Sweet Dream Baby (22 page)

Some high school boys from Warrington find Bick Sifford's abandoned car. The next day when they read in the paper that Bick's father reported him missing, they tell their parents what they saw. Sheriff Hollister goes out to the foot of the bluff and examines the car. The keys are in the ignition. He drives the red Oldsmobile back to town and parks it, locked, in front of his office across from the barber shop.

The town knows all this. People walk past the red Oldsmobile and stop and stare. They talk about Bick's disappearance in Tolbert's, and they talk about it at the Baptist and the Presbyterian churches. They talk about it in the barber shop and at the Curl Up and Dye Beauty Parlor. People who never speak to each other stop and talk about it on the street. People who never even talk, talk about it.

Some say Bick was kidnapped for ransom. Some say he went lunatic on bad moonshine and ran away. These say he'll show up in a day or two awfully damned embarrassed and very glad to be leaving soon for Princeton.

Most say he's in the river. Some of these say he'll never be found. Others say the river only gives up its dead after three days, and that's when Bick will be found. His body will rise, they say. Bodies always do.

Some of the older men talk about other times and other drownings. How the bodies look, white and bloated and gnawed by snapping turtles and alligator gar, when they finally rise. They tell stories of men dragging the river with grappling hooks and divers going down to look for the drowned. Mothers cry and tell about sons lost in car crashes and in farm accidents and to any old scratch or bug in the days before the wonder drugs were invented. For the town, it's a time of inward sight and reconciliation. It's a fine time for the preachers.

The Baptists have altar call, and their preacher says it's time for a revival, a good-old-fashioned tent meeting with pitch-pine flares and gospel music and marathon preaching. He says it's time to bring back the old-time religion. He says the disappearance of the fine young son of the town's most prominent citizen is a sign. He doesn't read the sign, but the town knows it's not a good one.

At the Presbyterian church, the Reverend Laidlaw preaches love and loss and the tragedy of youth cut down in its prime. He preaches how brief and meaningless is this life compared to the majesty and beauty of the next. He closes with a reading from Isaiah, about the green grass of morning cut down by the hard blade of the midday sun, and there is no man or woman under the stifling arch of his sanctuary whose eye is dry.

Sheriff Hollister is a man of few words, but says he is pressing his investigation. He leads a group of volunteers to the foot of the bluff. They spread out in a long line and climb to Widow Rock looking for any sign of what happened that night. They find nothing. After that, the sheriff says he'll drag the river and canvas the entire county. Bick's father gives the box factory a holiday and organizes his own search. He and two hundred factory workers search the hills and bluffs and comb the woods on both sides of the river. At sunset, exhausted, they quit as planned and congregate at the foot of Widow Rock. Men bring forward spent shotgun shells, tatters of clothing, pieces of soaked illegible paper, and there is one ancient New York Yankees baseball cap. Mr. Sifford extends heartfelt thanks, promises bonuses, and sends his men home.

On the morning of the third day, it rains. It's a steady, soaking rain, and the town sees it, too, as a sign. On the afternoon of the third day, Mr. Sifford demands to have his son's car back. He wants it examined by experts from Tallahassee. Sheriff Hollister refuses. He says the car may be evidence in a crime, and it's his right to keep it until such time as he, and anyone else he chooses to ask, have properly examined it. The town knows all this, and the town isn't surprised.

At sundown on the third day, a man returns from fishing in a rented boat. The fisherman, a veteran of two wars the newspapers say, lives in Milton, downriver from Widow Rock. Walking the dock past rows of tethered boats to return his red gas can and oars to Mr. Johnny Barnes, the veteran notices something odd floating in the shallows, wedged between a piling and the bow of a boat. The body is naked, bloated, and white, and there is no recognizable face, though the funerary arts will provide one later. The veteran is shocked but does the right thing, helping Mr. Johnny Barnes pull the body out and wrap it in a tarpaulin. And so, Bick Sifford is found.

