by Newman,James
MIDNIGHT RAIN
By James Newman
Cemetery Dance Publications
Baltimore, MD
2016
Copyright © 2016 by James Newman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cemetery Dance Publications
132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7
Forest Hill, MD 21050
http://www.cemeterydance.com
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-575-1
Front Cover Artwork © 2016 by Lynne Hansen Design
Digital Design by Dan Hocker
Do you remember the exact moment your childhood ended?
I do.
For most of us, it is impossible to pinpoint that single instant when we became adults. We treasure the memories both perfect and bittersweet, reminisce on old friends and days gone by. We can’t remember how it all ended—despite an infallible belief, once upon a time, that it never could end—but it did. Eventually.
We hold on to the memories leading up to that point as best we can. We pray they will never fade, because when they do the magic is gone. That is when we grow old.
Or go mad.
This is the way my childhood ended…
Not when I received my first driver’s license. Or the first time I tried marijuana.
Nor did it end with that initial teenage taste of carnal knowledge—awkward groping up at Storch’s Rim, my hometown’s rendezvous point for young lovers with raging hormones and an indifference toward patrolling lawmen.
The day the North Carolina school system deemed me an adult with a fancy certificate and a clammy handshake from Principal Colin Maxwell meant little in regards to the death of my boyhood.
It was nothing so prosaic as all that, in a town called Midnight.
It happened on August 5, 1977. One month after my twelfth birthday.
What I saw that night changed me, forever altered the way I look at other people and the masks they sometimes wear.
Do you remember the moment your childhood ended?
I do…
That was the night I witnessed the murder of a young lady named Cassandra Belle Rourke.
AUGUST 5
CHAPTER ONE
I remember wondering several times if it would ever stop raining, during those two dark weeks in ’77.
Even when the booming thunder grew silent for a while, when the lightning did not illuminate my hometown every few seconds like brief glimpses of daylight after dusk, all my old haunts around Midnight, North Carolina seemed doomed to bask in that gray autumn chill forever.
It just kept raining.
The storm seemed destined to never end, as if one day my town might drown beneath it all, float belly-up and drift off to some other place far away…
After what happened, I almost wished it would.
****
“Danny. Hey, Dan, man…you awake?”
The sounds of blankets rustling, a bedspring squeaking. A groan from my big brother.
I shook him again, whispered his name with a tad more urgency. Part of me envied Dan as I watched him come to, coveted his ability to doze without images of death and violence filling his dreams. It didn’t seem fair.
Of course, he hadn’t seen the things I’d seen. He hadn’t witnessed what I witnessed.
“D-Dan, wake up,” I said. My lower lip trembled as I tried my best not to cry.
I shook him again.
“Um-merzgrhl,” said Dan.
“Wake up. Please?”
I used to think Dan could sleep through a nuclear war (getting him awake was “like tryin’ to shake the brown off shit,” Mom used to say, and that wasn’t too far from the truth). There were times when I carried on lengthy conversations with him only to discover later that he’d been half-conscious the entire time and remembered not a word of them.
Finally he opened one eye, squinted up at me. “Kyle? What’s going on?”
“I’m scared.” It was all I could think of to say at first. My voice was thick with oncoming tears, my head filled with the lingering crimson images of the awful things I had seen earlier that night.
Dan yawned, sat up, squinted at the clock on his nightstand. “Jeez, man. It’s two-thirty in the morning. You know I got that thing tomorrow.”
“I know,” I said. I sniffled, let out a frightened little moan in the darkness, and plopped down on the bed beside him. “I’m sorry.”
A flicker of lightning outside Dan’s window suddenly lit up the room, and my big brother resembled something malevolent looming before me. He was a black shape in the night for those next few seconds, a tall silhouette with its hand on my knee…but then the thunder that followed was weak, distant, and he was just my brother again.
Dan yawned again. Farted. He tossed the covers from atop his body and scooted closer toward me. “What’s the matter, bro? You in some kind of trouble?”
Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. Oh, Dan…if you only knew…
“Didn’t ride your bike through old Ms. Mertzer’s flowerbed again, did you?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Samantha Barrett caught you peeking through her bedroom window! I knew you’d get busted one day, loverboy.”
“No,” I said, through clenched teeth. “It wasn’t anything like that, Dan. It wasn’t anything like that at all.”
Dan said, “Turn on the light, Kyle. Tell me what’s going on.”
For another minute or two I just sat there. I began to sob softly. I didn’t ever want to leave my brother’s side. But then he nudged me, and I staggered over to turn on the light. Any other time I got a chuckle out of that face-plate on Dan’s light switch—a cartoon drawing of a well-hung pervert opening his trench-coat, the switch his vulgar knob exposed for all to see—but this time I just stared at it blankly before returning to sit beside Dan on the bed.
“Aghh, God.” My brother pretended to shriek in agony when the lights came on.
