"He's not moving," Delia said.
"He might get up," said Alma.
"He won't get up," Cap whispered. "He was crazy, like an animal."
"We should never have come here," Delia said. She began to sob, but quietly, as though any sound might waken him.
"Shhh," Lenny said. "He would have hurt Buddy." She dropped her own voice to a whisper. "He wanted to kill Buddy."
"Don't we have to tell someone?" Delia put her hand in Cap's, tried to pull at her, but Cap didn't answer. She didn't raise her eyes from the shape on the ground.
"It's over now," Lenny said slowly, evenly. "But if we tell someone, it'll never be over. We'll have to tell it and tell it. We'll never be able to stop telling it. Nothing else will matter anymore, ever."
Cap turned her head to look at Lenny. Her eyes were wide, startled, so close Lenny saw the facets of her green irises. "Then what?" She mouthed the words silently, over the heads of the younger girls. The wind tossed a coppery strand of her hair across her lips, and Lenny looked away. Dense woods circled the open clearing of Turtle Hole. The giant beeches and willows arched their limbs, nearly bestial. Their branches stirred and moved, hulking, protective. Lenny strained to hear the sound of the leaves, as if there were words in their lissome rattle.
"It should stay here," Lenny whispered. "It should all stay here."
"Look at him," Cap murmured.
The shape on the broad dirt shore hadn't moved. His legs were twisted and his upturned hands were empty, the fingers curled. Lenny looked at him and her body stung in the moist air, limb by limb, as though it were painful to come alive again. She imagined lying still. He would have stood over her like this, or reached for the others. Which one? She pulled them all closer. The world would not be as it was. She saw that there was no world but this one now, full blown and dense with shifting air; they were born into it, mourning. He lay at their feet, unmoving: now he looked like a man. Above them the far-flung sky arched away and dusk gathered, blurred and soft, rolling like a wheel that only rolls and darkens as it rolls.
PARSON: DREAM SO DEEP
He moves to stand and knows he can't, not yet, but his vision clears and the colors separate into forms. He sees the boy first, a shape light and then dark, a profile finely etched against a cataclysm of sparks. He calls the boy's name once, twice. There is a hush and that quiet holds still. He sees the boy for what he is: a piece of light with dark scars on his wrists, at his throat. Someone is sobbing calmly, but it's a sound like water pouring from vessel to vessel, a sound like an undercurrent. Parson thinks it's a sound he has heard and brought here with him, an old sound that goes on a long time. The boy moves toward Parson and the sound fades; the light gives way, becomes Buddy's face, Buddy's hands on him. He gets to his knees. The boy wants to hold on to him, takes his arm as though to show him, lead him closer, but the girls stand with their backs to him. Parson can't see what's in front of them.
He stands and the knot of their bodies loosens. They say nothing, they only wait, and Parson edges them all a little aside, moves into the circle. Carmody has turned nearly face down on the bank of Turtle Hole at their feet; there is an absence, a blank around his body, and the absence is empty: everything has gone away. Parson bends down, kneels, reaches beneath the body to unbutton Carmody's shirt and pull it off. He wraps the shirt around Carmody's head and face, and ties the empty sleeves to keep the shirt in place. But there is not much blood. It's as though whatever was in Carmody's head has withdrawn, pulled back, moved on; now he is only what's left. He has a weight, dense and quiet; he sleeps in a layered dream, a dream so deep he has sunk far from whatever he knew, far from all of them. Now it would be wrong to hurt him, and impossible. He is delivered; it is already done.
Parson looks up to see the girls standing motionless, a still configuration. Lenny with her arms around the younger ones, each wedged near like a shadow, and the other girl then, standing just before them, one arm flung out in front of them all. She holds a rock in her other hand, as though Carmody might stand and lurch toward them, as though it might all begin again. Parson hears them, hears someone, gasping.
He stands up and nearly loses his balance; he does lurch toward them but Lenny moves closer and places one hand flat against his chest. They are all moving, tilting, standing near him. There's a smell coming off them, a smell of tears and sweat, new and smashed, sweet. Like clover reduced in someone's hands, worried until it's moist. A panic smell, but they're standing in their own silence.
Parson looks at Lenny and tells her, "Stand with the little boy."
