Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) Read online

  2

  What happened with the fire was this. We made a mess, and we got caught.

  The night the whole muddle started, Daddy and Carlie were having a familiar argument. As I waited in my bedroom for Dottie, Glen, and Bud to show up, I listened to them talk. Our house was small. Their bedroom was off the kitchen, and my bedroom was kitty-corner to theirs, so I heard most everything pretty easy.

  The problem was, Daddy hated going anywhere, but Carlie loved to travel. She and Patty went on a yearly trip up the coast, but she wanted Daddy to take us somewhere as a family.

  Daddy said, “Why do you want us to go somewhere else? Most folks want to come to somewhere like this.”

  “Because we do the same damn things every day. Get up, eat, work, eat, sleep, and get up. Let’s do something we’ve never done. Go somewhere we’ve never been.”

  “I don’t do the same damn thing every day,” Daddy said.

  “You’re right. You wear a different shirt on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Look, honey, we don’t have to do anything expensive, and I’ve saved some tips.”

  “I got to paint the house. I got to paint Ma’s house. I got to get in the wood. This is a bad time. We can do it next summer, I promise. We’ll make it work, somehow.”

  “Oh, Leeman, it’s always going to be a bad time. You’ll always be busy. Let’s just do it, honey.”

  The sharp knock on my bedroom wall made me jump. I waited a few seconds to see if my parents had heard it. But they talked over it, so I slid up the window screen and dropped four feet to the ground. Glen, the tallest of us so far, reached up and pulled down the screen to keep out the mosquitoes.

  “Let’s go,” Bud said. We took off up a worn path close to my house that led to the woods. At the edge of the woods we scrambled over The Cheeks, one big white boulder that was cracked down the middle. Bud switched on a flashlight, and we followed him. I was in back of him, Dottie was behind me, and Glen brought up the rear.

  The four of us were twelve, though Bud would turn thirteen in November. Brought up cheek-by-jowl in houses that hunkered down on granite ledge, our families had fished from The Point for generations. We knew each other well, but during the summer of 1963, tempers flared, people stomped off, and eyes darted like minnows trying to avoid becoming lunch. Small bumps took up space on Dottie’s wide chest, while Glen’s bathing trunks sported a lump in the front. A smattering of brown hairs made themselves to home over Bud’s upper lip. Nothing appeared to be changing on me, but I felt as strange as the rest.

  The motley crew we made that night sneaked behind the wobbly beam of a flashlight through the State Park’s woods along its walking paths. On summer days, the Park swarmed with families eating lunches at picnic tables, playing in the little playground, and hiking the paths. I had never been here at night and it was creepy. The ghosts of those who had been there that day brushed against the hairs on my arms and I crossed them over my chest to keep out dark thoughts.

  Glen’s sneakers creaked like old hinges, and one of my anklebones snapped. When something blacker than the night flashed across the path right in front of Bud, he stopped dead. Dottie bumped into me so hard I pushed him down. He thrashed around underneath me as I struggled to get up. Glen finally grabbed me and set me on the path while Bud righted himself and brushed dirt off his shirt and shorts. “Get back a little ways, for chrissake,” he said to me.

  “Don’t stop so fast,” I said.

  “Don’t stand so close.”

  “Thought I was fighting a friggin’ skeleton,” I said. “You got to eat more.”

  Dottie moved me between her and Glen. “Now you both got cushion,” she said.

  We went on, and a short time later, Bud’s flashlight picked out a path almost hidden by brush placed there by the park rangers to separate it from the park. This Path led to the big private summer cottages. We’d traveled this path during winter days, when the Park was quiet and the cottages were boarded up, but that summer night was a first for us.

