As it turned out. the manager didn’t care what people in Neptune, Maryland. thought of Bryon Bell or how highly he regarded himself. Bryon was nothing here in Baltimore: he didn’t stand a chance. By accident or by design, the old man spat upon the ground as he dismissed Bryon, dripping spittle on the dirt and on Bryon’s boots. Bryon had a bad temper when things turned against him; he liked things easy, and he could get downright evil when the least difficulty arose. It had happened when that pregnant girl begged him to marry her; he’d just lifted her up and tossed her out the door pregnant or not, pleading or weeping, he most assuredly did not care. He didn’t stop to think at such times; the adrenaline ran through him, like poison that had been heated up to a feverish temperature. Facing a man who laughed at him. who reduced him to dust the way he had always turned others to ashes, he picked up the bat closest to him and he slammed the hell out of that big-shot manager. Down on the ground, the manager had spit up bile like anyone else. His blood was just as red as the next man’s, and although there was a certain savage satisfaction in that, there was a steep price to pay as well.
Bryon Bell served eighteen months for assault, enough time for him to harden into the sort of man that no one would wish to cross. He no longer saw faces when he looked at people; he thought only about how they might serve his interests. When they let him out of jail, he wasn’t a boy anymore, but a full-grown, spite-filled man who was so handsome doves toppled out of the sky to light on his shoulders and women dropped the keys to their front doors into his lap. His eyes were so dark a woman could drown in them; she could fall so deeply and so fast she’d never know she had stumbled until she was gone.
As for Bryon, there was something unquenchable inside him, and an emptiness too infinite to ever be satisfied. As he walked through the world, all he could hear was the word míne. There was so much he wanted, so much he needed to have. It was hard for him to stay in one place after spending a year and a halfin a cell, so he took to the winding roads of Maryland. In the spring, when the fruit trees began to flower, so many peach and quince, almond and plum, that the air itself seemed scented with perfume, he worked as a roofer. In the winter, he cleaned chimneys and plowed snow. Throughout the year, he hired himself out to contractors as a day laborer, happy to tear down walls or raze buildings, as if destruction had been bred in his blood.
Years passed this way, and in this time he became so embittered about his place in the world that he cared not a damn for the human race. For amusement, he’d taken to setting fire to farmers’ fields. He’d start a blaze in the foxtail grass that grew at the edge of cornfields; he’d throw lit matches at the leaves of the sweet gums and the myrtles, making certain to leave a black and burning trail behind. Although such senseless acts gave him a jolt of gratification, happiness was further and further away every day. He had started to feel as though he were drying up inside, the way a man does when he’s walking across the desert. One summer day he came to a town he had never been to before and found he was thirsty. He was so thirsty, as a matter of fact, that he thought he might die if he didn’t have a drink, and that was how he came to the general store where he bought a six-pack of beer and noticed a beautiful girl at the register. As she rang up his purchases, he could tell by the way this girl looked at him that he could have her if he wanted her, and a gorgeous, slow smile spread across his face.
Bryon had been working outdoors for more than a month, helping to build fences and backyard decks, and hed turned a golden color. In all that gold, there was that dark gaze a person could drown in if they failed to look away. The girl behind the register stared at him blankly with her pretty green eyes. Bryon figured her to be eighteen, a hometown girl who had a lot to learn. She had long red hair that he wanted to get his hands on. She wore shorts and a little shirt that he wanted to tear right off of her, so he smiled more deeply, the smile he knew women loved. Not exactly sincere, but full of possibility and promise and pleasure.
“What time do you get off work?” he asked. He figured the smile on his face told the rest of the story about everything he was looking for, which was a good time and something to make him forget his thirst.
“Not till nine,” the girl said. “I’m trapped until closing.”
“Kind of like being in jail. That is some bad luck.” Bryon Bell lifted a pack of cigarettes and ripped open the cellophane; he was pleased to note the girl behind the register didn’t ask him to pay. “Not that luck can’t be changed.”
The girl laughed, a sweet, musical sound. She was too tall and freckled for boys her age to notice she was beautiful, but Bryon Bell had an eye for such things.
“Let’s take off,” he said. “Let’s have some fun.”
“Now?” The girl laughed again. She had an itchy I’ve got to get out of here look that allowed Bryon to gauge what would happen next. He knew that she was coming with him long before she knew it herself.
“There must be someplace to go swimming.” he said. It was a blistering hot day; and the store wasn’t air-conditioned. One fan hummed in the window and pushed the heat around.
“Hell’s Pond,” the girl said.
Bryon laughed at that, and liked it fine. “Hell?”
“It’s spring-fed, almost like a hot spring, but at high tide it’s half salt water.”
“It is much too nice outside to be working.” Bryon gave her a look and held up the cold six-pack of beer he’d grabbed to ease his thirst. One more peal of laughter and he had her. She left her boss a note—Gone swimming and locked up the store.
“They’re going to fire me.” The girl hesitated before she got into his truck. It was carly August and the wild rice was turning yellow all over town, as pretty as sunlight. “They’re going to kill me,” she said.
