Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  Last year, Rudy and me hung a rope on a strong laurel branch. Shame on us but we were too chicken to swing into the water, too stuck to run and fly and let go then get that sickening moment of falling and splash. What if there were rocks we hadn’t seen? Or sticking up branches that’d skewer us dead? I wasn’t the best swimmer in the world and everyone knew it so never expected me to go first, but even Rudy was afraid, though he joked it off. Jenny stood close by me, said she didn’t want to get her dress wet and, despite the heat, despite the cloying, sweating hotness of the world, all we did was dip a toe.

  Except Gloria.

  None of us were looking for her to be the bravest, the first. We took it as certain that she would go last, she was a girly girl, rich family type. But before Rudy could turn around and tease her for it, Gloria was sprinting. A blur of red dress and red hair as she ran for the rope, kicking up brown leaves, sending them skimming the water. I remembered her swinging high, letting go, shrieking and disappearing into the lake, then popping up like a mermaid, hair dark red and stuck to her head, laughing and calling us all sissies. From that day on Rudy said you can never be sure with Gloria. Momma thought the same when I told her the story. She’ll grow up to be a quicksand woman, Momma said. Careful of that one, John Royal, she’ll have you running circles you don’t even know about. Be the death of you, she will.

  Gloria always did what nobody expected.

  So that Friday when we were fishing for perch in Big Lake, it was Gloria, wandering, not fishing because she thought it was boring, who found it. Tangled in the roots of a ripped-up sycamore, half-sunk in the flooded wood.

  ‘Come look,’ she shouted, stick in her hand for prodding. ‘Get over here the lot of you.’

  Rudy, on the other side of the lake, ran.

  Jenny trailed behind me. ‘But the fish, Johnny.’

  ‘It’ll just take a minute. Hook’s in the water anyways.’

  Gloria pointed with her stick. It was just out of arm’s reach, the thing in the roots. But it wasn’t a thing. The closer I got the clearer I saw. Rudy stopped running. He saw it too. Gloria’s face was frowning and pale. Rudy looked back at me with hard eyes that said, keep Jenny back. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, not here. It was grey skin and hair once blonde like Rudy’s. It was bloated but not unrecognisable. Gloria’s stick left impressions in the skin.

  It was a woman and she was dead.

  2

  We didn’t tell anyone about the body, at least not at first. A mixture of fear and fascination silenced us. It fizzed inside us, this knowledge, this secret, so colossal and strange we thought it would crush us if we put one toe wrong, one word in the wrong ear.

  The four of us stood silent and staring for I don’t know how long. Just as dusk was settling and the starlings began their wheel, we decided to pull the woman out of the water and roots and lay her alongside a fallen tree trunk. We thought it kinder, to have something at her back, some comfort.

  The woman, in my head I named her Mora, for the sycamore tree, was the first I’d seen naked. Mora’s were the first breasts, the first swatch of hair between the legs, the first bullet hole.

  Gloria couldn’t look at her. Jenny couldn’t stop.

  Rudy swore in a whisper and leaned into me. ‘What do we do?’

  But I didn’t have an answer.

  ‘Who do you think she is?’ Jenny said but nobody wanted to guess.

  ‘We should tell Sheriff Samuels,’ Gloria said and I heard a tremor in her voice. Usually so steady, her tone, rich like knocking on oak, shook at the sight of death. Rudy was quiet, a deep frown clouding his eyes, as if were he to concentrate hard enough, he would bring a storm rolling across the cornfields.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. It was a terrible secret, I realised. One that could change everything, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run home, to Momma. She’d know how to handle it, what to say, she always knew best, but I was rooted. Momma wouldn’t be home this time on a Friday night and, besides, how could I explain it?

  Jenny stepped closer, looked at Mora as if she’d come upon a rat snake taking in the neighbour’s dog. The serpent’s jaw dislocating and reshaping itself so unnaturally. Something that small ingesting something far too big, you can’t help but watch, a jumble of curiosity, revulsion, an urge to help surpassed by a want to know if it would succeed in its swallowing. I’d never seen that expression on Jenny’s face before. Something happened to her that day. Changed her from the girl who would lazily kick her feet in the river, breathing in the sun and scent of evening primrose, to a girl who couldn’t sit still, as if she had electricity running through her, twitching her muscles, itching beneath her skin.

  ‘Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.

  ‘Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.

  Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.

  I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.

  ‘Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. ‘Johnny, look.’

  The dead woman’s chest moved.

  I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.

  A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.

  ‘She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.

  Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.

  ‘We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. ‘We have to get help.’

  Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.

  I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.

  ‘Jenny, get back,’ I said.

  But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.

  A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.

  The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.

  Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.

  ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Gloria screamed.

  ‘Quiet,’ I said, harder than I should have. She was so loud, so shrill, I feared her call would bring parents and police down on us and we’d have to explain all this.

