The Girl from Charnelle (37 page)

She saw the car where John and Willie and Mrs. Letig were. The windows were tinted lightly, but she could see them huddled in the backseat, heads down. She watched unabashedly. And then John turned to her, as if he knew she was looking, or as if her stare had compelled him. His face didn't change, though. It seemed frozen. Finally he blinked twice. Then he turned, expressionless, back to his wife and child.

Laura's father and Manny were pallbearers, and she watched them, along with the other men—John's brothers, Mrs. Letig's brother-in-law, three other men she didn't know—as they carried the closed casket slowly to the hearse. They stepped aside while the driver shut the door. The engine of the hearse started, and then her father motioned for her and Gene and Rich, who held her hands, to follow him. They walked quickly to the truck.

Along the way, the automobile engines, in a fitful commotion, started, the bodies of the cars and trucks shaking slightly. The beams of light came on, one by one, but you could barely tell in the harsh sunlight, only a dull silver sheen over the globes and the bumpers in front. And then finally, slowly, the phalanx of humming vehicles followed the dead boy to his grave.

E
very day since the funeral, she walked to the abandoned warehouse and waited. He didn't show up. She really didn't think he would. But each day she went with an electric sense of hope and dread, and she waited, telling herself,
No, he won't come.
Her breath quickened when each new car or truck turned the corner, and she could feel the pressure in her chest, thinking,
Yes, this will be him,
and when it wasn't, she thought,
Of course it's not him,
and she chastised herself for going back and forth, like a yo-yo. Her need to see him was, in part, practical. She still hadn't been able to tell him that it was a false alarm. She figured he'd want to know, would need to know, and so she kept coming day after day, as a kind of formless obligation. She'd rehearsed how she would tell him and had tried to predict what his reaction would be. She could even imagine him striking her, and at first she tried to dispel these thoughts, but soon she willed herself to think about that possibility because maybe she deserved it and so should prepare herself for its inevitability.

She was afraid to call again. She had worked out what she would say if Mrs. Letig answered the phone, and she had dialed the number and let it ring. Mrs. Letig answered, her voice dark and dull, as if drugged, and Laura knew that the lies from before would not be so easy now. She hung up.

She thought of sending him a note. Just something unsigned in code: “False alarm” or “Everything's okay.” But then she remembered his reaction to that first letter she'd sent. She'd wait it out. She'd just keep coming to this spot, or she would one day go with her father to their house, to take a meal, and she would tell him then. Slip a note to him, or whisper something in the hallway or kitchen when no one else was around. And then it would be done. Everything would be over. She longed for it all to be over. Some part of her never wanted to see the Letigs again. They would always remind her of this year, this accident, and her part in it. But she also felt bound to them in a way, and drawn to them as well, as if they were a powerful planet and she simply a moon orbiting them.

Her father had gone over twice to visit the Letigs, but he'd not asked her to go with him, and when he returned he seemed stunned and vague. She wanted details, specifics:
How did they look? What did they do? What did they say?
But she didn't feel it was appropriate to ask.

He just said, “It isn't good,” and shook his head. “It's sad,” he said. “They're having a rough go of it.” And he went to wash up for supper.

How? What do you mean? Tell me!

So she kept coming here to this place, hoping he would show up, telling herself that he wouldn't, but secretly believing that one day he would.

 

Waiting for him, in the increasing cold as the sun dropped lower in the horizon each afternoon, she relentlessly brooded over the events leading up to the accident, as if this time of waiting should be her penance. She had begun to wonder if Jack would still be alive if she and John had left. It seemed to her as if their staying had set in motion a chain reaction that had resulted in his death, and if they had gone, as they originally planned, if they had headed out of Charnelle, if they had started their lives over anonymously, even if their guilt over abandoning their families had torn them apart, creating only divisive shame and isolating regret, even if they had been permanently exiled from Charnelle, even if all of this had occurred, it would have
saved Jack because he would not have been in that truck with John that terrible night. He would have grown into a man, perhaps a man who hated his father, who hated Laura, who hated what they had done to his mother and his brother and himself, but all that bitterness, all that anger and pain that each and every one of them would have felt, would have been worth it because he would be alive right here, right now, and on into the future.

