The Bright Forever (6 page)

Mr. Dees

I
HADN
’
T INTENDED
to do it, promise Raymond R. that money, but that night, he took me out to his truck, and he poked around in his toolbox for a screwdriver just right for tightening my glasses. I can barely say the feeling it gave me to watch him hold my glasses in his fingers and reach in with the tip of that screwdriver. It was delicate work, and he took care.

Looked after. I guess that’s what I felt. Seen to. And who among us hasn’t wanted that?

When he was done, he slipped the glasses onto my face, and I leaned toward his hand to help him. “How’s that?” he said, and I told him it was good.

I was thinking what a puzzle we were, the two of us. He was so chatty and I was so used to being alone. “People,” my father always said. “Go figure.”

There were all sorts of secret lives in our town. They came out sooner or later on deathbeds, in letters, police reports, whispered confessions. Think of it, and it was true: incest, dope, suicide, adultery, arson, theft, murder. The lunatic and the maimed. So many feeble souls.

The stories came out, and when they did, we had ways to explain the dying: too duty-bound, too fast, too careless, too drunk, too desperate. We died in the war in Vietnam. We took the S-curve west of town with too much speed and smashed into the bridge abutment or left the road and crashed into a tree. We went joyriding, didn’t take care at the crest of Sugar Hill and ended up smashing into a gravel truck just then turning onto the highway. We left cigarettes burning and died in house fires, ignored weather reports and got hit by lightning, went swimming at the quarries and got in too deep. We got up on kitchen chairs, tied ropes around beams in our basements, looped nooses around our necks, and then kicked the chairs away.

All these things happened in our small town.

The Dog ’n’ Suds across from the hospital had an old wreck of a car—its hood crumpled, its windshield cracked—arranged so it looked like someone had driven it into the side of the building. It was one of the first things anyone saw when they came into town from the west—that optical illusion of a horrible accident and a sign reminding us to take care:
This is not a fairy tale! It’s the truth! It’s a tragedy!

We found ways to forget the warning, to think of the crumpled car as a cartoon. We imagined that as long as we lived cautious lives we were safe.

That evening, after he had fixed my glasses, Raymond R. opened his glove compartment and took out an envelope. The flap was tucked in, and he undid it and held the envelope open so I could see what was inside: the fluff of Katie’s hair that I kept in the drawer of my night table. Sometime, and this knowledge sent a chill up the back of my neck, Raymond R. had been in my house.

I didn’t say a word. What could I say?

“I don’t know whose hair this is.” He closed the envelope’s flap. “But I know it isn’t yours. For a price, I’ll forget all about it. I won’t tell a soul.”

Something gave way inside me, not because Raymond R. was threatening me with blackmail, but because here, at last, was someone who knew about me.

It had become too much to hold the secret to myself. My love for Katie was something I couldn’t keep quiet forever, and surely I’d been waiting for this chance a good while. I would have paid Raymond R. what he asked just to have him listen. So I told him the whole story. I told him the truth.

Gilley

O
NE EVENING
that summer—it was the day Katie got her new bicycle—a man came to our house. He was a man who worked for my father. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know why he had come. We were on the patio, where my father was cooking steaks on the grill. My mother and Katie were inside.

The man was no one I could describe, the sort you see and then can’t call to mind. Dark hair parted on the side and combed over the way so many men then did. I recall that he was neatly dressed, a blue sport shirt tucked into his tan slacks.

He stepped up onto our patio, and he said to my father, “Junior, I ought to have something for those days I worked last week. You can’t just let a man go and not pay him for days he worked. I’ve been with you a good number of years. I thought you’d do me better than this. You’ll make things right, won’t you, Junior? You know I’ve got my little girl sick right now. I need that money.”

“This is my home.” My father was holding a barbecue fork. He waved it in front of him as if swatting gnats. “For Pete’s sake, I’m here with my family.”

“Junior, you’ve got to listen to me. You and I, we go back a ways. My daddy and your daddy were friends. I’m trying to be as decent as I can, but damn it, you’ve got to listen.”

“I don’t have to listen to a thing you have to say. I don’t keep drunk men on my payroll.”

