We All Have Cloudy Days
What people don’t talk about when it comes to the market crash is the ripple effect of it all. Yes, people lost their jobs, and there was a certain horror in that, but there was also a horror in how those men and women processed the loss of their life’s work. Many drank, some skipped town, leaving their families behind, and some took it out on their families.
I lived in a small working-class suburb, and Danny lived a block away from me on Dover Street, and Brooke also lived on Dover, just further down towards the mountains. There was a small park in between all our houses where we met up most evenings when the wind wasn’t too cold, or we weren’t locked in our rooms playing catch up on homework we should have started months ago.
The park was built by the town right before the crash, with hopes of the vacant lot behind it being turned into a school, because the elementary school up on Normandy Avenue was in a serious state of disrepair.
The park got built in a hurry around election time, the only time anything really happens, and then all the money went to abroad to places where factory workers didn’t complain as much about little things like benefits, pension plans, raises, and labor laws. So, now we were left with the shadow of a town filled with disillusionment at the great lie that our parents’ generation were sold.
I was lucky, in a sense. My father was able to switch over to a management job for the railroad, which was a non unionized position. He knew the storm was coming and could switch over before many of the conductor jobs got axed along with the closures of our three major industries, which all fell like dominos within six months of each other.
But the railroad hung on by the skin of its teeth, because of the smaller industries all along the coast heading west. It wasn’t much, but he remained employed, though that didn’t always make me Mr. Popular at my high school. Danny’s father survived too. He was a cleaner who had a contract with the Walmarts in Atlantic Canada. He was on the road nonstop, but Danny, his mother and sister kept a roof over their head because of it. That was what mattered the most.
Brooke’s father, however, did lose his job. We didn’t know the severity of it until she started coming to the park with different afflictions. One evening, it would be a cut just above her left eyebrow. A week later a shiner with every color of the rainbow swirling like a vortex, and then a few days after that a swollen lip, cracked and busted.
“What’s going on, Brooke?” I finally said one evening.
“Oh, it’s nothing.” She answered, walking towards the small yellow slide where she laid at the bottom and stared up at the night sky.
I looked over at Danny, who shrugged his shoulders, and we followed her. I laid on the slide next to her, and Danny dug in the sand under the playground and grabbed three bottles of warm beer that he buried for evenings like these. We opened them up and drank warm piss, making faces like we were shooting hard liquor, and then I asked again.
“Seriously, Brooke. What’s going on?” She was silent for a moment.
“You ever wonder what you’re gonna do after high school?” She asked, then continued before Danny or I had the chance to answer. “I know that we won’t see each other anymore. I know that.”
“Brooke, that’s not tr–,” I tried to say, but she cut me off.
“My mom was going through photo albums the other night. She was a teenager here in the late 70s. There were pictures of her and she was beautiful, so full of life. She had that Charlie’s Angel’s hair, and she was so happy. Every picture she was smiling like her face couldn’t stretch anymore. Every. Single. Picture. I asked why I’d never met her friends from back in the day, and she said, that’s life, sweetie. People drift apart. People lead different lives. And she started to cry. One of them died of cancer a few years ago, and the other’s were on the other side of the country living in a goddamn glass cathedral on hills overlooking a mining town. And she was here.”
Danny and I looked at each other, unsure of what to do with our bodies. He peeled the label off of his beer, always trying to extract it in one go, and I stared at the small dark freckle just below her left cheekbone and kept my eyes locked there, not knowing where else to point them. I got lost in that freckle, and for a moment I loved Brooke, and I wanted to tell her I loved her, and that I’d keep her safe, and I’d make sure that we never drifted apart, but I couldn’t because of the pact. When Brooke first started hanging around Danny and me, she said we had to make her a promise, and we said sure, what was it? And she told us we couldn’t fall in love with her, no matter what. Danny and I had looked at each other and laughed, but she was serious, not a hint of humor in those auburn eyes, and we agreed. We spit in our hands and shook them. No one was allowed to fall in love, as though that were something within our control.
“My father isn’t handling things well.” She said in a voice just above a whisper. Almost like she was hoping we didn’t hear, but that she could still say she told us. Or at least she told the wind.
