What Dies in Summer (21 page)

But she was damn strict on certain points.

“You absolutely must keep condoms with you at all times,” she said. “Here, let me have your billfold.” When I handed it to her, she opened it and said, “Yes, this
will be fine. Leave the wrappers on and keep them right in here. That way you’ll always have them with you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Later I looked Hubert up and asked, “What’s a condom?”

“Same thing as a rubber, man,” he said. “Don’t you know nothing?” He pulled out his own billfold, and damn if he didn’t have two rubbers in the secret
compartment. I could see the circles they’d made in the leather, so I knew they’d been there awhile. A day or two later he brought me three of my own in individual foil packages. He
wasted one by unrolling it and trying unsuccessfully to pull it down over his fist, playing with it, snapping it and blowing it up like a balloon. “Make a hell of a water bomb,” he
pronounced. He watched as I stuffed the remaining two into my billfold. “Now you’re all set,” he said.

It felt weird at first, like carrying concealed weapons, but eventually I got used to it. I tried to adjust my thinking around the need to keep my billfold from falling into Gram’s or
L.A.’s hands, which was going to be tricky because of the mysterious way their curiosity and powers of detection were always amplified by me having something to hide. But I was determined.
For all I knew this was something else L.A. would punch me for if she found out, and I didn’t even want to imagine what Gram’s reaction would be.

Another time, Dr. Kepler and I talked about boxing. She seemed to know a lot about the sport for a woman, and it sounded like Gram had told her about Jack and me and the lessons. We talked about
different champions and styles of fighting for a while, then she sighed and closed her eyes, saying, “You never wanted to learn any of this in the first place, did you, James?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before. I thought about it for a few seconds. “No ma’am,” I said.

“And yet I’ll bet now you wish you knew even more than you do. Enough to turn the tables on him.”

I rubbed my eyes, remembering how the universe had turned blood-red that day with Jack. “No,” I said. “I mean yes. I don’t know. I wish somebody would tell me
what’s right to feel.”

“I can tell you it’s not wrong to hate a true enemy, James, no matter what you may hear in Sunday school. Any other feeling would be a violation of nature. But you must take care to
maintain the distinction between thought and deed. Ideas and emotions are not good or bad. They come like birds in the air, beyond our control. But our words and actions are a matter of choice, and
they will always have consequences.” She put her hand on mine. “Do you see?”

I nodded. This I understood perfectly, because of the huge gap that had always existed between what I felt about Jack and what I’d ever been able to do about it.

“Tell me about your father, James.”

“My father?” I said, surprised by the sudden change of gears and unsure how to answer.

“Who was he really? Was he a good man? Did you love him?”

Hearing this, I saw myself once again in our kitchen in Jacksboro:
Our last breakfast as a family
—
Mom in her yellow bathrobe setting out cereal, orange juice and coffee, Dad in
his jeans, boots and a red plaid snap-front shirt, smelling leathery and smoky, headed for the auction barn with the horse trailer, everything okay between him and Mom, the orange sun just coming
up beyond the live oaks outside the kitchen window. Dad pulling away in his old Ford longbed, the trailer bouncing and rattling along behind. That night a state trooper appearing at the door,
speaking briefly to Mom as I watch from the hall in my pajamas, Mom swinging back from the door as if she has been hit, her arm out for support that isn’t there, falling on her butt next to
the easy chair.

“He was real good with horses,” I said. “I think he drank too much, and I know he got into fights sometimes, but he loved us. He took good care of us.”

“All was well, then?”

I looked down at the floor, wondering if I had any right to answer.

“He and Mom yelled at each other a lot,” I said. “She says he ran around with other women. Sometimes she talked about leaving him.”

“Do you think she would have?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she loved him too much.”

“And after that?”

“It took a long time for her to get over him dying.”

“What about you?”

“Me too,” I said, thinking how after Dad was gone it seemed like just Mom and me against the world. The emptiness in my chest never really left me, but in another way being with Mom
and having all her attention, without the fights between her and Dad, was the best time of my life. “But then she found Jack,” I said.

“What a shock that must have been for you.”

I shrugged.

