You Only Get Letters from Jail Read online

  “I want you to come down to the house and we’ll go through those boxes in the morning,” she said. She took my hand in hers so that we could weave through the crowd.

  There were more drinks, and more dancing, and at some point I could no longer feel my feet or my face. When Leeanne’s good mood finally wore out like a fan belt, I told Vivian that it was getting late, and together we got Chuck to agree that it was time to go.

  We were silent in the car, all of us pressed together for warmth until the heater could catch up and take the fog off the windows. I had turned the corner to drunk and was trying to hold myself upright in the backseat next to Leeanne. Once we hit the parking lot, Chuck had decided to drive, and from what I could tell from my one good focused eye, he was doing all right despite the fog and the dark and the turns I could not see coming.

  “I hate this stretch of road at this time of night,” Vivian said.

  “Why do you have to say that? Why even think it?” Chuck rubbed the back of his hand against the bottom of the windshield so that he could clear what the defroster couldn’t reach.

  “What’s wrong with the road?” Leeanne asked.

  They were quiet in the front seat, and then Chuck cleared his throat and turned the heater down to cut the roar from the fan. “Go ahead, Viv. You started it,” he said.

  Vivian turned in her seat so that she could face us. “This is where Deacon died,” she said.

  “On this road,” Chuck said. “In this kind of weather, you know. Rain in the day that goes cold at night so the fog settles in the low spots, but it was nothing new, he’d driven it a million times before.”

  Vivian turned and looked out her window. “Did we pass it already?”

  I watched Chuck squint against the oncoming headlights, but he didn’t look away from the road. “I think it was back there. It was either around that last curve, or the one coming up. I don’t remember.” His eyes glanced into the rearview mirror and I couldn’t tell if he was looking at Leeanne or me.

  “That’s terrible,” Leeanne whispered. She leaned her head against my shoulder.

  Vivian turned the heater fan to high again so that the noise filled the car and she had to raise her voice to talk above it. “I guess it isn’t true to say he died here—he got farther than this. The police said he had managed to walk a good hundred yards from the car before he finally quit.”

  There were lights flashing ahead of us and Chuck tapped the brakes so that we slowed and came alongside two cars on the shoulder. There were men standing by the car in front, and even though the hood was wrinkled and the windshield had been busted, and the grill was pushed into the radiator so that all the fluid had poured out onto the road, both of the headlights were still on and shining strong. We could see the deer just beyond the front of the car, its front legs outstretched toward the centerline, the hind end rolled up and twisted at the spine, blood and its insides puddled around it. One of the men waved us on and Chuck swung the car out and crept wide to avoid them.

  Leeanne pressed her face into my sleeve and I could feel her breath through my shirt. “I can’t look,” she said.

  “I think it was a deer that got Deacon,” Vivian said. She was leaning forward in her seat with her cheek against the window. “I think Deacon swerved to miss a deer and he rolled his car. He was the kind of person who wouldn’t want to hurt anything.”

  The moon came out from behind the clouds and lit the fields and pastures so that the darkness retreated to the hills and I could see fence posts and wire and the white weeds that soaked up the rain. Chuck drove slowly the rest of the way until he made the soft turn and pulled the car near the house. We stood in the driveway and listened to the engine tick and then we moved in different directions. “I will see you in the morning,” Vivian whispered into my ear when I hugged her good night, and I wanted to hold on to her, shuffle my feet in that tight clockwise circle, and go back to the dance floor so that I could hear her now that my head was quiet, and I could tell her that I was fine with what I had and what already belonged to me. An owl called out and we were startled and reminded of where we were headed.

  “We’re opening the shop late tomorrow,” Chuck said to me as he walked toward his house. “Maybe we won’t even go in at all. I’m gonna sleep like the dead, and it’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than the alarm clock to wake me up.”

  I followed Leeanne up the stairs to the room and then I pulled the covers back on the bed and helped her down, slipped her shoes off for her and tucked her in. “I don’t like these people,” she whispered. “I want to leave.”

