June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  A large cloud blackened the moon. Under its cover, she shambled up the column of the porte cochere. She hoped she’d stay shadowed until she’d clambered up to June’s window. Apatha had been direct when Lindie had brought June back to the house from the cemetery two nights before: “You let June be.” Thomas was gone by then, but Apatha still hadn’t offered Lindie dinner, not even after she’d been the one who rescued June.

  Once on the second story, Lindie was surprised to be met with a closed window; she’d assumed June would be eagerly waiting. She rapped on the pane and peered in.

  The room was dark, but Lindie could see her friend’s form under the chenille bedspread. The easel, wardrobe, and bed dominated the room; by comparison, Lindie’s rickety bedroom furniture—left over from her grandparents’ days, or maybe even from before that, when the workmen building Uncle Lem’s house had lived there—was already half-broken by the time she’d inherited it. Her fingertips pattered the cool glass. June was ignoring her. Lindie tapped again. June finally sat up. She saw Lindie—of course she saw her. But she didn’t move. The night turned bright again. Lindie ducked out of the window and flattened herself against the brick wall, praying Apatha wasn’t waiting below with that broom.

  That time against the side of the house gave Lindie an opportunity to consider letting June be. She wouldn’t show her Artie’s letter, but she wouldn’t tell her Jack’s plan either. Was that the right thing to do?

  The night dimmed again. And, without necessarily meaning to, without having fully decided on her next move, Lindie found herself tapping at the window again, tapping and tapping, until June finally came toward her. June cracked the window just wide enough to speak through it. “What?”

  June was trying to hide any trace of her tears, but Lindie caught their tracks down those pearly cheeks in the moonlight. “What’s wrong?” she asked dumbly. She hadn’t realized June was crying.

  June shrugged. She looked up at the night. The moon was reflected in her eyes and on her glossy face. Her cheeks were flushed, her lower lip wet. Something twanged inside of Lindie. She wanted, needed, to end any pain June might be enduring. She put her hands under the sash and pushed the window up so they stood inches apart. Perhaps there was a third option—neither Artie nor Jack: simply to mention the passion boiling inside herself. She’d tell June how good she thought she was, how much she wanted to give her happiness, how she’d only ever do right by her. Only how to begin?

  But June spoke first. “I know you don’t understand why I’d care for a man like Artie Danvers. Sometimes I don’t even understand it.” She glanced at Lindie, narrowing her eyes. “I know you think it’s weak to marry him.” Her mouth gripped tightly in on itself, but her bottom lip quivered. “So maybe I’m weak then, Lindie.” She shook her head. Lindie couldn’t bear to see June wrapped inside this torment.

  “I don’t know myself, Lindie, not like you. But I do know that I liked how he made me feel. I was looking forward to him coming home. To getting married…” And then she was weeping in earnest.

  “Don’t cry,” Lindie mumbled.

  June looked at her again, brow furrowed. “Clyde was over here today promising Mumma he was doing everything he could to find Artie. That means Clyde doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t it?” She seemed to sober then. To age. June’s gaze grew flinty as a blade. “I’m a fool. I’ve been sitting here for months waiting for a man who doesn’t even want me.”

  The letter, fine, the stupid letter. “He does,” Lindie said, hanging her head.

  “Oh hush,” June barked. “Don’t pretend you care.”

  “I don’t care,” Lindie said, “I know.” She reached for Artie’s letter in her breast pocket, fingering its edge.

  But June’s next words stopped her. “You’re here to sneak me out?” It was something about the way she sounded: hopeful, encouraging. As though what she wanted, more than anything in the world, was for Lindie to say yes, which was not a common occurrence; Lindie could count on one hand the times Miss Goody Two-Shoes had snuck out her window. Anything would scare June off, even on those nights when she’d promised to come: a stomachache, the sound of distant thunder, a sudden convenient fear of heights.

  “You want to sneak out? Even now?” Lindie tried to hide her happy shock.

  June sighed. “I might as well start living.”

  Lindie dropped Artie’s letter back into her pocket.

