[18]

Kill me, Kill me, Kill me, 1975

Clementine told Buckley that in June she’d overdosed on pills. “Yellow jackets,” she said, “but the nurse called them Seconal.” The nurse at the clinic held her hand, brushed Clementine’s hair back from her face and asked if she was comfortable. “’How you doing, sweetie?’ is what she said. Sweetie. It made me want to be a nurse or something. She was so nice; I can’t explain.” She didn’t have to explain: Buckley knew about the kindness of strangers. Clementine continued, “The nurse told me I was too precious to kill myself, and I told her I’m not trying to die. I don’t want to feel pain anymore. That’s not the same as wanting to die.”

Buckley thought, Yellow jackets and red devils—Winter’s sleeping pills. The devil with his pitchfork. The yellow jackets circling. Things that sting and prick.

He massaged Clementine’s shoulders and looked through the front door of the shack at a boy sitting in the dirt. Buckley felt sad for Clementine. He felt sad for the boy crouched in the dirt. He felt sad for the whole world, what a waste it all was, but he felt glad too that Clementine had confided in him. He was glad that someone was finally being honest with him—the way his mother had been. He was determined to help Clementine. She blew her nose into a dirty tube top. “And then Scott came and got me, and the nurse said, ‘Don’t go, sweetie. Don’t go with him. You need to go home.’ She said, ‘You’re just a girl.’ Isn’t that sweet?” Clementine blew her nose into the tube top again.

Chuck, Clementine’s new supplier and old man, ducked his head into the shack. “My turn,” he said. He shook a brown lunch bag and Buckley heard the loose pills dance inside the paper. “What did I say, Buckley? We’re a community. We share.”

“See you later, Buckley.” Clementine’s face was anxious, but she smiled up at Chuck. “I’ll see you, Buckley.”

The Reverend Whitehouse flung a mud-crusted boot at Buckley when he walked into the kitchen. “That girl’s a whore, boy.”

“Who?”

“You’re coming to church Saturday and Sunday. Do you hear me?”

The reverend wasn’t a particularly mean man, just a cold man. A serious man making ridiculous demands with one thing in mind—his dwindling congregation.

There were only thirty people in the reverend’s whole congregation, so if someone was missing, the Reverend John Whitehouse and Winter Pitank took notice. The missing someone, the lax congregant, got a Christian visit to remind the offender about the importance of his soul; to remind the ailing someone that this was not the end of the journey but only a stepping-stone to a better place; to remind the lost sheep that it wasn’t too late for him to give to the Lord, to return to the flock, to share the wealth the Lord bestowed—every last cent.

After all, the reverend was a man who liked to eat. His girth showed that, and he couldn’t eat very well without money in his pocket and food on his table. He might’ve married his dead wife’s mother, the way she took care of him, if it weren’t inappropriate—the age difference. This was how the reverend thought.

Buckley didn’t know what went on in the reverend’s mind; nor did he want to know. Once free of Mont Blanc, en route to the University of Arkansas, Buckley would never have to see his fat zucchini-nosed stepfather again. He might’ve hated him, but he couldn’t waste that much energy on the man.

Buckley tossed the reverend’s boot back over toward the kitchen table. The reverend whispered, “How is she, anyway?”

“Who?”

“Your little girlfriend. How is she?” The reverend glanced through the window at Winter out front, parking the truck. “Come on, Buck.”

As Buckley walked toward the bathroom, shaking his head in disgust at what the reverend suggested, the reverend called, “You’re a weird boy.”

Sitting on the toilet, his shorts around his ankles, Buckley thought of Clementine’s story. She had said her dad called her a whore and a freak and told her to get out of his house. He’d said, “You’re dead to me.” Maybe it was better not to know his father than to have a father like Clementine’s.

Clementine told Buckley, “He’s a bastard.” Buckley knew she was never going home. She said, “If I’m dead to him, he’s dead to me.”

Buckley told Clementine his mother really was dead. He broke down and told Clementine that after the lightning hit, when they were trying to lift her to the dock, he could see her brain. The lightning had burned her and split her head open, and he knew she was dead. He told Clementine that if there was a god, which he seriously doubted, then that god was unjust. She agreed, adding, “God’s a bastard too.”

Taking his hands in hers, she said, “You can touch me.”

“That’s okay.” He didn’t feel right about it anymore, now that Chuck was around. Chuck could give her the drugs she craved. Buckley brought canned food and candy bars. Chuck delivered pacification in paper bags.

The bathroom was small like the rest of the house, and Buckley propped his feet on the bathtub. He remembered wanting to feel good like Clementine, wanting to feel numb, and Clementine said the world was unbearable without the pills. She said she wanted to feel nothing all the time. She loved being numb. Buckley, on the other hand, felt he deserved to live in pain.

