Out of Darkness

by Ashley Hope Pérez

  But it could not hold.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  He did not say: I know why it happened. She did not say: Cari died hating me. He did not say: somewhere, there was a heater I did not check. She did not say: I sent them into that building.

  She reckoned up what a braid and a pair of shoes had cost her.

  He tried to recall the embrace he’d bought with his unfinished work.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Naomi pulled back and leaned against the tree’s crumbly insides. “Beto,” she said.

  Wash pulled her back to him. “How is he?” He took her hand, held it. She was wearing the ring he’d made her.

  “I can’t wake him up,” she whispered. “He won’t look at me. Won’t talk. He stays under the table where she is. Just lies there.”

  He swallowed. He had no solutions. “Time,” he said. “Give it time. Imagine. They were always together.”

  Her silence filled the tree, swelling the hurt that hung there.

  He lifted a hand to her damp cheek. “And Henry?” He slid his thumb to her lips, down to her chin, along the smooth expanse of her throat. He found her heart and felt its steadiness.

  “Naomi,” he said softly. “Talk to me.” He could feel her holding back.

  “A little worse than usual,” she said. “Impatient.”

  In a flash, Wash could see their situation clearly. The explosion had shattered their timeline. School was over now; Henry might not be persuaded to wait any longer. He would want to secure his hold on what was his. What he wanted to make his.

  “Be careful,” he said. A lump formed in his throat. The size of his helplessness. It wasn’t just Henry. He thought of the roughnecks blocking his way at the school. The truck that came to Egypt Town and demanded volunteers to dig graves. Even at the cemetery, he’d heard murmurings. People were restless. They wanted answers, any answers. Anything could happen. Anywhere. Nowhere here was safe enough.

  “How soon can you be ready to leave?” he asked her.

  “Cari...” she said.

  “After the funeral. Listen.” He gripped her shoulders. “You know something’s different with Henry. He’s not going to wait around. We can’t risk it anymore.”

  She let out a ragged breath. “Where will we get the money?” she asked. “I counted ten dollars with the coins the twins have squirreled away.”

  “I have some,” he said. “I’ll borrow the rest.” He could almost feel the Booker money box in his hand. A solution.

  “And Beto?” she said.

  “We’ll find a way to help him. But first we have to go. To San Antonio and then to Mexico. I’ll get tickets.”

  “It’s so hard to think about—it’s hard to think,” she said. The work of making the plan real exhausted her. She tucked her head up under his chin. Fell into the rhythm of his heart.

  “Just take care of Cari and try to help Beto. I’ll meet you here whenever I can, leave you a note if I don’t find you here. We could be in Mexico by the end of next week. Maybe sooner.”

  She tried on that thought for the first time since after the explosion. It did not feel the same. But then, nothing felt the same.

  “Okay,” she said.

  THE GANG We were lucky, that’s what they said to those of us who were left. Half of our class was dead. Elliott Grovener lost a leg. Dot Miller lost an eye. Others of us took a beating. But the smaller forms of damage—bruises, cuts, scrapes—did not seem worth mentioning. Some of us came out of the school painted with our classmates’ insides.

  Still, in town they said we were lucky. We were lucky we were cutting class down by Propp’s pond. Lucky we chose the seat we did. Lucky we were carrying out Miss Carson’s wastebin. Lucky to be sewing crooked lines in home economics. Lucky not to have lost more. Lucky to be alive.

  It was a new kind of luck for us. Heavy. Balanced by loss. All the missing faces. We did not know what it would mean, this luck. We avoided the mothers of our dead classmates, their hungry eyes.

  BETO At around ten o’clock each day, the square of light disappeared. And then Beto felt alone until it came back, but at least he was near Cari. Sometime after the light was gone one day, Henry lifted her off of the table. Even though Beto knew it wasn’t really her, knew that she was gone from the body, it being there had helped him to pretend. It had been better than nothing. It had made it possible, moment by moment, to pretend that she was pretending. But that was over now. A new silence took hold of him.

