What Dies in Summer

  “Yeah, like that.”

  She opened her little patent-leather purse and offered me a Certs, which lifted my heart because I knew it meant that when we got back to her house I was going to get another kiss to go with the two or three quickies I’d had during the movie. During one of these I’d opened one eye and seen several kids in the balcony leaning forward to look down at us, and, being unsure whether they thought we were doing it right, I hadn’t known whether to be embarrassed or not.

  Thinking about this, I noticed Diana smelled kind of spicy at the moment, halfway between the sudsy smell she came from the shower with and the salty one she had when she was sweaty. Wait, not sweaty, I corrected myself, remembering Gram’s rule: horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.

  “What about Aquaman?” I said when I got my thoughts back in order.

  “Mackerel breath,” she said, popping a Certs into her own mouth.

  “Know what’d be good?” I said. “Living underwater like that—the cool and quiet and just plants waving in the current and a few fish going by. A whole ’nother universe.”

  “I’d rather be in the clouds.”

  “What, like an angel?”

  “No, a fighter pilot.”

  I visualized Diana diving on a MiG, cutting loose with the machine guns, the tip of her tongue out for concentration.

  “Do they let girls fly jets?” I said.

  “Probably not. But I’d do it if I could.”

  “You’d really shoot down a Russian?”

  “I didn’t know you actually had to shoot anybody.”

  “Fighters have to shoot somebody down. What else can they do?”

  She chewed her lip and reflected. “I’m not sure about that part,” she said. “Maybe they’d just let me fly around and watch for troop movements and stuff.”

  “Balloon’d be better,” I said, thinking of the silence.

  Diana didn’t say anything.

  “Holy shit!” I yelled, jerking her into the doorway of Woolworth’s, causing her to yip in protest. “It’s Jack!” I said, the words coming out in a kind of desperate hiss.

  Getting it now, she followed my eyes. A block down the street Mom’s boyfriend and another man, a thin bald guy in a black Harley T-shirt, were having a conversation on the sidewalk, looking almost like a mirage at this distance in the heat haze. Jack was dressed in starched jeans and a bright green cowboy shirt.

  “Did he see you?” asked Diana. “Is your mom around?”

  As if hearing her, Jack looked our way. I felt a sensation like swallowing a chunk of ice. It sounds strange now, but in those days I actually thought I understood what danger was.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “C’mon.”

  We ducked into the store, negotiated a couple of aisles, found the rear door and pushed through it. Walking along the alley toward the next street, I said, “I can never figure out where the hell he’s going to be.”

  Diana took my arm. “He wouldn’t do anything to you out in public like this, would he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’ll be okay, Bis.” She squeezed my arm. “Just stay away from him.”

  Neither of us said anything else for a while. The locusts filled the atmosphere with their zinging. We walked along the hot sidewalk, in and out of the shade of the old maples, pecans and sycamores that overhung Madrid Street, the sections of concrete occasionally tilted one way or the other or cracked across to accommodate the thick roots knotted up under them. Diana had complained to me of having big feet, but I didn’t see it that way at all. In fact I thought they looked pretty delicate next to mine, and I enjoyed the light little stepping sounds they made as she walked along beside me. She was about L.A.’s height, which meant she was almost eye to eye with me and could keep up without any trouble even when I was in a hurry.

  I was still thinking about how all-around good it was to walk with Diana when we saw Colossians Odell. We weren’t too far from the bus station and the Salvation Army, definitely still in bum country, so it was no surprise to run into him here. He was halfway down the alley with his red Radio Flyer wagon, looking into a trash can that stood against the wooden fence behind a gray-roofed house. When we caught up to him, he flinched at the sound of our footsteps.

  We took his upwind side.

  Diana said, “Hi, Mr. Moog.”

  “Why, how do,” he said when he saw who we were, giving us the whole keyboard of his smile. “Proud to see you, miss, and you too, Mr. Biscuit. This a fine day the Lord done made us.”

