by John Fulton
Finally, Mrs. Morris came away from the coffin again. She grabbed her daughter’s wrist, twisting until Holly bent with pain, though the girl didn’t stop smiling the whole time her mother dragged her down the hall. Mrs. Morris was a large woman with thick ankles and a fleshy round face, not at all like her thin, blond daughter, all sleek tan arms and legs. Even at thirteen, she had real tits that stood out from the rest of her, a fact that had not at all been lost on Jack Rogers, me, and the Watkins brothers, since she was one of the few girls at Wilford Junior High with a woman’s body. The mother tossed her in a room and locked it with one of those old-fashioned keys that she put in her pocket. On the way back down the hall, Mrs. Morris was crying hard. “God bless you,” Mrs. Tucker said. Like many of us, Mrs. Tucker had been there the day of the death, had seen everything, and had some idea of the uncertain rage Mrs. Morris might feel toward Holly. Those who had not seen the event had heard about it, and even as Pastor Lamb took his place at the head of the old woman, straightened the flower in his lapel, and began to speak, I couldn’t help imagining how the part that I hadn’t seen had happened: how Holly and her grandmother had just gotten into the Buick and were off to Holly’s soccer practice when the old woman remembered she’d left her purse inside. I saw it all take place then as Pastor Lamb said a eulogy for the joyful elderly lady who’d so willingly driven neighborhood children from event to event, who’d kept the Morris garden up, who’d fed the stray cats of Wilford, who’d had an inspiring passion for the lost and needy. I imagined how surprised the old woman must have been when, right after stepping out of that car, she’d turned and seen the Buick rolling slowly down the slight grade of the driveway—so slowly that the eighty-three-year-old grandmother thought she could catch it, get inside, and stop it. She’d taken hold of the handle and been about to open the door when she somehow fell and ended up under the car, which kept rolling even as Holly sat in the passenger seat watching it happen. She no doubt saw the panic in her grandmother’s face as she went down, perhaps heard something like a scream and felt the give-and-take of the car as it rolled on for a moment before settling, unimaginably, in place. How quiet the inside of that car must have been for Holly Morris. Mrs. Scott had seen the event from her kitchen window as she scrubbed a plate. Her husband had called 911 and rushed outside, but he couldn’t get Holly to unlock her door. She stared right through him, then looked the other way when he knocked on the glass. As soon as he headed around the car—which he’d wanted to avoid doing because he’d already seen the old woman over there once and didn’t want to have to see her twice—the girl reached over and locked that door, too. They, Mr. and Mrs. Scott together now, shouted at her. When their efforts failed, they even enlisted a policewoman, who had just arrived and was a mother herself, to say in a really nice voice through the window that Holly needed to unlock the door, sweetie, and come out now.
But the girl didn’t hear a word of it. She turned the radio on to a high volume, so high that the Browns and Meyers and Jensens, who had come out to help, could hear the evening news, the weatherman predicting in his too-perfect radio voice that the Indian summer—the blue skies and mild temperatures that seemed so wrong for a day like that—would continue into the first week of October. When the fire truck arrived and a team of rescuers—all local men, amateurs from Wilfred, who quickly saw that there was no one to rescue—began lifting that Buick off the old woman with a hydraulic jack, Holly turned her grandmother’s AM radio up still higher to a top-ten pop song countdown to which, her eyes closed, she swayed slowly as she mouthed the familiar words of a song she had danced to many times at one of the Wilford Junior High stomps. When finally, after more than twenty minutes of trying, a rescue worker managed to jimmy the lock on the driver’s side, Holly simply reached over and slapped the lock down again before he could open the door.
