What Dies in Summer

  “How come?”

  “They’re the good eating. None of those pikes, pickerels and pick-handles are much good on the table, too many bones. Natives call some of ’em snakes—shows you right there how much use they’ve got for ’em.”

  I could have listened to this all day. As Don took a long swallow from his bottle, I tried to think of ways to keep the conversation going, which as usual made my mind go blank.

  “Daddy,” said Diana, coming into the kitchen with Andy on her arm and closing a cabinet door with her free hand. “He’s dry now but I need to feed him. Are you home for the day?”

  Looking at her, I was dumbfounded. How could this possibly be the same girl I’d been kissing just a few minutes ago? She seemed older, purified somehow, and her expression, the completely natural way she stood there with Andy on her hip, made my chest tight. I wondered if what I was seeing and feeling had anything to do with the special energy between girls and their fathers.

  “Yeah, babe, I think so,” said Don, setting his root beer down. “Want me to take him?”

  She passed Andy to him and started getting the pan ready to heat his milk. She expertly took a clean bottle from the sterilizer and set it on the counter, then got out the formula. I watched Don grinning and jigging Andy on his knee. They looked like a picture in a magazine. I tried to swallow the strange sadness that rose in my throat.

  “I got one other thing, Jimbo,” Don said, shifting Andy and picking up his root beer again. He swallowed the last of it and leaned over to toss the bottle in the trash. “Lee Ann’s got to come down to headquarters pretty soon anyway to talk to the stenographer, but I want you and her to come in with me before we get started on that. I need a little help on something.”

  Suddenly I felt much better. Don had my entire attention now.

  “Yes sir?” I said.

  “You and her are both pretty sharp, and you seem to get all over this end of town. Located us one dead body already this month.” He smiled, gave his head a small shake.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I want you both to look at some pictures for me, see if you recognize anybody, maybe tell me a few things I don’t know.” He kissed Andy on the cheek and then scratched his own chin.

  Andy began to fret.

  “Here, Fubbit,” said Diana, bringing the bottle of formula over to Don, who took it and touched the nipple to Andy’s lips. Andy turned his head a little from side to side for a second before he located the nipple and locked onto it. He sighed and sucked.

  “There you go,” said Don. “Get after it, fullback.”

  “Sure,” I said, my heart filling with the desire to help Don. “Anything you want.”

  10 | Lessons

  WHEN I OPENED the unlocked screen and knocked on the door of Dr. Kepler’s neat little pink-brick house on Fernwood, Miz M, the nurse, let me in. As always the house seemed bigger on the inside, with hardwood floors and foreign-looking furniture in light colors. The air in here was cool and medicinal, and the whole place had that quiet, suspended feeling that terrible sickness brings to a house.

  “She’s asleep,” said Miz M. She looked at the dish I was carrying, which was filled to the top with half the apricot cobbler Gram had baked this morning. Jiggling her round cheeks over it, Miz M took me back through the arched doorway of the deep sunny kitchen, her thick legs whisking as she walked.

  “Gram says there’s enough for us to have some too,” I said.

  But Miz M was already into the dish cabinet. She set out small plates along with forks, napkins and glasses for milk.

  “She had her morning morphine at ten,” said Miz M. “She’ll sleep for a while yet.”

  As she talked, Miz M was dishing up cobbler and pouring milk for both of us. I sat down at the maplewood table. She took a bite of cobbler and said, “Hmm-mmm, Lord, this is iniquitous! Are you going to stay awhile?”

  “Yes ma’am, till Gram and L.A. get back this afternoon.”

  “Good. She does love having you. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Where’s that listening-boy of mine? I’ve got talking to do!’ ”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I hear you’re going on a trip to Canada or someplace like that.”

  “Minnesota. With the Chamforts.”

  “Good for you,” she said, taking another bite. “Isn’t it awful about those poor girls? My friends could hardly believe I knew the young man who found one of them.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  I had no appetite for food or talk, so I drank some milk as I looked out through the window above the sink at the mimosa in the back yard. Its powderpuff blooms were mouth-colored, and the clusters of seedpods looked like snow peas. I wondered how long it had been there and how long it would live after this house and all of us were gone. Then, I thought, it would die too.

  Thoughts and images of death kept coming—Dee’s funeral, naked and strangled girls lying in the grass, and finally Dr. Kepler herself, not dead yet but not really living either. Gram had told me her mother, father and all three sisters had died in the war in Europe, and explained that Dr. Kepler was an atheist who believed in a strictly mechanistic universe.

  This had been a new idea for me; hearing it, I imagined a huge noisy factory with gears and levers and drive belts everywhere, turning out some unknown but essential product. Then I was off into speculation about how all the devices got there, how they knew what to do, who’d turn them on and off and keep them oiled and in repair.

  But I knew speculating about it was a waste of time, because my mind wasn’t organized to deal with questions like that. And not only was I was too ignorant to figure anything out on my own, there was no one I could conveniently get answers from, because generally people already had their minds made up and couldn’t discuss this kind of question sanely. Of course, that didn’t include L.A.—not that she was necessarily sane in the strictest sense, just that she wasn’t the type to have any do-or-die opinions about mystical subjects. The problem was that she would consider it all a matter of guesswork and foolishness. She only really believed in what she could see or hear or touch, so if I asked her about the mechanistic universe thing she’d probably just look at me and say something like, “That’s dumb, Biscuit,” or “Pass the ketchup, sprocket-head.”

