Son of Destruction

34




Dan


‘Why am I here?’

Poor lady, she looks tired now that they are in the light, uncertain and wounded by Dan’s tone, does she have any idea how late it is? Did she expect him to thank her for yanking him out of a stone sleep to chase a dead fire? After which she scammed him into this ride home, getting into his car on the strength of information that she shows no sign of delivering; you bet he’s pissed.

She says lamely, ‘I thought you were into fires.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Everybody knows.’

His eyebrows shoot up.

‘After all, you told Jessie. You’re not in Los Angeles with a billion strangers, this is Fort Jude.’ She’s maneuvered him into a chair in the French Provincial living room – one of those orderly, hushed places where no people come. Cold, like a decorator’s model room. ‘Davis won’t be back tonight.’

‘Ma’am . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘I have stuff to do.’

‘We won’t bother Steffy, she’s over at Jen Pritchard’s.’

Oh, lady. Don’t smile at me like that. ‘It’s late.’

‘It isn’t late, it’s early.’ Mrs Um, Nenna will say anything to keep him, lilting, ‘So. Talk about your suspicious fires. Want to hear what they’re saying about Boyd Till?’

‘I’d rather hear about my mother – whatever you know.’

‘They’re saying some bike buddy of Boyd’s set it, you know Boyd goes around in Carole’s evening dresses when she isn’t . . . Oh, please don’t look at me like that!’

‘Look, you said . . .’

‘I know what I said. I had to tell you something.’

And don’t scrunch up your face like bubble wrap, it’s disfiguring. And would you stop sighing? ‘If you don’t have anything . . .’

She blurts, ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come!’ Everything is sliding around now. Her face, her stated reason for this encounter.

‘. . . I’ll just go.’

‘I couldn’t bear to get back in that car with Davis. Not with everybody knowing. Not after I kicked him out for good.’

‘Right.’

He can leave, but he can’t stop her from following him to the door with that sweet, frenzied smile. ‘This is a really hard time for me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. If you want the whole truth, I just wanted to show Davis.’

‘Show him what?’

‘That I have friends!’ She grabs his arm. ‘Was that so terrible of me?’

Pressed, Dan bares his teeth. As a smile, it sucks, but at five a.m. it’s the best he can do – a rictus to get out the door on.

But she goes all life-or-death on him. ‘Wait! Ugh.’ Nenna groans. Something inside her is struggling to the surface. ‘Agh. This is hard. I . . .’

Shit. He has to stay until she coughs it up.

Finally she blurts, ‘I had to show them all I’m still attractive. Is that so terrible?’

‘You don’t have anything on Lucy, do you.’ Say no, so this night can end.

‘No.’

‘OK then.’

‘I mean. No, I do!’

Now it’s his turn to groan. There is no way of seeing into urgent, worn-out Nenna, no telling what she has stored up for him. To find out, Dan has to follow her back into that Louis-Whatever parlor, sit down and wait.

‘Coffee?’

‘No.’ He sits, but does not speak: an interviewing tactic he learned on the job. Let silence do its work.

‘I should have told you yesterday,’ she says, ‘but it’s hard. We never talked about it at the time and we didn’t talk about it afterward and we don’t talk about it now because you don’t in Fort Jude, especially since nobody’s sure what went down and it would ruin one of us. Am I making any sense?’

Looking into his hands, he waits.

‘See, certain things are best forgotten. Everybody has something to live down and we respect that, aren’t we all here to help each other through?’

They sit until the period clock on the marble mantel strikes again.

‘When you get mixed up in something shameful in Fort Jude you’ll shoot yourself dead before you let on, because your nearest and dearest will badger you until the story comes out – and when it does, you are implicated. Tarred with the same brush, you just are. We think your mother was . . .’ She blushes. ‘Well . . . A thing like that can toxify your life. You don’t talk about it with your best friend, you don’t even whisper it to your lover, you wouldn’t dare because we are all connected. Tell one single human being and they all know. You have to protect yourself!’

Oh f*ck, he thinks. Talking in circles.

‘What if people found out that was you, laid out drooling by the bonfire when it happened, squealing drunk with a bunch of boys so out of control that there was no telling what they’d do? What if people knew you were so loaded that you don’t even remember what you stooped to or with who, what would everybody think of you then?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘What if they started asking why didn’t you stop them?’ All her breath comes out in a sob. ‘Understand, when these things happen, they always blame the girl.’

‘What things?’

‘Like it’s all your fault,’ she says bitterly, ‘for being jealous of her and so wasted that you didn’t lift a hand. You didn’t make it happen but you let it happen. Do you know what that’s like?’

He needs his digital recorder. The tangle of words is unraveling too fast, with loose ends everywhere.

‘I mean, look at poor Jessie. It took her years to live down all the things she did with all those boys, because everybody knew. She had to make all those donations, drive all those miles for Meals on Wheels to . . . What do I want to say here? Atone for whatever she did with those boys. And she enjoyed it!’ Frowning, she corrects. ‘Or what we think she did.’

