Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  During one of the brief moments when our lips and tongues were not twinned and twined, I mentioned how strange it was to feel Marie’s actual flesh beneath her blouse rather than a bandage. Laughing, I added, “And you’re wearing a bra for the first time!”

  In response to a request I did not make, Marie unbuttoned her blouse and wriggled herself free of it. She twisted around so her back was to me. “I still have trouble reaching around,” she said. “Unhook me.”

  My trembling, inexperienced fingers eventually managed to accomplish the task. Then, with a movement so subtle and deft I didn’t quite understand how she performed it, Marie allowed her brassiere to fall off.

  She turned back to me, her crossed arms covering her breasts. She let her hands fall away and at the same time reclined across the Studebaker’s front seat.

  In these pages are examples aplenty of my inventive powers (or deficiencies). There is evidence as well of how my imagination is as likely to lead to misapprehension and mistake as to truth and understanding. Let me merely say at this point that I could more successfully imagine my way into a murderer’s mind than anticipate the wonder of Marie Ryan’s perfect breasts exposed to my sight and touch.

  Marie, however, had no patience with my awe. She extended her arms, beckoning me to lie down with her, and just in case I didn’t understand the invitation, she whispered, “Come here.”

  The sight of the almost-naked Marie Ryan was intoxicating, but even more thrilling—and astonishing—was the feel of her. Her skin was warm and amazingly soft to the touch—silk right off the ironing board.

  “Now,” she said.

  When my kisses became too long and too intense, Marie turned her head to the side. As if to expand her body and its openness to pleasure, she extended one arm out under the dashboard and with the other reached up and pressed against the seat.

  If the months-later occasion when we finally had intercourse was somewhat less ecstatic, mark it down to my overeagerness and awkwardness. The act occurred in the unfinished attic of Marie’s parents’ home. The attic entrance was through the garage, and we were frequently able to climb up there undetected. Under the slanting roof and the cobwebbed timbers, lying on our makeshift pallet (flattened cardboard boxes covered with winter coats and old clothes), we explored our bodies and their secret delights, and finally, on a warm April day that was warmer still in the attic, we went all the way. That was the phrase in currency at the time (and perhaps it still is), and while I felt its accuracy—I had plainly gone somewhere I had never been before—I also sensed its inadequacy: I knew there were further realms to travel to, and one journey was barely finished before I wanted another to begin. And gradually, with Marie’s help, I overcame the ineptness of that first time. In sexual matters, she knew my nature better than I, and she taught me that the greatest pleasures came from being controlled by the moment rather than trying to control it.

  Across from Marie’s parents’ home was an elementary school, and I remember being in the attic once when the shouts and laughter of children at play rose to our height. We had just finished making love, and while Marie still lay on our “bed,” I rose and went to the high, small window to try to take advantage of what little ventilation it might provide.

  The day, like so many on North Dakota’s calendar, was breezy, and just enough air moved through the window to cool my sweating body. I couldn’t see the children, but I could hear them, and the sound was enough for me to imagine their activity, their play. . . . What Marie and I had been doing was, of course, playful, yet just as certainly it was different. I didn’t at that time have Frost’s phrase—“play for mortal stakes”—but it applied. In our stifling garret Marie and I played together. Life and death depended on it. Whose, I couldn’t be sure.

  I didn’t keep from my parents the fact that I was going steady with Marie Ryan, but neither did I go out of the way to advertise the relationship. I was concerned, a worry probably without foundation, that they might display an unseemly interest in what Marie might know about Raymond Stoddard. And though I say “they,” I really mean my father. A year and a half after the murder-suicide he was still seeking the truth behind it. His quest was no longer very active, but he was not yet satisfied with any of the theories that might have settled the minds of others. My mother, as I said earlier, was content with the version that Ross Wilk had presented to my father.

  But though I didn’t want anyone else to try to take advantage of Marie for her inside information on the Stoddard family, I had no compunction myself about seeking to learn any secrets she might possess. I often questioned her about her memories of Mr. Stoddard and for any theories she might have had about his behavior. Marie, however, had little to offer, and not only because she had observed almost no examples of behavior that would lead one to conclude that the father of her then-boyfriend harbored murderous impulses.

