What Dies in Summer (10 page)

She and I still went swimming a couple of times a week, but on Thursdays we had to get home early enough for her to change so Gram could drive her to her appointment with Dr. Ballard. This had
become part of our household routine after L.A. punched me out and then started getting the drooling shakes every day or so and staring off into space, getting into a fight one morning with some
guy at school who accidentally bumped up against her. She did everything but tear his gallbladder out, and after that the school counselor gave Gram Dr. Ballard’s number—no options, no
slack. Seeing Dr. Ballard was the only way L.A. could stay enrolled.

Sometimes when they came back from these visits L.A. would be driving, depending on Gram’s level of confidence in heaven that day. Then we’d go out and buy hamburgers, onion rings
and milkshakes at the Sundown on Beckley and bring them home to eat at the kitchen table. L.A. always put big puky gobs of mayonnaise on her onion rings, even with me looking at her funny about it,
which incidentally was how I learned what a waste of time it was trying to influence her with disapproval.

By this time, even though she’d never even set foot on a high board until last summer, she’d moved completely beyond what I’d taught her about diving, practicing until the
final whistle at sundown almost every Adult Day, and at this point her skill was so unbelievable that people from the neighborhood would stop by the pool just to watch her. And Gram had finally let
her get a bikini, hot-pink, a super color for her with her dark skin and eyes. I suppose her wearing it helped some when it came to attracting attention. It certainly attracted mine. When she
climbed the ladder up to the high board I’d look around and see guys elbowing each other in the ribs and pointing and I’d enjoy the feeling of being her original coach, the one who got
her started diving in the first place. Then she’d somersault through the air, come cleanly out of her tuck and slip into the water silent as an ice pick, and there’d be claps and
whistles around the pool and even out on the sidewalk.

But as far as you could tell from looking at L.A. she never even noticed anybody was watching. Looking on, I felt a weird combination of pride, humiliation and envy, knowing the time when my
diving was equal to hers, the time when there was anything I could teach her, was gone forever. She was now at a level of ability that I couldn’t even truly understand, much less compete
with.

I don’t remember now why, but on the morning I’m thinking of we didn’t go to the pool even though it was an Adult Day and the weather was clear. L.A. left the breakfast table
as soon as she’d finished her coffee and milk—“café-oh-lay,” Gram called it—and carried the cup and saucer to the sink, rinsed them off, then went out to the
garage.

I could hear her thumping around out there as I was trying uselessly to get Jazzy to jump up for a leftover corner of my toast. She wouldn’t jump, just kept trying to get the toast by
turning around in circles on her hind legs, the way L.A. had taught her. I guess it was hard for her to let go of a skill that had always worked for her, with her mind shorted out by the smell of
the food right there above her nose.

“Kitchen detail,” said Gram, pointing her finger at me as she stood up. She went into the laundry room and began sorting through a basket of clothes, throwing whites left, colors
right. I gave Jazzy the toast and she took it straight to her box. Then I started clearing the table, not my favorite thing, but I had a rhythm for it: hot water on, soap in, grab the silverware
and slip it into the water, then saucers, plates, cups and cereal bowls as the water level came up. Pitchers and serving bowls in last when the water was deep enough for them. Butter, milk, jam and
juice back into the fridge, bread in the box. Couple of passes with the rag over the table, then the dishes in reverse order, large to small, rinse in hot, into the rack and I was done. Even though
Gram herself used a towel and made L.A. do the same, she let me rack-dry, a break I got for being the man of the family.

As I worked I watched L.A. in the doorway of the garage next to the loose black coils of Old Sparky, our thrill-a-minute outdoor extension cord, ferociously rug-shaking a burlap sack, dust
clouds billowing around her in the morning sunlight. When she was satisfied, she dropped that sack and picked up the other one she’d brought out.

Gram, who had walked back into the kitchen, looked through the window at L.A. and said, “Mercy! What’s the girl doing, fighting off snakes?”