“What were your thoughts then?”

“I couldn’t understand why she would want him. He’s nothing like Dad. But she said she loved him, he was there to stay and I’d just have to get used to it.”

“And you tried, didn’t you—tried very hard?”

I nodded miserably.

“If I believed in such things, James, I would call you both cursed and blessed,” Dr. Kepler said. “What others understand with ease and never question, you cannot fathom, and
that is your blessing. Your curse is that you grasp without effort so many things that most people will never comprehend.”

Deciding after a little thought that this pronouncement must fall in the category of a blessing, I said, “Are you really an existentialist?”

“Ho! That grandmother of yours has been talking about me, I see. Do you actually know what the word means?”

“No ma’am, not really. I guess it means you don’t believe in God.”

“What I believe, dear, is that perhaps God is beside the point. We are not given reliable instructions, we are not rescued from our troubles, and our obligations in the world remain the
same whether a supernatural being is watching us and keeping score or not. Do you understand?”

“Yes ma’am, I think I do.”

“But that isn’t what you believe.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think I know enough to have beliefs.”

“Ah, there you have put your finger on it, dear boy. Never accept that you must believe in order that you may know.” She looked at me for a long while. “Do you mind if I take
this off?” she said, touching the purple scarf that covered her head.

“No ma’am.”

She unwound the scarf and laid it on the nightstand. Her head was smooth as an egg.

“Are you offended?”

“No ma’am,” I said truthfully. To me she looked like a gentle alien.

She took my hand, laid it on her head and closed her eyes. Her scalp was warm and dry, and I could feel the blue veins under the surface. I looked at her tired face, wishing I was like one of
those tent preachers, my touch powerful enough to make her well. I actually tried it, mentally shouting for God to heal her, but I didn’t feel anything, and as far as I could tell she
didn’t either. When I finally drew my hand back she opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Perhaps there is yet some little hope for this race of perfumed baboons,” she said. “My dear boy.”

One day I asked her about the killings. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t figure out, sadness maybe, then said, “Unfortunately nature does make mistakes, James.
Sometimes very bad ones. There will always be monsters among us, but we cannot let that take from us our courage. There is still much that is good in the world.”

“What kind of monster do you think it is?”

“A man, if we may call him that, who takes pleasure in the pain and fear of others, who kills human beings for his own enjoyment, it is right to call him a monster. Hitler found many such
men to do his mad work. In other times a creature so misshapen inside might have been destroyed in childhood. Or perhaps made a shaman.”

“Do you think they’ll catch him?”

“I think he will catch himself,
mein lieber.
He will see to his own destruction.”

She sighed, her eyes fluttering and closing.

It was hell watching Dr. Kepler die, but there came a day when she made it much harder for me. It was a Friday afternoon, and it had been raining all day. In Dr. Kepler’s room time had
slowed almost to a standstill, the air around us seeming to listen for something. She lay still on her bed, her breathing barely noticeable.

“James,” she whispered, “have you ever given any thought to what life really is?” Her voice making me think of the wind in winter grass.

“No ma’am,” I said, unsure what she meant.

“The thing itself, life—what is it? Is it more than just having a pulse and curiosity and lust?”

I tried to think this through fully, because Dr. Kepler would never settle for less. I’d heard life called different things, like a gift or a trial, but those seemed like religious ideas
that wouldn’t satisfy anyone with a mind like Dr. Kepler’s. Finally an inspiration came to me. “It’s a responsibility,” I said. “Like a job.”

“Bravo,” she answered in a faint voice. I thought of the changes the doctor had made in her medications yesterday, wondering if that was why she seemed so used up today. Her face was
sort of carved away like desert rock, and her legs were like sticks under the covers. When she looked at me, I felt a kind of unreal heat from her eyes. She said, “And when our job is
accomplished, what then?”

Having no real idea how to answer, I said, “I guess we’re done.” Feeling goose bumps on the backs of my arms. Fighting off an image of myself turning in some cosmic resignation
letter at an unmanned desk on my way out the door and disappearing into endless darkness and silence.