  The eel spasmed and jerked and fell into the leaf litter inches from my feet. I jumped onto the log, Rudy and Gloria cried out, ran halfway to the Fort, Jenny shuffled backward but she was slow. The eel flicked itself, landed on her bare foot. She shrieked as if stung, the spell of the body broken, and kicked out.

  I lunged for her, pulled her close to me, wrapped my arms around her shoulders. The eel landed far from the water, then as if sensing
its distance, increased its convulsion.

  We all looked to Rudy but he was up on a tree stump, squealing worse than Jenny.

  The eel flicked toward us and Jenny and Gloria screamed afresh.

  ‘Kill it!’ they yelled.

  Do something, Johnny boy, get your head together and goddamn do something.

  I grabbed a stick, hooked it beneath the eel’s body and flicked it in a long, squirming arch into Big Lake.

  A breath. A beat. A splash.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Rudy said, finally climbing down from his perch.

  I looked at him, big brave Rudy Buchanan, shaking like a sissy with a spider on his hand. Rudy would take down a bully in a single punch but he was quaking in his shorts at a fish? I tried not to laugh.

  ‘It’s just an eel. What are you so afraid of?’

  He glared at me. ‘It came out of a dead body.’

  ‘Johnny, come on,’ Jenny said. ‘We should be getting home.’

  We shouldn’t. We didn’t have a curfew and Momma wouldn’t be wringing her hands for us. But when I looked around at my friends, my sister, I saw them all shaken. In truth, I was shaken too but one of us had to keep it together or we’d all be screaming on tree stumps.

  I’d gotten rid of the eel but the body, the girl, she lay where we’d dragged her and all humour drained from my mind. It changed the day. Turned the blazing sun cold. Jenny’s face showed raw confusion at what we’d found, what it meant. I saw the same in Rudy’s eyes, in Gloria’s. Hooked lips and frowns.

  I usually had the answers but today, I was as lost as them.

  The four of us left the Fort in shuffling silence. We emerged from the trees and the sticky evening heat pressed against us. I suddenly missed the cool, sheltered air of the Roost but couldn’t face going back down there. Not now, maybe not ever.

  ‘We have to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said. ‘They have to find out who she is and who did that to her.’

  ‘Cops won’t do anything,’ Rudy said. ‘There’s all sorts going on in this town they don’t know about. Shit, if they did, Samuels would have a heart attack.’

  Gloria scowled at him. ‘I think a murder is a little more important than your dad’s chop shop.’

  Rudy sneered and mimicked her voice. Gloria punched him in the arm.

  ‘What will they do to her?’ Jenny asked, looking back toward the trees, toward the valley and our lake.

  ‘Take her away,’ Rudy said. ‘Put her in a morgue. Find her parents, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m going to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said.

  ‘We’ll get in trouble,’ I said, a knot forming in my chest. ‘We moved her.’

  ‘Yeah, we will,’ Rudy said, his finger bouncing in the air. ‘He’s right. We moved her. They’ll think we did it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Gloria’s scowl deepened.

  ‘All the detective books and cop shows say you don’t touch the body, Gloria, and you definitely don’t move it,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should wait until Samuels finds her himself?’

  Rudy pointed at me, his arm straight out. ‘I like Johnny’s plan.’

  ‘It’s a stupid plan,’ Gloria said. ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Samuels.’

  Rudy grabbed the back of his neck with both hands, his elbows stuck out like sails. ‘Just wait, yeah? Just a day. Maybe do one of those anonymous tip-offs and leave us out of it.’

  His voice turned small. ‘They’ll think I had something to do with it. They’ll lock me up, Gloria. I’m a Buchanan. I got bad blood, remember, and everyone in town knows it.’

  Jenny put her arm through Rudy’s, held his hand and pushed her cheek against his shoulder.

  ‘You’re not bad,’ she said. ‘We’ll all tell Samuels the truth. You didn’t touch her and if they think otherwise, they’ll have to go through us to get to you. Right, guys?’

  ‘Right,’ Gloria said and took Rudy’s other hand.

  I completed the circle, put my arms over Jenny and Gloria’s shoulders, pulled the four of us into a group hug.

  ‘We’re like a flock of birds, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘We stick together and we protect each other from eagles and eels, hey?’

  I prodded Rudy’s stomach and he told me to shut up.

  ‘A flock. I like that.’ Jenny patted my back. ‘We’ve got a Roost after all.’

  Rudy finally smiled. ‘You and your birds, Johnny,’ he said, just as quiet, then shook his head. ‘If only we were, huh? We could all fly the hell out of here.’

  ‘We will, one day. All four of us,’ Gloria said, then checked her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Daddy’s taking me to the fairground in Bowmont tonight. Mom is at one of her Clarkesville society dinners and thank God she didn’t make me go to that. I’ll win you each a teddy bear.’