The town knows all this only hours after it happens. The town knows that the damage to Bick Sifford's handsome face, most likely from his fall from Widow Rock, is so ghastly that anything the snapping turtles and the alligator gar have done is not immediately apparent. Widow Rock has no mortuary, so the body is taken to the one in Warrington.

This is what is known: at eight-thirty on the last night of his life, Bick Sifford told his parents he was going for a drive with Ronny Bishop. Ronny Bishop said he didn't hear from Bick that night. They had no plans for a ride, though it would not have been unusual for Bick to drop by anyway. No one has come forward to say that he or she saw Bick Sifford between the times when he left home and when he was found in the river.

The town has a great many things to say about all of this. The moonshine theorists maintain that Bick was drunk when he fell from Widow Rock. Those who are for kidnapping say that desperate men waylaid Bick, then panicked and threw him from the rock before they fled the scene. When the talk comes to the fact of Bick Sifford's nakedness, voices are lowered. The people of Widow Rock do not ordinarily speak of such things. Who does? Such things may be the dark side of love, and though many must know them, their names are rarely spoken aloud.

But a naked body in the river forces Sheriff Hollister to speak. For the first time, he tells of finding Bick Sifford's clothes the same day he brought in the red Oldsmobile. He says he found them neatly folded there on the white limestone in the morning sunshine.

Me and Delia have things to talk about.

We've laid low.

The night Bick died, we had french fries and Cokes at the Dairy Queen in Warrington. Kids from around the county came and went while we were there. We smiled and waved and called out, “Hey, ya'll!” We listened to the radio, and Delia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and didn't eat or drink and didn't look at me.

When we came in that night at ten-thirty, Grandpa Hollister was still out patrolling, but Grandma Hollister was in the living room asleep with her needlepoint in her lap.

She said, “What? What?” when we came tiptoeing through. She woke up, and we said, “Hey,” and told her we had a good time. We were all asleep when Grandpa Hollister finally came home.

Since then, the hardest part has been listening to the town talk. We've had to be curious with everyone else, we've had to ask questions with them, and we've had to make our eyes big with surprise when things were revealed about Bick. Mostly we've stayed home, up in our rooms, me reading and Delia listening to the radio or reading one of the books the doctor's wife gave her. When Caroline or Beulah calls, Delia talks but says she doesn't want them to come over. She says she's upset about Bick. I don't think they're suspicious, but I'm worried about her. She isn't acting right.

I go into her room and check on her sometimes, and she just looks at me and looks away. Sometimes she smiles and nods, telling me everything's fine, but I can see in her eyes it's not. I don't know what she'll do. I'm afraid mostly for her, but some for me, too. I lie in bed with a book on my chest hoping Bick's death will pass like a storm in the night, leaving limbs down and shingles blown away, but Widow Rock mostly the same.

On the second day after Bick rises, I find Delia in her room staring at herself in the vanity mirror. It's not like before, a girl looking through a window at a girl she doesn't know, maybe doesn't like. She's a girl staring into nothing. I stand behind her with my hands on her shoulders. I touch her hair and say, “Please, Delia, talk to me.”

She's says, “I am talking to you.”

I say, “We have to go over this. I have to know everything you know, or I can't protect us.”

She turns in the chair and looks deep into my eyes, seeing things in me neither of us knew were there. Her eyes burn me, and I blink. She gets up and goes tired and slow to the bed, and we sit facing each other with our legs crossed.

I reach out and put my hand on her knee, and she looks at my hand. She doesn't care if it's there or not. I say, “Tell me what Bick said before I got there.”

“He said he loved me.” She stares at my hand as she talks. “He said he had to show me, and this was the only way he could do it.”

“No, I mean about what he knew. About us.”

She looks at the window, the oaks move, rubbing, fussing in the light wind, the birds are irritable in the heat. She says, “It was him watching us at the river, not Kenny. Bick left my gold cross on Kenny's mirror. When Bick got to Tolbert's, Kenny and Ronny were already inside, so he walked over and hung it there. I asked him why. He said he was angry about the way I acted with Kenny at the gas station. Getting him a Coke and all. He said what he did was stupid, and he was sorry.”

