplin jacket had a tear in the shoulder that he had very carefully mended with an iron-on patch, and no one could see how his eyeglasses sat crookedly on his nose because he dreaded having to walk into Blank’s Optical and ask for an adjustment. He’d do it eventually. He’d go in and say in his teacher’s voice what he wanted, but for now he was happy not to have to do that. The plane soared high above him and above the glassworks and its furnaces and smoke. Magnificent.

“I’m Henry Dees,” he said to Ray, who was squatting down beside him now, weight balanced easily on the balls of his feet, rear end hanging over his heels. “How do you know I’m a teacher?”

Ray touched a finger to the corner of each eye. “Keep the peepers open.” He tugged on his earlobes. “Hear what you can hear. Easy.” He laid his hand on Mr. Dees’s wrist. “Friend, I’m handy with these sorts of things. Now watch how I spread this mud.”

Mr. Dees let Ray take the trowel from his hand. It was all too much for him, the upkeep of the house. Too much he was worthless to do: caulking, painting, electrical wiring; repairs to the furnace, the plumbing, the roof. He’d never listened when his father had tried to teach him how to do those things. What was the use? He didn’t have the knack. His head was full of numbers, equations, problems. He liked to chase the unknown, find the answer, or noodle around with theorems, starting with the assertion of truth and then offering up the proof. That was how the world made sense to him. Doing away with mystery. But home repairs? It was always one problem on top of another. He understood them in theory—how to patch the cracked concrete, for example—but when it came time to do it, he was clumsy and inept, and he was glad now for Ray to have the trowel.

“Work the point in deep.” Ray was talking to him in a soft, patient voice, the sort Mr. Dees used with his students. “Don’t be shy. Tamp that mud in there. You got to fill that crack all the way up or else the damp gets in and then winter comes and the concrete freezes and heaves. Fill it all the way. Then when the mud starts to set, smooth it out with the back of your trowel. That’s all there is to it.”

He said all this without passing judgment on Mr. Dees and the slapdash way he’d been slopping on the mortar. Ray showed him how to patch the concrete without embarrassing him, and for that Mr. Dees was grateful.

So a few days later, when Ray asked him why it was that the folks in Gooseneck, neighbors Clare had known for years, suddenly had their noses out of joint (“Won’t so much as give us the time of day”), he patiently explained that these people had known Bill Mains, had thought well of him, and now they were put off by the way Ray, so soon after Bill died, had moved in and set up shop.

Then, because he didn’t know how to hold back the truth when it was there, clear and irrefutable, he told Ray that folks in Gooseneck had no patience with someone nosing around in their business—someone they considered an outsider, a gabby Gus who didn’t mince words. They didn’t want him, as he was prone to do, offering them advice on how to keep their houses in tip-top shape. He knocked on their doors and told them straight-out that they ought to do this or that—said it all with a big smile, of course, but still, there it was.

Mr. Dees knew all this because he watched and listened. In the Super Foodliner, the Rexall, the City Newsstand, he heard his neighbors talking, and what they said was
That Raymond Wright, that Johnny-come-lately, that know-it-all.
They rolled their eyes.
Raymond R
., someone always said with a smirk, and someone else answered,
Raymond R. Wrong
.

In their houses, where Mr. Dees often went to tutor their children, they sometimes said these things to him. It was easy to tell him what they thought because they trusted him. They said these things to him, and he took them in, not knowing how to respond because the truth was he liked Raymond R., felt sorry for him, even, because Mr. Dees could see that he was trying so hard to make his neighbors like him. He remembered how Ray had taught him to patch the concrete steps. He was the only one of his neighbors who had ever come to offer a hand instead of asking him to please, please, do what he could to help their sons and daughters learn their numbers.
Please, Mister Dees. Can you teach them?

These were people who worked hard hours, many of them at Mackey Glass. People like Leo and Lottie Marks, Tubby and Thelma Carl—all of them working. They came home in the evenings bone tired, and sometimes it was hard for them to keep up with what needed doing around their homes. They didn’t want Raymond R. to point out curled roof shingles to them, or a bum paint job, or windows that weren’t airtight, and it was hard for them to forgive him for being forward.

That’s what Mr. Dees explained when Ray asked him for the story. He said it the way he always said something when he was trying to be encouraging—in a voice that was just a little sad, but also kind, the voice he used with his students, the one that said,
I’m disappointed in you, but don’t worry. I know you’ll do better.

He and Ray were in Mr. Dees’s garage. A strong wind had toppled one of the purple martin houses that Mr. Dees, a few years back, had paid a carpenter to build, and Ray was repairing it. He had brought down his miter saw and cut a new piece of wood to replace the side of the martin house that had splintered, and now he was tacking it into place.

“I just want to be a help,” he said.

“I know you do,” Mr. Dees told him.

“You didn’t seem to mind when I showed you how to patch that concrete.”

“Me?” Mr. Dees swallowed hard. He looked away, out the garage window to where the surprise lilies—the naked ladies—were just sending up their long, leafless stalks. He was embarrassed to say what he had been about to, that he had no friends, that he was thankful for Ray’s company. “My house is old,” he said instead. He cleared his throat. “All these houses in Gooseneck are old.”

