Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Alvie might know. Alvie was sneaky. He watched. He figured things out. He was working in his dad’s church now, Crooked Creek Baptist, the same church that had kicked out his father all those years ago. Alvie planned to be a preacher, too, which surprised Harm no end. A preacher? Alvie? Well, okay. To each his own, right?

  The important thing was that they had kept the secret of what happened on that dusty road outside of Caneytown. They never talked about it, never even said the word “Caneytown” out loud—never, not even once. But when one of them wavered, and got together with the other two at this very diner, say, or at Sal’s, a bar three blocks away, and started murmuring words such as “honor” and “morality,” the other two knew what to do. They brought out words such as “family” and “responsibility.” And “jail.” Now, there was a word for you, there was a real conversation stopper. They talked about all they had to lose if …

  They did not finish the sentence. They did not need to.

  So they had looked out for each other after the war, just as they had done before and during the war. Just as they had been doing all of their lives. No matter what happened to any of the three of them, no matter what choices they made or what roads they walked, they would never tell. They had burn marks on their souls, identical ones, and those marks bound the three boys together forever.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you. You’re a fucking liar, do you know that?” Vivian was leaning over the table, her voice a strange singsong hiss, the tenor of it not matching up to the viciousness of her words. “You think you can just take off and go like that? Is that what you think? Just walk away like I’m some piece of garbage that you fucked and you fucked and then you—”

  The waitress was back. She took one look at Vivian’s face, and at the way she was leaning over the table, and she turned around and left. She had not even taken her order pad out of her apron pocket.

  “You fucker,” Vivian said, resuming her chant. “You fucking fucker.”

  Women did not talk this way in Norbitt. Harm was pretty sure they didn’t talk this way anywhere. She was coarse and bold, and she’d always been so, only he was not enchanted by it anymore. Harm was glad there was almost nobody else in the diner at this hour.

  She settled herself down. “I want to know why,” she said, her tone businesslike. “That’s all I want from you at this point, Harm. Just the why. Seriously.”

  He looked down into his coffee cup. He had kept a grip on it throughout her verbal assault. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because it’s a fucking secret? Or because you don’t know?”

  “Because you’ll make fun of me.”

  That surprised her. She had had a speech all ready, a cutting retort for the answer she was sure he’d give. She was sure he was going to say that that bitchy fiancée of his had found out about them and was insisting he break it off, or that he was afraid Vic or his dad would find out and he could not bear their rage and disappointment. She had expected, that is, some boring, predictable excuse, an excuse she could counter with scorn.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  He was still staring down into his coffee cup.

  “I mean,” he said, “that I want to be different.”

  “Different.” She’d intended to echo his word disdainfully, with cynical blackness in her tone; instead it came out, against her will, sounding curious.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I want to be a different kind of man.”

  “Little late for that, don’t you think? You are what you are. And here’s a little clue, honey—the war’s over. Long over. If it was going to change you, lover boy, that would’ve already happened. And it didn’t. Trust me—I know. I know what you like to do to me—and it ain’t reading me Bible verses, you know? So, sorry—no chance for you to be that different man you’re talking about. Didn’t happen. You can’t do it.”

  “I can try.”

  That put her over the edge. “Well, aren’t we the noble fucking saint.” She laughed a thin, brittle, low-pitched laugh. The disdain never drifted very far from her. It was always within arm’s reach. “Aren’t we just so all-fired fucking good.”

  He did not answer.

  She needed a cigarette, and started to dig in her purse for one. Then she stopped. She’d had enough. She did not need to take this from him. She was a good-looking woman—any man would tell you so, and would pump his eyebrows up and down appreciatively while he was saying it. She could have her pick.

  “Just tell me this,” she said. She was gathering her things. She might never speak to him again, and so she had to get the information quickly. “Why now?”

  Her meaning was clear: You have been back for five years now. What in the world had prompted this sudden see-you-later—when she knew for absolute certain that he was still attracted to her, when the sex was still as good as ever?