“What about spying on us at the river? Was he sorry about that, too?”

She says, “He told me he was just out driving and decided to go to the place where we skinny-dipped that time, him and me and Ronny and Beulah. He didn't know we were there. But when he saw us, he couldn't leave.”

She pulls her eyes from the window, and looks at me. “He said I was so beautiful, he couldn't leave.”

“You were so beautiful he laughed?”

“He said he cried. He said maybe it sounded like laughing to us, but he was crying. He couldn't stop it when he saw what we did together.”

“So he wrote you that note about the way you like to swim because he loved you?”

She looks away from me again. Her chin drops and her voice goes low and cold. “I told you he said he loved me. It hurt him that we did those things. He wrote the note so I'd come with him and he'd warn me not to do those things again. It was all for my own good, he said.”

I want to change her mind, tell her how Bick really was, but I can't. Not yet. I want to make her happy again, but I can't. Maybe later, but not now. Now I need to know things. I say, “But we heard it. We heard Griner's engine. There's no other one like that around here.”

She looks at me.

“We heard it, didn't we?”

I have to ask. If a laugh was crying, then maybe hate is love, and I didn't hear Griner's engine.

Delia says, “Yes, we heard it.”

• • •

Bick's body is taken to Tallahassee in a refrigerated truck. The autopsy is done by a doctor at the university hospital. It shows that Bick Sifford died of massive cranial trauma. There is no water in his lungs. There is no alcohol in his blood. There is no other substance in his body that arouses suspicion. There are no wounds that might have occurred before the head injury. The doctor's report confirms what was apparent: Bick Sifford died of an eighty foot fall from Widow Rock into the Hiawassee River. The town knows all this.

And the town knows that Mr. and Mrs. Sifford are inconsolable in their grief and suspicious of these findings. That Bick's father has been to see Sheriff Hollister many times in his office to ask about developments in the case. The Siffords and the town want to know what Bick was doing up on Widow Rock alone at night. They want to know why he took off his clothes and piled them neatly on the limestone. But there seems to be no way to know, and so the rumors and the theories are tried and touted, and as quickly as they arise, they die.

Some say Bick went there to meet a girl, some say a married woman, some say a man. Some say that standing on the street of Widow Rock right now there is someone who knows what happened to Bick Sifford. One or two of the talkers, country people fond of the old sayings, remember this one: murder will out. They say the person who met Bick Sifford up there, or who was supposed to go and didn't, or who met him and did him in, will not be able to keep this thing hidden. They say murder will sing from the house or the heart of the guilty party. It always does.

One day, Mr. Latimer, the town drunk, stumbles from the alley where he sits in the shade drinking cheap whiskey from a paper bag. He looks up the street at the red Oldsmobile parked in front of the sheriff's office. He looks at the small gathering of people who never seem to tire of staring at Bick Sifford's car and talking about it. He scratches himself and looks up at the sun and blinks, and then he says, “Aw, hell. That boy just wanted to feel the night wind on his dick. Don't you people know that?” When the crowd of shocked citizens stops talking and stares at him, Mr. Latimer crows, “And he ain't the only one!” This is another theory for the town to consider.

A day comes when the town knows Bick's story is almost over. Mr. and Mrs. Sifford will never be satisfied with the town's theories of what happened to their son. If they have a theory of their own, they will never tell it. They will never forgive the sheriff for not proving that someone else acted in the story. They know a boy like Bick could not die alone in the middle of the night on Widow Rock. He could not die of a joke or a slip or some sorry jape.

The town is concerned with its own feelings. The town knows that feelings rise to a taut, trembling pitch when a funeral comes, and after that will come an awful trough of nothing. Widow Rock will go back to its old grievances and its old monotony and its simple hope.

The funeral will be too big for the Presbyterian Church. The Baptists offer their sanctuary, but it's not much bigger. The two preachers decide to hold the service in the Warrington High School gym.

