Nightwoods (23 page)

—From now on, palm readers won’t be able to make shit sense out of your future, Maddie said. Look at that ragged new love line. This is going to throw everything off.

—Ha ha, Stubblefield said, looking down at his mangled hand.

—The children? Luce said.

—Let ’em sleep, Maddie said. Get him home before he passes out on me.

MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
, Stubblefield sat at his breakfast table, holding his cut hand higher than his heart in a failed attempt to keep it from throbbing. Grouped on the white Formica like a modern still life, a half-empty fifth of Smirnoff stood beside a full Davy Crockett jelly glass sitting in a pink plasmatic puddle. Stubblefield angled his hurt hand into the light. Still oozing. The black thread looking damn bad against the waxen skin, even paler than the tabletop.

Luce slumped in the armchair. She had set the radio to her late-night music. Lightning somebody. Smokestack something. So many of the musicians seemed to be either little or blind. Then an ad for a record store and Royal Crown hair dressing.

—He’s white, you know, Luce said.

—Who’s white?

—The DJ. I’ve seen a picture of him. He sounds black, but he’s white as they come. His voice is an expression of his state of mind because he loves the music so much.

She paused and said, You didn’t tell me.

—What?

—That he was here.

—Rumors. I had to drive an hour to a library that takes downstate papers to find out he’d been let go. I didn’t want to worry you until I knew for sure.

—Future reference, don’t ever leave me out again.

Couple of songs went by, and the phone rang. It squatted dense and black on the table at the end of the sofa. Luce answered immediately. Old habit.

Bud’s voice, pitched thin over the wire as cricket song, said, They’re not your damn children, Lucinda. Go live your life, and forget about me. Do it and don’t look back. And remember what I said about keeping your mouth shut, because I meant it.

Luce said, How did you know to call here? But the line went dead after her first word.

She put the phone back on the hook and looked at Stubblefield.

He said, Him?

AN HOUR LATER
, Luce sprawled on the sofa, asleep, her head pillowed on her right arm, her shoes kicked off. The girlfriend dress twisted around her, bloodstained.

The line of her hip and thigh and calf hit Stubblefield as painfully pretty, and somehow consonant with the heartbeat throb in his hand. He sat at the table way into the early morning with his vodka and Luce’s powerful radio music, watching her sleep. Holding up his cut hand like swearing an oath, and imagining the remote borders he might be willing to cross on her behalf.

CHAPTER
  11

O
UT OF FEAR AND ALSO
making assumptions like he would do if he were dealing with normal people, Stubblefield placed a couple of phone calls. Within a day, a guy he knew in Jacksonville had an address for Luce’s mother.

You need a safe place far away to hide, what’s more normal than over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s Florida beach house? That was as close as he had to a plan. Get Luce and the kids gone from Bud’s orbit. Get Lola to keep them for a couple of weeks. Let him go back and try to get Lit or the sheriff or somebody to pay attention. Get Bud out of their lives.

Luce probably should have known it was a mistake from the start, but she was scared, and wanted to believe that something as simple as distance might protect the children. Also, Stubblefield’s argument for normal was pretty compelling. When you’re up against it, family is who most people turn to.

STUBBLEFIELD CARRIED
a musty kapok daybed mattress from the sleeping porch to the Hawk and pressed it to fill the entire backseat area. Luce cooked popcorn on the woodstove, enough to fill a brown paper grocery bag and leave dark butter stains on the bottom third. They set out driving south in the late afternoon, the children alert and eating corn by the fistfuls, studying the passing landscape with their eyes pinpointed by the low sun. And then, soon after dark, the children burrowed under a quilt and slept as deep and innocent as the dead.

Luce spent a great deal of time twisting the knob on the radio, which drew strange new stations, such as one from a town with a bus station big enough to advertise both its own newsstand and its restaurant, said to be known far and wide for T-bones and chili dogs and banana splits.

—Living in this car wouldn’t be all that bad, Luce said. Hard to hit a moving target.