By that time half the neighborhood was out there, including me and Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers, all on our boards and trying to get a glimpse of Holly locked in that deadly car and moving to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” We walked around to the opposite side of the car and, along with other neighborhood kids, all younger than us, saw what was left of the old woman, her legs extending from beneath the Buick with a pair of clean, brand-new, bright red tennis shoes—she’d always worn loud, youthful shoes—on her dead feet. The little Brian girl with strawberry-red hair and her friends, Carrie and Shana and Belinda, who’d been jumping rope in the Johnson driveway, as well as Ricky Hedge and Martin Bibs and a bunch of kids on their tricycles and Big Wheels with rainbow-colored tassels streaming from their handlebars, were there and witnessed that sight too. Most backed off and wandered down the street in a daze. Others lingered, staring, transfixed until an emergency worker said, “They shouldn’t be here. Somebody get rid of the kids!” A few parents came, covering their children’s eyes with a hand, and a cop shooed the unaccompanied ones away. The cats remained, though. She’d fed them for years, and no doubt they recognized her, even became hungry at the sight of her, which might have explained why the rescue workers, kicking and yelling at the twenty or thirty scraggly strays, could not scatter them or quiet their repetitive mewing. The animals dashed at the old woman’s legs and darted under the car, where they crouched, just out of reach and close to their provider.
We were smart enough to stay back, just within eyeshot across the street, where Gary Watkins threw up in a bush while the rest of us watched Holly swaying to that music. We had all told lies about this girl with tits and a tight ass and a soft child’s face. She and I had locked ourselves in the janitor’s closet in the school basement, where I’d held onto a mop handle while she gave me a very slow, torturous hand job, licking her palm just to make it better for me, I’d told Jack Rogers, who’d told the Watkins brothers, who themselves had received what they called “twin blow jobs,” pushed up against her picket fence one midnight. We’d taken her through every motion we could imagine in our lies. We’d made her body the target of a pointsystem game we played. A piece of Holly Morris’s ass—a caress or pinch or feel—was worth ten points, the highest by far at Wilford Junior High, where copping a feel from any other girl would get you only five at most. (And because points could only be earned when all of us, Mark, the Watkins brothers, and I, were present to witness the act, our lies didn’t count.) I’d scored 200-plus on Holly, and Jack Rogers was just behind me with 180; the Watkins brothers were slower, more shy and scared, though that obviously didn’t stop them from lying about blow jobs. The last time I’d touched her, slipping my hand on her butt as I stood behind her in the school-bus line, she’d turned with rage in her face and jabbed a mechanical pencil at me. “Get your little pussy fingers off me, Billy Munroe,” she said. I’d never guessed at the fury she’d had in her, and when I got home that day I couldn’t help but look at my hands and feel a little disgusted at what she’d called my “pussy fingers,” even though I knew that I was out in front in our game, that point-wise Holly Morris was mine.
But she didn’t seem to belong to anyone that day as we watched the unpracticed Wilford rescue squad, who just weren’t used to dealing with disasters, fumble their efforts to retrieve what was left of Holly’s grandmother. The car, a huge sky-blue American cruiser, slipped off the jack twice before they recovered the old woman and began the messy task of putting her away. “Someone get the girl out of the car,” a worried neighbor—it looked like Mr. Brown—shouted at the men. But the workers didn’t budge; they’d already tried and failed. She wasn’t bothering anyone. At least she hadn’t been until her father returned from work, parking his old Ford truck across the street, to witness the aftermath of the accident.
Mr. Morris was a large man, tall and thick and bearded, not in the least known for his gentleness. He stood with his clipboard in one hand, a ballpoint pen resting behind his ear, his BF Goodrich name-badge rising and falling with each breath. When he crossed the street, Mr. Brown and Mr. Scott both backed away, seeming to give him space to comprehen
d the tragedy that had killed his mother. The rescue squad had mostly zipped old Mrs. Morris up in a brown plastic bag, but Mr. Morris could still see the worst of her. A great weight seemed to force him to his knees. The whisper of a policeman in his ear made him weep. The sprinkler in the middle of the lawn came on then so that a hard rope of water slapped Mr. Morris in the side, his shirtsleeve and pant leg suddenly dripping. An adult seized five-year-old Marty Green and turned off the faucet the child had been fiddling with. “Get away!” Mr. Morris yelled, and his friends and neighbors retreated. “Get the hell fuck away!” People returned to their houses then while we withdrew behind the bush that Gary Watkins had hurled on earlier. From there, we watched the kneeling Mr. Morris, his whole body dripping, his whole body seeming to grieve, as he noticed his daughter locked away in her odd, unchanged world.
