Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  Frank’s goal, his secret plan, had always been to go home. Home, northward—to ice and darkness, to wet sloppy springs and mild summers. He wanted to go home: his father’s birthplace, his own birthplace, not the place of his father’s death. He often sat there on his stepfather’s back porch and looked out to the woods, where Preston had what he called a root cellar, a place to keep things cool and safe. “That’s where we’d go if a big storm came,” Preston had said. At first, Frank found the thought terrifying, climbing down into what really was like a vault, a tomb with a heavy iron lid, like a cistern or a manhole with a rickety ladder, but then the spot became more and more appealing, like a clubhouse, a secret spot. And it really was incredibly cool down there at the height of summer—six feet down, room enough to have his back against the cool brick and stretch his legs. Preston saw he was claiming it as his camp, and he let him; in fact, Frank came home from school one day, and there was a brand-new ladder attached, and a little wooden chair and table and a flashlight down below. “No wonder you got so interested in tombs,” Lil had said, and laughed when he first described it to her.

  It did feel like another world down there—removed from everything. When he had read about the Civil War and the Underground Railroad, he pictured tunnels growing out of a space like where he sat, the damp smell of earth and the darkness. And in later years, when people really were building fallout shelters, Preston claimed to be ready; by then, Frank was in school miles northward, the jar of flattened pennies and marbles still down there where he left them.

  “We all want to leave something behind.” Frank used to begin his introductory class that way. “We all want to be remembered.” And then he asked that his students make a list of those belongings that defined them. A thousand years from now, what would it mean? A song, a sign, a secret message. Kilroy was here. Students were often too young to know the origin of Kilroy, even though they might have heard the saying, and he loved telling how some say the real Kilroy was from just south of Boston—Braintree—all roads leading back. Kilroy was here. A lot of people think that the little cartoon of Kilroy—peeping eyes—grew out of the omega symbol. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.

  There was a club at the high school he had attended, Alpha Omega: girls in their matching sweater sets and bobby socks and loafers, girls laughing and holding hands, clear-faced girls who thought this small town was the center of the universe. So much is coming back to him. Afternoons in a high school gym or walking the elm-shaded sidewalks to the movie theater, his youth and all that he failed to do in life calling his name.

  So foolish what sticks in the brain—so inconsequential, so meaningless, and yet sometimes there is something in the glint of the sun on those rails and the thought of youth that makes him almost believe he can go back. It was like a part of him had also died on that cold night in December, and now it is just a simple continuation of that process, a signing over of all the other parts: Here is my heart, and here is my brain.

  Frank was here. He had written that in charcoal there on the brick of Preston’s root cellar. Perhaps today that fearful-looking young woman will finally let him in the house, and then he will say he just wants to wander there in the yard and adjoining woods, and he will look for his place, and if by fate it is there, he will climb down into it, like a dog making its bed.

  Harvey

  Sometimes when Harvey is asked to sit by himself a few minutes at school or at camp, he thinks about what Super Monkey might do. First, Super Monkey would be able to wear any mustache he wants to wear at school. It is not fair for a kid not to be allowed to wear a mustache whenever he wants to if he needs to. Second, Super Monkey can get all the money and jewels he needs anytime at all. He can buy his mama a car and a castle and any other stuff she wants and he guards where the rabbits are living in the tree and he guards where all the little fish and skinks is buried and he tells that bad man, “Don’t kill the Dog House Girl,” and “Don’t kill or hurt Harvey’s mama just because she has to write a report on you. That is her job and she does it good and you are not good, bad man. You eat poo-poo platters and murder people.” And Super Monkey thinks the bad man should pick up trash for the rest of his life and he will be one nobody waves at.

  Harvey’s mama said, “Honey, don’t wave at those men. Those are convicts.” But to Harvey it was hard to tell, because none of ’em wear stripes like the Hamburglar. They look like regular people in blue jeans and shirts and hats, picking up trash. But his mama said, “Do you see those men standing at either end with guns? And if one of those men ran, then they would get shot, so it’s better not to smile and wave at all.”

