Blue Diary

WHEN HE TOLD HIS WIFE THE TRUTH, he felt as though he were recounting the story of another man’s life. Who was Bryon Bell, anyway, but a boy who had been a sleepwalker? Who was he but a soulless being left behind in a shallow grave in the rich Maryland soil? In his short lifetime, he had loved nothing but baseball and himself, although in time he learned to despise both. He was a small-time individual, but a big shot all the same in a town as humble as Neptune, a tiny speck of a place on the outermost edge of the Eastern Shore, where the bulrushes grew to be as tall as a man and fish crows and grackles wheeled through the sky, ready to steal whatever catch the fishermen might bring home on any given day.

Bryon himself was a fisherman’s son who hated the sea. He was contrary and vain, the sort of boy who smiled politely, then did whatever he pleased, no matter the cost or the consequence. His father had died young, disappearing into a storm, and although his mother doted on him, she often watched her son as though he were a stranger who had come to call only to stay on, uninvited, to take over the house. Here was a child who destroyed whatever he touched; everything near him turned into ashes. By the time Bryon was twelve, he was rifling through his mother’s purse for money and staying out half the night. At sixteen, he quit school and could be found down by the docks, as much an opportunist and a scavenger as the fish crows screaming from their perches on the pilings. As he grew older, he grew more handsome and more selfish as well. After a white, the boys Bryon had grown up with refused to be on the same baseball field with him, for he played not just to win, but to hurt his opponents. And yet the girls in town seemed unable to refuse him, and the way they looked at him only served to raise his opinion of himself People said that Bryon Bell carried a mirror in his pocket. The better to see himself, that’s what they whispered. The better to know exactly who he was.

As the years went on, the girls in Neptune became wilder in their pursuit of him. They drove by his house at odd hours and telephoned day and night, until his poor sleep-deprived mother got in the habit of leaving the phone off the hook. Such girls knew they were fools; surely they’d only be hurt by Bryon, like the others before them, yet when he smiled, even the smartest girls in town grew convinced that no matter what had happened in the past, this time he would remain true. They paid for his new clothes and for the gas in his truck, they loved him in their own single beds after he’d sneaked through their windows in the hours past curfew, or they went with him into the woods, where the loblolly pines howled at night, like men trapped in the darkness, fated to stand in the same place for all eternity.

By the time Bryon was seventeen, two local girls had tried to commit suicide because of him, and a third was up in Baltimore, at a home for unwed mothers. None of this bothered Bryon Bell in the least; he looked at girls and saw only sweet little fuckboxes, there for him to use, no hearts involved, no souls, and, most assuredly, no responsibilities. In time, the girls in town wished on him a sort of curse: they hoped he would one day know the sort of love they themselves had experienced the first time he kissed them, the cruel and desperate variety that always accompanies yearning for someone you’re bound to lose.

Throughout his youth, Bryon worked odd jobs, learning a carpenter’s trade, but he knew he was meant for more than a town where there wasn’t a single movie theater and a person had to drive a good half an hour before he found a decent bar. He dreamed of baseball, of money and fame, and his dreams stuck to his skin and made him shimmer, so that even grown women who should have known better found their heads turning as he passed them by on the street. Why, his mother’s friends couldn’t keep their eyes off him when they came to the house to play cards. He’s trouble, they said, their tongues practically hanging out, no matter that he was years younger than many of their own sons. Have pity for the woman who wins this prize, that’s what these women warned one another, and as it turned out, they were right.

It was Marie Bennett he wound up with, a pretty forty-year-old who should have known better. When his own mother kicked him out. Bryon moved in with Marie and stayed in her house overlooking the shore for the next two years. Marie gave him too much money and she didn’t reprimand him for his selfish deeds, not even when she knew he was meeting young girls down at the dock. She bought him a leather coat, fine boots that would last a lifetime, a gold chain that he quickly traded for cash at a pawn-shop. She could give him every gift money could buy, but Marie understood he would never be true.

