Nightwoods (11 page)

It started so quickly and ended so quickly. He had not removed any of his clothing, so all he did was stand up and zip and apologize and leave. His check for the month’s telephone service lay faceup on the table. Three dollars and sixteen cents. Also a gold Saint Christopher’s medallion on a gold chain.

Funny thing. Soon after Mr. Stewart left, the clapper on the bell started striking, announcing a call coming in. Luce stood up from the cot and pulled her skirt down. She couldn’t think. Her mind felt distant from her body, and her body felt distant from everything in the world. The cigarette butt still smoked on the wood floor, and she crushed it out with the toe of her shoe on the way to the switchboard. She put the headset on and jacked in the plug and said, Number, please?

It wasn’t until after midnight that it came to her. She was sitting there in the chair on a damp place doing her job just because a bell rang. Luce stood up and took off her headset and walked out, leaving the door standing open. Didn’t call her backup girl. Luce wasn’t really premeditating much at the moment. Mainly, she figured, phones dead for one night, so what?

And normally, she would have been right. Except this night the high school burned down, and there was suddenly all kinds of need for people to make phone calls. Switchboard all lit up. And true, most of it was still useless chatter at three in the morning because sirens screamed and the sky was yellow with flames. But one call in particular was an actual urgent emergency message to the closest larger town, requesting a ladder truck and a crew of firemen to help out. The school became a heap of scorched brick fallen in on itself, and the oiled oak floorboards and wall laths and beams and joists converted to ash and charcoal. The pile smoked for weeks.

Naturally, Luce’s name became mud, regardless of whether the truck and crew would have arrived in time to make a difference or not. Small towns will go a long mile to take care of their own, but there’s a bright line you dare not cross, and Luce found herself on the far side of it. She might as well have left all the black plugs and silver sockets as they were and gone straight to the school with a gas can and a book of matches instead of walking down the empty street to her room and showering in the dingy bathroom used also by a waitress at the diner and a counter girl at the drugstore fountain. Then trying to sleep, and wondering what to do about Mr. Stewart. Finally falling hard asleep with the radio on, not even hearing the sirens.

Luce never went back to work. For two days, she kept trying to tell herself that if Mr. Stewart had been a stranger instead of her teacher, she might have reacted differently. Maybe in that moment of shock, she hadn’t fought hard enough. But no matter how she tried to revise the moment so as to heap the blame on herself so she wouldn’t have to try to make Mr. Stewart pay, she kept circling back around to the truth.

Also, she couldn’t help replaying things she’d never forget. Him licking up her neck and biting her ear. And after he was done and gone, touching her lobe and looking at the drop of blood on her finger, black in the dim light. Also how, back in school, when he waved his hands to make a point, the skin of Mr. Stewart’s fingers, and the nails too, were scurfed chalky white from the chemicals he handled all day for experiments. Thinking how, from now on, it would be a fact that those fingers had been in her.

She walked up to the Sheriff’s Department. Sat in the chair opposite Lit’s metal desk and told her story, looking him in the eye the whole time.

Lit started trying to act a little fatherly, but Luce would have none of it. She said, We pass each other on Main Street and barely speak. I saw you last week outside the post office, and we sort of nodded to each other, like to an acquaintance. We never were close, not before or after Lola took off. Let’s do business and let it go at that.

Lit said, Well, if that’s the way you want it, then I’ll tell you that this sort of charge is hard to make stick. You say one thing, he’ll say something else.

—Of course he will.

—You might not know it, but the last graveyard-shift girl, the one that only stayed here a few months, was sort of an amateur whore. Mainly, when her rent was coming due.

—So what?

—It doesn’t help, is what.

Lit described how it worked. Some man hears something in the pool hall or barbershop or gas station, puts off paying his phone bill until late. Knocks on the door and steps inside. Says something smooth, like, I been a-thinking about you. Gives the girl the monthly payment, plus a gift. An item of jewelry or something else easy to hock. She didn’t take cash, just gifts. Fifteen minutes later he walks out the door to the sidewalk with an attitude like Adam cast out of paradise.

