The Graduation (7 page)

Michael lowered his head. Most of those present did the same. Jessica closed her eyes and felt a tear slide over her warm cheek. Just one tear. The minute lasted an eternity. Sara’s voice made her sit up with a start.

“And now Jessica Hart will close the ceremony with a song.”

Jessica stood and glanced at Polly, who in turn stared up at her.

“Was he right about us not having any more friends?” Polly asked sadly. Jessica squeezed her shoulder.

“We’ll always be friends, Polly.”

Jessica found the piano and sat down. The silence persisted, but a faint breeze had begun to cross the stadium. She felt it in her hair and on her damp cheek. She had no music before her; she had to choose a Beatles song. That was OK. They had composed the perfect one for the occasion, especially since Michael had forgotten to thank his wonderful mother for having given birth to him.

Jessica began to sing.

“‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, whisper words of wisdom, let it be…’”

She went through the song alone, and when she came to the final chorus, no one in the stands or on the field joined her. That was OK, too. She may not have sung it as beautifully as Paul McCartney, but she sang it as if it were important to her, which it was. When she finished, the silence returned, deeper than before and just for a moment. Then the applause poured down upon her from all sides and she smiled. It was the first time she had felt good all day.

The diplomas were handed out, one by one, with Mr. Smith shaking everybody’s hand and wishing each one well. When that was done, Sara squealed something ridiculous into the mike and the class sprang to its feet and cheered. Then five hundred caps sailed into the air, the largest of which was Bubba’s huge straw sombrero, complete with gold tassel.

Jessica hugged Polly. They had made it. School was over, and if they wanted, it could be over for good. Sara burst through the crowd and embraced them both. And then they laughed and insulted one another, and it was just as it always had been between them and, she hoped, always would be. Michael didn’t know everything after all. Jessica meant it when she had told Polly they would be friends forever.

Jessica didn’t find Michael in the crowd, though she looked long and hard. He seemed to have disappeared.

Michael had indeed left the school, but Carl Barber, better known as Kats, had not. He stood in the middle of the joyous crowd, watching everybody hug and kiss, a wide grin on his face, but a scowl in his heart. Nothing really changed, he thought bitterly. He had his diploma. He had earned it attending hours of tedious night classes. He was as good as the rest of them. But how many of them wanted to shake his hand? As many as had shaken his hand last June when he had failed to graduate because of a few lousy grades. Nobody cared about him. Nobody ever had and nobody ever would.

After tonight, though, they would remember him, if they remembered anything at all. Almost the entire senior class would be on that cruise ship when it left the dock for Catalina. But if he had his way—and he would, he swore it—not a single one of them would be on board when it reached its destination. That ship would be a ghost ship.

Michael parked down the street from Clark Halley’s house and removed the gun from the glove compartment. Checking again to be sure it was fully loaded, he stuffed it inside his sports-jacket pocket. Clark’s huge black Harley-Davidson sat at the end of the crumbling asphalt driveway, fuming in the boiling sun from recent exertion. Clark was home. If the place could be called a home. It looked more like a chicken coop, out at the far east end of San Bernardino Valley, where the desert began and the rents plummeted. The place stunk, yet when Michael had finally located the house a month earlier—after a great deal of effort and an equal amount of luck—he had celebrated.

And then I did nothing but watch and wait.

A last name is not the same as an address. Michael discovered that soon after he had found Clark’s ugly picture and full name in the Temple High yearbook. The Monday after Maria’s accident, he had revisited Temple High and asked to speak to Clark Halley. Turned out the guy no longer went there. He should have been in the middle of his senior year, but he had unexpectedly dropped out at the beginning of October. He had, in fact, disappeared just after Alice had died.

No sweat to find him, Michael had figured. He would get Clark’s family address and catch up with him there. Easier said than done. Clark didn’t have a family. He lived alone. He was an orphan or his parents had died or something; the secretary at Temple High wasn’t sure what the situation was. Using the best of his charm, and a couple of tricks Bubba had taught him, Michael was able to obtain from the secretary—the same woman who had given him the yearbook during his original visit—the address Clark had had his mail sent to while at the school. It proved to be phony—a closed Laundromat.

Michael went back to Temple High at lunchtime, again and again. He mingled, made friends, asked questions, and listened. He led the other kids to believe he went to Temple. He began to build up a picture of Clark Halley, and it matched the one he already had—the guy was a creep.

Clark had kept mostly to himself, but when he did speak up, it had usually been to insult somebody. One girl recalled how he’d asked to sign her cast after she’d had a skiing accident. He’d drawn a tasteless sketch of her stepping into a bear trap, her foot being sliced off at the ankle and bleeding all over the ground. That was one thing everyone seemed to agree on—the dude could draw. He had talent. He might even be a genius.

What he didn’t have, and what Michael desperately needed to find, was a friend. Clark didn’t seem to have a single one. No one knew where he lived. No one had his phone number. He had attended the school for three years and no one could provide Michael with a single fact about his personal life. Did he have a job? Did he have any brothers or sisters? Did he have a favorite place to eat? Michael heard the same answer repeatedly—I don’t know. At one point he began to feel he was chasing a phantom.