  “And he’ll be there?” June bit her lip and leaned on the he’ll. Lindie knew, for sure, that June didn’t mean Artie Danvers.

  Their eyes met. Lindie felt a flurry in her gut, dizzy and bright and awed. “He arranged it, June.”

  June’s hand fluttered to her throat like a bird flushed out of the undergrowth. It flitted to the back of her neck and tended its tendrils, then found a perch on her cheek. It turned back into a hand then, blotting and wiping any trace of sorrow. She straightened her shoulders toward the night, toward the safe hush of their quiet, sleeping town.

  In the shadow of the garage behind Lindie’s house, June clambered onto the back of the Schwinn. She begged Lindie to reveal their destination. She preferred to walk—she always preferred to walk, especially when Lindie was at the handlebars—but Lindie told her it was too far, and that was all she’d say. Then she shushed June. All it took was freezing her finger in the air, as though she’d heard someone approaching; the power Lindie could occasionally wield over June was intoxicating. June wrapped her soft arms around Lindie’s narrow torso. Her breath unfurled into the younger girl’s ear. Lindie pedaled them onto the gravel alley behind the house, keeping tight to the bushes.

  They needn’t have feared; they could have ridden straight down the middle of Main Street and no one would have seen them. It was Friday night, nearly eleven; the pious were abed, the drunks were down at the Red Door Tavern, and the few who liked adventure were headed out, incognito, to the eastern side of town. Just in case, Lindie kept to the darkest, emptiest roads.

  “I’ve arranged a whole shebang,” Jack had explained with a self-satisfied smile. “Everyone will be there.”

  Lindie had shaken her head vehemently. “She won’t come if it’s everyone.”

  “And if she sneaks off to meet me alone, you don’t think they’ll talk?” He’d pointed to the old ladies, gathered across the south side of the street, watching him as lions might eye their tamer. “They’ll know. They always find out.” He’d taken a handful of salted nuts from Crafty and tipped back his head, dropping them all into his mouth at once. “But a girl can come to a party, can’t she?” He winked. “What’s the harm in that?” And he’d tousled Lindie’s hair and, loosening his costume’s old-fashioned bow tie, headed to his trailer.

  —

  Lindie pedaled them out past the farms on the two-lane road. The waxing gibbous moon colored the world as though in slate pencil. All the familiars turned strange. Behind them, the spire of the Presbyterian church became a dragon tooth piercing the sky. Above them, the newly leaved trees roiled in a chalky swirl. And the neat, low rows of wheat stretching out toward morning had become endless lines upon which a giant school-age child might practice her delicate hand.

  “Where are we going?” June asked again, but politely, because she knew Lindie would reach back and pinch her if she heard one more complaint. Lindie nodded at the saltshaker boxes on the horizon. Since the spring, they had been sprouting, seemingly fully formed from the razed earth. You’d count four on a Tuesday, and by Friday morning there’d be three more.

  Of course, Bobby Prange and Walter Eberle had gone exploring early in the spring. They’d returned with a tale of a lunatic war veteran turned security man who roamed the construction site with his shotgun and a pack of wild dogs, and, though Lindie never believed the story, it had been enough to keep the rest of the St. Jude hooligans from making the construction site their regular hangout spot. Still, nearly every adventurer among the under fifteen set had, at one point or another, snuck through Mr. Rohrbach’s soybean fields to
spy on the bright yellow American forklifts and diggers gobbling up the farmland. Workers came in from Lima and Dayton with hammers and tar paper and white paint. They ate bologna sandwiches and bags of potato chips during their lunch breaks, but Lindie’d only heard reports, because Eben had been strict about giving the builders a wide berth. Lindie suspected that had less to do with her physical safety and more to do with the fact that this particular development was the first stage in what he derisively called “Uncle Clyde’s quest to change St. Jude for the bigger,” although Eben remained tight-lipped beyond that.