  As she made plain as far back as the day of Raymond Stoddard’s funeral, she believed that the man was obviously deranged, if not legally insane. His acts were, ipso facto, evidence of that condition. The minds of such people couldn’t be understood. Furthermore, pragmatic to her core, she thought it futile to try.

  And though she wouldn’t hold up any memory to explain Raymond Stoddard, she did tell me about an incident that corroborated her conviction that he was mentally ill.

  Marie first met Raymond and Alma Stoddard when Gene invited her to a family picnic in September 1960. The day was windy, cold, and overcast, and to make matters worse the picnic site wasn’t a Bismarck park but an unsheltered prairie hilltop north of the city. Mr. Stoddard, however, insisted that the spot, which he chose, was perfect. They spread their old wool blanket over buffalo grass so wiry and stubborn the stubble poked right through the fabric. Stones and the picnic basket weighted down the cloth at the corners and kept it from blowing away. The paper plates had to be heaped with food immediately, or the wind would tear them away like dry leaves.

  And the food was not standard picnic fare. It was leftovers, and not particularly impressive ones at that. Chunks of cold (though previously overcooked) pot roast, unheated potatoes and carrots, apples (for weight, if nothing else), and buttered bread. Two thermoses—one filled with coffee and the other with milk.

  Odder still was Marie’s introduction to Mr. Stoddard. Shortly after meeting her, he wanted to know where she lived. When she told him, Mr. Stoddard said he knew the neighborhood well. When he first came to Bismarck, before he found an apartment for his family, he stayed with Mrs. Hills, who lived on Marie’s street but had once lived in Wembley and was a friend of his grandmother’s. Did Marie know Mrs. Hills?

  Yes, she knew the old woman.

  “How unfortunate,” Mr. Stoddard said, “that she’s no longer with us.”

  Marie didn’t understand. “Not with us?”

  “Why, she had a stroke,” Mr. Stoddard said. “She passed away.”

  She wanted to make a good impression on her boyfriend’s parents, but Marie Ryan couldn’t allow this misinformation to stand. “No, she’s alive. She lives just down the street from us.”

  “You’re mistaken. She’s no longer with us.” Mr. Stoddard kept using the same phrase. No longer with us.

  Another teenage girl might have backed down in the face of an adult’s certainty. “She’s alive,” Marie reiterated. “Alive. I saw her recently.”

  Mr. Stoddard never stopped smiling or insisting. Mrs. Hills had had a stroke. She had passed away. He was sorry he hadn’t attended her funeral.

  Eventually, like the relentless prairie wind, he wore her down. Marie didn’t submit to his belief, but she stopped arguing.

  When Marie related this anecdote, I confessed that I didn’t quite understand. So he had made a mistake; I didn’t see how that was evidence of derangement.

  Marie shook her head strenuously. It wasn’t just that he was wrong—though that could have been a sign that he was delusional in his convictions—but that he wouldn’t admit to doubt. He was so certain of the
rightness of his belief.

  That sounds, I suggested, as though you’re describing someone religious.

  “Okay,” Marie said. “I don’t have a problem with that. If you add ‘zealot.’ ”

  Yet for the most part, Marie resisted my efforts to pry from her any inside information on the Stoddard family, especially as such information might relate to Raymond Stoddard’s pathology. In fact, she was critical of my curiosity.

  I remember very well an evening when we sat in the darkened kitchen of her parents’ house, facing each other across the table where the Ryan family ate their meals. I had been questioning her again about her memories of Mr. Stoddard and what Gene had told her about his father.

  “Why,” she wondered, “is it so important for you to know why he did what he did?”

  One psychology class in high school and another in college provided me with a suitably high-minded and personal response. “If we can understand people like Raymond Stoddard—their, you know, their motivation—then maybe they can be stopped before they kill.”