  If he could have talked to her, really talked, he would have told her the truth. But the truth would have made no sense to her, because it was not a matter of words, but of an image, a memory, one that had moved forward to lodge front and center in his brain, like a piece of shrapnel:

  A dusty road.

  * * *

  Harm married Dixie Chambers. Vic was his best man, and Alvie was there, too. When Harm first told Alvie that Vic would be his best man, Alvie had nodded, grinned, and smacked Harm’s back. Don’t care about that, buddy, he said. You know me well enough to know that. But of course he did care, he cared a great deal, and so his response had a pathetic ring to it. By now Alvie was even skinnier, his face long and narrow and flat, his eyes little slits that made him look nervous and paranoid by default.

  Alvie had had some trouble since the war ended. The year before Harm married Dixie, he was accused of rape by Lola Pope, a young woman who worked as a volunteer at Crooked Creek Baptist Church. Alvie had continued to go there, too, despite his father’s disgrace; neither the Rev. Leonard Sherrill nor Alvie’s mother ever went back. The church and its people were like poison for them now. But Alvie stayed.

  Lola claimed that, after they had been working late one night on the programs for the revival, Alvie followed her out the door. He put a hand on her bottom. And he said something to her that—well, it shamed her, she said, even though she had done nothing to encourage him, nothing whatsoever. Next thing Lola knew, Alvie was yanking her back inside the dark sanctuary, kicking the door shut behind them. He turned her around and started kissing her. They were slimy-wet, open-mouthed kisses that made her sick to her stomach.

  And this all happened in the Lord’s house, she added at this point in her statement to the deputy. In the Lord’s own house! Alvie had jammed his hands up under her skirt, she said, and he fingered the hem of her panties. Then he raped her.

  The good news was that Abe Pope, Lola’s father, was a veteran. He had been in the Air Force, in the Pacific Theater. He knew Alvie from the VFW Hall. And frankly, as Abe Pope would say once the beers starting hitting him, that girl of his was not as all-fired innocent as she pretended to be; he’d seen her go out of the house in some outfits that, if he hadn’t been her father—wellsir, you could finish the sentence yourself. He had warned her, he had told her about going out looking like a two-dollar tramp. That skirt, for instance, the one Alvie had supposedly put his hand up under? That one? It was so short that Abe wondered why she didn’t catch her death of cold when she stepped outside. My God. Didn’t the girl know anything about men? Anything? Alvie was a vet. He’d saved the world. For God’s sake, wasn’t he entitled to a little something? So Abe Pope had a talk with Lola. Vets stick together, he told her. It’s a sacred bond. You live under my roof, girl, you eat my food, you better understand that.

  And so somehow it turned out that she had been mistaken. Alvie had indeed been alone with her in the sanctuary that night, but no, he did not kiss her or flip up her skirt, and no, she said, he did not rape her. The charges were dropped. It was all a big mistake.

  Mistakes happen, don’t they? Of course they do.

&n
bsp; Two years after Harm married Dixie Chambers, Alvie, too, got married. The woman’s name was Bonnie Oliver. The same year, Vic decided to marry his longtime sweetheart, Eva North.

  After that they lived in overlapping circles, the three boys and their families. Vic and Eva bought a house on Briarly, one of the nicer streets in Norbitt. Vic was a salesman, and a good one, and his commissions were the kind that made you blink and read the sum again, just to make sure you weren’t dreaming. Alvie and Bonnie moved into Alvie’s parents’ house in the old neighborhood; as Bonnie had confided to her friends at the time, it would not be too long until her father-in-law and mother-in-law died and then they would have the place to themselves, free and clear. But there was a small hitch: Rev. Sherrill did not die. Alvie’s mother was thoughtful enough to fulfill Bonnie’s hopeful prophecy, dying in 1969, the same year Alvie’s and Bonnie’s son, Lenny, was born, but not the reverend. The Reverend stuck around. Bonnie much preferred Alvie’s mother. Yet it was Rev. Sherrill who plugged along, a shriveled streak of gloom and resentment, chewing over past slights until his gums were ground down to stumps.