  What little Lindie knew about Uncle Clyde’s brainchild she’d learned via the vent that lay at the foot of her bed and opened directly down onto the living room. Occasionally, a few of her father’s cronies came by for a game of cards and a bottle of whiskey. At Eben’s house there was no woman to harangue them for talking till all hours of the night; as long as the floorboards didn’t give away Lindie’s eavesdropping, her father’s friends were happy to forget there was a future woman listening above.

  In her darkened room, feeling the weight of her drowsy limbs as she lay upside down in her bed to lean an ear over the vent, Lindie had bought into Uncle Clyde’s “master plan” the way children are wont to do; namely, she’d taken it as fact. Clyde and the other men who ran the town were responsible for how it was shaped, for its rules and regulations, for its future. Men deciding was how the Goodyear plant had come to town and given so many fathers jobs, and how Memorial High had gotten a new gymnasium with shiny floors. Men deciding kept St. Jude safe; after all, most of the men deciding had shot the Nazis and their cronies to smithereens, and, as far as Lindie knew, that had turned out quite well for everyone involved.

  Clyde’s plan was four-pronged. It rested on the cornerstone fact that only two-lane roads could carry anyone out of St. Jude and, for that matter, bring anyone in. These country highways were as straight as if they’d been traced with Apatha’s wooden yardstick, and they’d been built for horse carts, not for the great American driving sedans that folks were buying these days. As the crow flew, there were direct routes from St. Jude to anywhere else in the state of Ohio, but one had to follow those little two-lane roads at right angles, making stair steps across the wide-open countryside, since no roads went straight from town to town.

  But the U.S. government was deciding to build an interstate system, wide and fast, which would connect not just towns to cities but states to states; they were going to pass a law about it. These roadways, to Clyde’s telling at least, would create great commercial booms for the small towns that happened to be along the way. After all, travelers had to stop for gas, food, and lodging. And why couldn’t St. Jude be one such place? It already had the lake—a potential tourist draw—and the sweet little town to pull at the heartstrings, not to mention the potential tourism dollars brought in once Erie Canal was released and everyone wanted to see “Monroeville” in person.

  And, speaking of the interstate, it just so happened that Clyde’s buddy, Mr. Frederick Ripvogle of Lima, was on the short list to win the contract for the new interstate that Ohio wanted to build on the western side of the state, from Toledo all the way down to Cincinnati. Ripvogle was friends with the governor; Clyde said he’d had it from Ripvogle’s mouth that he was a shoo-in.

  Once Ripvogle won the bid, he’d be sure to design the interstate so it came just by the eastern side of St. Jude, near where Clyde’s new development was now sprouting. Clyde would fill that side of town—currently just wide-open fields with cows mooing—with all sorts of novelties: perhaps one or two of those new fast-food restaurants, maybe someday a roadside hotel. These niceties would not only improve the lives of the current St. Judians but also be a draw for young families looking for a safe, affordable place to live that combined town with country. And when these families wanted to move in, well, Clyde’s brand-new houses would be waiting just for them. Eben and a few of the guys who were “getting in on the ground floor,” as Clyde called it, would invest a little of their “nest eggs” and “it would pay them back handsomely.” In spite of Eben’s doubt, which seeped up to Lindie through the rafters—“Clyde, what if the law doesn’t pass? What if Ripvogle doesn’t win the bid?”—she felt hope buckle the backs of her knees as she thought of her town, St. Jude, on its way up in the world, and all because of her uncle Clyde’s dream.

  Since the first of Clyde’s houses had gone up, the wagging tongues had had their share of complaints—the walls of those new houses were too thin! With just a poured concrete foundation and no cellar, where were you supposed to store your potatoes? And surely no one would ever give up their Victorian in the heart of town for a flimsy one-story wooden box two miles outside of it, where it smelled of manure more days than not. But, as Lindie pedaled the last quarter mile toward the development, calves aching and forehead dripping with sweat, she surged with pride. She steered them through the newly erected stone wall, which stretched out on either side of the drive, as though signaling the beginning of an ancient ruin.

  “This is private property,” June hissed as they passed into the first row of houses.

  Lindie braked and turned to June, panting. “Feel free to wait here.”

  June’s mouth formed a prim line.

