Nightwoods (14 page)

She set another section of pine onto the chopping block and whacked it, scenting the air with piney odors, sharp and clean. And then before Stubblefield could go, What? in relation to the house, some instant memory flashback washed over him. Something about the sway of her hair, or a glint of light off angles of cheekbones and jawbone. Seventeen memories came rolling in from some useless brain attic that usually opened up only to inform Stubblefield exactly where he was and what he was doing and what the weather was when he heard a particular song for the first time, even back to early childhood. Hearing his mother singing,
When the red red robbin goes bob bob bobbing along along
while she ran meat through a hand-crank sausage grinder, October sunlight beaming aslant onto the green tiled kitchen floor, segmented by the crossed black shadows of the muntins.

But no music kicked off his Luce memories. They rose to him like watching an eight-millimeter movie thrown onto a white wall by a Bell & Howell, the only sounds a soft clatter of sprockets engaging holes in the film and the hiss of the film feeding off one spool and snaking its way onto another.

IT IS SUMMER’S END
. But not reckoned by some vague astronomical moment when the autumn equinox passes and nobody even looks up or feels an onset of chill. Reckoned, rather, by Labor Day, after which the pool closes for the year and school resumes. Which feels much more like something irreplaceable just died.

As for locale, it’s the town swimming pool beside the mile-long grass airstrip. Two dozen pretty teenage girls walking around the concrete apron, the water dark green. A Labor Day beauty contest back when girls wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner. All the bathing suits identical except for color, body sheaths cut low across the chest, modesty panels stretched quivering tight. Deep reds and blues and greens, and then the less interesting pastels. The most popular girls are curvy armloads levered up onto stiletto heels. Scarlet pouty lips. Breasts scooped like double cones of vanilla almost to their chins and glowing with Sea & Ski. Hair domed and flipped and sprayed into crunchy helmets. Pinched waists and asses like upside-down valentines.

Aluminum megaphones on creosote poles at each corner of the pool’s chicken-wire fence blare some fake Latin samba cha-cha saxophone shit played by heroin-addict New Yorker jazzmen daydreaming they’re living in Rio or Batista Cuba. Anyway, whatever the music, even if it were a Sousa march, only pretty girls drive Stubblefield’s picture show. They walk around the rim of the pool, each one a Helen of Troy, launching a carload of high school boys to spray-paint her name on the water tower.

A red-and-white antique biplane lifts off the green grass airstrip into the pale blue sky above the dark blue mountains. Four shirtless teenage boys ready for football season set off running down the length of the landing strip, constantly angling their Timexes, worn on the undersides of their wrists, to see how close a pace to Bannister’s four minutes they are achieving. Townfolk gather around the pool fence and hang over the rails atop the sunbathing platform, applauding all the loveliness their lives encompass.

Luce is one of only two beauties wearing sunglasses. Green lenses set in black cat eye frames. And, by a long stretch, she is the only one eating a frozen Mars bar from the concession stand while she parades. Her lips candy-apple red, and all twenty nails painted to match. Black swimsuit. A swoop to her do so that one eyepiece of her glasses is nearly obscured by a dark wave of hair.

So, what high and mixed emotions for young Stubblefield that day after the beauty show. Driving his grandfather’s Packard back around the lake to the farmhouse, the hopeless and glowing vision of Luce burrowing deeper into his head by the minute. And then the gloom of his mother’s arrival the next day to take him back to Jacksonville for the start of his final year of high school.

KEEPING COOL AND LETTING
the memories unreel, Stubblefield wandered off to check out the Lodge. Floor to floor, opening a door now and then, barely attending. All the way up to the sad, airless servants’ quarters under the eaves. Back downstairs, he studied the lobby, the daybeds near the fireplace and the elderly radio. Kerosene lamps mixed in with a few mica-shaded electrics. Woodstove in the outsized kitchen, iron frying pans big as car wheels, and a flashlight by the back door. By the time he finished scouting around, he was dizzy from trying to hold the current image of Luce and the one from the past in his head at the same time.