He remembered the day after his mother’s funeral, telling Joan Holt and Padraig John that he needed to call his grandmother and the reverend. He remembered feeling no allegiance to his stepfather or his grandmother, but feeling he deserved Mont Blanc. He deserved misery. It was his fault that his mother was dead, even though Padraig John said, “It’s nobody’s fault, Buckley.” Even though Joan Holt said, “You can stay here with me. I’m your surrogate grandmother.” Buckley felt that he didn’t deserve to be happy when his mother was dead.

At sixteen, Buckley had received letters from both Paddy John and Joan Holt. Each of them wrote to Buckley to ask about school. To ask when he might visit Galveston. To see how he was making out in Arkansas. To tell him that they still mourned the loss of his mother—recalling daily the funny things she’d say and the way she was entranced by the ocean. They missed her. They missed him. Padraig John, two months after Abigail’s death, wrote:

Buckley drafted multiple responses to Padraig John (as he did to Joan Holt) but didn’t send one letter. He couldn’t. It was too painful. Nonetheless, the letters from Joan Holt and Padraig John kept coming, and when Buckley was with Clementine, swallowed up in a junk food, warm beer, dirt-encrusted haze, he remembered his old life and knew he’d made a mistake leaving Galveston. Then he reminded himself that he couldn’t have stayed and lived his life there with his mother dead in the ground.

No.

He didn’t deserve to be happy, but it was with Clementine when he sometimes forgot that he didn’t deserve happiness. It was Clementine who poked at his ribs to make him laugh. Who asked Buckley to keep talking when the walls were closing in, when the sleeping bag, damp under her warm hands, felt like taffy, like it would suck her in and choke her.

The reverend shouted, “Did you fall in?”

Buckley flushed the toilet. He thought, I’ll be getting out of here soon. Maybe I’ll go back to Galveston. Maybe I’ll go to New York with Clementine. You never know.

Clementine spent Thanksgiving 1975 with Buckley and his “family” at the Holy Redeemer Church. She ate a few scraps of dark meat and some canned cranberry. After supper, she and Buckley sat in one of the back pews, listening to the reverend’s booming voice. He was trying to convince one of the parishioners to invest in some riverfront property. “A no-lose situation. Win! Win! You can’t let this opportunity pass you by. You’ll kick yourself.” He slugged his punch. “I’m not kidding you.”

Clementine laughed. Turning to Buckley, she said, “He’s so full of shit.”

The doors to the church stood open, the November air cool. It was dusk. Clementine looked stunning to Buckley in the waning light. Her hair was clean and pulled back in a ponytail. She had rubbed Vaseline on her lips and eyelids, and she glistened in the soft light.

Buckley said, “He’s selling Amway products now.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like aerosol cans and cleaners and empty bottles. He says he can make a million dollars. He’s got all these boxes of cleaning supplies in the shed. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you, there’s not going to be anybody left at Holy Redeemer if he keeps taking everybody’s money.”

“The good Lord will provide, Buck,” she mocked.

Buckley smiled. He loved Clementine. He worried about her.

Chuck had grown tired of her blow jobs. She was no longer worth his dwindling stash, and Scott had not come back. To her own father she was dead (sometimes people don’t think what their words can do), and Clementine was beat from trying to live in this world. She was putting on a good show today and congratulated herself for the clean hair and plaid skirt, the white tube socks Buckley had loaned her, which she folded down like bobby socks, and the baby blue polyester blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry. Genuinely, she could say, “I look pretty.”

When Buckley was in the bathroom, Clementine left the Holy Redeemer. She waved goodbye to Winter and Buckley’s stepfather, but they didn’t see. Church sucks. She hated thinking about God, this asshole who crucified his own son so that people like her, pathetic people, could have eternal life. What about this life? Face the facts: If you can’t live here and now with any level of enthusiasm, you might as well forget about some Nirvana afterlife. If you can’t get this one right, what makes you think you’ll do better in the next place? She was never getting to New York. She was never getting Scott back. She would never be able to live without her drugs. The world was too much.

Crossing the parking lot, she passed the reverend’s unlocked pickup, spotted his hand-carved gun rack, the shotgun, the floor mat scattered with shells. Maybe the asshole upstairs was trying to tell her something. She’d borrow the gun. He’d get it back later. This was the same gun Abigail Pitank had worried would ruin her son.

