Mr. Dees

THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a perfect crime. You can think you’ve gotten away clean, but you always leave a clue. If you’re Junior Mackey, though—if you have enough money and sway—you can get to the right people. You can make sure they keep their mouths shut or go blind to the truth right there in front of their eyes. But you can never, ever buy back time and the things you should or shouldn’t have done.

I never told Tom Evers everything. This last thing I’ve saved for you.

It was a Wednesday evening, remember? July 5. The temperature was ninety-three degrees. Trans-Ams and GTOs were cruising around the courthouse square. People were starting to slip into the Coach House for supper. The breeze was rattling the leaves on the oak trees, and the sun wouldn’t set until 8:33. All that light, and there I was in the truck with Raymond R., and he pointed across the square to the corner where out in front of the J. C. Penney store Katie was crouched down, fiddling with her bicycle chain.

“Yonder she is,” said Raymond R. “A little queenie in distress.”

He drove over there. He pulled the truck up to the curb.

“Darlin’, you need help?” he asked Katie.

“My chain,” she said.

He told her, “Oh, that ornery chain. Dang it all, anyway. Hon, we’ll give you a ride home.”

She reached into her bicycle basket and took out a stack of books. “I have to take these back to the library,” she said.

“Sure, we’ll take those books back,” Raymond R. told her. “Then we’ll run you home. We’ll throw your bike in the back of the truck, and you can hop up here with us. You can sit right here between us, and we’ll take care of you. You live in the Heights, don’t you? On Shasta Drive?”

“How do you know where I live?”

“Your friend here told me. Your teacher. You know Mister Dees, don’t you?”

Katie climbed up on the running board of Raymond R.’s truck. She curled her fingers over the lip of the window frame and said, “Hello, Mister Dees.”

I could barely stand to look at her because I was ashamed of that kiss I had given her on the porch swing. I stared straight ahead at the J. C. Penney display window, where someone had dismantled a mannequin and left it lying in the corner: torso, head, legs, and arms.

“Katie,” I said, “this is Ray. Mister Wright. He’s my neighbor.”

She rose up on her tiptoes and leaned through the open window. Her hair fell across my arm, and I smelled the faint scent of her little-girl sweat—the smell of talcum powder and a towel fresh from the dryer. A breeze had come up from the south, and it was a blessing—that stir of air—after a day of sun and heat.

“Hello, Mister Ray,” she said. “I’m Katie.”

“K-K-K-Katie,” he sang, and she giggled and then smiled at him and said, “I know that song.”

“I bet you do, darlin’,” he said. “I surely do.”

I felt like things were the way they should be. I was out of the picture and it was just the two of them—sweethearts. Oh, it was easy to see. They adored each other, and I thought I might as well have been that mannequin in the J. C. Penney window—a heap of bones snatched and tossed away.

I told Katie to please hop down from the running board, and I started to open the door. All I wanted was to go home. You have to understand: I had no idea then that Raymond R. had any intent of doing her harm. I’m not even sure he knew that himself.

“I’m going to walk,” I told him.

The air was cooler now. The leaves rattled on the courthouse lawn’s oaks. Cars roared down High Street—sporty cars all jazzed up with cherry-bomb mufflers and lifters and racing stripes. Teenage boys honked their horns—Shave and a haircut, six bits. Their tape decks played loud rock-and-roll music. People went into the Rexall, came out of the Coach House. Couples strolled around the square, looking in the store windows. I wished I could be like them: a man with a woman who had known him for years, a man just killing time, comfortable with who he was.

“Take it easy, Teach,” Raymond R. said. “I told you I’d give you a lift.”

“No. Please,” I said. “Just let me go.”

“Henry.” It was the first time that he had called me by my Christian name, and I couldn’t help but face him, look him in the eyes. What I saw amazed me—left me, though I was loathe to admit it, delighted. Raymond R. Wright was afraid—fearful, I imagined, of something torn loose inside him, some howl screaming through nerves and veins. That’s how it happens with people at the end of misery. All the torment builds up and then lives explode, and there they are, broken forever. I was happy—oh, I know it was a horrible way to feel—but it was the truth. For a moment I was happy because, when I looked into Raymond R.’s eyes, I knew that he was in trouble. I had given him that money, and it hadn’t been enough to buy him peace. Now, as I stood witness to his anguish, it made me believe that things weren’t so hopeless for me. I could walk away, join the people strolling around the square, nod and say hello, and then head out Tenth Street to Gooseneck, just a man walking home on a summer evening. “Henry,” Raymond R. said again. “Please.”

