Nightwoods (24 page)

—Lily’s husband, Bud. He hurt the children. And then he killed her. He’s come to town, making threats. And Lit won’t do anything about it because he’s buying dope from him.

Lola said, Golly, I wonder why I ever left?

STUBBLEFIELD’S SWADDLED
cut hand throbbed. He looked at all four of them, the way some bloodline thing connected the wings of their noses, their eye slants. Nevertheless, Lola and the children didn’t care to own each other. They wouldn’t look her way, like she was some ghost wavering before them in a dimension they took a pass on sensing.

—I wasn’t made for a grandmother, Lola said.

—Or a mother, Luce said.

—News flash, Luce. Neither were you. We’re a lot the same. Lily was the one different.

—You don’t know anything about me, Luce said. I’m not the same as you. And if I ever was, I’ve changed.

—People don’t change, Lola said. Maybe you’re still young enough to pretend that’s not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.

—I didn’t go anywhere. None of us did.

—But I did. I couldn’t take any of you one day more.

Stubblefield had been standing off to the side saying nothing, but now he said, Great God.

Lola glanced at him like she hadn’t even noticed he was still there.

—Here’s the final word, Lola said. I can’t help you out. Sounds like you’re maybe exaggerating some. I heard he got off. Sometimes, juries get it right. And that doesn’t mean I’m not sad about Lily. But when I left, I left. I’m not looking back. And I’m not looking for a family. I’ll fix you some ham sandwiches and let you talk about the good old days if you care to. And then pretty soon, it will be time for all of you to get in the car and head out home.

Luce said, Hell, we can eat a hamburger on the road without having to listen to another word of your shit.

—Well, Stubblefield said, I guess that about says it. Dolores and Frank, go give your granny a big goodbye hug.

The children didn’t attend to the suggestion in any way other than to flick each other a glance.

Lola took a final lungful of her Kool and flipped the sparking butt at Stubblefield and went into the house. The butt bounced off Stubblefield’s chest, and the screen door bounced off Lola’s still-fetching ass before clapping shut.

And yet, before they could load up and drive away, Lola stuck her head out the screen door and shouted, I never loved a damn one of you.

ON THE WAY BACK NORTH
, Stubblefield took A1A, to let Luce and the kids see the ocean. He hadn’t slept but a few snatches in days, and he was all drained of adrenaline and had switched to take-out coffee. His vision and hearing and thoughts seemed kind of gritty.

Somewhere after St. Augustine, he pulled Luce across the seat to him and said, That was all my mistake. I thought it would be a safe place. It’s not how I expected it to go.

—It’s what I ought to have expected. But I let myself start hoping. That was the mistake.

Stubblefield drove awhile, Atlantic on the right and palmetto scrub on the left, and tried to line his thoughts up. He said, There’s a kind of person that wants you to carry their trouble. If they can, they heap it every bit on you and walk away without a guilty look back. And if they can’t do that, they lighten their own load by handing off a piece of woe to anybody who’ll take it. You two girls didn’t have a choice but to take what your mother dished out. All the rest were fools that let themselves get altered in their thinking by the prettiness of her.

—She is, isn’t she?

—You had to get it somewhere.

They crossed the St. Johns on the ferry and went up Little Talbot and then across the inlet to Amelia, flying fish leaping almost as high into the air as the car windows as they drove over the low wood bridge.

Stubblefield checked his wallet and did some figuring. They could stay awhile at his old beach town with the fort and the lighthouse and the shrimp boats. It wouldn’t be quite like the dream date on the Gulf he had imagined. No beer-joint oysters or beach-music jukebox dancing or night swimming. No being young and free. Mostly being scared and not knowing what to do about it.

But, through a stretch of beautiful autumn weather, they rested and walked on the beach. The children ran up and down and threw shells at each other and waded in the cool water until they flopped in the sand exhausted and happy. For brief moments, they let Luce wrap them in towels and sneak in a hug before they squirmed away.

