Whitechurch Read online

  Nearly as big as Texas too. When skinny old Pauly waves the thing around, it pulls his arm along like he’s not in charge of it at all.

  “That’s okay,” I say, “I can see it fine.”

  “You can’t see it. You gotta feel it, is the thing, Oakley.”

  He grabs my wrist and works the monster into my palm. My hand closes around it, and it nearly pulls me to the ground.

  “She’s gonna go ‘wow,’” Pauly says.

  “She’s gonna go something,’” I say. I can feel my free hand shaking as I examine the Colt up close.

  But Pauly is right about this: It’s unignorable.

  It’s like, every line is in place. Every straight is straight, every curve is schwoop, it’s cool to the touch but feels so comfortable in the fleshy innermost of the palm that you feel as if it knows what it’s doing, and it probably belongs there. The barrel is polished blue-gray, almost the same color as the late-afternoon light behind the hill, and the brilliant stainless steel body catches every chip of that light and forces you to pay close attention.

  Automatically, like a five-year-old, I raise it up, close one eye, and point it. At an apple tree. At a squirrel.

  “Where’d you get it?” I ask.

  “Really want to know?”

  I look up at my friend’s face, to see whether in fact I do. He smiles crookedly. I don’t.

  “Borrowed it from the Rev’s collection that he doesn’t want nobody to know about. He knows I know, though.”

  I knew I didn’t want to know.

  “She’s leaving because of me, because I’m boring her,” Pauly says.

  I aim at the little rusted rooster twisting on top of the cider-press house. “Pauly, you are many things—in fact, you’re most things I can think of to call somebody—but one thing you could never be is boring.”

  “Well, we know that, but I think Lilly is bored with me, and that’s why she’s leaving Whitechurch.”

  “She’s leaving Whitechurch to go to school. If the university was here, she wouldn’t be leaving.”

  “That’s just an excuse,” he says.

  Lilly is where she’s supposed to be. Pauly told her to meet him. I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be here at all. But when Lilly told me he wanted her to meet him at our spot above the prison yard, I decided I should be here. It’s Wednesday afternoon, and as we wait for Pauly, we listen to the fife-and-drum-and-bagpipe corps. They’ve been getting better. They’ve got “Loch Lomond” pretty well nailed.

  But they’re not supposed to be here. It’s not Thursday.

  “Sounds so pretty,” Lilly says. “How come you guys never told me about this before? This is sweet.”

  I nod. She looks nervous, no matter what she says.

  “Did he tell you what he wanted you up here for?”

  “Said he wants to show me something. But he’s always saying that. To tell you the truth, he hasn’t really shown me anything in a long time.”

  I let out a low, steady whistle, the kind that everybody knows means “Oh, boy.”

  “Well what can I say, Oakley? You understand, I know you do. There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.”

  Of course I understand. The Lilly-Pauly relationship was always the type of thing that practically brought “Booooo” calls from the whole town. The Reverend, for one, would carry her on his back to Boston, with all her luggage, to get her away from him.

  “He’ll be okay,” I say, and I have never said a more outrageous thing. “In fact, you probably don’t even have to wait for him now. I’ll talk to him. He’ll be—”

  “What the hell are they doing down there,” Pauly says, popping up behind us quiet as a catamount. He walks right on past us and points down at the prison yard with the Colt.

  “My god, Pauly,” Lilly gasps. We both jump to our feet. “What is that?”

  “They are not supposed to be there,” he insists. “This isn’t Thursday. Is it? Oakley, is this Thursday?”

  I start to answer, but he cuts me off.

  “And you’re not supposed to be here, either. This was supposed to be a special moment between me and my girl.”

  He is gesturing at me with it now. But he doesn’t mean anything by it.

  “Don’t call me your girl, Pauly. I don’t like that.”

  It is my turn to gasp. “Do you see what he’s holding, Lillian? Maybe you could save this conversation—”

  “I’m very worried about you leaving,” he says. “You need me, Lilly, we all know that. I can make you happy, Lil.”

