(2005) Wrapped in Rain (13 page)

At noon, our stomachs brought its up the rock ladder, back to Waverly, and into more trouble. When we reached the barn, I spied Rex's twelve-foot johnboat leaning against the door and motioned to Mutt. "You think we can get that thing down to the quarry?"

Mutt stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed the situation. Tilting his head, he looked up to the house, back to the barn, and then down to the quarry-a distance of little over a half mile. "Not without a little help."

Even at the age of nine, Mutt could build more than most forty-year-olds. Just a year prior, he had built Miss Ella a twenty-holed martin house out of balsam wood. He painted it white and green and then sunk a fifteen-foot pole just outside her bedroom window. Thinking of her back, he engineered a cable and winch system to raise and lower the house for spring-cleaning. She walked outside, bent down, grabbed both his hands, and said, "Matthew, you've got a gift. I thank you."

Katie and I flipped the boat over, brushed the ants off, and checked for snakes. Once clear, Mutt reappeared with two skateboards in his hands. Borrowing a few of Rex's lead ropes from the barn, we tied a skateboard to each end of the boat and started sliding her toward the quarry. We never ate lunch. That boat curbed our appetite completely. The gentle slope of the hill made the work rather easy, and at one point we actually had to hold the boat back rather than push it. When we started pulling rather than pushing, Katie hopped in and crossed her suntanned and scuffed legs that, like all three of us, were covered with sun-bleached blond fuzz. I grabbed a golf umbrella and handed it to Katie, and she played the part of a Southern belle. Katie's gift was grace, and she had lots of it.

The work was easy until we reached the rock ledge. We looked sixty feet down into the water and realized there was only one way to get the boat into the water below. Push it and let gravity have its day. The anticipation was delicious. Katie hopped out, Mutt untied the skateboards and pitched them aside, and then we started inching the boat forward while Katie watched and waited with wide and anxious eyes. The boat tipped over the ledge and balanced on its midpoint. Mutt smiled, pushed it with one finger, and the boat fell forward. It scraped across hard granite and tumbled silently into the crystal blue below. The fall, the noise, and the splash were a concert of glory.

This was about the time we learned that the metal boat was leaning against the barn door for a reason. Rex, in a late-night and drunken skeet-shooting outing, had punched two holes in the hull with his best Greener twelve-gauge. When the boat hit the water, it sunk like a concrete barge through forty clear feet of sparkling Alabama water and settled on the bottom.

I looked over the edge, my eyes wide, and said, "Uhoh." Mutt, ghostly white, looked up from the water and asked, "How are we going to explain this?" Of the two of us, he'd be the appetizer and I'd be the main course. Katie looked at the boat, then back at me, and immediately fell on the ground laughing. She might get a paddling, but she really didn't care. The sight of that boat plunging and sinking-and then our faces-was worth every switch.

The beatings could wait. We grabbed our swords and jumped.

The afternoon found us sunning on the warm, smooth granite ledge that protruded out of the water like a landing just below the anchor of the two zip lines.

The evening crickets picked up, and I noticed that our jeans had long since dried. Miss Ella rang the dinner bell, signaling the end, and our faces showed the disappointment. The last day of summer had come and gone. Big Ben had struck midnight, and school started tomorrow. In the morning, the bus would pick us up a quarter mile from the house and take us down to Clopton, where I would start fifth grade, alone.

The zip lines made entering the quarry delectable fun, but there was only one way out. Climbing the steps. Slipping and falling was always possible but not really a big deal. It just meant you were going swimming again.

Mutt was the first to move. He was like a cat anyway, so he hit the rock steps and bounded up and out of the quarry while Katie and I watched. Katie was next. She stood and walked to the first step, but for some reason, she returned, grabbed my hand, and said, "I love you, Tucker Mason." Before she let go, she reached up, pecked me on the lips, and floated up the rocks.

It was my first kiss, and when I close my eyes, I can still feel it.

The rocks were slippery when wet, so she took her time and climbed using both her hands and feet. Finally, I stood on the rock and looked around the quarry. Shadows climbed the walls, the water cooled the air, and I felt a chill on a hot Alabama afternoon. Summer was over. So were a lot of other things.

