July 5

IN GOOSENECK, Clare unplugged her iron. Ray was in the bathroom, shaving, and he was whistling that song, that “Candy Man.” She folded his trousers over a wooden hanger, taking care that the seams were straight. Saturday, they had bought the khaki twills uptown at the J. C. Penney. She had just enough to spare from her paycheck. Got to have some new pants, Ray said, if he was going to look for work after the Fourth of July holiday. The clerk, a polite boy, told them the khakis were on sale. “I remember you,” the boy said to Ray. “You were on the square during Moonlight Madness. You shook my hand.” Ray said no, sorry, I’m afraid you’re thinking of someone else. The boy was handsome, so well mannered, and Clare wondered what her own children would have been like—hers and Bill’s—if they’d ever had any.

She carried the trousers into the bedroom and hung the hanger on the knob of the closet door. Outside the sky was just beginning to brighten in the east. She raised the window blind and looked out over the backyard at the clothesline poles, the garage Ray had built, and the old oil drum where they burned their trash. She smelled the dew on the grass and listened to Henry Dees’s martins warbling. This was her favorite part of the day, just before dawn, when the air was cool and the birds were singing, and it was easy to believe, if she chose, that the day wouldn’t turn hot and muggy. She wouldn’t have to spend all those hours in the kitchen or the laundry at Brookstone Manor. She and Ray could just lollygag.

Saturday, after they came home from Penney’s, they sat out on their porch to catch the little bit of air that was stirring.

“Name your heaven,” Ray said.

It was a game that he liked to play. Ray and Clare Own Paradise, he called it. Together, they came up with as many names for prosperity as they could. Names called outside the bright forever, Clare thought, recalling that old hymn that promised a “summer land of song.”

“Easy Street,” she said, even though it made her feel guilty to play the game. There was always someone worse off. Across the street, for instance, the curtains were drawn on Lottie and Leo Marks’s house. They’d gone off to Indianapolis to be with Lottie’s sister when the news came that their nephew had died in Vietnam. Clare saw it every day in the paper or on the news: mothers losing their sons, car bombs going off in Northern Ireland, airplanes being hijacked, that man running for president—that George Wallace—shot and left a cripple. In the light of all the world’s misery, who was anyone to wish for an ounce more than what they had? Why tempt fate, Clare thought, by wanting too much? Still, she played along with Ray because she liked the way his voice went all soft and whispery, and it was love, she thought. It was just love. This wanting more.

“Shangri-La,” he said.

“Never-Never Land,” she told him.

Then, for a long time, they didn’t say anything, and that was good, Clare thought. That was just them together, no thought of time moving on, no worry because Ray had lost his job. It was Saturday. It was summer. They had a new porch, a new garage. Why fret? Maybe this was all there was. Maybe this was paradise. All this. Right here, right now.

Now Ray came into the bedroom, his face shining with aftershave. “Old girl.” He put his arms around her waist and hugged her. “Things are looking up. This is my day.”

He drove her to Brookstone Manor in his pickup and said he’d be back for her come evening when she got off at eight. He was all spiffed up in those twill trousers, a grass-green sport shirt, and the brown pull-on boots he saved for good. He had polished them and buffed them with the horsehair brush he always used. He thought he’d drive down to Brick Chapel to check out that power plant. He gave her a wave when he pulled away from the curb. He slowed down for a moment. His brake lights came on, and she thought he had forgotten to tell her something. She thought he was going to turn around and come back. But then he stuck his arm out the window and waved at her again. She waved back. He tooted his horn, and then he was gone.

HE DIDN’T come back at eight. One of the girlie-girls asked if Clare wanted her to run her home. “No, don’t trouble yourself,” Clare told her. “Ray said he’d be here. I’ll just wait.”

The girl’s name was Pat. She had a boyfriend fighting in the war. She wore his high school ring on a chain around her neck. Sometimes she picked up the ring and tapped it against her teeth. She was the sort of girl Clare had never trusted in high school even though she had wanted to. She had harbored more than one secret crush, had spent hours daydreaming about being friends with such girls, those pretty girls with the bright smiles and the merry voices. She knew she would never be one of them. She was too plain, too tall and skinny, her chest caved in, her shoulders slumped. She was too timid, too ordinary. She knew how to crochet and cook, but no one really cared about that, and they didn’t care that she had a good heart, not unless they were girls like her, the spooks, the ones the other girls, the popular ones, acted like they never saw.

“I could wait with you,” Pat said. “Really, Clare. I don’t mind.”

