Reality Check Page 6

  “Thanks,” Cody said. “Uh, Ms. Beezon? Remember when you mentioned about a job next summer and everything?”

  “Sure,” she said. “And I meant it.”

  “I was wondering if maybe I could start sooner.”

  “Sooner?”

  “Like this week, if possible.”

  “We really don’t hire any part-time help, Cody. With the paperwork and all it’s just not worth it.”

  Cody cleared his throat, suddenly all blocked up. “The thing is,” he said, “that’s what I’m kind of talking about.”

  “What is, Cody?”

  “Full-time,” Cody said.

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  Sue Beezon was silent for a moment or two. Cody thought of his mother, something that didn’t happen much anymore.

  “How’s Monday to start?” she said, her voice a little softer than it had been.

  “Thanks, Ms. Beezon,” he said. “Seven sharp.”

  Cody spent most of the time till Monday at the gym. His range of motion kept improving. His strength rose up above pitiful. His knee swelled up at night. He iced. He slept.

  He reported to the yard Monday at 6:55. Right from the beginning, things weren’t the same as they’d been in the summer. For example, Frank Pruitt no longer worked for Beezon Lumber. He’d quit or been fired; Cody never did find out which. The new driver was called Dax. Dax was a poor driver, a horn honker who went much too fast, didn’t see things he should have, rolled through every stop sign. He chewed tobacco all day long—spitting out the window when they were in the truck, spitting just about anywhere when they were on a work site—and also smelled bad. Worst of all, he was a bigot, and every time he opened his mouth, out came a nasty comment about anyone different from him. What made him think that a potbellied, bad-smelling white guy who never did any of the heavy lifting was somehow at the top of the heap? Cody thought of asking him, but he didn’t know what would happen 79

  next and he needed this job. Mostly he stayed silent all day long.

  But the pay was good—still $10.75 an hour—although overtime didn’t seem to happen when the weather cooled. Probably a good thing: At first, Cody’s knee swelled up terribly and he often limped while making the deliveries at the end of the day. If Dax noticed, he made no comment. After work Cody usually bought a sandwich at the Main Street Deli and stopped by the gym. His range of motion returned to normal; his strength improved, but oh, so slowly. From the gym Cody went home, iced, slept. He got into a routine. Sometimes he heard news from school—Tonya had started going out with Dickie van Slyke, Jamal had signed a letter of intent with Boise State—but it all seemed distant. He began to hang out with older kids, nineteen-and twenty-year-olds, not really kids, in fact, who had jobs in construction, or at the mine, or at Home Depot; or no jobs at all. He found himself at parties with lots of booze, went home one night with a waitress who had a baby sleeping in the next room. The weekend after that he stayed home. At the end of the season the Little Bend Guardian, the local weekly, always published a special issue with pictures of all the players. Cody was at the Main Street Deli, picking up his after-work sandwich, when he saw the football issue in the rack. He moved toward the rack, wondering whether there’d 80

  be anything about him, going back and forth in his mind about whether to buy the paper or not.

  Cody never got to the football article, because of something on the front page; something that got his heart beating fast, something, in fact, that woke him up and made him feel alive, as though he’d been in hibernation. Alive, but not in a good way: What Cody saw on the front page of the Guardian was a photograph of Clea. Over it, a big black headline read:

  “Local Girl Missing.”

  81

  Local Girl Missing

  Authorities in the town of North Dover, Vermont,

  have reported th

  i

  e d sappearance o i

  f s xteen-year-l

  o d

  Clea Weston o

  i

  f L ttle Bend. Ms. Weston, a boarding student at Dover Academy, was last seen on Wednesday, horseback ri i

  d ng on trails in a wooded

  area near the campus. Wit i

  h n hours of the horse

  retur i

  n ng alone to the st l

  ab e, loca

  l

  l po ice as i

  s sted by

  v l

  o unteers began a search of the area. The search

  continued yesterday, sup l

  p emented by the presence

  of Vermont State P l

  o ice Search and Rescue and

  tracking dogs, but as of today at 2 A.M. MST no

  trace of Ms. Weston has been found. Her father,

  w l

  e l-known Little Bend investor Winthrop C.

