“Allan Richards started giving Uly Kingbird a lot of crap. You know, about his brother and all. It was pretty hurtful stuff. Uly finally lit into him. Richards is way bigger, so I went over to, I don’t know, try to help somehow. A couple of other guys stepped in to stop me. Shaw was one of them. I tried to get around him. He shoved me. I shoved him back and he went down. That’s about all there is to it.”
“Except for the gallon of blood he lost.”
“Yeah, except for that.”
“What do you think?”
“Huh?”
“About the whole situation,” he said.
“I probably shouldn’t have shoved him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess you shouldn’t respond to violence with violence?”
“That’s a question.”
Annie dumped the softball out and slid her glove back onto her hand. She gave the leather palm a couple of hard thumps with her fist.
“The truth is, I don’t know that I’d do anything different,” she finally said. “Those guys were total jerks.”
“Okay. As long as you’re willing to accept the consequences. Your mother told me you’ve been suspended from school and from the softball team.”
Her eyes narrowed in anger. “That part’s unfair.”
“School or the softball team?”
“Softball.”
“Are you suspended permanently?”
“I can’t play in the game on Friday. Winning the conference depends on this one. So if we lose, it’s as good as permanent.”
“I’m sorry, kiddo. That’s hard, but under the circumstances, understandable.”
She didn’t respond for a minute. Finally she said grudgingly, “I suppose it’s like you said. If I think it was the right thing to do, I need to accept the consequences.” She picked up the softball and slapped it into her glove. “I just wish I’d done some damage to Allan Richards while I was at it.”
Cork couldn’t help smiling. “So how did Uly do with the Richards kid?”
“He had him for a while, but Allan’s a lot bigger. Kind of a David and Goliath thing, only Uly didn’t have a slingshot. Am I, like, grounded or anything?”
“I’ll talk to your mom, but I think missing the playoff game is enough.” He stood up. “Your mom and I are going to the visitation for the Kingbirds tonight. You want to come?”
“Yes, thanks. Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“When I was a kid and I had to take the garbage out at night, I was scared sometimes that there were things hiding in the bushes. You know, monsters and stuff. I was always sure they were going to jump out and get me.”
“What about it?”
“That’s how I feel right now. Not about me specifically, but about everybody and everything here. It feels like there’s something scary hiding in the bushes, you know what I mean? I keep thinking that any moment it’s going to leap out and…I don’t know what exactly, but I’m kind of afraid.”
She looked up at him as if she expected her father to put her fear to rest.
Cork gave her the only thing he had, which was company in her concern. “Hell, Annie, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t scared, too.”
TWENTY-THREE
The visitation was held at Nelson’s Funeral Home. Annie had been there over the years for other visitations and memorial services. Also, when she was a sophomore, she’d gone on a field trip organized by her biology teacher, Mr. Dexter, an odd man, short and balding, full of gruesome stories about the strange parasites he’d seen inhabit people’s bodies when he was a Peace Corps worker somewhere in Indonesia. The mortician had taken the class on a tour of the prep room, explaining how he prepared a body for burial and showing them the instruments and the bottles of chemicals. It had seemed alien and cruel and unnecessary to Annie. Why not simply let go of the body in the same way the spirit did?
Nelson’s was one of the nicest of the old houses in Aurora. Bigger, more luxurious homes had been built on Iron Lake, but Nelson’s, with its gingerbread trim, its wraparound porch, and its cupola, seemed elegant in a way that suggested there was some sort of etiquette to the aftermath of dying. The biological stuff of body preparation Annie could do without, but some of the traditions that accompanied death felt right, like the visitation. Gathering to offer comfort and to remember the life that had gone before the death seemed fundamental and natural to a transition that Annie thought was probably more difficult for the living than for the dead.
Annie and her family paused at the door to the room where the visitation was in progress. On the tour she’d taken, the mortician said that it had once been a grand dining room and held a table that could have easily seated twenty. Now it contained two dark-wood caskets placed side by side, a number of flower arrangements, several photographic memorials that had been created on poster boards and positioned on display tripods in the corners of the room, and a lot of people talking quietly. Her mother signed the guest register while her father wrote a check to the St. Agnes Early Education Fund, which the Kingbirds had designated for memorial contributions.
Annie went on ahead. Across the room, Uly stood peering at one of the poster memorials. She wandered over, but he was so intent he didn’t notice her. He seemed to be focused on a photograph of him and Alexander standing together on a white diving raft in the middle of a lake. Uly was short and skinny; Alexander was much taller, much older, a young teenager with a developing physique. He wore a broad smile. Uly stared warily at the camera, as if he was on a raft drifting out to sea.
“Where was it taken?” Annie asked.
“North Carolina, I think. Lejeune,” Uly said. “Probably just after we moved there.”
“Alexander looks happy. You look like you just lost your pet turtle.”
“Alex liked moving. He was good at it. Dad would get a new posting, we’d hit a new base, a new town, and Alex was out the door getting to know the place, the people. Charisma. He had it in spades.”
“You didn’t like moving?”
Uly shook his head. “Staying in one place seemed better. Safer. Till we moved here.” He thought a moment, then smiled. “Alex got us kicked out of base housing once.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure exactly. It involved a cherry bomb, a bag of dog crap, and the base commander. Alex was never much impressed by authority. It was the only time Dad ever hit him. Slapped him across the face.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “That part I remember.” He turned to her. “Sorry about today.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I really like the way you lit into Allan Richards. He’s such an asshole.”
“I wanted to kill him,” Uly said. “If I’d had a gun, he’d be dead.”
The pupils of Uly’s eyes were a swirl of green, and what Annie saw in them made her think of the threatening look of the sky before a hailstorm. She struggled to find a way to help him out of the dark hole into which he seemed to be sliding. “I’ve been thinking. What if we did another piece for church? Everyone loved what we did last Sunday.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t have to give me an answer right away.”
“He just did.”
Annie turned and found Darrell Gallagher at her shoulder. He was dressed, as usual, entirely in black, which should have been appropriate for the occasion, but somehow felt instead like an insult. The sly smile on his face made everything about him feel off.
“You have an annoying habit, Gallagher, of butting in on other people’s conversations.”