A bad wind blows in out of nowhere. ‘At least I’m not the only one.’

‘The only one what?’ Shut up, Carteret. Just let her do this.

‘The only one they blame for letting Lucy go off with them,’ she says impatiently.

‘Off with who?’

‘If our folks knew their girls were laid out on the sand with their knees up just like Jessie Vukovich . . . Oh, that sounds terrible, but this is Fort Jude.’ Another long, time-sucking sigh. ‘Around here we drag our pasts around like Marley’s ghost, because whatever you do, if even one person finds out, everybody knows it. You’d have to move to Alaska to escape it! In Fort Jude people forgive, God knows we all do it every single day, but nobody ever, ever forgets,’ she says.

She says, ‘And if you’re a slut, that’s what everybody thinks of you.’

‘You’re saying my mother was a slut?’

‘Hardly.’ Something ugly breaks the surface. ‘She thought she was too good for us!’

The thing about period clocks is the pendulum. Every f*cking tick.

Nervously, she zips and unzips the hoodie she threw on to go out tonight. Color keyed to the silk tank top, what was she thinking? Was she dressing for him? ‘Oh this is embarrassing. Girls like us, no matter what we did back then or where we did it or who we did it with, the day we get married we’re all virgins again.’ She rocks with anger. ‘Because it’s expected! If nobody finds out, it just – un-happens. It has to. Am I making any sense?’

‘Not really.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure up north things are a lot freer, but this is a small town locked up inside a big city and down here everybody minds everybody else’s business – that is, everybody that matters.’ She fixes him with her eyes. ‘It’s how we keep each other safe.’

He lies politely; anything to keep her going. ‘I see.’

‘We keep quiet.’ She spreads her fingers in apology. ‘It’s what we do, and I’m sorry. If the truth came out, it would ruin more lives than just Lucy Carteret’s. So I hope you understand, and I’m sorry.’

He doesn’t. He wants to pick this woman up by her hoodie and batter her with questions but he has to wait until her head comes back from wherever it’s wandered off to. It takes longer than it should.

‘OK,’ she says finally. ‘So what I wanted to tell you was, it got way too late that night; there were at hundreds of us there, everybody that mattered and all their friends, all the team captains, cheerleaders, prom queens and the whole May Court except, of course, for Lucy because she was beautiful but she was never one of us, which is why . . .’

He leans forward to catch what comes next.

Instead she takes him on a detour. ‘It’s like Lucy was above us all even in first grade, birthday parties in the club ballroom and we had to dress up for old Lorna’s little princess, unless . . .’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless she was her prisoner! Then Lucy’s dad died up in Charleston and she came into some money. All those years trapped in the tower. She bought a convertible! Came down on the beach at the tag end of houseparties, amazing body and her hair was perfect. It just was too much. We hated her. I’m sorry, that’s the way it was, like, if it had happened to another girl, we might have—’

‘What?’

‘Warned her off!’ Is she drunk or just used up? The girlish way Nenna rearranges her breasts inside the tight tank top makes clear that she’d have sex with him to keep from having to explain. ‘I must look awful.’

‘You look fine.’

‘I don’t, but thanks.’ Oh, lady, don’t sigh! ‘Sometimes I wonder how it would have come down if we’d been friends. But she was not like us!’

‘You said that.’

‘God knows what her problem was.’

Carefully, he leads her back into the interview, asking little, giving nothing – no hint of an agenda, framing a question from what he knows. ‘Shy?’

‘Like, we were never close. I don’t know if she was shy or just too good for us. She just didn’t do like we do. She lived in her own little world, and maybe if she’d stayed there, she wouldn’t have . . . And the saddest thing?’ Her face is all messed up.

‘Ma’am?’

She wails, ‘Not Ma’am!’

In the silence, he counts heartbeats.

‘Bobby Chaplin was in love with her. He begged her to come out in his car so maybe it was his fault, what happened. She came sailing down at the tail end of a long week fresh and shiny as the sun goddess, when the rest of us were wrecked. Did you know that when you’re sleep-deprived, it’s like being drunk?’

Just when he thinks she’s getting to the point, Nenna lapses. He nudges. ‘You were saying . . .’

‘I was saying Lucy came down on the beach because Bobby begged, but she didn’t come with him. Maybe she was a little bit in love with Bobby too, but I doubt it or she wouldn’t have come so late. He gave up on her and got blind drunk plus whatever else Chape and them were taking. Listen, there’s something you should know.’ It takes her some time to formulate what she has to tell him and when she does, it’s nothing he expected.

‘You know, when you hang out with people all your life, you learn some necessary things. What to look out for. How to handle yourself. But Lucy was like Edie Sedgewick at her first party.’

‘Who?’

‘Crazy-wild. Too wild.’ She leans in, desperate to explain. ‘We sure as hell never would have . . . She shouldn’t have . . . Well, she just shouldn’t!’