“You’ve got things to do,” Clare said. “You don’t need to be wasting time with an old dame like me. He’ll be here in a jiff.”

But he wasn’t. She walked uptown and stood on the curb in front of the Coach House, thinking maybe she’d see his truck coming up High Street. It was nearly eight-thirty. She wandered up and down the block a ways, glancing at the new ladies’ dresses on the mannequins in the front window of Helene’s Dress Shop—goodness, how short the hems were—turning back to the street from time to time. She would see headlights coming and she would think, There, that’s his truck, but it never was. She remembered once, when she was a girl—probably no more than six or seven—coming out of a matinee picture show on a winter afternoon and looking for her mother, who had said she would be there waiting for her. But she wasn’t. Clare stood in the cold, snow coming down, not knowing what to do. “Just stand still,” her mother told her when she finally arrived. “If you think you’re lost, don’t move. I’ll find you.”

Clare knew she should have stayed at Brookstone Manor; maybe Ray was there waiting for her. She almost turned around and went back. She almost started walking the rest of the way home. Finally, she couldn’t bring herself to do either. The longer she stood there, the more worried she became. She was afraid to move, afraid that if she walked away from that corner, Ray would pull up in his truck and she wouldn’t be there to get into the cab beside him, to hear his familiar voice, “Oh, hon, did you think I’d forgotten my best girl?” To slide over next to him and let him drape his arm over her shoulders and to ride along, the breeze coming in through the open windows, as they went home. He would be jabbering about everything he’d done that day—oh, how she loved to hear him talk—and she would close her eyes and revel in what she had missed those long months after Bill died, the sound of someone talking to her, the sense that she was part of someone’s life.

Finally, it was a quarter of nine, and cars of teenagers were cruising up and down High Street. A few men who were staying at the Litz Hotel came out onto the sidewalk and started passing a pint bottle back and forth. Across the square, in front of the J. C. Penney store, a man and a boy loaded a bicycle into the trunk of their car. Clare hated for people to see her there, like she was lost and didn’t know where to turn. She gave up on Ray and started walking to Gooseneck.

When she got home, the house was dark, and Ray was nowhere to be found. She heated up a can of vegetable soup and tidied up the kitchen when she was finished eating. She dragged a kitchen chair out onto the new porch and sat there awhile, again imagining that each approaching set of headlights belonged to Ray’s truck. She got sleepy in the dark, and the mosquitoes came out, so finally she went back inside, put on her nightgown, and went to bed.

IT WAS THE smell that woke her, well past midnight—the smell of something burning—and when she opened her eyes, she saw the glow on the bedroom walls. She rolled over toward the window and saw the reflection of the flames, watery on the glass.

Ray was in the backyard at the burn barrel, poking at the fire with a stick. He was in his T-shirt and jockey shorts, and his pull-on boots were still on his feet. Bits of ash fluttered at the tips of the fire’s flames.

Clare put on a robe and walked barefoot across the damp grass. She came up behind Ray and touched him on his arm. He didn’t look at her. He kept staring into the fire. She could see his new trousers, his green sport shirt, charring and curling in the burn barrel. She wanted to tell him that she had waited and waited for him. She wanted to ask him whether he had found a job. Where had he been all this time? But she didn’t say a word. It was such a strange sight—her husband in his underthings, burning his clothes—she had no idea what to say.

“I went fishing,” he finally told her. “I went down to Patoka Lake. Me and another fella, we cleaned up a mess of perch, and I got fish guts all over my clothes. Well, hon, I just ruined them, that’s what I did. My shirt and my new pants. No good for nothing but to burn.”

He stirred the fire, and the flames crackled and sparks flew up into the air.

“I could’ve washed those clothes,” she said.

All the houses up and down the street were dark, and the night was still. The only sound was the crackling of the fire.

“No,” said Ray. “Nothing you could’ve done would’ve ever got them clean. Now go on back to bed. I’m going to pull my truck into the garage and then I’ll be in.”

SHE HAD JUST settled back into bed when a knock came on the front door. It was a loud knock, three impatient raps. She thought it must be Ray, but why would he be knocking? She came out into the living room, this time without her robe. Her long cotton gown swept over the floor. She opened the front door, and standing on the porch was a policeman. He was tall, and his shoulders slumped a bit as if he were ducking under a low ceiling. “Ma’am,” he said. A soft-spoken young man in a light-blue shirt, a silver badge pinned to the pocket. He had thick sideburns. “Ma’am,” he said again. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but it’s your husband.” He lifted his right hand and scratched at a sideburn. “You are married to Raymond Wright, aren’t you, ma’am?”