I got out of the truck so Katie could get in. I fetched the three library books from her bicycle basket, got back in the truck, and held the books on my lap while Raymond R. drove away, down Fourteenth Street past the public library.

Katie squirmed around on the seat. She came up on her knees. “Hey, the library,” she said.

Raymond R. told her, “Don’t worry, darlin’. We’ll get there, but first let’s just ride around some. Let’s enjoy the breeze.”

He drove down Fourteenth Street, the library disappearing behind us, until he got to Taylor. He turned left and went a block east to Thirteenth. We were just driving, he said, just lollygagging.

That made Katie laugh. “Did you hear about the fight in the candy store?” she asked. “The lollipop got licked.” She giggled and squealed and toppled over until she was leaning against me. “What did the chocolate bar say to the lollipop?” She rattled off the punch line. “Hello, sucker!”

Raymond R. tooted the horn. “That’s the ticket,” he said. “Now we’re cooking.” He turned back west on Cherry. “Let’s air things out. Let’s get up some speed.”

He reached into his shirt pocket, fished out a pill, and popped it into his mouth. The truck went south on Tenth and soon we were passing Junior Mackey’s glassworks and Gooseneck. The air rushed into the cab. Katie’s hair came undone and whipped around her face. I tried to help her brush it away from her eyes, and one of her hair clips came loose. It fell to the floorboard, and when I reached for it, my foot came down on the metal clasp, snapping it. I picked up the thin, gold bar and closed my hand around it, knowing I would keep it for myself.

Katie patted the top of her head. “My hair clip.” She crouched down, looking for the clip on the floor of the truck. I moved my feet, nudging away a crescent wrench, chewing gum wrappers, an empty Pepsi bottle. Katie found the metal back of the clip. “My mom will kill me,” she said.

“Forget that hair bob.” Raymond R. grabbed Katie’s arm and jerked her back up onto the seat. “Hey, little doll. Do you know what the snail said while he was riding on the turtle’s back?”

“I know that one,” she said. “My dad told it to me.” She threw her arms up over her head and shouted, “Wheeeeeee!”

I’d turn that moment over in my head a good while after—Katie’s voice ringing out so clear and gay. “Wheeeeeee!” she said again, and Raymond R. took his hands from the steering wheel. “Wheeeeeee!” he said. “Come on, Teach. Join the fun.”

So for an instant there were the three of us, silly with the air rushing in and Katie’s hair flying about and the road stretching out toward the horizon.

Raymond R. put his hands back on the wheel and kept driving, not slowing down until we were a few miles out of Tower Hill. Nothing but farmland, a haze hanging over the fields. For a while, none of us said anything. We’d laughed ourselves silly over those jokes and then gone quiet, and I knew we were at that point where we felt strange to one another, when we knew we couldn’t keep driving forever. Soon something had to happen.

Raymond R. turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. He stopped the truck and let it idle. Quail were bunching together in the middle of the road, a sign of rain coming, he said. Then his head lolled back and his eyelids drooped. “I’m give out,” he said. “Jesus in a basket. I’ve been on the move all day.”

Katie said, “Mister Ray, you promised you’d take me to the library.”

“Shut up about that library,” he said. “Jesus shit.”

I snaked my arm around behind Katie and snapped my fingers close to his ear. He opened his eyes. He turned his head very slowly and looked at me, his face going hard.

“Please don’t talk like that,” I said. “She’s a little girl.”

“She’s a sweetheart.” Raymond R. took a strand of her hair in his fingers and very gently tucked it behind her ear. “Lordy, Lordy,” he said. “Lookit all that pretty hair.”

I couldn’t bear to watch him touch her hair. I had to look away. I stared straight ahead down the gravel road past where the quail ruffled their wings, taking dirt baths in the dust. I kept my eyes on the point where the road dipped and then began to climb. I stared at the top of the hill where the gravel blanched white in the sunlight and land seemed to meet sky. I thought of the day, back in spring, when I’d been patching the cement steps, and the airplane flew over and I tipped back my head, wondering what I looked like from such a height. It was the moment just before I introduced myself to Raymond R.

Now I took a breath. “Katie,” I said, “we’re going to get out of the truck. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

“But the library,” she said, and I could tell she was starting to worry just a little.

“Give me your hand,” I told her. “I promise you’ll be all right.”

