Tomorrow River (19 page)

Woody squealed, “You look like the movie actress Mia Farrow,” but I thought she was acting crazy. Had Mama forgotten what Papa had told her about never cutting her hair?

Later that afternoon she came out to the fort with a couple of sandwiches and two soda pops. His Honor was due home from the courthouse at any minute. She called up to us, “Stay put for a while, peas. I fear there are rough seas ahead,” and she wasn’t acting so full of herself anymore.

Woody got dewy-eyed and shouted back all stuttery, “No matter what he says, I love your pixie cut.”

I pretended I didn’t hear Mama as she headed back up to the house heavy-legged. She stopped at the rose garden to give us a weak wave. That’s when I lost my temper and told Woody, “I don’t see what you’re so upset about. She’s bringin’ this on herself. She knows how much he loves her long hair.”

Oh, how I wish I had that afternoon back. I would’ve complimented her, too. Thrown her kisses, shouted, “Good luck” or
“Buona fortuna
.
”

There’s somebody standing above Mama in Woody’s drawing. It’s hard to tell if it’s a man or a woman.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” I ask, pointing to the barely there figure. “Papa?” If I got to face this, she might at least lend a helping hand. She could pick up a crayon and write,
Shenny, quit being dumb as a bag of hammers. Can’t you see that’s a picture of _____?
Is that too much to ask?

Woody jumps off the bed and rushes to the window, starts wildly gesturing. I head to her side and cinch my hands around her waist. I look in the direction of the reading bench and then the clearing that Mama vanished from that sits right behind it. There’s nothing there. My twin is going absolutely bat shit. Flapping her arms and making this weird noise that sounds like a going-dead car battery. Whatever she was trying to tell me about the drawing is long gone. She’s just acting up now.

“C’mon. That’s enough.” I’m tugging with all I’ve got. She can get like this sometimes. Especially after an encounter with Papa. Hard to work with as a piece of Saran Wrap. “Let go of the sill. Let go!” When she does, we fall backward into a heap onto the carpet. We roll around for a while until she straddles my stomach and pins my hands. “Maybe I
should
sell you to the carnival, not as Mule Girl but . . . Wrassling Woody.” I laugh, but when she gets her hands around my neck and starts squeezing it’s not so funny anymore. “What are ya doin’? You’re . . . I can’t . . . breathe!” I say, chopping at her arms to break her hold.

She lets go and looks down at me, hurt and confused.

That’s when I get what she was gesturing to from the window. It had to be the Minnow place. “Woody, don’t cry.” She’s still sitting on my tummy, her chest heaving and her hair going every which way. Suddenly, I realize I don’t care anymore what Papa will say or do if he catches me. I’m doing what he should’ve done for his little girl. Getting her what she wants, what she
needs
. “If you would let me up, it might be easier for me to go over and fetch Ivory. That’s what you’re tryin’ to tell me, isn’t it?” I ask, positive that it is.

Her tongue darts out from between her lips again.

“Don’t even think about it,” I say, bucking her off. “One lick of appreciation is fine, but I do not want this to become another one of your peculiarities. I mean it.”

My sister starts happy wagging, not just her tail, but her arms and legs, even her head.

“All right then.” I slip on my sneakers and head out our bedroom door. “Get out the soap and start running the tub. That pup takes after Clive. He’s gonna look like hell and stink to high heaven.”

C
hapter Seventeen

I
vory Minnow is small for a Lab.

Looks like he’s got some Corgi in him. Or maybe like what happens to people, he’s just shrunken with age. He’s lying between the bentwood rocker and Mr. Clive’s metal-detecting device that’s propped up against his house, which is about the same size and shape as a boxcar.

That’s how our neighbor spent most of his day when he was still alive. Rocking in his chair or wandering around in the woods that’re between his place and ours, using his metal-detecting device to unearth what he called, “Buried treasure. Free for the taking.” He found scads of Civil War coins and other left-behind-in-the-heat-of-battle momentos. Muskets and snuff boxes, lots of uniform buttons from both sides, belt buckles and swords. If Clive found something he thought was extra valuable, he would snap a picture of it and then ask me to bring Mama over. She’d take what he found into town for him the next time we went. Artesia Johnson, who owns What Goes Around Comes Around, would place Clive’s find in her store and some enthusiastic tourist would buy it.