“For sw imming? I don’t think so. That’s not a federal offense. And take a good look around.” The girl eyed the empty road, the fields of millet and wheat, the red-winged blackbirds on the telephone lines. “I realty don’t think you’re going to miss many customers today.” Bryon told her.
And so she got into his truck, eyes closed, as if she were taking the plunge into cold water instead of directing a stranger toward the warm and brackish shore of Hell’s Pond. He promised not to look when they took off their clothes and dived in. But of course he did, and he’d been right, she was gorgeous, so tall and pale, turning green in the murky water of the pond. Unfortunately, every time he tried to get near, the most he could manage was a kiss. Later on she ran behind some pine trees to get dressed, then came back to drink beer with him. their feet in the water that had begun to seem warmer than the air. Little shadowy fish came to nibble at their toes, and Bryon told his companion he knew why that was: even the fish could tell how delicious she was, good enough to cat.
When the day was done, Bryon still hadn’t gotten what he wanted, but that didn’t mean he was giving up. He drove her home through the dusk. A scrim of pollen was floating through the air. She gave him directions, and as soon as he pulled off the road, he kissed her deeply, leaving her breathless.
“This isn’t enotrgh,” he told her. “I want to see you some more.”
“What difference does it make?” The girl shook her head sadly. “You’re just going to leave town.”
The sun had burned her cheeks, and she looked hot and flushed. This girl had probably fallen in love with Bryon Bell at the moment when he first walked into the store, if not before. She had been daydreaming about a mysterious stranger when the bells above the door jingled, someone with eyes as dark as the feathers of the blackbirds that now cut across the sky.
“Well, I might leave,” Bryon teased her. “Or I might not. I’ll come back for you later, and we’ll ride around awhile, and then we’ll see.”
The girl looked across the field. The lights in her house were on. It was a white farmhouse, miles from anywhere.
“After midnight. I’ll blink the headlights, and you come on out.”
“I can’t,” the girl said, but she kissed him once more
.
“Don’t disappoint me,” he told her right before she got out of the truck and ran to the house.
Bryon went back the way he had come. He was maybe forty miles from home as the crow flies, but people in Neptune never went anywhere, and he felt sure he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. As it turned out, the town he was in was called Holden, and it had a decent bar called Holden’s Corner, and Bryon sat there for a good couple of hours, getting drunk and trying to extinguish the anger he always had boiling inside him, hoping to somehow quench the desperate thirst he felt within. Afterward, he drove around on the back roads for a while, thinking maybe he’d head for the interstate and go on up to Philly, where there would certainly be jobs. But he’d had quite a lot to drink, and he started thinking about that red-haired girl from the general store, and before long he found himself on the dirt road that led to the farmhouse where he’d brought her earlier. Instead of drifting up to Philadelphia, the way he’d intended, he went there instead, out past the dark fields, guided by starlight and his own drunken sense of direction.
He pulled his truck over and turned off the engine. He blinked the headlights, but the girl didn’t appear. He blinked them again; a tunnel of white light illuminated the stand of bald cypress by the house, but again nothing happened. He got out of the truck, already starting to feel the heat of his anger. He had parked in a field of strawberries, but he didn’t notice as he walked over the plants. He started once, when he glimpsed someone lurking between rows of berries, but it was only a scarecrow, set there to frighten the blackbirds away. So he went past the lettuce and the corn and the trough filled with water for the two sheep that slept in the barn, then headed up to the house. He looked in the windows, and he figured out pretty quickly which was hers, the one with the sheer organdy curtains. He climbed in the window, just like that, good and drunk, and more than a little pissed off.
She was in her bed, under a white blanket. He got in with her, fast, pulling the covers over them, disregarding the mud his boots would leave on the sheets. She almost screamed, but he put his hand over her mouth.
“I told you I’d be back,” he said.
The room was like a child’s room, with dolls and stuffed animals and pink wallpaper patterned with daisies. Bryon figured some women never grew up. Some women liked to act like little girls, when it suited them. Sure enough, this girl looked terrified, even though they’d been together all day, and for some reason Bryon liked that. Maybe she thought she was too good for him, but when he was done with her, she’d be mooning over him for weeks. Shed wish on every star for him to return, but hed be in Philadelphia by then: he’d have already forgotten her and moved on to the next girl, and maybe the one after that.
“Where were you?” he whispered. “You were supposed to come out when I flashed the lights. That wasn’t very nice of you.”
She was wearing lightweight pajamas and as soon as he moved his hand to cover her breast, she panicked. One touch and she started to fight him, arching her back, using her nails, as though she hadn’t spent the afternoon kissing him at the pond, swimming without any clothes on. She tried her best to get away, until he slammed her up against the wall; then she fell backward, like one of those rag dolls on her bed. Her long red hair swept across her face, and at last he did what he’d been wanting to do all day. She was tight, as though she were a virgin, and she smelled good after the sort of girls he’d gotten used to, girls he picked up in bars who begged for him to go home with them and wept when he left them, long before morning.