  Harm, too, had some misfortune. Dixie died in 1960, of breast cancer. They had barely had a chance to get to know one another, which made it hard for Harm to mourn her properly—not because he did not love her, but because he did not really know her, and mourning is about specifics. You mourn the sound of a laugh or the memory of how somebody eats a piece of corn on the cob. You don’t mourn an abstract thing called “loss.” Loss only matters when it is attached to particulars. You can’t mourn a concept.

  Harm remarried in 1965. Sylvia Branigan was fifteen years younger than he was, and a good choice. She was practical and efficient, a dynamo on housecleaning day, a reliable sounding board guaranteed to espouse the status quo. Four years later, Darlene was born. Harm asked Vic and Eva to be her godparents. And then ten years after that, Sylvia, too, died, of kidney disease this time, and just like that Harm was a single father.

  Shortly after Dixie’s death, but before he married Sylvia, Harm thought about going to the authorities and telling them what had really happened on that dusty road outside Caneytown in 1938. He should have done it long ago, if he was going to do it at all, but he was too afraid. He would not implicate his friends; he would not even mention their names. He would say only that it was him, not Frank Plumley, who had run down the old lady and the little girl.

  But he did not do it. He never called anyone or confessed to anything. And so it was that Harm Strayer henceforth carried a small indigestible pellet of guilt in his gut: Maybe his action—really, his lack of action—was why Dixie had gotten cancer so young. Her suffering toward the end had been terrible to watch. Maybe she had been forced to atone for his sin. It was an awful thought, the kind of thought that turned him inside out with anguish.

  A few years later, there was one more moment when he thought about setting the record straight. He imagined walking into the Muth County Courthouse and holding out his wrists to the first person in uniform he came across and telling the whole story. But by then he had remarried, with a child on the way. He had responsibilities. It was inconceivable that he would leave his wife and his child to fend for themselves, so that he could indulge in the luxury of confession. That was how it felt to him at this point: like a luxury, a way to pamper himself. He needed to work. He needed to support his family. That was the priority now.

  He never discussed it with Vic and Alvie, but he assumed they felt the same general way by this point. Years had passed. People had forgotten. Frank Plumley was dead—he had been obliterated in a car accident, hitting a bridge abutment at a speed estimated to be 90 mph—and so he could not reap any blame for having lied to save his son and his son’s pals. Vivian Plumley was also killed in Frank’s car on the night of the crash. Both of them were so drunk that, according to witnesses at the bar they had just left, they had slid and slithered all over the car in the parking lot, laughing and snorting, unable to figure out where the doors were. And then, unfortunately, they found the doors, and they got in and drove away at a high rate of speed.

  So the three boys moved on with their lives, never having spoken of Caneytown again since that day on the Arky in 1944. They drank beer together, and went to some of the same social events, and their wives were friends; they constituted a sort of volatile Venn diagram, the trio of circles merging and separating, making different configurations along the way.

  Darlene was very smart. That was evident early. She studied hard and she loved school. She had short dark hair and, when she was concentrating, she had her father’s features, the stubborn jaw, the hooded eyes, and the eyebrows that looked like a harsh V, like a black stick somebody had tried to break in the middle but had not quite finished the job. She was a star in school. The teachers predicted great things for her: medical school or law school or an MBA. She would put Norbitt on the map. No question about it.

  Lenny Sherrill, however, was not a star. Alvie and Bonnie were embarrassed by him. His grades were terrible; if a teacher called on him in class, he blushed and mumbled. He was as skinny as a soda straw. His acne was a nightmare he was forced to share with the world, a rippling thistle-patch of pustules and scarlet fury. He was shy, and so he did what shy, tall people tend to do: He hunched. He was always looking down.

