Nightwoods (18 page)

Two turns more, and what they had been driving toward stretched in front of them out of the twisty mountain roads. An anomalous straight, longer than the reach of the headlights. Some philanthropist with a paintbrush had measured a quarter mile and swiped a messy slash of white across the pavement at beginning and end. Barely enough space left over at the end for braking before the next hard left-hand curve.

Lit stopped at the line, downshifted, and floored it. The cruiser squatted on its hind wheels and howled, laying two long trails of rubber in first and again at the upshift to second. Even chirping going into fourth, at which point the red speedometer needle quivered past a hundred. Neither of the men said anything during the run.

When they passed the second stripe, Bud said, I counted thirteen. Lit said, It was twelve.

FOGGY AND CHILLY
, midnight, they discovered a dozen high school kids drinking beer and dancing to music from a car radio, warming themselves with a roaring fire of burning truck tires on the tenth green of the golf course, the fire centered on the cup. Bud stayed in the car, waiting to observe an epic ass-kicking. But Lit walked to the fire and warmed his hands, said hello to a tall slim blond girl like he knew her. Then pulled a couple of beers out of the kids’ cooler and informed them that what they were doing was all kinds of illegal. Guessing at the charges, he’d say trespassing and vandalism, if not arson. Also public consumption and, for most of them, underage drinking. And that’s before anybody gets mouthy or breaks to run down the fairway, which would add some version of resisting arrest. Oh, what deep shit they have fallen into.

Lit asked, Does anybody know what the term
mitigating circumstances
means? Raise your hand if you think you know the answer.

Nobody said anything, and Lit said, Right this minute, it means every grey-headed golfer that ever played this hole would trade everything he has if he could swap places with you right now. So I’ll just say good night. I ought, at least, to add, tomorrow’s a school day, but what the fuck.

Lit got in the cruiser and handed Bud the second beer and rolled on.

LATER, THEY SAT BEHIND
the Roadhouse, finishing their current beers before going inside to order a couple more. Before Lit saw him coming, a big drunk with a face like one of the raw hams in the trunk had his head stuck all the way inside Lit’s open window, yelling proclamations of anger.

—You remember me? You blackjacked me, you fuck. For nothing but back-talking when you tried to arrest me for breaking and entering. All I stole was a worn-out TV.

—I didn’t
try
to arrest you, Lit said. I
did
arrest you.

—I still can’t feel my fingers sometimes. But now you ain’t got your uniform on. You’re off duty and that means you’re not different from any other citizen, you little shit. I’m gonna drag your ass out of that car and kick you all over the parking lot.

Real quick, so that it was done before Bud could take it in, Lit cranked the window up to trap the man’s neck, and then hit him in the mouth over and over, so fast Bud couldn’t count the blows. Lit rolled the window down, and the drunk’s face slid below the windowsill.

Lit shoved his door open and got out. The man rose to his feet, blood dripping off his chin, but ready to go again. He acted like he was in a boxing match and squared up for right crosses and uppercuts, old sporting shit. Like maybe a ref in a white shirt and bow tie stood at his elbow to call infractions.

Not nearly so romantic, Lit grabbed a tire iron from under the front seat and with one hard swing, parallel to the ground, ended the thing.

The man lay in the gravel, trying to coil his body around his shattered knee. Cursing Lit and God equally.

—Nobody to blame but yourself, Lit said. You didn’t have to bring that down on you, but you did. Free will’s a bitch.

Fights came with the job. Bud had witnessed a half dozen already. Some idiot with a load on starts believing he can fight the law, exactly like his Rebel great-granddaddy. Always instructive for Bud to watch the outcome.

Wet from a dunking in the lake, Lit might go one thirty-five. But wiry and high-strung for the express purpose of amazing quickness. When he went man-to-man, he worked his little keen fists in a deeply destructive fashion, probing toward a spleen that needed rupturing bad. The actions of Lit’s hands had no common internal wiring to his face, which stayed as blank as the bottom of an empty bucket. He’d be sweating all over during a fight, but his expression remained mild as Jesus in his sunbeam amid the youngster animals. Drunks and criminals could be trying to head-butt him or shove up close, nose-to-nose, spitting out vile epithets, yet the look in Lit’s eye remained as if he were peering into another green and peaceful world entirely.

