What Dies in Summer (18 page)

He told me later that the flags were still at half-mast when he got there. The cadet corps had turned out in full dress on the parade ground and a four-man honor guard met him in the quad and
escorted him to the commandant’s office.

Later Mr. Campion, looking across at me from inside some other reality, said, “Military’s got good ceremonies for death.” Wiping at his nose with the handkerchief, he circled
back to the center of his pain as if being pulled by some irresistible gravity, saying, “Sergeant major told me Dee had to’ve made at least a couple of runs at it. Didn’t think he
could’ve gotten that much penetration in one try.”

Mr. Campion was never the same after that. When he hugged me at the funeral I could feel that he was old and broken now, his voice thin and his hands shaking. I knew he could never really
believe in himself again, his courage lost forever.

As for me, I kept wondering about odd things, like whether they’d given Dee’s painting stuff back to Mr. Campion along with the body, and why it seemed like such a strange joke that
the funeral home had fixed Dee up to make it look like nothing was wrong with him. And how Mrs. Campion had won the battle over how to dress Dee; he was in the shiny blue suit he wore for church
instead of his Halberd uniform.

In the chapel Mr. Campion brought me up to sit with him and Mrs. Campion in the section reserved for the family, leaving Gram and L.A. and Diana in their pew two rows back. As I sat beside her,
Mrs. Campion gave my hand a squeeze and touched a tissue to the corners of her eyes. I tried to get my tie straight and concentrate on the service, but all I could really think about was how things
had worked out, and how I didn’t belong up here with Dee’s parents. I thought about losing Dee this way and about having no father of my own. I thought about how it must feel when your
only son dies.

Now Dee had stopped everything. Set it in stone. Now nothing could ever be repaired.

“
What’s it like to be an orphan?
” he had once asked me.
He is sitting in the swing next to me at the park looking off into the distance where a bunch of small kids
are kicking a soccer ball around on the open green.

“
I’m not really an orphan,” I say, a little irritated for no reason I can understand. I eat a couple of animal crackers from the box we bought at the 7-Eleven on our way
here.

“
I know. But in another way you are. Do you ever dream your dad’s alive?”

“
Once in a while.”

“
Like everything’s okay again? Like him being dead was a bad dream, and you woke up from it?”

I look at him. “How do you know about stuff like that?” I say.

He shrugs. “No reason.” He bites his thumbnail.

“
C’mon, there’s always a reason.”

“
I dream sometimes.”

“
That your dad’s dead or something?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
Then what?”

He stares at his thumb. “Me,” he finally says. “I dream that I’m the dream.”

“
You? What do you mean?”

“
I’m the dream everybody wakes up from.”

That was what I was thinking about as I looked for the last time at Dee in his casket, understanding clearly now that his story and mine could never be separate again, that he would live forever
in my mind, and die there forever too.

THE DAY AFTER
Dee’s funeral I was sitting with L.A. in the living room, pretending to be interested in the Cubs-Giants game on TV, but it was
really L.A. who had my attention. She was sitting in the green chair reading
The Long Walk
by Slavomir Rawicz, so I knew her mind was in Siberia. The family showdown at Gram’s was
still echoing in my mind, and I wondered how L.A. had gotten herself back together like this already, having no understanding yet of such things or even of how little I knew about them.

The frizzed ends of her cutoff jeans were fluffy blue bands around her brown thighs, and her hair, which looked wilder than usual, was fringed with a halo of sunlight from the window behind her.
Hundreds of hot-looking little specks of dust drifted slowly in the air between us. She turned a page, and the flecks floating in front of her moved around a little faster for a while. But they
still weren’t going anywhere.