And why, she wondered, did Willie have to get sick, his ear so bad that he had to go to the hospital on that particular day and stop them and make them think it was a sign, a sign that had saved them from their own foolishness? Why had her period not come for so many days, alarming her and causing her to alarm John so that he could not concentrate on the icy road, and then why had it started just hours later? Why had Mrs. Letig asked her to watch Jack on the day that an ice storm descended so suddenly and unexpectedly on the Texas Panhandle? And why, out of all the accidents that occurred that day—the rigs turned on their sides, the spilled oranges across the white highway, the truckers stalled in the black ice and snow outside of Amarillo, the seven accidents that happened in Charnelle alone and the ninety-eight that happened that night in the Panhandle—why out of all of these accidents had the only fatality been this guiltless little boy, who did not deserve to die, and whose only wound, whose only scratch, had been a thin, jagged gash across his neck from the broken windshield?

And going back further, why had she and John met on that snowy New Year's Eve, and why had it been snowing then, almost as white and cold as the night of the accident, a warning, it seemed to her now, and why had she let him kiss her, and why had she kissed him the next time she saw him, urging him on, and why had they kept meeting when it was so clear that this was no good for either of them or their families? And why had she continued to see him after everything that happened at Lake Meredith, and why had she not heeded Gloria's warning to end it, to end it then and there, because, if prolonged, it could only result in disappointment and heartache? And why had he not heeded his own warnings of danger, danger to himself, to her, to their families? And why, for that matter, had they not been caught before this, when there were so many opportunities to be caught? There had been close calls, and it was miraculous, really, that they had not been caught, by Bob Cransburgh at the Armory that very first night, by her father during his poker game, or by Manny, who suspected something, she
knew, or by Rich or Gene, or Willie, or Jack, who came the closest that night while she hid in the Letigs' bedroom closet. Why didn't she heed the signs then? Why hadn't she just jumped off the trestle over the Waskalanti Creek, just jumped like Danny Lincoln when she felt the impulse to do so?

They had been lucky, she thought, so lucky, and yet what kind of luck is it that leads to this? She could imagine her father's rage, Mrs. Letig's anguish, John going to jail because of what they had done, could even imagine getting pregnant and desperately searching out Mrs. Aguilar or going shamefully to Dalhart or Amarillo and living with other teenage girls who didn't want, or wouldn't be allowed, to keep their babies, and it all would have been better than this.

And why, she finally wondered, had circumstances allowed them to go to Galveston together, giving her a maddening glimpse of what it would be like to have him to herself, making realistic a fantasy that propelled them into their crazy plan to escape Charnelle? And why did they continue to see each other after the huge failure of that fantasy, even though they both knew it was over? And why did they just keep passing the time, killing the time, refusing to end it cleanly, until all of these significant and insignificant events conspired to murder this little boy?

 

Two weeks after Thanksgiving, on a clear, chilly afternoon, she heard a car turning the corner, but she didn't look up at first. She had trained herself to wait before she looked, as if the waiting would lessen the disappointment, and when she did look, she saw the dark green Chevy, Mrs. Letig's car, rounding the corner. She darted behind the warehouse where she couldn't be seen, but when the car got closer, she could see it was John. Of course it was John, of course it would be the Chevy. The truck had flipped three times, the windshield shattered, the front end squashed like an accordion. She had driven with Manny and Joannie to see it at the junkyard, where it sat propped on blocks, like a county-fair spectacle. Bloodstains were still on the seats. It had been hosed down, but the stains had not come out. She expected Manny to make some bad joke, but he seemed as shaken by the sight as she was.

When John pulled up, she opened the door and got in, hunching down onto the floorboard.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked immediately.

“No,” she said.

He put his forehead on the steering wheel. He stayed that way for a long time, with the car engine idling. She didn't know what she should do. Get out? Stay there?

“John, I'm sorry—”

“No,” he said sharply, lifting his head. “Don't talk.”

“But—”

“I mean it. Don't say anything.”

Okay,
she thought,
okay. So this is how it will be.

