Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  'You're okay,' she said, as we sat beside one another in the car.

  It was not a question, more a statement of fact. My perception in that moment was that she had sensed some slight misgiving on my part, something in my demeanor that told her I was not here on the same terms as she was.

  'I'm okay,' I said.

  'I know you loved Caroline,' she said, almost in a whisper. 'I saw you together a couple of times, and you can always tell.'

  I looked sideways at Linny, and there was something in her eyes, something in her expression that told me she perhaps understood more of what I was feeling than I did myself.

  'You can lose someone, Danny, lose someone without ever really losing them. You have to recognize that there was a time and a place back there which you will never find again…'

  Linny's hand closed over mine.

  Her skin was warm and soft, like a summer peach.

  'You just keep the emotion somewhere quiet where it cannot be disturbed, and when you're alone you can reflect on it, enjoy it once more as if it had never gone… but when you're not alone you have to realize that there is no place for that emotion. You have to be wherever you are, have to be with whoever you are with when you're with them… and if you can't do that, then wherever you might find yourself, and whoever might be there, then you're always going to be alone…'

  She squeezed my hand gently.

  'You understand what I'm saying?'

  I smiled. I nodded. I leaned towards her.

  She closed her hand around my neck and pressed her cheek to mine.

  We stayed that way for a long time, and she was the one who drew back slightly, and then she kissed me, and she kissed me forever too, and then she released me.

  'Lobster,' she said, and turned the key in the ignition.

  And we did eat lobster. Fresh, caught right there off the Sound. We sat on wooden chairs on a pier with the sound of the sea beneath us, and we drank wine, red and strong, and we stayed there talking, smoking cigarettes, watching the world go about its business but with no wish to become involved.

  Boats went by, fishers and shrimpers, and the rough faces of seafaring men observed us with a wry and curious detachment: kids from the city come down to see how real life can get. I had always felt that people like that would live more life in a day, an hour, than I would in three score and ten.

  But my viewpoint was changing. I was going on twenty- two, I had lost my father, I had heard of Kennedy's death the day it happened, I had fallen in love with Caroline Lanafeuille, at first from a distance and then up close, and now I was losing my mind and my heart to someone called Linny Goldbourne whose father was perhaps the third or fourth most important man in the State. I had been to Atlanta to mourn for Martin Luther King. I had grown up with boys who were now dead in some vast wilderness of jungle on the other side of the world. I had smoked grass, made love in the sand near Port Royal Sound, had drunk tequila with salt and lemon until I believed I would lose my stomach to the gutter. I had shared time with a woman called Eve Chantry, and she had shared with me the candlemoth.

  And soon… soon enough, someone would write and tell me to go to Vietnam.

  It came then - that thought, the name, the place, the things I imagined would happen there. A shadow passed across me, and within its passing I felt myself shudder. The war was out there, it was calling my name, and though I pressed my hands against my ears and hummed a tune to myself, I could hear it echoing through everything.

  I closed my eyes.

  Was this not a life?

  Surely, yes.

  I felt the breeze coming up off the sea that day, could almost taste the salt in the air, and as that day closed I lay in

  the back seat of a Buick Skylark with a girl I could so easily have loved for the rest of my life, and she whispered secrets that meant everything, and yet nothing at all.

  I felt things had somehow simplified.

  That was the only way I could describe it.

  As if things now had some meaning, and thus everything else could be aligned and given its rightful importance.

  For now, Linny Goldbourne was the most important thing in my life.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  Throughout May of 1968 I cannot recall a day I did not see Linny.

  Looking back at it now I can so clearly see how I pushed Nathan aside. Hindsight, our cruellest and most astute adviser, so easily illuminates our errors of judgement, and yet in the middle of life one seizes upon things that seem to mean so much. Looking back, they could never have meant as much as those things that came before or after. If they had, well, if they had they would still be present.

  Had I known that my involvement with Linny Goldbourne would last less than a month, and had I known how and why it would so abruptly end, I would have kept my distance, but - as ever, the moth to a flame - I found her whirlwind of passion and enthusiasm so addictive I could not withdraw.

  Throughout that month I drank tequila and Crown Royal, red wine and beer; I smoked Colombian hashish and opiated marijuana; I read books by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, I listened to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' a thousand times and believed that all the answers of life were somewhere contained within the spaces between the words… and all for Linny Goldbourne, ex-Congressman's daughter, my Svengali, my savior, my nemesis.

