The Enchanted (10 page)

She is exhausted. She hasn't been home in days. It is now mid-June, and while she spends every working moment on this case, the days seem to be racing past faster and faster. She spent two days in the county seat, dredging up all the men she could find named Troy from the old microfiche census listings of Sawmill Falls. She narrowed her search to the key years of York's childhood, but there were more men named Troy—or TJ or JT—than she had expected. She spent another day in a motel room, living on greasy take-out food and working on her laptop to locate the men. Though some of the Troys are dead, a few are alive, spread out all over the county.

Now, after driving for hours through increasingly arid and empty country, she has found this gate. Behind it is one of the men named Troy, according to the last address she found.

The hills here are rugged, the forest dry with summer. Holly grows in the scrub. A faint thick, sweet smell comes wafting down the road. She takes a sniff. Yes, there is a sweet smell in these backwoods.

She hollers over the metal gate, her voice calling through the woods. “Hello? Hello?”

There is no answer besides an angry scrub jay. She tries to lean over the gate to see where the road goes, but it forks around a brushy turn and is gone. His home could be around that corner. It could be miles farther up the road. He could be waiting with a sawed-off shotgun around that turn—she was warned, after all. She looks at the sign again and weighs the chance that she will be shot.

She has a choice to make, like always. She could turn back around on the dirt road and bounce her car for hours back to the city. Or she can climb over the gate and take her chances.

You knew there wasn't a choice, she thinks as she hikes her skirt and starts climbing.

W
henever the lady imagines what a person will be like, she is usually wrong. The doctor she might picture as a good man turns out to be a besotted worm. A priest she
imagines would be rigid turns out lovably weak. A warden should be the enemy, but he is not.

And this Troy Harney, this man with a record of at least fifteen convictions for drug possession, disturbing the peace, and drunken brawling—this man she likes.

He answers the door with a quizzical smile on his grizzled face. He has been cooking a late lunch, and the small house smells like bacon and eggs. From the side yard comes the pungent smell of fresh wood shavings—he has been chopping wood for the winter and already has a large stack. The house has a warm, falling-down appearance, from the moss on the roof to a collection of abandoned boots near the front step.

“See you made it past the gate. You ain't selling Avon, are you?”

She smiles. “Gonna shoot me?”

He laughs, showing nicotine teeth. “Naw. That's for the police. Damn bastards. Come on in.”

She explains who she is as she walks inside, but he doesn't appear concerned.

“How do you know I'm not the police?” she asks, curious.

He turns around and gives her a
my goodness
look. “Look at your shoes.”

She looks down and smiles. She is wearing a pair of scuffed black boots with her skirt. “All right.”

“You here for what again? Not often I get a pretty girl visiting me.”

“I'm an investigator. I'm working a case involving a
man on death row. I thought maybe you knew him. Or his mom.”

Troy turns slowly from his little kitchen. Faded flowered curtains are pulled open around dusty-coated windows. Typical man, she thinks, not knowing how to clean.

“You mean Sawmill Falls.” His face is sober.

“Yes.”

He is quiet as he takes down two solid black plates from a cabinet. He spoons out limp bacon and scrambled eggs from a black cast-iron pan, then adds two slices of buttered white toast to each plate. “I always make extra,” he mumbles. He pours a cup of coffee, adds sugar for himself, and pushes the bowl to her as he pours her a cup. “Sit.”

They sit at a small wooden table with only one chair; he fetches a stool for himself. The cushion on the stool is faded with age and covered in yellow cat hair. He salts and peppers his eggs. Like a lot of men who live alone, he wolfs down his food, barely pausing to look up. “Eat.”

She eats. The food is good, especially the eggs. “I put ketchup in them,” he explains. “And a little bit of that garlic powder.”

He waits until his plate is clear and scraped, and he looks a little longingly at her half-eaten plate. She smiles. “I had brothers growing up,” she says, and once again feels the pang of the chameleon's truth as she pushes the plate to him.

He grins and begins stacking the eggs and bacon on her uneaten toast. “Makes a good sammitch. But you're waiting for me to talk.”

“Only if you want.”

He stretches his back. “If only the cops had someone like you. People like me would be dead in the water. You just sittin' there smilin'.”