  “Win” Weston, could not be reached for comment.

  CODY, STANDING BY THE NEWSPAPER RACK at Main Street Deli, read the article three times, forcing himself to go slow, to try to make sense of it, to absorb all the facts. It made no sense, no matter how slowly he went, and he couldn’t believe they were facts, any of them. When the paper started shaking in his hands, he dug out his cell phone and called Clea’s number.

  “Hi, this is Clea. I’m not here right now, but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  “It’s me,” Cody said. “I—are you all right? You’re in the paper but I just can’t believe . . . Call if you—when you get this. I hope everything’s . . .” He clicked off.

  “Next,” said the cashier.

  Cody paid for his sandwich and the paper, went outside. For a moment or two he couldn’t breathe. A cold west wind was blowing down Main Street; dark clouds, almost charcoal colored, swept across the sky. Cody turned his face to the wind, took a deep breath. He had air in his lungs, plenty of it, but still felt like he couldn’t breathe. His cell phone rang. He snapped it open. Clea?

  Not Clea. “Hey,” said Junior, “heard this news about Clea?”

  “I just—yeah, it’s in the Guardian. But is it true?”

  “Everyone’s talking about it. You know Matty Karlinsky?”

  83

  Cody had a vague memory of a skinny kid with glasses. “His old man works for Mr. Weston, and he says they think she must of fallen off her horse and gotten lost in the woods. Mr. Weston flew out there yesterday. It’s gonna be on the news.”

  “She’s a good rider,” Cody said.

  “Anyone can fall off a horse,” Junior said. “Horses suck, you know that.”

  “Was she riding Bud?”

  “Who’s Bud?”

  “Her horse.”

  “From here? She took her horse with her?”

  “Why not?” Cody said, annoyed by the question—as though Junior had made some criticism of Clea.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Junior said. There was a silence.

  “How’s the knee?”

  “Gettin’ better.”

  “Nice,” said Junior. “Everything’s so fucked up, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They say there’s a party tonight, up by the lookout. You wanna swing by?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Cody said.

  84

  “You broke up, right? You and her?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, man. Later.”

  “Later.”

  Cody clicked off. He didn’t feel like a party, getting drunk on a cold night, fifty-fifty chance of the cops busting it at any moment. Where he wanted to be was in those Vermont woods, searching for Clea. He went back to the apartment over the Red Pony, switched on the TV in time to catch a still photograph of her. Clea was sitting in a lawn chair, one wing of Cottonwood in the background, a big smile on her face. Then a reporter with a microphone came on-screen, a tag at the bottom reading NORTH DOVER, VT. The reporter stood beside a big red barn in bright daylight, meaning they’d ta
ped the coverage earlier. Speaking at first with the camera on him, then over video footage, the reporter said what Cody already knew from the Guardian article. Cody concentrated on the video footage: views of the most beautiful school he’d ever seen, huge buildings of brick and stone facing each other across broad green quadrangles; twenty or thirty people, some in uniform, working their way up a wooded hillside, yellow leaves clinging to a few branches, but most of the trees bare; a horse—Bud, as Cody could tell from that diamond-shaped blaze—munching hay in a stall. Then 85

  the reporter was back on the screen, with two people beside him, one a cop in uniform, the other a blond-haired kid a little older than Cody.

  “On my right is Sergeant Ted Orton of the Dover police. Sergeant, what can you tell us about the progress of the search?”

  “At this point,” said the sergeant, a burly guy with a red nose and a bushy white mustache, “we’re still working on the assumption that the girl got thrown from her horse, maybe losing consciousness for a while, and then became disoriented and wandered off in the wrong direction. It’s easy to get lost in these woods even for a local, and the young lady in question was new to the area. If the weather holds, we should have a state police helicopter on scene in an hour or so.”

  “You mention weather, sergeant. What role does weather play in the search?”

