Sorrow Road (6 page)

“Lemme guess,” Alvie said, breaking in eagerly before Vic could answer. He was giddy with certainty. “I bet you said, ‘Hell, yes, it's somebody's birthday. It's
my
fucking birthday.' Right? Ain't that what you said?”

Alvie had overstepped. He had gotten caught up in the story and forgotten himself. He knew it right away. Vic did not say anything for a long time. It was probably no more than a minute, but it felt like forever to Alvie. He could swear he felt his life leaking away, like a glass of milk he'd accidentally knocked over. He'd have to make it up to Vic somehow. He was a fool.

“No,” Vic said. His voice was no longer lazy and no longer amused. It was cold. “That's not what I said. What I said was, ‘You know whose birthday it is, you fat old man, and if those keys belong to a car, it damned well better have gas in the tank.' That's what I said.”

Neither Harm nor Alvie believed for a second that Vic Plumley had talked that way to his father. Vic was just showing off. But you could not challenge him.

“And then,” Vic said, and once again his voice had that smug, lazy sound to it, “he took me outside and he showed me what was parked in the driveway.” Vic sat up straight. “He'd parked it right over there. So's I could see it, first thing.”

They all looked. They were awestruck, just as they'd been when they arrived here today and Vic came out the back door, slamming the door behind him, and they saw what was sitting in the Plumley driveway, the widest driveway on the whole block: a cream-colored 1936 Ford pickup with red trim. It was a beaut. That was the word Harm used when he first spotted it, and Alvie started to make fun of the word but then Vic said, “I like that word, Harm. A beaut. That's just what it is,” and so Alvie had to say that he liked the word, too. It was the perfect word: beaut. Vic's birthday present was a beaut.

The pickup had a flathead V8 with a three-speed transmission and a 12-volt electrical system. Its top speed was just over 80 mph. It was not brand new, but it was only two years old, and that was fine. That was plenty close enough to new.

Harm and Alvie were agog. They had not even ridden in it yet, and they were almost speechless with admiration.

There were only two rules, Vic told them: He had to let his father know when he was going to drive it. And he couldn't take it past the Norbitt city limits unless his father was with him.

The legalities of a twelve-year-old driving a car were not a concern. The state of West Virginia had been issuing driver's licenses since 1917, but only began testing drivers—the test was a formality, nothing more—in 1931. You were supposed to be sixteen to get a license, but driving without one was a ho-hum offense. The deputies didn't care. They had other things on their minds. Besides, if you were wealthy enough to have a car, then you—and your family—were the kind of people whom the deputies went out of their way to please.

Suddenly Vic's mother was there. She startled them, opening the screen door and initiating the drawn-out creak of its tired hinges. They had been gazing at the Ford and were ignorant of her presence until they heard that creak. Then they turned and looked up, taking in the shape of her, the way she held her arm out straight to prop open the door. Her other hand was curled and perched on her hip. Her hair was long and thick and blond. Harm felt his heart jump in his chest like a fish.

“You boys have your breakfast yet?” she said. She had a low, soft voice, a voice with a purr in it. That voice had a peculiar effect on Harm. He felt, along with the flopping heart, the heat rising in his cheeks and a flush moving across the back of his neck. And that was not the only thing that happened to his body when he was in the presence of Vic's mother. The other thing he couldn't talk about, not even with Alvie—and God knows he would never discuss it with Vic.

Harm's mother, Sylvia, swore that Vivian Plumley rehearsed that voice of hers, trained it, so that it would sound sexy and “drive the men wild.” That was Sylvia's exact phrase: “drive the men wild.” Like most of the women in Norbitt, Sylvia did not like Vivian Plumley. Harm had overhead his mother and some of the other mothers talking about Vivian, claiming that she had been observed at the edge of the woods a few months back, standing by her car, shouting until she was hoarse, trying to permanently lower her voice. Make it sexier. Was it true? Maybe. Harm didn't know. But the other things about her—her jutting breasts and her full hips and her mouth, a mouth that was never without a generous splash of red lipstick—had nothing to do with shouting at the woods.