“No need to be hard.”

“Sure. But I bet you can be.”

Their eyes meet.

“I knew him. That man you must be working for. York. He was a boy back then.” He pauses and studies a crust of bread. “That's who you're working for, right? You said death row and Sawmill Falls.”

“Yes.”

He wipes his plate with the crust. “Big news when he got caught.”

“Were you still in Sawmill Falls?”

“Naw.” He wipes the plate with his finger. “Left a long time before.”

“Before?”

His eyes raise to her, slow and brown. “Yes, ma'am. Look. It wasn't easy.”

“I know.” She waits and drinks her coffee. “You knew Shirley, I bet.”

He gets up abruptly and takes their plates. I screwed that up, she thinks. She watches him wash the plates—too hurriedly, with tepid water—and stack them on a bent brown dish drainer. She looks at his back in a brown shirt, the heavy jeans, and the worn boots. His arms are corded with muscle, though the slope of his shoulders tells her that he is a peaceful man. She remembers his
record and thinks it is funny, how sometimes the men with the longest rap sheets are the safest. She worries more about the men too smart to get caught. He dries his hand with a faded dish towel. “Got to calve some more wood,” he says.

“I never heard that phrase before.”

“Grandpa used to say it. He was on them ships up in Alaska that went whaling. Came home and wouldn't stop talking about it. Used to say everything like it was whaling times.” He chuckles. “We'd come up here to visit him and my grandma, and that's all the old fart would talk about. You'd think he hadn't married and had kids or nothing else but those damn whaling ships.” He hangs his towel, his eyes faraway. “Want to go see my babies?”

“Sure,” she says, and though she doesn't know exactly where he is going, she gets up and follows him out the back door. The old pasture is littered with broken-down wheelbarrows. She feels peaceful walking behind him, like a woods daughter behind her father. She developed a finely tuned sense of fear as a child—she knows when there is any danger. Her body tells her there is no danger in this man, at least now, so she can traipse after him through the sunny meadow and into the shady woods.

The sweet smell gets stronger as they zigzag down circuitous paths and scramble over logs set across dry creek beds. He lifts branches for her to pass under and, more than once, a string across the path—a poor man's booby trap, to see if others are spying.

“My grandpa left this land to me. When I left Sawmill,
I came here. It took a lot of healing, I guess. I got into that hippie shit for a while, then some other stuff I won't mention. Mostly finding the bottom of the bottle. Looking for answers.”

A spiderweb hits her in the face. She nonchalantly claws at her face and sees a huge orb spider hanging inches from her hand. Without a moment's hesitation, she claps both hands together and kills the spider, then wipes her messy hands on some ivy on a tree.

He grins with admiration. “Ain't afraid of bugs, is you.”

“Grew up with too many.”

“Human or fly?”

They come to an open clearing where the smell is intense. Dozens of huge pot plants stand at attention, reeking with the perfume of their potency. He breaks off a bud and rubs it between his fingers. “Pretty babies.”

She waits. The smell is so strong, so female; she wonders if she can get high just from breathing.

He holds the tightly furled bud in his open palm. “I never got the whole thing, you know.”

“With Shirley.”

“With the whole town. It was like—something happened to us. Something wrong. And it was in me, too.”

The smell is overpowering, but there is also the sky above, and the calm woods around, and she can see even in the fabric of his shirt that he does not want to hurt her. Like most of the people she sees, he has been waiting his whole life for someone to listen. “You said you left.”

He nods. “I left because—I felt bad. I wanted to help Shirley. I moved in with her for a time, don't know if you heard that. Didn't just take from her like most of the men. But the other men, they had gotten used to it. They didn't want to back off.”

“And York?”

“Oh. Oh boy. He was 'bout nine at that time, I suppose. He had these eyes—I can't explain. I tried to help.”

“What did you do?”

“I brought stuff—food, mostly. I'd make them supper, feed that little boy. York's legs would hurt him something fierce, and I got this lotion to rub on them. But none of it . . . oh well.”

She waits. The smell is dizzying, and Troy is framed in his pot plants.

“None of it worked,” the lady says.

