by Dale Bailey
“Mr. Laymon, have you left us again?”
Nick jerked in his desk, spilling his books to the floor. A wavelet of laughter rippled through the class. Dr. Gillespie closed his eyes and solemnly shook his head.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “Fitzgerald ends the novel indicating that all we can do is believe in the green light, the orgastic—a word F. Scott, a terrible speller, mistakenly coined, by the way—the orgastic future—”
The bell shrilled through his last words, stealing them.
“We’ll wrap up next time. Class dismissed.”
Leaving, Nick saw Gillespie gesture to him, but Nick ducked his head and bulled his way into the crowded hallway. Outside, the cold numbing him instantly, Nick headed toward the cafeteria.
Donner’s overflowed with students and professors hurrying through lunch. Nick scanned the crowd quickly, but saw none of the others. Something cold unfolded in his stomach.
He pushed through the line, picking up a tuna on rye and an apple. Back in the dining area he still saw no one. It was the bus terminal all over again. Something serpentine stole into his heart.
“Nick! Over here!” Sue stood beside a table in the far back corner, waving. Finney sat beside her, his face stone, a newspaper unfolded in front of him.
Nick walked over and placed his food on the table. He sat between them, pushing his sandwich aside. He picked up the apple and slowly polished it on the tail of his shirt.
“Hey, lover, how was class?” Sue’s eyes were clear and bright. Looking closely, though, Nick could see the shadows of last night’s fears: dark circles under her eyes, an occasional twitch at the corner of her mouth.
“Okay, I guess.” He looked over at Finney. “Where’s Tuck?”
Finney shrugged and pushed the paper toward Nick. “You see this?”
Nick glanced down; it was the Ransom Daily, folded open to page four. He shook his head.
Finney jabbed his finger at a small story under the fold. “Body Found,” the headline said in letters like black tumors. The piece had no byline. Nick thought suddenly of the old man outside the bus terminal. You ain’t like them. He squeezed the apple, refusing the shake in his fingers. He read the article quickly, the words blurring before his eyes. He reread it, forcing the words to take shape, exhorting the piece to make sense.
The body of an unidentified man had been found late yesterday afternoon in the woods on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Sources reported that the incident bore the markings of a hit-and-run accident and that the driver had apparently attempted to hide the body. The U.S. Park Service had also discovered a stolen 1996 Camaro with Tennessee plates abandoned in a scenic overlook less than half a mile away. Because of the possibility of a murder on federal land, the FBI had been asked to participate in the investigation.
Nick read the last line several times. Shit. They were way beyond the deep end, drowning. He imagined the warm, dark waters of the Gulf searing his throat, filling his lungs.
“Notice anything?”
Finney’s voice brought Nick to the surface. He breathed deeply and met Finney’s eyes. “Besides the fact that we’re unbelievably fucked?”
Sue reached over and patted his arm. Her touch was the shock of jellyfish. He winced but kept his arm on the table.
“Any mention of Evans?”
Nick scanned the article again. None. His chest tightened; he wanted Sue to take her hand back. Breathing was hard.
“What’s his deal, Nick? He came through with his Dick Tracy shit before noon. Rangers discovered the body late afternoon.” He spoke in an even voice. “And what is a Tennessee Highway Patrolman doing in Ransom, North Carolina?” The last word came out Cah-o-lina, the Southern accent Finney had interred long ago slipping from its grave. The two of them stared at each other. Finney’s fingers tapped a quick beat on the table. Nick polished his apple.
“We need to think,” Sue said. “We need—”
Reed Tucker appeared between them, breathing heavily, his eyes wild and his usually impeccably swept hair greasy and disheveled. He dragged a chair over from the next table and collapsed into it. Nick noticed he had on the same clothes he’d worn yesterday, the Hilfiger sweatshirt rumpled and stained; he smelled as if he hadn’t bothered to shower since the accident.
“You see this?” Tucker slapped a bright blue flier on top of the newspaper. “I found it posted in the Student Center.” He snatched the newspaper from under the flier and fell quiet, studying the article. His leg jittered under the table like a pinned insect.
