Two Rivers (6 page)

She stood shivering on the porch for what seemed like forever.

“Mrs. Parker,” I said. “We should go inside. You’ll catch a cold.”

She came back to me then and nodded.

Inside, the house was unfamiliar. There were stacks of old newspapers all over the floor. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Mrs. Parker had to rummage through them to find a pot, which she rinsed and then filled with milk to warm for hot chocolate. Betsy came out of her room, and while she and I sat silently at the table dunking marshmallows in our mugs of cocoa, Mrs. Parker disappeared. When she came back, she was carrying a child’s sand bucket filled with snow. She set it down on the kitchen floor and smiled. “Let’s build ourselves a snowman,” she said. Betsy sank lower into her seat.

I sat quietly and watched. Mrs. Parker opened the back door when the bucket was empty and stepped out into the snow, still without any shoes on. She brought in more and more snow, until there was a huge pile of it on the linoleum. The kitchen was warm; the snow was melting all over the floor.

Betsy’s eyes were wide and wet.

“Here,” I said. “I’ll help.” I ran outside to the backyard and made a snowball. I set it down in a good patch of snow and rolled it back and forth across the lawn until it was the size of a large medicine ball. I went back into the kitchen to get them, to show them what I’d made, but by the time I got there Mrs. Parker had disappeared and Betsy was sitting on the floor next to the puddle.

She reached for my hand, pulling me down next to her. She looked at me as if she were trying to figure something out. Then she framed my face with her hands and kissed me so hard on the mouth that my front tooth bit into my bottom lip. I was a little puzzled but mostly excited. I started to kiss her back, but she pulled away. She looked hard into my eyes and said quietly, “I’ll never marry you, Harper Montgomery. It’s best that you know that now.”

I felt heat rising into my face, despite the chill I’d carried in from outside. “I don’t want to
marry
you,” I offered, like some god-awful gift. “Why would I want to marry you anyway?”

She softened then, and looked at me with something close to sympathy.

“What?”
I asked, still offended. I could taste my own blood.

Betsy’s shoulders slumped. “My daddy’s sending her away. To the state mental hospital in Waterbury. She’s crazy, you know.”

By Christmas, Mrs. Parker was gone and the Parkers’ house was no different from the other crumbling monstrosities on our street. Even the Christmas lights strung around the porch railings seemed haphazard and half-hearted. By the following summer their yard had grown into a sort of jungle. And even though Betsy had sworn she’d never marry me, I was pretty certain there was still a chance she might one day love me.

“W
here the hell you been, Montgomery?” Lenny asked. He was standing outside the train station, smoking a cigarette. “I told you. I was at the wreck. I went home to dry off. Change my clothes,” I said.

“Well, get in here,” he said, snubbing out his cigarette under his boot and blowing three perfect smoke rings into the air. He held his finger up and put it through one of the rings, letting it circle his finger, smiling stupidly like he’d exhibited a new and remarkable talent.

The station was eerily empty. All trains coming through Two Rivers had been delayed or diverted. Normally, there was a bustle of activity at the station at any given time of the day. Today there was no motion but the whirring of the ceiling fans. I shut the door to the freight office and tried to concentrate on the pile of paperwork that had accumulated in my inbox. As luck would have it, the ceiling fan in my office was broken. It was hot, especially with the door closed, but I didn’t want to be bothered. Within minutes Lenny was knocking.

Lenny had been a thorn in my side since he transferred up from Brattleboro five years before. He was the station agent, in charge of overseeing all of the operations at the station. His interpretation of this job description was poking his nose into my office, and generally impeding
all
operations at the station with his incessant drivel.

“The news wants to interview me,” he said. “Burlington. NBC.” He was examining his cuticles, trying to be blasé about it, I suppose.

“What for?” I asked.

“Duh,”
he offered by way of explanation, opening his buggy eyes wider. “
Earth to Montgomery.
A train wrecked in the river today.”

“I mean, why do they want to interview you? You haven’t even been down there yet, have you?”

“I’ve been waiting for
you
to show up all morning. I couldn’t exactly leave, could I?”

“Why don’t you go down there now?” I asked, hopeful.

“Maybe I
will
.”

“Great. Can you close the door on the way out?”

Since Lenny’s arrival in Two Rivers I had found myself in more than a hundred such inane conversations. Every single exchange we had had a certain prepubescent quality to it. I worried sometimes that I might actually wind up in a school yard brawl with him one afternoon. I didn’t know how much longer I could stand this job.

After Lenny was gone, I trudged through some bills of lading. I wanted to get through the mountain of paperwork so that I could get back to the apartment, to Marguerite, before Shelly got home from school. I was working on deciphering handwriting on an order when the phone on my desk rang, startling me so badly I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.

“My daughter!” the voice cried. “Please tell where my daughter is!”

