The Year of the Storm (7 page)

“Jesus. I should have never gone down there.”

“Where? What happened?”

“You know the place out on County Road Seven? Ghost Bells?”

It was a bar, a honky-tonk, a place I'd been expressly forbidden to go.

“Yeah. What about it?”

Dad hesitated. I could almost hear him changing his mind. He'd already told me too much. He would cut me off, tell me I was too young.

But I was wrong.

“I beat a man. At the bar. I hurt him pretty bad, Danny.”

“What?” There was nothing he could say that would have surprised me more.

“It was a mistake. I let . . . I let my emotions get the best of me.”

“Why?”

Dad sighed. “Danny, there are some things I haven't told you about your mother. Some things I probably shouldn't have kept from you.”

I waited, again resisting—this time by force of will—the urge to hang up on him.

“Your mother—well, you know, she had some trouble with alcohol—but that's not all, Danny. Your mother, at one time, well, she was a drug addict, and she's cheated on me before, Danny.”

I sucked in a deep breath. He was lying. It was easier for him to think about this sort of thing instead of her being dead. No different than Gran.

“I know this is hard to hear, Danny, but in the weeks and months before she left, she slipped back into her old—”

“Stop lying. Just stop it.”

“Danny, you have to face the truth. I know she's your mother, and I know you love her, but there comes a point—”

I hung the phone up. It's not something I'm proud of. My father was in jail, and I was all he had left, yet I hung up on him. These days, when I think about regrets, I don't have many, but that's one that still gets me. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it was a small gesture, but I can't shake the thought of him alone in that cell, believing that he'd been abandoned first by his wife, and then by his son.

—

B
ut that's not the only thing that nags at me about that conversation these days. He'd said she “slipped.” It was a word I hadn't heard yet from Pike, but I would. It's a word now that's always on my lips, as if mouthing the syllables enough times would help me break the code of my own life and see the truth of memory.
She slipped.
Yes, one way or another, I suppose she did.

WALTER

H
er name was Rachel Scroggins, and they never found her. She was the first to disappear. Rach was what her friends and family called her. She was only ten and actually lived across the highway from me, about a mile to the west. Her family had a small piece of land with a barn. They raised chickens and owned three cows. She loved German shepherds, and her dog, Molly, had given birth to twelve puppies just a week before she disappeared.

Back then her disappearance obsessed the town. It wasn't on the national news or the talk shows because in the early sixties local mysteries stayed local. In the sixties, the only thing that could bring national news to Alabama was civil rights. Anything else that happened in the state was mostly just ignored. It was no different on the local level. Look back at the papers from the early sixties. You'll find very little about Rachel, but that doesn't mean we didn't care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her name was on the lips of every person within a thirty-mile radius. We all felt the loss, the hard truth that somebody had taken a ten-year-old girl. Sure, she might have gotten lost. Those things do happen. My daddy used to tell a story of how back in 1936, a girl wandered off into the woods and didn't come back for nearly two weeks. She just got lost and confused. She panicked. She would have died in the woods if a hunter hadn't literally stumbled over her unconscious body.

This was different. People might have hoped she was lost in the woods, but in our hearts, we didn't believe that. The police had combed every bit of land within thirty miles. They had dogs. They had volunteers. But in the end, they had nothing. Not a damned thing.

My mother came into my room one night after turning off her radio programs. She sat on the edge of my bed. I was pretending to sleep, even though I couldn't because my thoughts kept jumping between Seth and Ronnie and Jake.

“She's dead,” my mother said. Her voice was a whisper. I didn't move.

Mama touched my forehead with her hand. She leaned over me, and I could feel her tears soaking into my sheet. “Dead, dead, dead. Dead.”

She sat there for a long time. I don't know what made her come into my room that night. I don't know if she had a vision or saw it in a dream or had inside knowledge of what was happening. To this day, I don't know. What I do know—and I knew it then too—is that she was right. The girl was dead.

—

A
few weeks later, when Tina disappeared, Seth stayed out of school. Tina and Rachel. Their names were on everybody's lips. Tina's story was simple. Heartbreakingly simple. She'd been walking her dog, Little Rascal, one evening and never came home. The leash was found in the park, the same park where Seth and I had sat and talked after school until dark. Other than the leash, there was nothing, not a fingerprint, not a note, nothing. Even the dog was gone.

