Lamb (19 page)

In the bunk room Tommie was wide awake, hands folded behind her head and just peeking out of a pile of sleeping bags.

“You’re eavesdropping,” he said as he closed the door behind him and approached the bed. She scrunched up her face. “We’re going to sit in here for a while, okay? Are you good for it?”

“Okay.”

“It’s just two days she’s here. Counting today.”

“Okay.”

“If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to be really really quiet, right?”

“I know.”

“I don’t have any books or anything for you. You’re not going to sneak out and go back to Foster’s, are you? Call Fox News and
USA Today?
”

“I’m scared.”

“You’ll hibernate, right? You’ll be my little mountain critter hibernating in her nest all day, won’t you? And when she leaves you’ll be full of energy.”

Hearing Linnie’s footsteps, Lamb moved toward the door. Linnie turned the knob and peeked in.

“What a cool little room!”

“It’s the bunk room.”

“Why don’t we sleep in here?”

“It gets really cold in winter.”

“Can we use those blankets?”

“I was just checking them out. Smells like mice got into them.”

“Too bad. We could’ve used them for a mattress. Or even stayed in here. Do those beds come apart?”

“Too far from the fire. Besides”—he raised an eyebrow—“it’s haunted.”

She took his arm. “By who?”

“There’s an old man who lives up the road?”

She nodded.

“He’s seventy-something, eighty. His wife had a stroke some years ago and she’s there in a bed—like in-home care, right? Like a breathing corpse. It’s the awfullest heartbreakingest thing you ever saw.”

“Oh, God.”

“Well, years ago they had a daughter.” He took Linnie by the arm and led her out of the bunk room, toward the stove where she’d spread the blankets on top of the rug. He set her down on it like a picnic blanket in a grease-stained concrete meadow. “And Foster—it was his brother-in-law who owned this place. Name was Calhoun.”

“Spooky name.”

“I know it. His first name was Smiley and they … you want a pillow?”

“A pillow?”

“I think those pillows in there were okay.” Linnie watched him. Inside the bunk room he took a pillow out from beside Tommie and put his hand over where her head was. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. We’re okay. I’ll come back in to you as soon as I can.”

He came out with the pillow. “They were as close as close can be. It was Smiley who introduced Foster to his sister.

“He was best man at their wedding. He never married because he was … a little off. Not dumb—he was just one foot in his own world. Always half a smile, a wandering eye.”

“Hence the name.”

“Exactly. Foster, he was as sound a man as there is. And stern where Smiley was off-kilter. But the two of them, they cowboyed all over this place together in the fifties and sixties. They’d go out before daybreak, just the two of them, razors and combs in their pockets, jerk and crackers and baling wire in their bags and off they went for five, eight, ten days at a stretch. Sometimes working, sometimes just crisscrossing the tableland and nosing through the trees on horseback. Calhoun never married, so Foster’s wife—the sick lady—she was mom for everyone. She was something of a drinker. But nice. They were a kind of a weird family up here, helped each other out over the years. Anyway, two, three
years into the marriage Foster and Calhoun’s sister finally have a baby girl.”

“What’s her name?”

“Emily.”

“You and your Emilys.”

“Linnie, it’s the same girl.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“You stay out here two nights with me and see for yourself.”

“She’s a ghost?”

“Listen to the story.”

“I thought you snatched her from some swing set.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m figuring this out as I go. Do you want to know the rest?”

“Go, go.”

“She’s a nice enough kid. Emily Rose. Soft swoop of pale hair and little stony blue eyes. Not particularly pretty, or smart, just a girl, right?”

Linnie shook her head. “You are such a sexist.”

“Oh, spare me, Linnie. She was just a dumb girl, okay? There are dumb boys too.”

“Go on.”

