Under the Mercy Trees (16 page)

Before Leon could see her Liza snuck back down the hall and outside and waited for him on the porch. When he came out, she grabbed the camera strap with one hand and twisted off the lens cap with the other. She had some idea of ripping the film out, if she could figure out which catch to press to expose it, but Leon grabbed her wrist, wrenching it, until her breath caught with pain.

“It
ain't your business
.
”
He thrust her away, then whistled. The dog under the school scrabbled out to meet him, arthritic hip bones grinding, a pencil-size erection obscenely pink.

“Not you, too,” Leon said to the dog with disgust. “Nothing but perverts around here.” He and the mutt headed down the deer path, into the woods. Without looking back at Liza he called, “I'll send you that graduation picture when I get the roll developed.”

Liza shoved Leon's lens cap into her skirt pocket and kneaded her bruised wrist. It made her sick to think of her image trapped in Leon's camera on the same roll of film as the photographs he was using to blackmail Mr. Samuels. She ran back into the school.

Mr. Samuels squatted on the classroom floor, trying to gather up the papers Leon had scattered. She knelt beside him. “Mr. Samuels, don't let Leon Owenby bully you. I'll tell Daddy. He'll talk to the school board.”

Mr. Samuels's face was red now, with embarrassment and fear. She reached her hand out, to let him know she didn't think less of him, but he moved away. “There's nothing anyone can do.” He stood up, knees cracking, and looked around the room. He grabbed a wooden apple crate that held supplies, dumped it out on the floor, opened his desk drawers, and began throwing personal items into the crate. His framed college diploma, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, the arrowhead he'd found the day of the first class hike, all tossed now like ballast.

“You can't just give in,” she said.

He stopped. “Oh, Liza. You don't understand.” He reached into the crate and handed her the arrowhead. Sun from the classroom window struck it, defining every facet. He drew in a long, tight breath. “You're going to be a fine teacher. Remember my teaching, not my skulking away.” He turned back to his packing.

She stared at him for a moment, then headed for her car and roared down the mountain until she had to brake, hard, behind a slow-moving chicken truck. She passed it on a curve, scaring the driver. The truck swerved toward the ditch, feathers flying. She slowed down in town, mindful that if she didn't, the neighbors would report her to Aunt Fran. When she got home she left the car door hanging open and ran around the side of the house to her father's infirmary, bursting in just as he was walking a woman and her sobbing little boy out to the waiting room.

“That hurt!” the child shouted through his tears.

“I know, son, but the shot hurts less than smallpox.” Her father reached into the candy bowl he kept on a windowsill and handed the little boy a sucker.

Liza opened the door for the woman to get them to leave faster. “Do you have any other patients, Daddy?” she asked once they were gone.

“No, I'm closing up for lunch.”

Liza locked the door.

“What's the matter, honey?”

She told him. If she expected shock, she didn't get it. A look of knowing, of pieces fitting together, settled on her father's face. “Ah. I see.”

“You have to do something, Daddy.”

“What can I do?”

“Talk to the school superintendent. Mr. Samuels is the best teacher this county has ever had. Or the police. Isn't blackmail illegal?”

“Honey, talking to anybody would ruin him. Men like Mr. Samuels, they have to be careful.”

“Men like Mr. Samuels. Why does it matter, Daddy?”

He rubbed his face. “I don't know, but it does.”

“You're going to let Leon Owenby get away with this?”

“All I can do is offer Mr. Samuels a good reference and tell everybody he left for personal reasons.”

It was the first and only time her father let her down. She unlocked the infirmary door and stormed out.

“I'll phone him right now, Liza,” he called. The door slammed behind her, cutting him off.

She walked back to her car, parked crooked in the yard, its open driver's-side door hanging like the broken wing of a big blue bird. She got in and drove. Stupid town. Stupid mountain, stupid road, stupid people on the road. Something skidded across the front seat. Leon's lens cap had fallen out of her pocket. She grabbed it with her right hand and squeezed until it dug into her skin. At Balsam Gap, a railroad trestle ran parallel to the road, the ground under it dropping away to bottomless gully. She parked on the shoulder and got out. The train tracks cast a short shadow on the steep rocks descending below. Behind the railroad bridge, the Blue Ridge Mountains rolled on top of one another. She fingered the lens cap. As the one o'clock Norfolk Southern blew its first warning whistle miles away, she hurled the lens cap as hard as she could into the ravine.

