The Lost Songs (29 page)

People who were alone were nothing.

Train walked unsteadily to his locker. He was prepared. He had a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which they’d used on the kid on the TV news. He had a lighter. He had given the can lid thing a look—opened a huge can of peaches his mama had left in the cupboard and experimented using the lid as a knife. Cut his sandwich in quarters with it. But if he was going to cut
somebody, he’d use an actual knife. Only he wasn’t going to cut anyone.

He’d chosen fire.

He shut the locker door and his cell phone rang.

Miss Veola again.

Probably knew Pierce’s daddy. Probably they had made plans together.

He would show them who made the plans.

Stop
, she would have written.

If Miss Veola knew what he was going to do now, she would thunder, “The Lord God did his best for you! He gave his Son for you. Now you do your best for him, young man.”

Train did not want to do his best. He wanted to do his worst.

K
elvin was puzzled by Miss Veola’s message. It wasn’t the usual
Stop
. It said,
Be sure to come
.

What did that mean? Come to what?

He walked slowly from the high school over to Tenth Street and turned north toward Miss Veola’s.

Tenth Street was not lined with chain stores or strip malls. It had no traffic lights at this end. No employers. No schools. Streets sprouted here and there, hardly visible where they led into Chalk. The sidewalk switched from one side of the street to the other without warning. Here there was no pavement, just a thin trail worn into dry grass. Kelvin trudged up a small hill. From the top he would be able to see the pink church. It was oddly rural here. He was not thirty yards from Tenth Street, but it felt like he was on a farm.

Then suddenly out of the grass came Train.

Kelvin stopped.

Any remaining charm had been eaten off Train’s face, as if by some interior monster. He looked starved. His eyes flared and his face widened as if something were hauling at his mouth.

He held a bottle of clear fluid in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other.

Train smoked all the time. The lighter was no surprise. But what was he drinking?

Train unscrewed the cap of the bottle and Kelvin realized with horror that Train was not drinking out of it. It was for something else. He remembered the TV coverage from every night this week about that kid who’d been set on fire. That kid who’d lost seventy percent of his skin because of forty dollars he hadn’t paid.

Train was ambushing him.

But Kelvin was one of the good guys. “Train?” he said.

Train laughed, high and vicious, like a hyena on a nature film.

Kelvin felt leaden.

He had to run, but he couldn’t stand the thought of running. He saw himself ponderously, cravenly, lurching away from somebody half his weight—a kid who had been his friend in kindergarten! If Kelvin ran, only his back would get burned. Proof of cowardice.

Or proof of intelligence.

He said, “It’s me, Train. Kelvin.”

I
can’t be a victim, he thought.

“Victim.” It meant a person killed as sacrifice, part of a rite. Train needed to shed blood, according to the ritual of DeRade.

Train’s fingers were finding a position on the bottle when his cell phone rang.

Kelvin felt Train’s desire to look at the phone. In that moment there was time to ponder the psychology of cell phones: how they always came first. You had to look. You had to know. Who wanted you?

That’s everything, thought Kelvin. Who wants you? Nobody wants Train. Certainly I don’t want Train.

Train couldn’t ignore the ring. He looked, and his rhythm was broken. For an instant, his expression was normal. He was exasperated.

Kelvin made a guess. “Miss Veola?”

For one beat, Kelvin thought they were going to be okay. Train had been knocked off track in time to regain his sanity.

And then somebody else came up the hill and Train was an attack dog again.

Doria Bell. No street sense. No caution.

Doria would come right up here. Train might go for her instead. Doria, who would chat about Mozart as Train flicked his lighter.

Only his parents cared what happened to Kelvin. But Doria was a prize on any scale. Kelvin could not let Train hurt Doria.

Doria was in a hurry.

She had brought good clothes to school and changed in the girls’ room, but now her dressy shoes were slowing her down and she was mildly angry at her mother for refusing to let her drive the Honda today. She didn’t want to walk fast enough to get sweaty, but if she dawdled she wouldn’t have time to talk to Lutie before the service.

On the hill in front of her stood Kelvin and Train.

Their posture was out of tune. Their bodies were arched and stiff.

Doria often had the sensation of being all music. Now she had a new sensation. All fear.

It was thrilling and energizing. She wanted to run right
inside it. She wanted to hold it up like a glass window and smash through it.

Fear demanded speed.

“Hi, Cliff!” she yelled, racing up the hill. “Hi, Kelvin! Are you on your way to the funeral? Will you sit with me? I don’t want to go alone.”

