The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (19 page)

“Hank, what are you doing in that getup?”

“I’m Charlie Younger in the reenactment, remember? Rolf gave me the costume at the meeting. There’s more to it, but I’m on my way to the station, and I thought the guys would get a kick out of my six-shooters.”

Lily looked at the pavement. “You didn’t tell me about it.”

“They thought Allan Fisk was going to do it, but he punked out.”

“Oh.” She looked at his hips. “Are the guns real?”

“Of course not.”

“They look real,” she said.

A train whistle sounded loudly behind them, and Lily heard the guardrail fall across the tracks. Hank’s black sneakers were only inches from her own.

“I miss you,” Hank said.

Lily studied the loose rubber at the front of her shoe. Why don’t I miss him? she thought.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

“Not really.” Lily rubbed a mosquito bite on the back of her leg with her sneaker. She could feel Hank’s anger, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Martin’s fit had exhausted her. She hung her head and looked down. The fact is, she thought, I’m really stupid with Hank. I’m not so stupid with other people.

Hank waved the back of his hands at her in frustration. “If you think,” he said loudly, “that that guy’s going to stick around here for you, you’re dead wrong.”

“Oh, Hank,” Lily said.

“You know I’m right. What is he, fifteen years older than you? For Christ’s sake, Lily, you’re making a fool of yourself. He’s not even divorced. Everybody in town knows he’s going to leave you high and dry. He’s got women coming out of his ears, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fucking Don Juan. You’re no different from all the others.” Hank rubbed his forehead hard. “Not to him.”

Lily raised her eyes. “I don’t care.” Her intonation was even, stubborn.

“You don’t care!”

“No.”

Hank moved toward her. He bent down and looked in her face. “Who are you?” he shouted. “What are you?”

Lily clenched her jaw shut. She kept her chin down and her mouth shut. Behind Hank she could see the grain elevator in the moonlight.

“Answer me!” His voice broke.

Lily bit her lip. “How can I answer that?” she said. She felt tears in her eyes all of a sudden, and she lifted her face to keep them from running down her cheeks.

Hank held out his arms. “Oh, Lil’,” he said and leaned toward her.

She put her arms around him tentatively. She remembered his smell and his shirt—the one that said “Minnesota Twins” on the back. She stood on tiptoe and whispered to him, “I’m sorry, Hank. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Lily pulled away from him and ran across the bridge and then past the Red Owl Grocery. She was still running when she reached Division Street. She slowed to a walk when she saw Rick’s and glanced at two men standing a few feet away outside the Corner Bar. One of them was wearing gray coveralls from Olaf’s Garage, and as she approached them she read the name tag sewn on his pocket: “Steve.” Lily noticed that his arms were too long for his short body, that he needed a shave and that he had clearly noticed her. When she walked past them, “Steve” started making panting noises, and in her peripheral vision she saw him throwing his hips back and forth. He smirked. For once Lily decided not to ignore the insult. She whirled around and started screaming, “What is it? I’d really like to know. What the hell is it that makes a shrunken little weasel like you think he’s some big stud, huh?”

Steve glared at Lily. She could see he was searching for a retort while making an effort to hold on to his leer. Then his friend started laughing, and Lily saw Steve’s expression change to uncertainty. Laughter followed her down the block, and she heard Steve say, “What’s her problem?” She walked slowly, conscious that their eyes were following her, and she made certain her posture was erect, her gait dignified. When she reached the alley beside the Ideal Cafe, Lily turned, seated herself on the ground beside one of the large garbage cans and cried.

It took her a long time to fall asleep that night. Mabel was typing in the next room. There was no light in Ed’s window, and although she knew he might be lying on his bed at that very minute, exhausted from hours of work, she also knew he might have gone out, and Lily wished she could wave her hand or mutter an incantation and look in on him wherever he was. Instead, she played her tape of
Don Giovanni
softly so Mabel wouldn’t hear. She remembered Dolores’s ankle buckling in Ed’s room, and it made her think of Mabel’s shaking hands and of Martin’s stutter, that word he had started but never finished outside the Arts Guild. She felt unsteady herself. Everybody’s quivering, she thought. Everybody except Ed. She remembered his hand on Dolores’s hip. And as Lily pictured his quiet face and deliberate movements in her mind, she realized that the calm in him was also something hard and stubborn, that Ed was like a man who, finding himself in a terrible storm on the road, refuses to turn back and instead plants his feet on the ground, leans into the wind and keeps on walking.

