Mr. Splitfoot (30 page)

I like the idea that Ruth and I are walking artists, as if our tracks leave color behind. Blue and green. Orange painting the map we make each day. But if everybody in the world were a walking artist, the land would be so jammed with traces of everyone who ever came before. Haunted, polluted.

“And what about mothers? Mothers-to-be? Are they artists?”

I have no idea.

“Then there’s the never-ending battle over what’s real. Or realer. What does reality mean? True things that happen? What are those? My grandma says she saw a UFO. Is that more real? My uncle believes in angels. Whatever. Is fiction the real thing or is history?”

“History.”

“Urr. Wrong. Want to guess again?”

I keep my mouth shut this time.

“If history’s real, how come people can’t stop making up lies when they try to write it down? Another fake memoir. Another fake memoir. The only truth is that fiction wins every time.”

“So you’re not real?”

“Oh, I’m real. I’m the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day. You see what I’m talking about? Then once you have the boundaries of history and fiction secure, where does everything else fall? Somewhere in between the two. History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other. Mother, father. Birth, death, and in between, that’s where you find religion. That’s where you find art, science, engineering. It’s where things get made from belief and memory.”

“I should have gone to college up here.”

Sheresa thinks I’m being funny again. As we pull into the motel parking lot, she asks, “When’s your baby due?”

“Soon?” I make a guess. Her headlights shine into my room. It’s still dark.

“Here’s something crazy to think about: You have two deaths inside your body right now. That’s the only time that ever happens.”

“That would make some Mother’s Day card.” I wonder why everyone I meet wants to tell me the bad parts of being a mom.

“Maybe that’s why you’re here at the motel.”

“Maybe.” I’m tired. I also have two births inside me. At least. “Thank you. I’ve never had an evening like this one.”

“You’re welcome.” She bends to whisper something to my stomach, but I pull away. I’m the baby’s mom, and while I like Sheresa, she talks about dead things a lot. My baby’s not going to die. I’m not going to die. At least not for a while. She lifts her head. “OK. Good night. Good luck.”

I get out of the car. “See you tomorrow?”

“I wouldn’t miss tomorrow for all the world.”

I wave. Sheresa backs out of the spot and puts her car into drive. As she’s pulling away, she stops. The passenger-side window slides down, smooth old American. “Cora,” she calls, though I’m standing right there.

“Yeah.”

“I almost forgot. Ruth left a message.”

“What?”

“She asked me to tell you.”

“She talked to you?”

Sheresa glances for a moment to the asphalt illuminated by her headlights. She looks back to me. “She said don’t leave him there alone. At the end.”

“Leave her?”

“No. Him.”

“Who?”

Sheresa shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Ruth talked?”

Sheresa’s shoulders and nose scrunch up, as if saying, Isn’t that cute? She releases the brake and her car pulls away. She gives a floppily enthusiastic wave goodbye, like waving to a puppy. Her headlights swing back out onto the road.

Alone in the parking lot, I do not wish to be. Leave who? Where? I’m pooped.

The lack of light in the room doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Ruth is sleeping. Maybe she’s come back. I unlock our door. It’s not the room I left behind. Someone has trashed it. Thrown empty dresser drawers out of their bureaus, tossed the blankets on the ground. The TV is on the floor, face-down. Ruth and I don’t have anything except for the backpack I’m wearing, and even that doesn’t hold much. Someone was just angry. I think to flee, to catch Sheresa, but a shadow moves over me, and with the shadow comes a fantastic blow to my head, one that sends me all the way straight back into the dark, dark, dark.

I
T’S STILL SNOWING.
Icicles smash off the roof in a rush. The wind’s making weird sounds down the chimney. After breakfast Nat finds a wardrobe of winter garb in the mudroom—parkas, snowshoes, mufflers. He finds a compass. “Who wants to see the storm up close?”

Mr. Bell’s playing solitaire. Ruth is distracted by a paperback mystery,
The Keening Wind
by Wanda La Fontaine. “No thanks.”