  The window was still open to air out the paint, but the night was cold and it filled the room with a chill that would probably take a long time to warm. I stood at the window and looked out at the light, the buzzards now gone to roost and replaced by the low shapes of cows on the hillsides. Behind me I could hear Leeanne’s breathing turn hollow like a snore, and part of me wanted to press my pillow against her face so that I would not have to hear the sound. Below and beyond us I could see the corner of windows of the main house, the tall shrubs and front door. I could see the mailbox at the end of the driveway, and the road in the distance. I imagined Deacon on that road in this same darkness, and I wondered how close he had really been to making it home.

  FIRM AND GOOD

  Me and Elbow Ritchie took the corner from Monroe to Jefferson at an easy forty-five and Elbow went deep with his right foot and dropped the Hurst shifter down a gear so the engine turned to a tight whine as the back end slipped out from under us and we fishtailed onto the other side of the street until Elbow led it back to our side with a relaxed left hand and we spit pavement under fifteen-inch radial slicks. Elbow was just showing off and I knew it, but his birthday had been two weeks ago and he had every right to brag, since his father had bought him a ’71 Mach 1 and I was driving a Schwinn. He had pulled up to my house the night of his birthday and hit the horn and the gas and I heard nothing but a 351 four barrel blow exhaust at the curb and I knew that fucker had worn his father down to nothing but a wallet who had spilled out the cash it took to put Elbow behind the wheel of too much car and not enough brakes and we had barely been home since. Now we were twenty minutes out of school that didn’t end for another sixty-five and Elbow had the short end of some backyard green he had paid thirty bucks an ounce for and I was so high I didn’t know if our tires were touching the street as we drove through the neighborhood and took the shortcut to get us home. Elbow had this big-ass smile on his face but everything else about him was sharp concentration and competence, because if there were things about Elbow that I didn’t trust, his driving wasn’t one of them, and he had a way of cocking his arm out the window, holding a cigarette and the wheel, and cranking up the stereo volume all at one time that looked like some ritualistic form of dance. I almost told him that, had my mouth open and was forming the words over the top of Black Sabbath doing “Fairies Wear Boots,” when we hit the cat—nothing more than a black-and-white stone in the street—and I jerked my head out my open window to watch it rebound and spin into the curb and Elbow pulled the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, exhaled, squinted toward me, said something about the paint job, and the Mustang went sixty to zero in a long burn of Goodyear rubber.

  It was March and the weather had turned bleak. The sky was milk and there was no warmth in the air even though there had been the threat of sunshine, and we had the windows down mostly because the passenger side didn’t roll up all the way and we both got tired of hearing the heavy slapping sound of tire echo if the driver’s window wasn’t down to match. There were white and weak pink blossoms in the trees, which still seemed as naked as November, and everything was poised on the edge of a spring that just was not coming. The only movement was the sharp wind that bit through our T-shirts, and the trees, and darker clouds that came in from the west and were the color of heavy aluminum and depression, hammered together above us.

  Without the ram air hood vibrating across the top of the
engine, we were suddenly dumped into more quiet than I had expected and for a minute I wondered if I had seen the cat get hit, or if maybe it was just my imagination and we were still moving forward and blowing back miles.

  “We hit that fucking cat,” Elbow said, and there were many things I did not trust about Elbow, but what he said around his cigarette was not one of them, and in the empty seconds as side one faded out on the tape deck and there was the quiet pause before side two, I knew that we had killed that thing in the road and I wasn’t that high anymore and it would be impossible now to fake it and forget.