  Lilly shakes her head.

  “Listen,” I say. “She’s not even leaving for months, yet. Why don’t we save all this, okay? We have the spring and the summer still and it’ll be the same … it’ll be better, even, than all the others. Then, next year when Pauly and me graduate, we’ll come down and join you and everything will be back—”

  “I can make you happy, Lilly,” he repeats. “We all know that. You’re just a little bored with things right now, you want a little—”

  “Pauly,” she says calmly, but not without a little tremor in there. “Pauly …” She doesn’t seem to know how to finish.

  Pauly wheels around to face the small figures down in the prison yard again. He’s staring. I hear the distinctive click-click of the hammer pulling back.

  “Cocked, Pauly, huh?” I say. “Locked?”

  He pauses for a long time. He nods. “Cocked and locked.”

  Pauly doesn’t want to hurt anybody. I know Pauly doesn’t want to hurt anybody. Lilly knows it too. We’re probably the two people in town who know. In the fall, there’ll only be one.

  He turns back to face us, and as he does he aims straight up into the cloudless azure blue of the sky. The Colt blends with it, with the blue, as if it were a siphon, drinking blue down out of the air, down through the polished blue muzzle, through the faded blue arm of Pauly’s old fleece-lined denim jacket, and into the blue body of pale Paul himself. Feeding into him, so much bigger than him.

  “Do you see this?” he asks her. “Don’t you see this, Lilly?”

  “I do,” she says. “Does it lead us to something, Pauly?”

  We all wait on that. We wait more out of courtesy than fear, to give him a chance to withdraw with dignity.

  “You need me” is all he can manage. He uncocks.

  With that, Lilly turns and walks away, leaving Paul with his hand still stuck in the air. He stares at her back for an awfully long time.

  I don’t turn to watch Lilly leave, because I don’t stop watching Pauly. But I can see by the draining of his face when she has cleared out of light.

  “You’re not leaving me, though, are you, Oakley?” he asks, lowering the Colt finally.

  “Of course I’m not leaving you.”

  He turns back toward the prison and sits down cross-legged in the dirt.

  I sit next to him. “Somebody would notice,” I remind him. “And it wouldn’t be a good notice.”

  Pauly finally smiles. He leans a shoulder into me, tipping me over onto the ground.

  “Ah, autumn’s still ages away, huh, Oak?”

  “Ya,” I say, propping up on one elbow. “Ages away.”

  “Ages away,” he says.

  Then Pauly puts the nozzle of the Colt in his mouth. He has to open his jaws all the way to fit the thing in there.

  I stay frozen to the ground. While I do, and while Pauly remains likewise still, he rolls just his eyes in my direction. When he’s had a good look at my stricken face, the smile comes back to him again. He looks like a skeleton with the pistol in his teeth.

  “Almost looked sick there, buddy,” he says as he pulls it out.

  “Almost was,” I say.

  “That’s good,” he says. “That’s good.” He stands, and offers me a hand. “We can go home now,” he says.

  When he’s got me halfway to my feet, he drops me. I’m on the seat of my pants. He comes right up close to me.

  “Put thi
s in your mouth,” he says coolly.

  I say nothing. I feel the blood-warmth run out of my face like a flushing toilet. The big hole at the tip of the Colt is now pressed like a cold mouth against mine.

  “Go ahead now, Oakley. Do what I tell you.”

  I open up, and my friend doesn’t hesitate before easing the barrel in, the sight scraping along the roof of my mouth. Pauly pulls back on the hammer, and it sounds like the mechanism is clacking and clacking, tumbling like the lock on a gigantic steel vault.

  “What does it taste like?” he asks. “It tastes blue, don’t you think?”

  Of course, I can’t answer.

  “Not nervous, are you? Oak? Of course not. Cocked and locked, right?”

  There is another click.

  “Cocked … unlocked,” he says, grinning. “Did I tell you how sensitive the Colt .45 semiautomatic is? I didn’t? Oh, let me then. When it’s cocked and unlocked, this piece will fire if you tell it to fire.”