She never said a word when he didn’t come home until two or three in the morning, and then, when he stopped coming home altogether, except to eat or to get clean clothes or to demand a loan to tide him over. Bryon stayed with Marie until two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, and when he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed with her one more time, he forged her name, then went down to the First National Bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars. After he’d gone, Marie didn’t tell anyone what he’d done to her for months; w hen she finally admitted what had happened and that her life’s savings had vanished along with Bryon, the other women in town told her she was lucky. Good riddance to bad rubbish, the) said. Bryon Bell had only taken her money they reminded her, but from the look on Marie’s face they knew this wasn’t the case, and no one was surprised when she had that accident out by Cove Road. By then, she was drinking too much, and to her most intimate friends she’d already confided that she had nothing to live for now that Bryon Bell had left town; everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Marie crashed in one way or another.

With Marie Bennett’s money in his pocket, Bryon knew he had a chance for something better than Neptune, so he drove to Baltimore, hoping for a chance at the minor leagues. He rolled down the windows of his truck, relieved to no longer smell the sea, happy to be on a road that led to a city where no one knew him and he’d be free to spend Marie’s money however he liked. But when he tried to sign up for the tryouts, the manager just laughed at him. There were boys there from college, stars of their university teams who had practiced for up to six hours each day. There were young men who had traveled all the way from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, individuals so serious and focused, they didn’t move a muscle until their names were called, and then they hit ball after ball out of the park, so that the blue sky above was filled with blinding white circles. until each one fell into the grass. where they sat smoldering. like stars.

As it turned out. the manager didn’t care what people in Neptune, Maryland. thought of Bryon Bell or how highly he regarded himself. Bryon was nothing here in Baltimore: he didn’t stand a chance. By accident or by design, the old man spat upon the ground as he dismissed Bryon, dripping spittle on the dirt and on Bryon’s boots. Bryon had a bad temper when things turned against him; he liked things easy, and he could get downright evil when the least difficulty arose. It had happened when that pregnant girl begged him to marry her; he’d just lifted her up and tossed her out the door pregnant or not, pleading or weeping, he most assuredly did not care. He didn’t stop to think at such times; the adrenaline ran through him, like poison that had been heated up to a feverish temperature. Facing a man who laughed at him. who reduced him to dust the way he had always turned others to ashes, he picked up the bat closest to him and he slammed the hell out of that big-shot manager. Down on the ground, the manager had spit up bile like anyone else. His blood was just as red as the next man’s, and although there was a certain savage satisfaction in that, there was a steep price to pay as well.

Bryon Bell served eighteen months for assault, enough time for him to harden into the sort of man that no one would wish to cross. He no longer saw faces when he looked at people; he thought only about how they might serve his interests. When they let him out of jail, he wasn’t a boy anymore, but a full-grown, spite-filled man who was so handsome doves toppled out of the sky to light on his shoulders and women dropped the keys to their front doors into his lap. His eyes were so dark a woman could drown in them; she could fall so deeply and so fast she’d never know she had stumbled until she was gone.

As for Bryon, there was something unquenchable inside him, and an emptiness too infinite to ever be satisfied. As he walked through the world, all he could hear was the word míne. There was so much he wanted, so much he needed to have. It was hard for him to stay in one place after spending a year and a halfin a cell, so he took to the winding roads of Maryland. In the spring, when the fruit trees began to flower, so many peach and quince, almond and plum, that the air itself seemed scented with perfume, he worked as a roofer. In the winter, he cleaned chimneys and plowed snow. Throughout the year, he hired himself out to contractors as a day laborer, happy to tear down walls or raze buildings, as if destruction had been bred in his blood.

Years passed this way, and in this time he became so embittered about his place in the world that he cared not a damn for the human race. For amusement, he’d taken to setting fire to farmers’ fields. He’d start a blaze in the foxtail grass that grew at the edge of cornfields; he’d throw lit matches at the leaves of the sweet gums and the myrtles, making certain to leave a black and burning trail behind. Although such senseless acts gave him a jolt of gratification, happiness was further and further away every day. He had started to feel as though he were drying up inside, the way a man does when he’s walking across the desert. One summer day he came to a town he had never been to before and found he was thirsty. He was so thirsty, as a matter of fact, that he thought he might die if he didn’t have a drink, and that was how he came to the general store where he bought a six-pack of beer and noticed a beautiful girl at the register. As she rang up his purchases, he could tell by the way this girl looked at him that he could have her if he wanted her, and a gorgeous, slow smile spread across his face.