  Super Monkey could do it, but he can do anything. He could go right now and find Harvey’s daddy and say, “Please come home. Please don’t leave.” Super Monkey would have saved those kids that got shot, too.

  “You can join the group now, Harvey,” Mr. Stone says, but Harvey tells him, “No, thank you.” He’s okay just sitting.

  “Really, son,” he says. “I want you to join the group.”

  “Can I wear this?” Harvey holds out the mustache he has kept safe in his pocket and finally the teacher tells him that yes, yes, yes, he can wear the mustache.

  Shelley

  Now that man struts in, looking as relaxed as a person can be in an orange jumpsuit with his life on the line. He even whispers something to his lawyer and laughs. Months before the trial began, she and Harvey had seen the doctor in Lowes Foods and overheard him talking to the clerk about a party he was having. He was wearing a loud floral shirt, long pink shorts, and shiny black loafers. He was going to have a luau, and he talked about leis and pupu platters, which made Harvey bend over double in the checkout line, his face red with laughter. When he laughed that hard, you could see the thin white scar where his lip had been unformed. This was before Harvey went to kindergarten and still laughed openly; his hands clutched the sack of gummy candies he had begged to buy, instead of covering his mouth.

  “Did I miss something?” The doctor looked at Harvey when he said this, and it made Harvey laugh even harder.

  She thought at the time what a hateful stare he’d given to Harvey, and then he leaned in close to her, so close she could smell his aftershave or soap, something out of her league to know, and he said, “You know there are surgeons who can do a much better job with that.” Harvey was still laughing, mouth wide, lip split, the thin white scar visible under his nose.

  She has seen that same stare every day for weeks and weeks. In the piece she didn’t mean to write, she described the doctor’s eyes as being like dark slits in a fleshy melon. A jack-o’-lantern, a pumpkin head of hatred, fermented rot.

  In the trial, he actually said he had never considered killing anyone. He added that he didn’t care enough about any of them to kill them—meaning, he clarified, there was no passion there. He asked, Why would he sacrifice his life, not to mention brilliant career, in the kind of town that needs every ounce of brilliance and expertise it can get?

  All she could think while taking notes was how humiliating it would be to have to go home and face the husband you cheated on, knowing that the asshole you cheated with didn’t even care enough to kill you! The argument in her mind made her want to laugh, and she realized she had missed a beat or two, a few words, because she was remembering a woman on the stand saying how he’d said terrible things about his wife. He’d talked as if his wife was abusive to him, this woman said. But that woman is not in the courtroom today; none of them are. Today’s show is just for the smart ones, the ones who did not go along with him, the ones who loved the young woman he killed, and the wife whose life he has temporarily ruined. And how sad for his children to have to always know their father was capable of something so horrible, that they share DNA with such a horror show. A person might spend the rest of his or her life waiting for it to spring out of them without warning, in the form of a knife or a gun or a push from a precarious high spot.

  One of the women who testifi
ed was someone Shelley had met several times, someone right there in their own neighborhood; she lived in that beautiful old house beside the cemetery and was the mother of a kid Jason knew, a sweet girl named Abby, who was Harvey’s favorite babysitter and who Shelley hopes will have the good sense to move far, far away, where all this mess won’t ruin her life. Sometimes the very best thing you can do is run, get away, shake the shit out of that snow globe you live in and never let it settle. Shelley herself had done that—of course she had—because she was like the canary in the mine, the thermometer in her childhood home. Why don’t you go in first, Shelley? What is the temperature, Shelley? She was always so afraid she might fly in and never get back out. She might fly in and die that way, her soul nothing but a little sacrifice so the others could claim that her sad loss was the root of all the other problems and failures. But she did not want to sacrifice herself. The smart canary would learn to aim a little higher each time until finally one day, she just flaps and flies up above it all; she gets the fuck out of there.

