"Pretty out here," RayAnn breathed. Not having the panorama available to me, I was hooked into this interview.
Justin said, "Me and my brothers, we never came back here as kids. It was a miracle when we were allowed off our street. If you look at my childhood you'd say I'm licensed to be crazy."
I wondered how everything had changed, what the chronology of things had been, such that he could take off for two weeks at a time with a mother who had once been beyond strict. I wondered if, as in many dysfunctional families, the rules had gone from a ten to a zero with few if any of the much-needed fives.
"So ... you stayed friendly with Bo and Ali, in spite of your mom."
"I didn't exactly wave any flag in my mom's face about it, but yeah, they were very cool," he said. "Bo gave me back Chris's diary as soon as he got out of juvenile detention, like, nine days after they sent him up. There was an informal hearing, and Principal Ames came, said he didn't think Bo was capable of it, and Mrs. Adams was there, representing him. My mom was there, too, but the only thing she had to offer was that none of the three thousand bucks my brother had saved in his bank account had moved, so obviously he had not run away. No charges were ever filed ... mostly because there was no evidence of a crime. Bo and Ali and me, we've been friends ever since."
"Can you let us look at Chris's diary?" RayAnn asked.
"Can't. Sorry. My mom found it maybe six days after I got it. I kept switching hiding places, but she was just too meddlesome. She keeps it in a safe-deposit box at the bank. You can ask her if you want to see it that badly. She disappears for a couple hours at a time some days, and I imagine her down there in the bank vault, reading it all by herself."
I thought of her keeping the diary in a locked vault because she hadn't managed to keep her oldest son in something similar.
"What do you think happened to your brother?"
Justin was rubbing his eyes again, swollen with strain but sparking with alertness. He chortled some and delivered what I viewed as a million-dollar speech. "I think my aunt Dee Dee had something to do with it. They're two of a kind, her and my mom. Both are stubborn and idiotic, with a streak against each other that can get downright evil. Too much alike. My aunt Dee Dee was the oldest, my mom, the youngest. There's a middle sister, my aunt Loraine, but she's a mealy-mouth. They were all raised out in the boondocks, ya know. In a shack with two bedrooms, one bath that only worked half the time. Mom's dad had tied her up with ropes in a few drunken episodes. He used to hang her upside down."
"Yeah," I said, remembering this part of Adams's tale being particularly intriguing to me. Mrs. Creed came to the principal's office the day she accused Bo, reminding Principal Ames and Torey and Ali that she'd been raised in the boondocks and her dad used to hang her upside down from a tree. Her point was that boons should not get any sympathy vote simply because they were poor.
"Before we were born, my aunt Dee Dee married my uncle Lance, who was in the military. They got stationed in Texas after a few other places, and they just always stayed there. Aunt Dee Dee took in my grandmother once Grammy decided to leave my drunken grandfather. Grammy remarried a really nice Texan who was more like a dad than a stepdad, even though the kids were grown. Aunt Dee Dee and Uncle Lance also took in my aunt Loraine, who went to college out there. But Aunt Dee Dee and my mom? Fire and fire, man. Too much alike, though that is the last thing either of them would admit. They each think the other one is evil.
"I can remember my aunt Dee Dee calling me aside a few times when I was a kid and we were out there trying to, uh, make lovely. It never worked. She'd be fighting with my mom within two hours, and she would pull me aside and say, 'If she ever gets too domineering, you just call me. I won't have my nephews destroyed.' I was all, 'Whatever, Aunt Dee Dee. I can handle Mom.' My brother, on the other hand? He was like ... How does the saying go? A lamb led to slaughter? You gotta be a bull, not a sheep, to get by in my family. Why was I telling you this?"
If his overtalking was genetic, I wondered if I'd have as much luck with Matt. "Any chance I can talk to your brother today?"
"If he's home," Justin said. "He's looking to be all-star baseball, so his coach has him and these two other guys at extra practices. We don't talk much since the dreaded Barbie incident. Dang, I should not have told you that one. I was, um, overstimulated last night." He laughed anyway.