  I did love her, I know I did, and in return she loved me. Linny enclosed everything within her own self-created world, and for that time I was the center of her focus, the fulcrum. I saw this in the way she smiled when she saw me, the way she reached and held my hand as we walked, and there was something so strong in the way she felt that my memory of Caroline faded. Faded gently, but faded nonetheless. I had loved Caroline, yes, but as a teenager with a teenager's heart and mind and soul. When I loved Linny I had become a man. Or so I thought then. Different, not necessarily better, but different. My feelings for Caroline were now tinged with a sense of betrayal, as if she had somehow cast me aside for something that should not have meant so much. She was my first. That meant something special, and yet I had recalled her leaving with a sense of bitterness and pain. Those emotions - my passion alongside my loss - had felt like a bruise that would always ache and never heal. Linny somehow healed it, at least from within, so although the bruise still colored my skin it did not gnaw at me as it had once done.

  Linny swept me up inside everything that she was, and she became a part of me that I would, and could, never lose.

  Had I never lost Caroline, perhaps what now happened would not have affected me so. But I had lost her, and that earlier sense of betrayal grew all the more relevant and pressing and real. That was how it felt, and time would not change that… for in the years to come I would begin to see them both in the same light, as if each - though necessarily and remarkably different - had been born to punish me in the same way. It would only be later, much later, that I understood the import of what might have taken place within Linny's family, and thus gained some sense of closure on why she did what she did, but in that moment she had become everything, and then suddenly nothing.

  The last time I saw Linny Goldbourne was the day Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles.

  Kennedy had just won the California primary and was speaking at the Ambassador Hotel.

  Someone called Sirhan Sirhan, who later said he couldn't even remember shooting the presidential candidate, walked towards him in the crowd and killed him.

  Shot him five times.

  How do you shoot someone five times and not remember?

  They did him, just like they did his brother.

  And who were they? Same folks who bet a dollar we could win in Vietnam.

  I was with Linny when we heard. I had just closed the Radio Store for the afternoon, and we were planning to drive down to Orangeburg and see one of her girlfriends.

  Linny started the car, the radio was already on, and we heard.

  She stopped the car. She looked at me with an expression I
had never seen before, would never see again.

  She looked at me and there was nothing.

  She was hollow.

  She shook her head, looked down, and when she looked up her eyes were filled with tears.

  'I have to go home,' she said quietly. 'I have to go home now, Danny. You understand, don't you?'

  I looked back at her with nothing to say.

  She leaned across me and lifted the door lever.

  The door swung open.

  'I love you, Danny,' she said, but she did not look at me as she said it. 'I love you… but I have to go now.'

  She started the car. She sat there looking right ahead. She was waiting for me to get out.

  I wanted to say something, anything, but when I opened my mouth I felt hollow also.

  Never so hollow.

  I edged sideways. My foot was on the sidewalk. I levered myself up and stood there for a moment, the car door open, Linny sitting stock-still, looking right ahead through the windscreen at the road, and then I closed the door.

  She revved the engine, eased the handbrake, depressed the accelerator, and she was gone.

  She drove more slowly than was usual, and even as I watched her go I knew she would turn back, raise her hand perhaps, anything to indicate that she had changed her mind, her plans, our plans. Even though Bobby Kennedy was dead, it still meant something that I was left there on the sidewalk watching Linny disappear.

  But she did not look back.

  She did not raise her hand.

  I felt the same as I had at that moment when she'd walked out of the sea towards me at Port Royal Sound.

  Invisible.

  I stayed there for some minutes.

  I saw Caroline's face for one fleeting moment, the way her head tilted, the way her hair tumbled across her face. I felt nineteen again. I felt ashamed and confused and naive.

  My heart was beating slowly, I remember that, but what else may have occurred in my mind is no longer there.

  And then I turned and walked towards Lake Marion to find Nathan Verney.

  Somehow, for some unknown reason, something had changed.

  I did not suspect for one moment that I would not see her again.

  The connection, for now, was gone.

  We never got drunk again. We did not smoke weed or listen to Dylan or read sections from Albert Camus or Tortilla Flats. We did not drive out to Myrtle Beach in the Buick Skylark and watch the sunset naked.

  And had there been more time I perhaps would have stayed to learn what had happened. Had events not spiralled so quickly out of control, beyond anything I could have imagined, I perhaps would have allowed myself time to grieve, to ask myself why, to beg some understanding of Linny's motives.

  But time had run out - so quick, so sudden, and yet in some way so expected. To live, to love, to lose: these things are just human, and perhaps say something of the way the world is. To do them twice says something about you.

  June 8th 1968 was a Saturday.