Winter was in the air. The town grew restless. My father came home less, choosing to stay over at a friend's or at the “club,” which was a place that sold moonshine out on County Road Seven behind the woods. When he did come home, he was drunk. Bleary-eyed and stinking, he'd stumble through the door, looking for something to eat, or some time with my mother in the back. She always provided for him, food or sex, it didn't matter, but she did it without enthusiasm. She had a kind of fuck-you attitude that I always admired. Still, I knew she was going down fast. My father couldn't catch her, and neither could I.

It seemed like Dad's favorite pastime was ignoring me, but that was probably giving him too much credit. The truth of it was that I was a piece of furniture to him. One more thing in the room. He was more likely to sit on me or use me for a place to put his jug than talk to me. I pretended this didn't bother me, that I didn't care one way or the other if he didn't notice me. I patted myself on the back for not being a baby like Seth. All the while I knew that, deep down, Seth wasn't a baby, and I was just a pretender.

A week after Tina went missing, I walked over to Seth's house on a Saturday afternoon. Some of the kids at school had been restricted to their houses when they weren't at school because their parents worried for their safety. This wasn't an issue for me. I came and went as I pleased. Mama was in her own world, seated most of the time in her leather chair, the radio tuned to some station or another. Sometimes, I wondered if she was really listening. In 'Nam, when it got bad, I thought about Mama a lot. Still breaks my heart to think about her. There's more than one way to disappear, you know?

Seth's house is gone now. You can walk out to the spot, but all you'll see are ruins, if even that. It burned down years ago, and what was left disappeared under a maze of kudzu and vines. The kudzu has always run wild here, and even though most of it was dead because it was late fall, the dry vines still held the house as tight as a straitjacket.

The front door opened and a man who had to be Seth's father came out. He was scowling and carrying a sack under his arm. His red hair and freckled face reminded me of some distant relative I'd seen in some of Mama's old photo albums. Where the skin of the boy in the photo was pale white and dotted with freckles, this man's was a deep brown. He wore overalls and big work boots. Later, I found out he worked across the road in the cotton fields. My own father did the same when he couldn't find jobs in town doing yards and such. The fields paid better, but my father never tolerated hard labor for any length of time.

Seth's father had his head down and didn't see me until he had almost walked by. “Oh,” he said, his face shifting smoothly to a grin. “You must be here for Seth.”

“Yes, sir. I'm Walter Pike.”

He eyed me carefully as if measuring me for a new suit. “Pike?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What's your daddy's name?”

“Preston.”

He nodded, and appeared to consider saying more.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Name sounds familiar. That's all. I've got to get to work. Go on in. Good to see he has a visitor.”

He started off, but then stopped and walked back to me. He placed a hand on my shoulder, leaning in close. His breath smelled bad, like fish. “Between you and me,” he said, “I worry about Seth. His mama run off and left us some time back and he ain't been the same since.” He patted my shoulder. “Your mama? She a good woman?”

I thought about this for a second. “Yes, sir. I'd say she is,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself even though I wasn't.

“Good. Good. A fine woman is a rare thing in this day and age. These days, the family don't mean what it used to.” He smiled, showing teeth that were uneven but clean, not stained brown like my father's. “Strange times we're living in. Young girls gone astray.”

I nodded. There had been some silly rumors lately suggesting the girls had been promiscuous and that had led to their downfall.

“Well, I got to get to work. I'm glad Seth's found a friend.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I watched him walk away, toward the road and the cotton fields beyond.

—

I
knocked. Nobody answered, so I decided to go on in. I found Seth in his room, reading a book. I must have been quiet. Either that, or he was so caught up in the book that he didn't hear me because he just lay there on his bed, reading. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room. Beside it, he had stacked dozens of paperbacks, creating two shaky towers of books. One window on the back wall revealed the deep woods behind his house. There were no curtains or blinds and the sun shone in. Below the window were three or four stacks of neatly folded clothes. The only other thing in the room was an old painting of what appeared to be a swamp hanging on the wall across from Seth's bed. The painting was large, but even that didn't explain how it seemed to dominate the room. I couldn't stop looking at it.

“Hey,” I said.

Seth dropped his book and jumped to his feet. He acted like I'd just tossed a bomb inside his room instead of simply saying hello. “Why are you here?”

“Why wouldn't I be? We're friends, right?”

He glared at me. “I didn't invite you.”

“Hell, you didn't ask me to pull your ass out of that quicksand either, but that didn't stop me.”

“I would have been fine.”

“'Cause you ‘went somewhere,' right?”