Harm could not think about her too much. If he did, things happened to him, confusing things. Things he could not control.

“Yes, ma'am,” Alvie said. “I had my breakfast.”

“Harmon? How about you?” Vivian Plumley said, looking down at him.

“Me, too, ma'am.”

She seemed a little disappointed. Harm wondered if he should have said no. If he had lied, she would have invited him into the kitchen and he could have been in the same room with her for as long as it took him to eat a second breakfast. Oatmeal, probably, is what it would have been. Or maybe pancakes. Hard to say.

The screen door closed. She did not slam it. Only kids slammed screen doors, Harm thought.

For some reason, he wished she had slammed it. Just let it go. That would have put something final and absolute between the moment when Vivian Plumley was there, and the next moment, when she wasn't there. A dividing line. A boundary. But without the slam, it was as if she might still be there behind him, waiting at the screen door, watching. He knew she wasn't—she never spied on them, not like his own mother did—but without the slam, she
could
be. She could still be standing there, with that slight smile on her lips, a smile of faint amusement but not ridicule or mockery. Without the slam, she continued to be present. It was as if she spent the day with him. Invisible—but still there. Distracting him.

Harm thought about Vivian Plumley lots of days, of course, but this day was one that he would remember for as long as he remembered things.

Because this day—the day of Vic's twelfth birthday—was the day they committed murder. The three of them did it. Each boy was equally responsible.

Okay, well. Maybe Vic was a
little
more responsible. That's what Harm and Alvie both thought later, and who could say it wasn't so, but they kept that conclusion to themselves. Because it seemed grubby and small and disloyal. In the event, they agreed that the blame would be apportioned equally, that they would think of it one way and one way only, and that was how they would learn to live with what they had done.

 

Chapter Three

The snow rose high on both sides of the road. The plow had been out here early, its blade pushing back a thick continuous curl of snow like a razor slicing through shaving cream on pitted gray skin. Carla had not actually seen the plow—that was hours ago—but she could imagine it doing its work based on the size of the ramparts lining the road: the heavy scraping sound, the patient, straight-ahead effort.

She was grateful for the clear road. She needed to make this journey in a hurry, before she changed her mind.

She had stopped just once.

“All outta Diet Dr Pepper.” The old woman behind the counter at the little store had offered five words and no smile. She wore an oversized flannel shirt. Her hair was a runaway blaze of white fuzz. She looked very tired. Everything sagged—her face, her breasts, the skin on her neck. “Got Coke and Sprite and Dew, though.”

Carla wanted a can of Diet Dr Pepper. No: She
had
to have a can of Diet Dr Pepper. It was a symbol, not a liquid. It was her reward to herself for having gotten this far, and it was her incentive to keep going. As her agitation had increased, she'd persuaded herself that if she could just get a can of Diet Dr Pepper, she'd be okay. It would be a sign—a sign that she was on the right track.

After that, she told herself, her mind would lie quietly for a while. She'd be able to make it the rest of the way home. And once she was home, she could figure out how to fix the mess she'd made of everything.

She had spotted the store on the right-hand side of the road just after she crossed the West Virginia state line. JUNNIOR
'
S, the sign said. A misspelling, she surmised. Or the petty revenge of a sign painter who had yet to be paid for the last job he'd done for Junior. Or maybe it really was how the guy's mother had spelled his name on the birth certificate. Could be. Anyway, Carla turned in. She parked between ruts of snow. She struggled through the shin-high mounds of it that Junior or Junnior—or whoever was in charge here—had not bothered to clear away from the entrance.

She headed for the rumbling cooler in the back. She searched in vain for a white-and-maroon can of Diet Dr Pepper. There had to be one, right? She picked through the assortment. Her distress was growing.

Dammit. They were out.

Maybe they had more somewhere else. In a back room, maybe. Maybe it was just a matter of replenishing the stock.

