Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Vic was a fine driver. He had a sure hand on the wheel. He did not do what Harm’s mother did, which was to lurch forward and then come to a stomach-jiggling stop at the end of every block. The lurch-stop method favored by Sylvia Strayer had sometimes made Harm throw up, when he was younger. But Vic’s driving was smooth. He had a sense of the vehicle, and a sense of himself. The two elements—two-year-old machine and twelve-year-old boy—lined up neatly, a truly swell synchronicity.

  They kept to the back roads, theorizing that there would be less chance of somebody spotting them and reporting back to Frank Plumley. Everybody wanted to please Frank Plumley. And it worked. Vic drove them from Norbitt to Redville and then back around through Caneytown, and they did not see anybody they knew. Vic stayed completely away from major roads. They passed farms, and they shouted at cows; the freedom made them feel goofy and almost airborne with delight. They yelled greetings at a dumpy old man in suspenders in a bean field. Harm did not recall what they said, but the old man lifted his straw hat in tribute to the Ford. A vehicle as fine as this one was a rare spectacle along the back roads of Barr County, West Virginia.

  They were nearly home when it happened.

  Vic downshifted. He checked his side mirror as he rounded a curve, having just left the city limits of Caneytown; he wanted to watch the yellow clouds of road dust boiling up behind him. Now he shifted again, and accelerated. Was he going just a touch too fast? Did he, for just the briefest moment, lose control of the vehicle, and of himself, as the exhilaration got the better of him?

  An old lady and a little kid—girl or boy, you could not tell which, because the kid had short hair and baggy overalls—were crossing the dirt road. No one would ever know if they saw the truck or not; they did not hesitate at all, or even glance in the direction of the Ford. They just marched right out into that road, the old lady holding the kid’s hand and looking straight ahead, the kid looking up at the old lady and talking up a storm. In her other hand, the old lady held a large black purse. Harm remembered thinking—the thought came to him in the final second of what he would come to regard as his old life, his life before the accident—that it was the same kind of purse his Grandma Strayer carried. She kept tissues in there, and coupons, and peppermints. She always gave him a peppermint from that purse when she saw him, without him even having to ask for it.

  The sound was bad, brutal and bad—a deep, resonant thunk-thunk—but the feeling was even worse. The vibration traveled from the front of the truck right on through to the steering wheel, a violent shudder.

  Harm knew what the wheel felt like because, at the very last moment, he tried to grab it and turn it abruptly, so that they would not hit the old lady and the kid. But Vic had seen the people, too, the pair of them walking so confidently and so obliviously across that road, and he was a good driver, with that sure touch on the wheel, and he had a great deal of strength in his wrists. Had he been left alone, he might very well have been able to execute the swerve, just missing them. The old lady and the kid would have felt the heavy swish of air as the pickup skidded and fishtailed in a vicious half-circle turn around them, and they probably would have blinked and squinted from the dust flying up in their faces. The old lady, maybe, would have frowned and made a fist and hollered something at Vic. About watching where he was going. About letting people cross the road in peace, for heaven’s sake.

  But Harm was pulling at the wheel, too, pulling it in the other direction, fighting Vic. And Alvie, at the last second, was pushing at Harm, trying to get him to grab the wheel tighter, turn it more sharply. Harm jerked the wheel out of Vic’s hands and thus he ended up sending the front of the Ford smashing full-force into the little kid and the old lady, knocking them like bowling pins, bam bam.

  The kid flew up in the air. If it had been a dog or a possum or a fence post, it might have been amusing: a small object looping up over the hood of the pickup like a ball tossed in the air, then landing in the dirt, now a funny crumpled new shape. The old lady did not fly anywhere; she was slammed into a ditch at the side of the road. Her dress, Harm could not help but notice, was up around her neck. Her knickers—frilly, edged with lace, but slightly yellowed, because nothing could stay true white when it was washed by hand and hung out on a clothesline to dry—were there for all the world to see. She was not wearing a brassiere; Harm noticed that, too. Her flesh was flabby, the fat around her waist puffed out like biscuit dough. Her breasts hung down on her torso.

