Pretty Leslie (14 page)

He liked to scratch. It was not his fault that scratching made the itch worse—that was the malignant ordering of the universe, and it seemed to him he was obedient to its fundamental law when he scratched until his skin was puffy and bleeding. Then the poisoned areas burned almost beyond belief.

It was a bad week for everyone, for the community, for the family, for Peg, for Ben. They didn't know what to do with themselves. No doubt those who really belonged to the family—as he did not—resented him as a burden but could imagine no way to dispose of him.

On Friday night, at a country revival meeting, he killed Billy Kirkland.

It would seem later that the action was planned—though it would seem, too, that
he
had not and couldn't have planned it and certainly no one else had.

Because there was already a crowd of cars parked around the church when they arrived for the meeting, Uncle George parked the Chevy in the steeply slanted lane that led up to the graveyard. The tops of the front fenders, even, showed above the velvet gray horizon to the leaning occupants, and the women wondered aloud if the brake would hold on such an incline. George, who was cross about being late, had jumped out to demonstrate that it would hold by thrusting his shoulder against the windshield frame. “It's also in gear,” he told them haughtily—a voice preparing the destruction to come, giving precise instructions for what would only be a plan when it was enacted.

They had hurried from the perched car into the already crowded church. Inside it was like an oven, like some van hauling the not yet dead off the surface of the earth to some unnameable rendezvous with the powers of night. The insistent rustle of discomfort, the ache of trouble in the voices that sang the hymns, the demoralized stridency of the sermon were like a common doom already suffered.

A wind seemed to be buffeting the walls. Every sound inside seemed to block another sound that would have been heard from without. Surely there were wagons and horses passing, armed men on their way to a battle! Surely this church was threatened like a shack in the path of a flood!

Ben stood for a while against the rear wall between Peg and Aunt Louise. He had never listened to sermons and he could not have listened to this one if he had tried. Sweat began to trickle and burn on his ravaged skin like sizzling grease poured over him. The fragments of exhortation he heard from the pulpit seemed to bear on some failed duty to the suffering dog. He felt himself not only physically tormented but rebuked. The images he had spent his nights with since the Fourth of July became more vivid than the ranks of nodding heads above the benches in front of him.

He made a gruesome face and showed his sweating blisters to Peg. “Go,” she whispered. As if she understood the plan and were telling him it was time to find his relief.

Billy was loafing on the front steps when he went out. Under the fatigued light from a bulb over the door, the boy's shadow fell on the concrete steps like an already shattered thing. A sign?

Moths and June bugs whirled insanely around the light. Thus God would see the planets in their statelier orbits, perhaps, and in years to come Ben Daniels would bring the recollected image of this night and these insects to his thoughts about astronomy, believing sometimes that the whole continuity of his mental life began with some vision he was made to endure on that hot evening.

Billy spat at his shoes as he went past. He shouldn't have. They were brown-and-white saddle shoes that Aunt Peg had helped him polish in preparation for the service.

“I said I'd rabbit-punch you,” Billy said. He shouldn't have said that.

Ben went on down the steps without looking squarely at the other boy. He went nearly to the perimeter of light from the bulb above the church door. Among the fenders of Essexes, Fords, and Chevys he stopped and turned around. What he must do began to seem very clear to him. “Billy!” he called softly.

Slowly, swaggeringly, Billy came down the steps toward him. “That dog died,” Billy said. “My dad found him down the draw from Stevenson's barn. I saw him. I told you to leave him alone.” He shouldn't have said that.

“I don't care,” Ben said. “I don't care about a dog.”

Ten feet away, Billy paused and eyed him suspiciously. “Well, you was sure taking on about it the other day. George said you went crazy about it. Maybe you're crazy now. Are you crazy?”

“I'm not crazy. I'm going to go sit in the car where it's cooler.”

“Well, are you still mad?”

“I'm not mad.”

“Well,” Billy said relaxing, “you shouldn't have taken it so hard. People will think you're crazy.”

