“You ever think about him?”
“Sure. He was my best friend.”
“He felt the same way about you.”
David was getting uncomfortable again. Staring out the window.
His house was approaching. I sped up.
“Hey, Mr. Rhodes, we’re goin’ right past my house.”
“Yeah, I guess we are.”
“Mr. Rhodes, I’m gettin’ kind of nervous, I mean, I wish you’d just let me out right here.”
I stared at him a long moment and said, “David, you’re going to tell me what happened to Jeff or I’m going to hurt you. Hurt you very badly. Do you understand?”
He got pale. He was just a kid.
I said, “I want to know what’s in that envelope you’re giving that blond kid every Wednesday, and I want to know who the blond kid is. Though I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
I made it as pleasant as possible. I took him to a Pizza Hut in a nearby mall. We had a double-cheese and two large Cokes and eventually he told me all about it.
He didn’t show up Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, the blond kid, but Wednesday, just as I reached my hiding place back of the clearing, I saw him climb the bridge and stand on top in that swaggering way of his.
I watched him for a few moments and then I walked into the clearing and through the buffalo grass to the bridge.
I wasn’t nearly as good at it as the kid, of course. He was younger; the monkey in him hadn’t yet fled.
He watched me. He watched me very carefully and very curiously.
He wasn’t afraid. If he had been, he’d have walked down the other side and run into the woods.
No. He just stood there smoking his cigarette watching me as I finally reached the top chord and started across to him.
For the first time, he showed some anxiety as to who I might be. “Nice up here, ain’t it?” he said.
But I didn’t hear him. I heard only the approaching train.
“Don’t usually see guys your age up here,” he said, smirking a little about my thirty-eight years.
The train, right on time according to what I’d been able to observe over the past week, rumbled toward us. You could feel its power shuddering through the iron box of bridge.
The blond kid looked behind him. At the other end of the bridge. The free end. He looked as if he wanted to turn and run now.
The big bass horn of the train set the forest animals to scurrying. And then the engine came hurtling around the bend into the straightaway across the bridge.
The kid finally figured out what I was going to do but he was too late.
I grabbed him by the hair, jerked him to me and then held him till the train was twenty yards from crossing the bridge. We were up too high for anybody in the train to see us. He smelled of sweat and heat and dirt and cigarette smoke.
His mouth swore at me but I couldn’t hear in all the noise. He fought but he was no match for me, not at all.
I shoved him downward just at the right moment.
I suppose I should have looked away but I didn’t. I watched every moment of it.
How he hit the tracks on his back, legs flung across one track, head and arms across the opposite track.
He screamed but he was in pantomime. He tried to scramble to his feet but it was too late.
The train lifted him and punted him into one side of the bridge. When his body collided with the iron, he splattered. That’s the only way to describe it. Splattered.
Then the train was gone, receding, receding, and there was just birdsong and sunlight and the fast muddy movement of the creek far below, and the ragged bloody remains of what had once been a human boy. The animals would come soon, and feast on it.
Just as I was getting in bed that night, my wife came in and said, “My God, Charlie, on the news.”
She was ashen.
“What about the news?” I said, sliding between the covers.
“A boy. Fourteen years old. Playing on that railroad bridge. He — was killed just the way Jeff was.”
She started sobbing so I held her. She was a good true woman and good true mother and good true wife. Nothing bad should have happened to her. Not ever.
I suppose that was why I never quit looking into our son’s “accidental” death. Going through his things one day up in the attic, I’d come across a note he’d written to David Mallory, saying that even though David was mad at Jeff because Jeff kissed his girlfriend... Jeff didn’t think it was fair that David would hire Lon McKenzie to beat him up.
David had finally told me all about it that afternoon at the Pizza Hut. The blond kid was one Lon McKenzie from the steeltown section of the city, a bully who not only took pride in his work but charged for it. If you wanted somebody taken care of, you hired Lon to do it and if the price was right, your enemy would receive a beating that he would remember for a long, long time.
A hit man for the junior high set.
Lon had probably followed Jeff to the bridge, where Jeff — despite our constant complaints — frequently played. Jeff loved to sit up on the top span and look out at the woods.
Afterward, McKenzie had bragged to David that he’d killed Jeff on purpose. He’d never seen anybody die before and he was curious. Then he’d started blackmailing David. Twenty-five dollars a week — or McKenzie would go to the police and implicate David in Jeff’s death. David had been scared and guilty enough to go along, saving every bit of his allowance to pay McKenzie.
Now it was all done. I suppose I should have hated David but I couldn’t quite. Foolish as he’d been, he hadn’t wanted to see Jeff die.
My wife turned off the light and got in next to me and clung to me in the darkness the way she would cling to a life preserver.
“I just keep thinking of that boy’s poor parents,” she said, starting to cry again. “It must be terrible for them.”
“Yeah,” I said there in the darkness, seeing again the train lift Lon McKenzie’s body and boot it against the bridge, “yeah, it must be awful for them.”
The Reason Why
“I’m scared.”
“This was your idea, Karen.”
“You scared?”
“No.”
“You bastard.”
“Because I’m not scared I’m a bastard?”
“You not being scared means you don’t believe me.”
“Well.”
“See. I knew it.”
“What?”
“Just the way you said ‘Well.’ You bastard.”
I sighed and looked out at the big redbrick building that sprawled over a quarter mile of spring grass turned silver by a fat June moon. Twenty-five years ago a 1950 Ford fastback had sat in the adjacent parking lot. Mine for two summers of grocery store work.
We were sitting in her car, a Volvo she’d cadged from her last marriage settlement, number four if you’re interested, and sharing a pint of bourbon the way we used to in high school when we’d been more than friends but never quite lovers.
The occasion tonight was our twenty-fifth class reunion. But there was another occasion, too. In our senior year a boy named Michael Brandon had jumped off a steep clay cliff called Pierce Point to his death on the winding river road below. Suicide. That, anyway, had been the official version.
A month ago Karen Lane (she had gone back to her maiden name these days, the Karen Lane-Cummings-Todd-Brown-LeMay getting a tad too long) had called to see if I wanted to go to dinner and I said yes, if I could bring Donna along, but then Donna surprised me by saying she didn’t care to go along, that by now we should be at a point in our relationship where we trusted each other (“God, Dwyer, I don’t even look at other men, not for very long anyway, you know?”), and Karen and I had had dinner and she’d had many drinks, enough that I saw she had a problem, and then she’d told me about something that had troubled her for a long time...