Summer of Night

  "What's your name, boy?" Dale told him.

  "Oh, yeah. You've been out here before to play with Duanie, haven't you?"

  "Yessir," said Dale and thought Duanie? "Do you know who killed my boy?" "No sir," said Dale. Not for sure. Not until I see Duane's notebooks.

  Mr. McBride drained another bottle. "I told 'em, ask that fuck Congden, that fake justice of the peace. They say Cong-den's been missin' since the day after my Duanie died and what did I know about it? They think I killed him? Dumb sonsofbitches.” He fumbled on the table, knocking over more bottles, but could not find one with anything left in it. McBride stood up, staggered to a couch against one wall, brushed some junk from it, and collapsed there, still holding the shotgun across his legs. "I should've killed him. Should've made him tell who did this to Art and my boy, then killed him…" He sat up suddenly. "What'd you say you wanted, boy? Duane isn't here."

  Dale felt a chill go down his back. "Yessir. I know that. I came to find a notebook Duane kept. Maybe more than one. He had something in it for me."

  Mr. McBride shook his head, then grabbed the back of the couch to steady himself. "Uh-uh. He just kept his story ideas in his notebooks, boy. Not for you. Not for me…" He lowered his head to the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. "Maybe I shouldn't've kept his funeral to myself the way I did," he whispered. "It was easy to forget that he had his own friends."

  "Yessir," whispered Dale.

  "I wasn't sure where to spread his ashes," mumbled Mr. McBride, as if talking in his sleep. "They call 'em ashes, but there're still bits of bone in there. Did you know that, boy?"

  "No, sir."

  The man on the couch continued mumbling. "So I sprinkled some of them in the river where Art's went… Duanie'd like that, I think… and spread the rest out in the field where he and the dog used to play. Where the dog's buried." Mr. McBride opened his eyes and fixed them on Dale. "You think I did wrong splittin' it up like that, boy?"

  Dale swallowed. His throat ached and it was difficult to speak. "No sir," he whispered.

  "Me neither," whispered Duane's father and closed his eyes again.

  "Could I look at them, sir?" asked Dale.

  "What, boy?" It was a sleepy, distracted voice.

  "Duane's notebooks. The ones we were talking about."

  "Couldn't find 'em," said Mr. McBride, his eyes still shut. "Looked downstairs… everywhere… couldn't find Duanie's notebooks. Like the fucking door of the Cadillac…" His voice trailed off.

  Dale waited a full minute, heard the man's breathing turn into a snore, and then he took a step toward the basement stairs.

  Mr. McBride pumped the action on the shotgun. "Go away, boy," he mumbled. "Go on now. Get far away from here."

  Dale glanced at the stairway-so close-and then said, "Yessir," and went back out through the kitchen door.

  The light was very bright. Dale walked a hundred feet down the driveway, feeling his t-shirt plastered to his skin, and then ducked behind the Chinese elms and into the cornfield. He didn't think that Mr. McBride had gone into the kitchen to watch him leave. He cut back through the tight rows of corn until he almost stumbled over Mike and the others still waiting there.

  "Jesus," hissed Harlen,"what kept you in there?"

  Dale told them.

  Mike sighed and rolled over onto his back, squinting up through the cornstalks at the blazing sky. "That does it for today. He probably won't go into town until he wakes up tonight.”

  "Uh-uh," said Dale. "I'm going back in."

  The window had been skinnier than Dale had guessed. He'd ripped his t-shirt and taken some skin off getting in.

  There was another worktable under the window-the damn house seemed full of them-and Dale had placed his feet carefully and lowered himself onto it, hearing the trestles creak under him.

  The basement was much cooler than outside and smelled like a basement: faint odors of mildew, laundry detergent, backed-up drainpipes, sawdust, cement, and ozone, probably from all the radios and electronic kits that lay around on every surface.

  Dale had visited Duane's basement room before, and he knew that he'd come into the back part of the basement where the shower and laundry stuff was. Duane's 'bedroom' corner was near the stairs. Great. Where the man upstairs can hear me. And where I can't get to this window to wave.

  He tiptoed across the back room, pausing at the open door to listen. No noise from the stairway or the upper floors. Dale wished that the doorway to the stairs had been closed.