He didn’t even know he’d hurt her until he was done. He whispered in her ear, “I’ll bet I’m your first.” which, in fact, he was since she was fifteen years old, not eighteen as he’d assumed, and had never even kissed a boy before this afternoon at the pond. She had indeed been a virgin, and maybe that was why there was blood all over him.
“Hey, you,” he said. “Answer me.”
It was then that he saw blood on her face. He had hit her head against the wall too hard, and it had split open, just like that. He scrambled onto his knees. For some reason, every breath was stabbing through him like a knife. There was blood on his hands and his legs and his cock, and he grabbed the sheet and wiped himself clean. He was hysterical, but he knew enough to be careful. If he didn’t calm down, it would be over for him. Something had happened that he’d never expected, but it had happened all the same.
Shit, shit, shit, he said to himself, until the words became nothing but a chain of breath. He hadn’t even thought to ask her name, but now he saw a plaque on her bookshelf She was a dancer and had won first prize at a competition. Her name was Rachel Morris, and she had just finished tenth grade. He saw her diary, there beside her bed, and the key, which was strung on a blue ribbon. By now, he could hear her blood falling onto the carpet. He got down on his knees right then and there, and as he did, he felt himself leave his own body. The responsibility of his deeds descended upon him like a mountain of murderous stones, and for the first time in his life, he cried.
It was the rain that made him snap out of it; rain had begun to fall in buckets, and it hit against the windows as it poured down, drenching fields and roads alike. Bryon forced himself to move; he grabbed his clothes and used a pink sweater he found on the dresser to clean his fingerprints off the window glass and the ledge. He slipped into the night, naked as the day he’d been born, with nothing in his hands but his own bloody clothes and the key to Rachel Morris’s diary, which he’d grasped so tightly, he couldn’t seem to let go. He went into the strawberry field, where he’d seen the scarecrow, and quickly reached for whatever he could find-a white shirt, black slacks, old, worn shoes -leaving his own clothes behind, shirt, jeans, and boots, blood-stained and burning hot, there beside the scarecrow. Still, he could taste blood, and to wash it away he grabbed a handful of strawberries. As he swallowed the sweet fruit he felt how alive he was. His mouth, his eyes, his ears, all alive in the dark rain-drenched night.
He could feel his old self sink into the field as he walked away, and the person he was about to become rose up to enter into the same blood and bones. He got into his truck and drove to Hell’s Pond, the place where she'd taken him when the world seemed so splendid and he was certain he’d have whatever he wanted. He got out, but he left the engine running; he wedged a rock against the gas pedal, then leapt away as the truck lurched into the waters. Already, the rain was nothing more than a drizzle, gray and heartless and cold. He stood there in a bank of pickerelweed and wool grass, breathing hard as everything he’d ever been disappeared. His wallet and identification were stowed in the glove compartment, and thinking about the way he’d lost himself, he was as sober as he’d ever been in his life.
He was shivering, though the night air had turned mild and sweet as tears. The truck splashed and strained like a big fish. and then the waters closed over it. Bryon watched, but not for too long. He would need identification, a new name and a new history, but that wouldn’t be difficult. He was the sort of man who could compartmentalize the different sections of his mind, and the segment that held all that was selfish and cruel, that small, evil section, was floating beneath the green water. Under the cover of the night, he washed his hands and prayed for guidance before setting off on his travels. As far as he was concerned, Bryon Bell was gone.
Fair or Foul
THE HEARING IS BRIEF, HELD ON A muggy day. when the sticky heat and the rain boil the dispositions of just about everyone in Monroe, including the most even-tempered citizens. Four years from now, when the referendum to overhaul the town offices and the courthouse comes up once again, people will remember this stifling day, they’ll fan themselves and think of how they longed for air-conditioning and peace of mind. No one is fillly prepared for what is to come, save Jorie, who sits behind Ethan with her head bowed, and Barney Stark, who has taken his place beside Jorie, his heavy, serious face showing nothing, though he is on alert, ready to pick up the pieces when they begin to fall. Collie, too, knows what is about to ha
ppen, but he is nowhere to be seen; he’s off by himself, watching the steady rainfall from what was once the parlor of the abandoned house where he feels so comfortable, at the far end of King George’s Road, just three miles as the crow flies from the courthouse steps, but a world away as well.
Mark Derry sits in the last row to watch the proceedings. He has worn a tie and a jacket for the occasion and is sweltering for his troubles. This morning he phoned Dana Stark to inform her he wouldn’t be back till the end of the week to finish up their new bathroom. He waited for her to take him to task, more than ready to quit the whole damned project if she did, which would leave her without a commode or a sink, but Dana had surprised him and said there was no hurry. Mark had other things on his mind. Anyone could understand that. The Howards over on Sherwood Street haven’t made a fuss either; they already know their kitchen won’t be completed until well into the fall, despite the efforts of the handyman, Swift, hired to finish installing the cabinets and lay the floor. There are, indeed, more important issues to deal with, that much is true. There are circumstances that can’t be put on hold, to be set aside and forgotten for a better day to come.