Free Jolly by John Weston Page A

said you would know when the time came, never fear. He had asked Jamie about that, too, two years ago when he had come home for three days. Yes, Jamie had agreed, you’d know when the time was right, and he’d grinned when Jolly admitted, at fourteen, that the nearest thing he’d ever done to or had done by a girl hearkened back to before Jamie had left home in Skull Valley when he and Jolly came upon Francee Epum in the swamp, and Jamie had made Francee let Jolly stay for a while until he had a chance to see her undressed, and she had made Jolly drop his pants, too, as payment. She had laughed and measured the difference between the little brother and the big one before Jamie had sent him on home with Pekoe.
    And Guppy, who was too simple to lie, just three weeks ago told Jolly and Luke and a half-dozen others in the gymnasium basement how he had lured Di, without much trouble, down there during a school dance and showed them the bench that ran before his locker where she had lain and how much trouble it was, the two of them trying not to teeter off the narrow bench and how they took a shower together afterwards where things got out of hand again. Jolly believed him because when he had finished his eyes were vacant, and he walked to the other end of the locker room and shut himself in the coach’s john, the one with the metal door; that and a certain reverent tone of voice like a country preacher revealing for the first time the wonders of Sodom and Gomorrah to a barefooted, toe-twisting shock of Sunday angels.

 
SEVEN
     
    AS THE long black car dipped down the last hill its headlights struck the shallow water of Hassayampa Creek, which signaled the beginning of the valley proper. The four of them were riding in the front seat of the mortuary limousine. Behind them, like a different room, the interior of the over-sized car stretched away solemnly.
    For the last few minutes Jolly had not spoken. With his forehead pressed against the window glass he watched for signs of anything familiar along the roadside in the new night. He wished it were daylight to better see those things that he had not seen once in eight years.
    The first recognizable object was the silhouette of the ruined adobe wall, momentarily visible against the skyline, which surrounded twenty low heaps of stones, purportedly the time-forgotten burial grounds of some small Indian band whose numbers had been further diminished at this spot by an encounter with white men, or perhaps another, hostile, Indian tribe. Jolly opened his mouth to speak, to explain the interest of the adobe wall, but no one else had seen it, evidently. He said nothing and saw nothing else within memory, except the two-lane dirt road ducking and hiding from the car’s headlights, until they came to the white creek.
    “What the hell’s water doing in the middle of the road?” asked Luke, stepping too hard on the brakes. The car slid down to the edge of the water where it stopped while the dust rolled over the hood and pranced in the beams.
    “Not deep,” said Jolly. “Go on across.” He watched the water separate to the side of the car and ripple in dwarf rage. If you drank from the Hassayampa, it was said, you’d never again speak the truth.
    Immediately beyond, Jolly saw the great trunks of the cottonwoods standing crooked and pale around what had been a favorite church picnic grounds, and he recalled, incongruously, the embarrassment Bethamae Epum had caused him by complaining shrilly to their Sunday School teacher that he had purposely hiked up her dress.
    “You guys bring any more beer?” Babe Wooten was asking.
    The narrow road that led into the hills and eventually to the Cranshaver’s where no one had ever trespassed and where, it was said, their idiot boy was chained in a lean-to and ate from the same dish with the dogs.
     
    Oh I had lotsa trouble makin’ Mary,
    Mary’s ma and paw don’t care for me,
     
    Luke sang.
    The lake, how little it looked now lying flat