That day was the greatest of days. And we'd had it all to ourselves, never burdened with doubt, fear, or anxious dread. It may have been the last great day. Maybe even the best day. I hadn't thought about Rex but maybe once or twice, or about Mutt going off to school by himself or Katie being sent to the rich kids' school where they would teach her to wear a dress, little white shoes, and socks topped with lace, and how to sit properly at the piano. Problem was, the day was now over, and in its absence, shadows filled the quarry. I looked up the ledge where the two of them had disappeared. The lost boys were gone, the Red Man had quit dancing, the mermaids were nowhere to be found, and maybe Hook won after all, because Peter Pan was gone, chasing his shadow again. Rex had killed a lot of things in his life. Even Peter Pan.

Maybe that's what I hated the most. Maybe that's why I asked Miss Ella if Katie could sleep over one last time before summer ended. Maybe that's why we had spent the whole day in a deserted rock quarry. Maybe that's why we rolled that boat down here and let it sink to the bottom, knowing full well we'd never get it back. Maybe I needed them to help protect me from the one demon I couldn't escape. Now the day was spent and my demon was ever-present.

I looked down into the water and saw the aluminum boat resting gently on the sandy bottom forty feet below. I nodded. That boat marked the day. I jumped into the water and swam below, pulling at the water. I grabbed the oarlocks and held myself to the bottom, just looking at the boat, listening to the quiet, and feeling the safety of the water. When I started seeing stars, I let go and pushed up. I had what I wanted. Proof that it had happened. And I wanted proof of today because it was the best day.

The best day ever.

Following that day, Katie and I fell in love-in the innocent way that kids do. For four years, we passed notes, called each other on the phone, held hands when nobody was looking, and watched each other grow through the discomfort and promise of puberty, which she hit first.

While I chased baseballs around the backyard, Katie polished the keys on the piano. Every time she came over, Miss Ella led her by the hand to Rex's grand and said, "Sweet Katie, the prettiest noises ever to come out of that piano do so after your fingers touch the keys. So touch them." Sometimes, Katie would play for an hour. And when she did, the look on Miss Ella's face told me all the world was right. Katie's fingers would dance up and down the ivory keys, and happiness would filter through the rafters of Waverly like someone had flipped a switch.

Problem was, it could be flipped off too.

The week prior to our first school dance, the commer cial real estate field opened up in Atlanta and Katie's dad moved the family to a little suburb called Vinings. He bought a house on top of a hill where Sherman had stood and watched Atlanta burn. As their station wagon followed the moving truck out of town, I walked to the end of the driveway, stood at the gate, and waved. It looked like a funeral procession with my heart nailed down in a pine box in the back. Katie peered through the window, waved with one hand, tried to smile, and blew a kiss that never reached me. I leaned against the gate, my face pressed against the bars, and watched the station wagon fade into the distance as loneliness sunk through me like a rock.

I waved, acted strong, and as soon as they disappeared from sight, I walked off toward the quarry and cried until Miss Ella found me curled up beneath the zip lines. She sat down, rested my head in her lap, and brushed the hair out of my face until I quit shaking. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to. And, when I looked up, she was crying too.

A week later I learned the truth. Rex was holed up in his office consummating his latest deal with his newest best friend. I was lying on the floor, my ear pressed into the grate of the air vent, listening to the conversation through the vents that led from the floor of my room into Rex's office. I cared less for what he said and more for how he said it. The how was my way of knowing which side of Rex would exit his office-the bad or worse side. We could handle bad, but it was the worse one that usually hurt. Listening through the grate was my way of taking his pulse. If he started using more cuss words than not or making promises he didn't intend to keep, then I'd slide down the banister and find a way to get Miss Ella out of the house until he either cooled off or passed out, hopefully the latter.

With my ear pressed to the grate, I heard the other man ask, "Heard you hired a local real estate developer to head your office in Atlanta. Made him a pretty good deal."