Carla returned to the front of the store. The old woman was having a frisky go at a thumbnail with a pair of rusty clippers, grunting with satisfaction at each tiny snip. She finished her grooming, such as it was, before looking up. Carla had to ask twice about the Diet Dr Pepper. The first time, the woman frowned and shook her head, as if whatever language Carla was speaking was not spoken here.

Then the clerk delivered the blow: No Diet Dr Pepper.

Carla felt a rising panic. She knew she was being ridiculous—
for God's sake,
she told herself,
it's a freakin' can of pop
—but she had been so focused on getting it, so intent on procuring this one small token as a sort of reward for the progress she had made on the drive, that this bulletin that it would not be forthcoming had devastated her.

The panic gave way to outrage. How the hell could they be out of Diet Dr Pepper? A dump like this was
supposed
to keep staples in stock. It had an
obligation
. Why else would it even
exist,
except to assuage specific cravings for items with no nutritional value? Carla took a quick disdainful glimpse around the dilapidated store and its three rows of plywood shelves, shelves featuring little more than a couple of pyramids of dusty Spam cans and six jumbo rolls of Hefty paper towels and a shiny red clutch of Wavy Lay's and several packages of Double Stuf Oreos.

“We got fresh coffee if that'll help,” the old woman added.

At least she was trying. But that made Carla feel even worse: Was her fragile emotional state
that
obvious? The surly old woman would not be offering alternatives had Carla not seemed right on the edge—ready to faint or puke or pitch a fit. The clerk surely did not want any trouble in her store this morning. The snow was bad enough. Who needed to deal with a lunatic in a rage because they were all out of Diet Dr Pepper?

“You okay, honey?”

This time the old woman's voice broke into Carla's thoughts like as broomstick crashing through a plate-glass window. The clerk seemed honestly concerned about her.

Carla flinched. The unexpected kindness had caught her off-guard. And so, just like that, she started to sob.

*   *   *

The first hour of her trip from the D.C. area had been on the interstate. Plenty of traffic, even on a cold Sunday morning, with plenty of places to stop. Carla did not stop. She kept right on going.

The exit showed up a little before she was expecting it to. It dumped her out on another four-lane highway. Not an interstate, but close. Forty minutes later, she made another turn. Now all resemblance to an interstate disappeared. She felt as if she had driven off the edge of the world—and landed, weirdly, not somewhere in outer space, bobbing amidst stars and planets and dark matter, but in another universe altogether. A universe with its own special brand of dark matter.

This road was a shortcut to Raythune County, used by natives or by people whose GPS systems had spitefully betrayed them.

Gone were the outlet stores with their endless iterations of brand names—Chico and Nautica and Pottery Barn—and the soulless strip malls offering tax prep and pizza by the slice and tanning beds and picture framing and PC repair. Gone, too, were the fast-food places that tended to pop up in multiples, as if the initial one had released spores that lodged in the soil and grew a new franchise every month or so, just to keep the first one company.

The back roads of West Virginia were very different from the interstates that coiled around big cities. That was obvious. But it was the
degree
of the difference that always astonished Carla, even though she had made this trip so many, many times, first as a child in the backseat of her parents' car and now as an adult driving her own car.

How could everything change so quickly, so absolutely? She meant the road—but right now, the same question could be applied to her life.

She was surrounded by dense white scribbles of woods and by the occasional gray zipper of a train track. In the distance, the mountains crowded along the horizon, sheepish-looking giants doing their best to meld seamlessly with a sky that arched over this remote and mysterious world. Today those mountains had snow on their shoulders, a mantle of white that helped them disappear into the bleak winter backdrop.

Yes, Carla knew this road well. And yet she was struck anew by its absolute singularity. Interstates were ubiquitous; driving on an interstate, you could be in St. Louis or Phoenix or Atlanta or Dallas or Baltimore. You could be in Miami or Chicago. Anywhere. A back road, though, had its own flavor and color and character. Its own brand. It was more than a matter of what you saw out the window. It was also a feeling. Leaving the four-lane highway, she could have sworn she had felt a shift in the barometric pressure. There was a raw new element in the air once she headed down the road to Acker's Gap.