  It was darker in this room; there were no windows here. No way out. There were various lights-a hanging cord for an overhead bulb, a lamp next to the dark mass of a bed, an artist's type of suspensor light on the big table near the bed-but Dale couldn't turn one of them on, the light would reflect up the staircase. He won't see it if he's asleep. A less foolhardy part of Dale's mind reminded him that the man with the shotgun would see it if he were awake. Even the sound might tip him off.

  Dale was having trouble breathing as he crouched near the bed, waiting for his eyes to adapt to the near blackness. What if something comes out from under the bed… a white arm… Duane! Duane's face all bloated and dead like Tubby's was, of course… shredded and torn the way Digger said that he…

  Dale forced himself to stop it. The bed was neatly made and as Dale's eyes adapted, he could see the faint furrows and ridges on the spread. Nothing came out from under the bed.

  There were books everywhere. Books in homemade bookcases, stacks of books on furniture beyond the bed, rows of books on the desktop and windowsill, cartons of books under the desk, even long rows of paperbacks on the cement ledges that ran around the basement. The only thing that competed with books was the number of radios: clock radios and table-top models, old radios in Art Deco Bakelite curves and naked radios made from kits, tiny transistor radios and one full-size Atwater Kent console job between Duane's bed and his desk that stood at least four feet tall.

  Dale started looking along the shelves, in the cartons of books. He remembered what Duane's notebooks looked like: little spiral jobs, some as large as a school notebook, but most of them smaller. They must be somewhere.

  The desk had yellow legal pads, cups filled with pencils and pens, even a stack of typewriter paper and an old Smith Corona typewriter, but no notebooks. Dale tiptoed to the bed, felt under the mattress, tossed the pillows. Nothing. He had moved to the makeshift closet and was patting down Duane's few flannel shirts and carefully folded corduroy pants there, feeling weirder and weirder about going through his dead friend's stuff, when his knee brushed one of the low tables by the bed and a stack of books tumbled to the floor. Dale froze.

  "Who's there!" Mr. McBride's voice was filled with phlegm and confusion, but it seemed to be just up the stairs.

  "Who's down there, goddamn it?" Heavy footsteps moved overhead, going from the dining room to the short hall by the kitchen where the stairway was.

  Dale looked across the long room, through the open doorway, at the glint of light from the small window on the far wall. He'd never make it to the window, much less through it. Mr. McBride had just awakened from his drunken sleep-he probably didn't even remember Dale's visit-and Dale would just be a dark shape scrambling in the basement. His back itched at the thought of buckshot blowing his spine out through the front of his body.

  Footsteps in the hall. "I'm comin' down, goddamn you. I've got you."

  Dale heard the shotgun being pumped again. The shell Mr. McBride had chambered earlier skittered across the floor above. Then footsteps on the top stairs.

  Under the bed, thought Dale. No, it'd be the first place the man looked. He had about ten seconds before McBrkle reached the bottom of the stairs, turned into the room itself.

  Dale remembered the way they screwed around sometimes with the empty console-radio shell in Mike's chickenhouse. The bootsteps were halfway down the stairs as he bounced over the bed, pulled the Atwater Kent away from the wall, crouched behind it, and pulled it back just as the heavy footst
eps reached the bottom.

  "I see you, goddamn it!" It was a fierce cry. "Think you're gonna get me the way you did my brother and my boy?"

  Footsteps staggered into the center of the room. There was a clothesline hanging there and Dale could hear something striking it-the barrel of the shotgun perhaps-then the sound of the line being ripped down.

  "Come out of there, goddamn you!"

  The radio had its working parts there, but there was just room for Dale to curl up at the bottom of the console. He covered his face with his forearms, trying not to whimper but imagining the shotgun aimed at him from eight feet away. Dale had fired his father's pump-action 12-gauge and his own.410 over-and-under. He knew the flimsy wood wouldn't shelter him for a second. He would have cried out then…" called a surrender as if they were two kids playing hide-and-seek… but his voice would not work. He panted to keep from screaming.

  "I see you!" cried the dead boy's father. But his footsteps receded into the other part of the basement. "Goddammit, I know somebody's down here. Come out now!"