  For all I really knew, though, Dr. Kepler didn’t actually believe in all the gears and machinery. I did know she was extremely intelligent and had taught things like relativity and something called particle physics at SMU. She was too sick now to come to the book club meetings anymore, but she was still Gram’s friend, and I came to see her every Friday because Gram asked me to. And because I wanted to.

  “She’s not long for this old vale,” Gram had said. “And since she doesn’t think she’s going anywhere when she leaves it, you should try to give her what comfort you may in the meantime, James. It’ll be a star in your crown, whether Joan thinks so or not.”

  Actually it was me who did most of the talking when I was with Dr. Kepler, because that was what seemed to make her happy.

  “Speak to me a little, dear boy,” she’d say. “All my words are old and tired, and I’ve had enough of them.”

  But from time to time she did explain some interesting things to me, like who Max Planck was and what quantum mechanics was about and why a full moon can only rise around the time the sun is setting. She said people of normal intelligence who considered things like this too complicated to understand were just mentally slothful—they’d never gotten in the habit of curiosity about how things work, or of thinking clearly about cause and effect. It was a pleasure to listen to her, her words creating new ideas and bright, clean-edged images in my mind.

  But mainly she wanted to listen to me, especially when the stories included Diana and L.A. And nothing was trivial to her. She wanted every detail about where we went and what we did and thought, what we were wearing or how the sky looked the day something happened. It was like she was hungry and the stories I brought her were gifts of food. She’d listen a
nd nod and smile in the right places even when she was very tired or in a lot of pain. She particularly wanted to know L.A.’s reaction to things, chuckling or shaking her head at the stories, sometimes even laughing until she made herself cough.

  “Ah, she is schelmisch, that one. Und so klug. What did she say then?”

  So I tried to remember everything for Dr. Kepler. Of course, I couldn’t, but it amazed me how much I did remember. And it amazed me even more how much better I understood things when I kept them in mind to talk about later, as if ideas could somehow germinate and grow in the dark like mushrooms while you were thinking about something else.

  I trusted Dr. Kepler with my thoughts, eventually even some of the ones I had about Diana and me, because Dr. Kepler was different from other adults in that nothing I said to her ever came back to bite me on the ass. And there wasn’t much point in trying to be sly with her anyway, since she was almost Gram’s equal in her ability to read my mind.

  One of the things she took a special interest in was what I was going to do about Diana. Of course, this sounded a little strange to me, because I hadn’t thought that was up to me. I’d thought it was more a matter of what Diana was going to do about me. Or rather what she was going to let me do.

  “Don’t obfuscate, James,” Dr. Kepler said. “You want to have sex with her, of course. I’d be worried if you didn’t. And soon enough, you will.”

  Suddenly I didn’t know whether to smile or not, or what to do with my hands and feet. I coughed.

  “But responsibility to each other is all we really have in this world, dear, and you’ve got some serious responsibilities where our Miss Diana is concerned.”

  Seeing that I was blushing, she said, “That is precious, James! You didn’t expect an old lady to talk about such things, did you?”

  I had to admit she was right, and the longer I thought about that the dumber I felt. This was sort of a turning point for me, because after that day I quit worrying about what I told Dr. Kepler and just more or less let everything come out when it was ready. And she seemed to understand it all, hardly ever being critical or trying to talk me into or out of anything.

  But she was damn strict on certain points.

  “You absolutely must keep condoms with you at all times,” she said. “Here, let me have your billfold.” When I handed it to her, she opened it and said, “Yes, this will be fine. Leave the wrappers on and keep them right in here. That way you’ll always have them with you.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Later I looked Hubert up and asked, “What’s a condom?”

  “Same thing as a rubber, man,” he said. “Don’t you know nothing?” He pulled out his own billfold, and damn if he didn’t have two rubbers in the secret compartment. I could see the circles they’d made in the leather, so I knew they’d been there awhile. A day or two later he brought me three of my own in individual foil packages. He wasted one by unrolling it and trying unsuccessfully to pull it down over his fist, playing with it, snapping it and blowing it up like a balloon. “Make a hell of a water bomb,” he pronounced. He watched as I stuffed the remaining two into my billfold. “Now you’re all set,” he said.

  It felt weird at first, like carrying concealed weapons, but eventually I got used to it. I tried to adjust my thinking around the need to keep my billfold from falling into Gram’s or L.A.’s hands, which was going to be tricky because of the mysterious way their curiosity and powers of detection were always amplified by me having something to hide. But I was determined. For all I knew this was something else L.A. would punch me for if she found out, and I didn’t even want to imagine what Gram’s reaction would be.

  Another time, Dr. Kepler and I talked about boxing. She seemed to know a lot about the sport for a woman, and it sounded like Gram had told her about Jack and me and the lessons. We talked about different champions and styles of fighting for a while, then she sighed and closed her eyes, saying, “You never wanted to learn any of this in the first place, did you, James?”

