Sorrow Road (35 page)

No Travis sighting. That was the single dark spot on the day. She had really, really hoped to come across him. She still did not understand why she was so drawn to the guy, and maybe the mystery was part of it—she did not even know what kind of music he liked or how he took his coffee—but she wanted to talk to him again. See that lean face and its contemplative expression as he thought about what she'd just said. And then he'd say something, too, something wise but not pretentious.

The
ding!
of an incoming text brought her back to the fact that she was sitting in a freezing car in a quasi-deserted parking lot at dusk. First she turned on the engine, and then she checked her text.

It was from Brad:
U sure u got the name right? Travis Womack?

She texted back a thumbs-up emoji.

His next text sort of annoyed her:
Double-check name, K?

Her return text started out with a red-faced, frowning emoji, followed by this:
Right name. What's up?

There was a small delay. Brad, she imagined, was staring at his tiny keyboard, thumbs curled protectively around it, before he typed his message:

Only 1 Travis Womack in any database: Dead 2010. Motorcycle crash

Three Boys

1950

Harmon Strayer sat in a booth at the Double-D Diner on the main thoroughfare that ran through Norbitt, West Virginia. He sipped at his coffee, trying to make it last. She was late. He did not want to order another cup—he had hoped to have this over and done with in minutes, and if she came and they talked and he'd ordered a second cup, he would have to wait until it was brought to him before he could leave. If the talk was not going well, if he needed to leave, those extra few minutes might be awkward.

He did not look appreciably different from the way he had looked five years ago, when he came home from the war. He was still handsome. He had not put on weight, the way Vic had. Vic was always pledging to lose it. He'd pat his belly, rub it with a satisfaction that made Harm wonder why he wanted to get rid of it. The belly seemed to bestow on him a certain confidence as he walked through the world. Ballast. And it did not affect his overall looks, either. He was still Vic Plumley, dark and dashing and nonchalant.

“Hi.” A woman's voice.

He looked up. She stood next to the booth. She'd dressed up for him. She was wearing a white dress with red polka dots—a summer dress, and this was February. But she knew how much he liked her in this dress, because he had told her so; her breasts looked as if they would be spilling out of the top of it any minute. She had put on makeup, fixed herself up. He felt a pang from this evidence of her efforts. Her eagerness. And in the middle of the afternoon, too. Just because he had called.

“Hi,” he said back. He gestured toward the seat across from him. “Take a load off.”

She slid in, folding her body neatly to do so, tucking the back of her dress under her bottom. He could not help it: He pictured her ass naked, the way it looked when she was walking away from the bed to get dressed, and he was still lying there, raised up on one elbow, savoring the sight of her round, saucy ass. A bit of a bounce to it when she walked.

He shook his head, hoping the memory would slide out of there and leave him alone. Not a good way to begin this kind of conversation.

“Glad you were free today,” he said. “To meet me.”

“You could've come by the house,” she said, and they both knew what that meant. “Frank's out of town all week. Some kind of a sales conference. Somewhere. I don't care, really. As long as he's gone.”

“Yeah,” Harm said, because he could not, in the moment, think of anything else to say. The picture of her, bare-assed naked, would not leave. He did not think he could get through this unless he got rid of the image. “Look, Vivian—”

“Oh, I don't like any sentence that begins like that!' she said, with a merry, twitchy, nervous little laugh. “That can't be good! ‘Look, Vivian' sounds like one of my teachers back in grade school.” She flashed him a naughty smile. “Have I been a bad girl, Mr. Strayer? Have I been a bad,
bad
girl? Are you going to have to take me over your knee and—”

“Stop it, okay?”

The irritation in his voice startled her. Her eyes widened. He thought, for a terrifying moment, that she was going to cry.

But it was the opposite: She was annoyed. She had gone from flirtatious to angry, just like that. Her rapid-fire mood changes had, once upon a time, intrigued him, aroused him. She was like her own little weather system, compact and self-contained; you never knew what you would be dealing with, from minute to minute, and the need to react to that, to turn on a dime, had excited him.

“Okay, then,” she said. Neutral now. “What's up?”

What's up?
That was her way of saying:
Two can play at this game.
She sounded like a bored gas station attendant leaning in the driver's window.
Check your oil, too, bub?

“I don't think we should see each other anymore.” There. He'd said it.

She did not blink. She did not shriek. She said, “Well, that'll be tough. This is a small town. We're bound to ‘see each other,' as you put it, every now and again.”

“You know what I mean.”

She looked out the window. It was a gray February day. February was not a good month for Norbitt; the dingy color of the sky seemed to leak into the town itself, into the old buildings and the streets.

“Yeah.” She turned back to look at him. “I know what you mean.”

The waitress showed up. Harm waved her away. “Still making up our minds,” he said to her, and he smiled, not wanting her to get the idea that he was in the midst of any kind of confrontation here, because news of that would be all over town in an hour. The waitress smiled back. More importantly, she left.

“So,” Vivian said pertly. “How do you want to do this?”