They were way far from home, driving down into the flatlands of Georgia, a waxing half-moon in the sky. Supper had been a while back. Cheeseburgers and fries and vanilla shakes ordered over a speaker at a drive-in and arriving on an aluminum tray that stood levered from Stubblefield’s half-open window. Luce had never had food served in such a novel manner. The children didn’t even wake up, but there was a box of Cheerios and a few cans of corned beef hash if they got hungry. They were happy to eat cereal without milk, and their favorite way to eat the hash was cold. Open both ends of the can and push one lid against the grey cylinder until it plopped out, with its impress of ridges intact, and then chop it into two exact portions with the other of the sharp-edged lids. To make up for the bad nutrition, Luce figured she’d cook a big stew of kale and white beans and tomatoes and smoked sausage the next chance she got.

They drove through the middle of Milledgeville as the second showing of the evening movie was letting out.
The Defiant Ones
.

—I saw that, Stubblefield said.

—How was it? Luce said.

—About what you’d think. He nodded toward the one-sheets in their lighted glass frames on either side of the box office. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier chained together and getting ready to fistfight each other.

—Sort of a county-fair three-legged-race kind of story? Luce said.

—Yeah. Pretty much.

Then, for lack of anything else to say, Stubblefield announced, State crazy house is in this town. Also, the man that wrote Brer Rabbit lived near here. Some time ago.

Luce failed to say anything at all in admiration of his knowledge, and in a minute Stubblefield said, There was a historical marker back there.

—Saw it.

They went out the bottom end of town, into dark country. Luce twiddled the radio to mostly hissing static with intermittent fading snatches of music. Far into the dark flatwoods, out of nowhere Luce said, You fetch up to our age, still single, people start wondering what’s wrong with you. Like you owe them an accounting of your love life. Most people are married by now. Why aren’t you?

—I almost got married one time.

—Almost, like engaged?

—Briefly, Stubblefield said. It’s a boring story.

—Yeah, but tell it anyway.

Stubblefield pitched it as a comedy, youthful idiocy way back a couple of years ago. Though it hurt a good bit at the time. His almost wife was the daughter of the owner of the Cadillac dealership, which in a small town made you nearly royalty. Her name was Alice, and she got intense about Stubblefield shortly after he moved to the island, when he was still the mysterious stranger come to town. Alice was fairly pretty, with swoopy reddish hair and good legs. Freckles across her nose and shoulders in a tempting spray. She featured herself special, to the point that she was at the end of youth and still uncommitted and prone to get attracted to somebody new flashing into her life.

All her previous boyfriends had worn nothing but frat-boy khakis and Izods, like they were in some pathetic paramilitary unit that got their asses kicked all the time. Back then, Stubblefield was still getting over his brief beatnik motorcycle phase. Still immersed in his little square black-and-white books of poetry with alarming titles, and sometimes sporting a goatee and a black turtleneck and black leather pants. His garb caused a woman on Centre Sreet one day to ask him what it was he liked so much about his unusual leather pants. Stubblefield said, You don’t have to wash ’em, you just wipe ’em down.

It was all thoughtless romance with Alice, and could have been the start of several decades of bitter misery, except that a month before the wedding day Alice’s heart changed directions. A better boyfriend came along. Not a passing whim, like Stubblefield, but somebody solid. Some old high school beau or golfer suck-up to her father. She informed Stubblefield all distant over the phone.

The diamond, though, was returned in person. To be exact, Alice flung it in Stubblefield’s face as if he were the spurner. It hit him at the brow and bounced onto the concrete stoop outside his front door. Then it angled off into the shrubbery, sparkling all the way.

The harsh tone there at the end was surely the idea of the new boyfriend, who struck Stubblefield as high-minded and adamant about his sensitivities. He wanted no trace left behind to remind him that he was not the first explorer to plant his flag on that pale frontier.

A week later, Stubblefield took out a classified ad in the local paper.
For Sale: One (1) engagement ring w. 1.5-carat diamond. Fair-to-poor condition. Also matching wedding band. Excellent condition. Diamonds are forever, but the heartbreak has passed. $1 ea
.

