What Dies in Summer (2 page)

Dee was a friend of ours, one of those kids who’s always around but doesn’t usually say much and never really seems to be completely in on things. At the time I didn’t
understand how much he and I had in common, and for a while I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Gram called him a “gentle boy,” something I never heard her say about anybody else.
He was an artist. His specialty was watercolors, things like apples, onions and wineglasses, and he painted them so well that I couldn’t distinguish what he did from straight-up magic. He was
thin and blond and seemed to catch more light than other people, which made him look beyond ordinary, maybe a little tragic, like a saint or a doomed poet. There was just something about him, and
whatever it was made me feel like a bear at a tea party when I was around him.

Plus we didn’t actually see eye to eye about much of anything, so even watching TV with him could be kind of an obstacle course. He was polite about it but you could tell he had no use for
sports, whereas I didn’t care much for stuff about romance, relationships and other female ordeals. If I ever did get him to watch a game with me, he tended to ignore the count and the
infield adjustments and veer off into speculation about things like whether the team colors agreed with a particular player’s personality or how the guy’s relationship with his father
might have affected his batting average.

But even though Dee wasn’t the kind of kid you’d ever think of offering a smoke to or going out to hit grounders with, there was still something kind of likable about him and I
considered him basically okay. In fact, he was one of the favored few allowed in on the secret of Gram’s supernatural once-a-month raisin cookies, and this month when the day rolled around he
dropped by.

But this was no ordinary cookie day, because after a little polite munching and idle chitchat with Gram and me, Dee got up and without any fanfare walked over to the green chair where L.A. was
sitting in her usual stony silence. No cookies for her. Just that thousand-yard stare in the general direction of the TV, like the rest of the world didn’t exist. Dee leaned down so that his
lips were by her ear and whispered something to her that lasted about as long as the Pledge of Allegiance. When he finished, they looked at each other for a couple of beats, then he lightly touched
her arm, went back to his place on the couch and reached for another cookie.

As much as I wanted to know what he’d said to her, I knew I never would, recognizing this immediately as one of those little loose ends the universe was always dangling in front of me,
especially where L.A. was concerned. I took the only sensible course, telling myself it probably wasn’t that important anyway, and tossed it in the same mental bin where I kept questions like
how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

But then the next night when I was studying for my U.S. History test, flipping through the pages without finding what I needed to know, I said more or less to myself, “What the
hell’s the Missouri Compromise?”

And without looking up, L.A. said, “Missouri washes, Kansas dries.”

I almost jumped out of my socks. I watched her and waited for a while to see if there was going to be anything else, but she’d said all she was going to for that day. Still, I took it as a
breakthrough. And sure enough, the next morning at breakfast she spontaneously asked me to pass the milk, and by the end of the day she was talking again, not exactly a mile a minute, but almost
back to what passed for normal with her.

As far back as I could remember, Aunt Rachel had never stayed at home longer than a few hours at a time, meaning she constantly needed a babysitter for L.A. And since Gram never turned her down
when it came to taking care of L.A., and did it for free, L.A. was always overnighting either at our house when I was still at home or later here at Gram’s. So even though she and I were
technically solo kids, we were used to each other, and now that we had no place left to fall we did what it took to get along, including wrangling out a morning bathroom schedule and getting the
chores divided up more or less equally. I wouldn’t call it wall-to-wall harmony, but we did manage to hammer out some kind of mutual deadlock on most points.

Then Gram started getting serious about L.A. going back to school. “We simply have no alternative, dear,” she said in that law-of-nature tone of hers.

But L.A. shook her head and went silent again. It was their first major standoff, and it got me thinking about whether truant officers actually existed in reality or were just another parental
figment like the tooth fairy. I’d never personally seen one or heard a reliable eyewitness report and wondered what the uniform would look like and whether they’d carry special
undersized handcuffs and nightsticks and arrive in small paddy wagons painted in cheerful colors.