  His report card and his complexion were not the only problems. By the time he entered Muth County Consolidated High School, Lenny was in trouble all the time. He had keyed a line of cars parked on Main Street. He had chucked rocks through the window of the school gymnasium. He was never accused of those things—there was no way to prove it—but everybody knew it was Lenny.

  Alvie Sherrill had followed through on his stated intention to become a minster. Alvie was now in charge of Crooked Creek Baptist Church. When the news of his appointment got around Norbitt, a lot of people assumed it was a sort of tribute to his dad. Ha, Alvie thought, when he was told of that speculation. The truth was, Alvie hated his father. He did not want to honor him; he wanted to show him up. Last longer in the pulpit than the old man had. Be beloved by his congregation and by the town, in a way the original Rev. Sherrill had never been.

  Alvie’s old man had ended his days in a nursing home, a breathing mummy who sat in a chair all day long. He still had his mind and most of his memories, which, in his case, was not a blessing: His memories were of betrayal and dissatisfaction, of the ruin of the perfect beauty of a life.

  1986

  In the alley behind the diner was a small detached garage that nobody had used in a long time. It was a hideout for Lenny Sherrill and Darlene Strayer. They would drive here after school in Lenny’s car on those days when they needed to be someplace where no one was telling them what to do, when the last thing in the world they wanted was to be looked at or talked to.

  The garage was filled with mice shit and busted furniture and random car parts and spilled motor oil and open paint cans with a half-inch of hardened paint in the bottom, but there was a roof, and the padlock on the door was broken. So it would do. It was a place to come and smoke cigarettes and drink whatever alcohol one or the other of them had been able to procure, and to talk about the indignities of high school.

  Their dads had been friends forever. Since long before the two of them were even born. Their fathers’ relationship was a bond between them, just like the bond they had forged over their love of Elton John. Lenny knew all the words to “Tiny Dancer.” Once, sitting in that garage, he had tried to give Darlene a nickname—Blue Jean Baby. She looked at him and said, “Call me that again and I’ll knock your teeth out, buster.” He laughed, like she was kidding, but he knew she really wasn’t.

  Lenny was a loser. Even this early, his loser status made a funky little force field around him. There was a smell, too. The indescribable odor of all the failures-to-be. Darlene, though, was clearly not a loser. Her friends sometimes asked her why she hung out with Lenny Sherrill. “I don’t hang out with him,” she said. “We just talk sometime
s.” Her friends still were mystified. Lori Smallwood asked her if she’d let him kiss her. Darlene laughed. Kiss her? Lenny Sherrill? The idea was so totally ridiculous. That wasn’t it. That’s not what drew them together. It was the fact that she could talk to him. About anything.

  Well, almost anything. Today, she had lost her nerve.

  She could not tell him. Could not say the words out loud. Not now, not here in their special spot. They had arrived ten minutes ago. It had rained all day but stopped abruptly at three, as if the rain had a precise schedule to keep.

  “Come on,” Lenny said. “Something’s bugging you. What is it? Can’t be that bad.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  He shrugged. “I’m here,” he said, “if you want to talk.”

  “It’s kind of hard to talk about.”

  He shrugged again. “A lot of stuff is hard to talk about.” He shifted his feet. “Talk or don’t talk. Up to you.”

  “Don’t get mad, Len.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “The thing is, if I told anybody, I’d tell you, okay? It’s like—like I know you won’t judge me. And you never would, no matter what.” She made certain he was looking at her, so that he could see how earnest she was. Her words came fast: “Things are going to happen to us, once we graduate. I know that. I’m going away to college. It’s all set. And I’m really excited about it. But listen, Len—I’m coming back. I can help the people in this town. People like my dad and your dad. I can stand up for them. I know it. But I need to get a degree. Some power. Or I can’t do anything. Once I do that—I’ll be back. I want you to understand that. We’re friends, okay? That’s not going to change. So no matter how bad things get around here, just hang on, because I’ll be back. We’ll figure it all out, okay?”