Dr. Kepler pressed her head farther back into the pillow and stared up at the ceiling with a daydreaming look. She said, “I loved Sol Kepler almost every day for twenty-six years and eight
months, James. He was a solid, honest house of a man, and, like you, noble without knowing it. When the storms blew him away, nothing was left but worthless ground that could never be built on
again. Our two daughters dead before us, two amputations of the heart without anesthesia. I taught other people’s children all I could about how to think clearly and how to love nature. Now
I’ve said goodbye to that and to all of them, and I believe I am finished. Do you understand that, James?”

“Yes ma’am,” I lied.

“You know,” she said softly, “I lived forty-seven of my years before you were born. Almost half of this monstrous century. Nevertheless, I consider you my compeer and true
friend. I’m going to ask you to do something for me, a little thing to help me finish with my assignment.”

“Anything you need,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “All right, then, James, here is what I want you to do. Go into the kitchen and open the cabinet to the right of the sink. Find the bottle with the large round
white tablets, the ones with grooves on the side. Take at least a dozen of them and crush them into a powder in one of those little blue bowls that I use for desserts, and mix the powder with some
applesauce from the top shelf in the refrigerator. Bring the bowl to me with a spoon, then get the brandy from the pantry and pour me a glass of it. Can you do that?”

I stared at her and swallowed, my heart banging against my ribs. The room was so quiet it hurt my ears. I thought of all the things I’d messed up in my life, of how I hadn’t been
able to help Gramp, or stop Dad from dying or Jack from moving in with Mom and beating her up. There’d been nothing I could do to help L.A., and Dee was dead because of me. What the hell was
my life but a junkyard of failures? The word
responsibility
glowed in my mind as if spelled out in buzzing red neon. I stood up slowly from the cane chair beside Dr. Kepler’s bed,
setting aside the book I’d been reading to her earlier. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “I can.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet. The tablets were at the front of the shelf. I counted out twelve of them and put them in a bowl I found in the next cabinet. I took a heavy bread
knife from the silverware drawer and used its thick handle to smash the pills into a coarse powder, visualizing Tricia Venables’s dead face in the grass as I worked. Rain tapped against the
window and trailed its weak fingers down the glass as I got the applesauce from the fridge. I carried the jar to the counter and spooned some of the applesauce into the small bowl, then mixed the
powder into it with shaking hands. I took a water glass from the cabinet, set it by the sink and went over to get the brandy bottle. I unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, coughed and took
another, the liquor burning all the way down to the center of me. I poured some into the glass and carried it and the applesauce back to the bedroom.

Dr. Kepler’s eyes were closed, and I thought she might be asleep. I stood by her bed and held the bowl. “Ma’am,” I said, my tongue a clumsy paddle in my mouth.

She slowly opened her eyes. She seemed to be coming back from some far place, and she took a long time to recognize me, looking almost surprised to find me there beside her bed. Her eyes went to
the bowl, then came back to my face. Her lips moved slightly, as if she were going back over the words we’d spoken earlier. After what seemed like a long time, she suddenly said, “Oh,
NO, no no
no
! What could I have been thinking? Where is my mind? Oh, James, forgive me, please! I was so wrong to have asked this of you.”

I set the brandy and applesauce on the table, sat down in my chair at her bedside and hung my head.

“I was so mistaken,” she said. “I ask—I beg—your pardon.” Her hand was thin and cool as a bird’s foot as she reached across to touch my fingers and then
my knee.

Long minutes ticked away.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, not even trying to stop the hot tears falling down onto my stupid useless hands.

GRAM AND
L
.
A
. seemed unimpressed, but to me the outside of the municipal building downtown on Harwood
looked kind of monumental and dangerous at close range, with its huge white columns and curlicued ledges and squadrons of pigeons clattering around the top. On the other hand, the interior, at
least downstairs, was ho-hum, like a collection of assistant principals’ offices. The squad room upstairs was more interesting, with a few lazily rotating ceiling fans above maybe two dozen
desks placed in pairs back to back, and the smell of cigar smoke, leather and old coffee in the air. There was a businesslike, slightly menacing feel to the place, but the walls looked like they
hadn’t been painted since Cochise was a kid.