  “What do we do?” I said. My mouth was as dry as the air that came in through the window, and I could smell burning wood, a distant fire leaking out someone’s chimney. For a minute I was reminded of fall and away games when I had played basketball and the team had traveled by bus to a distant town and me and Lonnie Howard would leave the gym when we were supposed to be doing homework while the varsity team played, and we would walk foreign sidewalks of cities we did not live in and there was always a smell that October carried with it—dank and dark and full of smoke and cold and fire and rotten vegetables waiting to be upturned by garden rakes on blustery Saturday afternoons when there was no sun and no heat. But now it was March and Lonnie Howard had transferred schools after freshman year and I was with Elbow Ritchie and I did not play basketball anymore and there was a dead cat behind us and a few months of senior year in front of us and beyond that nothing but the sputter and hiss of dead air like the end of our own tape.

  “Well,” Elbow said, “we probably have two choices.” He shifted his weight in the seat and I could see his right foot rise up from the floor mat and strain toward the gas pedal, and I knew that choice, so I pulled the handle on my door and spilled myself into the street and made choice number two. I heard Elbow make a noise behind me and then I had my legs underneath me and I was headed back along the gutter to the shape and the mess. Elbow gunned the car’s engine and I thought maybe he might punch it and run but then the motor cut and there was silence in the street and in thirty feet I was looking down at what we had done. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Other than the unnatural angle of the cat’s head and the way that the glassy eyes stared in opposite directions, it looked like it could be picked up and petted. I had seen a squirrel hit by a station wagon one time when I was walking home from school and it had exploded. Crunch and poof. It had looked as if the squirrel had decided to turn itself inside out and go empty in the process.

  But the cat was intact. I looked down at it and it looked sideways at me and it said to me five words that I would not forget even after the last of the cheap weed wore off. “It should have been you.”

  Then a woman in the yard beside the gutter was screaming and Elbow was beside me and the cat continued its accusation and I wanted to reach down and lift it from the thin stream of water it was lying in, but it told me to just step away, leave it alone, let it be. I looked at Elbow to see if he had heard the cat’s decision, but Elbow was lighting a cigarette and squaring up against the woman, who was yelling, “Toby, my God you killed Toby,” and I shoved my hands deep into my jeans pockets and decided to go as limp as the cat.

  She wasn’t a tall woman, but she crossed the yard in quick strides, and then the sidewalk, and she was on us before Elbow even had a chance to exhale. Elbow squinted at her and raised both hands in a gesture of accepted defeat. “It was an accident,” he said.

  “You,” she said. “You ran right over him. You didn’t even try to stop.”

  “Ma’am, I didn’t even see him. He ran right in front of my car.” He hooked his thumb up the street toward the Mustang, which was parked at a decidedly drunken angle in our lane. I could still smell the faint burn of new tire and by now other neighbors had left the warmth of their houses to stand on their porches with their hands on their hips or folded across their chests in a gesture of conviction and I knew that Jefferson Street had found us guilty of the crime and we would never get a jury of our peers.

  “I want the names of your parents. Both of you.” She said this matter-of-fact, and I realized that she was not hysterical or crying, but her face was flushed and she kept wringing her hands in front of her as if they might escape and do something on their own if she didn’t hold them back.

  “Everything okay over there, Marianne?” a guy called from two houses down. He was wearing an unbuttoned mechanic’s shirt over a white T-shirt and he had a can of beer in his hand.

  “These boys ran over my cat.”

  I heard a woman gasp and suck in her breath and a quiet murmur ran up the street like a wave. We were surrounded on all sides now. There were kids standing on the sidewalk, and crowds forming in driveways. “You want me to deal with them?” beer-can mechanic called. A siren started up in the distance and I wondered if someone had already called the police.

  “It’s okay, Randy. Everything is under control.” She looked at both of us, and Elbow just kept smoking and staring down the street at his car and I kept looking for a place to put my eyes, but in the end they just met hers and I couldn’t break away and she wouldn’t let me.

  Eventually the woman made us write down our names and phone numbers on a piece of binder paper I pulled from my backpack, and then beer-can mechanic came down the sidewalk with a pillowcase and a pair of gloves and everyone watched his performance of pulling the cat from the gutter, dripping water and wrappers, its limbs already stiff, and some of the kids cried and some of the women covered their own eyes from the sight and Elbow grew bored and started taking small steps back toward the car while the cat was bagged and carried away. “Your parents will be hearing from me,” Marianne said.