  All was still, except for the roaring in Harm’s head.

  The dust on the road was yellow-brown.

  The liquid mingling with that dust, a liquid that ran out of the old lady’s ears and the kid’s mouth, was a dull dark red.

  The Barr County deputy sheriff who came along about ten minutes later—the boys never knew how he had learned about the accident, and thought maybe it was a coincidence, maybe this was his regular daily route—was named Pete Diehl. Deputy Diehl. He asked the boys to step out of the Ford.

  Until the moment when the deputy arrived, they had stayed in the pickup. With the engine still running. They had not moved. They had struck the kid and the old lady and then they just sat there in stunned, flummoxed silence. All three of them. Maybe if they just sat there, it would be as if it had not really happened. The vehicle ended up at a crazy angle, half-in and half-out of the road, but no one else had come along. Until the deputy did. Deputy Diehl.

  Vic still held onto the wheel. Harm also had a hand on it. Alvie was leaning against Harm. Vic’s mouth hung open and there was drool shining on his chin, but Harm and Alvie never let on that they had seen it.

  It was clear that the two people—one in the ditch, one in the road—were dead.

  Where had they come from, anyway? An old lady and a kid? There were no houses around here. No stores. Not even so much as a shed. Where the hell were they on their way to?

  Deputy Diehl asked them again: Come on, fellas. Come on out.

  He had checked the bodies first, although the gesture was pointless, a formality. Then he opened the driver’s side door of the Ford and spoke to them. His voice was amiable, almost singsong: Let’s go, boys.

  An ambulance came and took away the bodies. The deputy found the old lady’s purse. Her name was Gertrude Eloise Driscoll. The kid was her granddaughter, Betty Driscoll. Betty was five years old.

  Somehow, Frank Plumley got there in his Packard. Deputy Diehl must have called the sheriff’s office on his radio, and someone in the sheriff’s office called Frank’s office. Harm never knew quite how it happened. All he knew was that by the time Frank arrived, they were lined up against the side of Deputy Diehl’s squad car, all in a row, like birds on a wire: Vic, then himself, and then Alvie.

  Three boys.

  “Deputy,” Frank said, touching the brim of his hat.

  “Mr. Plumley,” the deputy said. He nodded smartly.

  It was all arranged, then and there. Frank Plumley had been driving. That was what the report would say. Frank Plumley had been driving, and he had tried to avoid Gertrude Driscoll and her granddaughter, but damned if the two of them had not jumped right out in front of the Ford. Nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could have done.

  Maybe, Frank Plumley added, and these words went down in Deputy Diehl’s report, maybe Mrs. Driscoll was deaf and had not heard the Ford approaching, and the child did not have the wherewithal—Frank deliberately avoided words like “good sense” or “intelligence”—to look in both directions, being so young and all. It was a tragedy, no question. Two precious lives.

  Frank Plumley was a well-known and much-respected man in Norbitt, indeed in the whole of Barr County. The judge would require only a few minutes to decide that he was not at fault. Accidental death: That was the ruling.

  Harm never knew how the small details were explained away. The niggling facts. If Frank Plumley had been driving the Ford, then how did the Packard get to the scene of the accident? And what were the three boys doing there?

  It turned
out that the three boys had not been there, after all. Harm eventually read the report. Their names were not in it. Which meant they were not there. Vic Plumley’s future, plump as it was with promise—dazzling, even—would not be imperiled by something as trivial and irrelevant as an old lady and a kid crossing a dirt road on the outskirts of Caneytown, West Virginia.

  * * *

  It would be nice to say that in the aftermath of an event as momentous as causing a death—because of course they carried the truth in their hearts, even if it was never officially acknowledged—the three boys changed. Straightened up. Settled down. Recognized the fragility of life. Displayed the grace of gratitude. Worked harder in school. Were more respectful to their elders.