  NAOMI Naomi flinched when Henry came crashing into the kitchen. “It’s a sham and a shame is what it is,” he said. He was shaking. The green of his eyes was brighter than ever. The muscles along his jaw popped.

  She didn’t dare hush him. “Beto,” she began, gesturing to where he lay, open-eyed, under the kitchen table where Cari had been.

  Henry ignored her. “We’re not doing it, not if that’s the way it’s going to be. I won’t rush her in and out like that.” He hurled a wadded piece of paper against the wall. He paced the rooms with his arms crossed, bits of mud shaking off of his boots with each furious footfall. She edged over to the wall and picked up the paper, loosening the wad carefully.

  He wheeled around. “See? Like a goddamn train schedule!”

  She stared at the page and understood. It was a list of funerals he’d gotten from the undertakers. At the three New London churches, there was a funeral every fifteen or thirty minutes from nine o’clock in the morning until after eight.

  Naomi swallowed. “We don’t need a service,” she said after a long while. Cari wouldn’t have cared for extra time in a church anyway.

  Henry turned to her with such a look of gratitude that she worried he might have misunderstood her again.

  BETO “Did you hear me, Robbie?” Henry said, crouching down and giving him a hard look. “Get out from under there.”

  Beto was silent.

  “You think I can’t make a coffin for my girl? I can. I know my way around a saw and a hammer. Now get up or I’m gonna throw that cat down a well.”

  Beto moved. He handed Edgar to Naomi and then followed his father out to the dirt patch in back of the house. The lumber and tools lay in a careless heap. A bad sign.

  NAOMI Naomi’s hands were red and scalded from scrubbing pots. Pots that were already clean. There was no need to cook; Muff had filled their refrigerator with casseroles and fried chicken and potato salad and molded fruit gelatin. So Naomi dusted and straightened dishes in the cabinets. She swept the living room and the hall and the bedrooms and the bathroom and the porch. She washed the table again and felt the absence of Beto, the greater absence of Cari.

  From the porch, she watched Henry and Beto. Lengths of wood were spread out in the yard. Something like a box lay under Henry’s hands.

  She knew about bringing parts together to form a whole; it took patience to feel how things fit together. But that was not Henry’s way. Even when something wasn’t right, he forced it.

  Beto slumped by the pile of tools. When his eyes drifted toward the kitchen, she smiled, but his expression did not change.

  She went inside then and got the guitar case out. She closed her hand around one of the dance shoes. Bits of dried clay clung to the heel. Naomi remembered walking away from the cafeteria. Fingers clutching the braid she would not share.

  She felt for the braid now and coiled it carefully around her hand. She laid it under Cari’s pillow. An experiment. Nothing changed inside her except the size of her sadness. Beto, then. She would give it to Beto.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Henry came into the house cursing. He passed her in the hall, smelling of sawdust and sweat and fury.

  Beto was still sitting in the yard. He looked ill. The box was much too small, and the boards gapped in places. Every joint betrayed signs of force and compromise. Naomi was not going to let her sister be buried in that.

  “Come on, cariño,” she said, tugging Beto to his feet by his sleeve.

  She tried to get him to his bed, but he ducked bac
k under the kitchen table. Naomi set a plate of cold fried chicken and potato salad on the floor. She poured him a glass of milk.

  She carried a second plate to Henry’s room. When he didn’t answer her knock, she turned the knob and nudged the door open with her foot.

  He was sitting by the bed with his back against the wall. When she came in, he shoved something behind the nightstand. Naomi thought of the picture of her mother. The revolver. His hidden bottle.

  She handed him the plate. “We can call the Humble Oil people back. Tell them we want a casket after all,” she said.

