Local Souls Read online

  Birds overhead give cries of curiosity before diving toward possible nutrition. Few humans on the beach have noticed yet. One toy poodle stands urinating, with an air of patience, onto the picnic hamper of swimming strangers. A college boy, selling sno-cones, glows multicolored under his umbrella dyed the three major tints of ice cream.

  The daughter has been resting in a covey—seven other freckled girls almost-as-pretty, hoping to bronze. The nanosecond her father’s mind stops working, something jerks her clear to sitting. She turns off friends’ radio. She tears away her sunglasses. She stares down her own brown body’s length and out into our lake’s ten thousand blue acres. Bobbing there is one familiar boat, now idled.

  She sees its driver wave his arms, then signal toward something. Turning that way, his single passenger, her mom. The squinting girl, rising, now cups hand over eyes. She notes how the two adults keep peering into Moonlight Lake at one spot growing brilliant wine-colored.

  Her sleepy friend’s face is hidden under an opened Seventeen magazine, worn today as sun-shade hat. Even this friend senses some shift in beach action and asks, “What? Which boy’s back?”

  OWING TO THE death, our girl’s mother will go haywire sort of permanently.

  But not yet. That woman out there, in a white one-piece, simply standing in the pleasure craft, continues smoking. Having just witnessed a terrible severing, this trim woman finds she can still act poised. With trauma’s merciful delay, she has registered little past three words: “Another Boating Accident.”

  Such numbness leaves her effective at least these next few minutes. Soon she’s grappling with one long-handled fishing net. She takes it from the distraught captain—family doctor and lifelong buddy of the floater. In darkened water, it’s hard to tell where the victim mainly is. “Here,” she calls, “you pull that, that’s biggest. I’ll try fishing out this, the . . .”

  What she scoops aloft appears to be the, yes, her husband’s head. Its face still bears an expression. The lateral seam shows where a grin just vexed to grimace.

  She keeps biting her cigarette, eyes shying from her own smoke. The widow has entrapped this roundness in a net designed to just snag bass. Two other persons on the beach start noticing. One is a child newly-buried by his brothers. Now represented aboveground only by one crew-cut head that yells, “Gross-out. Lookit!”

  Drifted closer to shore, the boaters are seen hauling onboard legs and the torso. Three more witnesses now point. “Hey, that shouldn’t . . . Is that a man’s?” They whistle to friends. “Hey. Want to see something?!”

  At last today’s shellac-dark lifeguard blows his silver whistle.

  AND ONLY WHEN stepping from the boat, only upon finding her daughter in a crowd, only then did the widow’s screaming start. It simply failed to quit. Even when they wheelchaired her into the hospital, even when her cries upset the ER then the small Psych Ward whose other patients she was said to have “set off.” Finally, her dead husband’s boss, the Planters’ Savings and Loan president, having heard the improbable news by phone, volunteered his coastal hunting lodge as her retreat. This meant that she—should steady hollering continue—would be audible to nothing more inclined toward psychological panic than migratory coastal birds and water moccasins.

  THE GIRL’S MOTHER could not undertake her duties as a surviving-spouse. Fact is, she would skip her husband’s funeral. “Too much for me. We all have limits.” Falls’ leading white mortician would call the young banker’s burial both the best-attended and the very saddest one in memory; but then that undertaker got caught saying this every six years or so.

  The boat captain and his skier had been so close so long they physically resembled one other. They each had an unusual dented chin. They’d stood godfather for one another’s children. That one of them should kill the other meant—to the town of Falls—some brotherly law of nature’s symmetry had been broken. Best buds for life! Far better to be shot by some arbitrary out-of-towner. In high school there had even been rumors of one beach weekend’s mischief: The two had seemingly got caught in a latticed outdoor shower. They’d been doing something that their teen friends judged entirely too frisky to catch happening and then leave unreported. It was something boys their age most often do alone. Since both proved competitive, maybe were they racing toward their finish lines? Excess beer was blamed. That and a teasing coldness displayed the previous midnight by two heartless Raleigh debs. Somehow this shower-stall grappling had been forgiven. It got compared to the too-cruel horseplay known only between brothers.