  We’d planned a simple firecracker raid. Get in near some cottages, light off the firecrackers, run like hell. The firecracker raid was Glen’s idea. His father, Ray Clemmons, owned the general store on the road to town. His customers ranged from The Point folks and the surrounding areas to tourists and summer people. Sometimes, Ray wound up with goods that might not be considered legal. But the local sheriff was Parker Clemmons, Ray’s brother and Glen’s uncle, and every summer, boxes of fireworks and firecrackers found their way into Ray’s backroom. Most of the stuff disappeared after July 4th, except for a few boxes of this and that that Ray always held over for some makeshift celebration.

  That year, a box of firecrackers had found its way into Glen’s grubby hands.

  “We should pay a night visit to the cottages,” he said. “Set ’em off. Shake ’em up.”

  “You foolish?” Bud said. “Why rile ’em up? They’re them and we’re us. Should keep it that way.” He had a point, yet here he was, leading the way through the woods.

  The trail to the cottages wound around trees so thick the sky couldn’t bleed through the branches. The skin on my head crawled as I imagined a vicious fisher cat leaping from a branch above me and digging its teeth and claws into my scalp. But the sound of adults laughing shattered my fear like glass. Lights from the cottages pierced the trees and Bud shut off his flashlight.

  I never understood why people called these places cottages. They were monster mansions with perfect green lawns that spilled just so down to private docks and private coves with private brown-sugar beaches. Sometimes, we caught sight of one of the people who owned these houses in Ray’s store. When they talked, they bent their R’s like willow saplings. The women favored lime-green skirts and carried wicker bags with whales on them. The men wore old, faded clothes that always looked ironed. Soft moccasins covered their tanned, blue-blooded feet. They bought shitloads of lobsters and groceries all summer, and that made the men on The Point happy. But as Bud had pointed out, they were them and we were us and we lived in different worlds.

  Right now we hung on the hairy edge of breaking rules set by our fathers and their fathers as we crouched at the edge of a driveway across from a shingled, shambled cottage with a tower that skimmed the night sky. We knew from our winter visits that a screened-in porch set on the front of the house. From this porch, women’s voices rose and fell like gulls nagging at a fishing boat, while the men’s voices grumbled like distant thunder. Ice clinked against glasses. Cigarette smoke hung like fog in the light.

  Glen’s black eyes glowed in the back porch light. “Good. They’re all here. The porch sides got gaps big enough so we can crawl underneath. We set the crackers, light ’em, get back here, and watch the shit hit the fan when they go off.”

  “Too many people,” Bud said. “We’ll get caught for sure.”

  “They’re so loud they won’t hear us,” I said. “And they sound pretty drunk.”

  “That’s good,” Glen said. “Florine, you and I will go right. Bud and Dottie go left. We’ll meet up under the porch.”

  The hinges on the back screen door shrieked.

  “Someone’s coming,” Dottie said. We ducked and peeked through the tall grass.

  A tall, thin, bald man came down the stairs and headed our way.

  Bud and I were crouched in front of Dottie and Glen. When they backed up so Bud and I could follow them, a branch snapped under Dottie’s feet.

  The man stopped. “Whoze air?” he called in a scratchy slur. It was too late for Bud and me to move without being heard, so we balled ourselves up beneath the brush as close to the ground as we could get. The man’s feet crunched to the edge of the gravel and stopped. “Whoo?” he called and then he giggled like a girl. “Whoo? Whoo?”

  A few seconds passed, then the man warbled, “You’d never know it, but I’m a kind of poet.” The s
critch of a zipper sounded. Then a hot spray of piss hit the top of my head and drenched my back. I wanted to move in the worst way, but fear of getting caught loomed larger than what was happening so I took it. The spray swung in Bud’s direction and he grabbed my hand and squeezed. After what seemed forever, the old man finished and zipped up his fly.

  “Hadley?” a woman called from somewhere near the front porch.

  “Hold on to your saggy tits, you old bat,” the man muttered. His feet crunched over the gravel, and then the back door swung open and snapped back on its hinges.

  Bud stood up and peeled off his shirt and his shorts, down to his white skivvies. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.” He wrung out his shirt and shorts, and then not knowing what else to do, put them back on. I skinned off my shirt, wiped my head best I could with the dry parts in front, then pulled it back over my head.