“You know I’m not a drunk, Junior. You know it’s just I’ve had a tough time with my girl being sick and all. If you want to let me go, I can accept that. But still, I did the work those days, and I ought to be paid.”

“I’m sorry about your girl,” my father said. “I truly am, and I’m sorry things have to end like this between you and me. But I can’t pay you for time when you were laid up on a pallet sleeping it off.”

The man rubbed his hand over his face. “It’s true what you say.” He pushed back his shoulders and lifted his chin, owning up to whatever he had to face. “I won’t deny it. You’ve always been good to me in the past, but I guess you don’t believe I deserve a second chance.”

I could see that my father was thinking it over. “Do you need help with your girl’s doctor bills?”

“I do, Junior.”

“You come in tomorrow,” my father said. “We’ll talk about it then.”

“I’ll do that, Junior. I surely will. And I’ll be sober. You can count on that from here on.”

My father put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “There’s nothing more important than family,” he told him. “You have to remember that. No matter how rough things get, you’ve got to do what you can to take care of your wife and kids.”

You have to understand, because I didn’t then, that even as far back as high school days, my father was deliberately and carefully choosing the life that he would one day have. It would be a life of comfort and distinction. He had learned as much from his own father, who had passed the family business to him—had let him “see the future,” my grandfather always joked, and left my father, if he “kept a good head on his shoulders” and made all the right moves, “set for life.” So much of the world was made of glass, my grandfather said. Windows, doors, dishes, mirrors. That didn’t begin to account for it all. A man who made glass would always have as much business as he wanted.

But my father’s dreams of the future went far beyond the money he would earn, all on the strength of glass. Not long ago, I found a list of ambitions he had made when he was just a boy. A sheet of stationery slipped from between the pages of his senior-year
Hilltopper
. On it, in the precise and elegant handwriting that men used to have, he had noted that he intended to marry Patsy Molloy, that they would have two children, a boy and a girl. The girl, they would name Katie; the boy would be Gilbert, but they would call him Gilley.

“Gilley,” he said to me that evening after the man had thanked him and gone. “Go get your mother and Katie.” He speared a steak and held it up on the fork. He winked at me. “Get ready for some good eating, Gilley. Now that’s a fine hunk of meat.”

A house in the Heights
, he had written on his list.
A new car—a Lincoln—every two years. Vacations in the summer: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood, New York City, Canada
. I’ve often imagined him daydreaming as he made his list. Maybe he was sitting in class—physics, let’s say—and instead of listening to the teacher talk about matter and energy, he was moving on through the future, creating Katie and me and the life we would all one day have as a family.

I believe he needed this dreaming because, despite his family’s wealth, he imagined that he had farther to reach than most men. “Short men have big dreams,” he told me once when we were talking about what I would do after I graduated. Like me, he was barely five-foot-seven. “We’re bulldogs, you and me. When we get our jaws around something, we don’t let go.”

When I went into the kitchen to tell my mother and Katie that the steaks were ready, Katie was crying. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and my mother was standing in front of her, using nail-polish remover to take the red polish off Katie’s toes.

“It’s Gotta Go?” I asked.

Katie rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She sniffed back a few last tears. Then she nodded her head and told me, “The nail polish or the new bike.”

Just to play the devil, I said, “You should have given up the bike.” Although there was no logic to my claim, it was enough to make her doubt her choice and start her crying again.

My father came into the kitchen and said, “What’s all the howling about?”

“It’s nothing,” my mother said. “Are we ready to eat?”

Katie wouldn’t stop crying.

“Someone tell me what’s going on,” my father said.

“It’s Gilley.” Katie pointed her finger at me. “He’s mean.”

“Shut up, dimwit,” I told her, and the heat in my voice surprised me.

“Oh, he’s just being a big brother,” my father said. “That’s what big brothers do. They try to get your goat.”

“My goat?” Katie said, still sniffling. “I don’t have a goat.”

“Sure you do,” said my father. He stooped down and put his face next to hers. “Just listen.” He made the gruff baaing noise of a goat, and then he chanted a rhyme. “There’s an old billy goat. Where’s that old billy goat?” He traced his finger down Katie’s chin. “Right here, my dear. Right here, in Katie’s throat.”

