What Dies in Summer

  Now I slowed down to light the second half of the Chesterfield I had started the day before yesterday. I said, “Why do you think anybody’d cut on a person and kill them like they did with those girls?”

  He shrugged. “Why’s anybody do anything, man? Because that’s what they wanta do. Haven’t you heard of people that like to hurt girls they’re doing it with? Tie ’em up, whip ’em, stuff like that?”

  I didn’t answer, trying unsuccessfully to imagine what relationship there could be between wanting someone and wanting to hurt them.

  “And then you got your snuff movies,” he said.

  “What’s a snuff movie?”

  “It’s like they’re just making some porno movie, but then when they got the girl tied up and everything they go ahead and kill her.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said, the thought generating a twisting sensation in my gut.

  He gave me a look.

  But, thinking it through, I decided he could be telling the truth. It had been my experience that nobody ever went broke overestimating how bad people could be.

  “Damn, man,” I said, feeling like I needed to take a bath or brush my teeth or something.

  “Then there’s people that want to get hurt,” he said. “Mosko-something-or-others. I guess they get together with the ones that like to hurt people. Match made in heaven.”

  At this point I stopped even trying to track what he was saying because it seemed to have left reality too far behind. Or maybe because it hadn’t.

  We angled down across the grass to the edge of the freeway between Illinois and Saner. Hot booming air rocked us on our heels as the traffic slammed by, both of us watching back to our left for a break to get across. Hubert started bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet with his jaw out and his hair flying in the diesel-flavored wind, and I knew he’d take the first excuse for an opening. All I wanted was to get to the other side alive, but for Hubert this crossing was always a grudge match. I took a last drag, dropped the butt and stepped on it.

  Sure as hell, Hubert was off and running before I thought he had any kind of shot at all. Ignoring the horns and screaming tires, he made it across the inside lane about half an inch ahead of an eighteen-wheeler, then kept on going across the median and onto the concrete of the far lanes without even seeming to break stride or look at the traffic. Then he was all the way across, dancing around triumphantly with his arms above his head, both middle fingers up, giving a loud whistle through his teeth.

  I waited for a real break and made the median, then a few seconds later got enough of a gap to cross the last two lanes. I caught up with Hubert and we headed on up the slope to hit Zang and turn down toward the Jukebox.

  We hadn’t been on Zang more than a minute when Uncle Cam pulled up beside us in his van. “Where ya goin?” he hollered.

  “Jukebox,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m goin’ that way,” he said. “Jump in.”

  Hubert leaned aside to spit, then we piled into the van and Cam pulled away. Hubert got out an emery board and started filing the ragged calluses on the ends of his chording fingers.

  I glanced at Cam as we drove along, noticing how his fine brown hair—which had always reminded me of baby hair—was getting farther back on his forehead. He was skinny, with arms that didn’t look particularly strong, but had a soft little beer belly—a look I’d once heard Gram call “dissipated.” His mind always seemed to be somewhere else, and his eyes didn’t look exactly the same, like they were considering two different things at the same time. His expressions tended to change all of a sudden too, meaning you could lose track of his attitude if you weren’t careful. In my thinking all this was connected in one way or another with the fact that he was a musician. That and him being drunk most of the time.

  “How’s it shakin’, Hube?” he said. Hubert had known Cam a couple of years, actually a little longer than he’d known me. They’d riffed together a few times with the other two guys that Cam referred to as his band, the Nitecrawlers.

  “Good, doin’ good, Cam,” said Hubert, putting up the file and popping his hands on his legs like a bongo player. “You workin’?”

  “Fixin’ to start a regular Friday and Saturday night gig at the Legion Hall over here. We need a front guy that can actually sing, though.”

  I could almost see and hear how Rachel would have reacted to this if she’d been here. She’d have frowned, pooched out her mouth, crossed her arms and sent Cam one of those looks of hers, turning up the heat on him to get a real job and start bringing in some regular money so they could maybe get a little ahead for once instead of scratching by on what she made waiting tables and cashiering at the Whistlin’ Dixie and her always having to wrestle with the drunk owner trying to get his hand up her dress.

