Nightwoods (13 page)

Stubblefield could save the troubled girl from all this. He would take her to his cottage, which is what he had started calling the garage apartment. She could bathe away her smudge in his tub while he sat in the living room drinking coffee and listening to
Kind of Blue
, which would be exotic to her. She would come to him, flushed from the hot water. He would be all cool and cook a simple dinner, which they would eat at the table out back under the walnut tree at dusk.

So, the upshot was, somebody ought to do something for her. But still, Stubblefield didn’t want to meddle too deep in local matters. Back here, that was a good way to become a shotgun victim.

Yet, finally, one afternoon, Stubblefield worked himself up to visit the sheriff’s office. He said at the front desk that he had a concern about someone’s safety, and he was told to go see Lit, in the second office down the hall. The deputy sat behind a metal desk, and when he stood to shake hands, Stubblefield towered over him by a foot and found himself stooping a little to reach Lit’s hand. Lit wore his dark hair combed straight back, shiny with Brylcreem, comb tracks straight as soybean rows. No jewelry, not even a wristwatch. His faded chino uniform was starched and pressed sharp, with a silvery shine along the seams at pockets and fly and cuff and collar where somebody leaned hard on the steam iron. Stubblefield tried to call up the name of some little slim twitchy mammal that could squirm through the cracks of a henhouse and kill every bird in the place. Mink wasn’t it, but close.

Lit gestured Stubblefield down into a chair across the empty desktop and listened blank-faced to the detailed story.

—Exactly where is this cabin? Lit said when Stubblefield finished.

Stubblefield gave all the numbers of the roads and the turnings, including his best estimations of distances from major landmarks and intersections.

—We’ve been knowing about that situation for some time, Lit said, nodding. But there’s not much we can do until there’s an actual crime.

—Somebody needs to do something to help her.

—I believe it would be helpful, Lit said, if you would go check on that girl. As a private citizen, you’re not as restrained as I am. Hands tied behind my back, if you understand me.

—Yes, I do, Stubblefield said.

—Report back, Lit said.

Stubblefield drove directly to the cabin. Pulled two wheels onto the grassy shoulder. The afternoon sun broke rips in the cloud cover and cast a yellow glare on the glass, obscuring the desolate girl. Stubblefield walked onto the porch and knocked at the door. Nothing from inside, not a rustle. He circled through the high grass to her window, set in checked logs. He cupped his hands around his temples to shed the glare. His nose mashed its print against the glass.

What stared back at him was a dummy, the unclothed top half of a mannequin. Its frazzled dark nylon hair blown out on one side, like a hard-used brunette Barbie. One arm was broken off at the shoulder. The other lacked a concluding hand but was cocked back as if in the act of throwing something through the window directly at Stubblefield’s head. Yet what beautiful smooth nippleless breasts. And blue eyes painted impossibly wide with thick lashes like a Venus flytrap.

Stubblefield drove back to the sheriff’s office. Lit was waiting at his desk. He sat pitched on his chair’s hind legs with his hands behind his head against the wall. Expressionless except for a quiver of tension around his pressed lips.

—Appalachian humor? Stubblefield said.

—Welcome back to the Lake, Lit said.

CHAPTER
  11

T
HEY SAT WET-BOTTOMED
on a big flat rock at the edge of the creek, swapping a mossy crawfish back and forth. Dolores let it clamp its pincher onto her lobe like an earbob, then pulled it off, her eyes watering from the pain. She passed it to Frank, who let it grip his lower lip with both claws until he yipped like a beagle. Then into the creek again to flee backward, tail-kicking. Frank lay prone, put his whole face in the creek and opened his eyes to a green-tinged world, mica-flecked sand and gravel. He breathed out, and silver bubbles rose toward the surface, tickling up his face and into his hairline.

Sprawled in the grass of the creek bank, faces to the sun, they communicated in their manner with each other, trying to remember Lily. The color of her hair, her eyes. Chilly mornings when they ran in and climbed shivering into bed with her. How warm she was. She smelled like wet grass, fallen leaves. The memory remained vague, just her presence and her absence. A ghost that doesn’t wish you harm but can’t do you any good either. A beautiful white haze. They held memories in their heads like boxes. Some they were happy to open whenever they wanted, and some stayed closed and dark.

They circled to the smokehouse, where Luce had stored the unopened box of Lily’s things. They ripped the cellophane tape with the point of a rusty nail pulled from the wall and sat on the greasy dirt floor in the dim pork-smelling air. They sorted through treasures. A white rabbit-fur muff, a blue leather jewelry box that opened in tiers of little empty blue velvet compartments, a green hat with a black wide-mesh veil inside a hatbox, a blue velvet handbag with seven identical thin silver bracelets inside. A lumpy fox stole with beady-eyed heads and dangling tails. Two hard-shelled cases, like small pieces of luggage. Everything smelling of Lily’s perfume, Lily’s powder.

Dolores held her thin arm up and dropped the bracelets one by one past the elbow and then tipped her arm down to spill them jangling over her hand to the greasy dirt floor. And then again, over and over and over. Frank upended the muff and wore it like a hat, and then he wore the hat like a muff. Then he set the green hat, punctuated with a gold hatpin, on top of the muff, and pulled the black veil down over the white fur. Lily, though, was nowhere to be found.

Not curators by nature, they reached for contact with her by deconstructing her things. Breaking the golden hinges of the blue leather jewelry box and pulling out the blue velvet compartments. The hatbox, with its octagonal walls and thick lid and double floor, became a flat stack of pasteboard, hunter green striped with cream. They separated the hat into its components, green felt and black satin and veiling. The locked white train case, nearly as big as the hatbox, took some work, but it finally yielded many fragrant tubes and boxes and squat cylinders and, finally, two pink circles of pleated satin lining. The locked pink case held hair, two blond wigs and a ponytail extension, plus circles of white lining. The lumpy fox stole with beady-eyed heads and dangling tails was tricky, but eventually, after much picking at stitching with the rusty nail, it became three separate flat animals with no insides.

