“Who?”
“What’s the matter with you? Why were you screaming?” Jeanne tossed her braids back. “We were just this minute up by the chicken coop.”
“Are you okay?” Liz asked. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“He said you had cigarettes.” Snot ran out of Hannah’s nose and along the line of her lip. She licked it away. “Billy Phillips.”
“What about him?”
Hannah pointed down over the root saddle, down the path and onto the Bluegang rocks.
Liz inched her way to the edge of the overhanging roots. “Wow!”
Billy Phillips lay sprawled on his back on a boulder, his head at an odd angle, his arms and legs splayed.
“His mom’s our cook,” Jeanne said.
“What happened?” Liz asked.
“I . . . pushed him.” When Hannah cried, her whole body moved, up and down, pumping up the tears.
Jeanne grabbed her by the shoulders and shook hard.
“Stop being a bully,” Liz said. “She’s scared and you’re makin’ it worse.” She reached around Hannah and hugged her. “You want us to go home with you so you can tell your mom?”
“Are you stupid? You know her mother, how she gets. And what about the nail polish? That’s gotta come off before we—”
Hannah looked down at her toes.
“But he’s hurt—” Liz said.
“He isn’t hurt, you stupe, he’s dead,” Jeanne said. “This isn’t like a story, in a book, it’s real and she’s in big trouble.”
Hannah sank to the ground and huddled against the trunk of the oak.
“Are you sure?” Liz peered down at the body on the rocks. “There’s lots of blood on the rock. We should go down and look, huh?” The way his head was turned, they couldn’t see his eyes. “He might be in a coma.” Liz had read of such things.
“He had my underpants. They were in his pocket.”
“Yuck.”
“How’d he get them?” Jeanne asked.
“He stole them, I guess. Off the clothesline.”
“Is that why you killed him?”
“I didn’t kill him!”
Jeanne peered over the bank another time. “Looks suspicious.”
“I didn’t mean for him to fall. He was touching me and saying nasty stuff.”
“Boy, if this ever gets out, your family, your entire family, is going to be completely ruined. You’ll have to leave town.”
The three girls looked at each other.
“She didn’t mean to do anything. It was an accident, like self-defense.”
Jeanne snorted. “It’s not like he was trying to kill her.” She crouched on the edge of the hillside and picked at a scab on her knee. “This would destroy your parents. Probably ruin your father, you know that, don’t you?”
Hannah didn’t know anything except that she wanted to be away from Bluegang.
“Him being a minister means his family’s got to be perfect or the congregation fires him.”
The way Jeanne said it left no room for doubt.
“I just wanted him to stop touching me.”
“Your mom’ll have a heart attack.”
“I’m sure it’ll be okay.” Liz’s round, serious face in its squared-off haircut looked almost adult. “I read in a book where this woman—”
“I told you before, this is real life.” Jeanne thought a moment. “When the police find out she was down here alone painting her toes with stolen polish,
in public,
they’ll say it’s no wonder Billy Phillips acted funny. Haven’t you ever heard of girls asking for it?”
“Asking for what?”
“You know.”
They looked at each other again. Below them Bluegang sang over rocks and gravel and sand on its way down to the Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Bay; and in the deep pools the trout and crawdads dozed in the shadows of boulders and above it all crows perched in the oaks and sycamores and alders and bays, translating everything the girls said into squawks and caws.
Liz said, “I still think we should tell a grown-up.”
Jeanne crouched before Hannah. “If you tell someone, it’ll be just like on
Gangbusters.
The police’ll want to know everything Billy said and what he did and there’ll probably be photographers from the paper and no one’s gonna care if you’re crying or embarrassed or anything like that. I bet you have to stand up and tell everything in court. With a jury and all.”
“He said bad things.”
“And the judge’ll want you to say ’em out loud for the jury.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“You expect a jury to believe you? You’re a girl.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“The church’ll have a big meeting and they’ll vote and you’ll have to move out of Rinconada. Maybe go someplace like Georgia or Alabama.”
Hannah blinked and wiped her tears. A smudge of dirt and snot and tears spread from one cheek, under her nose to the other. “All I want is for it to be like it never happened.”
Jeanne thought a moment. “Maybe it can be.” She stared down at Billy Phillips. “We could just go away and leave him.”
“You don’t mean it. You know that’s wrong, you know it.” Liz’s plump cheeks colored. “Besides, dogs might get him. There’s coyotes around here . . .”
“Someone’ll find him. They’ll just think he fell over.”
“What about his mother?” Liz said. “She’s only got one son.”
“What’re you talking about her for?” Hannah sprang up in outrage. “What about me? He said he was going to make me do something . . . nasty. I don’t care what happens to him. I wish coyotes
would
get him. I wish I could forget about this forever. I wish I could hit my head on the rocks and get amnesia.”
“Like
Young Widder Brown.”
Liz nodded as if she now understood perfectly.
“Yeah, well, if wishes were fishes our nets would be full. My dad says in real life people don’t get amnesia.” Jeanne tossed back her braids. “Actions have consequences and he says we have to take what we get and make the best of it.” She glanced down at her Mickey Mouse Club watch. “If we’re gonna leave we better do it before anyone comes along.
“We’ll say you fell. We’ll say we went up to the flume and you fell off at that place where the boards are rotten. You could say you saw a snake, a big one and it really scared you and that’s how come you were crying. And you could walk through the poison oak on the way home. You’ll swell up like I do and no one’ll blame you for being miserable.”