“No, ma'am. None of it worked. They kept coming even though they knew I was there—that she had a man now. They didn't care. They'd come when I was at work, and I'd get home and she'd be sitting on her bed, her legs all wet and that smile on her face. You got to see, ma'am, she was daft, okay? She was daft, and the men all knew it. They all took advantage of her, and oh my Lord, it was like something bad in all of us. I did it, too. I admit it, okay? But I—I cared about her. I wanted to help. She had some nice parts, ma'am. Did you know she had a pretty voice? She could sing like an angel.” He is breathing heavily.

“York.”

“That poor boy. Sometimes I'd get home and she would be just sitting on the bed, no pants, wearing nothing but an old blouse with flowers on it, with those wet naked legs. And York would be crouching in the corner. There wasn't no place, you see, that he couldn't see. There were times I thought the best thing I could have done was poke that boy's eyes out with a stick.” He is still holding the green bud.

“They didn't just come for her, did they, Troy?”

His eyes are on her, beseeching. “No, ma'am. They didn't just come for her.”

“I thought you were one of the men who hurt her. But you wanted to help.”

“I didn't help her, ma'am. I tried and then ran like a chicken. I left that little boy. I left him and his mom to all those men. And later, when I heard what he did . . . I was a coward, ma'am.”

“You promised York you would stay, didn't you?”

His face looks old, no longer handsome. “How did you know that?”

“A rabbit told me.”

“H
ey, crazy.” Striker has been at his door for hours, whispering to me. “I know you can hear me, crazy man. I know you can talk.”

I hide under the blanket on my cot. I climb against the bed wall and turn my face to the reassuring stone. I wish I had a book to hold, but I gave back
Crazy Weather
days ago. I read it three times first.

“Got something for you, crazy ass.” Striker hoots like a monkey. His giggle is low and sharply melodic. A crumpled ball of stiff white paper lands in the hall in front of our cells.

I peek at the piece of crumpled paper from under my blanket. It looks like a page from a book. I am too far away to see if it has writing.

“See? Crazy ass. Here you go.” Another ball of crumpled paper lands in the hall. “Want more? Crazy ass, it's what you get.”

A distinct reek fills the row. It is the smell of shit, ripe and pungent. I smell it often enough, from my cell and others. The toilets don't flush well down here, and the air barely circulates. But this smell is in front of me.

“I like your book, crazy ass.”

Cold water fills me—cold water that turns to icy panic in my veins. I can barely hear someone on the other side of me say, “Aw, come on, knock it off, Striker.” It is York, of all people, telling Striker to stop.

“You like the Eskimos, don't you? Crazy.”

The sodden ball lands neatly in front of my cell. I can see the brown smears now, see the tiny print defaced with his shit.

“I heard you can talk, crazy ass. I heard you talked. You talked when you did him. Tell me about it, crazy ass. You're not fucking mute, you lying crazy ass. You can talk. Tell me.”

A chorus of complaints is rising from cells down the row. It is not my book they are complaining about, it is
the reek of fresh shit. I can barely hear them through my red rage. I begin to pull out my hair, tears smarting in my eyes. I remember what happened before I fell for the second time, and I am glad there are bars between Striker and me. Then I am not so glad, because I could easily kill him right now. I would strangle him and bash his ugly head against the stone floor until his skull broke and the brains and blood leaked from his ears and I would tear out his eyes with my long horny nails and I would use those sharp claws to tear open—

Another crumpled ball smeared with shit. It is the cover page of
The White Dawn.
“Let's hear you talk now, crazy ass.”

It is too late. I am bolting across my cell, my hands up the smooth metal bars, ricocheting back soundlessly to bounce off the walls, tearing, ripping, banging against anything I can. There is a delighted hoot next door. I smash my arms against the toilet rim, rip holes in my cheeks, and spread the blood. Striker keeps hooting, laughing, and tossing the shit balls as he hears me smash around my cell. He knows I can make no sound, raging in my cell, and he rips and tears, and the entire row begins shouting, and yet no guards ever come until my favorite book lines the row in an ankle drift of shit-stormed paper. I tear my graying hair until it is lying in torn clumps on the floor, each clump a seaweed strand headed with little white follicles. My walls are smeared with my blood, which looks weak and watery even to me, and I ricochet off the walls again and again as I hear him laugh.