She never told Martin. The Martin she knew then was a fighter and would have gone berserk. She wondered sometimes whether Martin had had an inkling back then about Mr. Samuels's sexual orientation—if he might have sensed something in the teacher before he recognized it in himself—but there was no point in dredging up Mr. Samuels now.

She never saw the photograph Leon took of her and Martin and didn't know if Leon had ever developed it. In the days following Leon's disappearance, Liza had tried to support the Owenby family, bringing casseroles and standing with the Owenby women, Eugenia always moving, Bertie so different now from the girl she had been at their graduation, when Leon dazzled her with the camera. As Eugenia and Bertie worried out loud about what had happened to Leon, Liza kept a studied, sympathetic look on her face, fighting the shrieks of the wild girl inside. “Leon Owenby, it serves you right!”

22

Martin

Martin scheduled the interview with the dean for eleven o'clock in the morning, late enough to get over any hangover he happened to have and early enough that he wouldn't yet be craving his next drink. He got ready in Hodge's basement apartment, putting on his one wrinkled suit, which he had never taken out of his suitcase after the last trip to North Carolina. When Hodge and his wife, Claudie, showed him the apartment after picking him up from the airport, they apologized for its small size, but Martin liked it. It was one long room, with a screen separating the bedroom area from the kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom was near the entrance.

Claudie, a sweet, plump little woman with her gray hair cut in a pageboy, had opened the bathroom door to show it to him. “Hodge did it himself. It used to be a closet.”

Martin peeked past her. The toilet had handicap bars. Good to know that if he got really drunk, he could still hoist himself off the can. “Great.” He walked into the room to see the rest of the space. The apartment smelled like a basement, but they had brightened it up by painting the dark paneling white and putting in rose-colored carpeting. The bed was a hospital bed.

“Sorry about the bed,” Hodge said.

Martin lay down on it and tried the controls. Head up, feet down. Head down, feet up. It entertained him for a few minutes, then made him uncomfortable. “I feel like I should be wearing an adult diaper.” He returned the bed to its flat position.

“We'll see if we can't find a regular bed somewhere for you,” Hodge said.

“No, no need. This will do nicely.” Martin sat up. Really, it would do. The room was almost as big as his entire apartment in New York, bigger when you considered it wasn't crowded with Dennis's antiques. He stood and kissed Claudie on the cheek. “You two are the best. Thank you.”

Hodge and Claudie couldn't take him to his interview because they had to work, but James had the day off and volunteered to drive him. James picked him up a little before eleven and drove him to the community college, silently handing him an extra coffee from the Bojangles' drive-through. James was quiet, his profile tired. Looking at the hearing aid in his brother's ear, Martin got the bizarre idea that James was listening for something. Martin sipped the scalding coffee, careful not to spill it down his front.

The buildings on the community college campus formed a long, low brick quad, with interstate highway on one side and the county's only four-lane commercial strip on the other. People crawled out of the coves to shop at the Kmart and eat at the chain restaurants. James parked in a visitor's space in front of the administration building. “I'll wait,” he said. Martin set his coffee cup in a drink holder and got out.

The building had an underfunded institutional feel. A few surly students smoked around the entranceway, grinding their ashes into the cigarette urns. They were not the fair young people one saw on brochures for four-year colleges. Inside, in the lobby, the original architectural drawing of the college leaned on an easel. Something seemed amiss. Martin realized it was the plants, nicely water-colored onto the drawing. Any plants put in when the building was erected had died long ago. The courtyards where they were supposed to bloom were hard dirt.

He followed yellow cinder-block walls down the hall to the English department offices. The dean, Jay Daniels, came out to greet him. Jay was even more rumpled than Martin. He wouldn't look Martin in the eye, not out of shiftiness, but out of extreme shyness, or perhaps embarrassment at how much he expected Martin to do for so little money. He periodically blew air out through his cheeks, like a horse, his version of clearing his throat. The first thing Jay told Martin as he led him to his office was that he was only the acting dean, had been for two years, and that he would be relieved when they got funding to pay someone else to be a real dean.