CHAPTER
  6

S
TUBBLEFIELD COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS LIFE
. It felt like wiring into some science-fiction time machine or downing a new drug and being jolted back to a lost highlight of life where you’d failed badly. But now you’ve been given an unexpected second chance. This time be bolder, smarter, funnier, wiser, not a teenage fool, cramped on all sides by pride and shame and fear. Be better all around, knowing more of life and having read more books and listened to more music. Yet how to connect seventeen to the unexpected now?

Stubblefield decided to play interviewer. Out walking the children or sitting on the porch, he drew fragments of Luce’s past from her with surprising delicacy, at least surprising to him. He watched and listened closely, asked questions only up to a line beyond which he sensed she’d spook away from him. Mostly, she had to be coaxed, and then sometimes she didn’t. He felt like a Depression-era WPA writer interviewing a reticent ninety-year-old about the great flood of 1873 and, at the same time, some half-folkloric riverboat race where a boiler blew and dozens were scalded to death by the steam. Get a little bit of one story and then a little bit of the other, and never be entirely sure how much to believe of either.

WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED
why Luce had taken the job at the Lodge, she said she wanted to get far from town, and the lake was beautiful. Old Stubblefield had been kind to her and an interesting man to work for, if you could call what she did work.

And that would have ended it if Stubblefield hadn’t kept probing. When he returned to the topic, she said she took the job at a point where she was of a mind to get over thinking about hopes and fears and desires. They didn’t help a bit when it came to voyaging safely through a day. Just live every one as it came and not let people intrude on you. Shut up and hope everybody else did the same. Strive for whole uneventful weeks where the weather was about all that changed. She pointed out that weather was plenty interesting to watch as it passed over you, and it had entertained people for many thousands of years. And not just immediate weather but also the larger movements of the seasons. You had to learn how to feel the long flow and not get hung up on the day-to-day. Big swellings and recedings, upturned and downturned sweeps linked in slow rhythms built from millions of tiny parts—animal, vegetable, mineral—not just temperature and length of daylight. For example, the way a rhododendron changed throughout the year, month by month. She claimed she had observed and learned nearly a hundred such parts of the local world. She said, Imagine holding every bit of it in your head at one time, this whole place, down to what the salamanders are doing every month of the four seasons. She put the bunched tips of her fingers to each temple and said, Boom. Then spread her fingers and lifted her hands in a gesture of explosion.

WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED
about vanity—Luce’s cheerleader beauty-contest days—she was surprisingly forthcoming. Right now she was about as pretty as she cared to be, considering that being pretty drew little but trouble. She wore no makeup, ever, and went many happy days in a row without glancing in a mirror. She cut her own hair, both for economy and preference. When it grew much below her shoulders, she whacked the ends off. She said, It looks just fine that way. Not fashionable, but with an actual style, mainly from it not mattering what you think looks good right this second in the history of hairdos.

When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that’s the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn’t like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it. At which point she looked Stubblefield in the eye.

As for clothes, only two stores in town sold women’s apparel, little of which she could afford. The sewing shop—with its bolts of cascading fabric stacked one above another almost to the ceiling, its bins of translucent Butterick and Simplicity patterns folded in their tight envelopes with optimistic pastel illustrations of wasp-waisted women, its notions case filled with dimpled thimbles and bright needles ranked precise behind the cellophane windows of their packets, each one piercing the matte black paper twice—might as well not exist as far as Luce was concerned. Sewing a button back on was all the seamstress she ever cared to be.