  It was hard to imagine how all the families affected by the orange-suit asshole wouldn’t be ruined. And yet you would have to have no heart at all to see someone sit there and hear themselves and their sex lives critiqued and judged in front of a courtroom by a man who says he never gave a damn and not be moved, right? He even laughed outright at their stupidity to think he’d wanted anything more than to use them like disposable wipes. He used that word, disposable. Disposable company.

  The woman who lives near Shelley had dressed like a grandma at church on her court day, a way that Shelley had never seen her look before. Usually, she was in short, tight dresses made for someone her daughter’s age, and high heels like they all wear on the Real Housewives shows, the kind of woman who might loop her thumbs in the front pockets of that little dress like she’s the cheese. The cheese, the cheese. The cheese stands alone. That woman had a daughter she should have been thinking about; children need to feel like someone is there. If Shelley’s mother had ever been there to say nice things—the kinds of things Shelley says to Jason and Harvey—Shelley’s life might have been different. She might have stood a little taller, taken more chances. Flown away sooner.

  The man is getting restless, watching the clock, whispering again to his lawyer. It’s like he’s pissed off he’s having to wait, like maybe he would have preferred to keep lounging in his cell instead. There is a low murmur of voices through the courtroom, and the tension is high. It feels a little like when Shelley went to see Madonna in concert that time.

  Why didn’t he just leave his wife and then date others? Then he could just break up, not murder them. Brent would call her naïve; he once told her that people like games. People like secrets. He paused then and asked, “Do you have secrets, Shelley?”

  But instead of answering that, she did a whole routine she had thought up about a commercial on television—a drug for men, but what they show is a woman half his age lounging on the bed in something skimpy. We are led to believe the man has testosterone to spare but, uh-oh, he does sometimes need a little help from his friends at the pharmaceutical company, while the camera stays focused on the young woman as she slinks around the room in the same way the cheese does. Don’t deny your passion—that’s the focus, passion, as she stretches out on the bed like a cat and waits for the man in the bathroom, who must be waiting for things to happen. But then if you listen very carefully, you will hear the fast, low-volume murmuring of truth: “If you have shortness of breath or severe abdominal cramping or diarrhea, if you experience sudden blindness and loss of memory, if you have an erection that is painful and lasts over seven hours and you find it impossible to urinate, if you are vomiting and having life-threatening seizures, you may want to see your doctor.” Read the fine print!

  Once, when Brent found where Jason had written SHIT on the outside of the garage door, he made a joke over dinner, saying, “Well, the writing is on the wall.” They all laughed, but when he asked a second time who did it and Jason still didn’t respond, Brent got angry and made him get out there with Clorox and wash that door that had not been washed in a hundred years, but Jason had used a Sharpie, and when they left, it was still there—SHIT—faded but there. “Maybe your old man wouldn’t give a shit about lying, but I do,” Brent said, but Shelley told Jason how his father was one of the most truthful people she had ever known. “He was a hero,” she said. “He was handsome and smart and kind and considerate, and he was a hero both in the marines and in life.”

  She didn’t tell how she met Jason’s father: at the end of a party with at least a hundred people, few of whom she even knew; by the end of the night, most were slumped around on the furniture or delivering nonsensical monologues, or so it seemed to her, and then there was this quiet boy on the couch, staring at an album cover—Fleetwood Mac—and without thinking, she went and sat beside him and said how it bothered her that they sang, “Thunder only happens when it’s raining,” because that isn’t true. In fact, she once heard it thunder during a snowstorm, and many times she has heard it thunder without a single drop of rain. “A damn single drop,” she said, and then repeated it when he laughed and offered her a hit off of his joint and then a sip of his drink. And she drank the whole thing out of sheer nervousness. It was raining, and she thought of being in a pup tent with her brother and how much fun they had once out in the yard and away from where their parents could hear their laughter. Their father had to get up early in the morning and would sometimes fly into a rage if he heard a floorboard creak or a commode flush or, God forbid, someone laughing. But there in the pup tent in the driving rain, they could relax and laugh and tell stories. Her brother was nice to her almost all of the time, like Jason with Harvey. These days, if she told how much she loved her brother, there would be some sicko trying to make something ugly of it, but that would be so wrong. He was like a parent to her; he was her best friend. He was all she had, her brother. His thick brown hair was wavy, and he pulled it back in a ponytail, which their dad hated.