Sweat broke out onto my forehead in cold drops. I thought about Marguerite at the river’s edge, the sunlight behind her.
My mama’s dead.

“Excuse me?” I managed.

“Oh God, is she dead?” Her accent was thick. Southern.

I closed my eyes, thought of Marguerite reaching for my hand.

“Ma’am, please slow down. The connection’s not so good. How can I help you?” Sweat ran down my sides; I could smell myself, the dank scent of the river and my own wet fear.

“My daughter was on the train. At least I think she was on that train. Dammit, we haven’t heard nothin’ from nobody. Who’s in charge up there?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I understand you’re upset. Please, let me see what I can do to help.” I wiped my wrist across my forehead, blinked hard to squeeze the sweat out of my eyes.

“Her name’s Sara. Sara Phillips. She got on in Virginia, headed to Montreal. Was she on this train?
Where
is my daughter?”

“Sara,” I said, my skin tingling with sudden relief. Release. But my body felt like it had just woken from a nightmare; everything was still buzzing. I breathed deeply. “This is the freight office. Let me give you the number for the railroad. They should have a passenger list.”

The woman was sobbing on the other end of the line.

“Ma’am?” I said, softly.

“Yes?”

“A lot of people made it out of the wreck just fine. I was there. I saw a lot of people who walked away without even a scratch.”

“Thank you,” she said. “This is the third number I’ve called, and you’re the first person who’s listened to me.”

“Call that number,” I said. “They can help you. If they can’t, call me back.”

When I hung up the phone, my neck was bristling. I closed up the file I’d been struggling with and stood up. If I’d smoked I would have gone outside for a cigarette. Instead I went out into the station and got a Coke from the vending machine. I drank the whole can in three gulps; it burned my throat but seemed to quench my thirst.

I needed to get the passenger list. At least then I could get Marguerite’s mother’s name. Marguerite’s last name. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know her last name. Where exactly it was that she’d been coming from. Then I’d just make the phone call. She was a minor, a
child
. Her father, no matter what he’d done, had a right to know where she was. Where his wife was.

But just as I was about to make my way to the ticket office, one man carrying a camera and another carrying a microphone came through the front doors.

“Do you work here?” the one with the microphone asked. He was well-dressed, drenched in spicy cologne.

I nodded.

“Name?” he asked.

“Montgomery,” I said. “Harper Montgomery.”

“Have you been down to the scene of the accident?”

I nodded again.

The camera guy suddenly shined a bright light on the cologne guy and he started talking into the mic. “At the junction in Two Rivers, a passenger train carrying ninety-four people derailed early this morning on its way to Montreal. The number of casualties is not known yet as many passengers are still missing. We are here with Harper Montgomery, an employee at the Two Rivers station. Sir, can you tell us what you saw today?”

I don’t remember what I said, I only remember the smell of cologne, the stifling heat, and the blinding white light in my eyes as I tried to articulate the wreckage.

I
was the only one outside Betsy’s family who knew what really happened to Mrs. Parker. The official explanation for her absence was that she was suffering from a mysterious respiratory ailment and had been sent to see specialists somewhere in the Midwest. But everyone had their speculations, the most popular being that Mrs. Parker had run off with another man.
A photographer
, some said.
From New York City
. My mother, who was nobody’s fool, said, “Phooey. That poor woman is probably frosting cupcakes in the sanitarium as we speak.” My mother, who was also a self-proclaimed champion of all women (both meek and strong), offered, “I’d lose my marbles too, what with nothing to do all day but dust my husband’s bowling trophies.” (Mr. Parker was a local bowling phenom, having rolled a half-dozen 300 games in his lifetime.) Of course, I didn’t tell her that she was right. I only shrugged and said I bet Betsy missed her. Betsy and I never spoke about what happened that snowy day on her kitchen floor. But there was an understanding between us afterward. We shared a secret both terrible and sacred.

At Two Rivers Graded School, there were rules for boys and girls. Rules that were handed down from the older kids to the younger ones like commandments. Only these statutes were not etched in stone but whispered conspiratorially on the playground. If you had a mentor, an older sibling or friend, you might be privy to the secret order of things. But most of us learned the rules the hard way: by breaking them. The rules for boys were different than the rules for girls (much as they are for men and women). Boys should
like
girls or else they were pansies. Boys should not, however, let said girls know they liked them. In fact, the more ambivalent and cold you were to the object of your affection, the better. As a boy who carried his heart on his sleeve, I learned this one early on. It only took one longing glance in Betsy’s direction during lunch to earn me a cuff on the ear from Brooder. A conversation during recess resulted in a stern admonishment behind the gym after school.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Montgomery?” Brooder asked. He had a wad of tobacco tucked in his cheek, making him look remotely like a chipmunk. He’d been stealing his father’s chewing tobacco since the fourth grade.