So, with scant money, she wore confusing clothes, owned for years. In summer, she alternated her jeans and loafers with pink or black pedal pushers and white or blue button-down oxford shirts and white Keds or scuffed Capezios from her life before the Lodge. Come fall, baggy turtlenecks and pointed black ankle boots. Everything always clean and pressed crisp, so you didn’t know whether she had a couple of such outfits or a dozen. Which to Stubblefield sounded nothing but delightful. He imagined that her change of attire happened on a schedule determined by what the trees were doing or some other minute cyclic marker of one season giving way to the next. The flowering of ironweed or a specific downward pitch of evening sunlight.

IN REGARD TO ECONOMICS
, all Luce cared to say was that she got by. Didn’t care to talk about money any more than religion or politics. Eventually, though, Stubblefield got her talking about her stipend and its limitations. What a nice touch of old Stubblefield’s to use that delicate term, she said. She became enthusiastic telling how she sometimes supplemented her cash by selling worked flints and clay pipe bowls turned up in plowed fields in the spring and after heavy rains year-round. Bird points and spearheads and scrapers from an earlier world. Down in the bowl of a good pipe, you could often see a crust of burnt tobacco and imagine some original inhabitant taking a smoke at the end of day. The roadside tourist shops bought them, along with ginseng roots. They sold the artifacts to tourists, and the roots mostly got shipped around the world to China, as had been the case for a couple of centuries. For gentleman problems, Luce explained.

Also, as a cash crop, she had tried growing a patch of tobacco, but her allotment was so small you could nearly spit across it. The government said that’s all she could grow, and sent a man and a boy around with a spool of measuring tape to enforce its area down to the square foot. After a summer of work, she barely broke even, and after that she gave up on commercial agriculture. During fishing season, anglers sometimes stopped by the Lodge to buy rock bait, stick bait, nightcrawlers.

Stubblefield learned, to his confusion, that Luce had limited use for cash money. Most of what it bought she didn’t want. She was happy without modern conveniences, her desires being mostly impractical and lacking monetary value.

Luce said, What I want most is the ability to whistle the song of every bird in the area.

At which point Stubblefield thought he detected humor going on at his expense.

He said, What about television? That’s something money can buy. You might like Paladin. He can be really dry too.

Luce said, I’ve got radio.

Besides, she told him, you start wanting things too much and you need more and more money. She said she tried as much as possible to live free from the bad idea of money. Otherwise, when you took a job, you inevitably sold your time to someone who valued it lowly. Luce, however, valued her time highly. Luce had it all figured out. Live out of sight from the bullshit of everyday commerce. Use money as little as possible.

But the children threatened Luce’s economics. They would need shoes and clothes, and they went through food faster than a pair of bear dogs. Her garden wouldn’t hold up three cold months under their hunger. By deep winter, the root cellar would be cleaned out of potatoes and cabbages and turnips and acorn squash, and all the colorful mason jars of tomatoes and green beans would empty out and be clear shapes of air lined on a shelf.

When the children went to school, then what? The State said they had to go, but Luce worried that they might harm the other students. She worried about them being cooped up inside a yellow bus for the long ride into town. All that gasoline in the tank. They were getting better, but maybe not fast enough.

WHEN STUBBLEFIELD ASKED
if Luce got lonely—living mostly outside of communication with the world, no phone, wasps nesting in the mailbox—Luce said sure she got lonely, but there had been many reimbursements. Animals, for example. Amazing that anything as big as deer and bear survived the bloodthirsty bygones when we snuffed out everything else of size. Bison gone before 1800, elk not long after, wolves before 1900, and panthers shortly after World War I. Dates verified by Maddie and old Stubblefield and other elders. No more left in these mountains or anywhere else for at least a thousand miles. Complete erasure. Except Luce, out walking at sunrise one morning last fall, saw something at the upper end of old Stubblefield’s hay field, something big and pale moving against the dark of the wood’s edge. It went along the fence line, and its sand-colored body and long tail didn’t lack much of reaching from post to post, which Luce later paced off to be eight feet. And the animal moved like no big dun-colored dog or deer ever did. It went smooth and low and soft-footed in the long grass that in the dawn light was close to the color of the cat. If she had not been alone, she would never have seen the panther or felt the hope it spread into the world like rings around the splash of a rock thrown into a still lake.