Red Earth Review #1

Evelyn Somers Appointment It had been very late summer, Dorcas told Charlie— September: after the fracas died down about the flying saucers that had been photographed flying over the capitol. Charlie didn’t remember much about their life near Quantico, or about D.C. It was the morning of the Saturday Dorcas died that she was talking about that September day, on their way to her appointment. Nineteen fifty-two, and Charlie was nine and a half years old. At first he hadn’t been listening because he was worried about getting in trouble. They were not supposed to be going anywhere in the car by themselves. Dorcas was only seventeen; she was not allowed to drive unless their mother or Cecily was in the car with her. Or his father, when he came back from Korea. Mary had enlisted, too. She was a Marine now; she’d left in August for Parris Island.

And aside from worrying about punishment, Charlie wasn’t listening because he was also extremely interested in watching Dorcas drive. Cecily drove like a bat out of hell. She was reckless; she drove with one thumb to show off. His parents drove unremarkably—his mother seemed to enjoy it and drift away at times, but not carelessly; his father treated it like another duty and discipline and would not talk when he was at the wheel, though he’d hum tunelessly the big-band songs he’d grown up with. Mary drove skittishly, at the edge of the road, chronically in danger of sliding off onto the shoulder because she was afraid of hitting oncoming cars, saying, “Watch it, Sister,” under her breath if another driver was getting too close. When Mary was driving, Charlie sat on the driver’s side in the back so he wouldn’t see how the tires were hugging the extreme lip of the blacktop. He hoped she was learning to drive better in training.

Dorcas was not nervous like Mary. She was governed by an abiding tranquility that seemed deepest and most complete when she was figuring out what to do about something that had gone wrong. When Charlie was much older, he would realize that in a seventeen-year-old, these had been the signs of an optimistic intelligence and capability that the world had missed.

It was before Christmas, and the skies were overcast, but it wasn’t going to snow. It was chilly, however, and the car heater 103