  Along with his big cream panama hat, Colossians was wearing his usual all-weather outfit today, baggy old khakis, brown tweed sports jacket with no collar or lapels, and his holey black high-top tennis shoes. I figured he’d have his rat Caruso in his pocket too because he never seemed to go anywhere without it.

  Of all the walk-around people I knew, Colossians was my favorite, one of the reasons being the songs he sang. They always came without warning, Colossians just spreading his arms out wide, throwing his head back and letting go, singing up into the trees about the fell tide or the Negro jubilee or other strange, tragic things in a voice so huge, dark and unbelievably powerful that it made dogs bark a block away and started the squirrels chattering in the trees. Hearing it for the first time, Diana had blurted, “Oh, geez,” and taken a quick step back before she could stop herself.

  Gram had said, “He must be a basso profundo. That’s quite a rare voice—I wonder if he’s been trained.”

  Generally Colossians only sang in the middle of the afternoon.

  “It’s according to how much wine he’s had,” L.A. had pronounced.

  When she and I had first met him we asked why he sang to the trees. He took off his panama, ran his long hand over the smooth dome of his eggplant-colored head and said, “Now you darlin’s, right there you done ast me the veriest thing I doesn’t know.” Then he put the hat back on his head, scooped out his rat and held him up for us to admire. He told us the rat’s Christian name was Caruso, but he usually called him Honey or Lagniappe.

  “How’d you get him?” I asked.

  “Outquick him down Salvation Army last year. Took a little gettin’ used to, both sides, but we finest of frens now.”

  Today Caruso let Diana stroke him between the ears with the tip of her finger, his whiskery nose twitching. Colossians took a raisin from a box he carried in his back pocket and gave it to Caruso, who sat on his haunches on Colossians’ palm and held the raisin in his miniature hands like an ear of corn as he ate it. With the sun behind him, the veins glowed red in the pink shells of his ears. We messed with Caruso for a while longer, then when we were sure Colossians wasn’t going to sing today we told him goodbye and walked on, me thinking about everything and nothing, Diana thinking no telling what, neither of us saying anything.

  7 | Beliefs

  EVENTUALLY my thoughts brought me around to something I wanted to ask even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted an answer. I said, “Is Dr. Kepler out of the hospital yet?” Her house was on Fernwood, not far from here, but it had been at least two months now since I’d seen her.

  “Yeah,” said Diana. “Mom said she’d probably be able to stay at home for a few weeks, but then she’ll have to come back to the hospital again.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It’s not that I was necessarily that big a fan of old people other than Gram, it’s just that Dr. Kepler was a nice lady. Even now that she didn’t have hair anymore, I actually thought she was pretty in her own way, with her soft skin and dark eyes full of thoughts. She was so thin you could see her shoulder blades and the bones down her back, but I knew from listening to the talk on Wednesday nights when the book club met at Gram’s that she was still a fighter. And I found out scientific people can have pretty strict opinions about literature.

  “We are Vladimir and Estragon!” she hollered in her sketchy voice one night. She’d made everybody read Waiting for Godot even though it was really a play instead of a bo
ok, because it was her turn to choose. When she said what she did, the other women kind of stiffened. They were mostly Baptists and Methodists, but she was a physicist, which meant that even though they liked her, none of them except Gram really understood her thinking. Diana and I were playing double solitaire at the kitchen table just through the archway from the front room, where we could hear everything. L.A. was at the pool practicing dives, so I felt like it was up to me to listen on her behalf too.

  “Explain, Joan,” Gram said, setting her glasses on the lamp table, where they focused two little half-moons of concentrated light on the white cloth. She picked up her cup of tea and took a sip.

  “Such folly!” Dr. Kepler said. “And such a fine metaphor for the entire human race—Vladimir and Estragon, waiting and talking, talking and waiting, endlessly deluding themselves and accomplishing nothing!”

  “Well, I don’t see how that applies,” said Mrs. McReady.