  It would be nice, but it would not be true. Over the next four years, they became even wilder than they had been before the accident. Vic, Harm, and Alvie were trouble, period. They shoplifted, they vandalized buildings, they got into nasty fights. Vic attacked a man in a bar with a pool cue; he ruptured the man’s spleen when he shoved it into his side like a Roman gladiator thrusting a spear. The man was strongly encouraged not to press charges, and he did not. Alvie was twice caught stealing cars, and both times, Frank Plumley squared things with the sheriff. The spring Vic turned fifteen, one of his girlfriends, Wendy Devlin, ended up pregnant—it might or might not have been his, but he was glad to claim it, because of the way it burnished his reputation—and he and Harm drove her to Baltimore, so that she could get it taken care of. Frank Plumley knew a doctor over there. The round trip took all night. On the way back, Wendy almost bled to death. Later, Frank Plumley helped them scrub the blood off the leather.

  It was as if the terrible shock of the deaths that spring day in 1938 had knocked something loose in the three boys—a wire that attached itself to another wire, and then that wire was supposed to be attached to a conscience—and now the untethered end was like a vestigial limb. They were vaguely aware of it, but they did not need it, and so they tried to ignore it.

  They still did a lot of the things they had done as boys: They fished together, and challenged each other to footraces up and down Main Street. They spent summer afternoons over at Crooked Creek, swinging high out over the cocoa-colored water in an old truck tire tied to an overhanging tree by a spindly bit of twine. At the right moment, one of them would yell, “NOW!” and the one clutching the tire—Vic or Harm or Alvie—would let go, legs bicycling wildly in the bright air, and crash down into the water, making a tremendous splash. They did a lot of bad things, irresponsible things, but they still did the playful, ordinary things, too, the things that had defined their friendship for as long as they could remember.

  In the late fall of 1941, the boys were fifteen years old. Vic was still the best-looking of the three of them, with his solid shoulders and his blue eyes and his big I don’t care grin, but Harm was not far behind him now; Harm had dark curly hair, olive-green eyes, and an athletic bounce to his step. Alvie, gray and skinny, still looked like a rat, only a taller one.

  On the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, the slanting, broken sidewalks of downtown Norbitt began to fill up with people. All kinds of people. There were layers and layers of them, all swirled on top of one another like a parfait dessert. That was the image Harm came up with. He still loved analogies.

  A special edition of The Barr County Herald was available on every corner. Kids had been recruited to sell it, and they yelled out the headline until they were too hoarse to yell out any longer. The papers were snapped up instantly. The kids could have sold double what they had. Triple, even. The news was so profoundly shocking that everyone wanted every piece of information they could get, every scrap, every rumor. Some women were crying. Some men looked angrier than they had ever looked before in their lives, and they locked their hands into fists and loosened them and tightened them into fists once again, over and over.

  “How dare they?” the men muttered, and then spat. “How dare they?”

  The Japanese, it seemed, had sucker-punched an American military base way over in Hawaii, a place that, until its name showed up in news accounts of the current crisis, was largely mythological to most citizens of Norbitt. There was feverish speculation as well that the Japs had submarines stroking toward the coast of California, vessels vacuum-packed with enemy soldiers, and that this pillaging swarm would hit the beach and then fan out across the country until it reached the streets of Norbitt. These very streets. “My God,” the men said.

  The three boys watched and listened.

  Chapter Ten

  It was late. Bell sat in the living room, cell in her palm. This was her favorite chair, and normally it gave her comfort, but the document she was reading right now—or trying to read, because she could only get so far before she had to stop—made any sort of comfort impossible. Minutes after they ended their call, Sam had e-mailed her a PDF of Carla’s arrest record.

  Bell had not turned on the lights. She didn’t need them. The cell gave off plenty of illumination—too much, as a matter of fact. It conveyed too well the glaring reality of what Carla had done, from the list of items she had destroyed in her mini-rampage at the mall to the responding officer’s recollection of the epithets she had hurled at him.

  What it could not tell her—what only Carla could tell her—was why.

  WHERE R U??

  That’s what Bell had texted to her daughter sixteen minutes ago.