  “Charity.” He spat the word out and knocked his head slowly against the wall behind him. His face was still damp with sweat. He gave a dry swallow, and his Adam’s apple rolled against the skin of his throat. She lowered her eyes to the floor, tracing the red clay that he had tracked into the bedroom.

  “I’ll get you some water,” she said.

  She came back with a glass and a damp washcloth. “Here,” she said. She set them beside him.

  He still didn’t say anything. She went for the broom and swept the clay up. After that, she passed a damp mop over the floor. Then she stood in the doorway and waited.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Henry said hoarsely. “Not any of it. Couldn’t save her, couldn’t get there to bring her out, couldn’t build a casket.” He took a long swallow from the glass of water and then looked up at her. He was pleading, although she did not know what for.

  She tried again. “We’ll get back on the waiting list, accept whatever they can get for us. They say by Monday, even...”

  He shook his head. “I want an honest coffin for her. Guess that’s why I couldn’t do it. My hands ...” He looked down at them. “They’re no good. Not steady, neither.” He held them up. His face was awash with self-pity.

  “It’s just that you’re tired.” She crossed back over to him, picked up the damp cloth, and pressed it into his hands. She needed him to hold it together long enough to get Cari in the ground.

  Henry wiped off his face and rubbed his chin. “We’ll need more lumber.”

  “We still have time,” she said. They did, but only a little. They had to collect Cari’s body from Overton by seven, and it was almost two. She had to get him moving. “You get the wood. I’ll find a carpenter.”

  Naomi made the declaration before she weighed its risks. Because she only knew of one carpenter who would put Cari’s coffin before the dozens of others.

  Henry reached behind the nightstand and held out a half-empty bottle of Four Roses whiskey to her. “Get rid of it,” he said. “See, I don’t need Pastor Tom to straighten me out. You and me, we make a good team, huh?”

  Naomi swallowed and nodded. Just barely.

  It seemed it was enough; Henry hauled himself up from the floor, grabbed a chicken leg to take with him, and veered down the hall toward the back door. Naomi followed and watched him cross the yard to his truck. He did not look at the monstrous thing he’d made.

  BETO Beto went outside when Wash called because it was Wash, and Wash couldn’t come in.

  “You know how to handle these tools,” Wash said. “Can you help me?” He handed Beto a hammer.

  “Okay,” Beto whispered.

  It was the first time he’d spoken since the school exploded.

  HENRY Henry saw him as soon as he turned onto the stretch of road lined with Humble houses. The Negro boy squatting in the yard next to Beto. There was a bit of paper, a pencil, and an open toolbox before them. The sight caused a clenching low in his gut, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Damn it to hell,” he muttered under his breath. He should have known.

  He let the truck idle for a moment before he killed the engine and got out. Naomi had come out onto the porch. She said something to him, but he didn’t hear.

  Wash pulled off his cap and took a few steps toward the truck. A shuffle, really. Henry relaxed slightly.

  “Awful sorry, sir. About Cari.”

  Henry stiffened. He eyed Wash. He knew he should thank the boy for bringing Beto out, for going back for Cari’s body, but he said only, “Can you fix this?” He jabbed a finger in the direction of the box he’d built.

  “I can try, sir, but...” Wash hesitated. “Seeing as how time is ... of the essence ... it might be faster to start fresh.”

  Of the essence. The boy turned Henry’s stomach. “Let’s get the lumber from the truck, then,” he spat.

  When the planks were unloaded, Henry turned his back on his son and the Negro and climbed the porch steps. Naomi was sitting there snapping the ends off of green beans. She stood up and offered him the stool. “Your boots?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’m going to Bud and Muff’s for a while, and then I’ll be back for the box. You can come with me to get her. It won’t take that boy no time if he’s half as fuckin’ handy as he seems. Give him my ... thanks.” Henry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But don’t you let him in my house. And you clean that box inside and out. Clean it down good before we put our girl in there.”