Which sealed his fate on ever getting a good deal on a new Caddie, but also made him more than a few friends around town. For a week, many Tanqueray tonics were bought for him down at the waterside bar. Drinkers young and old raised toasts welcoming him to his new fraternity of dumped lovers.

After Stubblefield finished his answer to her question, Luce said, Pale frontier?

—Figure of speech.

WAY INTO THE NIGHT
, Luce got head-bobbing sleepy, and Stubblefield reached to her far shoulder with his good hand and slouched her over in the seat toward him until her head lay tipped against his leg and her dark hair spread over his lap.

He drove down an empty road into the tree-farm pine barrens that led to Florida, feeling happy and as if, right this minute, everything matched his expectations of how life ought to be. The Hawk was dark as a piece of night, except for its dash lights and the overlapping beams of headlights. In the foggy late-night hours, Stubblefield pulled over at a wayside picnic spot and slept an hour or two with his right hand tangled in Luce’s hair, and then he went on driving. At the first thin rim of dawn the children’s eyes rose into the rearview. All bright with interest in the sudden new landscape.

They skirted the Okefenokee in early-morning fog, the wet air coming in the wind wings rich and urgent. Luce opened her eyes for a minute and said, What’s that smell?

Stubblefield said, Alligators.

She said, Good, and settled her head back on his leg while Stubblefield explained to her about the culture and history of Florida. For example, they’ve got snake farms. Imagine setting out on purpose to grow snakes. Florida was the Wild West before there was a Wild West. It was nothing but Indians and Spaniards, and then it went straight to cowboy gunmen like John Wesley Hardin. And it still is wild, or at least lawless. Good God, you can get away with all kinds of shit down here. The politicians are all criminals. Granted, that is only a distinction from everywhere else in that they’re so blatant about it that they often end up in federal prison.

Around about there, Luce drifted back to sleep.

DOWN AT FLAGLER
, Lola lived in a shady cinder-block cottage three streets from the beach. Dead live-oak leaves spilling over the gutters and a rusty red Olds Rocket 88 with all the good driven out of it parked in the sand yard.

Stubblefield went to the door and knocked. Luce and Dolores and Frank stayed in the Hawk.

Lola answered, wearing a floral-print beach wrap hanging open over a shimmering teal bathing suit. Barefoot, and her toenails painted pink. Freckled cleavage tanned to a line and then an inch of pale cream visible below that. Her hair wet and tumbling to her shoulders. A cigarette between her lips.

Stubblefield thought he must have come to the wrong place. This was not the grandmother he had imagined. He said who he was, and who he had with him. Her daughter Luce and the children of her murdered daughter, Lily.

—I do remember their names, Lola said, talking around the cigarette and very dry in her tone. How did you find me?

—Made a call.

—Not like I was hiding out or anything.

—She needs your help, Stubblefield said.

Lola said, Huh?

IN THE CAR
, Luce studied the woman. Her mother. The word called up nothing but dim memories of shouting. Rough hugs. A face shoved close, breathing Wild Turkey and planting sloppy kisses on her forehead, leaving candy-apple-red smears.

And something failed to sum. Her mother must be, what? Old, at the very least. Luce did some fast head arithmetic, and the surprise total was not far past forty. And, even so, Lola looked years younger, for she had been damn handsome to begin with and had undergone production of only the two accidental girls spaced close together in her final teenage years. Plus, she had successfully skipped most of the wear and tear of raising them. So she had low miles on her, and what she had were apparently road miles. Adding the youthful effect of breasts and tousled hair and beach clothing, she could probably pass for Luce’s older sister in any light more flattering than the glare of midday sun. Though, actually, this was midday.

Luce got out of the car and leaned the seatback forward. The children climbed from the back and began exploring their new world. Lapsing into their water-witch manner, following invisible lines of force across the yard, quartering the space, doubling back, feeling for something with senses other than the usual five. They finally settled ten feet apart and seemed not to be looking at anything in particular, but still alert.

Not much in the way of greeting between mother and daughter. A hug was too much, a handshake out of the question. Lola tipped her head back and blew smoke out the corner of her mouth, and Luce got straight to business.