“Your dad’s doing this?” Danny asked, the half peeled label in his hand. “Jesus, Brooke. We gotta go to the police or something.”
“No, Danny. You’re not gonna do anything, you got it?” She said, sitting up from the slide and pointing a finger right between Danny’s eyes. Danny was timid and small, always a target for small town cruelty.
“You got that too, Jamie?” She turned to me, and I nodded.
“No cops, gotcha. But what are you gonna do?”
She relaxed and laid back on the slide.
“I turn 18 in six months. I’ll have to go somewhere. Anywhere. Find a place, and grow up.” She sipped her beer. Then I followed, then Danny. It was terrible, but still to this day, anytime I drink a beer, I travel back to the park, the cold sand slipping through my fingers. The frigid evening air was cold, often too cold, but feeling like being a cool teenager meant always wearing less clothing than was needed. Danny’s laugh, the way his front teeth came out, and he looked like a rabbit. Then if you got him laughing hard enough, and loud enough, he’d snort like a pig and the three of us would erupt in laughter. The kind of laughter that you thought would never end on those days when your mind didn’t care about reality because you had friends, good friends, to take you away from it. Just like best friends should do.
But we didn’t do enough for Brooke. We didn’t do enough because we respected her wishes too much, or because we were scared, most likely a healthy mixture of the two. Because the cuts and bruises got worse, and the laughter became a rarity and even when it reared its head, it wasn’t filled with life, nor escape, it was just a short cackle, that signified, hey that was funny, in better times, I would have given you more. But this is all I’ve got left.
Danny and I didn’t talk about it, because talking about it would turn into finding a solution, and the only solution was the cops, exactly what Brooke didn’t want. So we remained silent, talking about sports and superheroes, and pretending we gave a shit about anything other than what was happening to our best friend, and the helplessness we felt.
——————————————————————————-
When she died, I was asked to do the eulogy. This is the note that she left:
When you bury me, I want Jamie to do the eulogy. Jamie with his soft brown hair, and his worried eyes that always made me chuckle, but also a little bit sad. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and I think that I didn’t let him talk enough. I didn’t let him talk enough because I was frightened of the truth that would come out of his lips. He’s wiser than his years. Oh, and one more thing, Jamie, I wish we would have never had that stupid pact. But it never changed the way that I felt.
So, I stood up at the altar of the Holy Cross and stared out at scattered people occupying less than half of the pews and talked about Brooke. As I looked down at her father in the front row, I realized something definite. I was going to kill him. At the altar of a church in front of a statue of the crucifixion, I decided I was going to kill a man.
That evening I sat at home, slouched on the couch, my father on his chair beside me, nursing a beer. For the first time, I felt like my old man had nothing to say. He always knew the right words to keep you going, but this time he didn’t. I could feel his eyes in my peripheral, constantly moving back and forth from the TV to the side of my head.
“I’m gonna go to the park with Danny for a bit.” I said, and my father said, “Sure, kid.”
When I got there, I laid on the slide. The one to the right, because by laying on the side that Brooke did, was admitting to myself that she wasn’t coming back. And that was something I wasn’t ready to process.
There were no stars that evening, just clouds that looked ominous in the dark sky. Like the sky understood how I was feeling, like it understood that people didn’t want sunshine and starlight every day, that some days you wanted to know that the universe could be ugly too. Like it was reminding you that you weren’t alone. We all had cloudy days.
Danny showed up a few minutes later, and he sat in the sand where he normally did. It was one of the reasons I loved Danny, because he understood the world the way I did. We saw things the same way.
“Shitty day,” Danny said.
“Yup.”
“Can’t believe she’s really gone.”
“Me neither.”
“What are you thinking about, Jame?”
Another thing I loved about Danny was that he cared what was on your mind. He wanted to have a conversation the right way. So many people spoke only to wait for their chance to speak again. That wasn’t the same as listening, that wasn’t the same as inquiring. But on that evening, I was scared to tell him what was on my mind. We thought alike, but maybe this was me descending deep into the throes of madness.