His real anger began then. He pushed his way through two police officers, beat the hood of the car with his fist, and became more enraged when his daughter didn’t so much as flinch. He cursed her, demanded that she turn that music off and step out of that car or he’d kick her ass to he didn’t know goddamn where, though all he did was smash a dent into her locked door with his foot, turn around, hold his face in his hands, then kick the car again while Holly’s seated dance became more animated, her forearms raised and swinging double time and opposite the back-and-forth sway of her head, graceful, skillful in a way that my friends and I had never come close to on the dance floor. She moved in perfect sync to what Mr. Morris and all our parents felt was the frivolous, sexual beat of godless music, the sort of music his daughter locked herself into her room for hours to listen to. It wasn’t Christian, Mr. Morris knew. It wasn’t good, and so perhaps it was easier to hate his daughter for loving filth like that than to feel whatever he’d been feeling for his dead mother. He hadn’t gotten along with Holly, as the whole neighborhood knew, for the better part of a year, and his growing fatherly rage came out now as he continued to beat the hood and to curse Holly, no longer his little girl, not after she’d repeatedly sneaked out of his house at night, not after he’d caught her and an older boy he’d never met sharing a cherry Slurpee spiked with vodka at the Wilford Mall. He suspected she’d done other things, too, and so he hated her that afternoon, the dirty, rebellious girl whom his mother had always been so willing to drive around town—to the mall, where he’d caught her with that boy, to the movies, where she’d done God knew what, to soccer practice, to anywhere she’d wanted to go—which might have been the thought that made him shout, “You killed her!” And maybe it was those words that made him stop and put his head down on the hood of the car. His wife, who had been approaching the scene hurriedly from a block away—she’d been having coffee with Mrs. Eliot, the neighborhood piano teacher, and had arrived just in time to hear her husband call their daughter a killer—slowed down to learn from a nearby policeman what had happened. She cupped a hand over her mouth. She shook her head. She went to her husband and held him then. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Your father says he’s sorry,” Mrs. Morris shouted at the car window so that Holly could hear her through the music.
“She won’t come out of there,” Mr. Morris told his wife.
“Please come out now, Holly!” Mrs. Morris shouted.
“Come out now, Holly,” her father said.
“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Morris said. But Holly was gone, far away from them, and finally they had to leave her there and hold each other while the same policewoman who’d failed to lure his daughter out of her trance—or whatever she was in—asked Mr. Morris questions and had him sign papers that made him cry still more loudly. We’d come out from behind the vomity bush since nobody seemed to notice us anymore. All the same, we shouldn’t have been watching. This was private and shameful, we knew. But we couldn’t not watch. Others had gone in and Mrs. Allison came out on her porch to tell us that this “happening” wasn’t for us boys to see. We told her that we were just skating, which was sort of true. Mark Watkins was riding the nose of his board with skill and easy cockiness until his brother knocked him off and said, “Not here, dumb ass. Not now.”
“She’s fucking crazy,” Jack Rogers said.
“Shut up,” I said, thinking about the 200-plus points I’d scored on Holly’s ass and feeling both famous and ashamed about it. I would have fought for her then. I would have smashed Jack Rogers’s face into the ground and stood on his head to keep him from saying anything more about her. I wasn’t at all sure what I was protecting her from, and later, after what would happen between Holly and me at her grandmother’s funeral, I’d see that I really didn’t want anything to do with her. But Jack Rogers backed off, and nothing happened.
The fire truck had gone, as had the ambulance with the Morris grandmother. The counselor, a woman wearing a dress suit, had arrived to convince Holly to leave the car, though finally she retreated inside with the Morris parents. One of the more beautiful sunsets we ever remembered seeing—then or years later—was beginning to light the sky a deep purple that made our shadows into twenty-foot lanky giants, their shapes falling across yards and out into the street. Just as we were about to leave and go home to our separate dinner tables, we saw an amazing thing. The music inside the Buick turned off, and Holly Morris stepped out—the long, spooky, dark lines of her shadow unfolding and preceding her across the grass—and went into her house. The amazing thing was how she walked on air all the way to the front door, taking these light, easy steps so that you could hear the crisp, brief click of her soccer cleats, heel to toe, against the concrete. Jack Rogers, who still talks about that day more than a decade later, never mind that Holly Morris long since left town and never came back, claims now that he saw her take a gleeful skip between steps. A quick, happy little kick. But he overdoes it every time he tells that story. She was just walking as if something nice and sweet as hell had happened to her and now she felt better and more beautiful than she usually did.