  Lindie scanned the night for the rumored rottweilers that should be tearing them to pieces—not a sign. She smirked at the prospect of bragging to the boys about coming out here after dark.

  As her breath stilled, she could hear something—a murmur. A pulse. A thrum that brought the night alive in a way they’d never heard before. It was coming from the far end of the development, the houses Clyde had built first.

  June’s arms found their familiar spot above Lindie’s hip bones. They rode on.

  —

  The small, new houses were dark, row after row. How many had been built? On treeless street after street, the white houses looked like boxes on a factory belt, waiting for their dolls. The occasional breeze that had felt so exhilarating back in town was wilder out here, less predictable. It danced between the vacant houses, whose picture windows should have framed mothers and fathers on their davenports. The wind whipped across the concrete driveways, which would soon house family station wagons. The moon disappeared again. June gripped Lindie tighter.

  Lindie had known the houses were unoccupied; Clyde had wanted them built in advance of Ripvogle’s gaining the bid, which was sure to be announced any day now. “Get ahead of the market,” that was another phrase she’d heard Clyde use. But Lindie never could have imagined the empty development felt like a ghost town.

  The wind flapped June’s hair across Lindie’s lips. The sound in the distance was becoming music. June pressed herself into Lindie’s back. Whether Lindie could imagine June’s heart pounding into her or it was really possible to feel that necessary organ through the thin layers of cotton between them, didn’t matter. Lindie felt they were one, and so, for that moment, they were.

  Nearly at the last row of houses, beyond which lay the central Ohio plains stretching on until morning, the girls heard the crow of a mariachi trumpet. Then the bike shot straight into light and color and sound. Lindie slammed on the brakes. Stretched above was a string of Chinese paper lanterns, the kind Lindie’d only read about in books. Every house blazed. Music, too, music everywhere: “Rock Around the Clock” and Satchmo on his trumpet and “Unchained Melody.” Music with a rattling backbone that Lindie didn’t even know existed but now could never unknow. And the people! Mostly from the film crew, but no longer automatons. Here they were, laughing, drinking, dancing up against each other in a way Lindie was certain was against the law. June’s face was a blaze of wonder as she took in the strange sight, the world lit up as never before. It felt as though they had stumbled upon a group of fairy people from a storybook, the kind who swiped children and were gone by morning.

  “So how’s that fiancé?” Jack asked June, motioning to the collection of booze set out on a card table at the foot of someone’s drivewa
y. June shook her head in a polite no. He opened her a Coke. They were in the middle of the road, surrounded by the crew and their guests. Everyone seemed to be moving together, amoeba-like, in the way of such events, which inevitably take on their own heartbeat and disappointments, although the night hadn’t gotten to that yet.

  To Lindie, Jack said, “Rabbit Legs, I can’t, in good conscience, offer you any of this poison. But a Coke?” He pulled another one from the galvanized bucket. Together, they watched June’s lower lip curl under the rim of the sweating bottle she held. The cold, wet sugar left a vibrant shimmer on Lindie’s tongue. She felt giddy and sick at the sight of Jack’s eyes on June, his face an ache of hopeful hunger.

  “Let’s not talk about my fiancé,” June said playfully. The cacophony of the party had changed: “Ain’t That a Shame” mingled with the sultry howl of a jazz trumpet, now layered atop Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer incongruously declaring it was cold outside. Each piece of music played out a front door of one of the pillbox houses that continued to the end of the road, where civilization once again met country. Lindie admired Clyde’s wherewithal to secure these tenants; she wondered if the studio was paying him, or if he supposed he could just tell potential buyers that Jack Montgomery had slept in their master bedroom and that would be enough to make up the difference.

  Suzie, the makeup girl, waved to Lindie as she led a young man down the road. Only a few feet away, a grip, Andy Number One, was dancing very close to Luella Caywood, the pretty girl who worked the soda fountain at Schillinger’s Drug. Andy’s face was at Luella’s neck, and her arms were flung around him. He rocked against her in a way Lindie hadn’t quite gotten up the nerve to conjure, even in the privacy of her bedroom.