"Personally, I don't think it's that big a deal," I said, concerning Barbie. "Bedrooms are private places, ya know? They're where you try thoughts out. It doesn't necessarily mean you're adopting a policy."
"Oh, I didn't think it was that big a deal either," Justin said. "But Matt didn't speak to me for a month. Honest to God, he tries to be Mr. Perfect, probably to make up for the rest of us. It's like his job. You want a really sucky interview? Like, the opposite of me? Call him sometime."
"So, you think Aunt Dee Dee brought your brother to Texas, financed him."
"Not Texas. You gotta be kidding. My mother is not stupid. While Torey Adams was still in the hospital, she bought herself a plane ticket and paid a surprise visit to Aunt Dee Dee, hoping she would find him there, despite her feelings about Richardson. Not a trace. Aunt Dee Dee sent him somewhere, that's what I think. Alaska, California, who knows? They moved around for a bit when Uncle Lance was still in the military, had friends all over. My brother could have been living in Saigon for all we know. They were stationed there for a while."
I kept staring at him, in awe of one thing.
"Justin, you don't sound too scared of your mother."
He looked at me and chuckled softly again. "Mary Ellen and Kobe spewed all their gossip last night when Mary Ellen called my clinic. She said there was this blind guy who was a reporter. She says you're as scared of your mother as my brother was of my mom. Whatever you told her and Kobe last night must have been off the charts."
"I mostly remember telling them things so they would agree to find you," I said. "My personal woes were a tradeoff."
"I'm flattered," he said. "Though I was not extremely close to my brother, and I'm not exactly close to my mom. Maybe I can't help you much in the great-story front. But maybe I can help you get over your mother garbage. I just came from rehab, where everybody is getting over something—believe me. I'll probably go home, sometime tonight, tomorrow, whenever I get my act together ... I just need a chance to brace up for it. I can take you with me. You can break yourself in for your own bullring by meeting my mom. She doesn't bite. Usually."
No thanks. I had planned on sending RayAnn to do that interview, but I didn't like how he was chuckling and watching me. He just didn't get it.
"What's so good about your mom?" I asked. "Yeah, truthfully, I thought she sounded very self-absorbed and loud and ... terrifying."
"She's loud. And self-absorbed, I like that word. She's never laid a hand on me, if that's what you're after."
"No..." I wasn't sure what I was after. I'd always felt under my mother's power somehow. She was huge to me. How the Mother Creed would not be huge to Justin was beyond me. "I just don't picture her as the goodhearted type, I guess."
He sat up and lit another cigarette. Then he lay back, dangling it out his window and trying to blow smoke upside down over his head.
"Remember that part in Adams's story where my mom told him, Ali, and Principal Ames that her dad used to hang her upside down with ropes and chains outside their shack in the boondocks?"
"Yeah."
"Scary guy, huh? I was never allowed to meet my grandfather when I was a kid. I didn't even know he was out there until a couple years ago. Then one day, Mom decided we were old enough and she took us out there to meet her dad."
"What was he like?" I asked.
"Drunk. Pushing seventy, but looks ninety. Basically harmless by that point in his demented existence. I couldn't put this old man with the Santa Claus beard, gumming his food, with the morning-after tremors, in with the picture of little girls all tied up and hanging upside down from trees."
"The pl
ace was a pit?" I asked.
"No, actually, it was spotless. My mom had been going out there for years to take care of him."
I felt pushed back, as if he'd said it with the intent to amaze me, to prove something. He just kept blinking at me in a satisfied way.
"She took care of the guy who abused her so badly?" I asked increduously.
"Yeah. She wouldn't let him live in our house ... not with a whiskey habit that supposedly could turn him into a maniac without notice. Mom's been going out there at least once a week since Chris was born to clean up. Lately she has to bathe him, shave him, and change his Depends. Now she goes every day."
"How does he still get booze if he's gumming his food and, uh, using diapers as a toilet?" RayAnn asked.
