Bitter Sun

‘Why’s she naked?’ Jenny asked.

‘Maybe she was swimming,’ Rudy said.

‘Swimming and then got shot,’ I said.

Maybe they didn’t see the bullet hole. Maybe they thought it was something else, something innocent, and this poor woman had simply drowned while taking relief from the sun. Maybe it was and I saw a gunshot where really there was a hole made by a branch after she was already dead.

I bent down and lifted a lock of hair from Mora’s face. Everything about her was grey. Her hair, between my fingers, was wet and coarse, grainy with silt. It didn’t have the softness of living hair, it hung wrong, it looked wrong. She was deflated, absent of rushing blood and air. It was human as I’ve never seen human.

‘Johnny,’ my sister’s voice, a frantic beat. ‘Johnny, look.’

The dead woman’s chest moved.

I yelped, stumbled backward, hit my elbow on a rock. Gloria gasped and Rudy swore and Jenny’s eyes widened.

A spike of fear pressed against my stomach. Same place on my gut as the hole in hers.

‘She’s alive, she’s alive, oh God oh God, do something,’ Gloria said, tugging on Rudy’s arm, backing away.

Mora’s chest rose then fell in a strange breath. Her eyes didn’t open. Her hands didn’t move.

‘We have to tell someone,’ Rudy almost shouted. ‘We have to get help.’

Her chest rose again but lower, not high beneath the rib cage. A bulge formed at the top of her abdomen, it shifted, squirmed. The breath was not a breath.

I pressed my back against the fallen tree, scrambled up.

‘Jenny, get back,’ I said.

But she’d bent over, put her face inches closer to the movement.

A shape formed in Mora’s skin, defining itself against the weight of her flesh like an arm stretching out beneath a heavy blanket. My pulse echoed in my ears and chest, drowned out everything but the soft squelching sound of the body. Nobody moved. Gloria still clutched at Rudy’s arm and he at hers. Jenny still stared, bent slightly at the waist, her top lip hooked up in pleasured disgust. I backed up, moss and bark flakes sticking to the sweat on my t-shirt, resisting the urge to grab Jenny and run.

The pink edging the inside of the hole in Mora’s stomach pushed and turned outward, a black something appeared. Wet and shining, it forced itself free, a thin sinuous tube. I felt sick, I wanted to hurl up my breakfast, my lunch, those few biscuits I’d eaten after class, I wanted to be empty. My head told me it was an eel or catfish, my eyes said demon, devil, alien.

Jenny backed away as the creature wriggled free of the hole and flopped, writhing and slick, on Mora’s stomach.

‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Gloria screamed.

‘Quiet,’ I said, harder than I should have. She was so loud, so shrill, I feared her call would bring parents and police down on us and we’d have to explain all this.

The eel spasmed and jerked and fell into the leaf litter inches from my feet. I jumped onto the log, Rudy and Gloria cried out, ran halfway to the Fort, Jenny shuffled backward but she was slow. The eel flicked itself, landed on her bare foot. She shrieked as if stung, the spell of the body broken, and kicked out.

I lunged for her, pulled her close to me, wrapped my arms around her shoulders. The eel landed far from the water, then as if sensing its distance, increased its convulsion.

We all looked to Rudy but he was up on a tree stump, squealing worse than Jenny.

The eel flicked toward us and Jenny and Gloria screamed afresh.

‘Kill it!’ they yelled.

Do something, Johnny boy, get your head together and goddamn do something.

I grabbed a stick, hooked it beneath the eel’s body and flicked it in a long, squirming arch into Big Lake.

A breath. A beat. A splash.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Rudy said, finally climbing down from his perch.

I looked at him, big brave Rudy Buchanan, shaking like a sissy with a spider on his hand. Rudy would take down a bully in a single punch but he was quaking in his shorts at a fish? I tried not to laugh.

‘It’s just an eel. What are you so afraid of?’

He glared at me. ‘It came out of a dead body.’

‘Johnny, come on,’ Jenny said. ‘We should be getting home.’

We shouldn’t. We didn’t have a curfew and Momma wouldn’t be wringing her hands for us. But when I looked around at my friends, my sister, I saw them all shaken. In truth, I was shaken too but one of us had to keep it together or we’d all be screaming on tree stumps.

I’d gotten rid of the eel but the body, the girl, she lay where we’d dragged her and all humour drained from my mind. It changed the day. Turned the blazing sun cold. Jenny’s face showed raw confusion at what we’d found, what it meant. I saw the same in Rudy’s eyes, in Gloria’s. Hooked lips and frowns.