That’s when Raymond R. put the truck into reverse and started backing up toward the highway. The engine whined. The quail lifted with a riffling of wings, their white tail feathers flaring as they flew. The truck moved back into the dust that its tires kicked up, and I put my handkerchief to my nose and mouth. For a moment I thought about throwing open the door and tumbling out. I’d pull Katie along with me. Together we’d roll down the slope of the ditch. But Raymond R. was having a hard time keeping a straight track. The truck was skating over the gravel, and I couldn’t take the chance.

“All right now,” Raymond R. said. “We’re done playing games.”

“Please,” I said.

“Stupid man.” Raymond R. snapped his fingers in front of my face. “What ever made you think you had any say in this?”

He drove back into town. He drove by the Little Farm Market, and he honked his horn at a woman sitting on a bench. She was wearing a flowery summer dress—all oranges and purples—and nylon stockings rolled down to her ankles. A big woman with a transistor radio held up to her ear. “Him,” Emma Short would later say.

“It’s funny,” Raymond R. said. “There she is, a woman in a tutti-frutti dress, just watching the world go by. She doesn’t have a clue, does she?”

“A clue?” I was holding Katie’s hair clip in my hand, rubbing my fingers over the smooth metal. “That woman with the radio?”

“She doesn’t know there’s people in the world.” Raymond R. honked his horn again. “People like us.”

He drove to the edge of Gooseneck and pulled down a grassy lane that ran along a wheat field. He cut the engine and the truck coasted to a stop.

The wheat field stretched out to the horizon. To the south, a wooded grove rose up. It was quiet there, away from town. Locusts chirred. A combine had cut a few swaths around the edge of the wheat field, and grasshoppers leaped up and stuck to the truck’s fenders, its windshield, making faint ticking sounds.

“You’re a darlin’.” Raymond R. took Katie’s bare foot. He cradled it in his hand. “Yes, sir. A real sweet potato.”

He let go of her foot, and he reached across her and took my hand. He laid it on her knee, made me touch her like that. “A doll baby,” he said. “Just what you’ve always wanted, right, Teach?”

Katie’s skin was hot from the sun. I lifted my hand as if I had stuck it into fire. A noise came from the woods, a hawk taking flight, and I recalled the evening when Raymond R. and I put up the martin house, and the Cooper’s hawk hid itself in the catalpa tree, just waiting for its chance at one of the martins.

“You know I’m in the dope, don’t you?” Raymond R. was whispering now. “You know that’s my story, right? I’m not afraid. People? They stopped meaning anything to me a long time ago. You know that too, don’t you?”

I thought about the hawk, filled with hunger and greed, and yet so glorious. It was gliding now, banking and turning in widening circles, and I watched, mesmerized by that gentle float and spin, the hawk lifting higher and higher with each pass until it was a dark speck wheeling through the sky.

“Don’t you think about Clare?” I asked Raymond R. “Such a sweet, good woman. Don’t you think about how you hurt her? Me? I don’t have anyone to be accountable to. But you .  .  .  Clare .  .  .  Ray, she’s had enough heartache in her time.”

That’s when he looked down at his hands, studied them as if they weren’t his anymore, belonged to a stranger. He reached into his pocket and took out the Sucrets tin. He opened it and started to fish out a pill. Then he stopped. He closed the tin and tossed it on top of the dashboard. “I never had a woman to love me until her,” he said.

There comes a time when you have to believe in the goodness of people. “You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?” I asked him.

“You’re right. I’m a lowlife kind of man. Always have been.” His voice shriveled up to a puny thing. “You shouldn’t be here with me. You shouldn’t have anything to do with me at all. You ought to get out of this truck. Take this little doll baby with you. Take her back home. Go on. Take her back to her mama and daddy.”

Katie scooted over closer to me, and I heard her sniffling, trying hard to fight back the tears. I felt a panic flare up inside my chest. I tried to imagine taking her home. How would I explain to Junior and Patsy Mackey how she’d come to be with me? I imagined ringing their doorbell and then standing in the glare of the porch light as the front door opened and Junior or Patsy waited for me to explain. How would I tell them the story? What would I say that would ever be enough for them to forgive what I’d done—the kiss, the time we’d spent with Raymond R.? Worse yet, how would I be able to stand it if Katie went running into the arms of her mother or father and I had to listen to her sobbing, telling them how frightened she’d been? How could I, who loved her, ever face something like that?

“I can’t,” I told Raymond R. “What in the world would I tell them?”