Finney picked up the blue sheet, examined it, and slid it across to Nick. He read it, aware of Sue looking over his shoulder, her breath moist on his neck. Printed across the top in cold black letters was the word REWARD. Just below was a blurry but recognizable photograph of Casey. She grinned brightly, like a child, warm and safe, centuries from the cold pain of the cinderblock room.
Just below, in the same bold black letters:
$100,000
FOR INFORMATION CONCERNING THE WHEREABOUTS OF
CASEY NICOLE BARRETT
MISSING SINCE NOV. 12
Listed beneath were a phone number and the name Alfred Reynolds Barrett. The name sounded distantly familiar.
“A. R. Barrett,” Finney said. “He’s a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. The Senator’s mentioned him a couple times.” He paused. “The money would be pocket change.”
Nick looked at the amount again. He closed his eyes as Sue took the flier. The inside of his head bloomed with a phosphorous green light. A hundred grand would take him through the rest of his youth. Everything about him felt suddenly weighted, as if flatirons had been strapped to his limbs.
Once, when he was thirteen, he and Alex St. Johns, his best friend at the time, decided to swim out to one of the Gulf buoys, a channel maker about two miles out. They were both strong swimmers and they liked the ring of bravado in the plan. They started early one Saturday morning the middle of June, the day hot and bright, the Gulf calm. Less than a mile out—just when they hit the truly green waters of the Gulf—Alex turned back, telling Nick that he’d felt something thick and leathery brushing against his legs. When Nick refused to follow, Alex got angry, shouting that he was a stupid son of a bitch going nowhere.
The desertion enraged Nick and he swam all the harder. They told him later that he must have veered off course and missed the buoy. Within a couple of hours his arms and legs screamed; he refused to surrender, convinced the buoy was just ahead. By noon, when a passing shrimper spotted him, his arms and legs were dead weights, dragging him under.
The sun had stripped his shoulders and fever blisters had covered his lips, forming and bursting in the salt water, spreading into his nose and the corners of his eyes. He remembered nothing of the last hour. The captain of the shrimper told him later that he’d been babbling incoherently, something about creatures under the sea.
He felt that way now, his limbs heavy, his mind water-logged, something dark and hungry circling just beneath him. He imagined opening his eyes in the briny Gulf—and discovering the fish-eaten faces of Finney and Tuck leering back at him, each clinging to one of his legs.
Tucker slammed the newspaper down on the table. “What the hell are we going to do?” Panic laced his voice.
Nick opened his eyes and took the flier back from Sue. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
“What about the tape?” he said, looking at Finney.
Finney glanced at the others and then back to Nick. “I say we destroy it. Cut our losses, kill our connections, lay low till this thing is gone.”
“Me, too,” Tucker said, his voice a ragged whisper. “It’s a trail leading straight up our asses, man.”
“Sue?” They all looked at her. She nodded her head, a terse dip of her chin.
“Who?” Nick asked.
“You do it,” Tucker said. “This whole thing is on your head—you made us go back to the body, you had to che
ck out the locker. You kill the tape.” He stood abruptly and reached into the front of his jeans; grinning, he pulled out the videotape. Finney and Nick looked at him incredulously. “You think I’m going to leave this time bomb in the apartment?” He tossed it to Nick and sat down. “Do it soon,” he said, “like now.”
Nick looked at Sue. She gazed back, her expression inscrutable. He tucked the tape into the inside jacket pocket, feeling it bump softly against the roll of bills. His heart quickened as he stood, swinging his book bag over a shoulder.
“I’ve got Modern Poetry at 1:00. I’m gone.”
“Class? You’re going to fucking class?” Tucker jumped up, knocking his chair over. It clattered against the tiled floor. The few students still scattered around Donner’s looked over, then resumed their lunches. One of the cafeteria ladies shuffled past and began to bus the table beside them. The fat of her arms and belly swung to the slow time of her movements. Her face was surprisingly sunken and her hair, what little Nick could see through the cobweb of her hairnet, was a lifeless iron-gray. Like an automaton, she cleared the table and then stooped to retrieve Tucker’s overturned chair.
“There you go, suh.”