Funeral? thought Kelvin.

Twenty feet away, Doria stopped. She bent over to adjust her black patent leather heels. She usually wore black, but this was not the vanishing black of her school clothes. Now she had on a black lace pencil skirt and a silky black tee. She was even wearing makeup.

Doria straightened. She looked beautiful and strange, like a magazine model stranded in the grass.

“What funeral?” said Train.

“Lutie’s mother. You didn’t hear? Her mother died on Sunday.”

Kelvin and Train exchanged shocked glances.

Normal glances, thought Kelvin. Oh, God, can it be? Had Cliff just surfaced?

“Lutie’s mother?” he said. He never thought of Lutie as having a mother. She had a grandmother. She had aunts.

“We should be at that funeral,” said Kelvin to Train. “We’re Lutie’s friends.”

Cliff Greene’s fever ended, as if the thermometer had broken.

The terrible decision had been made.

He would not do it.

Not because of Miss Veola.

Not because of Doria Bell running up a hill.

Not even because of Lutie’s sorrow.

The fever ended when Kelvin said “we.”
We
should be at that funeral.
We’re
Lutie’s friends.

The terrible decision: go good or go bad.

Bad meant you always had followers.

Good meant you might have to go it alone. If he went good, he might be shunned and despised.

“The funeral is at Miss Veola’s church,” said Doria.

He would have to set foot in the house of the Lord.

I didn’t blind Nate, he told the Lord. I stood there and let it happen, that’s all.

So maybe I did blind Nate.

It was too terrible for forgiveness. The whole idea of forgiveness seemed as wrong as blinding Nate. He thought of Pierce’s daddy telling him that being good was a ticket out.

Train did not want a ticket out. He wanted a ticket in.

He set the bottle of rubbing alcohol in the grass. He had shoplifted it new. Practiced with the half-finished bottle on the bathroom shelf. Worked fine. Exploded in flames.

“Rubbing alcohol?” asked Doria.

Kelvin said softly, “It’s good for sore feet.”

Doria frowned but didn’t pursue it.

Kelvin said, “I don’t think my parents know about Lutie’s mother. I’d better call them. They’ll want to be there. I can’t believe I didn’t know. What’s her mother’s name, anyway?”

“Saravette Painter. Isn’t that a beautiful name? I’m not sure she was a beautiful person. Still. When your mother is dead, it has to be the beauty you think about. That would be your song. Miss Veola wants Lutie to sing from the Laundry List to honor her mother. Remember we heard her sing some of the songs the other day, Cliff?”

It was startling to hear his real name. To think that that person still existed. That he might still be Cliff Greene.

“I don’t remember any songs about beauty,” said Train. “But I know which one I’d choose.”

Train remembered hymns? Had favorites? Kelvin practically fell over.

Doria beamed as if they were about to climb onto an amusement park ride. She even clapped a little. Kelvin felt dizzy with the strangeness of this trio that he and Doria and Train formed.

“Sing it for me, Cliff,” Doria begged.

She’s the only person in Court Hill who calls him Cliff, thought Kelvin. Except Miss Veola and his mother. Maybe that’s where we all went wrong. We let DeRade name him.

“I don’t sing,” said Cliff.

Although he did. Long ago and far away, they had been children in a Sunday-school choir, wearing silky robes and bright crosses hanging on ribbons.

Cliff scuffed the dirt with his huge filthy sneaker. “But for a funeral, I’d maybe choose ‘Cross My Creek.’ ”

A minute ago, my life was in danger, thought Kelvin. Now Train is just another self-conscious boy facing a beautiful girl.

Kelvin gave Cliff a breather. He said to Doria, “The old Painter house is a half mile that way, across a creek. Didn’t used to be a bridge. You had to go all the way around or wade. The Laundry List is different, you know. Those songs, they talk to the Lord different. Usually you invite people to come to the Lord, or you ask the Lord if
you
can go to
him
. But in ‘Cross My Creek,’ old Miz Painter tells the Lord to stop by. Set for a spell. Visit. And forgive each other’s sins.”

“Forgive
each other’s
sins?” repeated Doria.

“ ’Cause the Lord was slow,” said Cliff, as if he knew a
thing or two about the Lord being slow. “Old Miz Painter, she didn’t think he should have been so slow.” Cliff took a big breath, then looked down, as if he really were on a cliff. Teetering.