—So what? Luce said.

—I’m talking about expectations. Maybe there was a misunderstanding of some kind, Lit said.

—I guess he misunderstood that I was the same kind of whore as the last night girl. But I don’t see how that changes anything.

—Hard to convict. One says one thing and the other something else. Might help some if this was the first time.

—First time I got raped? Luce said.

—That wasn’t my point.

—I got your point.

—I was thinking about a jury. It can matter an awful lot to them, especially if a defense lawyer lays things out real vivid.

—Good God.

—I’m just saying, it’s a hard case.

—I guess it is, unless criminals generally confess right off. But is there anybody in Central Prison serving time for rape?

—White ones?

—Yes.

—A damn few, Lit said.

—Maybe one or two, though?

—You said you want business, but I can’t leave it at that. I’m saying, it won’t be easy on you if it goes to court. A little shit of a lawyer can do to you in a couple of hours what you won’t let go of for the rest of your life. People get all kinds of crazy ideas, and facts don’t matter much. Stewart’s got a place in this town. He wears a coat and tie to work, and you’re a nightbird living in a single room with a bath down the hall.

On her way out the door, Luce said, You go straight to hell.

A week later, her first evening as caretaker of the Lodge, Luce sat on the porch after a supper of light bread and yellow cheese. Paint flaked off the stair rails and pickets in dry petals, the bare wood weathered and bleached, and the grain raised. Rocking chairs equally weathered and skeletal, with sunken bottoms of twisted kraft paper woven in an intricate angular pattern by somebody now likely dead. What she had wanted was grilled cheese, but the whole tedious matter of lighting a fire in the cook stove for just a sandwich set harsh priorities.

The day was slowly going dark and chilly. Luce wrapped a quilt around her shoulders and poured amber liquor from an important-looking bottle into a little stemmed crystal glass. Old Stubblefield had told her to use whatever she wanted, and she had found the bottle that afternoon as she’d searched through every room, every closet and corner, under every bedstead. Hours of searching. She hadn’t wanted to go to bed imagining hidden places and getting herself all worked up. Down in the basement, back in a corner tangled with busted-out cane-bottomed dining chairs, she had found stacks of wooden crates, each holding dusty bottles of Scotch or red wine from France.

Luce rocked and looked across the water toward town, judging the separation to be about right. A mile by one measure, an hour by another. She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.

That first evening, as she continued to do for so many of the next thousand, Luce sat through all the degrees of sunset. Venus and the crescent moon and some other planet all stacked and falling through an indigo sky, the three spaced equally down a bowed path toward a jagged line of black ridges. Distant sreetlights in town came on, tiny and yellow, reflecting in streaks across the still water. Long past dark, Luce believed she had watched the seasons collapse, one into the ashes of another. To the east, winter star patterns rose, coming back around again. Orion chasing the Seven Sisters, old reminders of an abandoned order like a deep indelible pattern in the ground. An Indian trail, a long path. She went inside, reluctant, feeling eluded by so much.

CHAPTER
  9

I
N DIM BROWN LIGHT
, an old man scrabbled in a wooden bin, searching for the shiny two-cent nut that would thread onto his rusty bolt. Two boys in Keds and Wranglers studied red-and-white boxes of bicycle tubes for the correct size to fix their flats and give them their freedom back. Along with nails and brads and staples, the space behind the narrow storefront was crammed with lawn mowers, shotguns and rifles, a glass-fronted case of pocketknives, latigo dog collars, ripsaws and keyhole saws and bow saws, two-man crosscut saws so long they hung from pegs near the ceiling almost to the floor. Wooden spirit levels six feet long with silver bubbles floating in mystery green liquid. Many sizes of awls and planes and adzes and chisels. Wonderful adjustable wrenches in several sizes with knurled spirals to twiddle back and forth endlessly, imagining all the variety of nuts they were capable of turning. Brute murderous monkey wrenches two feet long with jagged teeth in their jaws. Sledgehammers and double-bit axes. A general odor of metal and oil, and also some funky underlying man smell that sparked an unwelcome prison memory for Bud.