In a minute L.A. came in through the back door holding a sack in each hand. “Let’s go find bottles,” she said. This had been one of our routines for years. Now that L.A. lived
here Gram gave us both a pretty okay allowance, but this was an angle we couldn’t pass up, good bottles being easy to find if you knew where to look. You could rack up a few bucks in an
afternoon if you showed a little energy, and then if we took the bottles to Beauchamp’s there was Froggy’s bonus on top of that. At the time I actually thought it was about the money,
not realizing that projects like this were what Gram had meant by
lollygagging
and that she was encouraging them.

I pushed aside the thought that I had outgrown this kind of stuff and said, “Sure.”

Jazzy, hearing the word “go,” watched L.A. with her eagerest expression, hoping to hear “basket” too, which would have meant L.A. was taking her bike and Jazzy could ride
along in the carrier behind her. But for us riding bikes was pretty much a thing of the past by now, and since Jazzy was too short-legged to walk very far with us, taking her along just
wasn’t something we worked into our plans much anymore.

When she figured out that she wasn’t signed on for this expedition she trudged back to her box with her tail drooping, circled around three times counterclockwise and lay down with a sigh,
gazing up at L.A. with piteous eyes.

We took off up Harlandale with the tow sacks over our shoulders. Both of us enjoyed walking, and for summertime this wasn’t a bad day to be out, the air clean and bright, not too hot yet
and with a nice breeze in our faces. We knew the dogs and cats, and one parrot, along this route and liked to check in with them if they were the sociable type, petting them or at least talking to
them in the case of the dogs and cats, and whistling to the parrot, whose cage hung out on the front porch of his house in good weather.

I was thinking that lately L.A. had seemed a little stronger and more like her old self, and I considered asking her how she really felt and maybe testing the waters about bringing up my
nighttime visitor. It was something I definitely wanted to know her thoughts about, but I couldn’t mentally put the words together in a way that sounded right, so instead I got out the
cigarette I’d swiped from Froggy the last time we were down there, lit it with a kitchen match and took a drag. I offered the smoke to L.A., but she shook her head.

At the overpass above the tracks I looked at the road and at the weedy downslope, visualizing the trajectories of the bottles as they flew through the air. People threw them out as their cars
approached the railing, trying to get them as far down toward the tracks as possible. The traffic was fast along here, which gave the bottles a lot of added velocity, and I was amazed how far down
some of them carried. We were headed for the general area down below where most of them ended up.

Green bottles were fairly dependable and would usually stay in one piece when they hit, but you couldn’t say the same for the brown ones, which didn’t bring refunds anyway. They were
not only worthless but treacherous because of the way they’d sometimes break into long ugly spikes that stuck up like fangs in the weeds. The broken bottles worried me more than they did
L.A., so she was in the lead as we headed down the slope, picking our way carefully through the grass.

Near the bottom of the main slope, L.A. had just come to the top of a small rise in the ground about fifteen feet ahead of me when she suddenly stopped. She turned around and bent over with one
hand covering her mouth and her eyes shut tight. She stayed that way for a second or two, then opened her eyes, blinked a few times and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Hey,” I said as I came up to her. “What’s wrong?”

She swallowed and straightened up to put her hands on my shoulders, then walked me around past her so I could look down at what she’d seen.

“Jesus Christ!” I yelped, jumping back.

There was a bluish white dead girl lying on her back in the grass just down the slope. She was naked, lying with her legs spread wide apart and bent at the knees, her hands over her breasts and
her eyes half closed. A few strands of hair straggled across her cheeks and between her lips, and her face had a peaceful, faraway expression, as if being here dead like this were no big problem
for her.

But it was for me. I was having a hard time getting enough air.

“Oh, man!” I blurted. “Oh, shit!” I turned around. “Let’s get out of here.”

L.A. was looking at the dead girl and still breathing pretty hard herself. But she said, “Wait.”

I stopped.

“Come on,” she said. “I want to see.”

Which was L.A. for you.

My hands were shaking and my heart was in my throat, but L.A. said, “Come on” again, and we moved down to opposite sides of the body. L.A. sat on her heels with her elbows on her
knees and her hands on her head, looking at the pale girl, her eyes going everywhere over the body without embarrassment or favoritism. The fact that the girl was about our age made the whole thing
that much weirder.