  His widow announced she would never ever speak again to Dr. Dennis S—. He was the man whose boat had guillotined her spouse. She despised herself for even being onboard. And what had she been doing when it happened? Had she been monitoring her beloved water-skier and reporting towline trouble to their skipper? No. Simply seated, smoking (a “Lucky Strike”!), simply watching shoreline bathers. Water sports had always bored her but “the boys” talked her into this boat-ride. They lied, saying she’d tan faster at noontime on the actual surface of Moonlight Lake.

  Having helped get severed body parts onboard made her, in her own mind, forever complicit. She announced herself an accessory after the fact. Suspended in that fishnet, one familiar face awaited her. Its peculiar expression looked less tortured than perplexed. Her banker husband, being on holiday, had failed to shave for once. Stubble blued the jaw without a neck. She would re-greet this sight in her next decade’s hollering dreams.

  THE DAUGHTER OF the man killed had always been being very lovely. Exemptions offered such prettiness stayed invisible to her, of course. But privilege’s easements were clear to anyone homelier. Being an only child, she’d forever considered her prospering parents her own best friends. They never quite spoiled her but certainly came close. They secretly referred to how she’d saved their lives. The banker, with his handsome wife, had been driving their girl and two friends to a dressage and sailing camp on the North Carolina coast. Traffic was dense. They kept passing (then being passed by) an electric blue Ford hot rod and one big silver Chrysler with Jersey plates. These drivers took chances, failed to signal and generally behaved like vacationing Yankees in an urban hurry.

  One of their daughter’s friends now patted the banker on his shoulder and suggested that his child was presently having a fit. He signaled, pulled right over, found his daughter dead-white, stiff. She could only explain that something new was filming up before her eyes. “Caking up” was the odd term this child used. Shapes like honeycomb but filled to overflowing with kaleidoscope colors. And through this scrim, she saw something horrible waiting. She whispered as her father bent nearer, “Something so bad has to happen next.” It scared him and he soon walked her around outside the car. He took care to keep her little friends from hearing but they already had. Ever after, the car’s passengers regarded the girl with such gratitude they all tried keeping her gift a secret. She at last got her breath. Slowly her dad pulled back into beach traffic and it was only while rounding the next curve they saw the worst accident ever. That hot rod and the silver car had somehow jackknifed under a yellow moving van and all were ablaze, raw passengers strewn across the road and one young one, red, hurled into a tree.

  The father and mom kept quiet about their daughter’s foresight. But they revered her more for this sign of strange talent.

  She herself attributed Falls’ favoritism less to her personal looks than to an intelligence self-evident. Plus Luck of course. At fourteen, she half-sensed that some guardian-aura forever attended and even half-clothed her. (Her mother owned a crystal “cake caddy,” one clear domed pedestal that both protected and displayed whorls of white frosting otherwise too easily squashed.)

  Even her “hardest” teachers at school tended to give way before this naturally-platinum-haired daughter of our bank’s rising vice president. —Some people’s futures look so smooth, only sadists would bother delivering even temporary setbacks.

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE her father’s death, the
daughter received an inconvenient nickname. As a child without siblings, she’d forever envied girls whose big brothers dubbed them Little Bit or Sandy. But she found you cannot choose for yourself a flattering reference to just your peppiness or coloring. The name they laid on her was only meant to tease. It found her; she immediately despised it.

  You see, she made a mistake. She always hated when that happened. During her middle school’s Christmas pageant, teachers needed a loud narrator. Most girls ducked it, hoping for the “Mary” role. (Even though smiling Mary never had one line.)

  As for announcing, boys’ voices, at fourteen, kept cracking. Some auditioning kid, sliding toward soprano, would giggle himself. He had that little control. She couldn’t help joining in. Her laugh emerged a hee-haw bray that, being “low,” always sounded ventriloquized, out of character.

  So—born a blonde, destined to look good in white—especially while standing bookended between today’s duck-feather wings—she found herself the announcer. She became “Angel #1.”