“Nothin’,” I said, though I could feel my ears red-hot still from the brief encounter with Betsy.

“You look like you got goddamned beets on the side of your head,” he said. “Over Betsy Parker?”

Just hearing her name made my stomach flutter. “Shut up,” I argued meakly.

Brooder smacked my back and spit a long black stream of tobacco on the ground next to my feet. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

And so, I kept my feelings for Betsy as quiet as I could bear. The rules for girls (and women I suppose) remained (and continue to remain) a mystery to me. There were intricacies to the girls’ rules. Nuances that escaped me. All I knew was that even after Betsy kissed me on the Parkers’ kitchen floor, she still pretended that she and I weren’t friends when we were at school. This was a charade I was willing to act out, however, because as soon as school let out, the world started spinning in the right direction again. When the last bell had rung for the day, and we made our way across the playing fields toward home, Betsy’s affectations of cool ambivalence toward me disappeared, our friendship restored in an instant.

It was fun breaking the rules. As far as we knew, we were the only boy and girl in our grade who were carrying on such an illicit relationship. If I’d been older, I might have compared our after-school trysts to the kinds kept by married men and their mistresses. But I was thirteen, and it just felt like we were doing something dangerous. Every cold shoulder in gym class, every snide remark, every snub was simply part of a necessary performance. It was okay, because I knew that it was just pretend and that out of sight of the school, as we ran across the expanse of wet green grass, she would reach out for my hand, dragging me behind her terrific strides. Home again. Where Betsy and I were best friends.

And then in the spring of 1959, Mindy Wheeler moved to town, and all of the rules (for both boys and girls) flew out the proverbial window. Mindy Wheeler was fourteen; rumor had it she’d been kept back at her old school, which was either in North Carolina or North Dakota—no one knew for sure. She had hair the color of hay, and boobs. Big ones. She was also almost six feet tall, a better basketball player than anyone in our whole school. Mindy Wheeler had the mouth of a sailor and the body of a goddess. She was the source of great confusion for all of us (boys
and
girls). What was one to do with someone like Mindy Wheeler?

It started when Howie Burke invited her to play a game of three-on-three during recess.
Invited
probably isn’t the right word;
allowed
might be better. When she grabbed the ball off the court midgame, dribbled it down to the rusty hoop, and made an easy layup, of the six boys, myself included, who had been arguing over whether or not a noogie constituted a foul, no one made a move to stop her. And Howie, perpetrator of the aforementioned noogie, said, “Okay, sub-in The Girl. Gauthier, you’re out.” And with that, everything I had come to accept as proper behavior became meaningless.

Boys openly fawned over Mindy Wheeler. She rendered poor Ray speechless. Even Brooder softened around her. On any given day, any one of my peers could be found stumbling and stuttering before her. We both feared her and worshipped her. And the girls, surprisingly, adored her. You’d have thought that a girl of Mindy’s stature, of her power to subvert an entire set of established social mores and, if nothing else, of her mere pectoral endowment, would have been more intimidating to the girls of Two Rivers Graded School. But instead, they fawned over her as well. They stumbled and stuttered. They feared and worshipped. Betsy Parker included.

Still, I didn’t see it coming.

I lived for the last bell. Usually after school, Betsy was mine again. After school, we could give up the pretense. Feigning indifference for six straight hours was a certain kind of torture for me. After school, at Betsy’s house, we spent hours going through her mother and father’s drawers, looking for forbidden things. We looked at her father’s dirty magazines, filled condoms with water and threw them over the fence into Mr. Lowe’s yard. We studied the complicated lingerie her mother left behind and her father’s jock straps. We once found a douche bag on the top shelf of a closet, and when Betsy explained what it was used for, I found myself so flustered I could barely speak. On less mischievous days, we mostly hunkered down in Betsy’s room listening to records, eating peanut butter straight out of the jar, and planning the next adventure. But after Mindy’s arrival, I couldn’t count on anything. Sometimes instead of racing home with me, Betsy would linger after school with Mindy, doing penny drops on the monkey bars or playing H-O-R-S-E. On those days I’d shove my hands in my pockets and kick dirt all the way home. Resign myself to another afternoon spent watching Brooder terrorize the little kids who were just trying to get home too. Betsy would always catch up with me later, but by then I was sunk so deep in self-pity even Betsy couldn’t pull me out.