I usually had the answers but today, I was as lost as them.

The four of us left the Fort in shuffling silence. We emerged from the trees and the sticky evening heat pressed against us. I suddenly missed the cool, sheltered air of the Roost but couldn’t face going back down there. Not now, maybe not ever.

‘We have to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said. ‘They have to find out who she is and who did that to her.’

‘Cops won’t do anything,’ Rudy said. ‘There’s all sorts going on in this town they don’t know about. Shit, if they did, Samuels would have a heart attack.’

Gloria scowled at him. ‘I think a murder is a little more important than your dad’s chop shop.’

Rudy sneered and mimicked her voice. Gloria punched him in the arm.

‘What will they do to her?’ Jenny asked, looking back toward the trees, toward the valley and our lake.

‘Take her away,’ Rudy said. ‘Put her in a morgue. Find her parents, I suppose.’

‘I’m going to tell the sheriff,’ Gloria said.

‘We’ll get in trouble,’ I said, a knot forming in my chest. ‘We moved her.’

‘Yeah, we will,’ Rudy said, his finger bouncing in the air. ‘He’s right. We moved her. They’ll think we did it.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Gloria’s scowl deepened.

‘All the detective books and cop shows say you don’t touch the body, Gloria, and you definitely don’t move it,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should wait until Samuels finds her himself?’

Rudy pointed at me, his arm straight out. ‘I like Johnny’s plan.’

‘It’s a stupid plan,’ Gloria said. ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Samuels.’

Rudy grabbed the back of his neck with both hands, his elbows stuck out like sails. ‘Just wait, yeah? Just a day. Maybe do one of those anonymous tip-offs and leave us out of it.’

His voice turned small. ‘They’ll think I had something to do with it. They’ll lock me up, Gloria. I’m a Buchanan. I got bad blood, remember, and everyone in town knows it.’

Jenny put her arm through Rudy’s, held his hand and pushed her cheek against his shoulder.

‘You’re not bad,’ she said. ‘We’ll all tell Samuels the truth. You didn’t touch her and if they think otherwise, they’ll have to go through us to get to you. Right, guys?’

‘Right,’ Gloria said and took Rudy’s other hand.

I completed the circle, put my arms over Jenny and Gloria’s shoulders, pulled the four of us into a group hug.

‘We’re like a flock of birds, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘We stick together and we protect each other from eagles and eels, hey?’

I prodded Rudy’s stomach and he told me to shut up.

‘A flock. I like that.’ Jenny patted my back. ‘We’ve got a Roost after all.’

Rudy finally smiled. ‘You and your birds, Johnny,’ he said, just as quiet, then shook his head. ‘If only we were, huh? We could all fly the hell out of here.’

‘We will, one day. All four of us,’ Gloria said, then checked her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Daddy’s taking me to the fairground in Bowmont tonight. Mom is at one of her Clarkesville society dinners and thank God she didn’t make me go to that. I’ll win you each a teddy bear.’

Gloria broke the circle and Rudy went with her, to see her home like he always did. Then he turned, walked backward a few steps.

‘We’re a flock, yeah?’ he shouted, the wince, the curl, the confusion still on his face, though he tried to put a mask over it. He smiled, flapped his arms like wings. ‘Ca-caw, ca-caw, Johnny. See you guys tomorrow.’

They waded through Briggs’ wheatfield toward town, waist-high in gold, as if their torsos were floating free. We walked everywhere. Jenny and me didn’t have bikes. No money for scrap metal that does a job your legs can do just fine, Momma always said. Rudy was fixing up a broken, rusted-up Schwinn but getting nowhere, and Gloria had a pink Raleigh she refused to ride because we couldn’t ride with her.

I let myself smile as I watched my friends. My flock.

Jenny fidgeted by my side. The calm she’d had with Rudy and Gloria had gone with them. She glanced at me, then away, then down at her feet.

I couldn’t move. Behind, the Fort and the body. Away to the left, my house, empty and sweltering. Right, Rudy, Gloria and the cops. Ahead, nothing but fields and sky. The sun burned rich orange and bled into the clouds. A swarm of starlings, black spots on gold, pulsed between power lines.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘There is still some chicken from yesterday’s dinner.’

‘How can you be hungry after that?’ she asked but I shrugged.