The money he got from those doodads would help supplement the check Clive got each month from the government for his service to our country. When he was a younger man, he was in the U.S. Coast Guard and got tossed overboard during a hurricane. He didn’t get rescued for two whole days. Clive told me at least once a week, “You think we’re alone in the universe, but we’re not. I saw four flying saucers
whish
over my head while I was bobbing in that ocean waitin’ to get saved. Not one, not two. Four.”

I’d sit out here with him some nights on this very porch, because just like me, Clive loved the sky. Not for the same reasons, though. He didn’t mind me pointing out the constellations to him, but would tell me to
hush
if he saw something that looked like an unidentified flying object. That was his passion. UFOs he called them. “They’re up there. They’re watchin’ us,” he’d say, real creepy. Thinking that there might be aliens peeking down on us would about scare the undies off me, but for him, it was a comfort. Since he had few friends on
this
planet, I think he believed there might be beings from far, far away who would be willing to visit him. (I’ve seen aliens in movies. None of them are that good-looking either, so Clive and those UFO beings would have a natural jumping-off point.)

He’s going to be so disappointed that he died and didn’t get to see the men land on the moon. He was really looking forward to that.

The wind has kicked up a notch and is pushing his rocker to and fro. The sky is on its way to going deep gray and I can hear thunder trumpeting from the other side of Elephant Mountain. A storm is moving in.

“Hey, boy,” I say to Ivory as I come up the porch steps, holding out my hand so he can get a whiff of me. Even though I told Papa that the dog was starving to death to try and elicit some sympathy from him, I’d told E. J. that it would make his wife-to-be happy if he’d go over to the Minnow place once a day and feed the poor thing. That’s why there’s clean water in a dish and a bowl half full with the food Clive kept in a garbage can out back. Just like I thought, the dog smells worse than wet wool and brambles have worked themselves into his chocolatey fur. Below his eyes, there’s fudgey trails. “Remember me? I was the one that used to play checkers every Wednesday afternoon with your master.”

I peer through one of the front windows of the house. Clive wasn’t the best housekeeper, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen his place. The parlor looks like General Sherman marched through. Sofa cushions are split open and lying catawampus on the floor. The oak mantel above his river rock fireplace has been swept clean. Maybe some burglars got in here, knocked him on his head, drug him to the creek, and rifled through his stuff. If that’s what happened, they weren’t real professional. The pipe rack is still on the end table next to his favorite chair. Clive told me a bunch of times, “Keep your germy hands off my white pipes. They’re from Germany. They’re worth something.”

Or maybe it wasn’t burglars at all.

Sheriff Nash told Papa out on the porch this afternoon that he thought our neighbor might’ve been murdered. It was probably the sheriff and his deputy, Homer Willis, who messed up the place looking for clues. But who’d want to kill Mr. Minnow? He was practically an antique. Doesn’t seem like anybody’d go to the trouble to do away with someone who the Grim Reaper already had on his folks-to-visit-next list. Clive didn’t have any family that I know of, (except for Ivory) or a lady friend (no one but Jesus of Nazareth could be that charitable), so his death could not have been the result of what is known in legal circles as a “crime of passion,” which means that you’ve got to love somebody a whole lot in order to murder them.

Ivory hasn’t moved from his post. He’s watching me in that same distrustful way Clive did.

“Quit lookin’ at me like that,” I say. “He told me I could have the ring. You heard him.”

The front door has a handwritten KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF THE ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY SHERIFF sign posted, but it’s unlocked, and my curiosity is getting the better of me.

Stepping over the threshold and into his parlor, I think,
This is a dead man’s house.
It feels different from just empty. It’s like all his belongings know that Clive is never coming back and they’re in mourning, too. The plants he had near the front window are limp. Everything that should be standing upright isn’t. The floor lamp is living up to its name. Lightbulb bits are scattered around its crushed shade. Clive liked to read science fiction books and they’ve been pulled out of the bookcase. The screen of his fancy colored television set has been smashed in with a fireplace poker that’s still stuck inside.