“I’m Mrs. Wright.” Clare could make out the shapes of men coming up the driveway. Three city police cars were parked along the street, but their lights weren’t on. She could hear boots kicking up gravel and leather creaking, and she knew the men were policemen, and that it was their gun holsters she was hearing. “I’m Clare,” she said, and then she felt foolish for having said it, as if she were a little girl. But that’s how she felt, like a girl bumbling through something she didn’t understand. She told herself to listen hard, to do what this nice young man was telling her.

It was her husband, he said again. That’s who he was looking for. Had she seen him?

Once when she was just a girl—this was when the Depression was on—she let a tramp into the house and gave him a plate of food. He ran off with the only thing of value that her family owned, her grandmother’s gold earrings, the ones with jade insets. “If Hitler was dying of thirst,” her father said when he found out, “she’d carry him to the well.” She couldn’t help herself. She knew too much about misery. When she saw someone else hurting, she couldn’t help but fall in love with that hurt. If she couldn’t be pretty or smart, she decided, at least she could be generous and kind. And she could make a nice home. She knew how to cook and sew and how to keep the house spic and span.

“He’s out to the garage,” she told the policeman. It came to her then what this was all about. Later, she would feel foolish for having such a simple thought, but at the time it made sense to her because she didn’t want to think that what was happening might be anything else. “Those cement blocks,” she said. “I told Ray not to steal them. I said, ‘Ray, what if someone finds out?’”

The policeman bowed his head. When he looked back up at her, there was such a pain on his face, she wanted to touch him and tell him it was all right. Whatever he had to say, it was fine.

“Ma’am, you seem like a nice lady.” His voice was so low she had to lean close to hear it. “I don’t know how you hooked up with Raymond Wright, but ma’am.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth as if he were trying to pull out the words. “Ma’am,” he said again, “the truth is, those cement blocks, they’re the least of your troubles now.”

THE POLICEMEN brought Ray out of the garage. They had handcuffs on his wrists. His head was hanging down, and he wouldn’t look at Clare, who stood in the backyard, her hands trying to rub the chill out of her bare arms. The flames from the burn barrel cast an eerie glow over the faces of the policemen and Ray in his jockey shorts and T-shirt.

“What’s burning in that barrel?” the policeman with the sideburns asked Clare.

“Ray?” she said to him.

“It’s just clothes,” he said. “Just dirty clothes. I went fishing.”

“Ray, what’s this all about?”

“It’s a mistake,” he told her. “Whatever they say I done, they’re wrong, Clare. They’re dead wrong.”

Soon there would be questions, plenty of questions. But there was a first one, and the soft-spoken policeman put it to Ray now. “Ray? Ray, listen to me. What have you done with the girl?”

MR. DEES saw the police cars go by his house. They didn’t have their red lights on or their sirens, but he knew that’s what they were, and he knew where they had been and who they had come for. He knew because at eleven o’clock, he finally worked up the courage to call the courthouse and tell the dispatcher who answered that he understood they were looking for a Ford truck, green with black circles painted on the doors. How did he know? It didn’t matter. No, it wasn’t important who he was. He just had the information they needed. He’d seen that truck uptown around five-thirty—and that girl, the one they were looking for?—he’d seen her up on the running board of that truck, talking to the man who was driving it. “That truck,” he said. “You come down to Gooseneck. You’ll find it. That odd-looking truck. It belongs to a man named Raymond Wright.”

Now he was up, pacing the floors, tired of tossing and turning in his bed, going back over everything that had happened that night.

Earlier, around ten o’clock, when the policeman with the fat fingers had come to his house, he had only told as much of the truth as he could bear to hear coming from his mouth. Yes, he had been with Katie Mackey that afternoon. Three-thirty until five. An hour and a half working on story problems. Then he lied: No, he said, he hadn’t seen her since.

The truth of the matter was, that afternoon, when he was with Katie, he found himself, without knowing that he was about to do this, leaning down and kissing her. They were sitting beside each other on the Mackeys’ porch swing, swaying back and forth in the shade, a lone bird singing somewhere in one of the oak trees. The scent from Patsy Mackey’s petunias was fragrant, and Mr. Dees would never be able to smell petunias from that day on without remembering how Katie had solved a story problem using the Parker 51 he had bought for her—“Fifteen banana Popsicles. Holy moly, Mister Dees”—and when she lifted her face to look at him, the light came into her eyes and she was more beautiful than he could stand, and he did what he had wanted to do all that summer since their lessons began—what he had done only in his dreams: he kissed her. He kissed her on the cheek, and it was only a fleeting moment—that quick kiss. Later, he would be tempted to believe that it hadn’t really happened. Only, he knew that it had. He had kissed Katie Mackey on her front porch, in plain view of anyone who might have happened to have been watching.