This is harder than he thought. He’s tried all his life to get inside that head but when he thinks of Lucy, even at eighteen, it’s as going along with that brave chin up and her elbows clamped to her sides, resolutely on her own. In all the time he knew her, the only stupid thing she ever did was marrying Burt. ‘Shouldn’t what?’

‘Oh.’ She hesitates. ‘A lot of things.’

‘Like . . .’

‘White bikini bottom and nothing under the white gauze shirt, no matter how gorgeous, that’s one. Two, the way she drank and what she was smoking, and three, going off with those boys. You don’t do that, not the way they were.’

‘Which boys?’

‘I guess you had to be there. It was the last night of life as we knew it – you know, dance, drink and get loaded, for tomorrow you die. Well, not really, but Sunday was graduation and the end of everything that mattered. We had a humongous bonfire, with a ton of hot dogs and hamburgers from Sharp’s Market – our graduation present from Stan Sharp’s dad, even though they lived on the south side. Nobody ate, but we were drinking, people brought six-packs and pints, airport minis and whatever pills our mothers were taking, stole pills, uppers, downers, believe me, we had everything out there, along with everybody you could hope for, even sluts and skanky glue sniffers from junior high that we never saw any more. The sand was hard enough to dance on, and the music, oh my God, the music.’ She names a bunch of bands from the dark ages. ‘Can you see what it was like?’

‘Who did she go off with?’

‘Crazy. It was that amazing, wonderful kind of crazy. Lucy Carteret waltzes into the mist of it, for the very first time. It’s a wonder we even noticed, we were so blasted, I mean, what’s one kid more or less in that mob? Except, she looked so hot! If you want to know the truth, it pissed us off. Boys forgot who we were and went lusting. It’s not fair!’

‘Ma’am?’

She doesn’t bother to correct him. ‘She was a perfect size four, except on top, where she was bigger.’

In spite of himself, Dan blushes.

‘Now that I think about it, she probably stayed over at the Carleton Inn and left after her grandfather went to bed. He and Eden Rowse were shacked up in there, had been for years before the divorce. Probably that’s why old Lorna was so mean. She hated Lucy. She hated everyone. She hated us.

Oh, Lucy. Oh, Mom. A good reporter, he prompts: ‘Why?’

‘She hated us for, I don’t know, corrupting Lucy. I’m surprised she didn’t show up with the cops and wreck the party. God knows what-all she had bottled up inside. No wonder she burned to death.’

‘So.’ Shaken, Dan sets his jaw. Do this like a professional. Just do it. ‘You were at the beach.’

‘I was? I was. We all were.’

‘That night.’

Mrs McCall’s eyes are shifting here, there. ‘Oh, God. I’m thirsty, are you thirsty? A little brandy? Coffee? It’s hard to know what to offer at this ungodly hour.’

‘No thank you.’

‘I need some water. Be right back.’

It takes forever. She returns like a car just out of a cheap body shop, with all the dings and scratches retouched, but not repaired. ‘There.’

‘The beach. You were telling me about the . . .’

She says apologetically, ‘There isn’t that much more to tell.’

He is careful to control his tone. ‘What do you mean, there isn’t that much more to tell?’

‘Understand, by the time Lucy got there we were all pretty far gone. Then at the ass end of that night Lucy went off in the Jeep. We saw her go.’

Her voice drops. ‘God help us, we were thinking, Serves her right.’

‘Ma’am!’

She sighs. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

‘Wait!’

‘Remember, we were eighteen. So Lucy went off with them and that’s the last we saw of her, she was valedictorian, but she didn’t show up for the speech. Something went down, nobody will talk about it and we try not to ask. The School Board never did get names so everybody’s safe – Sallie’s dad let that cat out of the bag and he never guessed what a big relief it was for all of us. See, those were not boys from South Side High that Lucy went off with and it wasn’t that gang from Bradenton, they were our boys that we wanted to grow up and marry, and some of us have.

‘By the time the School Board met on it we were all off in college in Gainesville or Tallahassee or Atlanta so we couldn’t forget it, but we didn’t have to testify.’

‘And?’

‘That’s it.’ She spreads her hands, and they are empty.

‘That’s all you have to tell me? That’s your big secret?’

‘Yes. Lucy went off with them and we let her go!’ She’s trying hard to come up with something more for him, but this is all she can manage. ‘We weren’t there and God knows the boys won’t tell.’ She takes his hands. She is desperate to explain. ‘We protect each other, OK?’

‘No.’ He finds it necessary to drive it in. ‘You wouldn’t even tell me who was in the Jeep,’ he adds, although he already knows.

A bad sound comes out of her. It is the sound of a woman losing it, so when Nenna answers it’s a partial answer. ‘Brad was driving.’ Tears are coming down her face, so swift and dense that they roll into her mouth and a bubble seals it as her mouth stretches wide in soundless grief. It shimmers until finally it pops. Words come out, but nothing he can use. ‘We saw what was happening and we let her go!’