  There is nothing for me to do, then, except keep on looking up into Pauly’s tired, watery eyes. So I keep on. Until finally I see, in there, where my Pauly is, and he looks back at me.

  He blinks away some of the glaze.

  Slowly, gingerly, I back off. Remove myself from the gun.

  He points it into the dirt and uncocks it.

  “You’re my friend, Oakley,” he says.

  “I am,” I say.

  He raises the Colt again, points it in my face. “If I tell you to put this back in your mouth once more, are you still my friend?”

  I open my mouth as wide as I can.

  Pauly puts the gun in my hand and closes his eyes.

  “I’m going to write you a poem,” he says. “‘Oakley #1.’”

  I tug on his jacket and start him down the hill.

  “You do and I’ll shoot ya,” I say, and this brightens his mood considerably.

  Love Me Don’t

  I LOVED HER FIRST.

  She showed up in town about one month before the end of the school year, plunked down into the seat next to me after spending the previous eight months in a seat somewhere else next to someone else.

  His loss, I figured, and I still remember that, thinking that, right that first day. His loss, whoever he was. I never considered that maybe she hadn’t even sat next to a boy at all, because that would have lessened my victory. His loss, my gain. I would think those kinds of thoughts endlessly, my unearned triumphs over life, watching the constellation of dust particles floating before my face while the lessons of the day would float past my ears. By the next September they’d bumped her up a year ahead of me where she belonged, but I did have that one sweet month.

  “Kind of late in the year for a move, isn’t it?” I said instead of learning why humans could stand on their heads and still swallow food into their stomachs. “Or early. Must’ve been pretty important, for your family to move you right in the—”

  “Must’ve been,” Lilly said, and smiled at me. Then she did this thing, this sort of snake charmer maneuver that I don’t think she did on purpose exactly, but that she did very well all the same. She leaned a little closer to me and stared into my eyes with this look that was like bits and pieces of question and sympathy, of asking forgiveness and offering it at the same time. A slight tilting of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, down turned the corners of her mouth as up went the center. It was the look that defined, and defines, our interactions.

  “If I ask you not to ask me about that, will you not?”

  Something in there, and the way she said it, gave me a little shake. I still think about that sometimes. How tidy and useful a motto that is. If I ask you not … will you not?

  “Okay,” I said, even though of course she only made me ten times as curious.

  She shook my hand then. And we were friends.

  Her grip was firm, like a man’s is supposed to be, and honest. Like she wasn’t selling me something or showing me how strong she was, or picking my pocket with her free hand. Her grip was firm and warm. Not all girl, was what I thought when Lilly first gripped me like that. Not all girl, and not at all guy.

  That’s how it started, believe it or not. Lilly and Pauly. Lilly and me and Pauly.

  We were thirteen and fourteen. Not that we were both at the same time. Lilly was fourteen and Pauly and I were thirteen and, as a bona fide legal working-age teenager, she got a summer job, making money and listening to music and eating ice cream.

  The actual job of ice-cream man’s assistant belonged to her, but she brought me along because we were already doing our thing of doing things together. She was still pretty new, and after that promising start in buddying up to me, she sort of stalled out and was never surrounded by tons of friends. I liked to think that she figured I was enough. But then I’d come down and think no, I was the best she could do. Whatever, I was happy enough with the situation, and didn’t care whether or not I got paid while hanging around Lil.

  Stan the ice-cream man didn’t care much either. He was about six foot two, with long superfine white hair and pink eyes and purple tattoos. Half a smile, too. Right side. The right side of his smile could smile but the left couldn’t because he fell off his bike and onto his face during his previous career as a stoned paperboy.

  “Who are you?” he said as Lilly led me by the hand up into the truck that first morning.

  “He’s my buddy,” Lilly said, standing in front of me protectively.