In a daze I glanced around his room, at all those trophies from his high school basketball team, at his movie posters (his favorites at the time: Rocky, Jaws, and Kentucky Fried Movie) and pin-ups of rock stars like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. My teary gaze lingered longest on the Farrah Fawcett centerfold above his stereo. Farrah wore a pink one-piece bathing suit in that glossy photograph. Her lips were pursed and she stared at the camera with a hungry expression I would recognize years later as “bedroom eyes.” The picture was signed, but a crooked DISCO SUCKS bumper sticker covered the “Stu” to whom it had been personalized (Dan had purchased the poster at a yard sale for a nickel). The closer I came to puberty the more infatuated I became with that picture, with Farrah’s supple curves and hints of exposed woman-flesh, but this time I stared right through the model. She might as well have been dead and blue up there.
Dead and blue…
Outside, the autumn rain continued as if it might never cease.
“Shit,” Dan said, rubbing gritty sleep from his eyes. “Eight o’ clock’s gonna come real early.” He yawned again, loud, took a second to scratch his crotch before staring at me with one eyebrow cocked. “So what’s the matter, little bro? You have a nightmare or something?”
Dan was eighteen years old, a recent graduate of Gerald R. Stokely High. God only knows why I turned out the runt and he had always been the gangly basketball player type, but my big brother stood six-foot-three at last count and Mom often said
he was gonna keep growing till his head burst right through the ceiling. He had our father’s deep blue eyes—the only visible trait from Dad that I can claim as well—and a head of sandy-blond hair he wore in one of those “bowl-cut” styles.
Dan had been pondering a career in gynecology. Gynecology or politics, he hadn’t decided which. It was the sort of thing folks liked to tease him about (“one wrong move and you’re in deep shit either way,” his friend Chris said one night and although I didn’t get it then I giggled like it was the funniest thing I ever heard), but Dan never joked about his future. In less than seven hours on the night in question he was scheduled to board a plane headed to Tallahassee, Florida, where he would spend the next four years as a student of Florida State University. I don’t think I have to tell you my thoughts on that matter. The whole town seemed to idolize my big brother, the way he’d earned that basketball scholarship with little effort. He had become a sort of local hero. I, however, could not get past my own selfish desire to keep him in Midnight forever. I honestly felt, as the moment of Dan’s departure grew closer, that my life would end the second he left me behind.
“Is something wrong, Kyle?” he asked me again. “What’s up?”
I could hold it in no longer. The dam inside of me broke at last, and a flood of tears began streaming down my face like the rain at my brother’s bedroom window.
“Hey…Kyle…?”
Dan had been sleeping in his Fruit-of-the-Looms and that baggy orange tank top with the big green 12 on it from his varsity basketball team. When he put his arm around me I couldn’t help but notice a musky odor about him beneath his sweaty sleep-smell and faint aroma of aftershave. It was a smell I would later in life recognize as the salty scent of sex.
“D-Dan,” I said, watching my hands fidget in my lap like pale creatures with minds of their own. “If I t-tell you something…do you p-promise not to tell anybody?”
“Sure, man.” He grinned, rubbed the top of my head with mock-roughness. “Unless, of course, you’re gonna confess you’re a fag. Then I’ll have to tell the world.”
Normally I would have giggled high and loud at that. I’m sure I would have frogged my big brother on the arm, called him “butt-wad” or “ass-lick.” But Dan realized I was in no mood for jokes the second the words were out of his mouth. His smile faded and his brow furrowed as he waited for me to tell my story.
“You gotta promise, Dan,” I whispered. “Swear it…you can’t tell anybody.”
“Okay, I promise! Cross my heart and all that jive! Jeez, man—what is it?”
At last I told him, all rapid-fire words-running-together because otherwise I feared I might never get it out: “LastnightaftertheAppleGalaIsawagirlgetmurdered.”
For those next seconds the only sound between us was the muffled drone of the rain upon our roof. A quiet but steadily building soundtrack for my own personal horror movie just beginning.
Finally, Dan said, “You’re not kidding around, are you, Kyle? Good God. You’re serious.”
“I’m serious.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
I shook my head.
“Not even Mom?”
“Especially not Mom.”
“Who was it?” Dan asked.
“What?”
He bit at his thumbnail, spat a pale sliver of it across the room, but never took his eyes off me. “The…girl. Who was she?”
I wiped at my dripping nose with the collar of my Spider-Man pajamas. “I don’t know. She…looked kinda familiar, I guess. But I’m not sure. Her face…oh, God, Danny…her f-face. It was…a-all messed up.”
I stared down at my feet, studied my big toe poking through a hole in my left sock. For some reason I suddenly found it hard to make eye contact with Dan. As if I had done something wrong. Even Farrah glared down at me accusingly from her place upon the wall, and I wished she would stop.
“We gotta tell somebody,” Dan said.
I quickly looked back up at him. “We?”
“Sure. You don’t think you’re gonna be alone in this, do you? I’m with ya, little bro. All the way.”
“No,” I said. “That’s why I made you promise. I can’t tell anyone.”
“First thing in the morning, we’ll talk to Sheriff Baker. I’ll go with you, tell him what you saw. My plane doesn’t leave till ten. The sheriff can—”
“No, Danny! No! You don’t understand!”