Then in mid-March he got a lead. He was on something like his twentieth visit to Temple High and talking to a guy who had gone motorcycle riding with Clark a couple of times. The guy’s name was Fred Galanger, and although he appeared to be a Pretty tough son-of-a-bitch—he carried thick biceps and lurid tattoos beneath his biker jacket—he spoke of Clark reluctantly, as if he were afraid Clark’s ghost might suddenly appear and rake him over with a steel chain. Fred probably knew Clark better than anyone at Temple, which, of course, was not saying much. Michael had cultivated his acquaintance carefully. Then he had tired of the game and offered Fred twenty bucks for a single slice of useful memory. Fred’s brain cells had lit up.

“We were out that afternoon I told you about before,” Fred said carefully, sliding the crisp bill into his pants pocket and keeping his hand wrapped around it in case it somehow vanished while he spoke of the mysterious rider. “We were hot-dogging these turns in the foothills down from Big Bear. That’s a dangerous place to be riding hard, but Clark, he’d have a smile on his face heading into the hood of an oncoming truck, if it came to that. He was crazy. It took guts to keep up with him. I was one of the few guys who could.

“Anyway, we came around this one turn near the bottom of the mountain and there was an oil spill on the road. Clark’s front wheel caught the edge of it and he went flying, right off the embankment and into this ravine. I figured he’d bought it right then. But he didn’t even have a scratch. Don’t ask me how. He was already pushing his bike back up the hill and onto the road before I could get to him. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world. But his leather coat was torn to shreds and he’d crushed his shift lever. It was weird; I went to help him bend the lever back so we could get home, but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He said he didn’t let anyone near his bike except this Indian who works at a station in Sunnymead. He wouldn’t even work on it himself, like it was sacred to him or something dumb like that.”

“What’s the name of the station?” Michael interrupted.

“I don’t know. It’s an independent, right off the freeway, I think at Branch. Yeah, it’s on Branch. We crawled there at ten miles an hour, Clark’s bike stuck in first gear the whole way. The Indian’s a mechanic at the station. I don’t remember his name—Birdbeak or Crowfoot or something. He must have been in his nineties. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding him. They seemed like old friends. He’ll probably know where Clark lives.”

“Anything else?” Michael asked.

“No. Except if you do find him, don’t mention my name. I mean it.”

“Why not?”

Fred Galanger wouldn’t tell him why. He didn’t have to. He was obviously afraid of Clark.

Fred was right about one thing—Michael did find the gas station without difficulty. He also met the Indian mechanic. His real name was Storm watcher, and although he didn’t have Clark’s strange pale eyes, he had a similar otherworldly stare that made Michael uncomfortable. Michael figured it would be a mistake to approach him directly for Clark’s address. He suspected that Clark was somehow involved with the occult, that he was in fact an apprentice of the Indian. The old guy might warn Clark he was being hunted.

It was the perfect time to go to the police. Michael didn’t have the time or the inclination to stake out the gas station day after day, hoping Clark would show up. The police could demand that the Indian tell them what he knew of Clark. But Michael did not trust the police; in particular, he did not trust Lieutenant Keller’s detective skills. Keller would question Clark, Clark would tell him about Alice’s instability, and Keller would go away satisfied, confident he got what he had come for.

A month later Michael was still debating how to make friends with one of the teenagers who worked part-time at the station-someone who could alert him by phone if Clark should arrive-when he got another big break. He was getting gas at the station when Clark drove up.

Clark didn’t see him-Michael was pretty sure of that. He was off again quickly after exchanging a few words with the old Indian. Michael followed him carefully, but not too closely. Clark drove very fast. Yet he didn’t go far before he pulled into the driveway of a broken-down house in a decrepit neighborhood.

And this was the same house Michael found himself sitting outside an hour after he had graduated valedictorian, a gun in his pocket, doubt in his mind. Yet he had sat here before—without a gun but with the same doubts—and he had done nothing.

Clark could say one word, and smash everything I believe.

Michael did not fear Clark so much as he feared Alice—feared who she might have been. When he got right down to it, he hadn’t known her that long.

He got out of his car, the sweat sticking to him like a layer of deceit; surely Clark would be suspicious about his wearing a coat on such a hot day. Yet Michael had no intention of lying to Clark about the purpose of his visit.

A cat ran across Michael’s path as he walked toward the door. It was brown, not black, but it had green eyes. Most cats did, he supposed. He wondered if he was going to die in the next few minutes.

Michael knocked on the door. Clark answered quickly. He had on a gray T-shirt and black pants. His red hair was shorter than it had been last fall, neater, and he was not nearly so bony or pale. Indeed, Michael wondered briefly if he had the right house. He remembered Clark as a fish dug from a foul swamp. This guy was not unattractive. The eyes gave him away, however; they could have been plucked from the cat that had just crossed the yard. And the southern twang was still there.