To Martin's embarrassment, Jay was actually a bit starstruck. After they sat down in Jay's small, book-filled office, Jay rattled off the short list of Martin's published plays.

“You remember them better than I do.” Martin wasn't joking.

“I'm sorry the only classes open are freshman English,” Jay said. “It would be wonderful to have you teach our creative writing class, but unfortunately that position belongs to an older member of our faculty, who has had some pieces published in
Guideposts
. I'm afraid I can't see her surrendering it.”

“Just as well.” Martin hadn't written a creative word in years.

“You might consider teaching a creative writing class as part of our adult education program in the summer.” Jay blew air out in a whinny. “Though that pays even less than adjunct pay, depending on how many people sign up for the class.”

“We'll see,” Martin said. Who knew if he would still be here by summer.

Jay made clear that the job was Martin's if he wanted it, based on good words from Hodge and Liza and the fact that no one else had applied. He was especially impressed that Liza thought well of Martin. She sent Jay good students from the high school. Martin thought it was brave of her to put her reputation on the line for him. He would be teaching two classes, during the day, for a ridiculously small amount of money. Jay grew even more apologetic when he told Martin the sum, and made vague references to eventually changing Martin's status from adjunct to permanent. Martin couldn't think that far ahead. At least his students wouldn't be the worst ones. They would all have placed out of remedial English and actually be able to read. The textbook was already selected. He flipped through the anthology Jay handed him, interested in spite of himself. He scanned the contents page, famous short stories standard in every high school and college text in America, but which he still appreciated. “The Lottery,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Stories that had been precious to him as a young person. Martin wasn't jaded enough to make fun just because they had become cliché. There was a unit on American poetry. He told himself it wouldn't be too horrible.

Jay handed Martin a much-photocopied sheet of paper called “Instructions for Adjuncts,” which told him he had to do a syllabus and post his office hours.

“Do I have an office?” Martin said.

“Erm, no, adjuncts don't get an office, but you can hold your office hours in the faculty lounge.” Jay gave him tax-withholding forms to fill out and took his driver's license down the hall to copy.

Martin had asked for this job. He would make the best of it. He filled out the forms. When Jay came back with his driver's license, Martin shook the dean's hand and walked out of the building. James was sitting in his truck, with the engine on for heat. As Martin climbed in the passenger side, Jay ran out of the building, waving something red. “It's your faculty parking sticker,” he said, handing it to Martin. Martin thanked him and Jay went back in the building, bending over to recover his breath.

“Parking sticker,” said James. “You're going to need a vehicle.”

Martin honestly hadn't thought about it, but James was right. He couldn't rely on his family or Hodge to chauffeur him to class and back three times a week.

“I can't afford a car,” he said.

“Leon's truck still runs okay. We can go up there and get it now if you want.”

By “up there,” James meant the home place. Martin had managed to avoid it on his last visit and didn't want to go now, but James was going out of his way to help and Martin couldn't say no. “All right.”

James drove along familiar back roads, while Martin tried to suppress the trepidation he felt. James turned off onto the road that went up to their father's place. When Martin was a kid it was just dirt, but Leon had covered it with gravel. James stopped the truck in the yard, and they got out. It had been years since Martin was here. The house was falling in. Wood had shifted. One shoulder of the house shrugged higher than the other. He swallowed despair at being back. Why in the world had he returned? He hated this place. Trees pressed in on all sides, January bare, complaining in their nakedness.

“You want to go inside?” James said.

“No.”

Leon's boxy 1968 Chevy pickup truck sat forlornly under an old cherry tree. James walked over and checked the tires. Martin followed him. The truck had been parked under the tree since Leon's disappearance. A length of heavy chain rusted away in its bed, almost covered by decayed leaves and bird droppings. James felt around in the left rear tire well and pulled out a little magnetic box. He opened it and handed Martin a truck key. “Climb on in. You have to get in the passenger side. The driver's-side door don't latch.”

Martin looked and saw that the driver's door was secured with a coat hanger, to keep it from swinging open. He went around to climb in the passenger side as James directed.

“Watch out for mousetraps,” James said.

Martin stopped. “You're kidding, right?”