It was spring then, and Betsy’s latest scheme was a complex one aimed at framing Howie Burke in an April Fool’s prank. Howie was notorious for his own annual April Fool’s high jinx. He bragged endlessly about the rotten eggs he had thrown, the houses he had toilet-papered, the tires he had flattened. His crowning achievement (and the source of Betsy’s greatest fury) being the shaving cream fiasco of 1957, when he broke into Betsy’s father’s barbershop and stole a case of Barbasol, which (to add insult to injury) he used to write “Besty Praker Eats Boogers”(Howie was likely dyslexic, though back then we just thought he was stupid) in the windows of Two Rivers Graded School. Betsy and Howie had been sparring since the second grade, when Betsy started the war by beating Howie in a recess footrace. Sometimes her passion for getting back at Howie verged on the manic, and I found myself feeling jealous. I never seemed to incite much of anything in Betsy; even when she and I were pretending to dislike each other at school, I got little more than a tongue stuck out. Eyes crossed.

Howie had a crush on our English teacher, Miss Bean. (The rules were different when it came to boys and pretty teachers too. We
all
loved Miss Bean. We all openly adored her.) However, of all of us, Howie’s infatuation was the most intense, and Betsy Parker knew it.

“I’ve
got
it,” Betsy said one Friday afternoon when Mindy was occupied with something, or someone, else and I was contentedly playing second fiddle. We were sitting on Betsy’s bedroom floor drinking our third and fourth Cokes respectively. (Betsy’s dad had a refrigerator in the basement, which was always stocked with extra sodas.)

“Got what?” I asked.

“We’re going to TP Miss Bean’s house,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. Though my heart sang every time Betsy spoke in the plural, the thought of doing anything like this to Miss Bean seemed like sacrilege.

“We’re going to TP the house, put eggs in the mailbox, AND shaving cream her car.”

I shook my head. “We can’t.”

“Yes,
we
can,” she said. “If you wear this Superman mask,” she said, raising a lone eyebrow and reaching under her bed. She pulled out a plastic mask identical to the one that Howie Burke had worn for the last three consecutive pranks. (He was known to work in disguise.)

“And
you
?” I asked.

“Lois Lane?” she said, smiling in the way that made my knees feel like oatmeal. The idea of sneaking around in the dark with Betsy was almost more than I could stand.

“We can’t,” I said then, laughing and shaking my head. “Miss Bean didn’t do anything. That’s just mean.”

“
You
like her
too
?” Betsy asked, accusingly.

“No,”
I said, reaching for the mask, wondering if Betsy was jealous. Hoping Betsy was jealous. But I
did
like Miss Bean. I liked Miss Bean in her sweater sets and pastel pumps that matched. I liked the way she smelled like toothpaste and patted the top of my head when I said something insightful in class.

“She’ll know it’s not Howie,” I said.

“How?”

“Because Howie’s like six feet tall,” I said. (I was a late bloomer. I wouldn’t see six feet until I was sixteen. And then, as if my bones were making up for lost time, I would grow another four inches between my junior and senior years in high school.)

“True,” she said sadly, and hung the mask on her bedpost.

Relieved, I picked up my Coke and drained the last few sweet drops. “We’ll get him back someday,” I offered, closing my lips tightly around
we
.

I figured out what happened during English class when Miss Bean slammed her books down on her desk and said, “Well, I hope you enjoyed your little prank. Very funny.”

I heard giggles. Girl giggles.

I turned around and saw that Betsy was sitting next to Mindy, who was whispering something in her ear. Betsy was smiling. My heart dropped with the realization of what happened. Of course,
Mindy.
Mindy who was almost six feet tall. I felt like I was melting into my seat.

Howie sat in the front row as he always did, eyes wide and full of love.

“
Very
funny,” Miss Bean said again, her voice shaking now. She looked out over us and frowned, her eyes teary. Then she opened her desk drawer and pulled out a shoe box. She took the lid off, and the smell of rotten eggs filled the room. She went to Howie’s desk and set the box down. “I just got a letter from my fiancé,” she said. “He’s in the service. He’s stationed in Germany. I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”

Howie looked confused as he peered into the box. When he reached in and pulled out the dripping wet letter, I heard Betsy gasp.

“April Fools,”
Miss Bean said, crying now, and then she rushed out of the room.

Howie sat there, dumb. We all sat there, dumb.

After school, Betsy came running up to me as I made my way across the soccer field. “I should have listened to you,” she said, reaching for my hand.

I nodded my head. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, because I know how much you like Miss Bean. We didn’t know there was a letter from her boyfriend in there,” she said, running after me as I quickened my pace. “We did it because of Howie.”

I kept walking as fast as I could.

“I’m sorry, Harper,” she said. “We didn’t do it to be mean to Miss Bean.”

I stopped and looked at her. She had two braids and both of them were coming undone.

“It was stupid,” she said. “Really stupid.”

And she had no idea that though I felt bad for Miss Bean and her stinky, soggy letter, I felt worse for me. Because Betsy had picked Mindy Wheeler as her coconspirator. Because she and Mindy had their
own
secret, and that it had nothing to do with me. I went home sulking and mad. I didn’t answer the phone when she called, and didn’t answer the door when she came over.