His shopping trip was not for a little poke of finishing nails or a ball-peen hammer. He’d come to lay down an alibi. So he picked up a cheap rod and reel and the biggest, gaudiest bass lure, for purely artistic reasons. As an afterthought, a filet knife because of the thin, elegant blade.

At the register, Bud shouted, Three fucking dollars for this fucking piece-of-shit Zebco?

Heads turned.

He tried to pay with a hundred, which the cashier couldn’t possibly break. He grumbled some more and finally pulled out a fist of ones and walked out to the car with no doubt that everybody in the store would remember him outfitting for a fishing trip.

Then, the lengthy scenic drive around the lake. Because, after much patience and discretion, he’d finally picked up a whiff of gossip about a couple of new kids with some woman that had to be Lily’s sister, living in an old-time lodge. Some place with a leftover Cherokee name.

IT WAS THAT DAY
at the very tail end of August when the sun angled a degree lower and the quality of light made people begin saying, Fall’s about here. Bud spent a half hour casting with his plastic Zebco, thrashing his big lure against the water, two shades bluer than the sky, and looking over his shoulder at the bark-shingled shake-roofed hulk. Like a bunch of dead trees decided on their own to shape themselves into a building.

What he kept on seeing was nobody. So the plan from that point was simple. Knock on the door, Zebco drooping at his side. No way Lily’s sister could know him. If she answered, ask if she minded him fishing in the lake below the Lodge. Or, better yet, seek advice on bait. For bass, are you better off with worms or bread balls? Some bullshit story. It didn’t really matter. Just riff along in the moment and leave. Important thing was, if nobody was home, go treasure hunting.

So, two polite knuckle taps at the screen door. Rod in hand, Bud grinned through the distorting veil. The bottom half bulged outward from kids pushing against it to open the door. Bright outside and dark inside. Bud had his face close, toking on a Lucky. Smoke clouding his face and filtering in through the screen. He tapped again. Nothing.

Bud grasped the handle and rattled the door. Hook in eyelet. No problem. The thin springy blade of his new filet knife fit perfectly into the wide crack between the stile and frame. He lifted the hook and opened the door enough to stick his head in, drawing more of his smoke with him.

Around his cigarette he said, Hey?

Still nothing, so he stood inside the door and waited, listening for the slightest movement. Hearing nothing, though, other than the silence of an unoccupied building.

He started creeping the lobby, and immediately it became clear that the Lodge enclosed a lot of space. And that was just the first floor. So, needle in a haystack when it came to half-inch bundles of hundreds. And what a bizarre place to live. Like a museum nobody wants to visit. Evidently, they all slept in the lobby. Single beds reminiscent of jail cots with faded quilts, arrayed near a monumental stone fireplace.

Ears cocked, constantly checking out the windows, Bud looked in the obvious places. Beneath a thin layer of powder in the Ivory box and the oats in the Quaker drum, behind the coal furnace and inside the antique refrigerator with the wheel of coils on top. Hoping to smell fresh cash, he sniffed the heat registers and got only cinders and mildew down in the ducts. He felt all over the fireplace for loose stones and stuck his hand up the flue to check the smoke shelf for bundles of money.

Bud looked for the personal and found a bureau, its drawers full of stuff that must have been the sister’s. Boring everyday clothes. Also a disappointing underwear drawer. Not even one item deserving the term
lingerie
. In the bottom drawer, carefully folded and mothballed, a red-and-black cheerleader outfit from back when the pleated skirts fell almost to the ankles. Yet when the girls twirled, what splendid glimpses.

He considered the dizzying possibility that his money had been split up, hidden in a dozen places. Such as what? A fat book with the center pages cut into a perfect bill shape with a razor? Bud riffled through the Webster’s. Not there. Roll bills into a tight fat cylinder and stuff it up the ass of a baby doll? He checked the children’s few things, but apparently these two hadn’t become baby-doll children. So, where was his goddamn money? No way could he imagine Lily being clever and devious.