Quickly, while they're moving, Parson stands between them and Carmody's body. He puts a foot against the nearest stack of piled rocks and shoves hard; the rocks topple scattered on the ground and Parson picks up the largest, the stable, flat rock from the bottom of the pile, and lifts it high with both hands. He brings it down on the back of the hooded head but the body never twitches. Still, they can't know. Parson has taken it on.
He whirls round in a smooth progression and topples each pile of rocks. One hard, balanced blow, a well-placed kick, and the rocks fall in a pummeled, nearly circular grid no one will know how to read. No one will come here looking, not for years and years. They'll look for Parson somewhere else, and they'll find him, and it won't matter then.
The boy steps forward, his pale, peaked face round as a moon, as blank and wan. "You got blood on you," he tells Parson.
Parson only looks at him, and Buddy comes closer, gestures for Parson to bend down, puts one hand on Parson's shoulder. "You got blood here, where he hit you," Buddy says, and Parson feels Buddy's hand on his temple, a touch as light as some wafted petal, a pale and waxen touch. Buddy brings his palm down then and opens his hand to show Parson the red stain, and he moves into Parson's arms, fits himself closely. He folds himself in and sighs raggedly. Parson stands, holding him, and they walk into the water just far enough for Parson to crouch down, immersed to his chest. He cradles Buddy in the water easily, with one arm, and he tilts Buddy's head back, only slightly, as though he will rock him, to comfort him.
"You can wash it off," Buddy says. "You can get it clean."
Parson nods and puts a finger to his lips, widens his eyes in a signal for the boy to be quiet. He palms a sluice of water into his hand and touches Buddy's head, first with his wrist, then with the heel of his hand, fingers opening, a slow, practiced caress.
Buddy looks, interested, into Parson's eyes. As though he's watching a man shoe a horse, Parson thinks, or load a gun, or make a pie. Cupped water from Parson's hand courses down his face, but he doesn't blink. His wet lashes are fixed in starry points.
Holding the boy in his arms, Parson lets himself sink into the water. The boy only nestles closer, light, lighter than air, Parson thinks, like some bird just resting, an intricate, airy works, densely packed, nearly weightless. Parson lets them turn in the water, thinks of stopping here, but he stands and begins carrying the boy back to shore. Buddy touches his face.
"Mister," he says, "let me see." He slides his fingers over the throb at Parson's temple.
Parson feels the ache as a separate pain for the first time, as though the pain responds to the delicate pull of the boy's fingers. "He clipped me one," Parson murmurs. Hears, doesn't see, the hip-high swak of water against them. Holding the boy, Parson lets him float, moves him forward in the water like a cradled ship.
"Not too bad," Buddy says, still peering at him through near dark. "No one's going to be asking you."
"Don't matter," Parson says. "I'll get away, lie low." He looks at Buddy, wanting an answer. "No one knows me here. You're the only one could even say where I came from."
They hear an owl call across the water, the sound a question and exclamation, hung in the air to fade.
"You know me?" Parson asks softly. "Do you know me, boy?"
Buddy looks up at him, smiles. "I saw that owl in the water," he says.
"They fish off the surface sometimes," Parson says, "frogs and p
eepers."
"I saw him deep down," Buddy answers. "Flew up at me from them lights on the bottom." Then he goes quiet, lapse of a heartbeat, and says, nearly too fast to make out, "Dad wanted me to steal them rings the old lady has in her room, so he could take him a stake away with him. He was fixin to go. He was going to take me too, then he was going to let me stay if I got the rings."
"He did go," Parson says. "He has gone and he won't come back, and you don't have to be afraid."
The boy finds his own feet and stands, walks out of Parson's loose embrace as they come up on shore. Parson feels his movement and lets him go, and the two of them move close to the girls until they stand, all of them, at Carmody's feet. Carmody's wet khaki pants are smeared with red mud, and his boots turn in awkwardly. The soles are pitted, dug in long scratches, as though something has clawed at them.
One of the little girls is still crying, sobbing.
"Delia," Lenny begins, stops, takes a breath.
Parson looks at her, at all of them. They raise their eyes to him, even Delia, each gaze cutting space like the spoke of a wheel. "You can finish it," he tells them quietly. "The body has got to be put somewhere."