He stepped forward, his fists clenched. “You shouldn't have come here.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I'd gone out on a limb to take up for him—losing the only two friends I had in the process—and now he was going to act like this. Bullshit.

“What's wrong with you?” I said.

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Of course not, because you're the only kid in the world with problems. Well, I met your dad and he didn't seem so bad. At least he was sober.”

“You don't know anything about my father. He's evil.”

This made me laugh. It was hard to imagine the man I'd just met as anything resembling evil. Hell, as wretched as my own father was,
evil
would not be a word I would use to describe even him.

“Evil, huh? Just because he couldn't get along with your mother doesn't make him evil. So she ran out on you. It happens to a lot of kids. They don't sit in their rooms and sulk for the rest of their lives. Maybe Jake and Ronnie were right about you.”

“Say that again.”

I shook my head. “You don't want a friend, do you?”

“Say that part again about Jake and Ronnie being right about me.”

I was feeling pretty pissed. “I don't know, Seth. You're a weird bird. Maybe you
are
queer. Maybe you
do
like boys.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to put them right back. Still, I let them linger because part of me couldn't help but think he had it coming.

There was a short lull when nothing happened. His face was blank and then he fixed me with a look that could have burned paper. I didn't even see his fist coming until it hit me under my chin. I fell back, my face already blooming with pain. He lunged at me and stuck his elbow into my neck, driving me against the wall. My head was forced back against the picture frame. The frame came loose from the wall and fell to the floor. I heard something crack but didn't bother to look. My chin was bleeding. Getting my fists up, I tried to locate Seth. I couldn't find him anywhere. Delirious, I stumbled over to his bed and sat down. Then I saw him. He was on the floor, hugging the picture frame to his chest.

—

T
he canvas was undamaged. Only the outer frame was cracked. I watched Seth carefully pull the frame away, brushing splinters off the canvas.

He touched the painting, running his fingers from the tall trees on the right side over to the cabin on the left and then up to the moon whose light spilled out over the painting in uneven streaks.

He picked it up and put it on the bed beside me.

“It's just a damn picture,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not to me.”

I scoffed at that. “It's not even very good.”

Seth glared at me.

“What? Somebody you know paint it?”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “I did.”

If he thought this would upset me, he had another thing coming. “Whoop-dee-doo,” I said.

Seth wasn't worth the anger. He was a nut, and that's probably why his mother left anyway. I felt an overwhelming urge to destroy the painting.

“No,” he said. “Leave it alone.” It was like he knew what I was planning, like he could look right into my eyes and see down into the deep, dark, ugly part of me that actually wanted to see him hurt, the part of me that was no damned different than Jake.

I shoved my way past him and picked it up. I tore the canvas away from the backing frame and held it in the air in front of him, my hands tensing like I was about to rip it in two.

“Tell me how you knew about Jake's dad,” I said. This was something that had been bothering me. How would a new kid have known about Jake's dad being in prison?

“Don't, Walter. Please.”

I started to tear the top part. He lunged at me, but I kept it away from him, stepping up on his bed. “Answer the question.”

I wanted to curse myself for what I was doing. I'd come because I wanted a friend, but I was making an enemy, and now I was too proud to stop. “Answer me or I rip it to shreds.”

“My dad and I lived here years ago. He knows Jake's family and yours. I'm not sure about Ronnie's.”

“What he say about my old man?”

Seth shook his head.

I began to rip.

“Stop! He didn't say nothing. He said he drank a lot. That was all.”

Suddenly, I felt like laughing. “Well, he got that right.”

Seth shot me a withering look. “Put it down.”

“Why's it so important? What's so great about a dumb painting? Even if you did paint it.”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Of course I wouldn't. My daddy's a drunk, and I don't know how it feels to be you. Jesus, man. I came over here because I wanted to be a friend, but I'm starting to get the feeling you don't want one.” I dropped the painting on the bed, feeling suddenly deflated, like my life was useless and I should probably just go back to Jake, plead for mercy, and live out my days in these woods, being a damn drunk just like my father.

I stepped off the bed, taking my time to be sure that I knocked over his stacks of books, scattering them across the floor. “Standing up for you that day was a mistake.”

I was all the way back out to the den before I heard his voice.

“Walter. Wait.”

I stopped. I was still angry, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. Anger can't hold a candle to loneliness.

—

H
e said he wanted to show me something, and when I saw it, I would understand about the painting.