Nightwoods (12 page)

Bud ghosted around, learning the terrain. Staying careful all the time to leave things undisturbed, invisibility being a great advantage, at least for now. But, in time, he got itchy. Eventually, he couldn’t help himself. He went to the back porch and found a red can of kerosene. He took the precious cheerleader uniform from the drawer and carried it to the fireplace. Careful not to overdo, he drizzled it no more than taking a piss, then returned the can to its place. One match, and the uniform blazed. At some point, Bud stepped onto the hearth and stomped the fire out, careful to leave a few red-and-black scraps, a perfect spooky calling card. People start doing all kinds of interesting things when they’re scared.

CHAPTER
  10

—H
OW MANY ACRES?
Stubblefield said.

After hearing the gloomy accounting of his new debt, which made the power pole in Mississippi look like nothing, it was the only question he could think to ask that might result in a happy answer

—In toto? the lawyer said.

—Yeah. One big pile of toto.

The lawyer, a bald buddy of his grandfather’s, gazed at Stubblefield as if some glum preconception had been confirmed. The lawyer adjusted his many papers, making new shapes of them on the green blotter covering most of his desktop. He wore a puckered seersucker suit, blue and white stripes. A square-bottom knit navy tie two fingers wide fixed tight to his wash-and-wear shirt with a gold clasp displaying the geared wheel of the Rotary club. His face was nothing but sags and wrinkles and brown patches, but up top, the skin stretched tight and shiny, and caught the reflection of the slowly turning ceiling fan. Stubblefield couldn’t take his eyes off the shapes of the fan blades circling the tanned pate like an outward expression of thinking. Or a little boy’s beanie with the propeller spinning.

The lawyer licked his thumb and paged through the stacks. He uncapped a tortoiseshell pen and made notes on a yellow tablet as he went, columns of numbers in a style of handwriting long obsolete. Big loops and whorls in blue ink flowing from the split gold nib. He was precise to the point of annoyance. All manner of fractions down to thirty-seconds.

Whereas Stubblefield always kept to whole numbers and rounded up and hoped for the best. Fifteen, Stubblefield thought. Or sixteen. Somewhere in there. It was just a flying fuck of a guess, but the riverside fields were good-sized.

The diddling with numbers went on so long Stubblefield asked for a magazine, and got another glum look.

But eventually, the lawyer said, Fifteen hundred fifty-six and seven-eighths, on the nose. He held his hands out flat, palms down, and then slowly spread them apart. A vestigial gesture. Some gambler move meant to indicate that the deal was unquestionably clean. Riverboat cardsharps in Mark Twain days spread their hands in such a manner, was Stubblefield’s take.

—A lot of rich bottomland, the lawyer said. And there’s the lakefront property and the farm. Pretty remote, though, and just thirty-nine and a quarter. Sad about the house and its contents.

—Uninsured, I’d bet, Stubblefield said.

—Yep. Too bad. Hate to see the historic structures go down. Our collective past, shallow though it is. Old wiring or lightning, one, got it. But what you do is divide that parcel for vacation building lots. It’s called progress.

—I thought progress meant things getting better, Stubblefield said.

The lawyer made a fluttery motion in front of his face with his right hand like shooing gnats. He said, There’s also the Lodge and the Roadhouse. But the thing to get in mind is that the taxes are your most pressing matter.

—Sixteen hundred acres is not nothing.

—No. Nobody said it was. And because it’s not nothing, the county has been running a tab for longer than usual.

Stubblefield might have raised an eyebrow a sixteenth, or a mouth corner. Some slightest twitch interpretable as smugness concerning his new holdings.

The lawyer paused and lifted one knobby-jointed forefinger to indicate that he was thinking. Then he said, That last statement of mine calls for revision. It could lead to a misinterpretation of how things stand around here. The tab that’s been left running is entirely because your grandfather was liked by a great number of people. Liked a great deal. If he owned one acre, we’d all be acting about the same. But now he’s dead, and you’re the one with his name attached to this pile of deeds. You’re nearly unknown. Nobody feels any responsibility toward you. The people in the courthouse are working themselves up to take as much as they can. And they might succeed in getting everything. So, my point is, we need to sell something to pay the taxes. Soon. Three or four months, outside. The Roadhouse might entirely cover it, and we’d be better off shut of it. It’s a mess waiting to fall on us.