“Not I.”

So Nat fills the pocket of his coat with cereal and wanders out alone.

“Careful,” Ruth calls after him, then, “Come back soon.”

The door closes. A quiet hour passes. Mr. Bell repairs a broken chair. Ruth finds a collection of LPs. Cher, Electric Light Orchestra, Peaches and Herb, something called the Bevis Frond. Every record in the collection is old. No one has lived here for a while. No one buys records anymore. Whatever the reason, each album feels like a forgotten archive of the way life once was here on Earth. She chooses the Bee Gees,
Spirits Having Flown.
She likes the title. After figuring out the stereo, the needle begins to pop. The song opens with three-part, falsetto, brotherly harmony. “With you.” A disco beat drops in loud and rolling. “Baby, I’m satisfied.” It is inescapable. It is fantastic. Ruth and Mr. Bell eye each other. He rises from the couch and starts by swiveling his shoulders, lifting his arms overhead as if climbing up a beanstalk. He grooves slowly. Ruth is still seated. Mr. Bell clears a coffee table out of the way. He does the breaststroke, slides down the fire pole, sashays left, makes the pizza, sashays right. He drops to his knees, hops up to his toes. He turns up the volume, kazatskies and cabbage-patches. Mr. Bell moonwalks.

Ruth shuffles and straightens the cards he was playing. She sets the deck aside and stretches in preparation, shaking her hips gently, nearly by accident. Mr. Bell and Ruth dance wildly. He keeps the music coming or she does. Flipping the record, finding new ones. They boogie through Hall and Oates, Françoise Hardy, The Chi-Lites, Joan Jett, Doris Troy, the Orange Blossom Special, Harry Belafonte, and one record simply called
Wine, Women and Cha Cha.
The snow keeps falling. Mr. Bell cues up “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Ruth blushes. He does not flinch. He takes her in his arms, leaving a tiny channel for mystery between them. They slow dance, spinning, sometimes close enough to feel the shapes beneath their clothes. Mr. Bell looks at her directly. “Shall?” the record asks, then skips. “Shall I? Shall I? Shall I?” It skips again. Without letting her out of his arms, without looking away, Mr. Bell delicately applies pressure to the stylus. “Come back?” Skip. “Come back? Come back?” He nudges the needle forward once more. “Again?”

When the song finishes, Ruth pats her brow dry. She’s on fire. She tucks her chin and thanks Mr. Bell for the dance. “Cocoa?” She slips away from him.

“Thanks. I’m all set.”

Ruth disappears into the kitchen, and the house falls silent again.

Nat finds many things outside, chief among his finds is the old mining town. A handful of buildings still stand. Others have been weathered so harshly that their private chambers—bedrooms, toilets, and attics—are twisted inside out. Windows and walls are filed parallel to the ceilings and floors. Electrical spiders dangle from the plaster. Exposed floral wallpaper. Snow is free to drift inside these half-homes. Some are in better shape than others. Nat snowshoes through.

Past the ghost town, he scrambles down an embankment, using tree trunks as anchors. He slides and falls just the same, landing at the base of the blast furnace. Its walls are like a castle’s tower. The blocks of stone, anorthosite or sandstone, are as big as bears. Tie rods lash the old rocks in place, but the hole where hot iron once ran from the chamber into sand pigs has eroded into an entrance. Nat steps through into the gigantic chimney, and the storm disappears inside. Temperatures here once climbed as high as 2,500 degrees, even when ten feet away winters dipped to thirty below. A round light shines on him from the opening far above. He listens but hears nothing. He tosses a small stone up the chimney, then ducks. The rock falls back to earth as a good idea pushes up through the soil, not unlike the hand of a zombie reaching up to grab some brains.

Ruth is alone by the fireplace. Nat does not remove his winter clothes. “I want to show you something. Get suited up.” The gear room is small and tangled with wooden water skis, jarts, snow pants, mittens, towlines, ice axes, snowshoes. Ruth chooses a pair made from guts.