  BETO Beto stood in the darkened kitchen and traced the edge of the real casket, the one that was right and tight and smooth from sanding. There was only a sliver of moon to see by. He slid the lid open a few inches and found the hand that was not really Cari’s hand anymore. He slipped the braid into it. It had been his first, and now it would be hers.

  He did not know what luck could mean to the dead, just as it was impossible to know if one baptism was enough. Either she was saved because of him, or he didn’t want to be saved. Both or none.

  He closed the casket lid and felt Naomi’s arms around him.

  “Hi, Omi,” he said.

  “You’re awake,” she whispered.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Morning. Blue sky. Velvety soft clouds. Small coffin. Hymns. Dirt clods tossed into graves. Cari’s body, in the ground. Their mother’s birthday on the wooden marker that would turn into a gravestone for Cari. Everything else, packed inside him. Beto waited to cry but couldn’t.

  WASH Wash heard Naomi coming. When she climbed into the tree, he folded her into his arms.

  “We buried her,” Naomi said.

  “I know. If I could’ve...” He’d watched from a grave four rows over as Cari went into the ground in the casket he’d made. He’d seen Beto’s face tilted up toward the sky, not blank, but strange. Naomi stood behind him. And there was Henry’s hand on Naomi’s elbow. Wash had seen that. He could only imagine what it had cost her.

  He held her close and felt the sob rise in her. Her body stiffened against it.

  “Shh,” he said, “I’m here.”

  She pressed her face against his chest. “How soon?” she whispered.

  Now, he wanted to say. But there had been no way to get away from the digging, no chance for a trip to Tyler to get the train tickets. “I’ll go for the tickets first thing tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll leave Tuesday morning. Catch the train in Tyler where nobody will know us.”

  She began to cry then.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “I know.” He did not, though. And still he had to try to take the hurt from her.

  He began to touch her, and he could feel the change coming over Naomi, the wildness climbing up out of her. He breathed in the warmth from her neck.

  And then she was gone, pushing her way out of the tree.

  She was fast, but he was faster and caught up to her before she could get out of the woods, where it would be too dangerous for him to follow her.

  “Please, Naomi,” he whispered as loud as he dared. His breath came fast.

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s go down to the river.”

  NAOMI Naomi could feel the space between them as they stood at the edge of the bank and watched the river. The water was so dark and smooth it looked like oil. Cottonwood seeds drifted down on their pale cushions, disappeared into the blackness. She thought of her desire that way, a thing float
ing away from her and vanishing safely into the water.

  “Mañana,” Wash said. He took her hand, squeezed it, released it.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  THE GANG We filled the days after the explosion however we could. The boys helped build the coffins and dig the graves. So many graves. Blisters that ached and burst. The girls laid out meals and put them away. Washed up. So many meals, so many dishes crusted with casserole. Knuckles and fingertips raw from hot water and steel wool. We avoided mirrors and went to funerals. Some of us sat in church after church after church. Sat through eulogies and prayer meetings. Learned to turn to the Lord again. Learned to lean not on our own understanding. Trust His wisdom. Others of us followed our fathers out into the woods, carried guns and rods. Hunted and fished and trapped with them. Opened beers for them and also drank them ourselves.

  Six of us, the last of the football team, followed our fathers to Big T’s. We slipped into the crowd.

  “Backsliding,” someone said to the beer in his hand. But we were not. Backsliding. We were sliding for the first time. Only Fred Carter had the guts to belly up to the bar. The rest of us just listened.

  We learned things.

  We learned where they buried the body parts that could not be identified.

  We learned that Tad Schmitt found a bright blue vein of gas still burning when he was clearing rubble from what used to be the school’s crawl space.

  Somebody asked why nobody called the gas company to get it switched off.

  Tad shrugged. “I did. But they told me the school quit buying their gas three months ago. Said the school probably switched to bleed-off gas.”

  We learned how news moves through a crowd of men. We felt them weigh the possibility. We tried it, too. Was it green gas that did our school in?