  Carla’s reply:

  On my way. Lost track of time

  Then there was a frowny-face emoji.

  Bell’s thoughts kept splitting off from the document in her hand. She was a terrible mother, right? The worst ever. For nearly a week now she had not pressed Carla, had not demanded an explanation for her sudden arrival here. Because Bell didn’t want to be the heavy. The bad guy. The nosy, overbearing mom who waggled a finger in her child’s face. Because if she pushed, if she hectored and prodded, Carla might go away. She was an adult now. She could do that. She could leave.

  That’s what I would have done, Bell told herself. If someone had confronted her with something she had done, something inexplicable, she would have booked. Instantly. That was her modus operandi—just take off. When things became too real, too hard, too emotional, she withdrew. She fled.

  It was how she’d handled her relationship with Clay, after all. Until tonight. Wasn’t it?

  So Bell had let things slide. She had not questioned Carla closely about the reason she’d left D.C. The thought that kept rolling around Bell’s head was this: She will tell me when she’s ready. She’s a good kid. A levelheaded kid. A responsible kid.

  Except that she’s not a kid, Bell corrected herself. Not anymore. Carla was an adult, with adult problems and adult consequences to her behavior.

  And there was more. Bell could not let herself off the hook. It was too easy that way. She knew that her non-interference in Carla’s life was more than just a desire not to alienate her daughter. There was another reason that she had not gotten in Carla’s face and declared, “I want some answers—now.” Bell was busy with her own affairs—with Darlene’s accident, with the deaths at Thornapple Terrace, with the murder of two defenseless women. Her job was always in the picture. Always trying to own her complete focus.

  It was her job that had put Carla in danger in the first place.

  When Carla was seventeen, she was among the witnesses to the murder of three old men in a restaurant in Acker’s Gap. Carla thought she had recognized the shooter. She could not reveal that to Bell, however, because of where she knew him from: a party at which drugs had been present. He was a dealer, intent on drumming up new business. Carla should not have been there in the first place. Her mother was a prosecuting attorney, sworn to eradicate the drug trade in Raythune County. Carla was ashamed of having been at that party.

  And so she had tried to track down the killer herself. She had enlisted the help of her best friend, Lonnie Prince. And in their confrontation with the drug dealer, Lonnie was shot dead and Carla was kid
napped. Carla narrowly escaped with her life, after a gun battle in an abandoned building.

  It was the kind of searing emotional trauma from which Bell had tried so desperately to protect her child. Because she knew those wounds never washed out. She knew about shock and terror. She knew how it felt to stare into the face of an evil that seemed to drench the world in endless darkness. Bell’s own childhood—thanks to her father, Donnie Dolan—had been lived in daily proximity to that kind of evil, that degree of darkness. She had promised herself that Carla would never, never know it.

  I failed, Bell thought. I failed my child.

  Her sweet girl already knew the truth about the world: that while it had joy in it, and good people, and hope, it also was a place of sadness and suffering.

  Bell thought she might understand why Carla had done what she had done in that store. They had not talked about it, but Bell got it: Sometimes the only way to make the roaring chaos inside your head go away was to create a rhyming chaos on the outside. Match frenzy with frenzy, anarchy with anarchy.

  I used to do that, too, Bell thought.

  In her case, she did it with running. Endless, insane amounts of running. In high school, in college, she would go for long runs along fearsomely steep mountain roads until she was slammed with exhaustion, half-delirious with dehydration, her legs too weak and wobbly to stand. Until finally she could feel the faint stirrings of an inner peace, an eye-of-the-hurricane calm carved right out of the middle of the emotional maelstrom.

  Her little girl, her beautiful daughter, had wrecked a store in a mall for the same reason that Bell had run up and down mountains: to try to heal herself.

  She lowered the cell. She did not need to read any more of the police report.

  Sam would be arriving in a few hours to drive Carla back to Arlington. Bell wanted to come as well, but her ex-husband had said: Listen. Maybe it’s better to let Carla handle the problem on her own. Face the mess she’s created.