My brother flinched beneath my harsh tone. “Shh. Okay. Easy. Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened…”
“He was there, Dan,” I whispered. “The sheriff was there.”
Dan went pale. My big brother—my rock, my role model, my portrait of strength when I had nowhere else to turn—looked like he’d been punched in the face.
“Sheriff Baker killed that girl. He murdered her. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
CHAPTER TWO
Midnight, North Carolina held its Annual Apple Gala every year during the first weekend in August. It was such an exciting time for the whole town, I remember, and each festival seemed infinitely better than the last. It hardly mattered that, as adolescence dawned, I outgrew the Free Fire Engine Rides, the Dunk-Your-Teachers booth (“All Proceeds Go To United Way!”), and the one-time allure of the Miniature Petting Zoo sponsored by the Futch Bros. Dairy outside of town. Although I eventually reached an age at which I considered myself far too “cool” to enjoy the silly antics of the Gala’s clowns and the cheap noisemakers those grease-painted jesters tossed to the masses of fun-drunk children, that point was moot. Everyone, of all ages, loved Midnight’s Annual Apple Gala. Vendors hawked delicious cotton candy, caramel apples, and fat funnel cakes throughout the two-day affair. All along the sidewalks of Main Street aspiring artists hawked their homemade crafts, competing non-stop with dozens of other amateur doll-makers, caricaturists, and whittlers for the dollars of the masses. I often reminisce on those spectacular days, and I can hear the innocent laughter of children beneath the wackier, louder chuckling of the dancing clowns (local retirees like Greta Morgan, Hap Somerside and Marvin Creedle, folks who dressed up every year “just for the kiddies” and seemed to have the time of their lives just playing young again). I can still hear the phantom tones of the Gerald R. Stokely High School Band, with their off-key renditions of songs I did not know (the theme from Star Wars excepted, of course) but which somehow seemed familiar. And of course the smells…oh, the smells! Autumn smells, I have always thought of them since. Those mouth-watering aromas seemed to linger about Midnight for several weeks after the Gala’s conclusion, and to this day they conjure images in my head of tiny hands sticky with cotton candy, paper nacho boats steaming with mounds of hot yellow cheese, and humongous apples impaled upon Popsicle sticks dripping with sticky strands of caramel.
My God, what a grand time we all had! Midnight’s Annual Apple Gala was the dying summer’s grand finale, its glorious swansong if you will, as well as our town’s boisterous welcome to the autumn that took its place.
They were the greatest days of my childhood, those annual celebrations. Such perfect memories.
Once upon a time.
****
On the night of August 5, 1977 I rode with my big brother to the Apple Gala, as was tradition every year. This time, however, Dan informed me—with a sly wink and a suggestive waggling of his tongue—that I should make myself scarce after the Gala. Seems he and Julie, that girl he’d been dating for a couple of years, planned to pay one last visit up to Storch’s Rim before he left for college. I took his hint, could even appreciate Dan’s motives in some way I was as yet unable to comprehend (I would end up visiting the Rim myself several times in the coming years, would in fact lose my virginity there one chilly November night in 1980 to a flat-chested redhead named Susan Connley). Of course, I especially didn’t mind the whole plan since Dan loaded up my Schwinn bicycle in the back of his pick-up, assuring me that if I promised not to tell Mom I could ride home by myself after the Gala. How I use
d to cherish that spectacular sense of freedom I felt when secretly cruising through Midnight on my bike late at night. Dan insisted I return home by ten o’ clock, though, a stipulation he sternly imposed with one long, skinny finger in my face. He rarely talked down to me, but when he really meant something—God, that was when he looked most like our father.
He was my hero, my idol. If I grew up to be half as cool as my big brother, I used to think, I’d make it all right in the world.
So we shook on it. Dan gave my wrist a minor Indian burn “to consummate the deal” and we swore Mom would never know a thing. This covered Dan’s “scorin’ some poontang,” he said, as well as my “gallyvantin’ through the woods like some kinda little monkey.” As long as I promised to be home by ten, everything would be “kosher.”
Kosher. Dan used to say that a lot, and I never knew what the hell it meant.
In any event, I knew I had to stick by my word. God forbid Mom ever found out her youngest son had ventured through the Snake River Woods alone. Or that Dan had allowed me to do so.
She would undoubtedly kill us both. Slowly.
With our mother, that was only slightly an exaggeration.
****
There’s something I should tell you about Darlene Mackey. I’m not ashamed of it, though when I was young you would have been hard-pressed to get me to talk about it at all.
My mother was an alcoholic, a die-hard alcoholic who would continue to be such until the day she died. It was that very disease what killed her, in fact. Don’t get me wrong—I loved my mother. I know she did the best she could under the circumstances, raising my brother and me all by herself. She worked long, hard hours in the local woodworking plant to support her family. But nothing had been quite the same in the Mackey household since the day that man in Dad’s division showed up decorated with all his fancy stripes and medals to tell Mom her husband was dead. I think after my father died she built a frigid wall around her heart so nothing could get in or out. And she turned to the bottle to help her deal with it all.