  But Hubert saw it a different way. Regardless of how little money he made, Cam was a professional, in Hubert’s eyes a wild man out walking the ragged edge, not answering to anybody, staying up all night and smoking pot and pulling off guitar licks Hubert couldn’t even have a wet dream about. In other words, a god. There was nothing Hubert wouldn’t have done to get into the group as an official member.

  “You a celebrity now, Biscuit?” he said. “Found that dead girl and all?”

  “I guess,” I said. A lot of times I didn’t know how to answer Cam’s questions, and the subject of the dead girl gave me a cold feeling inside.

  “Musta really been something. What’d the body look like?”

  “Pretty blue and stiff.”

  “Heard y’all were on TV and everything.”

  Which was true. L.A. and I had talked to several reporters and even been interviewed on camera by a thin man wearing a wig and a bow tie who had a voice like the Lone Ranger, the lights burning down on us like a dozen suns.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Had to be a kick,” said Cam.

  “Not really,” I said. “I was mainly afraid of saying something dumb.” I didn’t know why the hell I was telling Cam this, and in front of Hubert at that, but there it was.

  Cam decided to let it go and I was glad to do the same. I looked around the inside of the van, which was royally cluttered from end to end with beat-up concert speakers and amps, duffel bags, toolboxes, an old guitar case and other odds and ends. Next to Cam’s seat on the floor was a pump-up air pistol that he used to shoot at squirrels and cats he saw as he drove around, and on the dash there were two or three empty Raleigh packs, a can of lead pellets, half a roll of Life Savers, an old ballpoint and several matchbooks.

  As a driver Cam never seemed to be in a hurry, but he stayed alert as he drove, kind of the opposite of Jack, who was one of those kill-or-be-killed drivers, always seeming to be on the verge of having some kind of seizure when he was behind the wheel, like he was flying a fighter in a sky full of bogeys and he was out of bullets. Everything that happened in traffic seemed to catch Jack off guard and make him yell. But riding with Cam you could actually relax a little.

  Going on with his band problem, Cam said, “Last guy we had on the mike, I swear it sounded like you was frying live chickens. Way the guy juked and strutted around out there making all those faces, musta thought we was at the bottom of Deep Ellum or something. Mighta made a halfway good show if you unplugged his mike.”

  “What’d you do with him?” said Hubert, setting Cam up.

  “Put him on the road with a red ass, whattaya think?”

  Hubert laughed. Cam looked out the side windows and in his rear-view mirror.

  “Here we are,” he said, pulling up in front of the store.

  The sign over the door had the outline of a jukebox in different colors of neon. Below that it said FROM BEGINNER TO PRO. There were no other cars in the parking lot. We got out and looked at the guitars, drums and horns in the window. Cam scratched under his chin as he stared at a pearl-inlaid bass guitar, a sure sign he wanted it, and I figured he was thinking of ways to sell Rachel on the idea.

  Finally he went inside, Hubert tr
ailing along behind him. For a while I stayed at the window inspecting the merchandise. One of the guitars hung straight down from a cord looped around its neck. Looking at it, I felt something twang inside me. I took a deep breath and went inside.

  Cam was showing Hubert some tricky chord changes. I wandered around looking at the instruments until Cam and Hubert had worked their way through the display guitars and started a heavy conference with the clerk about various kinds of strings. The clerk kept pushing his thick glasses up on his nose with his finger, and when he turned to get something Cam had pointed at, I saw Hubert slip a couple of picks from the display into his back pocket. Then, when he saw he had the time, he grabbed a few more.

  I didn’t know anything about music, but I liked the exact artistic look of the different instruments. I visualized myself learning on the sly to play guitar and then springing it on Gram and L.A., ripping out some Slowhand or B. B. King for them. On optimistic days I thought it might be possible; I wasn’t tone deaf or anything, and L.A. and Diana even said I had a good sense of rhythm. But somehow I could never get the hang of making music. I figured maybe it was like Hubert’s problem with algebra, just a locked door for me.