Noises from the street, Mabel’s typing, and half-conscious thoughts accompanied her first two hours in bed when she was neither really awake nor really asleep. Moonlight shone too brightly on her eyelids through her thin curtains, and lilliputian voices chattered lines from the play. Her pillow was too hot. She fluffed and patted and turned it over again and again. Just before she felt herself finally dropping into sleep, she heard Howie Bickle’s voice in her head. Howie was Starveling in the play and Moonshine in the play within the play. A slow talker from a farm west of town, he dragged out every vowel: “This lantern doth the horned moon present.” Then, after what seemed to be only minutes of sleep, she heard the alarm ring and sat up in bed. Moonlight was still shining through the window, which didn’t make sense, but Lily stood up, walked toward two rectangles of light that illuminated the floor and saw a young woman lying there with her eyes closed. Lily bent over to examine her. “So you’re here,” she said. The woman didn’t answer, but Lily didn’t expect an answer. She looked down at the body and noticed a long piece of white fabric wrapped tightly around her hips, her shoulders and breasts. The fabric puzzled Lily. Why was her stomach bare? Lily looked at the girl’s navel with interest, and while she looked, a word suddenly came to her that solved the problem of the young woman: “bellclose.” The word elated her. I know, she said to herself. I know. But then as quickly as it had come, the feeling left her, and she thought, She can’t be here. I’ve got to get her out. Lily bent down to lift the young woman off the floor, but the body that looked as soft and white as dough wouldn’t budge, and after tugging hard, she discovered that the young woman’s hands had been attached to the floor with screws. Lily panicked, and in her panic she began to suspect she was dreaming and tried to fight her way out of the dream and away from the moonlight shining on those bloodless palms screwed to the floor, but telling herself to wake up had no immediate effect. She was drowning in the dream and struggled toward its surface, flailing and kicking her way up and out as she told herself to wake up. With her hands above her head, she pressed against something soft and wet, bursting through it to find herself awake and lying in her bed. The moonlight had disappeared. Nobody was on the floor. Had the nightmare taken place outside her room, Lily might have found comfort in waking to those four walls, but the distance between dreaming and waking had been too close. She sat up in bed and tried to recover the word in the dream that had made her so happy. She felt herself reaching back for it, finding it not in her head, but in her mouth. She had said it in the dream: “bellclose.” It’s nonsense, she said to herself. Mabel wasn’t typing anymore, and in the silence of her room, Lily tried to stay awake, but couldn’t. She slept again, dreamed again, and found the young woman on the floor again. I’m dreaming, she said to herself. I have to wake up, and Lily woke in her room and looked out and saw the moonlight shining down on the young woman’s body. And so it went all night. Time after time, she told herself to wake up, and she did, but sometimes she woke from a dream inside the dream and found the body again. After a while the police came into the dream and Hank with them. They broke through the floor, poked their feet through the ceiling and crawled in from the window. They pounded at her door in a rhythm as steady and relentless as a drum machine.

*   *   *

At work the next day, Lily’s arms and legs felt weak. The caffeine from the five cups of coffee she had drunk to clear her head raced through her body, and she felt suddenly aware of her nerves, which seemed to be vibrating just beneath her skin. Vince was unusually quiet that day, but Boomer yattered on about Graceland and Elvis sightings every time she came into the kitchen. At about nine o’clock she was standing across from Vince, staring at two sunny-side-up eggs for Russell Malecha, when Boomer started waving the doughnut he was holding in her face and said to her in a falsetto voice, “Earth to Lily, Earth to Lily.”

“What is it, Boom?”

“Heard you’re already two-timin’ yer new boyfriend.”

Lily picked up the plate of eggs and started for the door. “Where’d you hear that rot?”

Boomer shoved the doughnut into his mouth. Powdered sugar stuck to his lips as he widened his eyes behind his lenses. “Heard it from a kid who don’t lie. Said he saw you at the quarry, stark naked.” Boomer chewed. “With some cowboy.”

Lily’s back was pressed against the swinging door and she stopped. “Cowboy? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Said you was lyin’ on his lap, sleepin’ or sunbathin’ or somethin’.” Boomer opened his mouth and grinned, revealing half-chewed doughnut coated with saliva bubbles.

