Walking Dunes

by Sandra Scofield

  “Depressed?”

  David felt a vague thrill, cold and stirring. This must be like court, he thought, his questions coming at me like Ping-Pong balls. He had no sense of strategy. “I guess you’d say she was depressed.” He felt engaged, though; they were adversaries.

  “She talk about death? Love? The Cold War? What riled her up?”

  “I don’t see how that would help.”

  “She ask you to shoot her?”

  “I said no, sir.”

  “She talk about it?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Leland says he met her with you. She was in the hospital. You took him up there. You talked him into dating her.”

  “You already had my name?”

  “I tell a client, ‘Tell me everything.’”

  “He did do it.”

  “There are words. Mitigating. Temporary this or that. States of mind. That comes later. I start with—history.”

  “My mother worked at the hospital. I was killing time. Leland and I hang out together.”

  “Try this, Puckett. She wants to die. She talks about it to her friends. To you, to Piper. She plants the idea, like the idea for a play. Like a play, she keeps it in rehearsal. Over and over she talks about it. Till you’re all sick of it.”

  David could hardly speak. Crawford was uncanny. David felt as if his skull was sliced open. The lawyer could read his brain. If David had wondered why he wanted to see him, he knew clearly now. It was an instinct that had served him well. “She didn’t talk about it to me,” he said.

  Crawford stood, walked over to the windows, and pulled the drape shut. Not turning around, he said, “You remember what she did say, you come back.” He went back to the bar and poured himself a fresh drink in a clean glass.

  “Sir,” David began. His chest was like a band of steel. “Are you going to call me up on the stand?”

  “How’s that?” Crawford held the glass high in front of him, waiting to drink until David answered. The glass was like an extension of himself, a fist.

  “I’m wondering, under oath, what name I say.” David had not planned this. He had not even thought of it until this moment. He felt himself let go of some of the tension; air came more easily to his lungs. Crawford could not know what was coming.

  “How’s that?” Crawford said again.

  “Puckett is my mother’s family name. My dad’s name is Stolboff. Now, testifying, under oath, I’d have to say Stolboff, wouldn’t I?” He wondered what Crawford thought of Jews.

  “You think that matters a rat’s ass to me, Puckett? What’s your story? You come here to be sure I don’t call you? You ashamed of your friendship with Leland? He’s not as pretty as you?”

  “Look here.”

  Now Crawford drank. He sloshed the liquid around in his mouth before he swallowed, and then he said, “You think he would say, ‘Puckett knew about it, and didn’t do anything to stop it?’”

  “No way.”

  “Or is it that you want to be called? You want your big minute on the stand, everybody watching?”

  “I’d have to say, I don’t know. I didn’t hear. I’d say, Not me.”

  “Why? Because she did ask you? And you’re ashamed, you didn’t care, you didn’t talk her out of it, you were home in bed when she went wading in that caliche pit? You have a conscience, young man?”

  “I wouldn’t be any help. I came to tell you that.”

  “Don’t you worry, Sholfobb. I won’t call you.”

  “She was depressed!” David cried. “She was melodramatic. Ask around at school. Lots of other kids can tell you.”

  “Name some.”

  “Kids in ‘Antigone.’”

  “In what?”

  “She worked backstage on a play we just did. She spent time around other kids. Look, Mr. Crawford, I don’t understand Leland doing this. I don’t see how she talked him into it. But it had to be her idea. He wouldn’t have any reason.”

  “I had a client once, I asked him why he shot his wife. She was in bed with his partner, they owned a Conoco station. He said, ‘I wanted to see how big a hole it would make.’”

  “She would watch Patsy in the scene where she knows she’s going to go into the cave, she’s going to be shut up to die in there. She would say—Sissy I meant—‘That would be so slow. It would be so scary.’”

  “Very good, Puckett. Stawfobb.”

  “Other kids heard her say it! We all talked about how it would feel. But she was—she was crazy. Don’t you think she’d have to be?”