  “Do you really believe knowledge can keep people from killing each other?” Marie had a gift for phrasing matters in such a way that the ground under your argument began to erode even before it was built. “Or that we can ever understand people like him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But there was only one Raymond Stoddard. And he did what he did. And he’ll never do it again. Why not just let it all go?”

  “Isn’t it human to be curious? To want to know?”

  “It just seems so pointless. Even if Raymond Stoddard had lived and he could tell us why he did what he did, we’d still only have a madman’s word to go on.”

  I could never formulate an effective refutation to Marie’s position, yet I never took that inadequacy to mean that my own beliefs were flawed. She was, I told myself, simply a better debater than I. So there was no reason for me to cease my interrogations, no matter how they might exhaust and exasperate her.

  Let me offer just one more of Marie’s memories of Raymond Stoddard, and I present it not as evidence of anything but simply to share an image that was lodged in her mind (and therefore in mine).

  Marie never had that many occasions to observe Raymond Stoddard, and that was a consequence of the age as much as anything. In the early 1960s a boy might spend plenty of time at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, but she might never enter the interior of his. We all understood this, even if the why of it escaped us.

  But Marie was there a few times (and if anyone was likely to defy the more idiotic strictures of the era, it was she), and on one occasion she and Gene were sitting on the living room floor in front of the black-and-white console television that I myself spent so many hours watching.

  Mrs. Stoddard sat on the sofa and Mr. Stoddard was in his easy chair, but he was certainly not at ease. At one point he swiveled suddenly toward the living room window and the darkened night beyond and said, “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Mrs. Stoddard calmly asked.

  Suddenly embarrassed, Mr. Stoddard said, “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  Yet from where Marie sat, she had a clear view of him, and for the rest of the evening he seemed on alert, as if he were listening for that sound to repeat itself and its message that no one else could hear.

  In the weeks and months after Marie and I started dating, not a word passed between Gene and me. From others I learned that for most of the summer and fall he was working out of town, continuing in the employ of his uncle’s construction company. But Keogh Street was still his home, and occasionally I saw him drive by, now in a white Chevrolet convertible that he’d started driving about the time I acquired the Studebaker. His car was newer, faster, and cooler than mine, and he probably bought it with his own money. His job, according to all accounts, paid well.

  Was I worried about how he would react to Marie and me being a couple? Yes. Was that worry intensified because he was Raymond Stoddard’s son? Yes. And the worry played out on a daily basis as suspense, so while I was happy with Marie, happier than I had ever been, I was continually looking over my shoulder, constantly on the lookout for an attack from a wounded, enraged, drunken Gene Stoddard.

  But Gene troubled my life in another way. As odd as it might seem, I missed him. He had been a part of my almost daily existence for years, while for only months had our friendship changed, so I couldn’t quite adjust to the idea that now we were—what were we? Enemies? Rivals? Whatever term might have applied, the fact was we no longer had that regular, casual contact—Did you understand that algebra assignment? Are you going to play touch football on Saturday? Do you want to get a burger at Jack Lyon’s?—that had for so long been a feature of both our lives. Are you going to play poker at Billy’s on Friday? Do you want to drive or should I? Got an extra cigarette? Want to know what Marie let me get away with last night?

  Perhaps, then, it was both a wish for reconciliation and a desire to eliminate the tension that I was living with that made me do what I did.

  On the Friday after Thanksgiving 1962, snow began falling shortly after sunrise. By evening, close to a foot had fallen on the city. The snow was the dry, downy sort, so its effect was fairly benign. It was relatively easy to shovel, too light to snap branches or power lines, and since the wind was calm, flakes didn’t stray far from where they fell. Still, even in a land as accustomed to winter’s challenges as North Dakota, twelve inches of snow has an effect, and as I drove home late from Marie’s, the streets were largely deserted. Snowplows had not cleared the streets, and I had to steer through the ruts left by cars that had earlier passed that way.