Bryon had been working outdoors for more than a month, helping to build fences and backyard decks, and hed turned a golden color. In all that gold, there was that dark gaze a person could drown in if they failed to look away. The girl behind the register stared at him blankly with her pretty green eyes. Bryon figured her to be eighteen, a hometown girl who had a lot to learn. She had long red hair that he wanted to get his hands on. She wore shorts and a little shirt that he wanted to tear right off of her, so he smiled more deeply, the smile he knew women loved. Not exactly sincere, but full of possibility and promise and pleasure.

“For sw imming? I don’t think so. That’s not a federal offense. And take a good look around.” The girl eyed the empty road, the fields of millet and wheat, the red-winged blackbirds on the telephone lines. “I realty don’t think you’re going to miss many customers today.” Bryon told her.

And so she got into his truck, eyes closed, as if she were taking the plunge into cold water instead of directing a stranger toward the warm and brackish shore of Hell’s Pond. He promised not to look when they took off their clothes and dived in. But of course he did, and he’d been right, she was gorgeous, so tall and pale, turning green in the murky water of the pond. Unfortunately, every time he tried to get near, the most he could manage was a kiss. Later on she ran behind some pine trees to get dressed, then came back to drink beer with him. their feet in the water that had begun to seem warmer than the air. Little shadowy fish came to nibble at their toes, and Bryon told his companion he knew why that was: even the fish could tell how delicious she was, good enough to cat.

When the day was done, Bryon still hadn’t gotten what he wanted, but that didn’t mean he was giving up. He drove her home through the dusk. A scrim of pollen was floating through the air. She gave him directions, and as soon as he pulled off the road, he kissed her deeply, leaving her breathless.

The sun had burned her cheeks, and she looked hot and flushed. This girl had probably fallen in love with Bryon Bell at the moment when he first walked into the store, if not before. She had been daydreaming about a mysterious stranger when the bells above the door jingled, someone with eyes as dark as the feathers of the blackbirds that now cut across the sky.

Bryon went back the way he had come. He was maybe forty miles from home as the crow flies, but people in Neptune never went anywhere, and he felt sure he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. As it turned out, the town he was in was called Holden, and it had a decent bar called Holden’s Corner, and Bryon sat there for a good couple of hours, getting drunk and trying to extinguish the anger he always had boiling inside him, hoping to somehow quench the desperate thirst he felt within. Afterward, he drove around on the back roads for a while, thinking maybe he’d head for the interstate and go on up to Philly, where there would certainly be jobs. But he’d had quite a lot to drink, and he started thinking about that red-haired girl from the general store, and before long he found himself on the dirt road that led to the farmhouse where he’d brought her earlier. Instead of drifting up to Philadelphia, the way he’d intended, he went there instead, out past the dark fields, guided by starlight and his own drunken sense of direction.

He pulled his truck over and turned off the engine. He blinked the headlights, but the girl didn’t appear. He blinked them again; a tunnel of white light illuminated the stand of bald cypress by the house, but again nothing happened. He got out of the truck, already starting to feel the heat of his anger. He had parked in a field of strawberries, but he didn’t notice as he walked over the plants. He started once, when he glimpsed someone lurking between rows of berries, but it was only a scarecrow, set there to frighten the blackbirds away. So he went past the lettuce and the corn and the trough filled with water for the two sheep that slept in the barn, then headed up to the house. He looked in the windows, and he figured out pretty quickly which was hers, the one with the sheer organdy curtains. He climbed in the window, just like that, good and drunk, and more than a little pissed off.

The room was like a child’s room, with dolls and stuffed animals and pink wallpaper patterned with daisies. Bryon figured some women never grew up. Some women liked to act like little girls, when it suited them. Sure enough, this girl looked terrified, even though they’d been together all day, and for some reason Bryon liked that. Maybe she thought she was too good for him, but when he was done with her, she’d be mooning over him for weeks. Shed wish on every star for him to return, but hed be in Philadelphia by then: he’d have already forgotten her and moved on to the next girl, and maybe the one after that.

