“You’ve seen something I would like to have kept from you. If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
I glanced toward Jake who was staring at the dirt floor of the old garage. I held my tongue though in truth there was much I wanted to know.
My father waited patiently and gave no sign that he was disappointed in our silence. “All right,” he said and stood. “Let’s go inside. I’m sure your mother is wondering what’s become of us.”
My mother was in a tizzy. She gathered us to her bosom and made a fuss over us and swung between chastisement for our actions and delirium over our safety. My mother was a woman of deep emotion and also of drama and in the middle of the kitchen she poured out both on Jake and me. She stroked our hair as if we were pets and she dug her fingers into our shoulders and gave us each a stern little shake to set us straight and in the end she kissed the tops of our heads. My father had gone to the sink to run himself a glass of water and when my mother asked him about what had gone on at the police station he said, “Go on upstairs, boys. Your mother and I need to talk.”
We trudged up to our bedroom and lay down on our beds in the heat that lingered from the day.
“Why didn’t you tell them about the Indian?” I said.
Jake took his time answering. He had an old baseball that he’d grabbed off the bedroom floor and he tossed it and caught it as he lay. He said, “The Indian wasn’t going to hurt us.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t feel right.”
“We shouldn’t’ve been on the tracks.”
“I don’t think it was wrong.”
“But Dad said—”
“I know what he said.”
“You’re going to get us in big trouble someday.”
“You don’t have to always follow me around like a sick dog.”
He stopped tossing the ball. “You’re my best friend, Frank.”
I stared up at the ceiling and watched a fly with a shiny green body crawl across the plaster and I wondered what it was like to walk upside down in the world. I didn’t acknowledge what Jake had said although it was something I’d always known. Except for me Jake didn’t have friends and I wasn’t sure the weight I should give the confession or the response I should offer.
“Hey, you two desperadoes.”
My sister stood leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and a wry smile on her lips. Ariel was a pretty girl. She had my mother’s auburn hair and pillowy blue eyes and my father’s quiet and considered countenance. But what Morris Engdahl had said about her was true. She’d been born with a cleft lip and though it had been surgically corrected when she was a baby the scar was still visible. She claimed it didn’t bother her and whenever somebody who didn’t know asked her about it she gave a toss of her head and said, “It’s the mark left by the finger of an angel who touched my face.” She said it so sincerely that it usually ended the discussion of what some considered a deformity.
She came into the room and nudged Jake over and sat on his bed.
I said, “You just get home?”
Ariel waitressed in the restaurant at the country club south of the Heights.
“Yeah. Mom and Dad are having this big discussion about you two. A dead man? You really found a dead man? That must’ve scared you plenty.”
“Naw,” I said. “He looked like he was sleeping.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
It was a question the sheriff had asked too and I told her what I’d told him. That we thought he might have been hurt and when he didn’t answer our calls from the trestle we went down to check on him and it was easy then to see that he was dead.
“You said he looked like he was just sleeping,” Ariel said. “Did you poke him to find out or what?”
I said, “Up close he looked dead. He wasn’t breathing for one thing.”
“You investigated this dead man pretty carefully,” she said. She put her index finger to the scar on her lip which was something she did sometimes when she was deep in consideration and she looked at me a long thoughtful time. Then she turned to Jake.
“How about you, Jakie? Were you scared?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead he said, “We weren’t supposed to be there.”
She laughed softly and said, “You’ll be lots of places you’re not supposed to be in your lives. Just don’t get caught.”
“I saw you sneaking in the other night,” I said.
The moment of her playfulness vanished and she looked at me coldly.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell anybody.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
But I could tell that it did.
Ariel was my parents’ golden child. She had a quick mind and the gift of easy charm and her fingers possessed magic on the keyboard and we knew, all of us who loved her, that she was destined for greatness. She was my mother’s favorite and may have been my father’s too though I was less certain of his sentiments. He was careful in how he spoke of his children, but my mother with passionate and dramatic abandon declared Ariel the joy of her heart. What she did not say but all of us knew was that Ariel was the hope for the consummation of my mother’s own unfulfilled longings. It would have been easy to hate Ariel. But Jake and I adored her. She was our confidante. Our coconspirator. Our defender. She tracked our small successes better than our distracted parents and was lavish in her praise. In the simple way of the wild daisies that grew in the grass of the pasture behind our home she offered the beauty of herself without pretension.
“A dead man,” she said and shook her head. “Do they know who he was?”
“He called himself Skipper,” Jake said.
“How do you know?”
Jake shot me a look that was a silent plea for help but before I could respond Ariel said, “There’s something you guys aren’t telling me.”
“There were two men,” Jake said in a rush and it was easy to see that he was relieved to have the truth spill from him.
“Two?” Ariel looked from Jake to me. “Who was the other man?”
Thanks to Jake the truth was already there in front of us like a puddle of puke. I saw no reason to lie anymore especially to Ariel. I said, “An Indian. He was the dead man’s friend.” Then I told her everything that had happened.
She listened and the pillowy blue of her eyes rested sometimes on me and sometimes on Jake and in the end she said, “You guys could be in big trouble.”