“Something’s on your mind, man. Unburden thyself.” And he smiled. I did too.
I sat up and looked at him with as much seriousness as I could muster. “Look, Danny. You might think I’m crazy, alright?”
“Too late for that.”
“I’m serious, man.”
“Okay, okay!” He put his hands up.
“I want to kill Brooke’s dad.”
The words came out of my mouth, and it felt like the entire world shut down. Everything seemed so quiet in the moments following the words, because they were out there now, and there was no way to bring them back. No way to say that it was all a joke.
“What?” Danny asked. “You’re not serious?”
I could feel the tears coming now. I closed my eyes as my mind played snapshots of every memory I had with Brooke. It was the three of us watching movies in my old man’s man cave, laughing our heads off and spilling popcorn onto the carpet. We were sneaking out of our houses and walking along the abandoned rail line that was growing its own ecosystem behind the old high school. We were sitting right where Danny and I were sitting, drinking beer that we’d stolen from Danny’s dingy basement, and trying to act like grownups. She was alive, and we were talking about getting out.
When I opened my eyes, Danny had tears coming down his too.
“He took her from us, man. He beat her until she had nothing left to live for. He did that. He killed her. He doesn’t deserve to live. HE DOESN’T DESERVE TO LIVE!” I screamed.
Then it was quiet again, and Danny looked down at his hands buried in the sand and said,
“How are we going to do this?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
And we both laughed. Bent over laughing, unable to keep it in, and as my eyes closed, I could almost hear Brooke laughing with us.
We’re doing this for you, Brooke. I love you.
——————————————————————————————
That evening I laid in bed tossing and turning, and wondering how exactly we could kill a man. A few questions continued to echo inside my head.
Could I do it?
Could I get away with it?
And could I come up with a plan?
I thought I could do it. There was enough hatred flowing through my veins. It was just how to do it and how to get away with it. Did Dylan and I just knock on the door and when he answered, just pop him in the head?
Dylan’s old man did have a collection of Ruger’s. We could probably get our hands on a gun, but how did we dispose of the body?
But then I thought about talking to Dylan about the school they were supposed to build before everything went to shit, and how it was just a deep, dark pit. You probably could put a body down there. Plus, Danny also had access to his mom’s car. She was off on disability and the little grey Toyota usually just sat in the driveway begging to be driven.
Then there was the question of Brooke’s mother. She was as much of a mess as the old man. She wallowed in her alcohol, and in another life, she’d likely deserve what the old man was going to get. Her sin was the one of pretending things weren’t happening, but then again, if I were going to kill her for that, the next bullet would need to go under my chin.
But Brooke said that her mother went to the Legion for Bingo on Wednesday nights. She always said that because Wednesday nights we stayed at the park longer, because she didn’t want to be alone with her father. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, or talked to her when it was just the two of them.
Then my heart started racing because I thought I had formulated at least a semblance of a plan. Wednesday night, we’d get Danny’s mom’s car, put some kind of tarp in the trunk, and we’d knock on the door. Boom. Point blank, we’d shoot him once in the head. Grab the body and take it to the park, where we’d bury it in the hole.
Of course, the plan wasn’t foolproof. There were neighbors who might see what’s going on. There’s the chance he might not answer. There was also a chance that Brooke’s mom skipped Bingo that evening, and hell, there was the strongest chance of all that we just didn’t have the balls to go through with it.
But if all went right, there was also the chance of everything going as planned, and nobody finding out a thing.
Yes, Danny and I would have to live with it for the rest of our lives, but if he stayed alive, we’d have to live with that, too. And which was worse?
The following evening, I told Danny the plan and his face went pale.
“Put the body in my mom’s car?” He asked.
“We’ll make sure there’s no trace of anything. No way they could trace it back to you or your mom. We’ll cover it up and put his body on it, and then we’ll dump him.”
“You really want to go through with this, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because at night when I get scared of doing this and start trying to talk some sense into myself, I feel worse. I feel like letting him live is worse than killing him. Walking these streets every day knowing that there are monsters like that who are allowed to wake up and just go about their days. It makes me feel worse.”