James shook his head. “They crawl up in the seat cushions to get out of the cold. Last time I was here I found one drowned in a Dr Pepper bottle. I threw the whole thing in the woods, but you can still smell it.”

Martin got in and pulled the heavy door shut behind him. The dead mouse smell hit him, but he had smelled worse. He scooted along the wide seat, upholstered in green leather stamped with a saloon pattern. The sun had baked cracks, then crested waves, in the green plastic dashboard. Martin hadn't driven much of anything for the past thirty years. He tried to adjust the rearview mirror, but it hung broken-necked, unable to hold its head up. He took the steering wheel and gazed out on the hood, stretching for miles in front of him.

James stood at the driver's-side window and motioned for Martin to roll the window down. Martin wrestled with the handle and managed to get the window down halfway before it stuck. “Start her up,” James said. The key in Martin's hand seemed too thin and flimsy to start such a beast. He put it in the ignition and turned. Music blared from the
AM
radio, some contemporary Christian crap, not what he would have expected from Leon. He fumbled for the volume button, but the knob had fallen off.

For some reason known only to Leon, when he bought the truck in 1968 he had had a race car motor installed. The noise was appalling. The truck strained, begging to go. Martin was glad to see that Leon had left a half tank of gas to feed it.

“Mash on the brake.” James went behind the truck to check the brake lights. “Well, the left one works, anyway.” He patted the truck like a horse flank and called out, “You're good to go.” He walked back to his own truck, leaving Martin with eight horses throbbing under him.

He took off the parking brake and put a tentative foot down on the gas. The truck surged forward, throwing him back against the seat. He imagined his ears and face flapping like a test pilot's at fifty g's. More bad music blared from the cassette deck, but he was afraid to loosen a hand from the wheel to try to turn it off. The truck surged down the mountain, throwing gravel, with Martin hanging on tight. On impulse, he yelled out the window a long “Yee-hah!” He now had a vehicle, or maybe it had him.

He drove back to the apartment. Hodge's wife, Claudie, had left a plate of sandwiches in the minifridge. He ate them all, then unpacked his suitcase. Leon's padded envelope, with their mother's ledger and the photographs in it, lay flat between two pairs of pants. Martin took it out and put it in the zippered carry-on he used as briefcase and mobile office. He had the rest of the afternoon free. He could take the ledger to show Wally Metcalf and stop by the liquor store on the way home.

He got back in Leon's truck and drove carefully to the Sheriff's Department, glad for the wide spaces in the parking lot. He could hear Wally on the phone in his office as he approached. Wally's voice slid into that good old boy joking-around drawl that Martin supposed was crucial to his success as sheriff. Wally hung up as Martin reached his office door, still chuckling about something. Martin knocked on the doorframe, and Wally motioned him in.

“Hey, Martin, I heard you were back.” Wally rose and offered his hand. His handshake was strong and practiced, with a hard squeeze at the end to let you know who was boss. He sat back down. “What can I do you for?” Wally was a busy man, but he had a way of making people feel he had time for them.

Martin reached in his briefcase and took out Leon's padded mailer, with the ledger and photos inside. “I don't think this is anything, but Leon mailed it to me about a week before he disappeared. I thought I'd better show it to you.”

“Let's see what you got there.” Wally reached for it, and Martin handed it over. Wally gently pulled the ledger out of the envelope.

“It was our mother's,” Martin said. “And there are some photos in the back. He didn't include a note.”

“Of course not.” Wally carefully flipped through the egg book. “I'm sure you've been through it. Did you find anything that might be significant?” He looked up. “To the case, I mean. I know the book is significant to you.”

Martin appreciated that. “It's all my mother's handwriting. Leon didn't add anything. I assumed the book had been destroyed long ago. The photos are in that envelope in the back.”

Wally opened the manila envelope and carefully shook the photos out onto his desk. “That your brother?”

“Yes. I don't know who the girl is.”

“Have you showed them to your family to see if they'd know?”

“Not yet. Should I?” By now, the young woman in the photos had started to look familiar, as if he'd seen her shadowy outline somewhere before. He may have simply looked at the pictures too often, but for some reason he still didn't want to show them to the family. He tried to make a joke out of it. “What if this lady is now the mayor's wife or something?”