  Had it been a weekday I would have been at Karl Winterson's Radio Store when Nathan Verney came down.

  But I was asleep, and when Nathan came he carried a burden the like of which would crush a man.

  The burden weighed three grams. It was a pale manila color, and within it a single sheet of white paper with an official seal at the top and a printed signature at the bottom. It weighed more than heat tabs and Kool Aid and C-Rations and steel helmets and liners and camouflage covers, more than compress bandages and steel brushes and gun oil and fragmentation grenades, more than the weight of all our mothers' broken hearts, our fathers' vanished hopes…

  It came in the disguise of a letter, and upon the letter was printed Nathan Verney's name.

  It called upon his duty and his honor. It called upon his national allegiance. It called upon his sense of rightness and equity. It called upon his belief in the Constitution and the American way of life.

  It called upon him.

  More than anything, the burden called upon his fear.

  And Nathan came prepared. He carried a shoulder-sack and a holdall. He carried a polythene bag within which he'd stowed clean socks and a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a shaving razor and a kitchen knife. In his coat pockets he carried a packet of Kools, a Zippo lighter, a comb, loose change and a small roll of one and five-dollar bills which couldn't have amounted to more than thirty or forty bucks all told. In his heart he carried guilt and fear and an indescribable sense of loss and disassociation.

  And in his hand he carried the burden.

  My ma was out fetching provisions.

  The sound of his feet on the path below woke me, and I leaned from the window to see who was there.

  As I looked out he looked up, and with that one glance, that one image of his upturned face, I read everything that could be said.

  My body became cold, and yet I twitched as if with a fever.

  My palms sweated so much I couldn't tighten my belt, and as I went downstairs I almost tripped and fell.

  As I reached the front door Nathan was walking up the front steps towards the screen. He paused there, and in that second he glanced back over his shoulder towards the road, towards Lake Marion beyond, and in that glance I recognized his deep sense of longing, his heartache.

  In that glance was perhaps the belief that he would never see this place again.

  'You okay?' I asked. A stupid and thoughtless question.

  Nathan didn't reply, couldn't reply. What was there that anyone could have said?

  He passed by me and walked down the hall to the kitchen. He hesitated in the doorway, and then he crossed the room and sat down. He sat where he always sat, back to the window, his hands in his lap, his eyes downcast to the floor.

  We were six years old when we met, sixteen years before, and Nathan had perhaps sat right there two or three times a week in every week since, but never, never in all those thousands of times, had he looked like this.

  He placed the burden on the table.

  I believed the table would buckle with the weight.

  'My folks don't know,' he started. 'My folks believe I am going north to find work. I have been talking about it for six months. I knew the time would come and I wanted to be ready.'

  I sat down opposite Nathan. Even then I could picture my ma turning from the stove with fresh corn and potatoes, Nathan's round cherubic face grinning up at her as she spooned more food onto his plate than he could possibly eat.

  I saw us sitting there playing cards, the sun going down through the window behind him and, as it touched the horizon, the last brief burst of orange that would throw a halo of gold through his short wiry hair.

  I saw Nathan sitting there nursing a bleeding elbow, tears in his eyes, the temptation to touch it growing ever stronger as he looked.

  I saw myself laughing as we tried to chase a bird out through the back door and into the yard.

  I saw all these things.

  And then I looked at Nathan once more.

  'And you?' he asked.

  I turned away. I could not face him. My heart thundered in my chest. My fists were clenching and releasing. My pulse raced like a derailed freight train.

  I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing what to say.

  'Your decision,' Nathan said quietly.

  I closed my mouth.

  I thought of my mother, the memory of my father. I thought of Eve Chantry, of Dr. Backermann. I thought of Marty Hooper and Larry James lying dead and stiff and cold in the middle of nowhere. I thought of Caroline Lanafeuille, of Linny Goldbourne, of Sheryl Rose Bogazzi whom I had never touched, never kissed, but still somehow managed to love from afar despite her ultimate betrayal.

  I thought least of all of myself.

  'I -'

  Nathan raised his hand.

  'Your decision,' he repeated quietly.

  I looked at him, and for a moment I did not recognize the man who sat facing me. He seemed a stranger.

  'I cannot let you go alone,' I said.<
br />
  'That isn't a decision, Danny,' Nathan replied.

  I felt like crying.

  'I haven't received my notice,' I said.

  My voice sounded unfamiliar.

  Nathan didn't reply, merely looked back at me with that same detached expression.

  'My ma…'

  Nathan started to rise from the chair.