Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  No Gloria. No Rudy. Felt like I’d lost my right arm and my left leg and was now this misshapen thing, hobbling through the days, aching all over. No drive to keep the promise we made to find the killer. I knew it wasn’t Bung-Eye, though he was a part of it, and that made me even less inclined to carry on. Jenny kept throwing out theories and suggesting next steps I always made an excuse not to take. If the most evil man in Larson hadn’t killed Mora, then there was someone even worse in our town. Who, what, could be worse than Bung-Eye Buchanan? Didn’t take me long to realise it wasn’t worth finding out. Getting Rudy hurt like that, maybe one day getting Jenny or Gloria hurt like that, it would never be worth it.

  I told Jenny that when we were grown enough to make a sheriff listen and stand a chance against Bung-Eye, we’d start digging again. We wouldn’t stop until we dug up the whole truth. That’s a God’s honest, hand-on-heart, kick-me-if-I’m-lying promise.

  It worked for a while, then she stopped talking about it.

  The heatwave of ’71 got itself in the record books. Hottest. Longest. It broke in September, just before harvest. The clouds rolled in from the south in fat clods and let loose, soaked the fields. We didn’t see our friends except in school. We didn’t go out and play. You’ll get too muddy, Momma said, and I’m not doing your laundry every night, think we’re made of money? Why don’t you just burn a ten-buck note instead?

  I’d even forgotten about the pale grey Ford. Forgot about the feeling it gave me when I saw it, the tingle down my back, the squirm in my gut. Put it to the back of my head and left it there. By October I’d stopped flinching when I heard an engine on the road.

  Then, as if that car sensed I’d moved on, I saw it again. On the last Sunday in October. Halloween. Once, and only for a few seconds, driving along Main Street while Jenny and me were in the Backhoe. It didn’t stop or slow, just passed by, but it chilled me. I nudged Jenny, asked her if she’d seen it but she looked at me like I was crazy. Seen what, Johnny? Nothing is what. It was gone before she even turned but it set a cold in my bones that took too long to shake. A cold like I’d seen something I shouldn’t, something not quite of this world that nobody else could see.

  Three times was not a coincidence. Was it following me? Haunting me? I had to tell someone and there was only one person I could talk to.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I asked Frank at our Tuesday session. Early November had brought a chill to the air. He brought out the space heater that day, turned the trailer office into a sauna. Over the previous month, the sessions had become less about counselling and more about hanging out. That’s what it felt like. Two buds, talking, maybe playing a round of rummy. He never let me win but I did once and it was the greatest feeling. He bear-hugged me and gave me the deck so I could keep practising at home.

  ‘Ghosts?’ he frowned, shuffled the deck and dealt another hand. ‘What makes you ask?’

  I picked up my cards. ‘No reason. Just, you know, that woman we found in the summer,’ I shrugged, tried to keep the tone light. ‘Made me think about things, death and spirits and stuff.’

  He nodded, fanned his cards and rearranged the order.

  ‘It’s natural to think that way after experiencing something like you kids did. But I tell you, John.’ He picked up a card and put down a three of spades. ‘Ghosts? They’re just storybook tales designed to frighten. When a person dies God takes their soul to Heaven or sends it right to Hell. They say ghosts are souls that stick around to make trouble. That would mean God missed them in his sorting and God doesn’t miss, John. God does not miss a thing.’

  I took the three, added it to my three of diamonds, and put down a seven. We’d played so much, we did it all by reflex now, we could talk without really paying attention to the game.

  ‘Are you sure? I saw …’ I started, paused, unsure where to go.

  ‘What did you see?’

  Suddenly I felt foolish. I shifted around the cards in my hand, even though they didn’t need it. ‘Nothing, it’s stupid.’

  ‘Hey. Nothing in this room is stupid. You should know that by now. What did you see? Spill it, kid.’

  I smiled. Tried to. Shrugged off my discomfort. ‘It’s nothing really. Just … well … a couple of times now I’ve seen this car.’

  He looked up from his cards. ‘A car?’

  ‘An old Ford, Mustang, I think. It’s got this weird paint job so I recognised it. I’ve seen it a bunch of times around town.’

