You Only Get Letters from Jail Page 21

  “What is called a rebus?” I asked.

  “The puzzle. It’s got a name. It’s like code. We used it in the war, out on field patrols.”

  Debbie rolled her eyes and bit at the back of her thumb. “Stop with the war bullshit already,” she said. “Tell a different story.” She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked off to the west. “You want to go swim?” she asked me.

  I looked at the lake in the distance and thought I could see a white line moving across it, the wake from a boat cutting across the surface. I imagined how cool the water was, how deep it might be. I was terrible at gauging distance, but the lake didn’t look that far away. It was a hard blue stain on the other side of thick trees, high grass, a steep walk down. It could take us ten minutes to get there. It could take us two hours. There would be a lot to step over and through in the process—a lot of things that would like to poke in and scratch.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” I asked.

  Debbie ran her tongue across her lips. “I’m going,” she said. “Right now.”

  “Don’t be gone a long time,” Kenny said. “Ricky wants to do this just before sunset.”

  I looked at the sky and the sun was still far from making the slide toward the horizon line. “We’ll be back,” I said.

  We each grabbed an extra beer and started walking toward the oak trees that marked the slope down to the shoreline. I could hear our shoes trampling the grass and it was dry and brittle and sharp and pieces of it bit into the bare skin on my legs and I had to keep resisting the urge to reach down and scratch. We walked in silence; the only sound was the car radio spilling out the open doors behind us. The music was good and part of me wanted to stay and listen, sitting in the driver’s seat with my legs propped up on the open gap between the frame and the door, and just wait for the sun to start setting. I thought that maybe if I stayed by the car, I could keep bugging Kenny enough that he would make Ricky get down to it sooner rather than later and I could find out what he was up to and then we could make the drive back and I could get something to eat, since nobody had thought about the fact that we had all kinds of beer and no food at all.

  “You know Ricky is crazy, right?” Debbie said. I had been thinking about a cheeseburger, the kind with shredded lettuce and Thousand Island dressing, and a vanilla milk shake and fries with lots of salt, crispy fries that are too hot to bite into but you do it anyways because you can’t wait or hold back.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He’s crazy. He shouldn’t even talk about Suzy Eberhardt.”

  I took a long swallow from my open bottle and slowed down my pace so that I could step over some rocks that were piled in the grass. They had yellow flowers growing through the spaces between them, yellow flowers in the yellow grass, and the rocks themselves were a faded yellow, a flat sea, the yellow of sick skin.

  “He seems okay,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything more to say. When I got right down to it, I really didn’t care if he was crazy or if he wasn’t—he wasn’t my friend, he was my brother’s—and maybe he knew something about what happened to Suzy Eberhardt, even though that didn’t bother me much either, since she was a girl I had heard of but hadn’t known and her disappearing didn’t affect me.

  The breeze came up again and it was warm and uneven and very slight, but it was enough to dry the sweat. I wished that it would rain, that clouds would just muscle up and unleash, but the sky was as empty, hard blue, and unbroken as the lake in the distance and it was August and rain was nothing more than a dull ache like thoughts of the impending threat of school.

  “All that talk about the war? He never went.” Debbie finished her beer and tossed the bottle toward a dry skinny pile of broken tree branches. She had been in my English class last year, but she had been gone more than she had been present, and her hair had been different then, darker, and now it was an easy blond and she had let her bangs grow long and straight.

  “What about the jacket and the limp and all that stuff? He seems to know what he’s talking about,” I said.

  “He’s crazy, not stupid. That’s how crazy people are, right? They sound like they’re sane but they’re really so crazy that when you stop and think about it, nothing that they say really makes any sense.”

  The ground had begun a gentle descent and I was aware that we were moving downhill and the trees had thickened. I could no longer see the lake and had no idea how much farther it would be until we hit the rock-and-marsh shoreline.