“So, you want one of my old man’s guns, and my mother’s car, but you’re going to pull the trigger?”
“I’ll pull the trigger.”
“And not one soul finds out about this as long as we live?”
“Not a soul.”
We both paused, and then finally Danny said.
“Then let’s do it.”
I smiled.
“I love you, man. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Best accomplice to fucking murder you’ve ever had.”
——————————————————————————————
On Wednesday night, I waited at the park for Danny to show up with the car. I still had Brooke’s suicide note that told me she loved me. And if I ever lost it, I think I’d go mad.
Danny was a few minutes later, and I started to feel like it would never happen. That I should just forget it. That I was just a stupid kid.
But then I heard tires rolling down the gravel and knew it was Danny. I hopped the side of the fence to grab a green tarp that had been lying around since the contracting company pulled out, and I ran back towards the car.
“Pop the trunk.” I said.
I placed the tarp in the back and went around to the passenger’s side.
Dylan looked pale as he handed me a loaded Ruger with hands that shook. He looked like he was about to cry, and I tapped his shoulder. “Within an hour, it’ll all be over.”
We backed out slowly and drove west down Dover until we came up to Brooke’s house. It was a small one story with chipped yellow paint and shingles that direly needed repair. I told Dylan to back in, so that we would have less distance to carry the body, and at the word body, Dylan threw up on himself. Only a little, and it didn’t get in the car. But it was enough to tell me we had to do this fast.
He backed the Toyota up with expert precision, and I felt like we could get away with it. There were neighbors but not stuck together, and in front of their house was a crescent with no houses for at least 500 feet.
It wasn’t exactly the boonies, but there was a chance no one would notice anything. Of course, there was the sound of the gun, but we’d have to get the body in the trunk and leave before anyone even realized what had just happened.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“No,” he answered with a sad smile.
The gun was loaded and ready. We walked up the three concrete steps and I knocked on the door. Christ, I hoped Brooke’s mom was at Bingo. There was no answer for a moment, so we knocked again, Danny scanning the area to make sure that no one was looking. Though it was hard to tell.
After the third set of knocks, I heard a grumpy hoarse voice call out.
“One goddamn second.”
And I waited with the gun pointed at the door. As soon as he answered, I shot. I didn’t allow myself enough time to think, and I didn’t allow him enough time to grab the gun and turn it around on me.
He dropped quickly.
“Oh my God,” Danny said from behind me.
I turned to him. His face was white, and I’m sure mine was as well. “Let’s grab him. Grab his feet, okay?”
Danny nodded, and we struggled with the body. He was a big man, at least 250 lbs. And now it was 250 lbs of dead weight.
I grabbed him from under his armpits, and Danny grabbed his legs, scooting his hands up close to his knees. And we did a three count before throwing him in the trunk.
“Okay, let’s get out of here.” I said, and we scanned the area again. A couple of lights went on, but no one had exited their homes. “Don’t peel out, Danny. Just back it out slowly.”
He listened, and we took off east down Dover Street, driving even under the speed limit. Then we got to the park, drove slowly down the gravel, and backed the car up close to the hole.
“You did great, Danny.” I said. “Other than the puking.”
He didn’t laugh, but he seemed to be over the worst of it.
We pulled the body out of the trunk and just let it drop four feet into the dirt. Danny had a small flashlight, and he flashed it inside the trunk to make sure that the body touched nothing, or that no blood splattered, making his own mother an unknowing suspect in a goddamn homicide.
I jumped in the hole, and began burying the body as deep as I could, so that even if in time somebody came back to do the job, they’d just pour the concrete over this spot and hopefully no trace of this man would ever be found.
I came back up, and Danny was leaning against the trunk of the car. “I think we’re good.” He said.
“I think so too.”
We stood there for a long time, and then I said, “want to go to the park?”
He nodded, and we sat in our spots. I grabbed three beers, handed one to Danny, who instantly began peeling off the label. I put one on the slide next to me for Brooke, and then I drank one myself.
Danny and I didn’t talk much that evening. We just said, “To Brooke,” as we raised our glasses. And we both hoped that the horror of what we’d done remained a secret.