When he returned to her, Stubblefield started trying to say some vague things about the Lodge’s potential and its liability, talking like he was all business, using the bald lawyer’s vocabulary. Assets and profit and shit. Imaginary money. He broke off and said, I guess when the power goes out, you don’t hardly notice.

—I miss the radio.

Then Stubblefield decided to tell Luce about his memories. Except it wasn’t exactly a decision. He blurted something stupid before he could catch himself. Like, Great God, do you remember that beauty contest back when we were in high school?

ON THE WAY HOME
he kept striking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and trying to remember exactly what he’d said. His face felt flushed red as a lipstick kiss. Was it possible that he’d concluded his memories with, You were so beautiful back then? Had he really committed that unforgivable past tense?

But he remembered her response pretty clearly, at least in précis. How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All the urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we’re immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that’s why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.

Something like that. It was a fairly awkward conversation.

But Stubblefield was quite sure Luce had concluded by saying, I’m not the same person as that girl. Sure, too, that he had collected himself enough to state a firmly held belief. We are who we are. Ten or eighty. What we see in the mirror is all that changes. Same fears and hopes running around inside like hamsters on a wheel.

—Well, that’s depressing, Luce had said. But whatever. I didn’t win that day.

—They chose wrong.

—The sunglasses?

—Could have been the Mars bar.

After Stubblefield had turned and started to walk away, Luce said, either to his back or to herself, So, a flame still burns?

Even in that dizzy moment, Stubblefield at least retained enough clarity to know sarcasm when he heard it. Or would that be irony? Fine line, sometimes.

He had kept walking, but raised a hand as far as he could reach above his head, made a leveling motion, and said, Yea high.

As he rounded the corner, he saw the children sitting in rockers at either end of the porch, glaring and intemperate like pickets guarding the flanks. Stubblefield thinking, If they had muskets they’d shoot me down.

Later that night, back at the cottage, Stubblefield remembered that he had seen Luce one other time. The summer after the beauty show. His final summer at the lake. A teenage burger joint in town. Luce leaning over the jukebox, studying the songs. Her long hair falling forward, hiding her face until she hooked it behind her ears and he recognized her profile. She had on boy clothes. A white button-down shirt, the tails untucked over faded jeans. Black penny loafers with dimes in the slits. And the memory, when it came, kept spooling all the way to her dropping the nickel in the slot and the fans of shiny 45s rotating until one fell onto the turntable and Johnny Ace began singing “Never Let Me Go,” scratchy and hollow, since the record had been in the Wurlitzer for some time. Luce slow-danced solo, doing the Stroll, back to her booth to rejoin her friends, some dismal triple-date arrangement of cheerleaders and football players. As for weather, it was raining that long-ago night when Stubblefield walked out to his grandfather’s car. The neon of the cafe set the water drops on his windshield alight with pink and lavender.

CHAPTER
  2

M
IDMORNING, LIT ROLLED SLOW
down a gravel road, letting farmers harvesting crops see their tax dollars at work. It was one of the perks of the job, plenty of time for driving and thinking. That plus the cruiser, a lawman special with the big-block engine set up so hot that citizens couldn’t just walk into a dealer and buy one like it. At idle, the two banks of huge pistons rocked the whole car slightly from side to side, despite the extra-firm suspension.

Lit felt like shit. He’d downed about a pot of coffee already, and it hadn’t really raised his mood. He dialed the volume on the two-way down so as not to interfere with his thoughts about law. How, most places, it could be bought for a price, high or low. Which was a fact Lit knew could be tested all the way from little county deputies right up to Supreme Court justices and rarely fail. But it failed with him. He was not at all corrupt. If some lawbreaker tried to slip him a twenty to get off, Lit was not above pulling a blackjack out of his hip pocket and laying him out twitching in the road.

And deputy was fine with him. No higher ambitions, mainly because you had to get elected sheriff, and then the fools who voted in your favor thought you were beholden to them. The sacred public trust and all that tired bullshit. Deputy was just a job like any other. The sheriff got unhappy with you, he could fire you. You got unhappy with him, you say kiss my ass and walk away.