“Want to come sit in the car with me?” Ben asked breathlessly.

“Naa. What for?”

“To talk,” Ben said. He had nothing more to offer and he raged with the lack of bait, blaming that too on the boy he was going to kill, as if every deprivation and every threat had been embodied now in that droopy, unguarded figure confronting him.

“I don't want to talk,” Billy said.

“I want to tell you something,” Ben pleaded. Tides of slime and revulsion sloshed in his head. Chastely, blaming all the filth on Billy, he said, “I heard Alberta peeing.”

“Aw,” Billy said. His face remained stolid for a minute. Then he grinned and ambled forward. “Aw,” he said, “that's nothing. I've heard grown-up women.”

The vessel of all filth and stink and meanness followed him now up a lane smelling of fresh-cut weeds. Horned and hairy and poisonous as a toad, dripping with unmentionable nastiness.

There. Delivered
.

“Hey,” Billy said when Ben tripped him. “Gawdam you, sneak,” he croaked when Ben kicked him in the head with his freshly shined shoes. He was on his knees squealing from the pain of his smashed nose when the poised Chevy rolled backward over him with Ben clinging in terror and glee to the steering wheel, hearing his own scream rise up toward the stars, mounting over the still trees around the church, circling gossamer and terrible and henceforward inescapable in the everlasting night.

He was on the running board, riding the car down, when it smacked into Reverend Carlson's Essex and stopped. The impact threw him onto the dusty grass and he lay there a minute on his back before he screamed again. Or yelled. Something had been torn free of his throat. It felt loosened. It felt like his own throat again.

He lay there until he heard the sound of many feet running from the church. Then he rose shakily and watched them come. Now he knew them. He understood why they were coming. It all seemed very reasonable to him now. He had smashed his uncle's car and another one. Probably they would punish him. He had not forgotten Billy and the dog, but now they seemed, both of them, quite unimportant.

chapter 8

W
ASHED IN THE BLOOD
of Billy Kirkland, he was born again that night outside a country church in Kansas. And in the years to come what he could remember of his life before that night had always some quality of the incredible as well as the indefinite—as if it were some story told him by a forgotten tormentor who had not so much known the truth of fact as known the ways in which he could be moved to shivers and tears. Even the rash on his skin seemed like something told to him—and it sounded horrible—by someone about his own age who knew the cruelest way to tease.

The rash had been nearly gone by the morning after Billy's death, and with it had gone all that was definite in his mind about the killing.

The county sheriff had come to his Uncle George's home to question him before morning, of course, doing his mournful and bewildering duty the best he could. The sheriff was a taciturn, pudgy, grizzled man who had seen more trouble in the AEF than ever after his return to the prairies. He could not quite get his mind to close on the idea that a crime had been committed, nor could he be content to rest in the law's compromise that no one of Ben's age could commit a crime so vast. “We'll all feel better if we know,” he said several times. He was never to have an assurance that might have restored his feeling about the world as a sensible place where a good man's duty was clear.

Ben might have wanted to help the sheriff. He wanted at first to help everyone know whence their grief had come and what it meant. At least he had no impulse to lie. He was not frightened by the sheriff's presence or by the knowledge that Billy had been dead before anyone from the church got to him. That seemed too bad, but it seemed also dreadfully remote—something that had happened about the time of his father's death, maybe. And of his father's death he could not tell anyone very much, whatever his intention might be. Once he said, “These boys were going up to talk in the car.”

“What boys?” the sheriff wanted to know. “It was just you and Billy, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“It all happened in the dark,” Aunt Peg said. She was sitting on the front room sofa with Ben, her arm around his shoulders. Uncle George was sitting on the other side with his head resting in one large hand, staring at a curved shadow the table lamp cast on the rug. “You have to realize that the kind of boy Ben is, he's more touched by this than even Billy's parents. If he says he doesn't remember something, he doesn't remember. He's had a bad week.”