One afternoon, near sunset, Stubblefield built a small driftwood fire, which delighted the children. They sat calmly, watching the flames. In a while, Dolores got up and collected dead dune grass from the beach and came to Stubblefield, sitting at the fire with Luce. Dolores bundled four long stalks in her hand, and lightly whacked him on each shoulder. Very ceremonial, like a knighting. Then she threw them in the fire and backed away, her dark eyes looking just over his shoulder. She stopped and stood, waiting for something to happen next.

Stubblefield went to the tide line and collected ribbons of seaweed and twisted and plaited them, using old Boy Scout rope-making skills. He knotted the ends to form a small circle and set it on Dolores’s head. She immediately shook it off, but then picked it up and put it back in place and wandered in the direction of a few sanderlings quickstepping at the edge of the water. Frank sat near the fire and watched the whole process, and then he came over and stood at Luce’s shoulder.

She said, If you want one, say please.

Frank said, One say please.

So Stubblefield made him a wreath too.

Each evening during their time there, they ate shrimp, a new food to Luce, and she could not get enough of it. The children went to bed early, exhausted, and slept until dawn to the drowsy wave sounds rising from the beach. Way late, Luce and Stubblefield sat on the sofa of the beach cottage and listened to the radio and held each other, kissing like teenagers. Every song some variant of
oh baby baby
. But if Stubblefield went beyond a certain line, Luce was off to the bedroom to sleep with the children. Sweet about it, and sort of regretful, but off. Leaving Stubblefield to read and try to feel sort of gallant until he fell asleep.

Except one night, toward the end, she came back. Stubblefield dozed on the sofa with a paperback from his car library. He woke to Luce’s hand on his face, and then sliding down past the collar of his shirt to his shoulder. She gripped him at the muscle above the collarbone, and pulled him to her, which kind of hurt. Kissed him deep and said, One of these days it could be so good.

Before Stubblefield even roused awake, she was gone again. The door already closing behind her before he thought to say, Wait. Afterward, a restless late night for Stubblefield, with only the thin substitutes of poetry and Top 40 tunes on the radio.

Day by day, the money ran out. The last night, on the sofa before bedtime, Stubblefield told Luce a fairy tale about how they wouldn’t ever go back to the lake. Just start driving, and before you know it, be blasting westward at dawn down two-lane Nebraska blacktop. A pale moon setting up ahead and a bright yellow sun rising behind. Drinking truck-stop coffee and sharing a box of doughnuts for breakfast, three apiece. Listening to a radio station out of Red Cloud reporting wheat prices, and then Spade Cooley followed by the Sons of the Pioneers so as to capture in just two songs the exuberance and melancholy of the famed lone prairie with its match-strike daylight and night skies deep as the mind of God. You the tallest thing standing for miles across the sweeps of grass. And to let the place enter their dream lives, camp on blankets in a wheat field and watch stars and planets move westward across the slopes of convex space until they all fell asleep.

—Great, Luce said. Let’s do that, baby. Someday.

THEY WAITED UNTIL
late afternoon to leave. By the time they were driving back through the dismal pine forests at the state line, it was dark. The kids slept on the backseat mattress, exhausted from another day on the beach. Luce spun the radio dial up through the frequencies and back down, over and over. Fractional blips of voice or music phasing in and out, interrupting the overall hiss and warp of interference. She wouldn’t say a word. She didn’t cry, but with every mile they drove north, dread filled the car like floodwater rising.

Stubblefield tried to draw her close. She felt like one solid muscle resisting the pull. But as soon as he took his hand away from her shoulder, she let go, quit clutching into herself, and leaned to him.

Luce said, I asked why you’re not married, but you didn’t ask me.

—I’ve been too glad about it.

—Yeah, well. There’s probably about twenty reasons, but do you want to know one of them?

—If you want to tell me.

—I’m not talking about what I want. Do you want to know?

—Yes, I do.

So Luce gave him the story in brief. The room over the drugstore beside the movie theater. The library with the tiny librarian. The telephone office in the former hotel with the dark hallways. The wall of Bakelite plugs, the cot, and the quilt. Mr. Stewart and the Saint Christopher medallion. No anger, no emotion. Just the facts.

By way of conclusion, Luce said, I lived through it, so if you can’t stand to hear it, you can take me home and go to hell. Men get so damn strange sometimes.