  “Weather’s been warm for the time of year, low forties at night,” the sergeant said. “Could be a lot worse.”

  “Sergeant Ted Orton of the Dover police, speaking of the chances of survival in the night woods,” said the reporter. “And on my left, a senior at Dover Academy and fellow member of the equestrian team, Townes DeWitt. I understand, Townes, that you were one of the last people to see Clea Weston.”

  Townes DeWitt nodded. He was tall and strong looking, his 86

  blond hair very straight and kind of long, drooping down over one eye.

  “What can you tell us about that, Townes?”

  “We were coming back from practice a little early,” Townes said. “Clea wanted to try one of the trails in the woods. No one thought much about it—she’s done it before, and she’s an excellent rider.”

  The reporter nodded and said, “That’s the latest from North Dover, Vermont. Now back to the studio.” There was a pause with the three of them standing in front of the big red barn, the reporter and the sergeant gazing into the camera, Townes DeWitt glancing at something off to one side—maybe something amusing, from the slight change in his expression. Cody couldn’t sleep that night. He finally got up, went online, looked for breaking news about Clea. All he ended up finding was that same TV report he’d already seen, posted on YouTube. He watched it over and over—gazing so deeply for meaning into the faces of the reporter, Sergeant Orton, and Townes DeWitt that they disconnected into a blur of incoherent pixels. Only the face of Bud kept its shape, somehow calming him. Cody kept searching—a virtual search, he realized, parallel to the real one going on in Vermont at the moment, where it was probably daytime already—until it was time to go to work. 87

  The first job was a delivery of masonry forms to an outlet mall going up near Fort Collins. Dax had one of his hangovers, the grim, heavy kind that made his driving even worse but kept him from chewing his dip; an acceptable trade-off, in Cody’s opinion. On the way back, after a handful of pills swallowed with black coffee, Dax finally felt well enough to talk.

  “See about that girl from the high school?” he said. “Missing in Maine somewheres?”

  “Vermont,” Cody said.

  “Whatever,” said Dax. He took out his dip, plucked out a wad, shoved it in his cheek, chewing quietly for three or four exits. Then he said, “Some babe, that one.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cody said.

  “That chick,” said Dax. “From the high school, what I was just tellin’ you about. Her picture was on the news. I been around. Know a babe when I see one.”

  “Shut up,” Cody said.

  Dax turned to him, mouth open in shock, tarry strands hanging down from the roof of his mouth. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me,” Cody said. He got ready to fight, the knowledge that a fistfight in the cab of a truck going seventy-five could not end well temporarily absent from his mind. But there was no fighting. Dax’s face went bright red. 88

  He turned, spat out his open window, didn’t say another word.

  They got off work early, which sometimes happened on Saturdays. Dax went into the office; Cody went to the gym. He rode the bike for an hour, did leg curls and leg extensions, first with his left leg, then the right. They could have been the legs of two separate people, didn’t even look the same. On the extensions, his right leg zipped through three sets, ten reps each, at one hundred pounds. The left leg faltered halfway through the third set, and that was at thirty pounds. Cody rested for a minute or two, worked that bad leg again and again and again, until it was throbbing from the tip of his toes all the way up to the top.

  He drove home and iced, at the same time checking online and on TV for news of Clea. There was none. His phone rang.

  “This is Sue Beezon.”

  “Hi.”

  “I understand there was some trouble between you and Dax today.”

  “Um, I wouldn’t say—”

  “You’d better take a week off and think about it. Without pay, need I add.”

  “But I—”

  “Dax has worked here for seventeen years. He also happens 89

  to be Mr. Beezon’s second cousin once removed. Mr. Beezon wanted you fired, Cody. Take the week off. Come back with a better attitude.” Click.

  “Christ.” Cody raised his cell phone, got ready to hurl it against the wall. But could he afford a new one? Could he afford to lose this job? Cody grabbed his jacket. He had to get out. Downstairs in the entrance hall, he met the mailman coming in. “Two A?” said the mailman.

  “Yeah.”