They continued their work until bits of Lily’s life covered the smokehouse floor. Lily, though, stayed far away. Frank took a big powder puff from the train case and held it as high as he could and shook it. A pale shape formed in the air and then disappeared. They began heaping the stuff back into the big box, leaving until last the fake ponytail and useful stacks of paper tinder wrapped in red bands. Frank held the tail up and tipped his head back and brushed his face lightly with the ends of the long hairs. Dolores held one stack of tinder near her face and thumbed bottom to top and let the dry flammable leaves flutter her cheek.

Back at the creek, they lay on the bank, turned their faces to the sun, and remembered Lily hugging them tight, both at the same time, until their stomachs tingled and they laughed uncontrollably. Lily saying over and over, Love you, love you, love you, till the day I die.

CHAPTER
  1

A
LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON
. Tall stalks of ironweed and goldenrod bordering the dirt road nearly ready to bloom. Stubblefield drove one-handed, sipping a beer, trying to keep the Hawk from dragging its sensitive underparts against the rocks. Raking its shiny flanks against the various jungle shrubs encroaching on the passway. He had worked most of the way through a green eight-pack of Rolling Rock pony bottles, a gift from the Conway Twitty–looking dude leasing the Roadhouse and very much wanting to keep his jolly position, it being so central to a certain half-legal local social whirl.

Jollier still to be the owner of the Roadhouse. During Stubblefield’s tour, the potential for entertainment seemed clear, even hours before opening time, no music from either jukebox or live band, neon off, back-room pinball tables dark and silent. Daylight blared gritty through the opened door and cast a vampire-killing trapezoid onto the nineteenth-century wood floor, the splintery puncheons hip-wide and wrist-thick, cut from trees nearly two hundred years ago and made to last. Still bearing adze marks from bearded pioneer ancestors. The festive stale odors of spilled drinks and tobacco smoke soaked so deep into the thick boards that some archaeologist with sharp instruments could scrape down the layers of wood and identify McCallum’s Scotch spilled by some horseback trader in the days of the Cherokee Nation. Might as well put up a sign:
SERVING HIGH TIMES FOR TWO CENTURIES
. Stubblefield imagined cashing a check every month, and yet no other responsibilities on his part than to be
el patrón
.

The Hawk rounded a turn, raked its oil pan alarmingly on the high center of the two-track, and drew to a stop. Projected on its windshield, a brown log fortress set against a green mountainside. Down a weedy slant of lawn, the lake lay glassy, about halfway between the color of sky and the color of mountains.

Some memory of country etiquette learned in childhood from his grandfather kicked in, and Stubblefield tapped the chrome horn ring, the briefest of friendly toots, before getting out of the car. Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to walk right up the footpath and climb the steps and knock on the front door. He waited below the porch and called out, Hello?

Across the lake, mounds of pale grey and silver clouds rose in convincing mountain shapes so high into the sky that Stubblefield became confused about what was heaven and what was landscape. Have to be in Tibet to validate some of those upper peaks.

—Hey? he said.

Off to the far side, past the row of rockers, two small heads popped up over the rim of porch boards. Hair like dried shucks, and dark eyes glaring at him. Then they ducked back down. Stubblefield walked around to the end of the porch, but the children were gone. Whose children, by the way? Grandchildren of the hermit spinster’s?

In the backyard, no children. Just a clutch of chickens pecking at the ground and a slim girl. Or, rather, since she appeared to be about Stubblefield’s age, a woman. Wearing black pedal pushers and a white blouse and scuffed black penny loafers. Standing at a chopping block splitting kindling with a double-bitted axe, the shape of its flared blades echoing deep into Iron Age history, some Viking or Celt thing. Whack, and two yellow-faced pieces of pine fell away from each other and landed in a pile of their fellows.

—Hey, Stubblefield said.

The woman swept back dark hair with her wrist and glared, about as welcoming as the children. She said nothing for an uncomfortable stretch of time.

—So, again, greetings, Stubblefield said.

Just then, he realized that an empty pony bottle still dangled from his right fist. He shook it, pretending to throw it away but it wouldn’t go. A Red Skelton bit surfacing into his life all of a sudden.

The woman raised the axe to whacking level and propped its helve on her shoulder.

—Help you? she said.

—No, Stubblefield said. Or, possibly, yes.

—Which?

—My name’s Stubblefield.

—He died.

—Grandson.

—Ah.

—So, I guess Grandpa, what? Mentioned me?

—A time or two.

—And he hired you to, what?

Nothing from the woman but a neutral straight-on look. Put a level to her eyebrows and the bubble would stay inside the lines.

Stubblefield glanced off toward a set of fading ridges or clouds or whatever. Some big bird passed overhead. A shadow of wings brushed him but he didn’t even look up to see hawk or raven or buzzard. Instead, he watched the shadow waver away across the grass and become broken up by the ragged garden.

As if making an apology, he said, I guess I own this place now. And I need to … He paused and started to say, Make some decisions. But before he could get all confessional about what hard choices they were likely be and what a mess his grandfather had dumped in his lap by dying with everything in such disarray, he factored the lack of upwelling sympathy in the woman’s demeanor. The axe, but not just the axe. Something about her eyes. So Stubblefield revised his sentence on the fly, like lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of an old one, and said, Have a look at my inheritance.

—Look all you want, she said. It’s yours. And by the way, there’s a fair chance the children burned down the house.