The one called Delia shakes her face free of her tousled, curly hair. She looks into Parson's face and her wet eyes look blasted awake, alert. "The water, then," she says.
"No," Parson says.
"I know where," Buddy says. He is looking along the ground, walking a few steps away, and he stoops and picks up a box-like flashlight. He cups his palm over the plastic front and turns it on, and his hand shows suddenly red, the light pouring round his feet like something spilled. He switches it off. "Got to have a light," he says quietly. "But I know where."
"We can't carry him far," Lenny says.
"It's not far," Buddy says, and he tells Parson, "You best leave, before someone's looking for us."
Parson stands and listens. It has begun to rain gently, as though the shadow of a watery hand draws closer. He hears rain on leaves, a sound like a sigh all around the water, and far off he hears singing in faulty patches. The others are still at the campfire but they'll stop now, in the rain.
He looks at Lenny, doesn't speak, but she says, soft and deliberate, "You should go."
Parson takes a step back, away from them, watches Lenny take Carmody's hand, no, his wrist. The younger ones position themselves at his feet.
"Cap," Lenny says, "help us."
The other girl seems to rouse. She drops the rock she's holding, looks at Lenny. Their exchanged glance seems to pull her in, closer, until she too reaches for one of Carmody's wrists.
"Do it fast," Parson says. He knows they've got to do it now, together, and he remembers the bag of his clothes, his boots. He grabs the sack where it sits, near the rock. A curtain of rain begins to fall quietly across Turtle Hole and Parson is turning, walking. He thinks it will rain all night; he'll put on his clothes when he gets into the trees near the road. Soon it will rain hard and no one will wonder that he's soaked to the skin; men driving between towns on a wet weekend night will stop for him. In fact, they will: as a green Ford Fairlane shudders its way over Mud River Bridge near Gaither, he'll shut his eyes in the dark, whispering to himself in the back seat where no one hears him over the blare of the radio. And he will still see the girls, dragging the body around the diving rock, the body a spent slab they don't try to lift.
BUDDY CARMODY: DARK PARABLE
The rocky path to the diving rock is a broken road, a road that never was, and the grassy, weed-choked border of the path, the dense, leafy woods beyond, are suddenly full of sound. The rain is just beginning, a fine spray, a drift of cloud. Insects chorus in the clarified air, in the safety of the dark. Hundreds of crickets, Buddy thinks, more, maybe thousands, what are thousands, and he sees numbers in his mind, a one with endless zeros, points beyond points, and the crickets and beetles are small as zeros, darting hidden, hard as jewels, deep down near the white roots of the onion grass. He feels himself move among them, tall as a mountain. The girls follow him, tight together, and a blight elation stabs through him; the world has turned round and made real a scenario too surprising to have dreamed or hoped. They're like a team in the dark, a team in a group in a line, trooping all together, and for a moment he forgets what the girls hold in their hands, why they're struggling to keep up, their breathing a ragged, balanced cadence urging him on, pressing against him, their staggered footfalls moving him. And the dragging sound between them moves him too: the heavy thing they pull along the ground, the wound that hangs down, and Buddy's head goes black inside. At the edge of his darkness a bright thread jumps like a nerve, moving off into a separate space Buddy can't think about with what he knows. If he were really a mountain, the girls would be part of the dark, all four of them on the path with their cargo, unseen from way up high. Nothing lit from far away but the stranger who has left them and moved off, his trail a line of light through trees toward the road. He has to be moving, careful, in the cover of the trees, Buddy thinks, or stopped like a still point, standing on the road shirtless with his wet trousers clung to his legs. Or he could wait in the woods until real night comes, wait to leave, and far off on a road the car or truck that will pick him up is already moving toward him. Sound of an engine. The stranger will walk through trees to the road, and Buddy knows he'll come out two curves and a straight piece from the dirt turnoff that leads to Camp Shelter. Leads past the church with blue windows and farther on to Buddy's house. The car that picks up the stranger could head back past Shelter Road, past the wide berm where Buddy and Mam stand when they wait for the bus, on toward Bellington and across the whole country of America. That's where the road goes if you never stop, Mam says, clear to the Pacific Ocean, and Buddy thinks about the stranger plunging into the sea, not a man anymore but a long tail of light, like the comets he's seen in pictures at school. Or the stranger could head the other way, over Mud River Bridge into Gaither and quickly through it, like a thought going away from them, vanishing. There's an ocean on that side too, Mam says so, not so far either, a big cold ocean, and Buddy sees the stranger taking away everything that's happened, taking it all away into water so big and deep nothing ever comes out again. Buddy fixes the stranger in his mind, the way he looked, arched high out of the water of Turtle Hole and bearing down on Dad, suspended, come from nowhere: Buddy holds him still and looks at him. He did look winged, bronzed and dark, his big shoulders and the whole of his body curved, flared inward, an attack bird, a sprung predator poised to drop, and Buddy remembers a pounding, his heartbeat in his ears when he was pushed under the water, nowhere to go but deeper, the thrashing above him a flailing mix of limbs and white streaks. How big the water was, how cold as he went deeper, with the dappled gold color like circles inside circles, spangling the bottom that sank farther away as Buddy drifted toward it.