  “It’s Leland Piper they’re wanting to try.”

  “She didn’t ask me.”

  “She’d know you’d be too smart.”

  The phone rang. “Yes?” Crawford said. “Just a minute.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Don’t you worry, Shawfart. I won’t call you. You wouldn’t be any help at all.”

  34.

  Leland’s mother gave David a long look when she opened the door. He blushed; it was the first time he had been to the house in the weeks since the shooting.

  There was a four-drawer dresser in the hall outside Leland’s room. Inside, what was left of Leland’s belongings was piled on or next to the bed, and the walls had been stripped bare. Leland was by the window, hunkered down, painting along the sill. The room was now a pale green, the color their classrooms had been in elementary school. Did Leland remember that?

  “Do I know you?” Leland said.

  “Come on, Piper,” David said. “This is tough.”

  “You tell me.”

  David gestured at the walls. “Funny seeing them so bare. What’d you do with everything?”

  “Tossed it. This is the new Leland Piper. Orderly, clean—”

  “Green.”

  They laughed, the tension eased a little.

  “I’m going to my uncle’s in Big Spring in a couple of days, to work construction. The trial’s set for August.”

  “That’ll be good, huh. Being busy.”

  “Make some money.”

  “Sure.”

  Leland laid the brush down carefully on a piece of newspaper on the floor. It was awkward, the two of them standing looking at one another across the mess on the bed. He said, “It all seems a hundred years ago already. Or like it was somebody else and I read about it. I can’t believe it happened.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish I could undo it. This has just about killed my mother.”

  “Do you think about Sissy? Do you see it?” He knew he sounded ghoulish, but he really wanted to know.

  “Nah. It’s more like, I don’t know, like it was a kitten you put out of its misery. I don’t know if she was ever real, you know? To me, I mean. I don’t think anything that ever happened with her was my idea. I was always following along.”

  “My pop’s gone,” David blurted. For a moment he thought Leland didn’t hear, or understand, but then he said, “Gone where,” without the energy to make it a question. David could see that Leland was somewhere in another universe. He was the only person David could think of who would understand what this meant, but he wasn’t that person anymore. He was the boy who had killed Cecelia Dossey and that was the sum of his identity. It made David angry. He shrugged. “Florida, I think. Since Joyce Ellen had her baby, he stopped coming home lots of nights. He said he was staying at Chasen’s, but he had a girlfriend. Then he didn’t come home at all. We got a postcard from someplace in Louisiana. It said, ‘Maybe it’s not too late.’ My mom reads it, tosses it in the garbage, says, ‘Fat chance, Stolboff.’ And that’s all she’s said.”

  “When did he go?”

  “It’s been a week.” Talking about it made his throat ache.

  “Tough,” Leland said. He seemed bored.

  “It’s hard all over,” David said. He could not keep from feeling resentful. Both his friends had disappeared down a rat-hole. And Beth Ann—you didn’t pour your guts out to a girl like that. It wasn’t like that between them. When he told her about his fa
ther leaving, she said casually, “You two aren’t very close, huh?”

  “You’ve got the best of the best lawyers,” David said, wanting badly to leave. “It’ll work out.” He did not want to say, or hear, anything about the case. The idea of somebody he knew being “a case” was so strange, he would rather forget it. If Crawford was not going to bother him, he did not have to be involved. It was all so sad and pointless anyway. Sissy had wanted to be dead, and now she was. Leland was a sucker. They would never let him in Rice now.

  Leland dipped into the paint again, stooped to brush the wall below the window. With his back to David, he said, “My dad says we have to live through the publicity, through the trial, and then everybody will forget. He says when it’s over I can work at the store with him and nobody will care.” He turned around. “Crawford’s going to say I was crazy. That’s how you get out of it. You say something came over you.”

  “Didn’t it?”

  Leland went back to painting. David went home.