As she turned away, her eyes, blank as glass, crawled sluggishly over Nick. He recognized her then. He’d seen her probably a hundred times during the past two years and never made the connection. She was Carrie Witherspoon’s mother, the one who had floated ghostlike into one of the Torkelsons’ parties to search for her lost daughter. Nick watched her move slowly to the other side of Donner’s.
“With all this shit,” Tucker hissed into Nick’s face, leaning far over the table, “you’re going to a goddamn poetry class?”
“That’s enough, Tuck.” Finney didn’t move, but his eyes, clear and cold, were hard on Nick. “Calm down. Now.” Finney refolded the newspaper. “Nick knows what he’s doing. Don’t you, Nicky?”
Tucker kicked his chair out of the way and stalked out of the building. The door slammed behind him.
“I’ll catch him,” Sue said, gathering her books. “Calm him down.” She kissed Nick on the mouth. Her lips felt chapped. “See you at my apartment?”
“Yeah, a couple hours.” Nick watched her leave.
“Nicky, my man,” Finney said, standing and tucking the newspaper under his arm, “let’s you and I take a walk.”
The sky was bright and cold and seemingly endless, as though no dead man straddled his conscience. Nick followed Finney into the Quadrangle, a deserted alcove off to the side of Donner’s. The walls of four buildings, gray brick rising coldly into the sun, hemmed in a stamp-sized area of dead grass and concrete benches. Finney sat down on the farthest bench, blowing on his hands, hunched against the cold. His movements triggered a memory, one that Nick tried to suppress. He took the bench opposite Finney’s, dropping his book bag, still wrestling with the image of Finney seated on the same bench sometime last July. The cold seeped through his jeans, chilling him. His balls shriveled, hard as knots. Nick gave over to the memory, the revelation as merciless now as it had been that summer day so long ago.
During the summers, Ransom College dwindled to almost nothing, less than a hundred students taking maybe a dozen courses. Last summer Nick had planned to return to Glory, as he had the previous two years, but the week before finals—dead week they called it—Danny Patterson’s mother suffered a fatal heart attack. Danny was the English Department’s lone student assistant, a junior given to reciting Poe and selling tests he’d mimeographed for a hundred pops a page. Dr. Gillespie asked if Nick could stand in Danny’s stead for the summer, and before he’d really thought about it, Nick agreed.
The job was simple: two hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, copying and filing tests, sorting the mail, retrieving the chair’s dry cleaning. Nothing compared to the summer of unloading crates Nick had planned.
He’d just left work that July afternoon when he’d spotted Finney sunning himself in the Quad, a battered copy of The Golden Ass facedown on the bench beside him.
They chatted, nothing that Nick could remember, then Finney said, “Tuck and I are headed for Knoxville. Got any plans tonight?”
“Taking Sue over to Ashland, we’re eating at some place called Mallory’s.”
Finney laughed. “She used to make me take her over there all the time. Watch, she’ll order the stuffed lobster and a bottle of—”
The world slid from under Nick. He felt dizzy, nauseated, like someone had hit him in the heart with a hammer. He collapsed heavily beside Finney. The heat from the bench crawled into him.
“Aw, shit, Nick, I didn’t know—I mean, you know, it wasn’t—”
Nick held up his hand. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already suspected. He’d seen them together often enough during their freshman year, huddled together in Donner’s. But he hadn’t been a part of their clique, one of $100 T-shirts and sleek new cars. Finney and Sue and all the rest of them had been as distant as coastal islands, smudges on the horizon. He’d known—but had not allowed himself to consider what might have gone on before he came along.
Sue occasionally said something about Finney—his passion for Dairy Queen Blizzards, his intense hatred of public radio—that belied more than a base familiarity. Doubts whispered at the back of his head; jealousy cackled just over his shoulder. He’d often caught himself on the verge of asking, stopping himself because he knew it was not something you would ask Sue Thompson. If she wanted him to know—if there had really been anything worth mentioning about Finney, Nick convinced himself—Sue would have told him, laughing it off as a mistake, an experiment between friends.
But she’d said nothing, leaving Nick to steep in his own suspicions.
“Hey, Nicky.” Finney again.