  ‘Did you see who was driving it?’

  I shook my head. He put down an eight of clubs and I picked it up, tucked it into my hand beside a nine and ten of the same suit.

  ‘What’s weird about the paint?’

  ‘It’s this light grey colour, but it’s not shiny or anything like …’ like the brand new blue Dodge, gleaming in the sun. ‘Like new cars. It’s this faded grey, seems like it sucks in the sunlight. I don’t know.’

  Frank nodded along, eyes on his cards, and didn’t speak for a while. The silence set a squirm in my belly.

  ‘Like I said, it’s stupid. Just a car.’

  ‘You should stay away from it, John.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Strange things happen in this town. Have you noticed? That woman you found, now this car. And no driver? A pale grey the sunlight doesn’t touch. A Mustang.’ He shook his head, tapped the edge of his cards, his eyes darting left to right and back and forth. Quiet. He bit down on his lip and then looked at me, right in the eye, startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  ‘Revelations, John,’ he said, nodded along with himself, put on his hard sermon voice. ‘Revelations 6:8, do you remember your Bible studies? And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’

  Those words – pale horse – cinched up my muscles, tightened around my heart and throat and brain. I knew the passage, all the kids did. The end of days stuff is like the Bible’s action movie, all fire and explosions. We all read it again and again, acted out the parts, vied to be a horseman, but I hadn’t matched those words to real life. Now they stared me in the face. Pale car. Death. Everything turned cold.

  ‘Hell follows, John,’ he said. ‘Bad things follow Death and I don’t want you to get hurt. Stay away from that car and tell me if you see it again.’

  I looked at him, into his eyes, saw the warmth in them. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Listen, son, you and your friends found something terrible in a place you thought of as sanctuary. You’ve all been touched by Death and at such a young age, it marks you out. But it is just a mark, a smudge that can be wiped away with honest prayer. God is with you, John. He will protect you and so will I.’

  I nodded with him, smiled, but a crystal of ice settled in my chest, despite the blazing heater. Touched by Death. Haunted by him and his pale horse. With Hell and horror to follow. I was sure the pastor was right, my head told me that if anybody knew about this kind of thing, it was one of God’s own.

  Now, at least, the car, the strangeness, it had a name, a solidity that took away most of the fear. I felt lighter and smiled fully, honestly, when I called ‘Gin’ and laid out my four threes and run of clubs to beat him.

  Over that winter and the months of gloom, that hour on a Tuesday was my home fire. The only thing I looked forward to. I’d race out of fourth period and get to the trailer five minutes early. The constant rain had turned the office dank, mould crept down from one corner and the air tasted musty. But it didn’t matter. Frank, who I’d started to think of more as a father than a counsellor, and his roaring space heater chased away the cold, the damp, the bad memories. He listened when I spoke of the pale Ford and Rudy’s arm and Mora and the way Jenny changed over summer, the obsession in her eyes, what she’d said, ‘I wanted to see what would happen to me.’ He told me to be strong, stay the course, all would be well. And slowly, it was. The less we spoke of Mora, the more Jenny seemed like her old self, gabbing about fashion and flowers instead
of dead girls and murder. She started to smile again.

  February and Jenny’s birthday came around. Momma forgot again and I tried to explain it away on drink and worry and the new man in Momma’s life but I could see how much it hurt Jenny. All three of us could, so we had a party ourselves. Rudy charmed a coconut cake out of Didi at the Backhoe, Gloria gave Jenny a headscarf with blue stars on it and I got her the new Judy Blume with money I borrowed from Rudy who had stolen it from his brother. It was the first real fun we’d had since the previous summer.

  Talk of Mora, our investigation and its sharp ending quickly faded. Whenever me or Rudy mentioned the car, its engine or speed, Gloria rolled her eyes and pretended to fall asleep, Rudy went quiet when we discussed his old man, unconsciously cradled his arm. Talk of the body, the lake, made me shrink away. So we talked about algebra problems and who was seen necking behind the football field or who wrote ‘Larson Lions Are Pussies’ on the scoreboard in red paint. The four of us settled into our normal rhythm but there was always something left unsaid. Averted eyes. Clipped tones. Some dark fog floating right in the middle of our circle. It faded over the winter but never disappeared. It was as if it were waiting for the sun to come back and ignite us all over again.