  “Dear, dear,” Mrs. Pynchon said from the green chair. She was always a step or two ahead of Mrs. McReady, and she did see how it applied.

  “I smell a theological debate,” said Gram. “Why don’t I get us some cookies?”

  Dr. Kepler thumped her doilied chair arm weakly with her little fist and said, “Only our deeds matter. Man must do!”

  “. . . be-doo-be-doo,” sang Diana to herself as she turned over a card.

  “Love matters,” said Mrs. Pynchon, setting her own cup aside. “Hope. Certainly faith.”

  “Ah, yes, there is the magic word,” Dr. Kepler said. “Belief without evidence. With it we can justify anything.”

  “How’d she ever get so smart?” Diana asked softly.

  “Gram says they had different ideas about education in Europe.”

  For me Dr. Kepler’s words carried a certain kind of excitement even when they sounded discouraging, but Diana saw it a different way. “That’s too scary,” she said. Not many things troubled her, but she had a certain concern for the fate of her soul. When Mrs. Pynchon said, “Nothing in this world means much to me if I can’t believe in something greater than myself,” Diana nodded without looking up.

  Dr. Kepler said, “No one has brought us more unspeakable cruelty, more wars, more death, than the Prince of Peace and his peers with all their holy warriors. Perhaps we should look for greatness somewhere else.”

  Diana shook her head unconsciously as she laid down the club five.

  But now I was remembering when Dr. Kepler had come back from seeing her internist, the year after I came to live with Gram. Listening to her, Gram had said, “Oh, Joan, no!”

  “Now, Miriam, the last thing I will have is you saying there is some higher meaning in this, that I am being called home to Jesus and we will understand it all in the sweet bye and bye, or any of that happy nonsense.”

  “But Joan,” Gram had said, “is there no comfort for you?”

  “My comfort shall be in seeing to the completeness of my life and trying to be worthy of my friends.”

  Gram had hugged her and sniffled, and, watching from the hall, I’d felt a chill that seemed to go all the way down to the atoms in my bones.

  Now I thought of Colossians, who had no problem believing in things greater than himself because, on account of being off-and-on insane, he seemed to hear from them on a regular basis. I was the one who had introduced him to Dr. Kepler, and they had hit it off in spite of the different things they thought were real. She hired him to do some yard work, but she seemed to enjoy his singing in the same amazed way that I did. She said that in Europe before the war he might have been a luminary of the continental operatic stage, which I took to mean he could have been a singing star. But she said he wouldn’t be the headliner very often because, always and everywhere, the best parts were written for the tenors.

  “But what a splendid villain he might have made!” she said.

  One day Dr. Kepler, in her straw sun hat and gardening gloves, was watching Colossians at work when L.A. and I arrived to deliver Dr. Kepler a loaf of dill bread Gram had baked for her. Colossians was planting bulbs in the front garden and I got interested in the process and left the bread presentation to L.A. Watching him on his knees in the soft, dark earth, smoothly turning aside a thick curl of the soil with his trowel, slipping a bulb from the sack beside him under it and moving on to plant the next bulb with no waste motion, his big hands barely seeming to move, I realized for the first time how much more there was to raising flowers than just throwing out a few seeds, how if you wanted to do it right it was a matter not only of understanding but of somehow joining with the soil and in a way befriending it.

  “Perennials are so wonderfully appealing,” said Dr. Kepler. “Something that will come again each year, almost a way of going on oneself.”

  “These amaryllis and hyacinth do you proud, missus. They faces be gloryin’ the Lord ever spring of the world.”

  “Let them glorify your strong hand, Colossians—there is nothing in the sky I wish to exalt.”

  “Why, land sakes, missus, you not believin’ on the good Lord?”

  “I believe in what I know,” she said. “I know the damned gangsters burned up my mother and my father and my three sisters in big ovens, and I know the smoke went away into the sky. There must have been a great deal of it; maybe the good Lord saw it. Now I am only smoke that is waiting its turn to go up to the sky, and soon enough the gangsters will have their way with me too. Their bones, and the murderers who walk among us, can inherit the earth without any further protest from me.”