In that quiet instant, the image was born. He saw it as clearly as memory, Finney laboring arduously over Sue, her head thrown back, her lips working in a silent plea for more, more. Then the sharp, feral cry as Finney poured himself into her.
Finney touched him on the shoulder and Nick flinched.
“Hey, you all right?”
Nick looked at Finney, remembering that night at the Torkelsons, Finney reciting in Latin, that current of energy leaping between them, connecting them.
He choked the image, hoping to kill it.
“Nothing,” he said. “I mean, I know it was nothing. Sue told me about it and I know, I mean, it’s cool.”
Finney clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Because it was nothing. Can you imagine? Me and Sue?” Laughing, he turned his face to the sun.
Nick grinned weakly and, for just a second, considered asking—
—more Finney more—
—and knew that he could not. If he did, he would lose one of them. And Nick realized, sitting there in the heat of a late July afternoon, that he could not bear that. They completed him, the one as much as the other.
He struggled with the image, wrestling it into a trunk somewhere far in the back of his mind.
“We’re cool, Nicky?”
“Yeah, we’re cool.”
“So where are we, Nick?”
Nick looked up, startled, the vision of Finney’s heaving back as real as the dead man’s ghostly weight.
It took a second, but then he said, “In some deep shit—deeper than we realized.”
“Aren’t we though.” Finney nodded, as if Nick had given the answer he’d been waiting for. “You going to eat that?”
Nick looked down, surprised to find the apple still in his hand. He tossed it to Finney, who took a tremendous bite, every bit as complacent as Tucker had been edgy with panic. A phrase from out of the past floated into Nick’s mind, something Finney had said about Tucker that night after the party. He just needs someone to look after him. At the time, the sentiment had seemed harmless enough, but now, with Tucker visibly falling apart, it took on an altogether different—and more frightening—meaning. Maybe Finney was thinking along similar lines, for now, through a mouthful of apple, he said, �
�Why did you bring Sue into it?”
“Had to. No choice.” He’d be damned if he’d say more—though Finney’s question made him wonder. Why had he? He didn’t want to think of that, didn’t want to remember that sense that Sue was slipping away from him, didn’t want to believe he would implicate her in something like this just to hang on to her. Didn’t want to see that side of himself. There were many sides to himself he hadn’t known existed, it seemed.
But Finney only nodded again, like that was exactly what he expected.
“What about Tuck? He’s on the edge, man. If he—”
“Tuck’s okay.” Finney tossed the apple core into a nearby garbage can. “I’ll keep track of him.” He wiped his hands on a monogrammed handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “You watch Sue.” Wiping his mouth, he said, “What do you make of Evans?”
Nick pursed his lips, picturing the patrolman in his doorway. “I’m not sure. Someone sniffing around for a reward?”
“That’s sort of what I figured, too. But I was thinking—remember the car that passed us up there?”
Nick nodded, his mind filling with the image of that Cadillac, black as sin, and looming in the night like death.
“It came back,” Nick said.
“That’s right. And I can’t help wondering: was it Evans?”
“But why?”
“Playing his own angle. The guy had all that money. Maybe it was a payoff.”
“Think he’ll be back?”
“Fuck if I know.” Finney neatly folded the handkerchief and returned it to his back pocket. “Right now, he’s got nothing on us. Suspicions maybe, nothing more. We need to take care of the Acura, though. I went out to the garage yesterday afternoon and smashed the fender pretty good with a hammer, washed it with ammonia. Think a forensics lab could still pick up blood traces?”
“No idea—those CSI guys seem to be able to do anything, though.” Nick felt the coldness fluttering into his belly again. Finney’s calm litany set his mind awhirl. He’d known from the beginning that they were in deep waters, but the more Finney talked—always in that maddeningly tranquil voice—the deeper they seemed to get. Again, the image of the bum from the bus terminal popped into his head. You ain’t like them. And he wasn’t. Finney had the Senator, Tuck and Sue had families wallowing in money. If things got nasty, Nick knew he’d find himself alone. Again, he saw himself adrift in the swirling Gulf, his companions shrinking steadily in the distance.