“Tell them, ‘Here she is.’ Say, ‘Here’s your little girl.’” He closed his eyes. “Please,” he said. “Just take her and do whatever it is you have to do.”

In just an instant, it would come to me that maybe Raymond R. was shooting straight. Take her away from me, he meant. See to her. Make sure she gets home. Tell the police what you have to.

But by the time I thought this, I was already out of the truck, stumbling over the ruts in the grassy lane, wanting to get back to Gooseneck, back to my house where I could hide with my shame, because what I heard when Raymond R. asked me to take Katie, to do whatever I had to, was You’ve been wanting this, you’ve been wanting her. Now’s your chance. Go on. Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret. I won’t tell.

That’s what I’m guilty of: being a coward, too much afraid of my own confused desires.

I turned back once, thinking I’d go back to the truck and I’d take her. Katie. I’d take her back to the courthouse square, and there her bike would be, that Sting-Ray bike with the banana seat and the butterfly handlebars and the silver streamers. I’d put the chain back on the sprocket. I’d buy a screwdriver at the Western Auto Store if I had to. I’d get my hands greasy, maybe even ruin my poplin jacket, but that would be all right. That’d be fine. Then Katie would pedal away, and it’d be like all the time the three of us had been in that truck never happened at all. She’d put her books into the library’s after-hours returns bin and then she’d go home, and the next morning she’d wake to another grand summer’s day.

Then I’d be able to say at least I did that, and in the morning, when the martins began to sing, I’d think, All right, this is my life, not so bad as I’d feared. Not perfect, but enough, not one to have to answer for.

I turned back to the truck, but it was already moving, driving farther down the lane. I ran a few steps after it, but I was too late. I bent over, put my hands on my knees. There in the grass were two of Katie’s library books, The Long Winter and Henry and Beezus. I picked them up, and then I watched the truck until I couldn’t see it anymore. I stood there a long time, hoping I’d see it come back, hoping that Raymond R. would change his mind and I’d be able to do the thing I should have done in the first place, the thing I’ve spent years wishing I could make happen: if only, when I had the chance, I’d taken Katie by the hand, got her out of that truck. If only I’d had the courage to take her home and tell my story and face the Mackeys, who by that time were surely starting to wonder whether they had any call to worry. I’ve had the rest of my life to go over it again and again. I’ll have the rest of my days to wish I’d been a better man.

Did I think that Raymond R. might hurt Katie? I spent the rest of that evening convincing myself it couldn’t be so.

If that night at the glassworks, he got what he deserved—Raymond R.—does that mean I should have gotten the same because I left Katie with him that evening in that grassy lane along the wheat field? Or Clare because she was too simpleminded, too trusting to know that her Ray was a dope fiend? Or Gilley because he tattled on Katie at the supper table and sent her off on her bicycle? Or her mother because she didn’t tell her to stop and put on her sandals? Or Junior because Katie had been complaining about her bicycle chain for days, and he’d never done anything about it?

Oh, I heard it all that day at Katie’s funeral. I heard the stories they told, the moments they kept going over in their heads. I’m sure, like me, they call them up now. How many times I’ve thought about that instant on the porch swing when I kissed Katie, or later when I walked away from her down that grassy lane along the wheat field.

And what about the ones that evening who saw us come and go—me and Katie and Raymond R.—and never for an instant thought there might be something wrong?

The problem is this: how many of us were there who could have done something to stop what was going to happen? Where does responsibility start and end?

Sure, some of us were more guilty than others. I’m not a stupid man. Still, there were people moving through our town that night, thinking they didn’t have anything to watch out for. Maybe they saw us downtown on the square talking to Katie. Maybe they saw her up on the running board of Raymond R.’s truck, or me opening the door so she could get in and then fetching her library books from her bicycle basket. Maybe they thought, What’s that little girl doing with those men?

Maybe you’re one of those people. Or maybe you saw us later driving past the public library or heading out Route 59 or turning down that grassy lane at the edge of Gooseneck, and you didn’t stop us, didn’t follow us, didn’t call the police. But what call would you have had? It was just a summer evening. People were everywhere moving through the long light, and we were just two men in a truck, a little girl between us.

If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. I was the last person who could have saved her. No matter how long I live, I’ll know it forever. I’ll imagine the two of us walking up that grassy lane, away from that wheat field, away from Raymond R., the last of the daylight fading into dusk but still enough left so we could find our way.

If it’s true that I did what you claim, Raymond R. said when the police first questioned him (it’s in the court record now; you can find it there), then you ought to put me someplace where I can get help. I’m not saying I didn’t do it. I don’t know.