It didn’t take long for Holly Morris to get out of the room where her mother had locked her away. She must have climbed out the window and had a rough landing since she walked back into her grandmother’s funeral through the front door with a nylon ripped all the way down one leg, a smudge of garden dirt on her cheek, and an excited, invigorated look on her face, the sort of look you get when you’re free again. I tried not to notice her. I was in line then to view the old woman. This would be the closest I’d ever come to a dead person, and I was watching the adults ahead of me—the way Mr. Almer bowed his head and said a few silent words—so that I’d know what to do when I got to her. I’d watched the Morris men—who’d viewed her first and for a long time—touch her, lift her hands, lace their fingers—or try to—in her too-stiff ones, lean into the casket and kiss her, nudge their cheeks against hers in a display of physical affection for the dead that scared me and made me nervous about my own turn with her. But when Mr. Almer backed away, I found that I knew exactly what to do, how slowly, quietly to approach, bow my head, look and feel solemn, say a few silent words to myself. This was how to grieve and help my neighbors grieve their loss. I felt the pressure of a hand on my shoulder and looked over at Mr. Green, a good friend of my father, who said, “Hi, son” in a dusky half-whisper before he looked down, shook his head, and said, “Oh, Christine,” which had been the old woman’s name, then left me there alone with her. I knew next to nothing about Holly’s Grandma Morris save what Pastor Lamb had already said about her feeding cats and driving neighborhood kids around, about her love of gardening. And because Pastor Lamb had asked everyone present that day to contemplate one thing they knew that made Christine Morris unique and human, I treasured what seemed to me the saddest thing about her by saying to myself, “She had a passion for stray things.” A real reverberation of sadness moved through me, and I stood there for a moment until I heard the slight thud of something against the foot of the coffin and turned to see Holly, the streak of garden dirt still on her cheek, smiling at me and holding a bowl of green olives sh
e’d brought from the kitchen, where dozens of casseroles and other food neighbors had delivered crowded the counters. She selected an olive, aimed, then launched it. It hit my chest and rolled over the shaggy carpet. She smiled at me very nicely again, her eyes saying something like, “Hi, you.” Then she turned and flashed the same look at Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers before throwing a cluster of olives at them, forcing them to retreat down the hall and out of range. Holly saw that, with the dead woman behind me, I had nowhere to go. Standing in a sassy, smart-ass way, all her weight on one hip, she tossed another olive at me, this one flying over my shoulder. Mrs. Morris blasted down on Holly then, using too much force right there in the middle of the room and in the presence of that beautiful and expensive coffin. As if wielding a hammer, she swung the flat of her hand down on Holly, who willingly bent low and gave Mrs. Morris an easy target, even hiking her lemon skirt over her hips so that we could see—Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers staring from their safe place down the hall—through the white haze of her nylons the tight turquoise panties covering what to us had been her ten-point ass. Mrs. Morris was winded and had to stop, and only then realized what her daughter had done, what had happened to that room: Many mourners had looked away from the old woman, surrounded by banks and reefs of flowers, and fixed their eyes instead on what her daughter was displaying. It was full and perfectly shaped with a red blotch of torn skin just above her thigh where her nylon had ripped. Mr. Brown, Mr. Almer, Mr. Green (who had just touched my arm), Mr. Watkins, my father, Mr. Lemon, and other men—and some women, too—were looking and kept on looking until they realized what they were doing and realized that Mrs. Morris, still breathing hard from the exertion, saw them doing it, which was when the entire room looked away. I averted my eyes, too, for a long time, putting my head down and feeling the rush of blood and shame to my face. When I looked up again, my neighbors were shaking their heads and whispering. Some wept quietly. Others stood in line to view the old woman a second time. Mrs. Morris was now the only person looking at Holly, who had stood up and was smoothing the front of her skirt. Her mother stared at her with quiet disgust until her husband, his usual bad temper subdued by exhaustion and grief, took his wife’s hand and led her into the kitchen, where they would no longer have to watch their daughter misbehave.