  Stan started the truck. “Well buddy don’t get paid. But what the hell …” He shrugged and flipped a switch, and we hit the road to the tinkly tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”

  “You are so lucky,” I said after an hour of doing not much of anything. “I mean, this is it. You have it all. Died and gone to heaven. This is, like, the most perfect thing I ever saw, like, you should just do this for the rest of your life, Lilly, ’cause it’s never gonna get any better than this.”

  She looked at me with The Look. “Oakley, you are just messing with me, right? I mean, like, you have bigger dreams than this, don’t you?”

  You know how, after you’ve said something, you know the rightness or wrongness of it by what you hear in somebody else’s voice? I had to scramble then, because the truth was I’d meant what I said. I thought this ice-cream truck was the living end. I had already settled into my groove of “Think small, or not at all.”

  “Well, Lil, y’know, a lot of kids would kill for this. You get free ice cream, listen to music all day, get paid, and—”

  “Hey, Lilly, you wanna drive?” Stan hollered back over his shoulder.

  All I could do was point at him. He had said it all for me.

  “Okay,” Lilly said, laughing, “it’s a pretty good job.” Then she put her hand on my shoulder and spoke close to my face and way down deep into me. Like she does still. “But there is lots more, Oak. You know there is. And if I thought you meant what you were saying, I might cry right here in front of the ice creams and everything.”

  I looked at her. I looked at Stan.

  “And bring us some strawberry shortcakes and Mountain Dews,” he sang.

  I shook my head at her. “Okay. How ’bout if I wanted to own the ice-cream truck, would that be better?”

  “You are very funny, Oakley,” she said.

  I was quite unaware of being funny. I’d say that most people were unaware of my being funny. Lilly found me funny.

  I stood with my back against the windshield, in the big empty space up front, while Stan and Lilly shared the large driver’s seat and the driving. Lilly was beaming. The steering wheel was oversized, big even for a full-grown man and almost silly on Lilly, like she was captaining a ship. She was completely confident, though, and game. They took turns controlling the steering, while Stan did the pedals. When Lilly’s ice cream started to melt down her arm, she took a break.

  I stood there and watched Lilly, while Lilly sat there, licked her ice cream, and watched Stan and his footwork. She was preparing to work the
pedals.

  “Is this a good living, Stan?” Lilly wanted to know.

  Stan laughed loudly. “It’s crap.” He took a long pull on his Mountain Dew, beeped the horn, and waved as he drove right past a five-year-old waving a dollar. “Here’s some business wisdom, kids. Never waste your time stopping for singles unless they are stoned teenagers. Little kid like that is under orders to buy one damn Popsicle and bring back the change. I’ll waste more in gas slowing down and starting up again than I’ll make on the sale. But if you got a stoned teenager … hell, they’ll buy up half the truck and likely as not forget about their change. One of them can make your whole day.”

  “Thanks, Stan,” I said.

  “So you’re really like a serious businessman,” Lilly said, and right about now this was starting to bother me.

  Stan appeared to give this some thought. Tooling down the road, gripping the wheel. Then smiling. This was the thing, I thought, that made up for the halfness of his smile. The intensity, and the frequency. He seemed to find a lot of stuff grinworthy. “Serious? Businessman? Well I tell you what. I’ll do any damn thing I can get paid for, so I guess the answer is yes.”

  A flock of young boys came barreling off a baseball diamond screaming and waving at the sound of the truck’s music.

  “Now we’re talkin’,” Stan said as he yanked us to the curb.

  Lilly and I sprang into action, manning the window as Stan put his feet up on the dash and lit a cigarette.

  “He’s cool,” she said, handing out a snow cone.

  “Ya,” I said. “I suppose he is. A little. Cool.” I did my job, handling the money.

  “Come on, Oak. You have to admire the guy some.”

  I was a little too busy being jealous of him to admire him. “Some,” I allowed.

  “I said root beer,” one angry young baseball player said, shoving a Dr Pepper back across the stainless-steel counter.

  Lilly fixed him up. Got back to important matters. “I mean he’s a go-getter. Doing what it takes, making his way. Even though he hasn’t gotten all the breaks, like with falling on his face and stuff.”