  He didn't see me. Something sharp, part of a pipe maybe, was digging into Dale's back. Electronic stuff scratched his bowed neck. There was some sort of shelf down here that cut into his shoulder. Dale was not about to move to get more comfortable.

  The footsteps came back into the bedroom part of the basement. They moved slowly-stalking-to the far wall, across to the closet, back to the base of the stairs, then… stealthily… up to the desk not three feet from where Dale crouched behind the Atwater Kent.

  There was a sudden noise as Mr. McBride crouched, flung back the bedspread, and scraped the shotgun barrel under the bed. He stood up then, almost leaning on the radio, Dale knew; he could smell the man. Can he smell me?

  For a long moment there was silence so deep that Dale was sure that the half-crazy father could hear his heart beating behind the radio shell. Then Dale heard something that almost made him cry aloud.

  "Duanie?" came Mr. McBride's voice, no longer fierce, no longer threatening, only cracked and broken. "Duanie, is that you, son?"

  Dale held his breath.

  After an eternity, the heavy footsteps, heavier now, moved back to the staircase, paused, and went up the stairs. There was the sound of breaking glass in the dining room as bottles were thrown around. Footsteps. The kitchen door banged open and shut. A moment later there came the sound of a truck engine starting up from behind the house… We couldn't see it back there… and tires crunching gravel, turning down the drive.

  Dale waited another four or five minutes, his back and neck aching wildly now, but making sure that the silence was real. Then he shoved the radio away from the wall and crawled out, massaging his arm where it had been pinched against the shelf or something.

  He paused by the bed, still on all fours, then pulled the radio cabinet farther out. There was just enough light to see by.

  Duane's spiral notebooks were stacked on the shelf, at least several dozen of them. Dale could see how easy it had been to lean over from the bed or desk and set them in place.

  Dale tugged off his t-shirt, ripped and sweaty as it was, wrapped the notebooks in them, and went into the other room to climb out the window. He could've gone up the stairs and out through the kitchen with less scraping to his hide, but he wasn't sure that Mr. McBride had driven off.

  Dale was heading for the place he'd left the others when half a dozen arms lurched out from the first row of corn and pulled him in. He tumbled into the cornstalks. A dirty hand covered his mouth.

  "God," whispered Mike. "We'd just decided he'd killed you. Let him go, Harlen."

  Jim Harlen removed his hand.

  Dale spat and mopped blood from a cut lip. "Why'd you do that, shithead?"

  Harlen glared at him but said nothing.

  "You got 'em!" cried Lawrence, holding up the bundle of notebooks.

  The boys started poring through them.

  "Shit!" said Harlen.

  "Hey," said Kevin. He looked quizzically at Dale. "Do you get this?"

  Dale shook his head. The notebooks were filled with scrig-gles and scrawls, strange loops and dashes and curlicues. It was either some sort of impossible code or Martian.

  "We're screwed," said Harlen. "Let's go home."

  "Wait," said Mike. He was frowning at one of the small notebooks. Suddenly he grinned. "I know this."

  "You can read it?" Lawrence's voice was awestruck.

  "Uh-uh," said Mike, "I can't read it, but I know it."

  Dale leaned closer. "You can figure out this code?"

  "It isn't code," said Mike, grin still in place. "My stupid sister Peg took a course in this stuff. It's shorthand… you know, the sort of fast writing secretaries do?"

  The boys whooped and hollered until Kevin suggested they get quiet. They set the notebooks in Lawrence's backpack as carefully as if they'd been new-gathered eggs, then ran in a commando crouch back to where they'd left their bikes.

  Dale felt the sun burning his neck and arms, despite his tan, long before they got to Jubilee College Road. The distant water tower shimmered in the rising heat waves as if the entire town were an illusion, a mirage on the verge of disappearing.

  They were halfway to town when the cloud of dust rose behind them, a truck closing rapidly.

  Mike gestured and he and Harlen and Kev took one side, Dale and Lawrence the other. They crossed the ditch, dropped their bikes, and made ready to climb the fence into the fields.

  The truck slowed, the dark cab shimmering badly in the heat from the road and its own engine. The driver stared curiously as he crept by. The truck stopped and backed up.

