Nightwoods (19 page)

When Stubblefield came back around to the topic of loneliness, Luce got insistent about the reimbursements. A great deal of pleasure to be found in the growth of vegetables. And in the fall, birds passing over in waves, their calls singing of distance and other landscapes and the weird tones of Maddie’s folklore songs from back in an older America. Or a younger one, depending on your perspective. Also, the sadness and bravery of new doomed sprouts growing from dead blighted chestnut trees. At night, you could walk outside and look anywhere except straight across the lake to the town and not see a light, just shapes of black mountains against the charcoal sky and the brilliant stars overhead. Except sometimes in summer when fishermen went out on the lake in their little boats and shined big flashlights into the water to draw bass. Plus, recently, the hateful satellites whizzing over, marring the constellations.

And the obvious freedom of living alone could not to be discounted. Sample days from Luce’s pre-children life included summer afternoons swinging in an army-surplus jungle hammock she had bought for a dollar fifty. It smelled of mildew and had a canvas roof and mosquito-netting sidewalls. She strung it between two hemlocks, and it was like a pup tent levitating. Inside, she could float and look out at the garden and the woods, all misty through the netting, and read books from the lobby shelves.
Seventeen
by Booth Tarkington. Volumes of the outdated Britannica. The usual afternoon temperate-rainforest shower fell on the hammock roof and then passed and the sun came back out. Come autumn, build a late-afternoon campfire in the yard and sit in a striped canvas campaign chair and watch the night come on and drink a scant glass of the old important liquor from the basement. Watch the sun and moon and planets fall one after another down the same curved path to the horizon.

Stubblefield said, So you’re happy out walking alone at dawn seeing extinct animals? What about before that? Two in the morning kind of lonely?

Luce said that was pretty bad, no denying it. Sometimes, maybe she felt like a piece of her that used to be there was gone. But she had figured out a shape that days needed to take so that she hardly noticed whether she was happy or not. Keeping your mind on every day as it came was part of it. The garden, the chickens, firewood, cooking. The four seasons. Late summer, the last small watermelons and tired tomato plants putting out just one or two smallish fruits before shutting down for good. Then pumpkins turning bright, and the last apples in the old orchard little and misshapen but sharp and clean-tasting, with just the right balance of sweet and tart to be good either as eating apples or cooking apples. Autumn collards still small and reaching for the slanted light, and waiting for the first frost to come into their own.

CONCERNING HER CHILDHOOD
, all Luce wanted to talk about was a lanky dark-haired girl named Myrtle from tribal land across the nearest ridge from town. The girl spoke almost nothing but Cherokee. They were both free to wander, and sometimes they met at the ridgeline. Luce would have been happy to sit with her all day, smiling and hardly saying a word, making whole villages out of sticks in the dirt of the woods floor. But Myrtle could stay only so long before she needed to head home to help shuck corn or shell peas or whatever other chore the season dictated. The only English the girl knew was the phrase Get, damn hogs. Useful mainly when the neighbors’ hogs got loose in the garden. But also a lot of fun to shout on random occasions.

Stubblefield asked what it was like after Lola left, and Luce said, Better. She remembered that some people in town speculated pretty urgently, with no evidence whatsoever, that Lit had killed Lola and buried her up on the mountain. And of course kids heard it from their parents and couldn’t get enough of talking about it at school. When Luce went home confused and full of questions, Lit didn’t sugarcoat it. He told third-grade Luce and second-grade Lily that their mother had run off with a man from Shithole, Florida, and that the man had soon dumped her, so probably Lola was walking the streets of Tampa.

Young Luce had been out west as far as the county seat, twenty miles away, but except for having a marble courthouse with a green copper dome, it was not noticeably different than the lake town, except that it had two of everything. Even two barbershops with identical red-and-white poles spiraling to infinity inside glass cylinders. Yet, sadly, only one library per town. Even with the doubling, walking the streets took a matter of minutes. Up one side and down the other, a few blocks each way, and then you were done. So it was not clear to young Luce what walking the streets of Tampa might mean.

