The Past Is Never Read online

  Pansy’s disappearance was always with me, and hearing Bubba and his callers talk about missing people, missing time, and missing memories made my recollections sharper. Pansy’s disappearance stuck with Bubba, too. It stuck with us all. Mama sent money to preachers and prayed for Pansy to return. Willet searched for her wherever he traveled. I kept trying to make sense of the nonsensical, but Bubba looked to the skies. Some things never changed.

  One summer when we were still kids and Pansy was an infant, still feeding from Mama’s breast and crying on a regular schedule, still ugly and angry and needy, Willet and Bubba dragged an old red wagon to the fireworks stand outside the city limits. They’d pooled their money, a meager amount despite two months spent mowing lawns and pulling weeds for anyone who’d hire them. It was late afternoon on the third of July, and fireworks were marked to sell. They came back with a pile of cheap explosives: firecrackers, boomer rockets, whistlers, zippers, sparklers, smoke canisters, and more. Mama said it was dangerous. Willet was eleven. Daddy said he was plenty old enough and nothing in that wagon was going to kill anyone. We sat on the edge of the yard in shaky aluminum chairs. Mama clutched Pansy to her breast. Willet and Bubba laid out their haul in careful rows. Daddy stood nearby with his best Zippo lighter, which he handed off to Willet with a serious nod that left me yearning for something shiny and silver to hold. Willet wanted to light the best ones first, but Bubba stopped him. It would be more impressive to start small and work up to a finale. They had one repeater that promised a solid minute of star showers and multicolored bursts.

  “That ought to be the last one,” Bubba said. “We can just sit back and enjoy the show.”

  Willet went along. Bubba had a persuasive way of talking. If you closed your eyes and listened, it was easy to forget he was a kid. Willet lit a sparkler and brought it to me, told me to wave it in the air.

  “It’s a magic wand,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Willet. “It is.”

  Mama pulled Pansy in tighter and stepped away from my crackling wand. She didn’t trust me.

  The first few fireworks they lit were duds, and Willet cussed about the wasted money. Mama told him to watch his mouth, but Daddy said he was entitled to cuss about some things. That’s what cuss words were for. Finally, Bubba set off a fountain and the air lit up with sparks. Even Mama smiled. I waved my sparkler in the air and cheered. For a half hour, Willet and Bubba sent fireworks sizzling and popping and whistling through the night. Willet ran back and forth from the pile of fireworks to my spot on the edge of the yard, bringing me a new sparkler every time one fizzled. I grinned, happy to see I was still his favorite sister despite Pansy’s recent arrival. I inched closer to Willet and Bubba as the show wore on, and Mama was too distracted with Pansy to notice or care. The dark sky became crosshatched with silver light and red explosions and ghostly smoke trails. They lit the final fuse and Willet and Bubba stood on either side of me. We tilted our heads back and stood gaping at the night sky.

  “What do you think, Bert?” Bubba asked.

  “I think it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  On a clear spring night when the stars seemed especially abundant, I listened until Bubba signed off the air. It was well past midnight. I wondered if Willet knew about Bubba’s show, if he’d stumbled across it some night when he couldn’t sleep or when he drove away from a job site, bone-weary from a long day gone into overtime. I knew what Willet would say—he’d say Bubba was crazy. But was he? Why was Bubba’s story crazier than anything else we’d imagined over the years?

  I stopped the car in the middle of a deserted road and got out to look at the stars. I thought of all those people who talked about strange lights and visitors from another planet. What would it be like, to be lifted into the dark sky? I wanted to know. I hadn’t prayed in many years, having left God behind with other childhood totems like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but I wished very hard to see some sign of life and wishing felt like prayer. As with all the prayers I’d ever prayed, it came to nothing. The sky didn’t shift or change. No bright lights appeared. No craft emerged to take me away. The man in the moon didn’t give me so much as a wink. If creatures from another planet were searching for signs of life, I’d fallen short. Still, I thought, if Pansy were abducted by aliens as Bubba claimed, wouldn’t that be easier for us? For Willet and for me? How could we be responsible for that?

  The next day, I called the radio station. A woman told me the program had originated in Jackson at an affiliate station.

  “But you air it live?” I asked.

  “Yes. Lot of weirdos out there in the middle of the night.” I could tell from the tone of her voice she thought I might be one of the weirdos.

  I waited a week before driving to Jackson to find Bubba. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive, even in the dead of night. I drank cheap truck-stop coffee and pulled over twice to check the map. The radio station was located on the west side of town and a wrong turn landed me in a residential neighborhood with barking dogs and men clustered on concrete stoops, smoking and drinking from cans tucked in paper sacks. The men watched me as I crawled past, the whites of their eyes eerie and stark and full of suspicion.

  I found the station, a two-story brick building topped by antennas jutting into the sky. A chain-link fence surrounded the parking lot, but the gate was open. The glass front door of the building was locked. I knocked, hoping someone might hear me. No one came. I returned to the car and listened to Bubba’s voice while watching the building. I could picture him in there, talking into a microphone and answering calls.