“He remembered having a fight with Billy on Fourth of July,” the sheriff said. “What I can't understand is why, if you weren't friends, you was going up to talk in the car together.”

“Kids get over those things,” Peg said.

“I remember it was about some dog,” Ben said, wondering. He could not recall how the dog had suffered under the bridge. He could not remember how those queer-looking blistered patches on his bare arms had itched only a few hours before. “He said he'd rabbit-punch me.”

“Did he try to fight you tonight?” the sheriff asked. “Did he call you names? Was he chasing you?”

“These boys were going up to the car to talk. I don't know what they were going to talk about.” If he had known Billy Kirkland better, surely he'd have some idea of what Billy was interested in.

“Now, Ben,” the sheriff said, “Billy's mother and dad loved him just like your uncle and aunts love you, and they'll feel better if they know just how it happened.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

The sheriff waited with sorrowful expectancy. “Yes what?” he prompted after a while.

“I think they would,” Ben said. He wanted to cry because somewhere outside the lamplit circle of this room a boy was dead and his parents were mourning for him. Perhaps it was a situation that had been repeated on this night many times all over the world. “I wish you'd find out and tell them,” he said. “I wish I knew what happened.”

“Can't you let him sleep now?” Peg pleaded. “Hasn't he been through enough already?”

The sheriff nodded. “We've got to think there's another boy and he's dead. I'm not trying to be mean, ma'am.”

“I wish it hadn't of happened,” Ben said. Then he was crying, without strength to stop or strength to remember the best reason for his tears. Only it seemed too bad that there were dead boys somewhere and no one knew how it had happened.

“Maybe he'll remember more tomorrow,” the sheriff said. “I think you're right. He don't remember now. I don't think he's lying.”

And of course the quality of rest he was now able to enjoy—now that Billy was murdered—might have restored him to the point at which he could have remembered all that they wanted (or didn't want) to hear. His mind was formless and empty of intent as that of a well-nursed infant, ready to take the mold that was applied to it. At the same time, he was not an infant, and the substance of memory—all of it—lay in his mind waiting to be summoned to give this answer or that, depending on the next day's requirements.

If it had lain within the imagination of Green Rock, of Billy's parents, the sheriff, or of those closest to him, to charge murder, he would in all likelihood have agreed to the charge.

Changed so utterly, he was ready to say yes to anything. That was what his rebirth meant. In some strange way he was ready to begin life as whoever They said he was.

Later it would seem unlikely that even Billy's parents would have dared to conceive the actuality and call it by its right name. The loss of their son was enough for them to live with. Even in the initial shock some healing mildness would have cautioned them not to stir their fingers in horror beyond their capacity to stare at. They would have to call it an accident, just as the sheriff would, just as everyone would.

And whether they would have “felt better” to know a few more details of how death came, they never had a chance to find out. By ten the next morning Peg had seen Green Rock's only lawyer, had weighed as much as she needed to the legal risks involved in taking Ben out of the state.

“We're going to lose another one unless I get him away,” she said to Uncle George and Aunt Louise. “He can't stand it. I know his mother and I know him. He's not strong. And what the other kids will say to him, what they'll always say. If he gets by a week, will he get by the next? I won't let him stay to see.”

“I suppose if he did a wrong, his own conscience will punish him,” Uncle George agreed.

“Something's punished him enough already,” Peg said. “Never any more. We're going.”

So at three that afternoon they were on an eastbound train, as much fugitives from the law as he was a murderer, neither ever to be determined because both to be forgotten, dropped away, every mile of flight becoming a creation of a life that somewhere had to be better.

In a huge, threatful sunset they crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph that afternoon. Peg leaned on him as they both stared down from the train window at the brown, summery flood. On her reflection in the window he saw a faint, determined smile, saw it relax and soften as she said, “Tonight when you're asleep we'll cross the Mississippi. I've never been that far before. Ben, you don't understand now, but we're going to have a good life.” That promise was to herself as well as to him.