However, one of several benefits from her mother’s absence came immediately. Lit seemed somewhat less high-pitched every day. He quit drinking liquor and switched to beer and mostly confined himself to one or two on workdays. Also the house rested a whole lot quieter without all the quarreling. Lola couldn’t hardly scramble an egg, so the food didn’t change noticeably. Luce and Lily mainly lived off bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and boiled hot dogs except when Lit brought home sirloins and fried them up in a skillet with sliced potatoes.

—Did you miss anything about her? Stubblefield said.

—No. And that’s my last word, no matter how many times you ask.

Except when Stubblefield tried again, Luce said she remembered something from way back in childhood. Lily being sick. Colic or cholera or something. Lily wailing and Lola holding her, walking the living room floor back and forth, saying, Baby, baby, baby.

Stubblefield said, So a sweet memory?

—Yeah, sweet. I was scared that Lily was so sick she might die and leave me by myself with them. I started crying and Lola put Lily on the sofa and grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me to the kitchen and backed me against the refrigerator. Bent down right in my face, yelling about how weak I was. Didn’t even take the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth. I remember how it glowed and wagged up and down while she yelled.

AT SOME POINT
, Stubblefield wondered how much he was really learning about Luce. She would talk freely about dress patterns, the daily details of gardening, his grandfather. But Stubblefield kept feeling like he was watching a cardsharp shuffle the deck, all the fine subtle movements to misdirect your attention, and at the end, a reassuring spread of hands to hide the pit opening under her life.

Stubblefield liked to read mountaineering books about Hillary and Smythe and Mallory. There was a term that expressed how high you were, how far the drop below your feet, how bad the weather. All the cumulative danger of the world you had entered. The word was
exposure
. At some far degree, if you lose a glove, you lose your hand. You fall, you die. Stubblefield became convinced that Luce was pretty badly exposed. But if she believed she had succeeded in paring her life down to essentials and reimbursements, he needed to figure out which category he might best fit himself into.

CHAPTER
  7

T
AKE PINBALL, FOR EXAMPLE
. Especially on a wood-rail Gottlieb
Cyclone
or
Harbor Lites
table. Night after night, Lit’s reflexes allowed him to play a single quarter on and on until he got bored. His touch against the spring to launch the chrome ball into play was art. After that, carefully judged nudges and checks with hands and hips and knees guided the ball in regard to bumpers and kickers and chutes without tilting the table. Flipper work too subtle to comprehend. You could go to college and study mechanical engineering and physics for ten years and not understand it.

Psychic and saintly was the way Bud viewed it. The air disturbed by a leaf falling to the parking lot played a role in how Lit’s fingers twitched. Each second, Lit did two dozen different things at once, attending fully to the present moment but with a disinterested look on his face. Every machine in the county displayed his high score.

Tonight went the usual way. Lights flashing behind the backglass, bells ringing, numbers in their hundreds of thousands and free games spinning the wheels until Lit wanted beer. Usually that was when he collected his money. Instead, he handed the table over to Bud. Said, Keep it warm for me, I’m coming back.

Before Lit finished his second can, Bud had burned through all the accumulated credits. Every penny of a thirty-five-dollar cash-out thrown away.

Before the machine finished dying its loud sad death, Lit was out the door.

Bud caught him in the parking lot. Lit already in the cruiser with the engine rumbling and the lights on.

—You leaving? Bud said.

—Not leaving, I’m gone.

Lit sprayed gravel, and soon his two red taillights faded to nothing down the road. Leaving Bud standing alone.

No big deal. By tomorrow everything would be fine. And no long dark walk home, either. A man in Bud’s position had many new friends to count on. He went back to the bar and started talking up a ride to town. Acting cheerful, though pissed inside.

But it was a slow night, and late. The few drinkers were pros, planning to stay put until closing time. Bud held up a ten, dollar a mile. But no takers. Finally, the offer of a twenty, more than any of these idiots had ever made in a day, got him a ride in a panel van full of cabbages. The driver, drunk and mute, rarely drove faster than fifteen or twenty, but it was white-knuckle anyway. Lake close on the passenger side and the wheels dropping off the pavement over and over. Bud rolled his window down in case they fell over the edge and sank to the bottom. Swim through the window and up the black water. Rise into moonlight.