  PART TWO

  Summer, 1972

  11

  The rain carried on until May when it finally cleared and gave us a hot, clean summer. My worst and best summer. The weather changed just in time for the sunny photographs of the returning GIs to appear in the Clarkesville Combine. The newshounds loved it. The sun made the story come alive. After all, where was the triumph in a bronze star returning home in the rain, all soaked boots and dripping hair? Reporters and photographers from the Larson Herald and the Combine flocked to the bus stop to see them, snap them, hold out notebooks to get their quotes. How do you feel, son? How many slopes you kill over there? You’re a goddamn American hero!

  Those poor souls. Limping men in green. Day after day, the buses rolled in and deposited a few blinking, quiet GIs. Shades of the red-blooded boys who’d left a few years ago. The bus would blare its horn once or twice, bye kids, enjoy your ripped-up lives, then rumble on to the next town. They were the injured, the discharged, the too-messed-up-to-pull-a-trigger but still the vultures with their Pentaxes and flash bulbs circled, snapped, squawked.

  Jenny and me sat on the bench outside Al Westin’s grocery store licking ice cream cones. Jenny wore a sundress dotted with blue flowers, one of her favourites. A hand-me-down from some cousin we’d never met. Every year or two Momma would get a bag of clothes, all stained and full of holes, from a sister or brother she never talked about. Whatever fit, we’d keep. Whatever didn’t, would be taken – still holey and unwashed – to the church. I wondered sometimes if they came from the goodwill donations bin and Momma just wouldn’t admit it. It didn’t really matter. Jenny found the gems when Momma only saw rubbish. Jenny would polish them, add to them, transform them, like she was transforming herself along with it. If I don’t look like her, she’d say, meaning Momma, I’ll never be her. Eric Lahane, our longest-running Pigeon Pa, knew how to sew and when he first appeared, helped Jenny re-hem a pair of denims, adding on a strip of flowery material to the flared bottoms. She loved him instantly.

  Eric worked down at the Easton flour mill hauling sacks when he wasn’t on our farm. He had a moustache that just about reached his chin and brown hair down to his shoulders. Momma said he was like a show pony at a Texas rodeo. He mostly wore mustard yellow shirts and flared-out blue jeans, hair all glossy brown waves like someone had taken a curling iron to it. Bit of a hippy, full of ideas and plans and dreams. He wanted the farm to turn a profit and bring in a good harvest but it had been so neglected it was up to him, Jenny and me to get it back. The chores filled my days and I loved it, having help, direction, someone to talk to about yields and soil and how we could best use our land. It felt like, for the first time, my dream of running the Royal farm was out of the pipe, free to soar and grow with the crop. The amount of work doubled and I spent all my spare time clearing fields, planting, hauling the good corn to Jenny to put through the sheller, hauling the bad stuff into a pile to be burned. From the ashes, John, Eric would say, will grow a mighty stalk and we will be showered in gold. Along with farming, he talked a lot about Vietnam and the draft, said he was going to Washington to tell the president to call it all off.

  Eric greeted the vets as they came off the bus, thanking them, calling them heroes. Eric had pamphlets in the house talking about how bad the war was, how it was illegal and Nixon and LBJ screwed the pooch, killed a generation of American men and turned the survivors into murderers. Every night he’d sit glued to the TV set, watching those bombs fall in the jungle, hearing the justification from our side and snorting his disapproval. Before Eric, we’d all been aware of the war of course, not even Larson is that far under a rock, but he brought it dead centre and loud into our lives.

  Eric wasn’t the only one in Larson who didn’t like the war. Across the road from the seven or eight GIs, four people held signs. ‘Stop the War’, ‘No Baby Killers in Larson’, ‘My Lai Murderers, Get Out’, ‘If It’s Dead and Vietnamese, It’s VC’, with a picture of a shot-up child beneath the words. They’d been protesting for years but now Eric was around, I found myself paying attention, caring.