Katie didn’t even seem to notice. She was a girl who was used to being loved. He could tell that she thought there was nothing out of the ordinary about the fact that he had kissed her. But he was horrified over what he had done. He called the lesson to an end.

“Wasn’t I right?” Katie said. “Fifteen banana Popsicles? Isn’t that the answer?”

Yes, he told her. “Yes. Oh yes, Katie. You’re absolutely right.”

He heard the front door open, and there was Patsy Mackey stepping out onto the porch. In an instant he stood up from the swing, saying in a rush, good-bye, good-bye, it was time for him to go. What a good girl Katie was. What a smart girl. “She’s really coming right along,” he said to Patsy.

“Wait. Don’t go just yet,” Patsy said. “I need to make out your check. Katie, let me borrow your pen. It was so kind of you to give her that pen, Mister Dees. You’ve done wonders for her, really you have.”

Yes, yes, the check, he said, of course. He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was hurrying down the steps, eager to be alone, still stunned by what he had done, and only a few seconds before Patsy had come out on the porch. What if she had been watching from inside the house?

When he left the Mackeys’ he didn’t go straight home, as he had told the fat-fingered policeman. He made it as far as the downtown square before the heat became too much for him, and he had to sit awhile on the courthouse lawn. He slipped off his poplin suit jacket and thought what a fool he was for wearing it, trying to look like an upright man. He had kissed Katie Mackey. God forgive him. He took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, the dark-blue linen handkerchief he had folded carefully so three points made a line of pickets. He shook out the handkerchief and used it to blot the sweat from his forehead. He sat on one of the loafers’ benches in the shade and loosened his necktie. It was nearly five-thirty.

He watched the traffic go by, taking note as he always did of the makes and models of cars: Ford Fairlane, Chevy Impala, Buick Sebring. Later, at home, he would note them in his journal. He would uncap his Parker 51 and jot down the names of the cars and the snatches of song lyrics he heard coming from their radios. He would record the day’s high temperature, ninety-three, any fact that would keep him from thinking of Katie Mackey and what he had done. All those people passing by him, and none of them knew what had happened. None of them had any idea. He tipped back his head and closed his eyes. Then he felt a stir of air, and a shadow fell across his face. When he opened his eyes, he saw Raymond R. looking down on him.

“Teach, you look tapped out.” Raymond R. leaned over and took Mr. Dees’s face between his rough hands. He patted his cheeks. “Jesus in a basket,” he said. “You look like you’re ready to give up the ghost.”

“It’s the heat,” Mr. Dees said.

“Jesus, yes. I know what you mean. Come on. Let’s go home.”

Mr. Dees let Raymond R. take his arm and pull him to his feet. He followed him down the slope of the courthouse lawn. Later, he would think how easy it had been to do this, to put one foot in front of the other and follow Raymond R. to his truck. He was going home. He would lock the doors, pull down the window shades so no one could look in. He would sit inside his house and tremble with the thought of what he had done that afternoon.

By the time they got to Raymond R.’s truck, Mr. Dees was weeping. He was making no sound, but the tears were running down his face.

“Here, now.” Raymond R. opened the truck door, took Mr. Dees by the shoulders, and eased him in. “You just sit there. We don’t have to go nowhere. Not just yet. You tell me when you’re ready.”

It wasn’t bad there in the shade. A breeze moved through the truck. Raymond R. got behind the steering wheel and he didn’t say a word. Mr. Dees appreciated that, the way he just waited, and he remembered the night that Raymond R. had repaired the martin house. They were in Mr. Dees’s garage, and Raymond R. hammered in the finishing nails with such gentle taps, careful not to split the wood. Finally, he laid down his hammer and he told Mr. Dees that any time he needed him he should just call. If he had something that needed getting done, Raymond R. Wright was his man.

Now, in the truck, he was merely waiting, letting Mr. Dees dry his face with his handkerchief, saying nothing that might embarrass him, respecting whatever it was that had shaken him to the point that he could cry in broad daylight on the courthouse square, where anyone passing by would see him.