  That was not her nickname. That one she might have endured. Teachers placed her high on a ladder disguised as one giant cardboard rock. From up there, bathed in yellow light, she would tell cowering bathrobed shepherds, “Fear not . . . for unto you is born this day . . .”

  But snowstorms Christmas week meant the performance never got a proper run-through. Pageant-standards were pretty low hereabouts. Some folks believed: Why even bother with “tech-rehearsals” when we live this far from our state capital? Who really finally cares? Nobody mistakes our dressed-up kids for real angels or the actual Baby Jesus. Besides, in a town so small as Falls, whatever might go wrong likely will, right? And with a maximum number of witnesses! Best just smile and hope the Easter one rises to higher performance-standards.

  Sound equipment, borrowed from a local college, was only being activated as the Christmas Eve audience shuffled in. So, when her music cue finally came, in front of three hundred merrymakers, announcer Angel #1 found she didn’t trust the mike pinned deep within her right wing’s down.

  Being a straight-A perfectionist, she leaned nearer her Peking duck feathers and—to assure she was really truly audible—roared: “Fear not! (Wait; is this doggone thing even on? I swear to God . . . poor planning). Fear not? (you guys getting any this? See, but I keep, but it’s not . . .). (’S working? great), Feeeear NOT!”

  She provoked a huge laugh. All the tensions and pressures of the Christmas season got jostled loose by just such silliness. Laughter arrived in chapters. Such mirth had not been meant as harsh.

  If some plainer girl—whose father were not a trim bank officer—had got hooted at like this, laughter’s edge might have proved more raw. Three hundred cacklers might’ve driven the poor girl to some nunnery, stunting her for life. Instead, tonight’s slip just showed our Announcing Angel to be a brave and forceful charmer. Even if over-miked and under-sure, hadn’t she stood high up on that cardboard boulder, gilded in light while looking, throughout, as pretty as hell?

  No one chuckled louder than her parents. (They told her later, “Stars always turn mistakes to their advantage, dear. That’s how people know a star. You were the high point of tonight’s otherwise kind of so-so show. It’s our only funny Nativity, ever. And people will remember. Don’t we all want people to remember us? Relax, you’re always darling.”)

  But the Fear Not “took.” Her folks and everybody else in Falls soon advised each other, during polio vaccinations or upcoming tax seasons, “Oh, well, when in doubt Feeeear NOT!” and snorted again. Nobody could say why it had been hilarious, her standing up there, so solemn a perfectionist pissed-off, not knowing she was audible, then busted even by the littlest kids. Why that much laughing? Her guess ran: pure meanness.

  Small towns, being untraveled literalists, do tease a lot. Falls stays famous for its battles and grudge-matches. What big cities might call Sadism little towns name Fun. And because Fear Not so hated the nickname, her parents saved it mostly for those times they praised her while alone together upstairs.

  If she overheard some cute town-boy call her that, she simply turned her back on him, snubbing even her school’s good-looking quarterback; thus proving herself more fearless.

  THAT JULY FOURTH her father got killed, Fear Not stood recalling the nickname she’d been nailed with last December. Waiting knee-deep in warm water, she was soon pacing Moonlight Lake. Girlfriends tried to ready her for the boat’s coming ashore. In it, her father’s divided body. Strangers had their cameras out. The sno-cone boy had even rolled his bright stand nearer surf, the crowd.

  Our girl could not have felt more fearful and unmoored. Why? She’d understood at once: Till now, nothing had actually been protecting her, had it? Early belief in her own exemptions? merest pride and superstition. The only other time she’d come near death, some caking spell or sign had made her sick. That spared her parents and friends.

  But not today. Fear Not’s ruined faith in her own safety (and the world’s) frightened this wading child nearly as much as her dad’s dismemberment. If such a thing can happen today during recreation-hours twenty minutes from home, what cataclysm might befall some older homely untanned person on some rainy day more inland? Her heart went out to this invented stranger.