But I wasn’t truly worried, because of my experience with Gram’s rock-solid belief in education and the unbreakable will behind it. There was also the simple reality of L.A. being a
girl, with the kind of backhanded, diabolical intelligence that implies, plus her well-established history of dazzling teachers and showing me up in class. In other words, school was her natural
turf, and I knew she couldn’t stay away from it forever.

Sure enough, less than a week later she gave in, coming out of her room at seven-thirty that morning dressed and ready as I was about to leave. We hoofed it over to Lipscomb just like nothing
abnormal had ever happened, and that was the end of her educational strike. This returned us to a certain level of regularity at Gram’s, and by the time school was finally out for the year
L.A. and I were back in the old groove, kicking around town like we always used to, like we owned the streets and summer was just for us.

I guess it’s proof of how unreliable the so-called Sight was that it didn’t tell me what was coming. I’ve wondered a thousand times how things might have turned out if it had
only given me a heads-up about what was going to happen, and what I was going to do, before this summer was over.

IT SURPRISED ME
a little that Gram was actually in favor of L.A. and me running around loose.

“You both need the lollygagging,” was how she put it.

The way I took this was that if we stayed out of any kind of high-profile trouble and got home by suppertime we were in the clear. By now I had been living with Gram a long time—since back
in junior high, in fact—so I knew what she considered high-profile trouble and how to steer clear of most of it. With L.A. this part could have been tricky, but because her special
relationship with disaster was so mysterious and unpredictable that it was useless to worry about it, I decided to leave that whole issue to the universe’s discretion and put it out of my
mind.

Today we were on our way to Beauchamp’s Liquors over on Lancaster to throw the football around and maybe practice some pass routes, and we were making our next-to-last stop behind the old
Keogh place back under the big oaks and pecans across from Herndon Park. L.A. had gotten down on her hands and knees and was peering into the crawl space under the house.

“Here, Fangbaby,” she said, clicking her tongue softly. You could’ve fried meat on the street itself, but with the light breeze it was almost cool here in the deep shade at the
back corner of the house. Across the street I heard the bobwhite chirp of the seesaw in the park, and for a second I caught the old-shoe smell of the crawl space. I held my football under one arm
and watched L.A.

“I hear something,” she whispered, reaching into the pocket of her blue jeans, where I knew she had a fried chicken gizzard wrapped in foil.

All I could hear besides the seesaw was the
birdy-birdy-birdy
call of a cardinal somewhere in the bushes behind us.

“Most likely a rat,” I said.

But then Fangbaby materialized out of the darkness and edged forward: pink nose, long twitchy whiskers, bright green eyes watching L.A.’s hands carefully. There was no way you could
mistake her for any other cat. She had a white head and neck, orange stripes the rest of the way back and only three legs, like somebody had thrown her together at the last minute out of spare
parts. She was what Gram called feral, meaning everything scared her. One day she’d gotten half eaten by a couple of bird dogs from over on Alabama Street before I could kick them off her,
and now she couldn’t hunt to feed herself.

Trying to watch L.A. and the gizzard at the same time, she pickily sniffed it over the way cats do, like she hadn’t completely made up her mind about it yet, then took it carefully in her
teeth and went front-hopping back under Mr. Keogh’s house, where she turned around and watched as we eased away.

“Bet she lets me touch her pretty soon,” L.A. said as we pushed back through our break in the hedge to the sidewalk. This part of Elmore was paved with concrete that had seen better
days, the cracks mended with thick worms of dirty tar that divided its surface into a mystery map of some hot, unknown world. I glanced up at the high cirrus clouds streaking the sky and saw a
silvery commuter plane slanting down toward Love Field across the Trinity. I wondered who was on it, where they’d been and what it would feel like to fly away.

“Probably bite the shit out of you,” I said, tossing the football up with one hand and catching it in the other, not really believing my own words. Wild cats are a tough sell, true,
but L.A.’s magic with animals wasn’t something you wanted to bet against.