The current sheriff was a plump old boy who made a lot of money off a gravel pit and a bunch of crooked State road contracts. The unpleasant part of being a lawman didn’t interest him whatsoever. That was Lit’s job. The part where somebody deserved getting beat to the pavement and grabbed up by the scruff of his neck and thrown into the back of a patrol car and taken to jail. It was the part Lit was proud of and expert at, quickness of movement being such a great and unexpected equalizer.

Lit’s failings as a lawman mostly involved his being prone to form his own judgments. He’d look away if a mainly all right guy went astray and yet nobody got much damaged by it. Such as the shiny new bootlegger taking over the local liquor business. Lit judged it no big deal. Bootleggers were a fact of life. Can’t sell what people don’t want, and nearly everybody needs to find a way to shift their mood up or down a few degrees now and then. Or even daily.

As for the really wonderful uppers and downers, they had recently become illegal if you didn’t get them through a doctor. But back in the war, the government passed out Benzedrine like jelly beans when they needed you flaming bright seventy-two hours in a row, killing people that badly needed killing. So it was plain wrong that now you had to pay a doctor for a script and then pay a pharmacist to do nothing but count pills and put them in a bottle. In the long fights of France and Italy, nobody kept count. You just dug them out of buckets by the fistful. One bucket for go, another bucket for no-go.

Lit was a man of peace. At least he wanted to be someday. World War II had given him the gift of all the conflict most men would ever need. He’d witnessed all kinds of horrible shit, and he’d committed quite a bit of it himself. Such was life at the time. But back then he was so young. His blood called for other blood. Even now, he couldn’t believe how much fun some of it had been. A perfect dream, unmatched ever after, driven by the fervent hormones of youth and amphetamines.

That was some while back. Yet in these latter-day peacetimes, Lit still never quit wanting him a handful from the go bucket. It was a great chapter of his nostalgia for the past. Back in his youth, when he was always jacked up and happy.

Until recently, in lieu of pills, you could go to the drugstore and buy a Benzedrine sinus inhaler over the counter. Crack it open and be in business. Now the government had outlawed them, made you a criminal to get even a taste of what they once glutted you with. Where was the sense in that law? Probably some drug company or doctors’ union figured it out. And who gets fucked? Everybody but drug companies and doctors. And the old bootlegger was useless. He dealt in nothing but fifths and pints and fluid ounces.

When the gravel met pavement, the valley road, Lit didn’t even think about where to go next. He turned back toward town. This shiny new man needed checking out.

AN EMPTY BLUE SPAM CAN
sat atop a locust fence post behind Bud’s rental, yet some firearm malfunction stood in the way of amusement.

—You don’t think about a revolver being broken beyond repair, Bud said. They’re damn simple machines. Not much more than a hammer connected to a tube. But this pistol is done for.

Morose and not aiming in the least, Bud randomly snapped the trigger six or eight times to no effect.

—Point that up in case it does go off, Lit said.

—Shit, it’s dead broke.

Bud snapped three slow dejected snaps. And then a hopeless fourth, which fired with a fierce crack.

Lead whooshed weird and supersonic past Lit’s left ear.

Bud looked at Lit and then held the pistol two-handed up to his face, studying its profile, his expression a caricature of fear and amazement.

—They damn. It’s been healed.

Lit, unamused, put up his forefinger and wagged it at Bud.

—Set it down for a minute, he said. I’ve got questions. Such as, where are you from?

—Down along the coast. Several little towns in three different states.

—Why come here?

—Nice place, with business opportunities.

—Any relations in these parts?

—Nope.

—Mind if I take a look at your driver’s license?

—Not at all, except it went through the wash.

Bud dug his wallet from a back pocket of his jeans, and it came out cupped to the shape of his ass. He opened the wallet and extracted his license. Reached out a limp pale rectangle, which Lit declined to touch.