Stubblefield kept driving, trying to think of the right thing to say. Like a magic spell in a story. A few perfect words that make your wishes true. But they wouldn’t come. He said, all at once, I’m sorry, I love you, I’ll kill that bastard.

—He’s moved on, Luce said.

—I found Lola. I could find him.

—Nice offer, but that’s all long gone.

She fiddled the radio up and down again and then switched it off and twisted in the seat until she was lying on her back, her head in Stubblefield’s lap, looking up at a full moon above pine trees, flowing bright and dark through the windshield until she fell asleep.

CHAPTER
  12

S
HOULD HAVE BEEN A NIGHT DRIVE
like any other, but as soon as the beer and pills kicked in and the stars started jittering and pinwheeling, Lit set in on the same questions he had asked in the summertime when he came sniffing around for uppers. The difference was, now the trees were nearly bare and back then he hadn’t really cared about the answers.

Lit couldn’t possibly have a concrete clue to go on, Bud thought, only pool hall rumors and bullshit lawman instinct, thus far clouded by his need for pills. And the suspicions were the consequences of Bud’s own actions, primarily getting drunk and running his mouth to the wrong people. Nobody to blame but himself, except possibly Lily’s bitch sister, if she ignored his warning and set a fire under Lit’s skinny ass, either getting him all sentimental about his little baby girl from the way back years or the idiot grandchildren. Which gave Bud pause, since he’d never entirely clarified that last relationship to himself. Lit a granddaddy. Nevertheless, a deep disappointment for Bud that even his best friend had started acting strange.

Lit probed on and on into Bud’s past, but he didn’t mention Lily. Or Luce’s suspicions about the kids. But they were back there in the history Lit wondered about. However evasive Bud tried to be, however hard he squirmed to change the subject, Lit kept circling around. Every question had to do with Bud’s identity. What was Bud’s full name? Where all exactly had he lived in his life? Had he ever been married? In his previous life, had he ever encountered anybody who grew up here?

Bud felt a little glazed from trying to stay even with Lit on the uppers and beer, and he floated various lies and evasions that never rose above fair to middling. He could see where this was all heading. Lit penning him in. No way Bud could keep a string of lies consistent forever. In a few days, Lit would be right back at him, and Bud would have forgotten many details of his answers. His new lies would mismatch the old ones, which was exactly the way they trapped you. Then you went down.

Bud said, Come on, fuck this shit. What do you care about history? I thought we were friends.

—I guess we are, Lit said. You know a lot about me and my habits, but I don’t know much about you. Right now, I need you to be straight with me.

Sounded kind of self-serving to Bud. Lit mainly starting to get sad about the cutoff of Benzedrine if his questions ended up leading them both to a bad place.

—That’s what you’re needing? Bud said. Me being straight? And here I was having a good time. I thought what buddies did was ride around and tell each other lies, and drink some beers and take some pills.

—That too. But I’m getting some pressure about you, and I need the truth.

Bud said, Don’t pull that tired mess. I learned a long time ago, when somebody starts talking all sincere about truth, they’re usually getting ready to fuck you. Truth isn’t in your own self, and it sure isn’t in theirs. Whatever you tell me or I tell you, and call it truth, is nothing but convenient feelings and asswipe opinions. Real truth is way beyond people. Our brains weren’t tuned to get but a glimpse of it off in the distance.

—No. That’s not the way it is.

—Yeah, that is the way it is. People love the word, but all they use it for is like a club to beat you with. If we ever had truth in our heads, we couldn’t live with it. But because we’re friends, I’m happy to hear about your feelings and opinions, and maybe tell a few of my own, as long as we agree to call things by their right names.

Bud shut up and stared out the window at an impossibly big moon. He kept his head straight and the panic in his stomach damped down by wondering what it would cost to bring the white-haired lawyer up here. Eat these rubes alive in court. In two hours, that old boy would burn them all a new one.

Lit kept on driving deeper into the mountains. One beer later, he started again on places and dates and surnames. Said, What if I made a call down to the capital asking if they have a sheet on a man named John Gary Johnson? Put whatever they have in the mail. Particularly a photo. Be here in a few days. What would I find? I’m not out to get you, but don’t leave me hanging. People are talking.