The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  There was an argument about what to do next with the corpses, much like the two relatives fought over the fate of the car in Oregon. This time, the grammar was better, but the decision was not.

  “We’ll bury them.”

  “And have some coyote dig them up?”

  “By that time it won’t matter.”

  “By that time? What time is that, exactly? You’re saying you can predict when a coyote might smell the rot and feel an inclination to dig? When will that be, do you suppose? One week from now? One year?”

  “Shut up, both of you. I say burn them.”

  “Oh, brilliant. And we’re supposed to think that no one will notice the smoke lingering in the morning?”

  “It will look like a campfire.”

  “Not to anyone looking for missing people.”

  In the end they had what seemed at the time to be a stroke of genius, though later it would cause them a lifetime of worry they hadn’t counted on. In northern Alabama there were caverns of magnificent depth and breadth and inaccessibility—literal holes in the ground where not even the most dedicated and courageous spelunker went—narrow crevices where things could be tucked in tight. They were not cold enough to preserve corpses for very much longer than earth burial would do, but they were chilly enough and deep enough to mitigate the stench.

  At the time, the cavern they chose was on private land owned by a sympathizer. It seemed utterly safe. What they couldn’t anticipate was that in years to come there would be an environmentalist president of the United States who would annex tens of millions of acres of land for preservation, including five acres that included that very cavern. Nor could they have foreseen the burst in popularity of spelunking, starting in the 1990s, or the technical advancements in the equipment that would allow cavers to go where none had ever dared go before.

  From the moment the first caver got permission to go down, the conspirators who killed the Folletinos never took another easy breath—until one of them went down into the cavern—using that newfangled equipment—and at considerable risk, found the bones.

  And hid them deeper.

  23

  Marie

  “Birmingham.”

  Hardly able to believe I’m doing this, I push my driver’s license toward the airline ticket agent. I have purchased a companion ticket for Steve, at full price for both of us. He will have to put up with a tough security check to get on the airplane, because he fits some of the terrorist profile—tough-looking man, single though not traveling alone, buying a one-way ticket at the last moment. He’ll just have to tolerate it. There’s no way I’m going alone. Paulie Barnes said nothing about taking a friend. But he didn’t say I couldn’t take one, either, and if ever in my life I needed one, it’s now. Steve Orbach is not the one I’d choose in other circumstances, but he’s the only “friend” I’ve got with me right now. As we go through the security checkpoint and then wait for our plane, he never leaves my side.

  Before we board, I use an airport phone to call Franklin’s office and leave a recorded message for him: “I’m going out of town. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m sorry about the dog, and I hope everybody’s okay. I’ll let you know when I’m back.”

  On the flight to Birmingham, I skim The Executioners, highlighting plot points with a yellow marker. It starts with an idyllic family scene—a lawyer, his pretty wife, their nubile teenage daughter, their two young sons—all enjoying a day at a lake. But the lawyer’s worried. A man he once helped convict for the vicious rape and beating of a girl who was the age his own daughter is now, is free and threatening them. As the plot progresses and the family grows more frightened of their stalker, Max Cady terrorizes them in agonizing increments. He poisons their beloved dog. Insinuates that he will rape their daughter. Shoots and wounds their youngest boy. As MacDonald vividly describes him, Cady is by today’s standards of villain a cliché, but he didn’t seem so back in 1957 when the novel was first published. He’s a brute, “simian,” with a low brow, dark hair, a powerful and stocky man who smokes “well-chewed” cigars.

  As I close the book and stare out the plane window, I am suddenly struck by the uncanny coincidence of that fictional family by the lake and the four of us by the ocean. Paulie Barnes couldn’t have planned that, but oh, how the coincidence of it plays sweetly into his hands, because it gives me a fierce case of the quivering shivers.

  I suddenly miss Franklin very much.

  “What’s wrong?” Steve asks me, alert to my moods.

  “This.” I hand him the book to read. “Too close for comfort.”

  Maybe he’ll see something in it that I haven’t been able to. My reading only shows me what it always has: a psycho on a mission of revenge against a lawyer, taking out his fury on the lawyer’s family, pursuing them far past the boundaries of their ordinary scruples into a raw, terrifying territory in which the only way to stop him is to become just like him: brutal, homicidal, criminal.

  This holds no clues for me, however, or none that I can detect.

  I said as much in my first and only (so far) personal E-mail to him, the one that accompanied the chapters I have written about my own family, and my rewrite of his account of the murders.

  Dear Paulie Barnes,

  What do you want me to say? That you’ve shocked me? Of course you have, especially with that last message of yours. That I’m scared of you?Of course I am, who wouldn’t be? That I feel furiously angry at you, but that I also feel helpless to stop you? Of course I do. Do you want to know if I am doing everything I can think of to stop this craziness of yours? You bet, even if you’re not a “betting man.” Do I sometimes think this whole business has no reality, that I’m dreaming it, that I will wake up and it will all dissolve in the sunshine? Yes, I do think that, about every five minutes or so. Do I wonder why in the world you’re doing this, and to me? (Sarcasm is a temptation here, but I’ll try to avoid it.) Yes, I do wonder. What is it you want from this personal little note, hm? Shall we chat about Florida’s penal code, the one that can sentence you to prison for most of your life? That’s what my cop friends would like to talk to you about. Me, I don’t want to talk to you at all. But since you insist, what’s your opinion of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty?