“Shut your mouth, Boom.” Lily heard her voice rise. “Whoever you talked to is cracked. You hear me? Cracked. I haven’t even been to the quarry this year, and as for cowboys—what the hell is a cowboy? This town doesn’t have cowboys, not real ones, anyway. This is complete shit.”

Vince stared at Lily, his eyes small, and Boomer went on chewing the doughnut with a surprised look on his face.

Jiggling a frying pan of sausages, Vince said, “You feeling all right? Wrong time of month?”

“No, Vince, it’s not the wrong time of the month. How’d you like it if people were talking that kind of crap about you?”

“Are you kidding? I’d love to be known as the guy hanging around the quarry with naked broads.”

“It’s not the same,” Lily said, and pushed her shoulder into the door behind her. She looked again at the two perfect yellow yolks on the plate and felt suddenly light-headed. “It was you.” That’s what he had said. The cafe looked new to her when she turned around, and for a moment the red booth where Martin usually sat undulated in the sunshine that came through the window, and Lily thought, I’m dizzy again. I have to sit down. She moved the plate into her right hand and reached for the counter with her left. I’m so tired, she thought as an explanation. She took a couple of breaths, delivered the eggs, and when she turned away from Russell, a fragment of the dream came back to her—the white material that bound the woman’s breasts and marked her flesh with a deep red line like a cut.

A week earlier Boomer’s story wouldn’t have touched Lily, and she knew it. It was listening to Boomer after she had listened to Dick, Dolores and Martin that had unnerved her. The stories didn’t match, but they overlapped, and the similarities among them were making her skittish. Either there was a virus on the march in Webster that caused hallucinations or everybody was seeing the same thing and thinking it was something else. When Lily stood in the cafe and watched Bert making lively conversation with Emily Legvold, who had recently left the Moonies and looked like herself again, Lily decided the visions weren’t imaginary. There were too many. Then through the window she saw Mrs. Pointer walking with a group of kids from the Elizabeth Barker School. The children shuffled along in twos and held hands. A chubby boy, who looked about sixteen, broke away from his partner. Turning to the cafe window, he scrunched up his face and then did a little dance for the people inside. He had the distinctive features of Down’s syndrome—small eyes and a flat nose. The silly joy in his face as he wiggled his hips and threw his head back jolted Lily from her meditation, and she laughed. He saw her and bowed. Lily watched the kids laugh and clap. Mrs. Pointer walked calmly through the line and stopped beside him. She took him by both shoulders and started to rub the boy. His face looked frenzied now, and his tongue darted in and out of his mouth. Mrs. Pointer continued to rub his shoulders with strong strokes, and the boy’s expression grew calmer. Then, taking his hand in hers, she drew it toward his partner’s—a girl with two short braids that stuck out on either side of her head—and folded their hands together with a little shake that seemed to mean they shouldn’t let go. She walked back to the head of her class and signaled for them to continue walking, which they did, and soon every child had passed out of view.

Lily saw Bert move away from the cash register holding a copy of the
Webster Chronicle.
“Have you read the police log, Lil’?”

Lily shook her head. She surveyed the tables to check on her customers. Everybody looked okay. Bert stuck the paper under Lily’s nose and she took it.

“Get a load of the headline,” Bert said.

Lily looked down at the police log on the Records page of the paper. The wits at the
Chronicle
had given that week’s log the headline “Squealer Apprehended on Division Street.”

“Down here.” Bert’s finger pointed to the entry for Tuesday, June 11.

Lily looked down at the paper. The print seemed out of focus. She had to concentrate on the letters to read.

“Police made a traffic stop.… A fight was reported in Viking Terrace.… A black bag containing insulin equipment was found on Bridge Square.… A man on Albers Avenue reported noises in his basement. Officers discovered a gopher in a window well.… A woman on Dundas Street heard people talking outside her window. Police were unable to locate conversationalists.… A complaint of loud music at the Violetta Trailer Park was received. Officers asked residents to turn it down.… A pig was reported loose on South Division Street. Officers rounded up the critter and returned it to its owner.… A man carrying an injured woman was reported on Highway 19 at the city limits. Police checked the area but found no one.”