  I went home and the evening stretched out in front of me in one long inhale and I choked on my heartbeat every time the telephone rang. The air was cold and my eyes itched from too much weed and the fact that I couldn’t seem to close them and rest even though I wanted to.

  I had only pushed my dinner around on my plate and when the obligation was over, I went to my room and shut the door and lay on my bed in all of my clothes, right down to shoes and socks, and watched the light leak from my windows and the shadows shift and change on my ceiling. She still hadn’t called, and I figured maybe the woman had been all threat and no follow-through—it was an accident. Even Elbow had been saying that the entire way back to my house—“What is the bitch really going to do to us? It was an accident. I mean, we weren’t driving around trying to kill fucking cats.”

  When my clock ticked past nine, my eyes finally felt like they could close and I had put it all into justification and perspective and even decided that we hadn’t really been that high and it couldn’t even be proven that we had actually hit the cat when you got right down to it, and even if she called tomorrow or the next day, there was no way my parents would bust me for being a passenger in a car that had hit a cat—even if we had been cutting school and were stoned and I wasn’t supposed to be with Elbow Ritchie in his too much car for a kid like him without permission. Those were details—unimportant compared to the fact that it was an accident. Perfectly innocent. Perfectly faultless.

  I heard the phone ring the second before it actually did and I heard the television mute in the other room and I kept my eyes shut and pretended that I was blind. I wondered if losing your vision really does increase the strength of your other senses and if my eyes were closed would food taste different or better, could I feel my way from my bedroom to the end of the block, could I hear somebody strike a match in the house next door? With my eyes closed right then on my bed in the darkness of my room I could taste my own fear and smell my own sweat and hear my father’s voice on the phone and the sound of my name.

  Elbow got his dad to pay her off. He wouldn’t tell me how much or how the conversation went, but I figured it was more than a C-note, maybe more than two, and Elbow skated right out of punishment and my parents found another reason to think he was a bad influence on me, and come that Saturday morning I w
as standing in front of her house, 477 Jefferson, ready to serve three weekends of my time as penance for being high, for cutting school, for being with Elbow, for riding shotgun in a cat-killing machine. Three weekends of work, yard care, house painting, trash hauling, hammering broken stairs, gutter cleaning. Elbow’s dad threw her some money and I got to serve the time. “Take this weed with you,” Elbow said Friday after school as we headed out to the parking lot and I got relegated to the backseat because guys who didn’t have the money to pay to stay out of trouble didn’t get to ride shotgun in a cat-killing machine anymore, and now Brock Irwin was in my spot and I was in back like the hired help. Elbow handed me a Ziploc bag with a handful of joints at the bottom, all of them rolled like perfection. “It will make you forget that you’re doing a work project.” Brock held up his hand and Elbow gave him a hard high five and I rested my head against the back of the seat until the music came tearing out of the speaker behind me and I realized how much I hated that song.

  My father woke me up on Saturday morning, five minutes before my alarm was set to go off, and he followed me around while I got ready, monitored my time, supervised my routine, and when he dropped me off in front of her house, he waited at the curb to make sure that I didn’t bolt, which is exactly what I wanted to do. She opened the door after the first weak knock and invited me to step past her and into the half-light of her living room. Her house smelled like flowers and cooking and things I could not name but recognized. “You can call me Marianne,” she said.

  I stood there awkwardly looking down at my old pair of Converse I had worn to work in, and she did not break the silence that followed and relieve me of my shame. I could hear the heavy tick of a large clock coming from a room I could not see, and I wondered if that sound ever got on her nerves, woke her up in the night, made her have to turn the television louder in order to hear her shows. I looked around to see what kind of television she had. I didn’t see one at all.