  I had just turned onto Keogh Street when I saw Gene Stoddard trudging through one of those furrows. He had probably stepped out into the street because on that section of the block most of the sidewalks were unshoveled, the owners probably away for the holiday.

  Could I have simply driven past? Certainly. And that option would have been in keeping with what our relationship had become. But as I said, the suspense had gotten to me, and this seemed an opportunity to address it, if not eliminate it altogether. Besides, he would recognize my car.

  I stopped in the middle of the street and asked him if he wanted a ride.

  Gene was hatless, gloveless, and wearing only a light jacket. His shoes must have been soaked through. Nevertheless, he hesitated before finally shrugging and climbing into the Studebaker.

  “Remember Thanksgiving last year?” I said. “Sixty degrees.” An innocuous remark about the weather seemed like a safe way to begin, even if it would allow him the opportunity to comment on how many other things were different a year ago.

  “How about that time it snowed on Halloween? Who was the kid whose trick-or-treat bag got so wet it tore open and all his candy fell out? And then he went home crying, so we kept his candy?” Gene asked.

  “Jerry Blessum.”

  “Jerry Blessum. Yeah.” Gene was wearing aftershave or cologne, but its aroma was faint next to the stale but still overpowering smell of cigarette smoke and liquor. Was he drunk? Probably. “Fucking North Dakota. Snow on Halloween. . . . Why does anyone live here?”

  What was I supposed to say—in order to be close to Marie? I changed the subject. “Where’s your car?”

  “Sitting in the driveway at Vicky Morhoeffer’s. The battery’s so fucking dead it won’t even turn over.”

  For a moment I considered offering to drive him back there and help him start his car. In my trunk I kept, at my father’s insistence, a set of jumper cables. They were there not only so I could get myself out of trouble, but so I could help others, as my father had done with the Stoddard vehicle on the second morning after Raymond Stoddard had hanged himself. I lacked, however, my father’s Samaritan spirit. Indeed, it was hardly even an impulse to goodness that had prompted me to invite Gene into my car in the first place.

  And in the general direction of that topic was where I ventured next, albeit with trepidation. “Vicky Morhoeffer, huh?” />
  “What can I say—she’s a fucking slut. But she’ll do anything. Anything. And her folks are hardly ever home.”

  I took that to mean that, unlike in a previous relationship, love was not involved. I understood as well that I was free to ask what Vicky Morhoeffer was willing to do. Instead, I headed for safer terrain. “She’s a junior?”

  “A junior? Yeah, I guess.” We were on our block now, and he pointed toward his house. “Don’t pull in the driveway. You’ll pack down the snow, and it’ll be harder to shovel in the morning.”

  I stopped under a streetlamp across from his house. I hadn’t scraped the windshield very well when I left Marie’s, and frost stars glittered on the glass under the light’s glow. A few weightless flakes still floated in the air.

  “Hey, you got any smokes?” Gene asked.

  I reached into my shirt pocket for my pack of Chesterfields and handed it to him.

  He shook out two cigarettes. “A couple to get me through the night?”

  “Take all you need. Keep the pack, if you like.”

  Without warning, he grabbed my wrist.

  I stiffened and that might have prevented Gene from pulling me toward him. But maybe moving me was not his intention. Using my weight as an anchor, he drew himself closer to me. I could smell the rank, curdled odor of tobacco and whiskey on his breath.

  Strangely, having my wrist in Gene’s grasp didn’t so much feel like a physical threat as it reminded me of a time in our childhood when we had taken each other’s measure in quite a different way.

  During one of the summers of our Little League play, Gene and I embarked on a strenuous program to improve as ballplayers. We practiced long hours, hitting fly balls and grounders to each other, pitching, batting (and sprinting after the batted ball), and with the help of instructional, inspirational articles in Baseball Digest and other publications, tried to strengthen our baseball muscles. Following the example of Hank Aaron’s success, we tried to build stronger wrists by squeezing tennis balls and rolling weighted bars back and forth. To gauge our success, we were constantly calibrating each other’s wrists, hoping to feel that increase in circumference that would indicate muscle growth.