The Bright Forever
the bright forever
a novel
LEE MARTIN
Shaye Areheart Books
NEW YORK
Contents
To Deb
Thank you for asking the right questions
On the banks beyond the river
We shall meet, no more to sever;
In the bright, the bright forever,
In the summer land of song.
—Fanny J. Crosby, “The Bright Forever”
Raymond R.
I
’M NOT
saying I didn’t do it. I don’t know.
Mr. Dees
O
N THE NIGHT
it happened—July 5—the sun didn’t set until 8:33. I went back later and checked the weather cartoon on the
Evening Register
’s front page: a smiling face on a fiercely bright sun. I checked because it was the heart of summer, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that long light and all the people who were out in it; I’d seen them sitting on porches, drinking Pepsis and listening to WTHO’s Top Fifty Countdown on transistor radios. I knew they were getting a laugh out of
Peanuts
or
Hi and Lois
in the newspaper, thrilling to the adventures of
Steve Canyon.
Cars were driving along High Street—Trans-Ams and GTOs, Mustangs and Road Runners, Chargers and Barracudas. Some of them were on their way to the drive-in theater east of town—a twin bill,
Summer of ’42
and
Bless the Beasts and Children.
Others went downtown. Teenage boys were ducking into the Rexall or the new Super Foodliner to pick up a pack of Marlboros or Kools. Couples were strolling around the courthouse square, lollygagging after supper at the Coach House or a steak and a cold beer at the Top Hat Inn. They were window-shopping, the ladies admiring the new knee-high boots at Bogan’s Shoe Store, high school girls looking at the first wire-rim glasses at Blank’s Optical, the flared-leg pantsuits at Helene’s Dress Shop, the friendship bracelets and engagement sets at Lett’s Jewelry.
Enough time and opportunity, and yet no one could stop what was going to happen.
We were just an itty-bitty town in Indiana, on the flat plain beyond the rolling hills of the Hoosier National Forest—a glassworks town near the White River, which twisted and turned to the southwest before emptying into the Wabash and running down to the Ohio. That day, a Wednesday, the temperature had gotten up to ninety-three and the humidity had settled in and left everyone limp with trying. The air held in the smell of heat from the furnaces at the glassworks, the dead fish stink from the river, the sounds of people’s living: ice cubes clinking in glasses, car mufflers rattling, screen doors creaking, mothers calling children to come in.
In the evening, when the breeze picked up enough to stir the leaves on the courthouse lawn’s giant oaks and dusk started to fall, the air cooled just enough to make us forget how hot and unforgiving the day had been. After the hours spent working at the glassworks or the stone quarry or the gravel pit, people were glad to be moving about at their own pace, taking their time, letting the coming dark and the rustle of air convince them that soon there might be rain and then the heat would break. I was content to sit at the kitchen table, noodling around with the story problems I planned to use the next day with my summer students, one of whom was Katie Mackey.
Later, there would be a few folks who would step up and say they had something maybe the police ought to know. Their names would be in the newspapers—papers as far away as St. Louis and Chicago—and on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis television stations, people who would be in the notebooks of all the magazine writers who’d come—slick-talking out-of-towners with questions. Newshounds from
Inside Detective
,
Police Gazette.
They’d want to know how to find so-and-so.
I’ve never been able to tell this story and my part in it until now, but listen, I’ll say it true: a man can live with something like this only so long before he has to make it known. My name is Henry Dees, and I was a teacher then—a teacher of mathematics and a summer tutor for the children like Katie who needed such a thing. I’m an old man now, and even though more than thirty years have gone by, I still remember that summer and its secrets, and the way the heat was and how the light stretched on into evening like it would never leave. If you want to listen, you’ll have to trust me. Or close the book; go back to your lives. I warn you: this is a story as hard to hear as it is for me to tell.
Gilley
W
E WERE EATING
supper. That’s what I remember, the four of us sitting at the table: Mom and Dad and me and Katie. It was just a night like that, a summer night, and pretty soon Katie would finish her lemon sherbet and ask to be excused and then run up the street to find her friend Rene Cherry. That’s what would have happened. I’ve known it all these years. Rene and Katie would have made up, said they were sorry about the quarrel they’d had that morning, and played until dark, when Mom would have called my sister in.
But before any of that could happen, I said, “Katie didn’t take back her library books.”