Katie giggled then, and just like that my father had made her forget that just a few moments earlier she’d been upset. We all went out to our patio to eat, and my father said with a big smile, “Well, here we are,” and I could tell at that moment he was, like the rest of us, in love with this life we had.

Later that night, when I was in bed, I heard my mother talking to my father. Her voice, low and even, drifted up from downstairs, and the last thing I heard her say before I fell asleep was this: “Junior, how well do you know Henry Dees?”

It was a question that I would forget by morning, and only remember later. I’ve never been able to put it out of my mind, any more than I can forget my father’s senior quote from his
Hilltopper
: “The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.”

Clare

R
AY TOLD ME
later. It was after the sun had gone down, and we’d come in from outside. He was at the kitchen sink washing his hands, and to this day, whenever I smell that soap—that Lava soap, strong and clean—I think of that night and the way he told the story so la-di-da as if it was nothing at all, just a little piece of chitchat he’d carried home in his pocket.

“He’s one of them,” he said. “That Henry Dees. He’s a kid fruit. He’s got short eyes.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I was at the counter dumping the Kentucky Wonders into a drainer so I could rinse them, and I said, “Short eyes? Sounds serious. I thought he just needed his glasses straightened up.”

Ray turned off the tap and shook water from his hands. “He’s a puppy lover, Clare. An uncle. A chicken hawk. Do I have to say it plain?” He dried his hands on the dish towel. “He gets his jollies from being with those kids. He’s a pervert.”

“Henry Dees? I can’t believe that.”

“It’s hard to know someone,” Ray said. Then he said the rest of it, told me that Henry Dees snuck around in the dark and kept his eyes on those kids, one in particular, a little girl who lived in the Heights, a little girl named Katie Mackey. One night, he took a snatch of hair from her brush.

“Ray, did he go into that girl’s house?”

“I believe he’s capable of doing that, Clare. I really do.”

“He told you all this?”

“Darlin’, do you think I’d make it up?”

I didn’t even wonder then how Ray knew all those names for what he claimed Henry Dees was, and when I finally got around to asking, he said, Well, you know, it’s just things you hear. It’s just talk.

Mr. Dees

W
HAT I TOLD
Raymond R. was this: I didn’t think of Katie Mackey, or any of my other pupils, with lust. I loved them the way I would have loved my own children, had circumstances allowed me a family. I loved them because I had no one else to love. My parents were both dead. I’d never understood the art of courtship. I wasn’t like the purple martin who could sing his croak song and attract a mate. The only affection I knew came from children. They found me to their liking. I prefer to think there was a kindness to me that they trusted, that made them overlook the fact that I let my hair grow too long, wore crooked glasses, sewed patches on my clothes. My students at the high school took note of such things, and sometimes I overheard a cruel comment or saw a piece of graffiti written on a desk, but the children like Katie were at an age when they could still see beyond a person’s oddities to the real person inside, and there, I believed that I was good-hearted and above reproach. I gave thanks for those children. They were all there was between me and the rage I felt because I was, at heart, a lonely man.

But then they started to come to me in my dreams, Katie most of all. One night, I dreamed we were on her porch swing and she took my hand. Sweet child. What father hasn’t dreamed like this and woke feeling the joy of his love for his daughter? But when I woke I felt ashamed because, of course, I had no right to this dream.

I told Raymond R. all this because it had become too much for me—too big, too frightening—and he was the one who had patched the cracks in my porch steps. Work the point in deep, he’d told me. Tamp in that mud. Fill that crack all the way up so the damp won’t get in and set in the cold and cause that concrete to heave open. He’d patched those cracks and now I could barely tell that they had ever been there.

Sometimes all you can do is tell the truth. That’s what I was thinking when he showed me that fluff of hair in that envelope. I couldn’t have explained this then, but now I suspect that I had started to sense that he carried his own secrets, that he was expert in covering them over, that we were bound together by the dark lives we tried to hide.

“You came into my house,” I said to him that evening. “I thought you were my friend.”

“I fixed your glasses, didn’t I?” He folded the envelope and put it in my shirt pocket. “You loan me some money—like I said, a thousand, two if you’ve got it. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone your secrets about that little girl. Teach, you give me that money, and I’ll be your friend all the way to the sweet by-and-by.”