  "What're you doing?" called Kevin's father from the high cab of the milk truck. The long trailer tank gleamed of polished steel, almost too bright to look at in the midday sun. "What are you guys up to?"

  Kevin grinned, made a meaningless gesture toward town. "Just riding."

  His father squinted at the boys perched on the fence wire like birds ready to take wing. "Get home quick," he said. "I need help cleaning out the tank, and your mother wanted you to weed the garden this afternoon."

  "Yessir," said Kevin and gave a salute. His dad frowned and the long truck geared up, disappearing into its own dust.

  They stood a minute on the road, holding their bikes awhile before remounting. Dale wondered if the others had wobbly legs.

  There were no more cars or trucks before they reached the shade of town. It was dinner there, the lights filtered through a dozen layers of leaves everywhere along the streets, but the day was just as hot, summer still crushing them beneath its heel as they met briefly in the chickenhouse and then fanned out for lunch and their various chores.

  Mike kept the notebooks. His sister still had one of her Gregg shorthand textbooks around and he promised to find it and start decoding. Dale came over after lunch to help.

  Mike checked on Memo, found Peg's book on a shelf next to her stupid diary-she'd kill him if she caught him in her room-and took the whole batch of books out to the chickenhouse.

  He and Dale started looking just to confirm it was shorthand, decided to decode a line or two, found it tough going at first, and then fell into the rhythm of it. Duane McBride's squiggles weren't quite the same as the ones in the textbook, but they were close enough. Mike went back into the house, found a Big Chief tablet and two pencils, and went back to the chickenhouse. The boys worked in silence.

  Six hours later, they were still reading when Mike's mother called him in for supper.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Mike volunteered to go talk to Mrs. Moon. He knew her best.

  The evening before, after supper and during the long, slow waning of the day's heat and light, everybody but Cordie had rendezvoused at the chickenhouse to hear what was in the notebooks.

  "Where's the girl?" asked Mike.

  Jim Harlen shrugged. "I went out to her rattrap of a house…"

  "Alone?" interrupted Lawrence.

  Harlen squinted at the younger boy, then ign
ored him. "I went out there this afternoon, but nobody was home."

  "Maybe they were out shopping or something," said Dale.

  Harlen shook his head. He looked pale and oddly vulnerable in his cast and sling this evening. "Uh-uh, I mean it was empty. Crap scattered around everywhere… old newspapers, bits of furniture, an ax… like the family threw everything in the back of a truck and took off.”

  " "Not a bad idea,” whispered Mike. He had finished decoding Duane's journals.

  "Huh?" said Kevin.

  "Listen," said Mike O'Rourke, lifting the pertinent notebooks and beginning to read.

  The four boys listened for almost an hour, Dale finishing reading when Mike's voice began to get raspy. Dale had read it all before-he and Mike had compared notes as they decoded the stuff-but just hearing it out loud, even in his own voice, made his legs feel shaky.

  "Jesus Christ," whispered Harlen as they finished the stuff about the Borgia Bell and Duane's uncle. "Holy shit," he added in the same reverent tone.

  Kevin crossed his arms. It was getting quite dark out and Kev's t-shirt glowed the brightest of any of them there." "That bell was hanging up there all the time we were in school… all those years?"

  "Mr. Ashley-Montague told Duane that it'd been removed and melted down and everything," said Dale. "It's in one of the notebooks here and I heard it myself, at the Free Show last month."

  "There hasn't been a Free Show for a long time," whined Lawrence.

  "Shut up," said Dale. "Here… I'm going to skip some of this stuff… this is from when Duane talked to Mrs. Moon… it was the same day we all had dinner out at Uncle Henry's, the same day that…"

  "… that Duane was killed," finished Mike.

  " "Yeah,” said Dale." "Listen.” He read the notes verbatim: June 17: Talking to Mrs. Emma Moon. Remembers the bell! Talking about a terrible thing. Says her Or-ville wasn't involved. A terrible thing about the bell. Winter of 1899-1900. Several children in town… one on a farm she thinks… disappeared. Mr. Ashley (no Montague then, before the families joined names) offered a $1,000 reward. No clues.