They climb over drifts taller than their bodies. Though the snow is blowing in every direction, the path to the ghost town is a bit easier to tread now that Nat has stomped it down twice. He stops her in the woods. “There are a finite number of snowflakes here, which means you could count them.”

She looks up into the storm. “No, you couldn’t.”

When they arrive at the broken-down village, Nat lifts his chin and smiles.

“What’s this?”

“We could fix these houses up, make them homes for kids who are aging out.”

Ruth dusts an armful of snow from the front window of one cottage. A gas stove, a rug. She removes her snowshoes at the door and steps inside carefully, as a person stepping out onto ice. In the kitchen there’s a green citrus juicer the last tenants left behind, proof that life happened here before they arrived. Their living left a mark, maybe a small one, maybe not. Who built these homes? How long were they here? What words did they say as they worked? The shelves are wrapped with forget-me-not contact paper. Part of the floor is gone, and there’s a pile of leaves where a rodent built its nest. There’s a soap dish and a tin of vegetable shortening. There are bedrooms and a stove. Ruth enters one of the bedrooms, and the house creaks as if listing on a fulcrum. She steps back out. The old stove, the old linoleum, the old cabinet doors. It could be a home. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“OK. First one for me. Second one for you. Then we’ll keep going.”

“One for Ceph?”

“Sure. Ceph, Colly, Raffaella. Everyone.”

“Why do you get a home first?”

“It was my idea?” he suggests.

“To make a home for us? Please.” Like children arguing over the shape of a dream.

“Fine. Yours can be first.”

She spins around. “OK. I want this one. This one’s mine.”

Nat shrugs. “OK.”

“OK. This one’s mine.”

Mr. Bell sits by the fire, pinching his face as if it is made from clay. “It’s a very good idea, though maybe there are cabins a little closer to a town? A place where a person might purchase a hamburger or find a job?”

Nat and Ruth nod.

“How will you pay for the repairs?”

Nat shrugs.

“You’ll need some money, a box full of money.”

“Got one?”

“No, but I heard there might be one in an empty pool somewhere. Right?” Mr. Bell laughs. “Maybe there are homes that need fixing up a little farther away from here?”

Ruth’s thawing out under a quilt. The squares of fabric are less than square, human-made. “Did it end badly?”

“The problem is I don’t know that it has ended at all, though longevity certainly seems unlikely. Mardellion’s followers were runaways, drug users, sick and bankrupt people. He gave them a home and helped people no one else was helping, which is really very close to taking advantage of desperate people.”

Ruth pulls a thread off the quilt.

“Eventually Mardellion collected too many people, too many mouths to feed. Responsibility like that makes a person do reckless things.”

“Like what?”

“First he found some lines in
The
Book of Ether
that told him—”

“What’s that?”

“
Book of Ether
? Mardellion’s religious text. His greatest hits.”

“He wrote a book?”

“It’s prophecy, poetry of a sort. I’m sure there’s a copy around here somewhere. Maybe up in the temple.”

“The temple?”

Mr. Bell draws in his chin, smiles again.

“I thought this was some blue-blood Adirondack camp.”

“Ah. No. Bring blankets. It’s even colder up there.”

One door in the upstairs hallway has a bronze latch shaped like a bird’s beak. Mr. Bell lifts the latch. The staircase is unlit. “Watch yourself.” They follow him up into the dark. Smells of mothballs. “One moment.” Mr. Bell switches on a light. The room soars like an airport hangar, round as a chicken’s egg, a perfectly white space-age chapel or sci-fi movie sound stage. They’re inside the roof.

Ruth takes a seat on the floor. Nat plops down beside her, covering them with a blanket. Their breath is visible. She wraps up to her neck. Mr. Bell does the same, woolen blobs in a white room. Mr. Bell’s silent a moment, looking around.

One side of the oval has been given over to a number of electronics, two television sets, an ancient computer, and another small record player, a lowly command central set in front of a swiveling captain’s chair.

“What kind of name is Mardellion?”