  Gloria broke the circle and Rudy went with her, to see her home like he always did. Then he turned, walked backward a few steps.

  ‘We’re a flock, yeah?’ he shouted, the wince, the curl, the confusion still on his face, though he tried to put a mask over it. He smiled, flapped his arms like wings. ‘Ca-caw, ca-caw, Johnny. See you guys tomorrow.’

  They waded through Briggs’ wheatfield toward town, waist-high in gold, as if their torsos were floating free. We walked everywhere. Jenny and me didn’t have bikes. No money for scrap metal that does a job your legs can do just fine, Momma always said. Rudy was fixing up a broken, rusted-up Schwinn but getting nowhere, and Gloria had a pink Raleigh she refused to ride because we couldn’t ride with her.

  I let myself smile as I watched my friends. My flock.

  Jenny fidgeted by my side. The calm she’d had with Rudy and Gloria had gone with them. She glanced at me, then away, then down at her feet.

  I couldn’t move. Behind, the Fort and the body. Away to the left, my house, empty and sweltering. Right, Rudy, Gloria and the cops. Ahead, nothing but fields and sky. The sun burned rich orange and bled into the clouds. A swarm of starlings, black spots on gold, pulsed between power lines.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘There is still some chicken from yesterday’s dinner.’

  ‘How can you be hungry after that?’ she asked but I shrugged.

  Jenny squinted at me, like she did when I said something stupid. Momma did it too. Where Momma might yell at me, Jenny just turned away, sighed through her teeth, and stalked across the field. The path home was well trodden, we made shortcuts of the fields, they were our highways and backways, free of grown-ups and rules.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go straight to the police?’ she asked. ‘Feels wrong to just leave her down there.’

  ‘I know but we agreed. We’ll go tomorrow. I guess we just try to forget about it for tonight.’

  We walked together, silent, until we came to Three Points, a triangle of land made by three crisscrossing irrigation streams. Momma said it’d been there since they split up the land between us, Briggs, and Morton down the track. She said that idiot Briggs couldn’t count right and ended up short on one side. Caused a rift between the families for years and the swatch of land remained unclaimed. It was twenty strides end-to-end and covered in grass green as a lime candy straight out the jar. No matter the weather, no matter the heat, Three Points stayed alive. It was a rule, one of those known somehow by everyone in town, that you could say or do anything on the Points. It didn’t belong to anyone so no one was watching, no one was listening.

  Jenny slowed and stopped in the middle of the island.

  ‘Do you think someone in Larson killed her?’ she asked.

  I’d thought about it while we were walking but pushed away the idea almost as quickly as it came.

  ‘I don’t want to think about what that would mean.’

  ‘What about the Fort? Could the person who wrecked it have killed her?’ she said; her voice had an edge of fear to it, a tremor I recognised. Her eyes darted left, right, into the trees, over the fields. ‘Could … could they still be around?’

  I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘
No. Whoever did it is long gone. And even if they aren’t, you’ve got me and Momma and we won’t let anything happen to you.’

  The tension in her eased, her shoulders dropped. ‘I know you won’t, but her? She’d probably offer me up to the killer for a bottle of bourbon.’

  It needled at me when she spoke of Momma like that. I’d tried for years to be peacekeeper between them, but the barbs kept flying, the hate kept growing and resurfacing no matter what. Now my days were all about maintaining the uneasy calm.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said, straightened up and took Jenny’s hand. ‘Momma won’t be there anyway.’

  Twenty minutes and two more fields brought us to the edge of our yard. We both stopped and Jenny’s grip on my hand tightened, turned my knuckles white and sore. Faded red truck parked skewed against the side of the house with two deep tyre scars in the dirt. Fresh dent in the door. The frayed rope on the oak branch swayed but not by the breeze. Momma always flicked the rope with her finger when she got home. Her mindless habit.

  The sound of footsteps throbbed from inside the house. One-two, one-two, a stumble, a crash, the picture frame in the hall, dropped and broken twice this month already. A low moan, something monstrous in it, thick and slurred. A clatter of metal on enamel, the pan that cooked yesterday’s chicken, pushed into the kitchen sink.

  Jenny sighed. ‘Looks like you were wrong, Johnny.’

  3

  There weren’t many reasons Momma would leave Gum’s before midnight on a Friday. It likely wasn’t to give us a new pa this time, as I couldn’t hear anyone else in the house. A Pigeon Pa, Jenny called them. They fly in, shit all over the place then fly out again, none the wiser. Momma alone in the house meant Ben Gum, owner of Gum’s and one of our years-ago Pigeon Pas, had cut her off. When that thought hit us both, Jenny’s grip on my hand turned iron.