  Nobody had ever asked me that before. I thought about it for a few seconds. “No ma’am,” I said.

  “And yet I’ll bet now you wish you knew even more than you do. Enough to turn the tables on him.”

  I rubbed my eyes, remembering how the universe had turned blood-red that day with Jack. “No,” I said. “I mean yes. I don’t know. I wish somebody would tell me what’s right to feel.”

  “I can tell you it’s not wrong to hate a true enemy, James, no matter what you may hear in Sunday school. Any other feeling would be a violation of nature. But you must take care to maintain the distinction between thought and deed. Ideas and emotions are not good or bad. They come like birds in the air, beyond our control. But our words and actions are a matter of choice, and they will always have consequences.” She put her hand on mine. “Do you see?”

  I nodded. This I understood perfectly, because of the huge gap that had always existed between what I felt about Jack and what I’d ever been able to do about it.

  “Tell me about your father, James.”

  “My father?” I said, surprised by the sudden change of gears and unsure how to answer.

  “Who was he really? Was he a good man? Did you love him?”

  Hearing this, I saw myself once again in our kitchen in Jacksboro: Our last breakfast as a family—Mom in her yellow bathrobe setting out cereal, orange juice and coffee, Dad in his jeans, boots and a red plaid snap-front shirt, smelling leathery and smoky, headed for the auction barn with the horse trailer, everything okay between him and Mom, the orange sun just coming up beyond the live oaks outside the kitchen window. Dad pulling away in his old Ford longbed, the trailer bouncing and rattling along behind. That night a state trooper appearing at the door, speaking briefly to Mom as I watch from the hall in my pajamas, Mom swinging back from the door as if she has been hit, her arm out for support that isn’t there, falling on her butt next to the easy chair.

  “He was real good with horses,” I said. “I think he drank too much, and I know he got into fights sometimes, but he loved us. He took good care of us.”

  “All was well, then?”

  I looked down at the floor, wondering if I had any right to answer.

  “He and Mom yelled at each other a lot,” I said. “She says he ran around with other women. Sometimes she talked about leaving him.”

  “Do you think she would have?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she loved him too much.”

  “And after that?”

  “It took a long time for her to get over him dying.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me too,” I said, thinking how after Dad was gone it seemed like just Mom and me against the world. The emptiness in my chest never really left me, but in another way being with Mom and having all her attention, without the fights between her and Dad, was the best time of my life. “But then she found Jack,” I said.

  “What a shock that must have been for you.”

  I shrugged.

  “What were your thoughts then?”

  “I couldn’t understand why she would want him. He’s nothing like Dad. But she said she loved him, he was there to stay and I’d just have to get used to it.”

  “And you tried, didn’t you—tried very hard?”

  I nodded miserably.

  “If I believed in such things, James, I would call you both cursed and blessed,” Dr. Kepler said. “What others understand with ease and never question, you cannot fathom, and that is your blessing. Your curse is that you grasp without effort so many things that most people will never comprehend.”

  Deciding after a little thought that this pronouncement must fall in the category of a blessing, I said, “Are you really an existentialist?”

  “Ho! That grandmother of yours has been talking about me, I see. Do you actually know what the word means?”

  “No ma’am, not really. I guess it means you don’t believe in God.” br />
  “What I believe, dear, is that perhaps God is beside the point. We are not given reliable instructions, we are not rescued from our troubles, and our obligations in the world remain the same whether a supernatural being is watching us and keeping score or not. Do you understand?”

  “Yes ma’am, I think I do.”

  “But that isn’t what you believe.”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think I know enough to have beliefs.”

  “Ah, there you have put your finger on it, dear boy. Never accept that you must believe in order that you may know.” She looked at me for a long while. “Do you mind if I take this off?” she said, touching the purple scarf that covered her head.

  “No ma’am.”

  She unwound the scarf and laid it on the nightstand. Her head was smooth as an egg.

  “Are you offended?”

  “No ma’am,” I said truthfully. To me she looked like a gentle alien.

  She took my hand, laid it on her head and closed her eyes. Her scalp was warm and dry, and I could feel the blue veins under the surface. I looked at her tired face, wishing I was like one of those tent preachers, my touch powerful enough to make her well. I actually tried it, mentally shouting for God to heal her, but I didn’t feel anything, and as far as I could tell she didn’t either. When I finally drew my hand back she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “Perhaps there is yet some little hope for this race of perfumed baboons,” she said. “My dear boy.”

  One day I asked her about the killings. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t figure out, sadness maybe, then said, “Unfortunately nature does make mistakes, James. Sometimes very bad ones. There will always be monsters among us, but we cannot let that take from us our courage. There is still much that is good in the world.”

  “What kind of monster do you think it is?”

  “A man, if we may call him that, who takes pleasure in the pain and fear of others, who kills human beings for his own enjoyment, it is right to call him a monster. Hitler found many such men to do his mad work. In other times a creature so misshapen inside might have been destroyed in childhood. Or perhaps made a shaman.”