He rode holding the armrest and bracing his feet against the firewall, wondering with considerable bitterness why this was the best he could do. Bootlegging had made Bud a man of consequence. An eminence, much to his amazement. But there was no glamour to it. He was just a delivery boy, and it was making him soft. His lost money swirled constantly, bright and desirable, in his head. Brooding, too, about the injustice of being taken for a sidekick, even though Bud liked Lit an awful lot, even when he was high-strung. For Bud, the relationship felt part like brethren on a football team without all the ass patting and showering together, and part like boy crushes where you don’t so much want to be
in love
with the other boy as to
be
him.

But apart from that, just sticking to the practicalities, getting close to the law was not bad strategy in case complications arose in regard to Bud’s new profession. And possibly helpful if he got caught prowling up at the Lodge.

On Main Street, Bud climbed out of the van, thanking the spirits of commerce that he hadn’t been foolish enough to pay in advance. He stretched a five through the window, and the driver was too far gone to notice the difference. Bud walked the dark streets home trying, all at once, to focus his mind on his money and the lessons of the teenager-prison counselor. Be patient. Defer gratification and wait for rewards to pour down. Not part of the lesson, though, was how long you were supposed to wait. Bud’s patience had a fuse, and you could hold up thumb and forefinger of one hand to depict its length.

CHAPTER
  8

A
FTER A WEEK OF INDIAN SUMMER
, skies deep blue and leaves beginning to turn yellow and red, a cold front blew through. Chilly rain fell out of a pewter sky for two days. Stubblefield became animated and nostalgic about the northern Gulf of Mexico in the warm days of October. And at first, Luce enjoyed hearing him describe a place she’d never been. How most of the shore was muddy, and you had to know where to go if you wanted white sand and clear water. But he knew exactly where. Plus, epic bouts of fishing to be accomplished, whether casting from shore or boat. Little cheap rental cabanas on stilts at the edge of the water. And white clapboard bars set in crushed-shell parking lots under live oaks, where the beer was ice-cold and the oysters hadn’t been out of the Gulf more than a few hours, and they handed you a zinc bucket overflowing with them, and one brown leather glove and a thick-bladed knife. You twisted the shells open and gave the live oyster three spurts of Tabasco and watched it quiver and then tipped your head back and slid it from the shell into your mouth, and chased it with cold beer. Maybe a saltine or two, depending on your attitude toward the texture of a raw oyster. And then dancing to a neon Wurlitzer full of beach music unknown in other quarters of the country. One bare light bulb swinging from its ceiling cord, pitching dancers’ shadows crazy against the walls. Later, after midnight, swimming out half drunk into the black water and not caring how damn deep the bottom might be beneath your white wiggling feet nor what big-mouthed fishes might be gliding almost between your legs.

By the time he finished talking, Luce felt like she was sinking from him, going down slow. Him still treading water in the moonlight up above. She sat quiet a long time. He had been delicate, hardly hinting at an invitation, but what she found herself wanting to say was, Let’s do that, baby. Go be careless and young. Get sunburned and drunk. Eat too much and dance too much and go night swimming. Do something entirely new. It had been so long since she had even wanted to.

Until recently, it had been theoretically possible to throw clothes in a bag and get in the car and go. By tomorrow, be sitting on the beach at sunset drinking a beer. In the new reality, though, the children.

She said, Down at the Gulf, it’s like the ocean?

—Well, it looks a lot the same. Water as far as you can see.

—No trees on the other side? No towns?

—None whatsoever.

A week later, James Brown and the Famous Flames were playing over in Tennessee, and Stubblefield asked Luce to go with him. A long dark way across many mountains on winding roads, and there wouldn’t be two dozen white faces in the whole place. And damn, James Brown, one of Luce’s favorites. What an adventure.