“Anyway, this kid turns ten or eleven, and around this time Calhoun decides he wants a shop. This shop. So of course he calls on Foster to help. They put the place up themselves—they’re hard workers and decent guys, good builders, they pay attention
to the craft, right? First thing they do is they dig the foundation. They rent a backhoe and they make it a big project. An early summer project. They pour the footers, they tie the rebar, they pour the cement pad and place the bolts to secure the steel poles. They bolt the wall frames and use this truss-type design”—he looks at Linnie and points up again—“to erect the roof. All of this takes well over a month—much longer than it needed to. For the first ten days, everything goes fine. Every day the wife comes down to the cabin with the kid and they make big suppers. Fried chicken and early salad and potatoes and lemonade. Pork chops and macaroni salad. Then Foster helps his wife clean up and Calhoun piddles around outside while the kid scrambles over the rock and up into the old cottonwoods. This is how it goes, right? They’re digging the foundation and pouring the concrete and piling dirt here and the backhoe’s scooping earth from this side of the fence and dumping it on that side of the fence and they bring in a roll of corrugated steel, right?”

Linnie adjusted the pillow and looked up at him.

“All the while this kid is running dumb all over the place—up this pile of dirt and pounding on the sheet metal like a wild goat and up in the tree and hands in the concrete and then all of a sudden at lunch one day—she’s supposed to be bringing in the
sun tea—they can’t find her. Just disappeared. They don’t know where or how, but of course the wife tells the sheriff and the sheriff’s posse comes out on horseback and for two weeks they run a comb of men and horses over this whole pasture and up into the skirt of the mountain looking for any sign of this kid. Dark birds of prey swinging against the hyperblue sky, men in their sweat-stained hats disappearing into the shimmering heat, into the tall columns of white trees. Week three they bring out the cadaver dogs and of course they don’t find anything. In their grief and in their frenzy Calhoun and Foster finish the shop. Very carefully, very deliberately, to keep them sane, right? They keep it empty and cold as a tomb all that first winter, but eventually—because the thing is so useful—Calhoun starts using it. Practically moves in. Lets the cabin go.”

“That’s why it’s such a wreck?”

“Exactly. And I’ll tell you something, Linnie. You feel watched in this place.”

“Really?”

“So many people have attested to seeing this girl that the first guy who was going to buy it—he’d put in a bid and everything—he found out after the offer was approved that the place is haunted and—get this—he legally got out of the bind.”

“No shit.”

“So.”

“And this kid is still haunting the place?”

“Not only. Foster comes down here every goddamned night with a flashlight.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m serious, Linnie. We can wait for him tonight.”

“Just looking for her?”

“Whatever happened to her, I say either Calhoun or Foster knew. Kept it under his hat all the rest of his days.”

“Can you imagine keeping that kind of thing from your own wife? Or sister?”

“Foster’s a miserable old man, Linnie.”

“And he’s just tortured by it.”

“My thought is whatever happened, happened fast. And that old Smiley—let’s say it was Calhoun who did it. Or maybe he didn’t even kill her. He was just there when she fell—something like that, right? But he was implicated by his own guilt—who knows why, who knows what the guy’s story was. He was quicker or crazier than people gave him credit for.”

“And you’ve seen this kid?” She grins. “This ghost?”

“Linnie.” He bent over her in the dark, put his mouth to her ear. “I’ve
talked
to her.”

“Uh-huh. Come here. My hands are like ice. What does she say?”

“She’s in love with me.”

“Of course she is.”

“No, seriously. She wants to live with me forever. She wants me to marry her. She wants to bear me ghost babies. Here. Lift.”

“I don’t know if I like the way this is going.”

“This or the story?”

“The story.”

“The floor’s not too hard.”

“No.”

“Turn around. Here, take the pillow.”

“Will you tell me another story?”

“I’ll just tell you the next chapter. I’ll tell you what happened when I went into that bunk room and found her little dead self tucked in with the mice running all over her face.”

“God! David that’s awful. I’m trying to kiss you here. Can it wait?”

“It’s a better story in the dark, anyway.”

Linnie looked up at our guy and grinned. “Oh, shut up.”

Tommie stood for a long time in her nightgown facing the closed door to the shop and breathing,
listening, holding her breath, listening: nothing. Wood hissing and snapping in the hot stove. Eight o’clock and dark as midnight. Their voices would have stopped humming some time ago. But she’d know they hadn’t gone inside, or washed the dishes.