On the television screen the center fielder came trotting in and took an easy fly to end the inning. As I looked at L.A.’s smooth skin I thought about Cam’s white fingers and how
they moved like spiders over the strings of his guitar when he practiced, usually in his bare feet as he sat on his living room couch, his toes spreading and curling in sympathy with the fingers. I
remembered how skillful his hands were and how the nails on his picking hand were long and slightly bent, orange with nicotine, grooved like horn. I imagined those hands on L.A.’s skin,
everything Mom and Aunt Rachel had said coming back to me in a choking rush, and I began to wonder if going crazy worked on the same principle as burning out a fuse by plugging in too many
appliances at once. It occurred to me that if you were smart enough, maybe you could somehow learn to turn off your thoughts temporarily when the circuits got overloaded, which could be a big help
to me in some situations.

Like right now.

I got up, turned off the set and walked into the kitchen. I looked in the fridge and the cabinets without finding anything I could get interested in. Then I suddenly understood for the first
time that the emptiness I felt had nothing to do with actual hunger, that it wasn’t in my stomach but somewhere in space behind me, just out of sight. I went back into the living room and
switched on the stereo without looking to see what was in the slot. It turned out to be an old Johnny Mathis
Greatest Hits
collection, and his light, smooth voice started in about “The
Twelfth of Never,” a number that somehow always caused a tightening in my throat. I walked over to the couch and sat down.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re gonna use up your brain with all that reading.”

L.A. looked up at me. “Still be ahead of you,” she said.

“No shit.”

“You tired of baseball?”

“I’m thinking about Dee.”

“What about him?”

“I just keep remembering how he was.”

“You mean about liking guys?”

“Yeah. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to feel that way.”

“So ask a girl.”

Johnny Mathis sang about the poets running out of rhyme, and the end of time.

“Wouldn’t help,” I said. I took a deep breath. “What’s really on my mind is, it’s like all those times when Dee was with me it was one thing for me and
something else for him. Like the world was completely different for the two of us.”

Until the twelfth of never
, sang Johnny.

“Okay,” said L.A., tilting her head to the side and watching me. She put a folded Baby Ruth wrapper in the book as a marker and laid the book on the end table beside her.

“What I mean is, what the hell difference does it make what he thought, right?” Tears were coming up in my eyes again, and I tried angrily to stop them.

L.A. waited.

“Like if he put his hand on my knee the way he did that time, it didn’t really have anything to do with me. Because he was still in his world, not mine.”

I guess L.A. had given up on my sanity by this time because she didn’t say anything, just stared at me like you might at some foreigner who won’t stop yakking at you even though
it’s obvious you don’t understand a word he’s saying.

“It didn’t change anything about me at all,” I said. “It didn’t matter who Dee was seeing when he looked at me. It wasn’t really me he was
touching.”

At least this seemed to make some kind of sense to L.A. “Yeah,” she said. “So?”

“So everything about you that really counts is still okay.” I caught a flash of her
back off
expression, and swallowed dryly. “No matter what happened,” I
said.

There was something different in L.A.’s face now. Today was her day to see Dr. Ballard, and I hoped I wasn’t somehow setting her back in her treatment. But I just couldn’t shut
myself up. I brushed at my eyes.

“Some things they can’t touch,” I said, and swallowed again.

For a long time it was so quiet I could hear the small whirring between the ticks of the clock on the mantel across the room. I looked down at my hands, then back up at L.A.

I’m not sure, but I think she nodded.

WE HAD FINISHED
the supper dishes and L.A. and Gram were in the living room watching TV. After wiping the table down I dug around in the junk drawer at
the end of the counter by the back door until I found the stump of a citronella candle and two wooden matches. Then I cracked ice cubes from one of the metal freezer trays into a big glass, filled
it with sweetened sun tea from the pitcher in the fridge and walked out to where the wrought-iron chairs were arranged around the patio table beside the garden. It was almost full dark. I set the
candle in the little dish on the table and scratched a match on the flagstones to light the bent black wick.

As the candle pointed its short yellow flame straight up and filled the still air with a soapy smell a couple of birds woke up and flittered around for a minute in the pecan branches above me. I
looked carefully around the yard for any sign of an intruder, and when I saw nothing out of place decided it must have been my arrival, and maybe the lighting of the candle, that had awakened the
birds. I sat down to watch the lightning bugs as they circled and glided over the grass I’d cut with the old Sears push mower that morning. I breathed in the watermelon smell of the St.
Augustine, thinking about Dee, the girl L.A. and I had found and the other two, and wondered what it felt like to die. What it would be like to have a sword through your chest or to choke to
death.