—It’s the only thing bringing in any money.

—Selling the Lodge won’t nearly cover the taxes. But it might buy us some time. Go look. Your grandfather has a hermit spinster he liked an awful lot living there as caretaker. But the place is getting in bad shape. About all she can do is call me when something is nearly coming apart, and I send a man up. Out of my own pocket, lately, which we can talk about later. And go look at the Roadhouse too. Then we’ll sell something and get the taxes off our backs. After that, we line up five-year ag leases on the big bottomland tracts along the river.

—Ag?

—Corn, soybeans, tomatoes. Doesn’t matter to us what they try to grow as long as the checks clear. This goes like I think it will, there’ll be a drop of our tomatoes in the ketchup we pour on our hot dogs two or three years from now.

—You put ketchup on hot dogs? Stubblefield asked.

—I more assumed you might. The point is, I tried to get your grandfather to do this for the past five years, but he was tired of thinking about his land. He let it lie fallow. There’s jack pine growing on some of it. Goddamn Chinese trees of heaven twenty feet tall. It hurts my sense of management every time I drive down the valley. For better or worse, it’s all yours now. Decide on something. There’s not but about two ways to go right now.

—What’s this going to cost me?

—Maybe I should have been more clear, the lawyer said. You’ll be making money.

—Your part, I’m talking about.

—It’s your land, but you don’t know what to do with it. So, probably I’m a fool not to say fifty-fifty. I’ll go twenty-five, and don’t insult me by coming back with fifteen.

—What do you do for your part? Stubblefield said.

—Nearly everything but own the land. All major decisions to pass through for your agreement, of course.

—Well, Stubblefield said. I’ll have to think about it. I might just sell out and be done with it. Move on down the line.

—You’ll get low dollar if you want to do it fast.

—Goes without saying.

Stubblefield stood and was at the door on his way out when the lawyer said, You don’t even remember me, do you?

Stubblefield turned and looked more closely, but nothing registered.

The lawyer said, Go way back. Fishing in your grandfather’s boat. You were a snotty kid. The bass were biting and we were going to have a fisherman’s dinner of Vienna sausage and saltines and RC Cola and then keep casting. But you wouldn’t eat that food and got fussy. Nothing would do but your grandfather had to go in to the dock and get hot dogs and french fries and shit from the cafe to suit you. And when we got back out on the water, the fish were gone. So, standing here looking at you, all grown up, the question I ask is simple. In the long run, how different is a goddamn hot dog from a Vienna sausage?

Stubblefield pondered his younger self. Sorry? he said.

REACQUAINTING HIMSELF WITH
the landscape after years of absence. That’s how Stubblefield justified spending a stretch of afternoons driving and thinking and being confused every time he cast his thoughts more than a day into the future. Checking out the two properties would have to wait. Summer lay heavy, every cove and ridgeline claiming its own particular green world for only a few weeks before the first frost burned everything up.

September was low season, but Stubblefield tried not to get sucked into that kind of thinking. Low, high. Though it did mean a good rate on the garage apartment he had rented in town. He had never been here this time of year. Back then, he’d had to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became its own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together. Now, Stubblefield suspected, September might become his favorite month, if he drove enough and paid attention.

He found that the steep country remained beautiful and sometimes hard to travel even in these latter days, and he also regained the old feeling that life could be enlarged by burning a few gallons of twenty-cent gas as an offering to the mountains. A spiritual transaction, like the Sioux with their tobacco, or like his own ancestors who’d had a hard time letting go of the deep idea that particular landforms and plants and animals and weather were sufficient within themselves, leaving no great need to affiliate with larger outside abstractions.

One favorite route went with the flow of the river down the dim gorge, sunlit only at midday, the twists of the road like swirling toward a drain somewhere ahead. Then later, an exhilarating tire-squealing race up the switchbacks of the Jorre Gap, toward the clear thin light of the upper altitudes where dark balsams grew. One afternoon, he drove the dirt road all the way up to the fire tower on Juala Bald. He had gotten the impression as a boy that legendary Indian things involving giant flying lizards or spear-fingered monsters happened up there. Now illicit lovers drove the winding dirt road for trysts in the midnight hour, at least that was the story he’d heard at the barbershop. But, then, to hear the barbershop loafers tell it, lovers went all kinds of places. Around the lake, down the gorge, along the river. The complex mountain landscape, with all its nooks, offered infinite possibilities for romance. And yet, Stubblefield had nothing of the sort in his life, except listening over and over to his scratchy copy of
Kind of Blue
and getting sad. Love, at least sustaining it, had not been his best talent. His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.