  “And the limp, that’s a good one. He fell out of a tree. It was the middle of the night and he was across the street from my house, and I saw it happen, I was upstairs in my bedroom, standing at the window . . . Part of it was probably my fault,” she said.

  “He told my brother that he hurt his leg in the war. A guy in front of him stepped on a booby trap or something and Ricky ended up getting hit.”

  Debbie laughed and opened the other beer she had brought with her. I was still working on the one I had been drinking in the car and it had gone warm and flat and it was all I could do to keep swallowing it. Even the unopened one in my hand didn’t feel that much cooler and I was sorry that I had carried it.

  “He was never in the war. He was in jail.”

  “Why was he in jail?” I asked.

  I could see her smile. “He liked to watch girls.” She looked at me from the corner of her eye, but she didn’t slow her walking.

  “Watch?” Debbie’s left arm was close to me and I could feel her skin sharing the same space as mine. I could hear her shoes pushing through the grass and without turning my head I could see each stride, knew the way that her thighs didn’t touch at the top of her legs when she moved. She had a habit of tugging on the hem of her shorts after every third or fourth step and she didn’t change her pace when she did it, like a small nervous tic that she wasn’t even conscious she was making.

  “Ricky liked to sneak around our house at night, hide in the bushes. That sort of thing.”

  Debbie started walking faster and I fell in behind her. We had to turn sideways to walk through the trees and the piles of brush, and the dry branches were naked and sharp and pulled at our clothes. I could see bursts of manzanita, its red branches twisted and topped with thin rigid leaves. I hadn’t given much thought to poison oak and I figured I probably should, since this was the perfect kind of place for it, but I wasn’t sure if I would recognize it even if I waded through a field. I knew it had something to do with the leaves—leaves of three, let it be—or some rhyme like that, but just about anything can look like it has three leaves and I wasn’t sure if it was the absence or the presence of the three that made the difference.

  “And they arrested him for that?”

  Debbie paused for a second, and I could feel her searching for the next thing to say. “He liked to watch my sister, get her attention, and then—you know. Touch himself.”

  I tried to picture Ricky Riley outside Debbie’s house, ducking down in the bushes in the dark, staring into an open window, watching her sister read or watch TV or eat dinner at the kitchen table, and I tried to imagine what would make him take the next step, what would make him want her that badly.

  “He was in love with her,” Debbie said. It was as if she had been reading my thoughts and it made me feel weird, as if she had looked inside of me. “That’s what he said in all the letters he wrote to her. He wrote to her from jail. According to the police, he was in love with quite a few girls. My sister. Suzy Eberhardt, maybe. I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  I finished a last swallow of flat hot beer and hung my bottle on a dry branch jutting out from a skinny tree. The branch bent but held the weight.

  “So your parents called the cops on him?” I said.

  “One time we came home and the front door was unlocked even though we never left the house that way, and my sister’s dresser drawers were open and some of her clothes were pulled out. Underwear and stuff on the floor. My dad had had enough.”

  “I’m surprised
your dad didn’t just shoot him or something.” I had seen a lot of movies and I knew how fathers were when it came to their daughters. I had no idea as to how fathers were when it came to their sons. I thought about my own father and how he was always in the garage, working on something—the lawn mower, a carburetor, a set of shelves for the living room—listening to baseball games, drinking beer from the extra refrigerator, never doing much of anything with us except to remind us to mow or take out the garbage or clean up.

  “I think my dad thought about it, but what would be the point? My dad thought Ricky would suffer more consequences in jail. Learn his lesson,” she said. “I guess he was wrong.”

  The music had faded behind us and I realized that there were no sounds except for our feet moving through the grass and stepping across the broken branches that had fallen everywhere. The trees formed a thin canopy above us and the sunlight was scattered and the heat had lifted from the air.

  “He didn’t do much time, and when he got out, he just started coming back around. But he’s more careful this time. My parents don’t even know yet.”