There’s no figuring the sorts of ragtag lives people can live, but if you want to, you can go to the circuit court’s office and read the file and try to make more sense of it all, the way I did the one time I slipped back into town, the last time before I was gone forever.

So many years had passed, no one in that office recognized me, but they all knew the case I was talking about. They knew about Raymond R., that construction worker who up and disappeared, and a woman said she remembered that there used to be an old bachelor schoolteacher in town who’d been his friend, but she couldn’t recall his name or where he’d gone. The Mackeys? Yes, they were still alive. Junior and Patsy. I asked whether they still lived in the Heights. “Oh no,” the woman said. “They moved to New Mexico a good time back, and that boy of theirs, that Gilley, last I heard he was living in Missouri. A banker. That’s what he made of himself.”

I’ve thought this many times since then. For all of us, that Wednesday evening in July, there was something in the way the light caught the undersides of the maple leaves and set them to shining, some false promise in the way the river water held the sheen of the sun going down and the way the air cooled. We thought we were all free: free from work, from chores, from one another. The courthouse clock chimed the hours and folks could hear it in Gooseneck and the Heights, and for a time there was twilight’s grace—that muted light just before the final turn to dark. I think of Patsy Mackey stepping out onto her patio, worried because Katie hadn’t come back from the library, and Gilley and Junior retracing her route, up High Street to the courthouse square, where they saw that bicycle, her bicycle, leaning against a parking meter. At the time, I was walking from the grassy lane along the wheat field to my house. I was walking through the fading light, and Raymond R. was driving away with Katie in his truck.

“It’s a wonder something like that went on,” the woman in the courthouse said when she was telling me what she remembered about “that ugly business with the Mackey girl.”

“Henry Dees,” I said to her. “That was the schoolteacher’s name.”

“That’s right.” She snapped her fingers. “Henry Dees. He always looked like he was carrying the world on his back. I’d see him around town, and my heart would break.”

“Did you ever tell him that?” I asked her. “Tell him that you saw him, that you felt something about what it was to have his kind of life?”

“I can’t recall ever saying a word.”

“He might have liked to have heard it,” I told her, and that was the last word I ever said to anyone who lived in Tower Hill.

TOWARD THE END of August that summer, Junior Mackey pulled into my drive. I let him in my house, and he stood in the kitchen just as he’d done the night he’d come to ask me to drive to Georgetown and bring back Raymond R.

“I can hardly bear to look at you,” Junior said. He paced around the kitchen. “Every time I see you around town, I think of what you did, the way you watched us. I think about what you know.” That was his life now, and always would be—a fearful life. I frightened him because I knew he’d killed Raymond R., and even though I couldn’t afford to say anything because of my own part in it—I’ve barely been able to tell the story to you—he must have wondered whether someday I’d go to Tom Evers and tell him what I knew. “Do you have someplace to go?” He looked at me. “Somewhere away from here?”

I thought to myself then that it didn’t matter where I ended up; I’d always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I’d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn’t. I’d never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you’re happy about that. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I’m not. I’m just the one to tell it, at least my part in it—this story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It’s an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise.

“I guess one place is as good as another,” I told Junior Mackey.

He nodded. “Then maybe you could be thinking about going.” He took five bills from his wallet. They were thousand-dollar bills, a sight I’d never seen, and he reached them out to me. “To take care of yourself for a while. To get you back on your feet.”

I pushed his hand away. “You live with your own regrets,” I said. “I’ll live with mine.”

That was the end of it. He got back in his car and drove away, and a few weeks later, toward the end of summer, I closed the door to my house in Gooseneck for the last time. I left the furnishings there, left the martin houses atop their poles in the backyard. I wouldn’t be there in spring when the birds came flying back. They’d sing their dawnsong, but I wouldn’t be there to hear it. I got in my Comet, and when I turned onto the Tenth Street spur, I didn’t look back.

The day was clear. I remember that, one of those bright days when it’s still summer but we’ve already made the turn toward autumn, and the sky is blue. Here in the flatlands of Indiana you can hit a straight stretch of road, and you can see all the way to the horizon. If it ever happens to you, you might swear, as I did that day, that if you can just keep moving—keep driving long enough, fast enough—you’ll come to the edge of the world, that point where land rises up to meet sky, and you’ll have no choice; you won’t be able to stop. You’ll just float out into all that blue—call it Heaven if you want—and just like that, you’ll be gone.