I sit with Grandma and Grandpa Hollister and Delia in a row of folding chairs about halfway down the aisle on the right. I'm sitting between Grandpa and Delia. He arranged us this way. He's been watching us.

A lot of people are watching him. Some watch like they think he should have solved the case of Bick. Some look at him like they're glad he's sheriff and they're not. They watch me and Delia and Grandma Hollister, too. Some of them know that Bick and Delia went to the Sifford's anniversary dinner dance together, and some remember Bick and Delia talking and dancing at Tolbert's. They're waiting to see if she cries. We sit and watch the people arrive, and I try to take Delia's hand, but she won't let me.

There must be five hundred people here. Everybody's dressed for church. Both high school football teams are here, sitting together, all the boys with their crew cuts and thick necks sweating into the collars of their white shirts. Ronny Bishop sits with the Widow Rock team. Many of the mothers are sniffling already. They're going to cry hard in a little while. Some are not sniffling, and they won't cry, but they hold their children close to them. Their eyes are fierce and vigilant. They say the world is a dangerous place if the richest man's son can die for no reason.

The fathers sit stiff and dignified, but they look a little lost. They look at the wives who sniffle and the ones who hug their children close, and they don't know what to do. They're just here, buried, like the foundation of all this. A funeral is no place for men.

When the Siffords walk in with Caroline Huff's parents, the towns of Warrington and Widow Rock hold their breath. Mr. Sifford is tall and military and fierce in his black suit. He looks like he'll fight anybody right now who says a bad thing about Bick. Mrs. Sifford's eyes are lost in dark holes above her sunken cheeks. When she stops to enter the first row, she sags against her husband, and he steadies her. When she looks up suddenly into his eyes, the whole gym exhales, and that's when the women who are sniffling begin to cry hard.

I try again to take Delia's hand, but she won't let me. People are watching her, and I know they want to see her cry. They want her to cry the right way, like a girl who's lost a friend, like a girl who has no idea what to do with death, like a girl who's scared of life now that she's seen it end. They don't want her to cry like she loved Bick Sifford. She can't do that. Cry like a lover.

I look over at her. Her eyes are frozen dumb, stunned. I watch Caroline Huff's father put his hand on the small of her mother's back and guide her into the first row after the Siffords. When the four are seated, the organ music begins, and Mrs. Clements, a Baptist lady who works at the Curl Up and Dye, rises in a black choir robe and sings, “When This Weary Life Is Over.” She has a beautiful voice, high but full of a throbbing fullness, and the towns of Warrington and Widow Rock listen carefully, feeling every note. When she finishes, some of the men reach up and snap tears from their cheeks with quick fingers or stare up with bewildered eyes at the gymnastic equipment tied to the rafters.

Two mortuary men in black suits wheel in the casket. They center it below the platform decorated with black cloth and pots of white lilies of the valley. They turn at attention and face the people, then walk off together. The Reverend Laidlaw stands and offers the invocation, and then he starts to preach. I don't listen to the words, I reach again for Delia's hand. This time she lets me take it.

I hold it hard, and I can feel Grandpa Hollister on my other side. He can't see it, he doesn't look, but he knows I'm holding her hand.

As the preaching goes on, and the gym gets hotter, and the Reverend Laidlaw gives way to the Baptist minister, Mr. Simmons, Delia doesn't cry. Some of the women around us have spied on her. They've raised their programs to their mouths and pretended to cough, and they've looked. They've lifted their wet-wrung handkerchiefs to their eyes, and they've looked. So I curve my thumb and dig my nail into the soft skin between Delia's thumb and forefinger. I drive it as hard as I can, and I feel her tremble beside me, and I hear her breathing bump and swerve, and then there's an animal sound from her chest, and she pitches forward, and puts her face in her right hand, and the sobs full of her soul pour out.

Grandpa Hollister leans across me and puts his hand on her back. His face is red, and his hand hovers over her for a second like she's too hot to touch or he doesn't know the best place for his hand to light. He doesn't look at me. I lean back and let him comfort her. The women around us stare openly now, and I see how they approve and how the pieces of the story have all come together.