  It’d been easy till now, acting kind toward those all treating you with deference. But manners weren’t laws. Courtesy was a privilege; it also sprang from stupid Luck. Well, here Luck quit! She’d enjoyed fourteen years of it, then came this bladed moment. Thirty strangers waded toward the landing boat to look in at a body. One camerawoman asked her wading husband, “Think I need the flash, Ed?”

  Fear Not saw even her best girlfriends pull instinctively away from this and her. Their very worry for her made her suddenly repulsive. After being considered an ice-princess, she’d tipped into some “uh-oh” category scarcely noticed till now.

  Her father’s best pal, everybody’s handsome doctor, had stood drinking gin in direct sunlight. He’d likely got tipsy unexpectedly. Then, veering his teak craft into wider panicked circles, seeking his dear friend, he’d overcorrected his course. At that moment he pushed “Fear Not” here from Luck to Fate. Her two-part nickname, a phrase from the second chapter of Luke, today became one unit: “Fearnot.” Rammed from two words about resisting fear to a lifelong reason for it.

  Fellow sunbathers, her closest girlfriends (two saved by her station-wagon premonition), saw blood, announced, “We’ll be back at the cottage. We’re only in the way here.” Then four of six, shaking sand from towels, stumbled off from her at a half-run.

  The banker’s daughter, arms crossed, remained thigh-deep in mild lake. She looked concentrated as someone whose college entrance exam gets administered as a sudden pop-quiz:

  Q: Why do most adults live in fear of storms, traffic deaths, their babies’ failure to thrive?

  A: Experience.

  Her mother disembarked and saw her. Then the screaming started.

  A HEARING WAS held with lots of awful publicity. The Falls Herald-Traveler published boating charts. One white X indicated “death site.” Another edition showed the diagram of an ordinary adult male’s outline with dotted lines hand-sketched across his neck.

  A legal team for the doctor responsible brought so many positive character-witnesses, no actual charges were filed. Doc Dennis had been one popular general practitioner. Not even a charge of “manslaughter” was lodged.

  Doc Dennis’s father had owned the cotton mill. But, to the rich boy’s credit, instead of simply taking that over, he—though always known as a lazy student—tried everything to get himself into the state med school; he somehow became his hometown’s doctor, helping others at stupidly reasonable rates. He lacked the selfless talent of Falls’ beloved family practitioner, Marion Roper. But people swore Doc Dennis meant well, despite a growing drinking problem. Everybody drank then. If not while pulling water-skiers on Moonlight Lake at high noon, with the actual glass in your hand.

  So Falls’ newspaper had t
o editorialize, praising Fearnot’s dad, the “fallen” banker who’d been two-time Kiwanis Young Man of the Year. And our opinion page did state that the doctor’s fuel-injected 350 h.p. “Pleasure Craft” outboard had just been “way too much motor for a that-sized boat.”

  The young physician felt so eaten up with regrets, he retired from practice for two months. Other, older doctors (Roper included) filled in for him. Young Dennis seemed obsessed with replotting his failed nautical strategy. He lived lost in a generalized acid-bath of self-disgust. Doc Dennis S— soon showed his own signs of mental instability.

  Ignoring his wife and kids, he deeded most of his inherited textile stock to the young woman newly-widowed and her only child. People said it would, in the end, have been a mercy if Doc had really served some hard-time. He’d begged the judge for a penance fierce and public enough.

  The banker’s grieving wife would not come downstairs to see the culprit. She refused his costly orchids and Sunday phone-calls. People told Dennis to be patient, not to press her now. Trust time. Friends urged him to return to practice: he needed work, he was making himself sick. Everyone knew how much he’d loved his friend. Unable to address the widow, Doc spent whatever hours allowed with the dead man’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

  The doctor, aged forty, could not find a coffee shop in Falls where the sight of him with Fearnot did not cause staring then a stir. A rushed chattering first ran along the lunch-counter; then hushed politeness fell, making for better eavesdropping.

  Doc soon drove over to pick the girl up after school. The two would head out into the countryside. They’d tool along some rural mail-route not known for its beauty. He would restage aloud the whole ordeal. It had been, he cried, all his fault his fault his fault.