Half way up the hill Liz stopped and pointed at Hannah’s feet. “What about her toenails? Her mom’ll see—”
“I don’t care!”
Painted toenails and confession magazines and cigarettes were not important anymore. All that mattered was getting away from Bluegang and never coming back. Maybe then Hannah could forget Billy Phillips. Maybe if she lay down in the poison oak and rolled over and over, the poison on the outside would drive out the poison she felt on the inside.
At the top of the hill, Liz and Jeanne put their arms around her in an awkward hug. She wanted to believe Liz when she said, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be like it never happened.”
When Hannah got home her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner, a pork roast with applesauce and summer squash and bowls of Jell-O chocolate pudding with sprinkles of coconut on the top.
“I’m not hungry,” Hannah said on her way across the kitchen.
“You will be by dinnertime. Have you done your chores?”
Clean the upstairs bathroom bowl, scour the sink with Bon Ami, fold the towels in the special way her mother said was the only way to fold towels.
“I will.”
“Come back here, Hannah.” Mrs. Whittaker laid her palm across Hannah’s forehead. She was a tall almost-pretty woman with soft curly hair and wary eyes. “You look flushed. Do you feel all right?”
Her mother worried about polio, all the parents did. If a kid got a fever or felt stiff or had a bad headache, the doctor made a house call that very night. Mostly it was too much sun or sugar, but sometimes it really was polio. The summer before two boys in Hannah’s class had been attacked—this was the way grown-ups always spoke of the disease, like it was an enemy soldier. One of the boys would have to live in an iron lung the rest of his life. The other was half-crippled and could never lead a normal life. That was the worst thing about polio, and another thing grown-ups always said: once you got it, you could never lead a normal life.
Hannah hardly thought about polio, or about anything going on in the world. There had been a war in Korea and when grown-ups weren’t talking about being “attacked” by polio they worried about the The Bomb and Communism; and it seemed to Hannah that being an adult meant being scared all the time. Hannah mostly thought about school and her friends and how she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. That was about as far ahead as her imagination carried her—though occasionally she wondered if anyone would ever want to marry her and what kind of a house she’d live in and what would it be like to “do it.” There were so many things more urgent to Hannah than polio and bombs and Communists.
“I want you to take a couple of aspirin and nap a while,” Mrs. Whittaker said. She looked Hannah up and down.
Hannah tried to curl her toes under.
“You’ve been painting your toenails.”
Hannah stared at her feet and the ten pink dots.
“Oh, Hannah.” Her mother sighed and sat down at the kitchen table. “What am I going to do about you?”
“It’s only polish, Mommy. I can take it off.”
“I know you can take it off and you will, believe me, you will. That’s not the point.”
The point, Hannah knew without listening, was that there would be a time and occasions in the future for painting her toes. When she was grown she could paint them green if she wanted to. But she was too young now. She needed to try to understand how it looked to people to see a little girl with painted toes; she should be aware of the kinds of assumptions people made just on appearances.
“You never want anyone to think you’re not a lady, Hannah. A young lady now. A grown lady soon enough.”
Hannah wondered if her mother would ever understand that she did not care about being a lady any more than she cared about polio and Communism. She wanted to yell out how much she hated gloves and girdles and those hats with dinky veils. But the way her mother bent her head and passed a hand over her face, the dejected slope of her shoulders, stopped her and filled her with shame. She thought about Billy Phillips lying dead on the rocks at Bluegang and about the terrible things he had said to her, and she had to believe that what her mother had said was true. She had painted her toenails and tied up her Brownie blouse and Billy Phillips . . . assumed. It was her fault. The police would say so, the judge too.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said and meant it.
Upstairs as she lay on the bed with a washcloth across her forehead and a glass of cold water—her mother was a loving nurse—Hannah could not stop her mind from going over and over what had happened. And then she remembered her Saturday panties.
Jeanne sat in the kitchen eating the slice of peach cobbler the school cook, Mrs. Phillips, had left for her. It felt very peculiar eating the cobbler and thinking about Mrs. Phillips making the crust and all and her son lying dead, probably. She was glad Mrs. Phillips had gone home for the day and Jeanne didn’t have to look at her face and answer her questions about what kind of a day she was having.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Billy looked lying on the rocks, but instead of trying to put the image out of her mind, she went over every detail. She saw the way his legs were sprawled and the zipper down on his pants. Maybe someone would find him and think he fell when he was peeing. She had watched the boys from her parents’ school having pissing contests and could just imagine Billy Phillips arcing his pee out over the oak root saddle like a fountain. When she watched the boys, she never saw their you-knows but she’d once seen her father’s when she walked in on him in the bathroom, and he was so stewed he barely saw her. The next day she went to the library after school and looked up penis in a medical book. There were about a dozen pictures of men who had venereal disease and one had the elephant’s disease and the underneath part of his thing had swollen up so it looked like he was sitting on a basketball. Jeanne had decided the penis was the ugliest of any body part and she was really glad she didn’t have one and that she hadn’t seen Billy Phillips’s. She finished her cobbler, washed her dish and left the dining hall. Bells rang every hour at Hilltop so she knew it was after three. Too soon to go home.
Jeanne’s mother had fallen off the water wagon again so she had a pretty good idea what awaited her at home. Mrs. Hendrickson would be sitting in the little den with a book open on her lap and a tall glass of water beside her. It wasn’t really water; it was vodka, only Jeanne wasn’t supposed to know that except one time she had sneaked a taste.