"I got a handful of McIntyre cousins out there, descendants from a first marriage of my grandfather's. They're in their thirties. Mack and Ozone are my favorites. And while they don't help clean up after Grandpa, I suspect they keep him in Ol' Sweat Sock, figuring he's got nothing else to live for, so let him gum a bottle neck if he wants to."
"She still goes?" I asked. I wanted to ask about her drinking habit. Drinking would seem like the last thing she would want to do, though I understood parental drinking from watching it develop for years. I don't think wanting to drink is a prerequisite. It happens so slowly, and the drinker is the last to notice anything amiss. Justin was on a roll, so I let it lie.
"So, she's not this evil witch. Mom doesn't know I've done anything more than shake hands with Mack and Ozone. They make me think of what Bo would be like without the army. They're burly biker types, but they take me on dirt bike rides all over the place. I've gone out there to shoot pool. There's this bar out that way, Brownie's. They call themselves the Brownie's Mafia, and other boons treat them with respect. I know, 'cuz they take me in the back entrance. Big hearts, the McIntyre clan. They just ... a lot of them always want their own way and it gets them into trouble."
"Last night at the crime scene, some people told me you hit your mother once." I wondered if I should have gone after her less controversial drinking habit. I didn't want to upset him, and suddenly his energy went to black. He hardly moved, but his eyes cleared of humor and his cheeks flamed up.
"I'm part McIntyre too. Maybe that's an excuse. I guess you could say ... my mom and I were at a crossroads that night. If I didn't stand up to her, I'd have ended up like my brother, doing everything she said and hating every minute of my life. I did not want to be my brother. I love my brother, but there's one thing about him I don't respect, okay? He's a runner. I gotta face down my devils, or I lose, okay? Which doesn't mean to say that it's easy to hit your mother. Oh my God. She got me in some military ju jitzu hold right afterward that I could have easily gotten out of, but I just let her win. Because once you've beat your mother, what does that say about this world? What kind of a place is this? You know?"
"Yes, mothers are sacred," I said, despite that I saw it from a different angle.
"She let go of me to call the cops, and her face was all bleeding, and I just peeled out of the house. Had somewhere important to go that I couldn't tell her about."
Drug deal? I could sense his honesty shutting down. Fistfighting your mother could stress anybody. Time to close it up.
"I could listen to you forever, I think. You're smart for high school."
"Tell that to my teachers," he said, with no joking smile to cut his tension.
"RayAnn and I have to go to the police station now. But I don't want to lose you. How can I get ahold of you later, or where can I find you?"
"Gimme your cell."
I handed it to him, and I heard him punching his number in. I could also hear him sniffing up tears suddenly.
"Shit. I can't see." He swiped at his eyes, tossed the cell into my lap, and opened the car door. "I won't go home until I get myself together and the hour is right, probably late tonight. Until then, I'll be at the Lightning Field."
"I thought you said the Lightning Field was—"
"Yeah, my party haven," he admitted quickly. "It's where I also get my peace."
He got out, slammed the door, and started walking away.
Between my guilt and my curiosity, I was tempted to bag on the cops and go with him.
RayAnn stopped me with valuable wisdom: "Mike, he's not Charlie. Don't get emotionally involved."
Charlie... my brother. RayAnn knew a lot of things about Charlie because she'd dug it out of me a few times. I knew she was right.
My mind was good enough to remind me of RayAnn's age and her lack of school experiences. "You're not going with him," I said. "We'll find him together later."
RayAnn spun the car around, we came up beside him, and I spoke out the window.
"Do you want us to drop you off? We have time for that—"
"No, I just want to chill by myself for a while."
"No drugs. Okay?"
"No coke, no 'ludes, no 'shrooms, no Vals, gotcha," he said, but almost in a trance.
"You mentioned medication last night," I said, not very professionally. "Do you have it with you?"
I felt mortified at my breeches, especially when RayAnn said under her breath, "Not Charlie! Be careful." Yet I couldn't help feeling relieved as Justin reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out a prescription bottle, and muttered, "Thanks," as if he'd forgotten about it.