Clementine carried the gun, barrel in hand, on down the road toward Drop Out City. A few cars passed, the drivers doing double takes, but no one stopped. A trucker honked his horn and waved. A station wagon passed, two children pressing their noses to the back window. Walking down that road, she made a deal with this shit god that if someone stopped, if someone came after her and said, Don’t do it, she wouldn’t do it. She’d keep living. She’d know it was a sign that the world wasn’t as cruel as she suspected.

When Buckley exited the bathroom, he expected to find Clementine beside the church ladies, eating pie. She wasn’t there. He thought she might’ve dozed off in one of the pews. No Clementine. “Have you seen Clementine?” he asked the reverend, who said, “Girls need space. Don’t smother her. Have some pie. Relax.” The reverend introduced Buckley to a circle of men. “This here’s my boy.” He put his arm around Buckley’s shoulder. “I was just telling Joey and Dan about that cleaner we’ve been using on the truck. It’s like magic, and you don’t ever run out. Isn’t that right, Buck?”

Buckley didn’t answer.

Winter handed the reverend a slice of pie on a Styrofoam plate.

The reverend said, “You are one fine cook, Ms. Pitank.” Introducing her, he said, “This here’s my mother-in-law. Best one in the world.” To Buckley, he said, “Go on. Tell these gentlemen how that spray made the hubcaps shine. It’s safe to use in the kitchen too, so it’s an ideal gift for the wife.”

“It’s great,” Buckley said. “I have to go.”

The reverend said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I need to find Clementine.”

“She’s probably in the ladies’ room. Buck, tell Mr. Jones about how those windows shined.”

“They shined.”

“See, I told you, and no elbow grease either. Isn’t that right?”

Buckley didn’t answer. He trotted to the ladies’ room. Pushing the door open an inch, he called out Clementine’s name.

Mrs. Jones exited the bathroom.

“Is Clementine in there?”

“There are no young women in the bathroom. Only old women.” She laughed.

As Buckley left the church, the reverend calling after him to wait, the sun having set, Clementine Wistar climbed the clay hill to her lonely shack. Buckley drove to Barry’s Pool Palace where Chuck hung out, thinking he’d find Clementine there.

Clementine sat on her sleeping bag, her Drop Out City shack now clean. Her clothes folded. The darkness in the room like a blanket warming her, she took off her shoe and fumbled, her toe on the trigger of John Whitehouse’s shotgun, the barrel just below her nose. Ironically, as Buckley drove his stepfather’s truck toward the old dirt hill, as Buckley parked and climbed the hill, hopeful that Clementine could come and stay with him in his grandmother’s house, could maybe move in with them and get a job, Clementine had a second thought. She thought maybe she didn’t want to die. Maybe I want to live. I’m only seventeen. The gun went off just the same. Buckley heard the shot, the sound of the gun like thunder smothering him.

Before he reached the shack where light had seeped in during the warm Arkansas fall he’d spent with her, he knew that Clementine Wistar was dead. She was not recognizable when he found her, legs washed clean for church and Thanksgiving dinner. He recognized her legs and glanced at the folded clothes.

When he carried her down the hill, blood soaking his shirt, he dropped her twice. He struggled to get her to the truck, saying again and again—as he’d done with his mother—“Don’t do this to me.” Struggling to put Clementine in the passenger’s seat, he dropped her one final time outside the truck, her limp arm knocking the door.

As he slammed the door, her head, what was left of it, slumped onto the metal glove compartment.

“Don’t die on me.” But he knew she was already dead.

He drove twenty miles to the emergency room, repeating his mantra, “Don’t do this to me.” The emergency room nurse, earning time and a half—it being a holiday—remembered Clementine: the girl who tried to kill herself with Seconal. She’d come to the clinic in Mont Blanc. This time there was a boy with her, an innocent-looking boy, who was not crying. He was numb now, finally. He had achieved what Clementine had so desired. He sat with a clipboard, paperwork, all blood-soaked, a dead girl in his lap.

Three years later in Farmville, Virginia, the nurse told Clementine’s story as Claire Burke’s stomach was pumped and she vomited. Claire Burke was saved from death, and a little girl, believing herself invisible and invincible, stood in the Farmville General Hospital corridor, overhearing the sad tale of one Clementine Wistar.

Buckley stood in the hospital emergency room as Clementine Wistar was taken from him, lifted onto a gurney, and rolled away. Never seen again. The nurse said, “I’m sorry.” Buckley didn’t hear her.

He drove home that Thanksgiving night to Winter and the reverend. The reverend was already asleep in his bed, while Winter, not looking at Buckley, not seeing the dried blood crisp on his collared shirt, said, “Your little friend’s nice, but next time ask before you take the truck. We had to get a ride with the Willises. You know I don’t like them.”