The green lines and loops of the fireflies in the air gave the impression that some slow invisible hand was trying to write an important message on the darkness but kept getting puzzled and
stopping in the middle of letters. I remembered the days when L.A. and I had chased lightning bugs together and filled jars with them to carry through the darkness like magical lanterns, but that
time seemed as long ago to me as the Mesozoic right now. I thought about how the world had looked and smelled and sounded then, wondering if this was what it was like to be old.

The sky in the west wasn’t completely black yet but the night was already so thick with the sound of crickets and tree frogs and cicadas that the air seemed almost solid, and I could hear
a mockingbird singing its night songs in the top of the cedar elm behind Mrs. McReady’s house. The candle flame cast a wavery circle of light on the flagstones and carpet grass around me, and
beyond that I could just see the silvered redwood fence covered with frangipani and white jasmine at the back and along the south side of the yard. At the other edge of the garden was a mossy
concrete birdbath with a bronze figure of a round-bellied little boy standing on goat feet and playing a funny-looking harmonica. Looking out from the candlelight, I could make out the shapes of
some of the plants, the showy blue irises, pink and yellow verbenas and lantanas, gladiolus in a dozen colors, the sentinel hollyhocks at the back of the garden, some of them taller than the fence,
their pale blooms like ghosts against the darkness behind them. Along the fence to my right were the big hydrangeas that Gram sometimes dosed with coffee grounds or old nails or baking soda to
adjust the color of the blooms.

But no matter how hard I tried to keep my mind on thoughts like these, I kept coming back to the subject of dying. I pushed against my throat with my fingers until I couldn’t breathe in,
then took the pressure off. It didn’t take much of a push at all to stop the flow of air. For years I’d been unable to get the idea of burning to death out of my mind, and now this.

I’d once managed to hold my breath for over sixty seconds without even getting mentally fuzzy, which taught me something about how long a minute could be. When the man had first taken
Tricia, I knew, without understanding how I knew, that she’d tried to tell herself she was only being raped, and thought,
This is what it’s like.
But she’d really known
better. Later, when she’d realized what he was about to do to her breasts, she’d hoped and prayed that would be enough for him, even felt a little bit relieved, and said in her mind,
Okay, do that if you have to and then please be satisfied, please let me live, let me go home
, because she’d wanted to believe that surely he wouldn’t have to do anything more
awful to her than that. But then it couldn’t have been long before she’d understood that doing that to her wasn’t going to be nearly enough for him, and she must have wondered why
this man she’d probably never seen before hated her so much.

I remembered her dead, sleepy-looking eyes and peaceful expression. I’d heard that when the policeman told her mother what had happened she’d shaken her head like the deal
wasn’t necessarily done yet and gotten down on her knees on her living room floor, taken the officer’s hand in hers, kissed it front and back and asked him to please stop saying her
only child was dead.

How someone like the killer could just walk around in the common world in the middle of everybody and not be noticed, I still couldn’t imagine. It seemed unbelievable, like having a tiger
in your bathtub without knowing it. This thought reminded me of something Gram had once read to L.A. and me, a poem about a burning tiger in the forests of the night and an immortal eye.

Were there beasts that could only be seen in darkness? Or by an immortal eye?

One thing that never got far from the center of my thoughts was the image of Hot Earl with his gap-toothed grin, like a human jack-o’-lantern. Not a pretty picture, but at least Earl was
no tiger.

But I couldn’t completely shake the idea that there really was something out there. I gathered my courage and tried to open myself, to extend my senses out into the night, to feel the
tiger as it burned. It was nearby, I could tell, breathing softly, waiting. Somehow knowing me, knowing all of us, hungrily accepting the touch of my thoughts, purring like distant thunder with
anticipation.