Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “What is it?”
“There’s been an accident,” I said. “Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie says she’s okay otherwise.”
“Vince?”
I thought of the way everyone said Vince drove—as if there were no tomorrow. Now there wasn’t. Not for him. “He’s dead, Sadie.”
Her mouth dropped open. “He can’t be!He’s only eighteen years old!”
“I know.”
The sheet fell free of her relaxing arms and puddled around her feet. She put her hands over her face.
14
My revised version ofTwelve Angry Menwas canceled. What took its place wasDeath of a Student,a play in three acts: the viewing at the funeral parlor, the service at Grace Methodist Church, the graveside service at West Hill Cemetery. This mournful show was attended by the whole town, or near enough to make no difference.
The parents and Vince’s stunned kid sister starred at the viewing, sitting in folding chairs beside the coffin. When I approached them with Sadie at my side, Mrs. Knowles rose and put her arms around me. I was almost overwhelmed by the odors of White Shoulders perfume and Yodora antiperspirant.
“You changed his life,” she whispered in my ear. “He told me so. For the first time he made his grades, because he wanted to act.”
“Mrs. Knowles, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind and I hugged her tighter, as if hugging could make it go away:Maybe it’s the butterfly effect. Maybe Vince is dead because I came to Jodie.
The coffin was flanked by photomontages of Vince’s too-brief life. On an easel in front of it, all by itself, was a picture of him in hisOf Mice and Mencostume and that battered old felt hat from props. His ratty, intelligent face peered out from beneath. Vince really hadn’t been much of an actor, but that photo caught him wearing an absolutely perfect wiseass smile. Sadie began to sob, and I knew why. Life turns on a dime. Sometimes toward us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes:so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?
And Jodiewasgood—good for me. In Derry I was an outsider, but Jodie was home. Here’s home: the smell of the sage and the way the hills flush orange with Indian blanket in the summer. The faint taste of tobacco on Sadie’s tongue and the squeak of the oiled wood floorboards in my homeroom. Ellie Dockerty caring enough to send us a message in the middle of the night, perhaps so we could get back to town undiscovered, probably just so we’d know.The nearly suffocating mixture of perfume and deodorant as Mrs. Knowles hugged me. Mike putting his arm—the one not buried in a cast—around me at the cemetery, then pressing his face against my shoulder until he could get himself under control again. The ugly red slash on Bobbi Jill’s face is home, too, and thinking that unless she had plastic surgery (which her family could not afford), it would leave a scar that would remind her for the rest of her life of how she had seen a boy from just down the road dead at the side of the road, his head mostly torn off his shoulders. Home is the black armband that Sadie wore, that I wore, that the whole faculty wore for a week after. And Al Stevens posting Vince’s photo in the window of his diner. And Jimmy LaDue’s tears as he stood up in front of the whole school and dedicated the undefeated season to Vince Knowles.
Other things, too. People saying howdy on the street, people giving me a wave from their cars, Al Stevens taking Sadie and me to the table at the back that he had started calling “our table,” playing cribbage on Friday afternoons in the teachers’ room with Danny Laverty for a penny a point, arguing with elderly Miss Mayer about who gave the better newscast, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite. My street, my shotgun house, getting used to using a typewriter again. Having a best girl and getting S&H Green Stamps with my groceries and real butter on my movie popcorn.
Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.
15
The Year of Our Lord 1961 was winding down. On a drizzly day about two weeks before Christmas, I came into my house after school, once more bundled into my rawhide ranch coat, and heard the phone ringing.
“This is Ivy Templeton,” a woman said. “You prob’ly don’t even remember me, do you?”
“I remember you very well, Miz Templeton.”
“I dunno why I even bothered to call, that goddam ten bucks is long since spent. Just somethin about you stuck in my head. Rosette, too. She calls you ‘the man who cotched my ball.’?”
“You’re moving out, Miz Templeton?”
“That’s one hunderd percent goddam right. My mama’s comin up from Mozelle tomorrow in the truck.”
“Don’t you have a car? Or did it break down?”
“Car’s runnin okay for a junker, but Harry ain’t goan be ridin in it. Or drivin it ever again. He was workin one of those goddam Manpower jobs last month. Fell in a ditch and a gravel truck run over him while it was backin up. Broke his spine.”
I closed my eyes and saw the smashed remains of Vince’s truck being hauled down Main Street behind the wrecker from Gogie’s Sunoco. Blood all over the inside of the cracked windshield. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miz Templeton.”
“He goan live but he ain’t never goan walk again. He goan sit in a wheelchair and pee in a bag, that’s whathegoan do. But first he’s goan ride down Mozelle in the back of my mama’s truck. We’ll steal the mattress out’n the bedroom for him to lay on. Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it?”
She started to cry.
“I’m runnin out on two months’ back rent, but that don’t confront me none. You know whatdoesconfront me, Mr. Puddentane, Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You the Same? I got thirty-five goddam dollars and that’s the end of it. Goddam asshole Harry, if he could’ve kep his feet I wouldn’t be in this fix. I thought I was in one before, but now looka this!”
There was a long, watery snork in my ear.