He was not prepared for that. “I don't know what you—”

“I
mean
,” she said, “do we just say good-bye right here and now, or do I get some sort of explanation? Did I do something wrong, Harm? Did I pester you, ask you for a lot of expensive gifts? Demand too much of your precious, precious time? Was that it? Or was it something else? Was it—” She stopped. She snapped her fingers. “Is this about that time you couldn't perform, poor baby, and I was a bit on the
needy
side, and so maybe I said something that you found a little
demeaning,
a little
insulting
and
belittling
, you big, strong war hero, you…”

“Vivian.” He knew about this side of her, the cruelty, the shallowness. He had seen her unsheathe it in front of other people. And when he saw that, he had known it was only a matter of time until she turned on him, too. He understood how selfish she was. In the beginning, it had fascinated him, that selfishness. She was completely devoted to her own pleasure. Single-minded. She would straddle him sometimes, furious with desire, clenching the hair on both sides of his head, moving forward and back with glassy-eyed abandon. The memory of those times could drive him mad.

They had started up before he left for the war. He was fifteen. “I could go to jail for this,” she'd whispered to him, at exactly the right moment, and that functioned as a kind of aphrodisiac for both of them, all she was risking. It was just a few times. During his years away, they did not keep in touch. There was too much at stake, with Vic right there beside him, in close quarters.

When he returned, they had resumed it. Harm was now engaged to Dixie Chambers, a girl he'd dated in high school, but that did not matter. That had not changed things one bit. Dixie was a nice girl. She occupied one section of his life, a small, solid, high-walled space that he had carefully prepared for just such a thing: the nice girl he would marry. Vivian Plumley was not a nice girl, and the space she occupied was big and flimsy and makeshift.

Did Vic ever know? Harm was not sure. Sometimes, Harm thought,
yes, yes, he knows. He
must
know.
But other times, he thought:
no, absolutely not.
Vic did not have much to do with his parents these days. He was out of their house. He ran his life as he saw fit. The idea of Frank Plumley laying an angry hand on Vic now—Vic was six feet, three inches tall and, even with his newfound gut, powerful and intimidating—was laughable. More like the other way around. You could easily envision Vic Plumley knocking the crap out of his old man.

Alvie might know. Alvie was sneaky. He watched. He figured things out. He was working in his dad's church now, Crooked Creek Baptist, the same church that had kicked out his father all those years ago. Alvie planned to be a preacher, too, which surprised Harm no end. A preacher? Alvie? Well, okay. To each his own, right?

The important thing was that they had kept the secret of what happened on that dusty road outside of Caneytown. They never talked about it, never even said the word “Caneytown” out loud—never, not even once. But when one of them wavered, and got together with the other two at this very diner, say, or at Sal's, a bar three blocks away, and started murmuring words such as “honor” and “morality,” the other two knew what to do. They brought out words such as “family” and “responsibility.” And “jail.” Now, there was a word for you, there was a real conversation stopper. They talked about all they had to lose if …

They did not finish the sentence. They did not need to.

So they had looked out for each other after the war, just as they had done before and during the war. Just as they had been doing all of their lives. No matter what happened to any of the three of them, no matter what choices they made or what roads they walked, they would never tell. They had burn marks on their souls, identical ones, and those marks bound the three boys together forever.

“Fuck you. Fuck
you
. You're a fucking liar, do you know that?” Vivian was leaning over the table, her voice a strange singsong hiss, the tenor of it not matching up to the viciousness of her words. “You think you can just take off and
go
like that? Is that what you think? Just walk away like I'm some piece of
garbage
that you
fucked
and you
fucked
and then you—”

The waitress was back. She took one look at Vivian's face, and at the way she was leaning over the table, and she turned around and left. She had not even taken her order pad out of her apron pocket.

“You
fucker,
” Vivian said, resuming her chant. “You
fucking fucker
.”

Women did not talk this way in Norbitt. Harm was pretty sure they didn't talk this way anywhere. She was coarse and bold, and she'd always been so, only he was not enchanted by it anymore. Harm was glad there was almost nobody else in the diner at this hour.

She settled herself down. “I want to know why,” she said, her tone businesslike. “That's all I want from you at this point, Harm. Just the why. Seriously.”

He looked down into his coffee cup. He had kept a grip on it throughout her verbal assault. “I can't tell you.”

“Because it's a fucking
secret
? Or because you don't know?”

“Because you'll make fun of me.”

That surprised her. She had had a speech all ready, a cutting retort for the answer she was sure he'd give. She was sure he was going to say that that bitchy fiancée of his had found out about them and was insisting he break it off, or that he was afraid Vic or his dad would find out and he could not bear their rage and disappointment. She had expected, that is, some boring, predictable excuse, an excuse she could counter with scorn.

“What do you mean?” she said.

He was still staring down into his coffee cup.

“I mean,” he said, “that I want to be different.”

“Different.” She'd intended to echo his word disdainfully, with cynical blackness in her tone; instead it came out, against her will, sounding curious.

“Yeah,” he said. “I want to be a different kind of man.”

“Little late for that, don't you think? You are what you are. And here's a little clue, honey—the war's over.
Long
over. If it was going to change you, lover boy, that would've already happened. And it didn't. Trust me—I know. I know what you like to do to me—and it ain't reading me Bible verses, you know? So, sorry—no chance for you to be that different man you're talking about. Didn't happen. You can't do it.”

“I can try.”

That put her over the edge. “Well, aren't
we
the noble fucking saint.” She laughed a thin, brittle, low-pitched laugh. The disdain never drifted very far from her. It was always within arm's reach. “Aren't
we
just so all-fired fucking
good
.”