She held her breath tight in her little freckled chest when she opened the door, just three inches and without a sound, and remained still and looking into the shop as her eyes adjusted to the light. Moonlight drenched the concrete floor and the pile of blankets where the two adults lay moving together before the stove. The white shape of Lamb’s face looked up at her, over the crown of Linnie’s head. So much light in the room Tommie could see where it made a white shining stripe in Linnie’s dark hair. Lamb’s eyes were blue-white in the silver dark. His face was at first twisted up in concentration but then it fell open, his eyes fell open, and a little smile. Tommie didn’t back away. She didn’t catch her breath or cry. She stood watching. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds. He loved her for it. Her mouth a little open, her eyes open, stunned, transfixed. Lamb paused only a moment and Linnie lifted her head, reached up, and put her hands on the sides of his face so he moved again, smiling down at Linnie and lifting his face toward
Tommie, their eyes deadlocked. He remained silent as he moved, watching Tommie, and when he finally shut his eyes and lifted his chin, teeth clenched, Tommie closed the door and stepped back into her room and crawled into the sleeping bag where she fell asleep, face pasted to the vinyl with tears and snot until Lamb came in and very gently, very carefully, woke her saying now, my dear, you know all my secrets. You are practically living inside of my heart.

“You’re wearing your nightgown.”

She nodded.

“You still love me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Do you have to go the bathroom? Come. Come outside.” He opened the side door of the bunk room that opened to the old horse tank. “Go ahead. Pull up your nightgown.”

She hesitated. Looked at him and down at the dead grass and back up.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re going back in that room in twenty minutes. We don’t have all night.”

When she finished he put his jacket over her and they hiked out a small distance from the shop and sat on the cold grass beside the dark rivulets of water running off the river and into the beds of brown pigweed and dead goldenrod.

“What do I call you now? David?”

Lamb kept his head down. His eyes filled. “Come here,” he said. He took her between his legs, her back against his chest. “It’s like you’re Emily.” He brushed her hair back off her face and tucked it into the hood of his jacket.

“That was a game.”

“No it wasn’t,” he said quickly. He turned her face to him. “Take it back. It’s not a game. Everything I do in my life from here on out is to protect us, to protect this thing we’ve discovered. Do you understand? You’re braver than I am, Tom. I haven’t always had nice people in my life. It makes me behave a little erratically sometimes, right? I didn’t exactly know what was going on when we met. I didn’t know where this was headed. Do you believe me?”

Nod.

“It doesn’t matter what we call each other, does it? That’s just names.”

“I don’t know.”

“Whatever you call me—John, or retard, or son of a bitch …” She smiled at this. “… you would still know my true heart, wouldn’t you? You know me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I know you do. It’s extraordinary. Come here. Closer. Yes. It’s cold, isn’t it? No one’s ever known
me as you do. You smell like a healthy little animal.” His face was very serious now. “We’ve seen each other, haven’t we, Tom. Do you understand that this doesn’t happen with other people? I don’t know what to say about it. I know what other people might say.” He pressed his thumb hard into the little plate of bones where her ribs gathered just beneath her breasts. She blinked and watched him. “The body doesn’t lie, Tom. It doesn’t know how.”

“Are you and that lady?”

“It wasn’t what you’re thinking. I will tell you what it was—I’ll tell you every detail. But when the situation is reversed, Tom”—his eyes filled and his voice cracked—“I don’t want to know, okay?” He was whispering now, fat tears coming down his old wrinkled face. “Don’t tell me, okay? Swear you won’t tell me.”

“Does she still like you?”

“She’s in love with me, yes.”

“Do you like her?”

“Look at me, Tom. Look me right in the eye. No. I don’t like her even a little bit. I sort of hate her, even. And I don’t use that word lightly. She’s spoiled and selfish.”

“Sounds like Sidney.”

“That’s a good way to think of her. Like a grown-up Sidney.”

“Does she want to marry you?”

“I think she might. Is this okay? Can I hold you like that?”

Nod. “How long is she staying?”

“One more day. Maybe two. I’m going to stay with her for us, do you understand?”

“I should stay in the bunk room.”

“You should?”

“I should stay there until she leaves. She won’t even know I’m here.”