by Terry Kay
“You damned right you did,” I told her. “We’re supposed to be friends. Everybody knows that. It’s been the talk of the year—all that stuff about being engaged, all those stories—and we’ve played it for all it’s worth. Friends don’t make other friends feel like idiots.”
Marie drug her feet in the dirt, slowing the swing to a stop. She looked at me curiously, tilting her head. She said, “Are we, Cole? Are we friends? Really?”
“Of course we are,” I argued. “What about all those nights of sitting around your house, studying and listening to records and talking? What about the day I gave you my ring and all the other things we did? Nobody was paying me to do that. I just made thirty-five dollars the first time we went out, and I gave that back.”
Marie giggled. “You did?” she said in an astonished voice. “You gave it back? Oh, my God, Cole Bishop, you are the grandest fool I’ve ever known.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said coolly.
“Sit in the swing next to me,” she said.
“No.”
“Sit down, Cole. How long has it been since you sat in a swing and pushed it up in the air?”
“Not since I was little.”
“Maybe that’s your problem,” she said. “You stopped being little.”
“I’m sure there’s some deep meaning to all of that,” I said. “But I’m also sure that only you understand it.”
She laughed easily. “You just grew up, like everyone else, that’s what it means. I think—no, I believe—that you were a great kid, a great one, Cole. I believe you had an imagination that aggravated everyone around you. I believe you were so unique that nobody understood you, and then you grew up and you became just like everyone else around here.”
I said to her, “Look, Marie, you’re not from the South. Some things you just can’t understand. You don’t know how it is.”
“Oh, really?” she snapped. “You know who you sound like? You sound like one of those stupid, tobacco-chewing rednecks at Earl Cartwright’s gas station. I don’t know how it is? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I answered meekly.
“Try.”
I remember that I did not speak for a very long time. I sat in the swing next to her, wedging my body between the ropes.
“I mean there’re things you can’t understand, and you can’t, Marie, no matter how hard you try,” I finally said. “What you said in there tonight was right, and maybe everybody knows it deep down inside, but they didn’t hear you because they know you don’t understand. You can’t understand, and I can’t explain it, because I don’t know how to. Nobody can explain it, and anybody who tries to, they’re just pretending.”
Marie touched the ground with her toe, pushing the swing. She slipped her hands up the ropes and pulled. Her body began to sway.
“God, I’m glad I wasn’t born here,” she said. “I can’t wait to leave.”
“Yeah. Me, too. In a way,” I whispered.
“Do you know where I’m going tomorrow, Cole?”
“No,” I answered. “I didn’t know you were going anywhere, except on the senior class trip.”
“The senior class trip?” she said, laughing. “Oh, my God, Cole, do you really think I’d humiliate myself by traveling to New York and Washington with a bunch of giggling idiots? No, Cole, I’m going away. My parents are driving me to Atlanta and then I’m going to catch a train all by myself and I’m going to go to Boston.”
I twisted toward her. “What?” I said. “Why?”
“To work,” she explained casually. “You think you’re the only person going off on a grand adventure, Cole? God knows, you’ve been talking about it enough. I guess everybody in this backward little Brigadoon knows that Cole Terrific will be working as a lifeguard at a camp in North Carolina this summer, but you’re not the only person alive.” Her voice had become sing-song, something strangely gay and mock-Southern, something rushed and frantic. “I have a cousin who lives in Boston and she’s got jobs for us this summer, and then I’m going to go to school up there. Harvard, Cole, Harvard. Maybe you’ve heard of it. This is my last night in this town, and I’m never coming back. Not ever. My parents will be moving back to Virginia this summer. Daddy’s going to work with the Department of Agriculture. It’s been his dream, you know. Get out of fieldwork and into administration. Well, we’re both graduating, Cole.”
“Quit lying to me,” I said firmly.
“Oh, but I’m not lying, Cole. I’m going tomorrow. I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Of course, you’re lying,” I argued. “I’d know it if you were leaving town. I’ve been with you too much not to know a thing like that.”
“I don’t tell you everything. Just the unimportant stuff.”
“Thanks a lot,” I grumbled. “I’m glad to know how you feel.”
“But you don’t, Cole. You have no idea how I feel.”
“I think I’m getting a pretty good clue,” I said.
“Oh, Cole, quit sounding so bitter. Why are you mad at me?”
“Well, for one thing, this is one hell of a time to tell me you’re leaving Overton,” I said. “I mean, I could’ve done something if I had known.”
“What, Cole? Have a party for me? Invite all my dearest friends? Connie and Sally and Alyse and all the others? Made love to me? Now, that would have been nice. After all those nights, me fighting you off, and on our last night together, I finally give in, pull my skirt up and let you paw away.”
“My God, Marie.”
She became suddenly solemn. She pulled from the swing and walked away to the sliding board and rubbed the slick surface with her hand. She said, “I didn’t mean that, Cole. Not the way it sounded. I think I will regret not making love to you. Someday, I will. When I discover what it’s about. I think I’ll hear about you, or read about you, and I’ll miss you and wonder.”