Jenny squinted at me, like she did when I said something stupid. Momma did it too. Where Momma might yell at me, Jenny just turned away, sighed through her teeth, and stalked across the field. The path home was well trodden, we made shortcuts of the fields, they were our highways and backways, free of grown-ups and rules.

‘Shouldn’t we go straight to the police?’ she asked. ‘Feels wrong to just leave her down there.’

‘I know but we agreed. We’ll go tomorrow. I guess we just try to forget about it for tonight.’

We walked together, silent, until we came to Three Points, a triangle of land made by three crisscrossing irrigation streams. Momma said it’d been there since they split up the land between us, Briggs, and Morton down the track. She said that idiot Briggs couldn’t count right and ended up short on one side. Caused a rift between the families for years and the swatch of land remained unclaimed. It was twenty strides end-to-end and covered in grass green as a lime candy straight out the jar. No matter the weather, no matter the heat, Three Points stayed alive. It was a rule, one of those known somehow by everyone in town, that you could say or do anything on the Points. It didn’t belong to anyone so no one was watching, no one was listening.

Jenny slowed and stopped in the middle of the island.

‘Do you think someone in Larson killed her?’ she asked.

I’d thought about it while we were walking but pushed away the idea almost as quickly as it came.

‘I don’t want to think about what that would mean.’

‘What about the Fort? Could the person who wrecked it have killed her?’ she said; her voice had an edge of fear to it, a tremor I recognised. Her eyes darted left, right, into the trees, over the fields. ‘Could … could they still be around?’

I put my hands on her shoulders. ‘No. Whoever did it is long gone. And even if they aren’t, you’ve got me and Momma and we won’t let anything happen to you.’

The tension in her eased, her shoulders dropped. ‘I know you won’t, but her? She’d probably offer me up to the killer for a bottle of bourbon.’

It needled at me when she spoke of Momma like that. I’d tried for years to be peacekeeper between them, but the barbs kept flying, the hate kept growing and resurfacing no matter what. Now my days were all about maintaining the uneasy calm.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said, straightened up and took Jenny’s hand. ‘Momma won’t be there anyway.’

Twenty minutes and two more fields brought us to the edge of our yard. We both stopped and Jenny’s grip on my hand tightened, turned my knuckles white and sore. Faded red truck parked skewed against the side of the house with two deep tyre scars in the dirt. Fresh dent in the door. The frayed rope on the oak branch swayed but not by the breeze. Momma always flicked the rope with her finger when she got home. Her mindless habit.

The sound of footsteps throbbed from inside the house. One-two, one-two, a stumble, a crash, the picture frame in the hall, dropped and broken twice this month already. A low moan, something monstrous in it, thick and slurred. A clatter of metal on enamel, the pan that cooked yesterday’s chicken, pushed into the kitchen sink.

Jenny sighed. ‘Looks like you were wrong, Johnny.’

3

There weren’t many reasons Momma would leave Gum’s before midnight on a Friday. It likely wasn’t to give us a new pa this time, as I couldn’t hear anyone else in the house. A Pigeon Pa, Jenny called them. They fly in, shit all over the place then fly out again, none the wiser. Momma alone in the house meant Ben Gum, owner of Gum’s and one of our years-ago Pigeon Pas, had cut her off. When that thought hit us both, Jenny’s grip on my hand turned iron.

‘I don’t want to go in there,’ she said.

‘It won’t be so bad. She’s just drunk. You know what she’s like when she’s drunk. You go straight upstairs and I’ll bring you dinner.’

Jenny kicked at the dirt. ‘Like that’ll help.’

I tried to stifle my sigh. ‘Just try not to sass her.’

We could turn around, run back to the Fort or go to the west field and sleep between the corn while Momma slept off hers. That would be better than seeing the anger and snarl on Jenny’s face a moment longer. But we stood by that rope swing too long. The crashing inside stopped for a sickening moment. Then the slam of the back door flung wide, the screen’s rusted spring whining. Then the slapping steps of her shoes on the dirt. Then the voice.

‘There you are, my babies,’ Momma said, slurred and breathy. ‘Look at you both, skin and bone. You hungry, my babies?’

Momma’s hair, thin curls turned white-blonde instead of gold like Jenny’s, flared wild on her head, like a storm brewed on her skull. And it did. On it. In it. She was a tornado, my momma.

‘Hi, Momma,’ I said and nudged at Jenny to say hello but she wouldn’t.

‘Come inside now.’ Momma swayed on her spindle heels and spindle legs wrapped up in tight blue jeans, her red camisole cut a half-inch too low.