  He sat on his bed with the two notebooks, his and Sissy’s, on his lap. He was thinking about the story he’d wanted to write last summer, about the woman who loved the boy, and then killed herself. What if she, like Sissy, had wanted to pull someone into it? If she had been beautiful, tragic, like Teresa, maybe that could have happened. You could talk someone into believing in your sadness. Sissy had not tried hard enough with him. She had not had a good enough story. She and Leland, they had been the right pair after all. He held the notebooks a long time, not opening them, trying to empty his mind. Then he put them under the mattress again. They aren’t hurting anything, he told himself. Nobody cares about them. He thought of them as a matching pair.

  The Kimbroughs took David to dinner at the country club. It was cozy. They sat by glass doors looking out onto a patio and a vast expanse of lawn. At the far end was a pumpjack. A few years ago someone had had the idea to see if there was oil on the club property; that hunch had made every charter member rich.

  By this time of year, Beth Ann spent a lot of every weekend at the club. She didn’t ask David along. He supposed there was a limit to how many times you could take somebody who wasn’t a member. So Beth Ann went out, with her friends, her other friends, to swim and play tennis and have lunch, and then, later, she got together with David. Things had changed between them since the ride to the ranch. Beth Ann had dropped the coyness. She called and said, “Can you be here at seven?” She said, “Next weekend we’ll want to see this movie.” He told himself that being taken for granted was a high form of security, though it chafed him. He thought, more and more, of making love to her, but he never made the slightest overture. The lines had been drawn from the beginning.

  There was going to be a lot of catch-up work if he was going to be anybody in her life.

  They had a meal, served family style on platters, probably unremarkable to the Kimbroughs, that was the best David had ever eaten: a slab of standing rib roast, dripping blood, with a snowy mound of horseradish; potatoes that had been fried or baked so there was half an inch of brown crackly crust; and sweet long stalks of asparagus, which he had never tasted. They were so casual about the food; the women, like always, moving things around on their plates while they gossiped, Hayden eating in a steady, pragmatic fashion, as though all the dishes had the same taste. David could hardly keep from moaning with pleasure. He ate more than anyone at the table, slightly embarrassed to do so, but unable to stop himself. He lived on canned soups, cheese and bologna sandwiches, and hamburgers. There was never a real meal at home. Joyce Ellen drank gallons of juice, and ate from the refrigerator in the middle of the night, keeping her mother company while she drank after work. Marge had eyes only for the baby, who cried constantly, unless held and walked. Every time David came through a door he saw one of them parading through the house, cradling the baby, shushing and fussing and cooing to keep him happy. Meanwhile the place filled with filth and clutter. David felt squeezed into his room, and he knew Joyce Ellen wanted even that. The bitter, bitter thing about Saul’s defection was that he did not stop to think that his son might want to go. Or worse, he did not care.

  “Look, it’s Helen Shaw back from Italy,” Laurel Kimbrough said. “And Missy, home from Wellesley already.” She slapped her hands together lightly. “We’ve got to go say hello,” she told her husband. “We won’t be two minutes.” She went off, trailed by Beth Ann.

  Hayden smiled indulgently. “Are we putting odds on two minutes?”

  “Not me, sir, I don’t gamble,” David said, hoping he sounded easygoing and humorous, rather than stupid.

  “Not on trivial matters, anyway, hey, David?”

  “Sir?”

  “Life’s a gamble. I say you ought to take a chance or two. The West was built on risks. And I’d say the odds are in your favor.”

  David was lost. He tried to show no expression at all, while he searched for something to say.

  “I’m glad to have a moment with you. Two minutes, as they say. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

  David wondered what Beth Ann had said. He swallowed hard.

  “I get down to Austin every month or so. How would you like to make a trip with me, say in June? I could take you down to the legislature, see what might happen for you in the fall. You are set to go to UT, aren’t you?”

  “On paper. I guess I will, if I get a job, find a place, all that.” He could not imagine how he was going to last that long in the house with the baby.

  “We could look around.”

  “That would be great. I appreciate it.”

  Hayden studied David. “You’re wondering why, aren’t you?”