  I noticed that my shoelaces were full of foxtails and they were the kind that are hard to remove, the kind that break off and dig in when you pull at them. “I guess I don’t get why you’re hanging out with Ricky then,” I said. We kept walking forward, breaking down the grass.

  “God,” Debbie said. “Do you smell that?”

  I inhaled and it hit me, the unmistakable smell of something rotten and dead. “Probably an animal,” I said.

  We stopped and looked in opposite directions, inhaling, testing the air. I shielded my eyes to try and see if there was something lying in the grass.

  “There are no animals out here,” Debbie said. “Haven’t you noticed that? I mean, think about it. What have you really seen?”

  I thought about it for a second and realized she was right—for some reason I had been convinced that I’d seen rabbits running, squirrels hanging on trunks, birds in the branches. But all of it was things that I expected to see, my imagination filling in the gaps. It was like the first time that I had ever been camping and it had gotten dark and we were sitting by the campfire, Kenny and me, and our parents had gone to bed in their tent and Kenny told me we were in bear country and that bears were drawn to campfires, and I became convinced that I could hear one walking around the campsite, snapping branches, trampling pine needles, and I had felt all the hair on my body stand up, and I had been paralyzed, too afraid to move, and in the middle of the night when I woke up with the strong urge to pee, I was so afraid to leave the tent that I lay in my sleeping bag and pissed myself and in the morning I had to hide my pajamas and Kenny had found out and laughed about it for weeks, called me Piss Boy and made bear sounds every time he passed by my room.

  “I guess I haven’t seen any animals,” I said. “Maybe we have just been making too much noise.”

  Debbie turned around and we faced each other. “We aren’t being that loud. There should be something out here.”

  I turned a full circle and looked at everything. The oak trees were a dirty gray with thick, cracked bark and rounded leaves grouped in tight spirals. There were scattered piles of acorns under some of the trees, the nuts themselves split and dry, but apparently untouched by any animal that might wander through. I looked above us and the sky appeared in fragmented shapes between the heavy branches, and there wasn’t so much as the dash of a bird to mar the stillness. The breeze came again, slow and insistent, and the leaves around us rustled, moved together in a soft rub. The smell was thick and heavy and I wanted to walk away from it, but Debbie just stood there, staring out over the grass and the trees and the broken branches piled into brush.

  “Maybe animals stay away from a place where one is dead,” I said.

  Debbie took a swallow from her beer and continued walking down the incline. “Maybe it’s not an animal,” she said. “I want to find it.”

  “I thought you wanted to go swimming,” I said. “C’mon, it’s hot.”

  “I’m not sweating anymore,” she said. She finished her beer and tossed the bottle to the ground, where it landed with a soft hollow thump. “Are you?”

  I could feel a tightness in my stomach, something more than cheap warm beer, and I thought about how we should have made it to the water by now, that we should be standing on the shoreline, pulling flat rocks out of the wet ground and seeing how far we could make them skip, counting their hops across the surface. I thought that by now I should be shirtless, with lake water around my shoulders as I swam out from the shore to try to see how far I had to go before I could turn around and see Kenny’s car on the hillside. I thought that by now I should be swimming with Debbie, seeing how long we could hold our breath, and she would be stripped down to maybe only panties and a bra, maybe, and she would be swimming with me and we would forget about the things that didn’t mean anything out here.

  “It smells like something big,” Debbie said. She had picked up a crooked stick and she was walking with it, poking it into tangles of grass, swinging it against trunks as she passed them so that I could see dust and particles of bark rise up and hang in the sunlight.

  “It could be a deer,” I said. “Besides, dead animal smells like dead animal. I don’t think size matters.”

  “Really?” Debbie said.

  “I’m going back to the car,” I said.

  I turned around and started walking up the incline, toward where the trees thinned out and went back to grass and rock. I noticed that there were three trails in the grass—mine and Debbie’s and one that I hadn’t noticed before. It could have been a game trail, my dad had pointed some out that one time that we had been camping and we had gone for a hike, Kenny, me, and our dad, and he had pointed things out to us, things like game trails, but nothing else that was useful. I could hear Debbie behind me, knocking her stick against trees. “I thought we were going swimming,” she said.