She caught herself on the side of the house. ‘I’ll fix you both a plate. Get in, get in.’

She pounded her fist on the whitewashed boards with every word, then hurled up her arm, half sick of us for being there, half gesturing which way to go.

I felt my sister’s heartbeat thrumming through her hand. I took a step toward the house, tried to pull Jenny with me but she wouldn’t move. Her face set in a dark frown. A prickle went up my back, I knew what was coming.

‘Please, Jenny,’ I whispered but she shook her head.

‘Not when she’s like this,’ she said.

Momma saw Jenny’s expression and matched it. All her slur and swagger disappeared and she turned pin-sharp. Momma stood tall and straight, her back like rebar, and set toward us. Careful steps turned ragged fast. Red whiskey heat rose in her cheeks and filled up her throat, turned the sweet words sour.

‘Look at you,’ she sneered down at Jenny. ‘That dress. Showing off those legs. You’re so dirty. Get in this fuhking house. I made you dinner and you’ll damn well eat it.’

Then she was in front of us, her hand on Jenny’s arm, pulling her toward the porch. Her eyes, blue and bloodshot, flared up bright despite the dark, red lips pulled back, lipstick on her teeth, smeared on her chin.

‘Let me go!’ Jenny tried to pry Momma’s fingers but her grip was iron.

‘I am your mother and you will mind me.’

Jenny’s shoes cut furrows in the dirt, her nails dug into Momma’s wrist. ‘I wish you weren’t. I hate you! Let me go!’

Momma recoiled like those words were a slap across the cheek. I put myself between them, one hand on Momma’s hand, the other on Jenny’s, tried to prise them apart.

‘She didn’t mean it, did you, Jenny?’ I said, keeping my voice level, calm, anything not to throw gas on the fire.

‘I meant it,’ my sister snarled. ‘I wish you weren’t my mother.’

The sharp sobriety in Momma crumbled and her slur returned. ‘You ungrateful little witch.’

She yanked on Jenny’s arm again, harder, fiercer, I thought it might pop out the socket. I was invisible to them. They sniped through me, around me, trading hurled stones and scratches one for one.

Momma’s elbow dug into my side, pushed me, and suddenly her and Jenny were away. Momma dragged her around the house. Jenny cried out, scratching, swearing and saying the most awful things about our mother, calling her ugly, fat, a bitch, and all sorts else. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. The noise, the hate, it all hurt too much to hear. Then I followed them around the house, begging them to stop but they wouldn’t. It felt like they never would.

At the step up to the back door, Momma finally let go and Jenny fell, landed hard on a rock, but Momma didn’t see.

‘You stupid, stupid girl,’ she hissed and went to grab her but Jenny scrambled away and I was between them again. Behind me, Jenny whimpered, clutched her knee.

‘Momma, please.’ I took her by the shoulders and held her wavering gaze. Same as Jenny, the best way to calm them both. ‘Jenny’s just tired, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t mean it.’

Momma’s eyes, red-rimmed with drink, welled with tears. ‘She breaks my heart, that girl, just breaks my heart.’

‘I know. Please go inside, Momma. I’m so hungry and I’d just love some of that chicken. I’ll talk to her, okay? She’s sorry, she’s really sorry and so am I. Please?’

Keep it calm, John Royal, keep the eye contact, keep the tone light, keep the platitudes coming.

Momma wasn’t Momma when she was drunk. She was a beast of ups and downs and harsh words she didn’t really mean. At least, I hoped she didn’t. I prayed neither of them did, else what hope was there for us?

‘She needs to learn respect,’ Momma said, voice like a dry kettle on the heat. ‘She needs her momma’s teaching, she can’t be dressed so loose.’

‘I know, Momma. I know.’

Momma put her hand, soft and warm and trembling, on my cheek. ‘You’re such a good boy, John. My perfect boy.’

Her hand fell away and her gaze drifted. ‘You look hungry. I’ll fix you a plate.’

Then she went inside and let the screen door bang. The only sound left in the world was Jenny’s anger, her sharp breaths and tiny scratches of her nails in the soil. I went to her, knelt down beside.

‘Jenny,’ I said, soft as cotton, put my hand on hers. ‘Are you all right? Let’s go inside now.’

Tears mixed up with dust, streaked down her face. Her hair, gold blonde and perfect, was rucked up and twisted. She shook. Hands on her knee, a trickle of blood down her shin.