  Parents hugged their sons in disbelief and sorrow. A man wept on the sidewalk when he couldn’t shake his boy’s hand. Left it in ’Nam, Pa, I imagined him saying. Even Frank was there, offering whatever comfort he could to the family whose boy didn’t come off the bus.

  ‘Johnny, your ice cream.’ Jenny nudged me, took my attention from the man missing a leg and the other missing an eye, and brought it to a trickle of melted choc-chip.

  I licked it up but it tasted foul in my mouth. It wasn’t important. They were. Those men. Two years ago, Jenny and me sat on this bench and watched the smiling, healthy sons go off on that same bus. They hugged their mommas, they shook their daddies’ hands, they saluted their coach and teachers, they drove away with fanfare and blown kisses. Jenny had been too young to notice, she’d kicked her feet, crunched on her waffle cone, but I couldn’t stop staring at them. The story Momma told of our real pa heading off to war all those years ago was feeling thin and worn. The men who’d gone to the jungles either came home within a few years or a man in a uniform knocked on the door. We’d had neither.

  Dozens went. A handful came back. They said you never know the reality until you’re in your fatigues, on the battlefield, but their faces told the story clear enough. A man’s memories can change and warp over time but the creases and scars on his face, the emptiness in his eyes, and quiver in his lips, they don’t know how to lie.

  I read them all like a book, saw their deeds writ large on their cheeks.

  My choc-chip slumped and dropped onto the sidewalk.

  ‘Those boys don’t have much to look forward to.’ Al Westin’s voice from behind us. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his white apron.

  ‘At least they’re alive,’ he carried on. ‘But I ain’t sure if that’s a blessing or a curse.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Westin?’ Jenny said.

  ‘They don’t come back whole. When they seen what they seen, friends dead, bodies blown up, that breaks off a piece of your brain. It makes you see things different, maybe even see things that ain’t there, can even make you think you’re still out there in the jungle, still fighting and everyone around you is the enemy. Trauma like that, killing someone, breaks a man. Even the ones who didn’t lose arms and legs left something of their mind out there. They ain’t going to find this world easy any more. But we’ll help them. Larson looks after its own. Some would rather be dead, I wager, and their parents think that too. Then they’d know and be able to put their boys to rest. That’d be something.’

  The grocer smiled beneath his moustache, a thick grey thing like the end of a broom. The rest of his face, usually shaved close and smooth, had a blanke
t of rough stubble, a few days’ growth at least.

  ‘You okay, sir?’ I asked. His eyes switched to me, sunken pieces of coal in a March snowman.

  ‘Oh sure, sure. Just got to keep praying,’ he said and something shone in his eye. ‘Why don’t you run over to the Backhoe, Scotty is over there.’

  Then he gave me a dollar and told us to share a burger and shake. Jenny jumped up to say thank you but he’d backed into the store and closed the door.

  ‘What’s eating him?’ Jenny asked and snatched the money from my fingers.

  I stood up and dropped my empty ice cream cone in the trash.

  ‘I’ll have a cheeseburger, fully loaded, please, miss,’ I grinned, pushing what joy I could through my face, into the world. Jenny wouldn’t see the darkness behind it and that’s how it should be.

  I shouted at Eric, pointed to the diner to let him know where we were going. He waved back. We had to walk past the sign-holders to get to the Backhoe. One of them was Kendra Lyle, daughter of Mrs Lyle from the post office. Then two men I didn’t know and, behind the last sign, the one with the photograph, I didn’t quite believe it. I had to look twice.

  ‘Miss Eaves?’ I said too loud. Four-Misters Eaves, as Momma called her.

  My geography teacher glanced at me, then, as if recognising me as part of her other life, lowered her sign. Red-faced, pale hair striking out at all angles from a loose ponytail, a dandelion shoved behind her ear. This wasn’t my Miss Eaves.

  ‘Hello, both of you,’ she said, out of breath from shouting.

  ‘What are you doing, miss?’ Jenny asked.

  Miss Eaves knelt down in front of us. ‘Do you both remember where Vietnam is on the map?’

  Jenny nodded. I didn’t.