The Forgetting Time(76)

“He shot you? Because you wanted a turn?”

“I don’t know why. I don’t know. I was standing there and then I can’t see anymore, it’s all black. And when I wake up I’m falling.”

“You’re falling?”

“My whole body is falling and it’s a long way down, and the water’s cold. It’s real cold in there, Charlie, the water’s way up over my head and cold and bad smelling. I try to keep my head up over the water and I yell and yell, but he doesn’t get me out, Charlie, he won’t let me out, and so I yell and yell and it hurts every time in my body, my body really hurts, but I keep on yelling and no one is coming and no one comes and I’m all alone in there, I’m all alone, and I can’t do it. I try, Charlie, I try real hard, but I can’t keep my head up anymore. It’s cold under there and I can’t breathe. I can see the sun shining down through the water, it’s shining down really hard making the metal pail bright. It’s really shiny. I can see it shining right through the water. And then I died.”

“Man. Oh, man. Oh, man.” He couldn’t say anything else but that. He saw his brother Tommy drowning. They were all of them down there, Tommy and himself and their mama and his papa, too, all of them down there, drowning in the cold water.

“Fuck. Paul Clifford. Why’d he do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. I tried to ask him why’d he do that to me, but he wouldn’t tell me. He ran away.”

The kid didn’t say anything else for a minute. His nose was running down into his mouth and he wiped it on his sleeve. He mumbled something in a low voice.

“What?”

“She don’t want me, Charlie.”

“Who?”

“Mama. She don’t want to see me. She forgot all about me. And I been trying to get back here since the day I was born.”

He didn’t know what to say. He put a hand on the kid’s back and rubbed it in little circles. The kid’s back was moving back and forth as he took big gulps of air. That’s all right, Charlie thought. You go on breathing. You just breathe now. Breathe for all of us. You got some catching up to do on that score.

All his feelings for Tommy had been locked up in a room somewhere and now the door was open and they were running amok.

He looked at the kid. Little snot-nosed white kid who was and wasn’t his brother. He couldn’t take it in. He didn’t even try.





Thirty-Three

“Tommy?”

Denise stood beneath the tree and heard the name come out of her own lips. It felt strange on her tongue and sounded strange to her ears, as if she was just trying it out, as if she’d never said that name before in her whole life.

She had stood there listening and felt her mind spinning in the dark and she wasn’t grabbing hold of anything; there was nothing to grasp onto except those two voices that sounded just like her own two boys talking in that rickety pile of lumber they used to hide out in. Her own two boys, she’d know them anywhere, only it wasn’t. She had heard and she hadn’t. There was a thing she had to do but she didn’t know what it was and she didn’t know what was real anymore and then she heard a voice that was her own voice speaking the name.

“Tommy?”

She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see. It wasn’t Tommy up there. She knew it wasn’t Tommy. She heard and didn’t hear. Tommy was dead and this was another boy.

But she grabbed hold anyway of the wooden steps nailed into the tree trunk and she climbed her way up through the hole, scraped her long body through.

The boy didn’t look like her son. He was a small white child, his hair golden even at nighttime like a picture in a JCPenney catalog. Not like her sweet boy with his light brown skin that seemed lit from within and his grin that split your heart in two. Nothing like her boy that was lost.

This was a different child sitting there with Charlie’s hand on his back.

The child looked up at her. He was all scratched up, his cheeks smeared with dirt and blood and tears, as if he’d crawled right up from the bowels of hell itself.

“Oh, baby.” She held out her arms to him and he scrambled over and threw himself at her, pressing his small body against hers so tightly it made her draw in her breath and lean back against the bark, so real and rough and hard against her spine.

She didn’t know if it was Tommy in there somewhere. She didn’t know how it could be. She thought that probably in her confusion she was making an honest mistake by wishing so hard that it was so. But she had known him by the look in his eyes that matched the look in her own eyes; he was one of the lost, one of her own.





Thirty-Four

Paul woke up. It was dark. He felt cleaned out. Clean. He must’ve passed out. He lay flat on the pine needles, looking through the trees at the night sky. A clear night. He could see stars looking back at him. There were so many. He always liked the stars. They weren’t coming down on him or judging him. They were just looking. None of it matters, that’s what the stars said. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.

He didn’t want to move. If he moved his eyes from the sky, he didn’t know what would happen to him.

Men were coming. He could hear them rustling. He could sense the flashlights invading the dark. They were moving through the woods. It was like a movie, only in the movie there’d be dogs. He’d be running in the movie, breathing hard. But he wasn’t. He was lying calmly, facing the sky.