  I wondered which one of the five vehicles in the lot belonged to him. I ruled out the vans with the station call letters on the side. There was a white Camaro with a spoiler on the back and a mustardyellow Pinto with a rusted out back panel. I hoped he owned the Camaro, but I could see him in the old Pinto. When Bubba signed off, I kept my eyes on the locked door of the station, expecting him to emerge. I’d about given up when I saw him walking across the lot. He must have come out a back door. He didn’t head for either the Camaro or the Pinto, but for a motorcycle I hadn’t noticed on the far edge of the lot. He passed under a bank of streetlights. He wore a black T-shirt and a ball cap. His hair was long. Otherwise, he looked like the boy I remembered.

  I jumped out of my car and shouted, “Bubba!”

  He walked faster, like he wanted to get away from me.

  “Bubba, it’s me! It’s Bert!”

  He stopped and turned. I ran to him. I threw my arms around his neck and laughed. “Oh, God, it’s been forever.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” he said. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

  I stepped away. “Are you still mad at me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  His stomach flopped over the waistband of his faded jeans and he had sweat stains under his armpits, though the night was cool.

  “I heard you on the radio,” I said. “I wanted to see you.”

  He sighed, looked at the keys in his hands, and shoved them in his pocket. “I assume you didn’t walk here.”

  I pointed at Mama’s old Ford.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  I drove us to the Krystal’s, where we shared a sack of oniony burgers and fries. He scarfed down a half dozen of the small, square, mustard-soaked burgers before I finished one. He drained his extralarge soda and went back for a refill. I figured I’d driven an awfully long way for the silent treatment and a bunch of terrible food, but eventually he started talking. He hit me with a stream of questions, though he didn’t pause long enough for me to answer.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Bert? Driving all this way in the middle of the night? What if something happened? What if you had car trouble? Does Willet know where you are? Does your mother? How is Willet? How is your mother?”

  I ate a greasy fry and studied him under the harsh fluorescent lights. “Are you done?”

  “I’m just getting started
.”

  “First of all,” I told him, “I’m not a child and you don’t need to worry about where I go or when. Second, I wanted to see you. It’s been almost four years and I always felt bad about the way you left. I felt like it was my fault.”

  He wiped mustard from the corner of his lips with a small square of paper napkin. “So you’re here to make yourself feel better?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  He crammed another burger into his mouth and seemed to swallow it without chewing. “Well, here I am. I’m fat. I’m ugly. I’m crazy. You can report back to the good people of White Forest: Bubba Speck is a lunatic. Same as ever.”

  “I don’t think you’re a lunatic.”

  “Everyone else does.”

  “Not the people who call in to your show.”

  Bubba shook the paper sack, searching for stray fries. He wouldn’t look at me. I babbled to fill the awkward silence. I told him I was working for Granny Clem and I would graduate in May. I told him Willet was working construction. I told him about Mama’s poor health and how we hadn’t seen Daddy since before Pansy disappeared.

  Bubba leaned his elbows on the cold aluminum table and stared at me. It was weird. He was weird. I’d made a mistake in coming to Jackson. I’d had this idea I mattered to Bubba, that he would want to hear from me, but I was wrong. I’d spent the past four years thinking about Pansy and my father and Bubba, but it did not seem like Bubba had spent any time thinking about me. He thought about his aliens and his abduction theories. I was some kid he once knew, some kid who got him sent away.

  I stood to refill my paper cup. Bubba grabbed my arm. “Bert, does anyone know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Not Willet or your mother or your grandmother?”

  “I just drove. I didn’t tell anyone.” His fingers dug into my forearm and he pulled me toward him. The way he looked at me made my stomach hurt.

  “No one cares if you disappear in the middle of the night?”

  No one did, but I didn’t want Bubba feeling sorry for me. “Is anyone looking for you right now?” I asked him. “Does anyone care where you are?”

  He let go of my arm. I sat back down, my cup still empty, my stomach still aching. I knew I should be afraid but I couldn’t fear Bubba. We were the same. Pansy’s disappearance got Bubba sent away from his home and it made me invisible in mine. Neither of us mattered.

  He rubbed his face and pushed his fingers through his long, greasy hair. He seemed middle-aged then, though I knew he was only twenty.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “Will you drive me home? I don’t feel like getting my bike.”

  It was two o’clock in the morning. I had no plan. I’d thought I could drive there and back without any sleep, but I dreaded the dark, empty highway. “Where do you live?”

  “Just a couple miles from here,” Bubba said. “Come hang out with me.”

  Bubba was a stranger now, but I was different, too. I wadded up the used napkins on the table and piled them on the plastic tray. It was not clear to me what he was asking. I could not predict what might happen if I stayed. I knew nothing would happen if I ran away. I needed for something to happen.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Bubba said. “You don’t have school.”

  “You said you never saw Pansy that day, but she was there. She was swimming in the quarry. How could you not see her?”

  “You know how.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Come home with me. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  I picked up my keys and he followed me from the restaurant. “Which way?” I asked.