“We’ll see,” she said. She unwrapped a sucker, popped it into her mouth, then balled up the wrapper and threw it at me. We angled across the concrete to Beauchamp’s, a
one-story yellow crackerbox with a wide empty lot beside it that we used for a practice field.

An old green Fairlane two-door with the windows cranked all the way down sat tucked into the shade under the big-leafed catalpa at the back corner of the store. From the rearview mirror a little
black shrunken head with stringy hair and stitched lips dangled like a piece of rotten fruit.

This meant our friend Froggy, the lady who owned the store, was here.

Inside, it was cool and dark, with a smoky spilled-whiskey smell and neon beer signs in various colors shining down like alien moons. Froggy was perched on her stool by the register, where she
sat all day smoking Chesterfields and watching the customers with those spooky pooched-out eyes of hers.

“Hi, Froggy,” said L.A.

“Junebug!” croaked Froggy. “Jasper! Come on in here and get you a couple RCs. There’s plenty in the cooler.” Probably not realizing we’d gladly stay anyway,
she usually bribed us with stuff like this or maybe pickled eggs or chunks of fried boudain to hang around and listen to her yarns about three-day parties and gunshots in the dark and famous
uncontrollable people she’d known, like Meyer Lansky and Ava Gardner and Ernest Hemingway. She seemed to use as many different words as Gram did but hers were quicker and edgier, going off
like strings of firecrackers in her stories.

L.A. went into the cooler, came back with two cans of RC and handed me one. When it was later in the day we could sometimes get a beer out of Froggy if she was in a good mood and had a broken
six-pack in the cooler, but I figured this time the sun was still too high for that. For some reason Gram wasn’t happy about us coming down here, but we liked the place and naturally we liked
Froggy because she took us seriously and seemed to get a kick out of talking to us. We brought the returnable bottles we found to her for the refunds because we enjoyed the way she always messed up
her count and argued with us that we had a dollar’s worth more than we really did. She also pretended not to notice the occasional Chesterfield we filched from her pack.

“What are you two shady characters up to today?” she said. Her hair was like orange steel wool and she wore heavy flashing rings on her little crooked fingers. Her nails were long
and lacquered blood-red.

“Pass routes,” I said, sipping cola. I noticed a man working his way up the middle aisle behind us. He wore a Celtics muscle shirt and was kind of hollow-bellied, with big knuckly
white hands that had freckles on their backs. He was looking at all the different kinds of liquor bottles, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was a whiskey drinker or a gin man.
Like he thought it didn’t show when you’re looking for a chance to steal something. I figured him for a bum, or maybe a transient, like Gram would probably say—anyway a white man
without a job—but to me he didn’t really seem very old for a bum in his sneakers and baseball cap turned backward. There was a big gap where his two upper front teeth should have been,
and even though he had a mustache and a pointy Adam’s apple and needed a shave, something about him reminded me of the kid on the cover of
Mad
magazine.

Froggy blasted off into a story about some hairy-eared husband she used to have.

L.A. said, “I didn’t know you were married, Froggy.”

“Why, hell, Junebug, one time or another I married about every knuckle-draggin’ potlicker and swingin’ dick in Texas,” she said. “Sucked ’em all dry as gourds
too!” She cackled herself off into a long coughing fit.

When she was recovered enough she took another drag on her cigarette, then suddenly her look went hard as she watched the man coming up behind us. I turned around in time to see him raise both
hands in surrender and disappear toward the back of the store. L.A. saw this too, and I could tell she was having one of her mysterious thoughts as she watched him go, but of course there was no
telling what it was. Not then, anyway.

What I did know was that something significant, something I myself couldn’t see, had just happened, and that we were a long way from being through with this guy.

AFTER WE FINISHED
the RCs and heard about how Froggy had caught one of her husbands, the guy with the hairy ears that she told the most stories about,
in bed with her manicurist and shot off one of his thumbs with her derringer—“Ain’t what I meant to shoot off!”—we walked back out into the blazing sunlight.