“Can I help you?” he asked, standing behind a torn screen door.

“Maybe. I don’t know if you remember me. My name’s Mike. I met you at a football game at Tabb High? You were with Alice.”

“What do you want?” His voice was cautious, but not hostile.

“I’d like to come in and talk to you about Alice. If that would be all right?”

Clark considered a moment. “All right.” He held open the screen door. “The place is a mess. It always is.”

It was messy only because it was crammed with paintings and artistic paraphernalia: recently stretched canvases, tubes of oils, stained rags, dozens of brushes in all sizes and shapes standing upright in tin cans. Except for the supplies, the house, though claustrophobic, was not bad. There were no half-finished TV dinners or overfilled ashtrays. Clark was not a slob. His place was, in fact, neater than Alice’s studio had been.

Michael had part of an answer to one of his questions even before he sat down on a stool beside the narrow kitchen counter. Art had been at the core of Alice’s life. Michael remembered how her bright blue eyes had constantly darted about wherever she was, as if she were eternally starved for visual input, of the beautiful or the unusual kind. Here, in Clark’s place, she could have drunk up images to her heart’s content. Maybe that, and that alone, had drawn her to Clark. The room was the inside of an LSD-gorged brain cell, despite the fact that the bulk of Clark’s work was black-and-white sketches and not psychedelic paintings. Michael didn’t know how he filled the colorless with color. It was as if he used magic; the mind saw something the eye did not.

A phantom.

The subject matter of the sketches consisted largely of women and
creatures
relaxing together on barren desert scenes. The women were always beautiful. More than a few looked like Alice. The creatures had insect and reptile qualities. They smiled a lot. They obviously liked their women.

“Want a beer?” Clark asked, picking up a can of Coors from the floor beside his chair. Clark appeared to have been reading when Michael had knocked. The book lay face down on the thin green carpet, a hardback. Michael couldn’t make out the title.

“No, thank you,” Michael said.

Clark sat down and crossed his long legs at the ankles. “You were a friend of Alice’s, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. Do you remember me? We met at that football game I mentioned.”

“Sort of. I wasn’t feeling so hot that night, if you know what I mean.”

“You seemed stoned,” Michael said. Clark didn’t look stoned now. He appeared very alert. He was definitely watching Michael closely. Michael pulled his coat tighter, conscious of the weight of the automatic pistol in his inside pocket.

“I might have been. What did you want to ask me about Alice?”

“Well, she’s dead, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Clark said, betraying no signs of grief. “I read about it in the papers.”

“Did you come to the party that night?”

“No. Alice didn’t invite me. Were you there?”

“Yeah. Why didn’t Alice invite you?”

“I don’t know. She was mad at me.”

“Why?”

Clark took a gulp of beer and set down the can. “What is this?”

“What’s what?”

“Why are you here? Who gave you my address?”

“I discovered your address by accident. As to your other question—I have doubts about how she died. The police say it was suicide. I think they might be wrong.”

“You think she was murdered?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

Clark thought a moment. His eyes never left Michael. “Go on,” he said finally.

“Do you think she killed herself?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“But you were her boyfriend. Did she show any signs she was about to commit suicide?”

“No. When I read about it, I was surprised.”

“How come you didn’t come to the funeral?”

“I don’t believe in funerals.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“I wasn’t invited.” Clark stood slowly and moved toward the kitchen, stopping beside the wall, standing above Michael. “Sure you don’t want a beer?” he asked.

“I’ll take one,” Michael said. Clark stepped into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and handed him a can of Coors. Clark had left his own beer on the floor beside his chair. He returned to his spot beside the wall, only a few feet from Michael’s stool. Michael opened the can and took a sip. “It’s cold,” he said.

I wish he wasn’t so close.

“Tell me more about Alice’s party,” Clark said, staring.

“It was big, with lots of people coming and going.” Michael felt uncomfortable under Clark’s scrutinizing gaze. The guy’s eyes were not only bright, but penetrating; naturally an artist as talented as he would be visually perceptive. Michael wondered what he was giving away to Clark. He was getting nothing back from him. Clark was impossible to read. His expression—if it could be called that—was as flat as a dead man’s.

“Yeah?” Clark said. He didn’t appear overly interested in the details of the party.

“But there were only a few people there when Alice died.”

A painting sitting on the floor next to Clark caught Michael’s attention. There was a creature and there was a girl—the usual. But this one was in a house, an ordinary room. It looked like an empty bedroom. The girl looked like Polly. The creature was a manfly. It was kissing the girl on the neck, probably sucking her blood. There was a real fly buzzing around the room. It landed on the wall near Clark’s head. He took no notice of it.

I’m on fire.

The temperature inside the house had to be over a hundred. Michael was dying to remove his jacket. He thought of the gun, why he had brought it. He wasn’t going to kill Clark. He had meant only to scare him into telling the truth. Now
he
was beginning to feel scared. He took another gulp of beer.