  When Cam and Hubert finally settled on the right strings and Hubert paid the clerk from the tight wad of bills he brought out of his pocket, I was ready to get going. We climbed back into the van.

  “So how’s that girl of mine?” said Cam, glancing at me.

  “Pretty good, really diving good. We go to the pool whenever we can.”

  Cam looked up and down the streets and along the storefronts. We swung out into the traffic. “I need to pick up some stuff,” he said. “We’ll go by the studio and then I’ll drop y’all off.”

  Hubert, looking as happy as he ever did, nodded. Cam glanced at me with some sort of expression.

  “She still seeing that head doctor?” he said.

  “Yes sir.”

  He never said so but I had the impression Cam didn’t much like the idea of L.A. seeing Dr. Ballard—because I figured he wouldn’t want her talking about him and Rachel and their drinking, for one thing—but he said when Rachel and her mama got their heads together about something you could just forget about it, which was pretty much true.

  “I just can’t picture that place in my mind,” he said, meaning the doctor’s office.

  As a matter of fact, I couldn’t either. The best I could do was an image of L.A. walking into a room something like a principal’s office but better furnished and without the sense of danger. All I really knew was that when she came out after an appointment she always had a little peppermint stick in her mouth. I shrugged.

  Cam said, “Wonder if them headshrinkers can get you to tell stuff you don’t want to, like hypnotize you or something when you’re not looking.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Not L.A.,” I said.

  No one said anything else until we stopped in front of the old Conoco station Cam’s parents had owned before they died. It had been closed for years but you could still see some of the green and white paint on the brick. He called it his studio because he sometimes got the Nitecrawlers together there to practice new stuff they wanted to work into their act. Hubert had sat in on a couple of these jams and later said, “Man, those guys are at light speed. No way I could keep up.” We waited in the van while Cam went in. Somebody had painted over the glass sometime in the past, but I didn’t need to maintain visual contact to know Cam’s last stop would be the little refrigerator he kept beer in. Sure enough, when he came back out with the old flight bag he carried his sheet music in, he was holding three opened bottles of Lone Star by their necks. He got in behind the wheel and offered one to each of us.

  Hubert took one, but knowing I’d be coming up on Gram’s radar pretty soon, I passed.

  “More for me,” said Cam, tucking the extra bottle between his legs.

  Cam and Hubert threw their heads back and their bottles up together like a drill team, and I saw their throats working. A pleasant malty smell filled the van, and Hubert belched as we turned toward the Illinois overpass. A minute later we drove past a blond girl in a red and yellow bathing suit washing a white Chevy Nova in her driveway, leaning over to reach a spot on the windshield.

  “Hey-hey-HEY,” said Cam, slapping Hubert on the leg with the back of his hand. “Is that choice or what?”

  “Better know it,” said Hubert, taking another swig of beer. “Like to get me some of that.”

  By the time they dropped me off in front of Gram’s, Cam and Hubert were talking about amplifiers. They hardly noticed when I slid out of the van and closed the door.

  I went up the front steps, across the wide porch and into the house. It was quiet inside but I could feel that L.A. was here so I crossed the living room and went into the kitchen. She had the newspaper spread out on the table and was on her knees in a chair, leaning over the table with her elbows on the paper and her chin in her hands. There was a pencil stuck in her hair, just the way Gram did it, and her eyes were slitted with concentration. Her all-out crossword attack stance.

  Reading over her shoulder, I had the feeling zebra was the word she was looking for, but I didn’t say anything. When L.A. wanted help she’d let you know, and I wouldn’t advise anybody to hold their breath. She glanced at me, gathered up the paper and jumped to the floor.

  “Guess what,” she said.

  “Tell,” I said.

  “We’re cooking.”

  From this I knew Gram had dropped L.A. off, left on some other errand and was going to be late getting back, leaving it to us to get supper together. Which under other circumstances would have been good news to me because I secretly liked cooking, but it was L.A. who’d received the assignment and that gave her absolute control of the operation. Gram required L.A. and me to be sea-cooks, which she said meant not starting anything you couldn’t finish, always cooking enough food to go around and getting it on the table regardless of the weather. Also never leaving the galley while anything was still dirty. But the first, last and no-exceptions rule was that there’s only one cook at a time in the galley. Anybody else passing through better be a helper, and if his tongue has been cut out ahead of time, so much the better.