  I looked up at a gap in the overhang of branches and leaves and there was more sky than sun above us. “We don’t have enough time,” I said. “I guess it was farther than we thought.”

  I tried to walk slowly in hopes that Debbie would catch up with me, but she just hung back and swung her stick and didn’t speak. The sky was changing color and the air had taken on the damp weight of humidity and now there were a few clouds, though they were flat and nonthreatening and far away in the distance. I could hear the music before I could see the car and I tried to hear the sound of voices and I knew that Kenny and Ricky would be drunk since they had had most of the beer for themselves. I had no idea as to how long we had been gone, and there was probably a way to tell time by looking at the shadows, but that was something I had never learned. I felt Debbie’s hand on my arm, it was warm and rough and she caught me just above the elbow, on the bare skin below the sleeve.

  “Wait,” she said.

  I stopped and looked at her. I knew that in a few more yards we would leave the stand of trees and be back in the grass that led to the clearing and whatever we had been talking about would be forgotten and I would not think any differently of Ricky despite what I knew.

  “He wrote me letters,” she said. “That’s what you wanted to know, right? Why I’m out here with him?”

  She was breathing hard, as if she had had to hurry a little bit to catch up with me. I wondered if she had planned it, waited for me to reach this point on the path before she stopped me, or if it was just an impulse that got to her, and she gave in to the urge to tell.

  “He wrote me letters from jail,” she said. “I had never gotten a letter from anyone before, you know? And then these letters started showing up—he had some friend of his mail them to me so that my parents wouldn’t see the return address—and I know he’s crazy, but he can write. There’s something about his words. And he said that the truth of it was that he was really in love with me. He just couldn’t tell me, except in his letters.”

  She said all of this in a rush, in a run-on set of
sentences that came out like a breath held too long, and even in the weakened light I could see that her face was flushed.

  “Now you know,” she said.

  “You don’t love him back, do you?” I asked.

  She let go of my arm and I realized that the whole time that she had been speaking, her fingers had been digging in and I could still feel the pressure even as I watched her hand fall away and drop to her side.

  “I don’t love him,” she said. “But if Suzy Eberhardt ran off, I know why she might do it.” Debbie shifted her eyes away from mine and she stared off over my shoulder, in the direction of the car that we could hear but not yet see. “It’s something to do,” she said.

  When we got back to the car, Ricky and Kenny were standing by the open trunk, moving things around, pulling out gas cans and setting them on the ground. The sun was low and the sky had gone from blue to violet, with a thin band of green that bled into purple and red as the color leaked toward the foothills. From the car we could see the lake again, untouched and dark now that the sun was setting. I was sorry that we hadn’t made it to the shore to swim and I wondered what it would be like beside the lake now, if there would be the sound of frogs calling, the steady low hum of mosquitoes, the splash of fish as they rose from the water to take bugs off the surface.

  “If you guys had been in the war, you’d be dead now,” Ricky said. “You made a fuck lot of noise as you were walking up here. I could hear you for the past twenty minutes.”

  Debbie took a beer from the case and opened it, drank half in one swallow, took a breath, and finished the rest of it. She tossed the empty into the weeds. “This isn’t the war,” she said.

  “How do you know we aren’t being watched?” Ricky asked.

  “Just stop, okay?” Debbie said.

  I looked at Kenny to see if he was listening, but he was bent into the trunk, still moving things around even though most of the contents had been pulled out and were scattered around him in the grass.

  Ricky grabbed Debbie and put his arms around her and pulled her against him, hard, and buried his head in her neck so that his hair covered his face and I couldn’t tell if he kissed her or not. I watched the expression on Debbie’s face, but she was as shadowed and blank as the lake in the distance.