I was still mad at her because sometime that afternoon she had gone into my room and listened to my Carole King album,
Tapestry
, and left a scratch on the “It’s Too Late” track so it stuck on the chorus—“Too late, too late, too late”—and I wanted to pay her back. I wanted to see her get in Dutch with Dad, who had warned her about keeping library books past the due date. “Good golly, Little Miss Katie,” he’d told her at breakfast. “If you’re not careful, you’ll be living a life of crime.” We knew we were a family that people noticed, envied even, for our wealth and my father’s influence in our town. Our family had owned Mackey Glass for years, and my father always told us we had to be careful not to screw up, not to give anyone a reason to think less of us. “If the police come looking for you,” he said to Katie, “I’ll tell them we tried our best to bring you up right, but you wouldn’t listen. Now, I mean it, Katie. Take those books back today.”
But she didn’t. She and Rene spent all morning on the front porch. They were there when I was getting ready for work. I was seventeen that summer, and I was a clerk and stock boy at the J. C. Penney store downtown. I was standing in front of my dresser mirror, knotting my necktie, and I could hear Katie and Rene in the porch swing. The chains creaked as the swing moved back and forth. Katie and Rene were playing their favorite game—It’s Gotta Go—where they made choices between things that they dearly loved. Pepsi or Coke, spaghetti or macaroni, Little Dot or Little Lulu, puppies or kittens, Barbie or Skipper, “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” or “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” Christmas or your birthday. Making a choice was heartbreaking and took hours. Often they’d end up bawling. They’d hug each other and agree that it was necessary. If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t matter. It proved how much they really loved the things they said they’d let go.
Rene’s mother, Margot, claimed to have ESP. The sixth sense, she called it. A sign in front of her house said,
WILL TELL YOU YOUR ENTIRE LIFE WITHOUT ASKING A SINGLE QUESTION
. I’d gone to her earlier that summer. Just for a kick. She held my hands, turned them over, and traced the lines in my palms. “You will be chosen,” she told me. “Soon a light will find you. Don’t look away.”
On the porch, Katie and Rene were trying to decide between
The Partridge Family
and
The Brady Bunch
: one of them had to go. Katie said that Keith Partridge was dreamier than Greg Brady, but she’d much rather be friends with Marcia than with Laurie Partridge. Marcia was just so cute, and her hair was perfect; Laurie was too skinny, and Katie was fairly certain that she didn’t really know how to play that electric piano. Rene, who usually took her cues from Katie, said yes, that was true, but who wouldn’t choose Peter Brady over Danny Partridge?
“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Katie said.
The swing’s chains stopped creaking; someone, maybe Rene, dragged her feet over the porch floor. “You can’t mean that,” she said, and she sounded very serious, like a grown-up. “You’ve got to be kidding. Danny instead of Peter? No way. Danny isn’t nice.”
I finished knotting my tie and went over to look out the window. A robin was parading around the lawn. The grass, still wet from the sprinkler, sparkled in the sunlight. The petunias in my mother’s flower bed smelled sweet; their pink and red and white petals ruffled in the breeze.
“I think he’s funny,” Katie said.
“He’s not funny,” said Rene. “He’s retarded.”
“What about me?” Katie was getting worked up, the way she did sometimes. She could be a drama queen, in love with the spotlight. The day before, she’d worn sunglasses and posed on the stone bench in our backyard so I could take her picture with my Polaroid camera. I knew her eyes were wide open now as she faced Rene, and her cheeks were filled with air. When she got like that, I told her she looked like Porky Pig. “I’m funny,” she said to Rene. “I always make you laugh when I do my Donald Duck voice. Isn’t that funny?”
“No, it’s retarded.”
“You’re the retarded one,” Katie said.
For a good while neither of them said anything. The only sound was the wind through the trees. Then Rene said, “Maybe I should just go home now.”
Katie agreed. “Maybe you should.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“All right. I guess you want me to go.”
So Rene left, and Katie ran into the house bawling, and she never got around to taking her books back to the library. She ruined my new record instead, and even though I wanted to feel sorry for her because she’d had that fight with Rene, I couldn’t, and I said what I did, and Dad blew his top.
“Katie.” He leaned across the table and shook a finger at her. “What did I tell you?”
She jumped up from her chair. “I’m going to take them back right now.” She was wearing a pair of orange shorts and a black T-shirt. Her brown hair, lightened from the sun, was combed off her forehead and pinned with gold barrettes. “The library’s open until seven o’clock. I’ve got plenty of time.”