"I hear something," a voice says behind him, and the procession slows, hesitates.
Behind, in front of them, the sound reverberates in the rain, fragile, a breathy calling that hangs in the air.
"Alma, it's just doves, or owls," Lenny says quietly, "owls in the trees."
"In the trees," Buddy hears himself say, like an echo.
"Don't stop walking," Lenny whispers back. "It will be too hard to keep going."
"Where is he taking us?" Alma asks her.
Buddy doesn't turn to look but he says, still moving, "This way, around the rock. I know a hiding place."
And he hears them fall in again, resume their march. He thinks about them marching and lifts his own knees higher, walking, not running, a troop is a team that walks: airy mountain, and the ground does rise here, toward the back of the diving rock, the door of the cave, the slant of shelf-like hole that opens, and Buddy feels a rush of fear, a tremor along his spine so chill he can't be drowsy, but he stifles a yawn that makes him shake. A little sound escapes him.
Lenny reaches out, puts a hand on his shoulder. "Shhh," she says, "quick now."
"Lenny," Cap
says, "did he hurt you?"
Buddy knows her, the girl Lenny stays with in her tent. Cap. A name like a hat.
Lenny whispers, "Don't talk about it now."
"We can't ever talk about it," Cap says.
"We can talk," Lenny says, "but only to each other. It's only ours to talk about. We're the only ones who were there. We're the only ones who know what happened."
One of the girls is crying, on and on.
"We'll talk later," Lenny says, "not now."
"Delia," someone says, "shhh, shhh."
"Never mind, Alma," Lenny says.
"Delia, some of us could have run away," Alma says quietly. "But we couldn't leave Lenny. We couldn't leave Lenny, Delia."
"I know," Delia sobs, softly.
"Let Delia be," Lenny says. "She's all right."
Buddy turns to look. Lenny and Cap are barely able to drag Dad over the ground. The younger girls seem far away, holding his ankles up, as though they only keep him from taking root in his heavy parts, melding into ground like a fallen tree gone powdery and rotten. But Dad is not rotten; he's someone asleep, with no face. His hooded head hangs down and his white chest is like a face. His bare back scrapes along the dirt. Buddy doesn't look, he doesn't look at Dad's long legs or think about Dad's belt. The belt with the buckle will stay in the cave, the buckle like a treasure that won't change, metal like a coin: Buddy knows about coins, how they last and never rot. Like animals rot on the loamy ground of the forest, like Dad will rot, all of him gone away to powder. Not big anymore, not fast, in front of Buddy and behind him and all over him. Buddy takes a skip, jumps in place, like he could help them lift, but he can't touch, no: Dad is too heavy for him. Buddy has the light though, he has the light, not Dad, and he'll turn it on when they get to the cave. Now he shows them how to go, here, around the back of the rock that anchors sheer above them. They can still see to follow, this dark is not really dark at all. Buddy knows about the real dark, the black inside the cave. Now he sees the back of the rock, the little rise of dirt leading to the hole. The scrub pine around the hole moves, pale, showing its underside; there's a wind picking up, a soft rainy wind to blow leaves and needles backwards. The pine tosses itself gently against the rock. Buddy grasps the damp, springy tendrils with his hands, pulls himself close, and kneels at the hole.
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