Ray laid his hammer down on the workbench. He ran his fingers over the bare wood. “You call me when you got something needs getting done.” He kept his head down, and it touched Mr. Dees to hear his shy voice. “Any time. I mean it. Don’t be afraid. You come get me.”

So that was how their friendship began, with this moment in the garage when they both admitted, without saying as much, that they were less than satisfied with the way their lives had turned out. They never said the words. They never said “lonely.” They never said “afraid.” They never spoke of yearning or the wrong turns they’d taken over the years and the hard places they’d come to, but it was all plain in what they did say, which was, Mr. Dees knew, as much as they could risk because they were just starting to know each other and how much could anyone stand to feel pulsing in another person’s heart?

He painted the new wood on the martin house, and when it was dry, he asked Raymond R. if he would be willing—that is, if he had the time—to help set the house back atop its pole.

They did the chore one evening at twilight when lights were coming on in houses up and down Gooseneck. Somewhere behind Mr. Dees’s bungalow, where fields stretched back to wetlands, spring peepers sang. The wind was from the north, and it brought the scents of freshly plowed earth and wild onions growing in the fencerows. Martins swooped down from the darkening sky, some of them coming to roost in the row of houses, each of them with eight compartments—four over four.

“They like close quarters, don’t they?” Ray said.

“They don’t shy away from one another,” Mr. Dees told him. “And they like to be near where people are living. It makes them feel safe. In fact, they’ll only nest in these houses that people put up.”

“Well, then,” Ray said. “I guess we better put this one back up.”

They set twelve-foot stepladders next to each other and together, Mr. Dees to the right and Ray to the left, they carried the martin house to the point where they could set it on its pole. The wooden ladders creaked with their weight, the legs wobbling just a bit, sinking some in the damp grass. Mr. Dees steadied the house while Ray anchored it to its shelf with wood screws.

“There,” he said when he was finished. “Good as new.”

“That’s a good job,” Mr. Dees said.

“Yes, sir,” said Ray. “That’s all right.”

Then they reached across the space between the ladders and shook hands.

It was then that an almost imperceptible shadow passed over them, just the slightest alteration in the dimming light, and Mr. Dees let his eyes follow that shadow to the catalpa tree along the side of his garage. He saw it then, the Cooper’s hawk—he saw its white undertails and its white breast stained with thin red lines—and he knew that the hawk had come to ambush the martins.

It happened from time to time. A Cooper’s hawk or a sharpie hid in the catalpa tree early in the morning or, like now, when dusk was falling and the martins were flying into their nests. Some mornings, Mr. Dees came out to the houses and found a scatter of black feathers, iridescent with purple, lying on the ground. The martins were so confident about their aerial skills that they thought they could always escape danger, and sometimes that faith cost them. They were ferocious at high altitudes. There they mobbed any hawk that swooped down on them. They called a loud, raspy
accck
as they dived on the hawk, coming within inches but not striking it, relying on their number and their noise to drive it away. But now, as they came to roost, they were stupid, blind to the Cooper’s hawk, who waited for his chance.

Mr. Dees wouldn’t come down from his ladder, not even after Ray had let go of his hand and said, “Almost dark, Teach.”

“Over there.” Mr. Dees pointed. “In that catalpa tree. A Cooper’s hawk.”

A martin gliding down to roost suddenly streaked upward. It shrieked an alarm call. The Cooper’s hawk, its wings popping, burst from the tree, but it was too late. The martin was still rising, gone. Other martins dived at the hawk. Their mob calls filled the air.

Mr. Dees was shouting, but only later would he understand that he had done this. He was waving his arms. “You, you, you.” He clapped his hands together. “You, shoo.”

Finally, the hawk rose higher and banked off toward the woodlands. The martins swirled in a black mass, their calls gradually fading.

Mr. Dees realized then that Ray’s hand was gripping his bicep. He felt the ladder wobble. “Easy, Teach. Easy.” Ray’s voice was steady. “I’ve got you. Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”

It embarrassed Mr. Dees for Ray to see the secret he kept: how much the martins mattered to him. He couldn’t begin to say what it did to him mornings when he heard their song. The first time, each spring, it was always a lone male, a scout, gliding and swooping through the sky, which was just beginning to brighten. He warbled and chittered, high above the martin houses that Mr. Dees had made ready. This was the dawnsong, the one that touched him the most—a sign of spring, a call to other martins that here, here, here was home.

He couldn’t tell Ray that. He couldn’t call it what it was, love. But, and this was what amazed him, Ray knew it without anything having to be said, and, what’s more, he understood.

“I hear those martins singing,” he said, “and I think, It’s not so bad, this world. It’s not so bad as we’d have it. No, sir. Not at all.”

CLARE LIKED
to wake early and listen to the martins singing. Such a happy, bubbling sound, the song of babies babbling and cooing. She liked to lie in bed, close to Ray, and think how lucky she was. Spring had come, and the martins were singing, and she was in love. Who would have thought it, particularly back in January when Bill had died and left her alone? But here she was, almost sixty years old, with another chance at happiness, and who cared what the neighbors thought? Her life was hers, and if someone didn’t like the fact that she had set up house with Raymond Royal Wright, then they could lump it.