  He directed me to the highway and through a series of turns. I tried to keep track of where we were, but Jackson was so much larger than White Forest and the early morning darkness turned landmarks into shadows. We pulled into the lot of a small, ugly apartment complex. We climbed a steep metal staircase on the outside of the building. I followed Bubba inside and wondered if I’d lost my mind. There was no good reason for me to be here. Willet would be furious if he knew.

  Bubba flipped on an overhead light. It wasn’t much—a fake leather couch, a beanbag wedged in a corner, a small television on cinder blocks, bare walls, the only window taped over with tinfoil, something I remembered from the visit to his home after Pansy disappeared.

  “Why do you do that?” I pointed to the window.

  “So they can’t see me while I’m sleeping,” he said. “I don’t like it when they read my dreams.” He opened a mini-fridge in the corner and pulled out two cans of beer. I took one and pulled the tab. It was bitter and made my nose tingle.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Nearly eighteen.”

  He sat on the couch. The fake leather squeaked and sighed. I chose the beanbag.

  He gulped from his beer can. “What are you doing here?”

  “You asked me to come hang out.”

  “But why did you come?”

  I couldn’t answer him.

  He drained the beer and opened the fridge for another. He offered me one, but my first was still full. “I didn’t go away. I was sent away. My family wanted to be rid of me and they used the mess with your sister as an excuse.” He put a hand to his chest and belched. The sour smell of beer and greasy food filled the room. “My father hated me. He thought I killed my mother. If she hadn’t had me, she’d still be alive. That’s the kind of monster I am. I’m the kind of monster who kills his own mother.”

  “You were a baby.”

  “And then when your sister went missing, he thought I killed her, too. Everyone thought it. People believed I dragged her into the woods and did terrible things to her. People believed I buried her or burned her or hid her body in a passing car. You know what they said. You heard them.”

  I shook my head, though I knew what they had said.

  “People thought I raped her. A child. What kind of person would do such a thing? And what does it mean that people think I’m that kind of person?”

  Bubba’s face went red and splotchy. His eyes were wet, though he didn’t cry. On the radio, he talked about surviving the abductions. He talked about the aliens studying his brain. He believed they wanted to read his dreams. They traveled across galaxies to find him again and again. He was special. It must have been a good feeling, even when it was terrifying. I couldn’t bring myself to believe Bubba’s stories but I knew he believed them. He might have been crazy but he wasn’t lying.

  I opened a second beer and we drank in silence for a while. My legs went numb in the valley of the beanbag. I wondered about Bubba’s life. What did he do after work when he was alone? Did he come here and drink beer by himself until he was able to sleep? Or did he turn on the television and watch whatever crap was airing at two in the morning?

  “What do you dream about?” I asked him. “The things you don’t want the aliens to see.”

  “Things I don’t want you to see either.” He excused himself and disappeared into the bathroom. Through the thin walls, I heard the stream of urine hitting the side of the bowl. I struggled from the beanbag and shook out my legs. I looked at his books. Most were first-person accounts of alien abductions, but not all. I pulled a book from the shelves: Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons. What was the point of such a book? Were people clamoring for anecdotes about missing people? If so, why? It was terrible enough when you were in the middle of it. Why would you read about it if you didn’t have to? I slid the book back onto the shelf.

  Bubba came out of the bathroom. “What’s your plan?”

  “My plan?”

  “Tonight, I mean. You’re not going to drive home tonight, are you?”

  I didn’t want to spend hours alone in the dark car. I wouldn’t have Bubba’s voice to keep me company. The radio would be nothing but obscure rock music and religion. Willet was working on a crew in Mobile. Granny Clem didn’t expect me until noon. Unless she ran out of cigarettes, Mama would never know I was gone.
r />   “Stay here,” Bubba said. “You can drive when the sun’s up.”

  He gave me his bed, a single mattress on a metal frame with a cotton blanket no thicker than the sheets. He went back to the couch. He said he slept there all the time. I heard the television droning throughout the night. I wondered if Bubba ever slept.

  When I woke, the room was dark, though it was nearly nine in the morning. The foil-covered windows blocked the sunlight. I never slept so late at home, even after sitting up with Granny Clem and a newborn. I brushed my teeth with my finger and splashed cold water on my face. I opened Bubba’s medicine cabinet, touched his acne cream and his ointments. He had a bottle of aspirin and a prescription for Valium.

  In the living room, he sat exactly where he’d been the night before. I got the sense he spent much of his life in that spot, watching television or reading or staring into space.

  “Thanks for letting me crash,” I said.

  “You can’t do this sort of thing, you know.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Show up at strange men’s houses and spend the night.”

  He poured coffee from a percolator on a hot plate. I took the mug from him. “You’re not a strange man.”

  “Bert, I didn’t take Pansy. I never saw her. I don’t know what happened to your sister. I don’t know what happened to any of us.”

  “I didn’t accuse you.”

  “You had to wonder. Why else would you come all this way to see someone you barely know?”

  I sat beside him on the squeaky couch.

  “Just because I didn’t take Pansy doesn’t mean I’m harmless. You’re too trusting.”

  He was wrong. I didn’t trust anyone. I loved my brother. I respected him, but I didn’t always trust him. Like everyone else, he had too many secrets. Mama, Granny Clem, Willet; they kept things from me and from each other.