She was wearing lightweight pajamas and as soon as he moved his hand to cover her breast, she panicked. One touch and she started to fight him, arching her back, using her nails, as though she hadn’t spent the afternoon kissing him at the pond, swimming without any clothes on. She tried her best to get away, until he slammed her up against the wall; then she fell backward, like one of those rag dolls on her bed. Her long red hair swept across her face, and at last he did what he’d been wanting to do all day. She was tight, as though she were a virgin, and she smelled good after the sort of girls he’d gotten used to, girls he picked up in bars who begged for him to go home with them and wept when he left them, long before morning.

He didn’t even know he’d hurt her until he was done. He whispered in her ear, “I’ll bet I’m your first.” which, in fact, he was since she was fifteen years old, not eighteen as he’d assumed, and had never even kissed a boy before this afternoon at the pond. She had indeed been a virgin, and maybe that was why there was blood all over him.

It was then that he saw blood on her face. He had hit her head against the wall too hard, and it had split open, just like that. He scrambled onto his knees. For some reason, every breath was stabbing through him like a knife. There was blood on his hands and his legs and his cock, and he grabbed the sheet and wiped himself clean. He was hysterical, but he knew enough to be careful. If he didn’t calm down, it would be over for him. Something had happened that he’d never expected, but it had happened all the same.

Shit, shit, shit, he said to himself, until the words became nothing but a chain of breath. He hadn’t even thought to ask her name, but now he saw a plaque on her bookshelf She was a dancer and had won first prize at a competition. Her name was Rachel Morris, and she had just finished tenth grade. He saw her diary, there beside her bed, and the key, which was strung on a blue ribbon. By now, he could hear her blood falling onto the carpet. He got down on his knees right then and there, and as he did, he felt himself leave his own body. The responsibility of his deeds descended upon him like a mountain of murderous stones, and for the first time in his life, he cried.

It was the rain that made him snap out of it; rain had begun to fall in buckets, and it hit against the windows as it poured down, drenching fields and roads alike. Bryon forced himself to move; he grabbed his clothes and used a pink sweater he found on the dresser to clean his fingerprints off the window glass and the ledge. He slipped into the night, naked as the day he’d been born, with nothing in his hands but his own bloody clothes and the key to Rachel Morris’s diary, which he’d grasped so tightly, he couldn’t seem to let go. He went into the strawberry field, where he’d seen the scarecrow, and quickly reached for whatever he could find-a white shirt, black slacks, old, worn shoes -leaving his own clothes behind, shirt, jeans, and boots, blood-stained and burning hot, there beside the scarecrow. Still, he could taste blood, and to wash it away he grabbed a handful of strawberries. As he swallowed the sweet fruit he felt how alive he was. His mouth, his eyes, his ears, all alive in the dark rain-drenched night.

He could feel his old self sink into the field as he walked away, and the person he was about to become rose up to enter into the same blood and bones. He got into his truck and drove to Hell’s Pond, the place where she'd taken him when the world seemed so splendid and he was certain he’d have whatever he wanted. He got out, but he left the engine running; he wedged a rock against the gas pedal, then leapt away as the truck lurched into the waters. Already, the rain was nothing more than a drizzle, gray and heartless and cold. He stood there in a bank of pickerelweed and wool grass, breathing hard as everything he’d ever been disappeared. His wallet and identification were stowed in the glove compartment, and thinking about the way he’d lost himself, he was as sober as he’d ever been in his life.

He was shivering, though the night air had turned mild and sweet as tears. The truck splashed and strained like a big fish. and then the waters closed over it. Bryon watched, but not for too long. He would need identification, a new name and a new history, but that wouldn’t be difficult. He was the sort of man who could compartmentalize the different sections of his mind, and the segment that held all that was selfish and cruel, that small, evil section, was floating beneath the green water. Under the cover of the night, he washed his hands and prayed for guidance before setting off on his travels. As far as he was concerned, Bryon Bell was gone.