At the tower, he climbed the winding open metal stairs to the tiny high room and knocked on the door. The sleepy-looking ranger seemed less than happy to have a visitor, but he opened up. Stubblefield stood breathless. Windows three-sixty, revealing dizzying vistas, green valleys thousands of feet below, blue mountains circling farther and farther until they faded into sky.

The ranger, hardly older than Stubblefield, behaved not at all lonesome and talky but like he’d been interrupted on a busy afternoon, though the entire horizon appeared free of smoke plumes. His hair lay lopsided on his head, mashed flat on the left and sticking out in greasy points on the right. Sort of a dirty-sheet smell to the place, and a skinned-over bowl of cold tomato soup on the table. Huge black binoculars fixed to a tripod, a long desk below one bank of windows, covered with many pale green topographic rectangles and scattered pages of notebook paper dense with tiny pencil scribble. Barely visible atop a peak in the distance, another tower. The radio crackled and the far ranger started talking about weather, a change coming. The faint voice said, We get a week of rain, maybe we can get off these damn knobs for a few days.

Stubblefield looked down toward the town and the lake. He held his hand at arm’s length from his face, and it nearly covered them both. Everything else was mountains and coves and valley, already shifting away from the highest pitch of summer green. Where would the big ag-lease fields and the Lodge and the Roadhouse be down there? The round black circle of the burnt farmhouse?

Thinking that surveying his new holdings from such a distance would be clarifying, Stubblefield said, Mind if I take a look through the binoculars?

—Sorry, no can do. Sensitive instrument.

The ranger looked at his watch. Impatient, like time was pressing.

—Big date? Stubblefield asked.

The ranger said, Maybe you could ease on out about now.

——

FOR A WHILE ON THOSE
late-summer drives, Stubblefield began believing he had fallen into an adventure. Near the top of Jorre Gap stood a lone log cabin, a tourist shop selling folkloric products, according to a hand-lettered sign by the road. Local honey, handmade pottery, rabbit-tobacco door wreaths, quilts, arrowheads. But the shop was closed. It had either failed or had taken a recuperative pause after Labor Day and was waiting to reopen early in October, when the leaf lookers drove up from the flatlands. Passing the tourist shop, he noticed a face behind the window, indistinct in the shallow light. Stubblefield’s initial reaction was to declare it a girl’s face, and possibly a pretty one. As he switchbacked from gap to valley, he wondered why his first thought was to distinguish man from woman, pretty from not pretty? Probably because he was so damn lonely and because the schematic of our fool brains inclines us that way. Always looking for any opportunity to cast our sad little package of hope into a future we won’t inhabit.

Stubblefield soon abandoned all other beautiful routes in order to drive over the gap every day. He found that unless the light was too faint or too bright, the girl was always there. Then he began to wave as he passed, and thought he saw a response. He started detecting a kind of agitated air about the woman. Not that she thrashed about or anything, but she seemed frazzled and distraught.

Stubblefield found himself constructing a story. A beautiful but emotionally disturbed young woman locked away in the cabin by day while her family went about the necessary business of life, jobs, and all that kind of crap Stubblefield had so far mostly avoided. But not a very serious disturbance, just a romantic manic-depression that might be lightened by Stubblefield’s presence. He imagined her neglect and dishevelment represented, movie-like, by a stray strand of hair, a two-fingered smudge on one otherwise perfect pale cheek. She probably sat all day in a rocker glooming out onto the infrequently traveled mountain road. His passing and waving would be a thing anticipated and remarked upon. He imagined her only company a radio tuned all day to the local station, the only one available until the sun set and the world blossomed outward. Midmorning, the
Mortuary of the Airwaves
, with the names of the deceased and their survivors announced over plodding organ music that made death sound like something with big slow feet. Midafternoon,
Tell It and Sell It
, with the hesitant voices of callers seeking buyers for used mattresses and dinettes and forlorn puppies. In between, nothing but country songs with tales of burning love and faded love and the longevity of yearning long past any possibility of fulfillment.