"Yeah," Rex said above the tinkle of ice in his glass, "that's what he thinks." Another pour, a few more pieces of ice, and a controlled sip. "Had to relocate him and"another sip-"his daughter, if you know what I mean."

The other man laughed below his breath. "Your son found him a sweet young thing?"

Rex got up and walked to the window, where he could survey his world. I craned my ear, sliding the lobe into the grate. "If my eldest boy is going to grow up and saddle the horse that I sired, then he's got to toughen up. Mason Enterprises can't be run by a man who gets weak in the knees at the first young thing to come along. Not even at this age." Another sip. "Got to nip that in the bud now, and when he gets older he'll learn the real reason to keep a woman around."

They laughed. "Yeah," Rex said over the practiced striking of the match that lit his Cuban, "I almost feel sorry for the guy. He'll arrive in Atlanta with his happy family who think they've finally found the American dream. He'll work a couple of weeks with a grin on his face, and then he'll find himself under investigation for stealing fifty grand from Mason Enterprises. Not to mention the half-dressed woman he'll find waiting in his office when my attorneys arrive to explain his options." Rex laughed above the inhalation. "Let's just say it won't look real good for a devoted family man." Another pause and Rex's voice lowered. "And when I offer him a deal to disappear and take his sweet young thing with him, he'll tuck and run north. Shouldn't cost me but ten or fifteen grand."

"Guess she really had her little hooks in your boy."

"Better to tear them out now," Rex said. "Do him good to get a few scars on his heart. Make a man out of him."

That's when it hit me. I raised my head, looked through the vent, smelled the cigar smoke, and for the first time in my life, knew what death smelled like.

I REACHED INTO MY WAISTBAND AND TOOK OUT THE revolver. I opened the cylinder again, then handed it to her, butt first. They toweled off while I built a fire. In the kitchen, I turned on the gas line to the stove and lit the burner. Finding tea bags in the cabinet, I put on a kettle of water in case she wanted tea.

"Katie, I've been traveling a week. I'm so tired I can't see straight. But you're welcome to stay here. Whatever you're running from, it won't find you here. Between these four walls is the safest place on earth."

"I remember," she whispered. She dried her son's hair and then her own, which was cropped short. She looked like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music without the smile or song. She knelt next to her son and pushed his bangs out of his eyes. `lase" -she looked up at me-"this is my friend Tucker."

I knelt down and held out my hand. "My friends call me Tuck." He cowered behind Katie. The friendly kid I had met at Bessie's was now scared out of his mind. "That's all right. When I was your age, most grown-ups scared me too."

I walked to the front door and Katie followed. "Are you going to call the police?" she asked.

"Do I need to?" She shook her head, and her shoulders relaxed to an almost-normal tilt. "Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow." It had been a long time since I'd seen Katie, but my guess was that if she was guilty of anything, it was of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I pointed to the front door. "I'm going over to that ostentatious-looking house just across that granite walkway, then I'm falling down the steps to the basement and into my bed. And I don't plan on getting up with the sun. Your car is cooked and you probably know as well as I that there's not a mechanic within twenty miles of this house. Even if they were up and open for business, I doubt if they'd know how to fix a Volvo. But if you want to steal something to make your getaway, the tractor's in the barn."

"Thank you," she whispered through a half-smile, holding back the tears. Jason raised his head over the sofa and clung to the pillow with both hands. I wasn't wearing a hat, but I looked at him, motioned like I was tipping my hat, and said, "'Night, pardner."

Jason smiled and tipped his baseball cap.

"Tomorrow, maybe we'll take some more pictures." He smiled more widely and Katie looked confused. "It's a long story. Tomorrow."

I opened the door and stepped underneath the front porch. Katie followed me, her face a collage of fear, anxiety, and relief.

I walked across the porch, wet and creaking under my weight, and Katie stood in the doorway, searching for the words. Swirling with questions myself, I turned around and said, "Why here? After all this time?"

She shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. But every time I flipped my blinker or looked at the map, Clopton looked like it was lit with a spotlight or yellow highlighter."

I walked out into the rain, too tired to make sense of the whole thing. I wanted a soft bed, silence, and about ten hours of sleep.