  A sapling shook against the weight of Glen’s and Dottie’s laughter.

  “Shut up,” Bud said. “Let’s go home.”

  The screen door screeched again and we all ducked.

  The voice of someone close to our own age whispered, “I know you’re in there.”

  “Great,” Bud said, and he stood up. Then the rest of us followed.

  “I saw you from the tower,” a boy said to us. “What are you doing? Spying on us?”

  “Casing the joint,” Glen said.

  “Jesus, Glen,” Bud said. “No, we’re not.”

  I studied the boy. His lips curved in a little smile. His eyes were dark and his hair was light. His hands twitched as he held them close to his sides. “No really,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Might as well tell him,” I said. “We got no choice.”

  “Unless we beat the crap out of you and leave you to die in the driveway,” Glen said to the boy. “And don’t think we couldn’t do it.”

  The boy shrugged. “You probably could, but not before I get a few yells out.”

  Glen snorted. “Think they’ll hear you over the noise?”

  “I know who you are,” the boy said to Glen. “You work in the general store off Route 100.” He looked at Bud. “You work on a lobster boat.” He looked at Dottie. “I’ve seen you around.” He nodded to me. “I’m Andy Barrington.”

  “I’m Florine Gilham,” I said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  “Now we got that out of the way,” Bud grumbled, “let’s go.”

  “You mean we’re not going to . . . ,” Glen said.

  “Not going to what?” Andy asked. “What were you going to do?”

  “We were going to set off some firecrackers under the front porch,” Glen said.

  “No shit!” Andy said, his dark eyes shining. “Let’s do it.”

  “I’m game,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Dottie said. “We come this far.”

  We all looked at Bud. He shook his head, then, with no warning he sped across the driveway and slid around the right side of the house. Andy and I followed right after him and the three of us slipped beneath the porch. “If I say yes to Glen again, shoot me,” Bud growled as he pulled some loose firecrackers from his pockets, heaped them up, stuck a couple of birthday candles into the pile, and muttered, “Happy goddamn birthday.”

  Glen and Dottie squeezed through the gap on the other side of the porch. “You were supposed to do it my way,” Glen hissed.

  “Your way went out the window when he found us,” Bud said, jerking his head toward Andy, who knelt in the dirt beside me. “Let’s get this done.”

  Glen piled his crackers. Then he and Bud put more near the center of the porch until four good-sized firecracker hills were set to go. Above us, floorboards creaked and voices grew louder. Andy said, “I have matches. Need matches?”

  “We got matches,” Glen said. “Florine, Dottie, Bud, get into position.” We each took up a post in front of a pile of firecrackers, then Glen said, “One, two, three,” and we all lit our candles. Dottie finished first. She bolted from beneath the porch, Bud and me close behind. We sped to the edge of the woods and waited for Glen. And waited.

  “Where the hell is he?” Dottie said.

  The first pile went off. The noise was even louder than I’d expected. They snapped and snarled. Confused people poured from the porch. Another pile went off. A tongue of fire flickered its way from underneath the porch, and Glen bolted toward us, holding his hand and running as fast as he could go.

  A man on the lawn cried out, “There he is,” and started our way. I fell over Dottie, who scrambled up, pushed me down behind her, and left me sitting in the path. Bud hauled me into the bushes. Glen tore by us, the man hell-bent after him.

  “The garden hose, get the hose,” someone on the lawn cried. A group of men grabbed a hose from the side of the cottage and soaked the fire climbing up the latticework. Smoke turned the air blue. Then a third group of crackers went off and people scattered back out of the porch light.

  The man who had chased Glen came from the woods and walked back toward the house. Another man met him. “Lose him?” he said. “Did you know who it was?”