  I doubted that Colossians knew much about the smoke or the ovens, but he took off his hat, wiped his head with his bandanna and smiled at us all with a drop of sweat hanging like a jewel from the end of his nose. “Well, that be all right, I reckon,” he said. “Expect He go on try to keep a good watch on us just the same.”

  But it wasn’t the Lord I saw keeping watch at my bedside again that night. It was the girl who was death.

  Doo-be-doo-be-doo, she sang softly from her cold blue mouth.

  8 | Times

  THE LAST TIME I ever rode my bicycle was the day I learned something important about what the word home really means. Or maybe what it doesn’t mean.

  I had been thinking more and more about L.A., trying to make sense of her being here and figure out what had happened to make her leave home. Gram must have wondered too, but I guess we both had our reasons for not asking. With me it was not wanting to piss L.A. off, along with the absolute certainty that she’d never tell me anything she didn’t want me to know anyway. And even though I told myself L.A.’s arrival had nothing to do with it, my night visitor had shown up right after L.A. had, and the feeling of connection wouldn’t go away. I finally decided that if I was ever going to have any peace I needed to know.

  But that’s where I hit the wall. I didn’t think Aunt Rachel or Uncle Cam would tell me anything, at least not anything I could be sure was true. Which didn’t leave many possibilities. The only source I could think of who might know something and be willing to tell me was Mom, but that didn’t simplify things much because of all the pitfalls talking to her could involve.

  What finally decided it for me was a miracle. Maybe that isn’t the right word for it, but then I can’t think of a better one. You can judge for yourself.

  The day it happened started with rain, which began coming down in earnest while L.A. and I were having breakfast with Gram at the kitchen table. It was a cornflakes morning, and along with her cereal, which she was mainly ignoring, L.A. was taking occasional sips of the coffee Gram had fixed for her—half a cup of fresh-brewed Folgers filled the rest of the way up with milk and sweetened with a spoonful of brown sugar. Like always at this time of day, her eyes were wide and blank and her hair had what Gram called that freshly dynamited look. Jazzy was curled up asleep by her feet.

  Since the municipal pool was open this morning and it was an Adult Day—which meant they only allowed swimmers old enough for you to have a reasonable hope they wouldn’t pee
in the water—this was supposed to be a swimming day for us. But when I heard the rain and wind and noticed how dark it was getting outside, I was forced to start thinking in terms of fallback plans. With a frog-strangler like this in the morning, a lot of times it’s just the beginning of a whole day of start-and-stop rain, which would mean the pool would be closed on account of the possibility of lightning.

  Gram looked out the window for a minute and said, “Now, where was all this last month when we needed it?” She set her coffee cup down in front of her.

  L.A. didn’t speak, just stirred her cereal around, rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand and yawned. She was never in a hurry to eat anything, especially in the morning. On the other hand, I was into my second bowl of flakes with no loss of momentum as I listened to the rain roar and rattle outside. By now it was almost dark as night out there. I didn’t know why, but I enjoyed the sound of the rain. Regardless of how bad they could sometimes screw up your plans, I liked rainy days almost as much as rainy nights.

  Then, while I was gazing absentmindedly at something on the back of Gram’s newspaper about a teen reported missing, and just as L.A. was finally getting around to taking a bite of cornflakes, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that her hair was sticking almost straight out from her head. Even the fuzz on the backs of her arms had begun to stand up. Feeling a tickle on my own skin, I looked at my arms and at Gram and saw the same thing happening to us. Jazzy’s head came up.

  “Well, my land,” Gram said, trying to smooth down her hair. I noticed a smell in the air that reminded me of a hot radio, and then the entire world seemed to explode with something completely beyond sound—like a gigantic fist somehow slamming into me from all directions at once. The accompanying flash half blinded me. The lights went out and the dishes went on rattling for a couple of seconds.

  “Good heavens!” said Gram. “I think it must have struck the old sycamore.”