But it wasn’t the only thing that did.

“I’ve seen her somewhere,” said L.A. “At the movies, I think. She must have lived around here.” She touched the dead arm on her side of the body.

I was too shaken up to say so, but I had most definitely seen this girl. In a way it seemed wrong not to tell L.A., but even if I could make my tongue work, what would I say?
I know where she
lived—she lived in my dreams.

She was the girl who’d been standing by my bed every night as I slept.

L.A. leaned forward and lightly took one of her fingers, lifting cautiously. The hand and arm came up a little, but not freely.

“She’s a little bit stiff,” L.A. said.

Under the hand we could see a nickel-sized black circle where the girl’s nipple had been cut off. I tried to swallow but my throat was too dry. L.A. put the first hand down and carefully
lifted the other. That nipple was gone too.

This was getting too unnatural for me. I wanted to cover my eyes. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted time to reverse itself so this whole thing would be undone. And then, without any kind
of warning at all, I had one of my flashes of knowing something other people didn’t, something I didn’t have any right to know. And didn’t want to know.

“She was glad when he did that to her,” I said. Then when I heard myself I yelled, “Damn!” and rapped my forehead with my knuckles, feeling like I’d just had my
heart licked by a hyena.

“What?” said L.A., her eyes wide. These spells of mine were nothing new to her, but the situation may have had her a little spooked too, even if she’d never admit it.

I looked at the body, then back at L.A., my head thumping. “She tried to make herself believe that would be the last thing,” I said. “That he’d be through with her then
and let her go.” We both just breathed for a while, looking at each other, me thinking about how totally wrong the girl had been.

Finally L.A.’s eyes went back to the body. “Look,” she said, pointing to a bruised line around the girl’s neck. “Choked.”

Her wrists and ankles were marked the same way. Looking at the girl’s body, I realized her legs would have been pretty if she were alive and wondered if she’d shaved them. This wild
thought, along with seeing the matted hair between her legs, made me sick with embarrassment, and for a second I wondered if I might be going crazy right here in the weeds.

“Wonder how she ended up down here,” I said.

Looking around at the grass, L.A. said, “Somebody drug her from somewhere, maybe the road. Then he fixed her like this.”

“How do you know it was a
he
?” I asked stupidly.

L.A. confirmed that with the
you dumb shit
look.

Of course. Whoever had killed the girl was absolutely a man. Women didn’t do things like this. And it came to me as an obvious fact that arranging the body just so, not hiding or burying
it, meant something. It meant the man who’d killed her wanted her to be seen this way. I imagined him fussing around, arranging the body, getting everything just right, maybe talking to
himself or even to the body as he worked, like little kids do when they play with dolls.

Maybe he wasn’t gone yet. Maybe he was watching us right now, to see how we reacted.

I looked around us in every direction, up and down the slope, along the edge of the trees, down the double ribbon of the tracks. I checked to make sure my Case knife was in my pocket and
experienced a rush of relief when I felt it, along with a flicker of amazement at how important a three-inch blade could suddenly seem.

“We’ve gotta get back and report this,” L.A. said. “We shouldn’t touch anything.”

“We touched her.”

“Well,” said L.A. She looked around until she found a piece of cardboard and brought it over to cover the girl’s lower body and thighs. Then she stood looking at the marks on
the wrists and ankles, frowning slightly and biting her lower lip. I saw that her eyes were starting to get that wild look you had to watch out for, and she was beginning to shake a little.

L.A. had this thing about people being tied up. For some reason the idea had an unraveling effect on her mind. If she saw somebody tying a person’s hands in a movie or on TV she’d
get up and leave, and later wouldn’t talk about it. For no reason I could put my finger on, it seemed to me this had something to do with her other little problem, the one about being
surprised, and how you had to remember not to come up behind her or grab her as a joke or anything. Because it wouldn’t be a joke to her, and you can believe me when I say she’d make it
a fun-free occasion for you too. Just ask the poor guy at school.