Last summer, Clive must’ve found something real rare because he got flamboyant. Ordered this nineteen-inch colored television set out of the Sears Roebuck catalog and a fancier camera with a long lens to take better sky pictures with. I was over here the day his new and improved detector and camera got delivered.

“All the bells and whistles,” he said, thrilled.

Of course, I was happy for him, but also concerned. I knew before Mama vanished that she’d been slipping him some of her household money because he was having a hard time paying his bills. So I pointed down to the empty delivery boxes and told Clive, “Don’t you think ya might’ve gone a bit overboard?” which, in hindsight, might’ve been a poor choice of words, considering his Coast Guard experience.

He got very wound up and told me back, “Don’t worry about me, little girl. I got what you’d call a long-term investment,” and then he ran off into the woods hither-nither and I didn’t see him for a few days after that.

I hop over the mess of pictures carpeting his living room floor. Whoever was in here has also upended the old sea chest where Clive kept his photo collection. There must be a thousand or more pictures. Mostly of the sky, but there are ones of Ivory and some of his metal-detecting finds and trees and dirt.

What I’ve come for, besides Ivory, is in the starfish box that’s lying untouched next to his special chair where he smoked his pipes. Clive got the box from the Far East on his travels. “The Chinese are very tricky and inscrutable. They love puzzles and hidden drawers,” he told me. He’d always turn his back to keep me from seeing how the box secretly opened, but there’s a mirror above his fireplace and I could see him just fine.

I fell deeply in love with the ring the morning Clive discovered it under a birch tree with his metal-detecting device. I begged him for it and kept asking every time we played checkers, “Please?” but each and every time he told me, “The day you get the ring will be over my dead body.”

So there you go.

The drawer on the side of the box that you can’t see unless you know it’s there pops open to reveal the mother-of-pearl sitting prettily on red velvet like it’s been waiting for me. Just for a second I have the most fanciful thought. What if the reason Clive was so adamant about me not having this ring was because he was intending to give it to Gramma Ruth Love? Wouldn’t that be something? I think he had a fat crush on her. He gave himself a spit and polish on the days he knew she was coming for a pie visit.

When Clive was alive, being suspicious like he was, he wasn’t that big on letting me see too much of the house. I want to look around now that I got the chance. I leave the parlor and go around the corner to the bathroom door, which is shut. The doorknob sticks, but when I finally jiggle it loose, I’m knocked backwards by the odor.

From the look of things, the sheriff is wrong (big surprise) about Clive getting murdered. He’d been complaining about stomachaches off and on, but I didn’t take that hypochondriacting seriously. I guess I should’ve because it looks like a real sickness is what did him in. Probably influenza. There’s a bad one going around. Old upchuck covers the toilet, the sink, and the green tiled walls. This room also doubled as Clive’s darkroom and his expensive developing equipment is right where he left it, untouched by his retching. The last photographs he took are hanging from the crooked shower rod, held in place by red plastic clothespins. There’s one of me and that’s the most upsetting part of all. Clive really did like me. Sometimes he called me “Peaches.” And he gave me the
Lost in Space
lunch box after he found it in a ditch by the road.

“Mercy,” I say, moving into the kitchen. The cupboard doors are flung open and what was inside is now on the outside. Dented cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, Clive’s absolute favorite, and a couple of jars of Kraft pimento cheese because sometimes he’d make me a sandwich when we’d play checkers, are lying on the tile next to a bunch of other food items and a whole family of dead mice. Their rotting bodies are part of the real bad stink. The rest of the putrid smell is coming from the overflowing trash can.

The house shutters have begun rattling. The windows, too. It usually takes time for a storm to climb over the mountains and settle into the valley, but every once in a while, one can surprise you like this. I get jumpy around lightning, so I hurry back out to the porch, shut the door of the house, and get Ivory by the collar. “C’mon, ol’ boy. We gotta get home. Something nasty is comin’ our way.”

C
hapter Eighteen

B
ranches are beating against the four-paned window. Our house has gone deep black, which always happens when the wind comes up this fierce. We lose our power. Lou tells Woody and me that it’s a ghost playing a trick on us. I half believe her, because Mr. Cole has tried to fix whatever is wrong in the fuse box time and time again with no luck. I’ve lit a couple of stubby candles, let the wax drip onto the porcelain sink and stuck them.