  Not needing to ask what L.A. wanted, I went to the cabinet for a box of macaroni and cheese while she got out a pan and filled it with water. She put the pan over a burner and turned on the flame, then shook some salt into the water. After considering for a second, she shook in a little more.

  I was standing respectfully back, holding the macaroni box for her and watching the blue flames curl up under the pan when Gram came in the front door. As she walked into the kitchen, I saw tears in her eyes and noticed she seemed a little more bent, and older somehow, the way she sometimes did after she had been downtown talking to Mrs. Bruhn, the social worker. And I was sure that was where she’d been this time. She stopped and looked at us, then said, “Come here, you two,” and gathered both of us to her with trembling hands.

  5 | Telling

  GRAM COMING HOME with tears in her eyes was trouble any way you cut it. It seemed to me the more trips she made downtown to see Mrs. Bruhn, the more dog-miserable each one made her, but this was way worse than usual. She cried about as often as L.A. did, in other words next to never, which made it clear we now had an out-and-out situation on our hands.

  “What’s wrong, Gram?” asked L.A.

  “Come into the living room, both of you. I’ve got some things to tell you. Your mothers will be here in a few minutes.”

  Now I knew we were in it up to our hocks. L.A. was no easy scare, but her expression told me she was thinking along the same lines. Which for me confirmed the worst: the women were now spooked, which removed my option to be afraid. As the only male on the scene, I had to think of something useful to do or say.

  “I’ll get you some tea,” I said firmly to Gram, heading for the refrigerator.

  Gram said, “I know we’ve always talked about both of you going ba
ck to your homes someday, but I’m afraid that’s all changed now. It looks as if you two vagabonds are mine for good.”

  Hearing it said right out loud this way stopped me in my tracks, but L.A. reacted differently. She looked at Gram with a little frown line between her eyes, an almost visible question mark forming in the air above her head, not troubled or anything, just waiting for the punch line. And that was when it dawned on me for the first time that for L.A. the possibility of leaving Gram’s had never been on the table. And I guess now that it came down to cases, something inside me had probably understood for a long time that I wasn’t going anywhere either. I was past answering to anybody but Gram for my uncombed hair and unfinished homework.

  “Okay, Gram,” we both said.

  She looked at us and wiped the tears from her eyes. After a minute she said, “Well, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “No ma’am.”

  Gram blew her nose in a tissue and motioned us into the front room, where we assumed our bad-news positions on the couch. She took the green chair.

  “All right, then,” she said. “What I’ll start with is that I’ve made a decision about some things, and about the two of you, that Mrs. Bruhn has urged on me. And I agree with her—both of you have seen and heard more, been through more, than most adults . . .” She looked hard at L.A. “I believe you are strong enough for this.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “A better question would be, am I?”

  She stood and walked across the room and into the hall, and a second later we heard her bedroom door open. After a minute or so she came back holding a letter that was old and yellowed, with creases from folding that were worn through in a couple of places. She handed it to me and said, “Read this, both of you.”

  It was written in pencil. I held it so L.A. could read with me:

  Dear Miriam Leah and Rachel,

  I hope this letter finds you all in good health and happiness and hope you all are going to be able to forgive me for this that I am fixing to do and maby go on and have some kind of normal life after I am gone to what ever their may be waighting for me on the other side God will have to decide that as I know he will in his wisdom and good custom. Their is just no other way to solve this and I am sure you will know I dont want to hurt nobody. I leave a pretty good business so with that and the burial policy and with what is in the bank it will keep the family at least for a while if it is managed half right and as you know the house is pade for. I wont blame the whisky for what I donn but it is a Demon and I was a different man with it and donn things I never would of or thought of otherwise I just hope the harm is not to great and in time to come I may be rembered for what good I donn in this world moreso than the bad. Lord knows how hard it is sometimes to see the right and then do it.