He went on, "Things don't get popping at the Lightning Field until dark. You can meet up with me by then, if you want. It will probably be a temptation station after the sun sets. The only person to care about it before sunset is me."
"We'll be back by four," RayAnn said. She had our list of perspective interviewees and had probably thought out a schedule last night after I fell asleep.
"Have fun with the cops. They're going to try to blame Darla on Danny Burden, I guess."
Chief Rye had mentioned Danny Burden as the boyfriend. "I think that's what makes sense. You know where he is?" I asked.
"Not a clue. But they're barking up the wrong tree."
It was a blurting moment. And it was the first clue I had that maybe Justin wasn't crying about fighting with his mother. He had told us not to bring up Darla, I recalled. These stories he told about the boondocks, the people he knew from back there ... I had read somewhere in the farthest corner of Torey Adams's site that Bo had asked Justin to look after Darla when he went into the service. It was just a line in a gossip post that I hadn't given much thought to until this moment. I wondered if maybe Justin had taken it seriously. The hell. He was only sixteen years old. He wasn't the angel Gabriel.
"What do you know about it?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said. "But I'd like to hear later what the cops tell you. Let's see how smart they are this time. Darla committed suicide."
I wanted to ask what gossip network he'd spun into to hear that ... and how she got into an amateur-dug grave if that was the case. But he darted off into the woods, obviously some shortcut to the Lightning Field, with his hands at his face, probably pushing tears away.
ELEVEN
AT THE POLICE STATION, RAYANN AND I were asked to wait for Chief Rye in the lobby. We sat in what I imagined were the two chairs that Torey and Ali had sat in on that night long ago: the night Bo Richardson had been busted for trying to break in to the Creeds' to get Chris's diary. Ali and Torey had also been brought in for questioning. For RayAnn and me, it was like walking into the pages of a novel. I had to force the peaceful grin off my face.
The chief was pacing and talking and pacing and talking with the officer I'd met last night, "Tiny" Hughes, behind a big picture window. There was an elderly secretary named Millie at a desk. I could hear seemingly meaningless words floating out from him and Officer Hughes: "Fax us the..." and "Why would Danny have..."
I figured we might wait quite a while. RayAnn had her laptop with her.
"Look up bipolar disorder," I said.
She rolled her eyes, keeping me in check by saying, "He's not Charlie"
I sa
id nothing, which probably got her feeling some level of sympathy. RayAnn had had Abnormal Psych last semester too, but in a different section.
"As I never was forced to study-for-the-test/forget-after-the-test, I don't forget things after the test," she said, alluding to the three weeks we'd spent on this fairly common disorder. "What did you forget that you'd like me to remind you of?"
"How bad a case Justin has?" I suggested.
"Well. We know that manic doesn't mean happy. It means hyperalert to certain situations and sensations. It can mean that people's minds race, which his does. It can mean that people will believe they'll be millionaires next week, or that they're vital to the operations of the universe. He doesn't have that last thing, thank God. Believing you're the God of the Underworld is where it gets serious."
"And he didn't claim to have heard voices," I said. "That's really serious."
"Yeah, let's hope he didn't hallucinate," she said, obviously thinking, as I was, of his mystery statement before dropping off to sleep last night: "Quantum thought works ... and I don't believe in ghosts..."
She dropped her fist onto my leg, punching lightly with affection.
"I'd say he's not too bad. He's probably like millions of people out there: if he stays on his medication and away from controlled substances, you'll never know he has it," she said, then added with more concern, "unless it's his mania that's making him interested in quantum thought. There's a thin line between believing your good energy is powerful enough to bring you good things, and having a mental illness that has you convinced you're drawing your brother back."
"I know," I said.
"Aren't you anxious to see those e-mails? See if there's anything to them?"
"I ... have a horrible feeling that they're a scam," I said. "Though the timing—a couple weeks after he'd been trying quantum thought—is very strange."
Chief Rye's voice carried out of the office, saying, "Sorry, I don't have anything for you yet. Call back at..." It became inaudible, but he soon walked into the lobby.