She turned to face me. “Thank you for being here for me, Cole Bishop. Please take care of yourself. Please be careful. I won’t be there to protect you. You’re so blind to so many things.”
“What things?”
She crossed to stand in front of me. She reached to touch the ropes of the swing. There was a sadness in her eyes.
“You believe in stories,” she said softly. “You believe in stories of dragons and knights and talking rabbits and flying horses and orange turtles. You don’t even know what’s going on around you. You think you do, but you don’t. You think we live in a time when everything’s all right. You think the wars are finally over. I don’t, Cole. I don’t believe in stories. I believe in what is, and what’s about to be. Cole, the wars are not over. They’re just beginning. I read about what’s happening and it scares me. You read stories that end with everybody living happily-ever-after, and you think that’s the way it is. You think that’s going to happen to you. But it won’t. It’s not that way. You keep dreaming and you’ll just disappear one day. You’ll open up a book and fall into it and somebody’ll come along and close it, and there won’t be a Cole Bishop. Stories always end, Cole. Not everything else does. Some things never end.”
“I don’t understand you,” I told her.
Marie reached for my hands and tugged me from the swing, and embraced me. I could feel her weeping.
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she whispered. She turned her head on my chest, resting her face against me. “I do care for you,” she said. “I will miss you.”
“And I’ll miss you,” I said. “But we’ll see each other. Tonight’s not the last time we’ll be together.”
“I guess I love you, Cole Bishop. In a good way, I mean.”
“I guess I love you, too. The same way.”
“I’ve got something for you.”
“What?” I asked.
She reached behind her neck and unfastened her silver-coated necklace that held my high school ring. She slipped the ring from the necklace and pressed it into my hand.
“Thank yo
u for letting me keep it,” she said. “It’s the best treasure I’ve ever had.”
“That’s—all right,” I whispered.
She moved against me. Her hands touched my face. “You’re going to be famous. I can see it. It’s all over you. Sometimes when I’m close to you, like this, I can even feel it. It’s a sweet, cool feeling, Cole. But it scares me.”
“I’m just going to be me, Marie. Just me,” I said.
“No. You’re going to be somebody.”
“I feel like you just condemned me,” I told her.
“Maybe I did,” she said.
“Will I survive whatever it is you know and I don’t?”
“Barely, Cole Bishop. Barely.”
“Will it ever come to an end?” I asked.
She hesitated. The expression in her eyes was one of sadness. “Yes, Cole,” she answered.
“When?”
“You’ll know,” she said.
She leaned to me, tilted her face to my face, kissed me, held the kiss, letting the electricity of it surge through both of us.
“I do love you, Cole. I truly do,” she whispered. “And I’ll always be with you—as trite as that sounds. I will, though. I’ll be with you, looking over your shoulder. Be still, listen, and you’ll hear me. I promise.”
Marie left Overton the following afternoon, as she had announced. Three days later, the senior class left for its trip to New York City and Washington, DC. I declined to go, knowing my presence would be uncomfortable to my classmates. For Art and Sally, it was their honeymoon.
Two weeks later, I received a large envelope from Marie—the first of many letters that would sustain me for many years. It was a wonderful, rambling narrative of her train trip and of Boston, and it also included one of the photographs taken of us by her father on the night of the Junior-Senior Prom as well as a copy of her graduation speech. She wrote:
You should be here, my naïve, mendacious friend. I’d like to hide behind trees and in doorways to watch you wandering around. You’d look lost, and you would be. There are things here that your feeble mind could never comprehend because you’re a hick and you’ll always be a hick. How you’ll ever become famous, I have no idea, and if I didn’t believe in fate, I’d never believe it could happen. God, I miss you. There’s not a fool in this city as gullible, or as grand as you. As to the photograph, I hope you choose to keep it and occasionally take the time to look at it. We were both beautiful that night. But I want us to make an agreement: never send photographs to one another. Even better, never call me, never send me a telegram or a message by carrier pigeon. If you choose to communicate with me, I want it to be by letter. When I think of you, as I often do against my better instincts, I want to open my photo album and remember you from that night, and I want to read your letters and listen to your voice rise up out of your words. If we do have a friendship, let it be that, Cole. A friendship of words, not pictures. That way we’ll never age, will we? We can be one of those happy-ever-after couples you dream about in that Dixie Crystal sugar sweet world you want to live in.
And, yes, I know you may not want the enclosed few pages (a copy of my graduation speech), but I wanted you to have them. Destroy them if you wish. However, it you do, first read them. Read them carefully, without prejudice. I have never felt as sure about anything as I do about those words. Change, Cole, change. It’s rolling over us. Don’t let it crush you.
I replied to her letter, but did not hear from her again until Christmas. In a card, she enclosed a short note:
I’ve found my world, Cole. College. I love it. It loves me. I hope you’re learning something in that backward little school that finally agreed to accept your enrollment. At least I hope you’re not embarrassing yourself. Remember, you’re supposed to be famous. Famous as in Fame, my ridiculous friend. That is what resides in that sweaty little palm of yours, somewhere among the masturbation warts. Someday it will happen. Someday.
I still love you.