She never even stopped to put on sandals. They were right there at the back door, but she didn’t put them on. I thought about stopping her. I thought about saying, “Katie, your sandals.” But I didn’t. She was barefoot, and she swung open the screen door. She threw her library books into her bicycle basket and I watched her stand up on the pedals until she reached the top of the hill. Then she sat down and bent over her handlebars, and her long hair flew out behind her, and I watched her until she was gone.
Clare
T
HE IDEA
was to build a porch on the front of the house. Ray said he could put it up in a whipstitch. He’d build it out of cement blocks so it’d never rot. He’d put a shingle roof over it and hang a swing from the rafters so we could sit out there of an evening, the two of us—Ray and me, just like folks do. Maybe then, he said, the high-and-mighty neighbors would come to visit and we’d all gab as the sun went down. When the mosquitoes came out and the lightning bugs, Ray would say, “How about a game of cards?” Everyone would come into the house, and we’d play a few hands of pinochle at the kitchen table. Ray would turn on the radio; I’d serve strawberry shortcake because it was that time of year, June, when the strawberries were ripe. “How’d that be?” he asked me. Pinochle and music and strawberry shortcake—and I told him I believed that’d suit me just fine.
He wasn’t always my life. That’s what I want you to know. My first husband, Bill, he died when he took sick in the heart. He died on a January afternoon. He was in our bedroom, hanging up his coat, and he went down. I can’t get the noise out of my head—mercy—the way a man’s body sounds when it collapses and hits the floor. The house shook. The storm windows rattled in their frames. Outside, the wind rocked the power lines, chased snakes of powdery snow across the street. Two girls walked past on their way home from school. They wore corduroy coats, and they’d pulled their hoods up over their heads. I could hear them chitter-chattering:
Cinderella dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a fellow.
Then the wind swallowed up their bright voices.
Don’t ask me what it was about Ray. We just hit it off. What good does it do to wonder over such things now?
We lived together in my house, lived there even before we married. I’ll admit that. Yes, it’s true. But even now, when I’m eighty-two, it doesn’t seem like all that bad of a sin, just one come from being lonely, and won’t God surely forgive that?
I keep thinking about the first time I saw Ray. Raymond Royal Wright. Raymond R. “You just keep saying my name,” he told me.
We were uptown at the Top Hat Inn, where I went sometimes with my neighbors Leo and Lottie Marks. They were dancing to jukebox songs. This time it was Charley Pride singing that number that always made me wish I was forty years younger, just starting out, all my life ahead of me. I wanted to close my eyes and listen to Charley’s molasses voice telling men to kiss an angel good morning and then love her like the devil when they got back home. Back in the corner, where I sat with Ray, the light was dim. He had on too much aftershave—that lime-scented Hai Karate that was so popular then. His cheeks were red, and he was grinning. He wasn’t a looker, and I knew right away I had at least ten years on him, but oh, that grin, and the way his eyes sparkled like there was something exciting just around the corner. I don’t mind saying it was cozy with him there at the table, and that song . . . well, I’ve already made it plain what that did to me.
“Raymond R.,” he said again. He just had that way about him, and I did what he asked. I kept saying his name, and he filled in the rest.
“Raymond R.”
“Magnificent.”
“Raymond R.”
“Strong.”
“Raymond R.”
“King of the mountain, as true as the day is long, all dressed up and no place to go.”
I couldn’t help but laugh then. Giggled like a girl. He took my hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. An old dame like me. Imagine.
“You must be out of your head,” I told him, and then before I’d even known that it was going to happen, I was crying. It’s funny how someone can come along and slice open your life, show you just exactly what’s inside. Me? I was a widow storing up tears for all the lonely days and nights I feared lay in wait for me. Then Ray kissed my hand, and I knew I’d tell him anything, tell him about Bill and how toward the end he went inside himself and brooded over his sick heart. We forgot love, forgot what had brought us together in the first place. It all came back to me that day when he fell to the floor. I called the ambulance. I covered him with a quilt from the bed, the wedding-ring quilt Mama had made for us, and I sat there rubbing my hand over his face, letting my fingers remember what he’d looked like all those years back when he was black-haired and smooth-skinned.
“Darlin’.” Ray patted my hand, held it between the two of his like he’d never let go, and I didn’t want him to. That’s how lonely I was. I want you to remember that. I’m not a smart woman. Never claimed to be. But I know how to love folks. Even now after all that’s gone on. “Don’t cry,” he told me while Leo and Lottie were dancing. “I’m Raymond R. Darlin’, I’m Mister Wright.”