  The mailman handed Cody a letter, a letter addressed to him. Cody couldn’t remember the last time anyone had sent him a letter; who wrote letters anymore? But he knew who’d written this one, just from the handwriting. He tore it open. Dear Cody,

  There’s something about a letter, at least for me—as opposed to email or texting or anything else, even talking sometimes. Blah blah blah. The point is, I’ve been thinking about you a lot, can’t help it. You pop up in my mind so often. I’m not sure I even understand how everything ended, and what I want to say is that if you ever (wel , maybe not ever, but in the reasonable future) change your mind—about you and me—then let me know.

  Things here are pretty good. The classes are

  90

  better—but not all of them!—and the facilities are amazing of course, and the place is gorgeous, especially when the leaves were changing. Bud loves it and is doing great in competition. Some of the kids are cool, some are snobby, make me feel kind of hickish. One or two I don’t like at al . It’s hard to know who to trust sometimes. Like rolling the dice—a cliché that turns out to have real meaning. But that’s true everywhere—right?

  Wel , I’m off to rhetoric class, actually my favorite. You have to give a speech and explain the importance of it. Everyone does stuff like the Gettysburg Address or Winston Churchil , but I’m doing Lady Di’s brother’s eulogy at her funeral. That’ll shake them up a little. Hope your knee’s all better.

  Lots of love,

  Clea

  There was no date on the letter. Cody checked the postmark, went to the wall calendar, figured out that it had been mailed on Wednesday, the day Clea had disappeared. He found he was shaking; the letter was like a message from the . . . But no: He pushed that thought away, refused to allow his mind to even think it, not once. He reread the letter, kept coming back to those two lines: One or two I don’t like at all. It’s 91

  hard to know who to trust sometimes. Could they now be considered some kind of . . . evidence? Evidence of what? Cody didn’t know. All he knew was that those two lines bothered him.
And if there was any chance they were evidence, how could he keep the knowledge to himself? For a few moments he thought about trying to contact that cop, Sergeant Orton. But Cody doubted his ability, even if he reached the guy, to get his point across on the phone. Instead he went out to the alley behind the Red Pony, climbed into his car, and drove to the Heights. Cody had parked in the driveway at Cottonwood and was walking toward the front door, letter in hand, when he realized Mr. Weston probably wouldn’t be inside, had to be in Vermont searching for his daughter. Cody knocked anyway. The door opened and there stood Mr. Weston.

  Mr. Weston looked terrible. All those past times Cody had seen him, he’d been perfectly groomed, almost like an actor playing a rich guy, but now he needed a shave, his thinning reddish hair was reduced to sprouts here and there, and blemishes spotted his nose and cheeks. He blinked in the light, although it was a dark day with low-flying clouds, and didn’t seem to recognize Cody at all. Cody had prepared a little speech about the letter, but instead he blurted the first thing that came to mind:

  “Is there any news, Mr. Weston?”

  Mr. Weston started to shake his head; the motion sent a little invisible booze cloud wafting Cody’s way. Then his 92

  expression changed, recognition dawning. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Or you?” said Cody; more blurting, but he just couldn’t help it: If there was no news, meaning Clea hadn’t been found, then what the hell was Mr. Weston doing back in Little Bend? Pink patches rose to the surface of Mr. Weston’s face. “How dare you—” At that moment, Fran came up behind him, a very good-looking woman who’d once been a model, but now for the first time Cody saw how old she really was.

  “Win?” she said. “What’s going on?” She became aware of Cody and frowned.

  “Mrs. Weston?” said Cody, taking the letter from his pocket, “I got this letter from Clea. It just came but must have been written the same day she—”

  Mr. Weston snatched the letter, started reading, his eyes desperate, those pink patches spreading on his face.

  “Skip the first bit,” Cody said. He stepped around, pointed at the middle section of the letter. “There’s this part I don’t—”

  Mr. Weston backed away, out of Cody’s reach. “‘Thinking about you a lot’—goddamn it,” he said. He glared at Cody.