  David squirmed, though he hoped it was not noticeable. He felt itchy and hot. With effort, he smiled. “Beth Ann—” he said.

  Hayden waved his hand. “Not Beth Ann. You. Laurel and I have grown fond of you. We see things in you.” He leaned his elbows on the table, closing the gap between them. “We look at some of the boys we’ve known all their lives, and we see boys without intention, boys without spines. Not all, I’m not saying our friends don’t have fine youngsters! But there are some. They lack sinew. They’ve had it too easy too soon.”

  David wheezed.

  “Besides, the world can’t be run by a tiny elite. You have to have new blood.”

  “I’d like to be that,” David said, finding the courage for a certain heartiness.

  Hayden sat back in his chair. He waved at a waiter and asked for two brandies. The waiter looked at David. “My wife will be right back,” Hayden said patiently. The waiter nodded and came back with the snifters. He set one in front of Hayden, the other at an empty place. Hayden smiled. As soon as the waiter turned around, he passed the glass to David. The first taste made David’s nose and throat burn, but the second made his chest warm pleasantly. He could not think of anything to say. He hoped he looked casual about the brandy, and about Hayden Kimbrough’s little speech, which might or might not be over.

  “It’s different for girls,” Hayden said. “Beth Ann will go to college, study something not too hard, pledge a sorority. She’ll grow more beautiful, more sophisticated, more like her mother. She’ll make a fine wife one day.”

  David’s face flamed. He had not finished the brandy, but he could not take another swallow. He set the glass down gently on the tablecloth. “All in good time,” he said.

  Hayden smiled broadly. “Exactly. That’s it, young man. All in good time.”

  David flushed deeply, then relaxed. He had merely stumbled on the right phrase, but with it said, he could see clearly what Beth Ann’s father had on his mind. A small hand-out, a bit of caution. No promises. It was not quite a contract, was it? But the door wasn’t shut. Here’s a leg up, Puckett, see what you can do with it.

  What more could a poor West Texas boy ask for? Even Saul would say it was a fair deal. All David had to do was work hard and grow up, while Beth Ann matured with some less effort. Then they would see.

  All David could lose
was Beth Ann. He could gain a better life, the one his classmates thought he was headed for.

  He picked the snifter up again and drained the glass. “Thank you, Mr. Kimbrough,” he said. He was pleased with the nice dark timbre of his voice. “I am truly grateful.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you called me Hayden? Look, here come the girls.”

  David and Beth Ann sat on the patio while her parents had a drink with friends in the bar. It had been a hot, summery day, and though it was much cooler now in the darkness, there was a pleasant smell and feeling to the air. David could feel the brandy. His toes seemed far away, but warm.

  “What did you and Daddy talk about?”

  “Not about. Around. We talked around you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I’m a patient young man. That I know you’ll want to do better if you can.”

  “David, you didn’t!”

  “Around. We talked around these things.”

  “They know I like you a lot.”

  “I like them too. I always supposed rich people were arrogant, but they’re not.”

  “Arrogant?” Beth Ann said idly, as if it were a foreign word she only wanted to pronounce.

  “Though it’s hard not to mind.”

  “Mind what?”

  “Where other people start from.”

  She didn’t comment. Someone blinked the yellow patio lights.

  “Maybe we should go in.”

  The lights went out. “I like the dark,” she said. Through the glass doors, the dining room, now empty, seem to glow softly like a bowl of fireflies. They sat side by side on lounge chairs, their legs stretched out. She reached for his hand. “Davy, what did you do with that girl’s diary?”

  The feeling in his hand, one second before so warm in hers, went numb. He could still feel his toes, but not his fingers. He pulled his hand away, sighed, adjusted his position in the chair.

  “Stop squirming and answer me.”

  He could imagine why men hit women. She would have to stop talking to him like that, sooner or later.

  “I hear Mommy and Daddy talking about it. The case, not the diary. Of course they don’t know about the diary.”