‘We have to,’ I murmured, distracted, eyes on the blood. The image of the girl, the body we found, hit the back of my eyes.

Jenny wiped her face hard with the heel of her hand. A bruise blossomed on her arm.

‘No. I won’t go in there.’

And she broke, wept hot tears into her hands. I wrapped my arms around my sister and sat until her sobs eased and the last of the evening light faded to night. I teased my fingers through her hair, tamed it down best I could without hurting her. A speck of rage grew in me that Momma had let this happen and Jenny had let this happen and a few stupid words had blown up into a fight that would linger for days. I wished I could say to Jenny, it wasn’t all Momma, was it? You said some nasty things too. You hurt her feelings too. You made her cry too. Why can’t you both just get along? Why do I have to be stuck in the middle all the time? But I clenched my jaw, swallowed down the blame, and tried to soothe my sister.

‘It’ll be worse if you don’t go in,’ I said. Then, as if it made it all right, ‘You know she’s only like this when she’s drunk.’

I met Jenny’s eyes, raw and blazing. ‘I meant every word.’

She slapped away my hand and scrambled to her feet.

‘Please, Jenny, just come inside,’ I said but she wouldn’t hear it.

‘You go, Johnny, you go be with her, she’s got your stupid chicken.’

Before I could say I’d share, she ran. Just turned and ran.

‘Jenny!’ But she was away, into the night, into the fields.

I whipped around to the house and to those three steps up to where my mother waited, wrapped in her own hurt. I heard her move inside, the clinking of glass as she poured another drink. Those sounds mixed with the rustle and crackle of Jenny’s footsteps running through dry grass.

I was stuck in the back yard, between Momma and sister. I didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Jenny but I knew where she would go. She was like those starlings, darting and weaving, the best runner in our class. Mr Escott, our phys-ed teacher, said it was a good job I could read and work a corn huller because I wasn’t much good for anything else. The rest of the class had laughed. I’d stared at my skinny arms and legs, my too small gym shorts, and watched the others cross the finish line.

‘John?’ Momma said, gently from the back door. ‘Come on inside, baby.’

She smiled, that full smile that lit up her face and eyes, rosy and glowing with whiskey. The snarl and sneer was gone, like it had never been. A flipped switch and there was my momma again, reaching for me.

‘Dinner is on the table.’

This wasn’t the woman who’d said those things to Jenny and dragged her across the yard. It just wore her face, spoke in her voice. It was the drink. It was the sickness. Not my momma, not really.

I went inside and sat at the kitchen table. Jenny would be fine. I’d never been able to truly calm her after a fuss like that, I’d never be able to get her to come home if she didn’t want to. Besides, if she was still riled up the fight would start fresh soon as she walked in the back door. It was best for them and me to wait it out, let the anger subside and then find her, cradle her, let her sob it all out onto me instead of watch her beat it out of herself. I knew where she’d go, I’d find her.

Momma sat down beside me at the kitchen table, smoking a Lucky Strike. She reached to me, brushed my hair back, then flicked out her ash into a chipped cup.

‘How was your day, baby?’

‘Fine.’ It wasn’t fine. We found a dead body. But I wasn’t ready to say that. It was still too mixed up in my head.

Momma went quiet as I ate. Her eyes flickered every now and then, like she was thinking of something, wanted to say it, but chickened out. She bit on her lower lip. Jenny did that when she was worried.

‘Is your sister all right?’

‘I don’t know. I guess,’ I said. ‘She will be.’

Momma stubbed out the Strike and rubbed her forehead, tucked her hair back, laid her hand over her neck, fidgeted like she had ants crawling all over her skin.

‘That girl makes me so mad sometimes, the way she talks to me. If I’d have spoken to my mother like that, ooh she would have kicked me out of her house so fast it’d make your head spin. You heard what that girl said, didn’t you?’

She shook her head, finally her eyes went to mine, eyelids drowsy with drink. ‘You’d never talk to me like that, would you, baby? You’re my prince. What a good boy you are.’

She cupped my cheek with her hand. Soft skin. Sweet smell of tobacco and old perfume on her wrist.

‘My temper sometimes, I don’t know,’ she said, waving her arm, dismissing it as nothing.

Then she snapped back to me. ‘Oh! I almost forgot.’

Momma went to the family room, to the cabinet behind the couch. She pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. A rectangle, about two inches thick, tied up with string.

‘I got this for you,’ she said, skipping back over to me and setting it down on the table. She moved my still full plate and pushed the package closer.