  I added, “Your turn to talk now,” and signed it, “Yours truly, You know who.”

  Okay, so I couldn’t entirely avoid sarcasm. We’ll see what it gets me.

  “When did he write this book?” Steve asks me, and I see he’s already up to page twenty. I take it back from him, turn to the copyright date at the front, and point to it so he can see. “I thought so,” he tells me. “It seems kind of old-fashioned.”

  I’ll admit it’s “dated” now, and reads melodramatically; it’s not subtle, no sir. It might not scare readers today the way it did me when I first read it twenty years ago. Steve may not be impressed with it at all. But all I can say is that I hope I’ll be alive someday to reread my own books. I hope I get the chance to live long enough to find them quaintly “dated,” too.

  Every time I fly into Birmingham International Airport, what I notice as far as I can see is green, green, everywhere green. There are so many trees that the streets and neighborhoods below us look as if they were inserted with great difficulty into a thick forest that might overgrow them at any moment. From the air, Birmingham looks like one of those jigsaw puzzles with athousand pieces, every one of them green. The downtown skyline has a distinctive touch: four modest skyscrapers all in a row, like building blocks. There are other tall buildings, of course, but that quartet announces “Birmingham” to me.

  This largest city in Alabama is set in a leafy valley framed by gentle, forested mountains that are the lower trailing edge of the Appalachians. It’s beautiful, although people who aren’t from here don’t necessarily like to hear that praise. In their view, Birmingham’s not supposed to be—is not allowed to be—lovely. Neither is Alabama, although it is arguably the most geographically interesting state in the Union,
with everything from bayous to mountains, marshes to canyons, beaches to rolling farmland. By the reckoning of people who’ve never been here, Alabama’s supposed to be as unappealing as illiteracy, poverty, and racism. As for the infamous city of Birmingham, it is supposed to be polluted because of its past incarnation as a mining and steel manufacturing center, and ugly, because of its former reputation as the most segregated city in America.

  But the steel mills are long gone. And it was always true that not everybody in Birmingham, black or white, was proud of that segregationist title, even way back then. If they had been, Birmingham never could have changed, and change it has, more than many cities, although maybe that’s because it had a longer way to come.

  “It’s green,” Steve says, sounding surprised, leaning over me to see out the little window. We were lucky and got seats together. I offered him the seat by the window, knowing how cramped he’d be in the middle, but he insisted on placing his body between me and everybody else. “Hell of a difference from the drought back home.”

  This is his first airplane ride, he claims, and it has been interesting to watch him react to all the things I take for granted—the metal detectors, wands, and “pat-downs,” the seat belts, the flight attendants, the takeoff, the clouds, the view down below, the peanuts and free drinks, even the magazines and the barf bags in the backs of the seats.

  “Have you ever been outside of Florida?”

  He shakes his head no, and settles back in his seat again.

  “I’ve been here on book tours,” I tell him. “But I never tell people that I was born near here.”

  “Why not?”

  “So they won’t ask about my family. Southerners always ask about family.”

  Who were your people ? It’s the archetypal southern question.

  The story in my briefcase doesn’t answer that for me. Nor does it identify the people who killed them. The way it’s written, the conspirators could have been anyone from either side of the racial divide or the civil rights movement. Those were the days when segregationists called what they did “the civil rights movement,” too. Black or white. Integrationists or segregationists. Who were they? Who were the unnamed men who killed them? I can’t divine that truth from the account that Paulie Barnes sent to me.

  “You believe this?” Steve asked me, skeptically, after he read it.

  Yes. Just as I’ve always known in my heart that they’re gone—dead—I do believe enough of this account to accept it as basically true. Of course, I can’t prove it, and maybe I never will be able to prove or disprove it. But I don’t think Paulie Barnes just made it up to torture me, as much as he seems to enjoy doing that in other ways.

  Was he one of the people at the crossroads?

  If he wasn’t, how does he know so much about it?

  Am I dealing with one of the men who killed my parents?

  If so, why does he want to kill their daughter, too?

  As we deplane, I feel the uncomfortable mixture of dread and excitement that I always feel when I return to where I was born.

  Alabama. Birmingham. Sebastion.

  Though I try to avoid them, they fascinate me.

  When I meet people from here—when they’re traveling outside their state and they tell me where they’re from—sometimes I think they look like a flinch waiting to happen. They look as if they’re afraid I’m going to despise them once I know where they’re from. I recognize it, that inner wariness, because that’s the same way I feel when people ask me about my family. In the case of residents of Birmingham, especially ones who lived here in the bad old days, I can see it in their eyes, that dread of what the rest of us will think of them when we know where they live. There’s such an unspoken, painful history in that look they get on their faces, because they’ve seen terrible and glorious things, maybe even taken part in them: freedom rides and beatings, voter registration drives and lynchings, burnings, torture, fire hoses and dogs set onto children, the NAACP and the SNLC, the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, hatred, terror, violence, and four innocent little black girls murdered in a church bombing in 1963, the same year my parents died. But they’ve also witnessed—or, themselves, shown—the love and the extraordinary courage that inspired the very best of them.