Without looking at her, he shifted into drive, pressed the accelerator. She studied him. His hair was oily, and it shot out in different directions. He must not have washed or even combed it for days. His face had a small layer of bristles that covered the three raised scars on his cheeks. The scars were purplish red now but no longer scabbed over. Only a few dimpled dots of abrasions were left on his forehead and chin. Under his eyes were faint, green-yellow shadows. He didn't smile. He squinted ahead. New wrinkles seemed to have sprouted around his eyes and the corners of his lips—a network of faint, crosshatched lines.
Grief lines,
she thought.

He wore his brown leather jacket, a flannel shirt, and a T-shirt under it. His knuckles seemed unusually white on the steering wheel, and the sight of them made her feel suddenly afraid. He was not going fast, and she could see the familiar landscape of trees and houses and buildings and poles that she was accustomed to seeing from the floorboard of his truck, though because the car sat lower to the ground, she saw more roof lines than usual. She felt the shift from asphalt to gravel, and then, a couple of miles later, he turned and parked behind the abandoned barn.

He did not say a word to her, did not even look at her, just shifted into park, turned off the car, and got out. She rose from the floorboard and watched him walk to the barn and go in, the door left open behind him. She cautiously followed him inside. He had turned on the kerosene lamp. Now he stood by the window, smoking a cigarette.

“John,” she said, like a question, but he ignored her.

No words.

She approached him slowly and touched his arm. He turned around, didn't say anything. He didn't seem angry, but there was a coiled look about him and that inscrutable blank stare. His face was swollen, his eyes dead in the lamplight, as if he had been punched several times and resigned
himself without complaint to the beating. It was chilly in the barn, not cold, but when she removed her jacket, goose bumps rose on her arms. He stubbed out his cigarette on the windowsill and then reached over and pulled off her skirt and her panties.

He pressed her down on the pallet and then took off his own pants and underwear. He took a condom from his shirt pocket. He began to slip it on, but then it got tangled or torn or something, and he flung it into the corner. He lay down over her and held her arms against the pallet with his hands and opened her legs with his knees. He pressed against her, breathed heavily. And then, in a sudden painful thrust, he was inside her.

“John,” she whimpered, “please.”

No response. He kept thrusting. Tears creased her eyelashes, but she made no sound. He let go of her arms and pressed his body tightly against her. He was heavy, and she could hardly breathe. He began to shake as he kept moving his hips roughly, pushing more deeply and then drawing almost all the way out, and then plunging fully into her. He pressed his cheek hard against her face. She could feel the bristles where he had not shaved and the raised texture of the scars. Then she felt his tears, hot on her cheeks.

“John,” she whispered again.

The motion of his body continued. And then a choked, guttural cry issued from his throat, a painful, ugly sound, one she had never heard from him before. Abruptly, he pulled out of her, lifted above her on all fours, and she felt the wet heat on her stomach. He leaned back on his knees, covered his face with his hands so she couldn't see his expression. And then he rose without looking at her. He dressed quickly, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, flicked the lighter, and the flame leapt before his face. He inhaled, the orange tip brightening. And then he grabbed his coat and walked to the car.

She strained to hold back her tears. She breathed deeply, but even the sound of her breath seemed offensive to her now. She closed her eyes and tried to remember other times they had been here, a time, not long ago, when she had believed that they loved each other. She realized how terrible she had been to think that they could run away together, how awful and deceitful she was, even to herself, how she had deliberately plotted to bring grief to so many people.

Now she could feel tears spilling down the sides of her face, and she felt even angrier with herself.
What in the hell are you crying for?
she thought.
You don't deserve these tears.

She heard the engine start. She was afraid for a minute that he was going to leave her there. It was dark and cold now, and she didn't want to walk all the way home. Not just because of the dark. She didn't want to have to explain a further delay. It was already past the time she was expected home. She quickly slipped on the rest of her clothes, grabbed her socks and shoes, and ran to the door of the barn. The car lights were off. He sat behind the steering wheel, staring blankly ahead. He did not even seem to see her. She turned off the lamp, grabbed her coat, and shut the barn door behind her. She ran to the passenger side, opened the door, and slid quietly inside the car.

They sat in silence for a long minute. Finally she said, “John.”

He didn't look at her, didn't even seem to register her presence.

“John,” she said quietly, “are you ready to go?”