• • •

When Grandma and Grandpa Hollister are asleep downstairs, I get up and go to Delia's room. I stand outside her door and listen, but I don't hear anything. The house is strangely quiet. I've never heard the oak trees so still. I think the whole town is silent in its forgetting and its return to the old life. I open Delia's door and go in and stand in the dark to let her see me. In the white bed against the window under the slope of the roof, her black hair fans across the pillow, her white legs lie long and straight, and her arm is thrown across her eyes. I go to the vanity and turn on the radio soft. It's Tallahassee: “When the night has come, and the land is dark, and the moon is the only light we'll see. No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid. Just as long as you stand, stand by me.” I wait for Delia to hear it, to move, to know I'm here, but she doesn't. She's still. I move to her bedside and stand by her.

I don't know what to say, what to do. The music doesn't tell me. Not exactly. I wait and watch her. The funeral's over, Bick is gone, his parents are sad but quiet, the town is still tonight, but I know there's danger. I have to save us.

She knows I'm here, but she doesn't speak. She doesn't pat the bed beside her and move over. I wish there was a storm, something to make her need me. I wish she'd cry. The song's over, and the DJ comes on talking about lovers and midnight and how it is out there on the roads and at the drive-ins and the burger joints, Little Suzie and Handsome Johnny doing what the night calls them to do. What nothing and no one on Earth can keep them from doing because they're young and they're in love in America.

I close my eyes and listen to what's inside my head for Delia. The words form, and I open my eyes. “I did it for you, Delia.”

I wait in fear and hope. My knees are water, and my mouth is dry. I know this could be the end. She could send me away. There could be nothing for us until I go back to Omaha and start school. Nothing but Aunt Delia and Nephew Travis.

As I watch, dizzy in the smell that rises from her in the dark, her long white arm moves from across her eyes, and her hand reaches out to me. She rests her fingers on my side just above my uns, and I bite my lower lip to keep from speaking how it feels to me. She turns her face to me and says, “I know, Travis. I know. I've been thinking about it. I'm sorry for the way I've been.”

Her voice is so slow and tired. I can barely hear the words, but her fingers dig into my side and pull me toward the bed, and my knees are so weak I almost fall on her. The big, good thing in my chest swells into my neck and takes my head so I can't say anything. I can't answer her.

I put my hands on her face. I touch her eyes lightly and listen. She says, “I can't say I'm glad for what you did, but I know why you did it, and I know you love me.” Her breath comes hard and sudden. “And I know I love you.”

I don't want to talk about Bick, not now, but I have to say one thing. “He wasn't ever going to leave you alone. He wanted to own you. I couldn't let him do that.”

She sighs, and I see her white face move from side to side in the black cradle of her hair. “I know, Travis. I know.”

And I know we can never be like we were. She'll never think of me the same way. What I've done makes me different in her eyes. She'll never call me Killer again, and I'll never think of her as my Aunt Delia. But I know she loves me. She can still do that even though I've been the animal boy who climbed the rock four-legged and pushed Bick over.

I whisper, “Move over.” She does, and I slide onto the warm spread beside her. We have to be careful because there's no rain to cover our sounds, and the radio is only playing soft, and the night outside is as still as the hour before morning. She turns her back to me, and I press to her long warm length and put my arm around her. She takes my hand to her mouth and kisses it. I shiver, and my thing gets hard, and I have to press against her. She lets go of my hand, and it falls to her neck, and I feel the gold cross there. I move my hand to her chest and let my fingertips circle her nipple. It grows like I've just grown. She sighs, and then her breath comes ragged and hard and so does mine, and I press my hard thing against her.

I say, “Turn over.”

She whispers, harsh, “No, I can't.”

But her breathing is harder still, and she's moving against me down there now, and my hand presses the soft grace of her chest.

I say, “Yes you can. Turn over.” My voice is hard, urgent, but now I'm calm inside. I know it has to happen now. Nothing can stop this.