It touched Mr. Dees, this courtesy, and before he could help himself he had started to speak. He said it all in a whisper, and what he said was this: there were times, he told Raymond R., when he felt like a little boy, the boy he had been all those years ago when numbers had started to make sense to him. He could add one to another and come up with an answer; he could subtract them, multiply, and divide. He could write out an equation and then see the proper moves that would isolate the unknown and solve it. Numbers he understood; they had a science to them, an integrity—they were what they were. But people—ah, people—they were a different story.

He told Raymond R. about the hours he had spent, even as a child, trying to understand where he went wrong when it came to making friends. It wasn’t that his classmates didn’t like him. He had opportunities to join their games, though he was never athletic, and their clubs—he tried Cub Scouts, the Methodist Youth Fellowship, the Junior Jaycees. But he was shy. Once in junior high, during an MYF hayride, a girl said to him, “Why don’t you ever smile? If you’d just smile, you wouldn’t be so weird.” He practiced at home, looking at himself in the mirror, but always there was something unnatural about his smile, a forced and hesitant stretching of his lips that made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Better to ixnay the smile, he decided, no matter what the girl had said. Her name was Bonnie, and because she had made that suggestion to him about smiling more, he got the idea that she liked him. She sat in front of him in their seventh-grade English class, and when she slouched in her chair, her long blond hair often fell over his desk. One day he started wrapping her hair around his pencil. It fascinated him, that hair. It was the color of wheat, and it gleamed in the sunlight slanting through the tall windows. He loved the feel of it on his hands and the way he could wind it around that pencil. Then the teacher noticed what he was doing and she said, “Pity sake, Henry. Leave her hair alone.” Bonnie tried to turn around, but his hands, that pencil, they were in her hair, and when she moved her head, he got all tangled up, and the teacher had to come and patiently work him free, and all the while Bonnie was saying, “Ew, ew. Henry Dees, you’re a creep.”

That was it, he told Raymond R. That’s how it was done. From that day on, to his classmates, he was that kind of boy. “I thought she liked me,” he said. “I guess I figured she’d understand that I liked her, too.”

“You don’t have to say anything else,” Raymond R. said, and then he told Mr. Dees the story of having to eat his lunch each day in the dimly lit hallway outside the school cafeteria. He told him about the steam pipe and how it leaked water on his head and how the kids, the ones who ate the hot lunches in the cafeteria, pointed their fingers at him when they came out into the hallway.

“People,” Mr. Dees said. It shook him to think of all the misery wrought in the world. He found himself telling Raymond R. that he had kissed Katie Mackey. “I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not right. A man like me.”

“Maybe you’re a different kind of man than you figure.” Raymond R.’s voice was soft, kind. It held no note of judgment. “Maybe it’s like that.”

Mr. Dees knew, as much as he hated to admit it, that Raymond R. was right. He’d been going through his life thinking he knew who he was, when all along he was dumb to his own mysterious heart. It was a frightening truth to run up against. Here he was, a man in the middle of his life, lost, desperate now for the chance to atone for kissing Katie and to move on to a better way of seeing himself. He wanted to erase that afternoon from his mind, from his heart. He wanted to go to sleep and not have Katie come into his dreams. He wanted to sleep a dead sleep and not wake, tormented with shame and guilt. He wanted to sleep through the night and let the martins wake him, their dawnsong a joy bubbling up inside him.

“Sometimes.” He couldn’t stop himself. He’d had no idea that he felt this until he heard himself giving it words. “Sometimes,” he said again, “I think if she weren’t here. Katie. If she didn’t exist, I’d be all right.”

He sat there, stunned. What a thing for him to say. He wished he could snatch the words from the air and stuff them back into his mouth.

“How much would that be worth to you?” Raymond R. asked. Mr. Dees was about to tell him that no, it wasn’t like that at all, but before he could speak, Raymond R. said, “Jesus in a basket.” He pointed toward Fourteenth Street, where Katie was coming down the sidewalk on her new bicycle. Mr. Dees recognized the black T-shirt and the orange shorts that she had worn that afternoon. She was barefoot. She stood up on her pedals, and he could feel the hard rubber digging into his own arches. Then her foot slipped, and she almost took a tumble. She got off her bicycle in front of the J. C. Penney store. She leaned the bike on its kickstand and squatted down beside it. The chain had come off its sprocket. “Lordy, Lordy,” Raymond R. said. “Speak of the devil. Yonder’s your little girl.”