In the years that followed, I wrote faithfully to Marie and she answered with long, exquisite letters that somehow trapped her voice and her laughter inside the envelopes—the way she had imagined hearing me.
We never exchanged photographs. I never tried to call her.
She wrote of school, of infatuations, of love-making, of lectures and concerts that dazzled her, of skip-away trips to New York for a feast of Broadway shows, of funny unexpected encounters with funny unexpected people, of books she had read, of dreams invading her. She wrote with passion, with words that bounced across her life like the ball that bobbed up and down on the lyrics of sing-along television programs. There was no order to her letters, no serene walk along a picturesque garden path. Marie’s words raced, leaped fences of thought, lay waste to fields of reason. Her letters were like a child at play in a room filled with toys.
I re-read each letter many times, memorizing lines that made me laugh with gladness or ache with loneliness.
But one letter, each year in the early years, said only one thing.
It arrived always on my birthday.
Are you famous yet?
And each year, I replied: Not yet, and time keeps ticking away.
A few days later, I would receive another letter, always with the same response: Ticking closer, you mean.
In 1962, the ticking stopped.
In 1962, on the day of the killing, I became famous.
THIRTEEN
He emailed his night’s work to Tanya, then napped for an hour, from eight o’clock until nine o’clock, then showered and dressed and stripped his bed and washed his sheets and pillowcases. His breakfast was a hard-boiled egg and hot tea.
Being Sunday, he thought of going to church, but decided against it. He was no longer ill, but he did not trust his body, not after his erratic schedule of sleep. It would not be good to fall into a slumber during the sermon of the Reverend Kenneth Casey, and that was always a possibility. Kenneth Casey spoke in a monotone, only slightly above a whisper. He had been accused of causing the angels of the stained-glass windows to doze, their wings visibly, miraculously drooping around their shoulders like birds at rest. Sadly, the content of his sermons was usually as dull as his voice.
He knew also he would hear from Tanya. Or guessed he would. It would depend on the lateness of the Christmas dinner and the work of the clean-up. If she attended church, she would not call him until the afternoon.
He was wrong. She knocked on his door at ten o’clock, as he was putting his dishes away in the dishwasher.
She was dressed in jeans and snow boots, wearing a dark heavy coat over a blue turtleneck sweater. A matching blue scarf was swirled around her neck. She carried a large bag bearing a design of Santa Claus smiling at a gathering of children with awed expressions, the cheeks of their faces rosy from the winter cold and from innocence.
You must be feeling better, she said.
I am, he told her. What are you doing here?
She held up the bag. Delivering your Christmas dinner, she said. She walked past him into his kitchen, placed the bag on the counter. Actually, it’s just a ruse, my way of getting out of the house. I told Mark you’d sent an email, saying you were still feeling poorly. He insisted I check on you while he’s at church. She looked up at him and smiled triumphantly. He loves his tie, by the way, even wore it to church. Then she opened the bag and removed the printout of the writing he had completed that morning. I’m here because of this, she added. She looked at him in amazement. Did you make this up?
No, he answered. At least I don’t think so. It’s the way I remembered it.
She pulled her scarf from her neck, slipped out of her coat, and draped it across a chair at the kitchen table. Do you have coffee? she asked.
Not made, he said. But I’ll make some.
Good, she replied. She sat in one of the chairs at the table. I’m exhausted. Make it strong.
She talked as he prepared the coffee, pausing only for the loud, irritating grinding of the beans. She was i
n disbelief over Marie’s graduation speech, saying he must have lived in the most backward town in America if no one jeered her, though it was her guess that no one understood what they were hearing. Or they were in shock. Or they heard it as a final confirmation that Marie was as off-the-wall as they suspected.
If you didn’t dream it up, it was one hell of a speech, Cole, she said. Problem is, there’s not a hint of reality about it. No one, not even someone like Marie Fitzpatrick, would dare make such remarks in front of the crème de la crème of redneck society.
She did, he said quietly.
For a moment, Tanya did not speak. She held her gaze on him and he believed she was searching for a sign that he had lied—in his writing and to her.
Okay, she finally said. My mind wants to reject it, but my intuition tells me different. She shook her head. My God, she whispered. I’ve never heard anything like it.
She was different, he said.
I would say so, she replied. She paused, then added, And what happened?
You said you didn’t want to know until you read it, he reminded her.
Damn it, Cole, she said. Don’t do that to me.
It’s your call, he told her.
She stood, crossed to the coffeepot, watched the final dripping, then took a cup and poured coffee into it. All right, she said. I’ll wait. She turned to him. But I think you should be aware that I do know something about the killing. I’ve always known about that. I remember when it happened. I even remember the picture. I was only a child, but I remember it.
He could feel a wave of surprise on his face. You’ve never mentioned it, he said.
Of course not, she replied. I’m your friend. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but no one talks about it up here. At least, not now. Maybe they used to, but not now. We all believe that’s why you came here, to get away from it. You’ve got a lot of people who care about you, Cole.
He sat heavily at the kitchen table.
Coffee? she asked.
He nodded.
She took another cup from the cabinet and poured the coffee and gave it to him. Then she sat across from him.