I move my hand from her chest, and she gives me a little cry of regret, and I take her shoulder and pull her to me. She turns a little and then all the way. As she turns, I move aside for her and feel her knee move against mine, opening. I rise over her and then settle between her legs. I rest above her on my elbows and let my lips brush her nipples. She gives me a trembling gasp of breath, stiffens, then moves her legs apart. It has to happen now. You don't return from where we're going. You're there forever.

For a second, I see her and Bick as I saw them when the wild boy climbed the bluff and came through the tree door: two white, sweat-slick bodies moving together on the moonlit rock. I don't want to see them. I blink to make it go away. I want us to be the discoverers of this thing.

I let my hips fall and push, and I feel her rise up to me. I try to see her eyes in the dark, but there's a blind, hot necessity, and we're moving. It's crazy and happy at once, and the storms that come at night to shake this old house are nothing like our two bodies in this wild hurricane no one can see or hear but us.

• • •

I don't know how long we sleep. It's a sleep I've never known before. It's like the hand of God reached down and took my mind. And when the rock hits the window, I don't know what's happening, only that something's wrong. It's hard for me to wake, and harder for Delia. I squeeze her shoulder until she rises with a gasp and a dance of legs and arms. I sweep aside her black hair and whisper rough in her ear, “Someone's down there.” I stab my finger at the window.

She babbles from the remnant of her sleep. “Someone? He's…?”

I shake her shoulder and push her toward the window. “Look out there,” I say. “Quick.”

I can't look out. No one can know I'm here.

She shivers, pulls the sheet to her chest, and leans to the window. I want to peek over her shoulder, but I don't dare. Just as her face comes to the pane, another pebble strikes. It's as loud as a shot from Ronny Bishop's pistol, but I know it's only a tap in the still night.

I hear Delia whisper, “Jesus Christ, it's Kenny Griner.”

Her hand reaches back to freeze me where I am, then she raises the window sash. Her black hair flairs out in the breeze that rushes in. She shakes her head hard, and I know she means no more rocks. She doesn't speak. If he speaks, I don't hear it. After a space, she eases the sash down and rests her head back on the pillow next to mine. “He wants me to come down.”

“Are we going?”

“I have to. I want you to stay here. It's too dangerous for both of us to go down. They might hear us.”

I don't say it, but it's more dangerous for her if I don't go down. She gets up to dress, and I go to my room for clothes. When I hear her out in the hall, I come out and stand in front of her until she knows she can't talk me out of it.

We go down so slow sometimes I think daylight will find us frozen on the stairs. We keep to the sides of the old groany risers, and when we finally make it to the kitchen, we stand for a long time at Marvadell's squeaky screen door. Finally, I whisper in her ear, “Don't open it. Make him come up on the back porch.”

Delia leans to the rusty screen. “Kenny! Kenny, come up here!”

I stand behind her on watery legs with the hair humming on the back of my neck. I send my spirit to the side of Grandpa Hollister's bed with a message of long, deep sleep.

Delia throws her whisper out another time into the night, and then, peeking over her shoulder, I see the bib of Griner's white T-shirt between black jacket wings. His big boots thud on the old porch boards, and I can feel Delia wince with each footfall. He stops three feet from the screen and whispers, “Delia? Is that you?”

I almost laugh out loud. Anybody but us and he'd be dead now.

Delia whispers, “It's me, Kenny. What do you want?”

“Look at me,” he whispers back. “Can you see me?”

Delia turns and looks back into the dark house, at the door that separates the kitchen from the dining room. I can feel her anger now. “Kenny, what are you
doing
here this time of night?”

Even whispering, Griner's voice holds the mulish weight of his place in life. He says, “I want you to look at me, Delia.”

Delia says, “All right, Kenny. Come closer, into the light.”

Griner's big boots slide forward, and his face looms visible, and we hear a scratch, and then the blue flame of his Zippo lighter is bright between us. And there it is above his other eye, a big ragged cut with new black stitches. It looks like the first one, only this time the eye below the cut is swollen like a ripe plumb and black as one, too.