  Her brother told her to never touch the canvas of the tent when it was raining, because it would make it leak in that spot, something she still thinks about. She thought of all those times her brother got beaten; she knew lots of people who got whipped, and they used words like spanked or switched. Her parents always said that shit that tons of parents said about spare the rod and spoil the child, but her brother got it worse than anyone she had ever seen, their father doubling his belt over, letting the end with the buckle bite her brother’s skin. When he came out of the room after the awful sounds, his face would be red but dry, not a tear shed, and she wanted to touch him but she didn’t, because it seemed like touching that canvas tent during the rain. It seemed one touch might bring him crashing down, which it eventually did.

  But that night with Jason’s father, sitting there stoned, listening to Fleetwood Mac, her brother was already long gone, even though Shelley pretended he was still where she knew to find him, living with several other kids at the edge of town and driving pizza delivery. He was stoned a lot but was so much happier than he had ever been, and she was wishing for him the ease she’d felt in that tent, tucked in and far away from the rest of the world. Jason’s father also had thick brown hair, and she asked was it weird he looked a little like her brother. He said he didn’t know, and she gave a long explanation about how she didn’t mean anything like that, like maybe all she meant is that her brother was someone she felt like she could trust and depend on.

  “You can trust me,” he said. “That’s true.” And he reached over, took her hand, and pulled her close, and they sat there like that until the needle was at the end of the album, a long, scratchy digging-in sound, until he got up and lifted it. Then he asked what her name was, and she told the truth.

  There was a photo of a girl on Jason’s father’s dresser—a clean-faced girl wearing pearls. Jason’s father’s skin was dark, his origin hard to determine, with his black eyes and dark hair, and he smelled clean, like that so
ap Irish Spring or some kind of spearmint, which surprised her there in that place so saturated in alcohol and smoke and mildew. He bumped her with his elbow when removing his shirt and said, “Excuse me. I’m so sorry,” and for that reason alone, she really did think that she could trust him. She felt the girl in the pearls was watching them, and wondered if she was somewhere wondering where he was, or if she was just some dream of a girl he was holding on to. Oddly, that was what she thought of when she missed her period, that the girl had watched and somehow knew Shelley was a failure in life, that she just longed to fit in somewhere, homesick for something she had never had.

  “All rise.” And then there she is, here comes the judge, stern and solid in a new pair of stylish heels Shelley has never noticed her wearing before, perhaps bought just for this occasion, but she is not about to make a note of that; instead, she rises and she watches the jurors file in, most looking straight ahead, as if to avoid having to see the hateful jack-o’-lantern sitting there. It’s true that very few people look good in orange, which may be a reason to have chosen it in the penal system in the first place—that and, of course, it’s easy to spot if someone makes a break. But this one isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Shelley, and now she gets on the right channel, her fingers in anticipation of flying all over that keyboard, because that young woman he murdered could just as easily have been Shelley. So many times, that could have been Shelley. She’s just that predictable.

  Lil

  New Year’s Day 2016

  Southern Pines

  (Mild and sunny/we wish it would snow!)

  Fun things to remember:

  Jeff, you won in the punt, pass, and kick contest and got your picture in the paper (here it is). You were mad they didn’t get an action shot. For weeks after, you did things like eat raw eggs and lift heavy bricks so you would be ready for the NFL, but first you had to go to sixth grade.