  The late naturalist Loren Eisley used to point out that we think we’re the pinnacle of evolution, but the truth is that evolution has never stopped. New creatures, he liked to say, are still coming out of the swamp. Evolution stepped forward in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s and 1970s, and a new and better kind of American began to crawl up on the shores, out of that terrible, bloody swamp of prejudice. Maybe it’s a city that is destined always to be the nation’s “forge,” where raw materials are burned into steel and people are, too. In Birmingham, it was courage, not cowardice, that tilted the scales in the civil rights war back then. Like every other city in the country, they’re still fighting local skirmishes and there’s still a ways to go before reaching justice, but I think it’s a city that has won the right to be recognized for both its natural and its hard-earned beauty. To insist on seeing it as ugly is tantamount, in my mind, to insulting the very people—the black people, the children, a few white people—whose blood ran in its streets. Their sacrifice had a magnificent and awesome beauty, and that was Birmingham, too.

  If my parents had to die, I wish I could claim it for that good cause.

  We have no trouble hiring a car. I splurge and rent a Lexus. If these turn out to be my last days, I’ll be damned if I’ll spend them in a cheap car. When we step outside the airport to take the shuttle to where we can pick up the vehicle, we discover that it is a beautiful day in Birmingham.

  With Steve driving, I direct him out of the airport to I-65 north. We’ll miss most of the city, and we’ll drive through a bit of the Black Belt—which refers to the color of the soil, and not to the race of the inhabitants. Then we’ll head on up toward cavern, lake, and mountain country. I don’t need a map.

  Sebastion sits on flat land with farms all around, but the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains loom within an easy bicycle ride from the town square. It’s a square that used to be charming and bustling. But unlike some other Alabama towns that have thrived on tourism since the bad old days, Sebastion’s population has declined from its high of 10,000 people around the time I was born, to half that now. When I recite those facts to Steve, to fill the silence in the car, he asks me, “When’s the last time you were here?”

  “In Alabama?”

  “In Sebastion.”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  “I was making a stab at finding out.”

  “About your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  He hasn’t read my chapters yet. “I found out that most people don’t like to talk about it.” As the Lexus rolls along the interstate, I stare unseeing out my window. “But I didn’t press very hard, not like I usually do with a book about other people. When I poked, and people drew back, I pulled back, too.”

  “Are you going to do that this time?”

  I glance over at him. “Not if my life depends on it, no.”

  • • •

  The Old Southern Inn is the only lodging left in town, we discover, but fortunately, like the Lexus, it’s fashioned for the luxury trade. I’m all for luxury right now; give me feather beds, champagne, and pâté de fois gras if I never sleep anywhere else, or eat another meal outside of Alabama. And if I do, I’ll make up for it by feeling guilty later.

  We’ve arrived at a vast two-story Colonial home painted an immaculate white, with a matching, classic, white picket fence. A wide cement walk leads up to a front center door. Narrow strips of leaded glass frame the door on either side. There’s a colonnaded front porch and a second-floor balcony, both running the length of the house and then wrapping around it. Grand old oak trees shade the front yard, and we can see others towering over the house in back.r />
  Similar impressive old homes line the street, but few match this one for its superb state of repair. Just to the east there’s a rambling Victorian monster complete with turrets and five different shades of blue paint. It looks like a retirement home for Victorian ghosts. To the other side, there’s a smaller bed-and-breakfast, The Gingerbread Cottage, with a paint job cute enough to make your teeth ache.

  “If you were staying there,” Steve mutters, nodding toward the gingerbread architecture, “I’d have to go someplace else.”

  “There are limits,” I agree. “But this looks nice.”

  As he pulls into and parks in a gravel parking lot on the east side of the Inn, I read to him from the brochure. “It says here we’re getting twelve-foot ceilings, heart pine floors, nine fireplaces, two parlors, a library, a formal dining room, a piano lounge, a private suite with its own bathroom and porch or balcony, full breakfast, coffee anytime, cable TV/VCR, telephone, fax, and Internet access.”

  “Just like my old cell at Starke,” he says.

  I stare over at him. “You made a joke.”

  Deadpan, he says, “Yeah, well, don’t expect it to happen twice.”

  As we stroll up the front walk, I spot the reason why these grounds look so nice: Hubert Templeton, the once-young black man who helped my father deliver me to a motel, is just coming around one side of the house with clipping shears in his hands. For a moment I’m caught in an emotional time warp. Mr. Templeton’s black hair looks thinner and more gray than it was when I saw him last, and he’s carrying more weight on his large frame. And yet he’s quite a bit younger than my father would have been by now. I’m struck hard by the idea that my father would look older than that if it were he who was walking around the corner of the house toward me.