  “It was the boy from the general store. There was more than one of them, I think. Fishermen’s kids. I’m calling the sheriff.” He spat onto the grass. His hair was yellow, like Andy’s. They walked back toward the house. When the fourth pile of crackers went off, Bud and I ran like hell. We followed Bud’s flashlight to the edge of the woods near The Cheeks, where we found Dottie on the ground holding her right ankle. Glen rocked against a tree, holding his hand beneath his arm and hissing pain through his teeth.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I’m burned bad.”

  “Let me see,” I said. Bud shone the flashlight as Glen held out his hand. Blisters were already bubbling up along his knuckles. “We got to get you some help,” I said.

  “Help me make up something to tell them first,” Glen said.

  I said, “They know you set the fire.”

  “Did not,” Glen said. “That kid, Andy, lit a firecracker with a candle, and when everything got to hissing, he threw the candle and ran like hell, the bastard.”

  “We got to get home,” Bud said. “We got to beat Parker.”

  But we were too late. When we scrabbled over The Cheeks, and down the path that led to my yard, our folks, along with Parker, were already there.

  Parker went off with Glen and Ray. Bud and Dottie got hauled off by their own parents. I was left with Daddy and Carlie.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Daddy asked.

  “How’d you get so wet?” Carlie asked, touching my shirt, and then she smelled her hand. “Did you roll in pee?” she asked. “Lee, smell her.”

  “I can smell her,” Daddy said. “You’re in big trouble, Florine.”

  After Carlie had scrubbed the pee out of my hair and thrown away the clothes I’d been wearing, we all sat down at the kitchen table.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” I said. And then I asked, “Will I go to jail?”

  “Might be best,” Daddy said.

  “Don’t scare her,” Carlie said. “She’ll go to jail over my dead body.”

  The next morning, Sam and Ida Warner with Bud; Bert and Madeline Butts with Dottie; Ray Clemmons and Glen (his mother, Germaine, lived in Long Reach and was seldom seen by any of us); and we Gilhams formed a caravan and drove up to apologize. Our fathers set the rules. We were not to look at each other. We were to face front and speak only when spoken to except for the apology each of us was to give to Mr. Edward Barrington, the owner of the cottage.

  We took the road that joined The Point to Route 100, turned right, went three fourths of a mile, turned left onto a dirt road, bumped along, then parked in the driveway where we’d hidden the night before. We got out and Ray knocked on the back door.

 
A woman the color of Grand’s cherry headboard swung open the screen door. Her nametag read LOUISA. She said, “Can I help you?” through her milk chocolate lips.

  “We brought our kids to apologize to Mr. Barrington,” Daddy said.

  Louisa walked down the steps and looked us over as if we were yesterday’s fish. “So, you’re the ones?” she said and she frowned. “Come with me,” she said. We all trooped around to the side of the house and stopped in front of the lattice. It was black where the fire had licked up it. A porch screen was scorched, as was some of the wood over it.

  Louisa pointed to a tangled mound of shriveled branches. “Look what you children did to Mrs. Barrington’s rose bush. It grew the biggest, yellowest roses. She cared for that thing like it was a baby. Dead now, just gone. How you gonna be sorry for that?”

  “Just tell Mr. Barrington we’re here,” Ray said.

  “Oh, I’ll tell him,” Louisa muttered. She climbed up the porch steps and went inside.

  “Jesus,” Ray said to Glen. “This is going to cost us some bucks.”

  Glen muttered something.

  “Shut up,” Ray said and cuffed him one up the side of the head.

  Mr. Barrington came to us by way of the screened porch, with Andy following him. In the daylight, Mr. Barrington was tall, with the same blond hair and dark eyes as his son, and although he was a handsome man, his face looked as if it could go from sun to squall in a split pea second. Andy looked down at the ground. His fingers curled and uncurled as he stood beside his father.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Barrington said in a deep, soft voice. He stepped back and looked at us. Daddy pushed me forward, as I was first in line.

  “You got something to say to Mr. Barrington?” he said.

  I looked at a spot on Mr. Barrington’s chest and said, “I’m sorry.”