Nightwoods (6 page)

When Maddie found the box, she dug around making a selection, and then gave Dolores and Frank two of the smaller ones, perfect and identical in the intersections of their angles. Also two shiny brown buckeyes from a tree struck by lightning and thus sacred.

Said, Carry them in your pockets for protection.

Then she brought out the main welcome gift she had bought on a recent rare trip to town. A child-sized straw cowboy hat, bright red. She set it on Frank’s head and said, Welcome to the lake. Luce could tell Maddie was awfully proud of the gift, but she also saw trouble written all over Dolores’s face. Luce said her thank-yous and hustled the children out the door and up the road toward home, thinking that a few weeks ago she would have made the same mistake. Not having children of her own, it had likely never occurred to Maddie that she’d better buy two hats.

Before they got much past the first bend, Dolores slapped the hat off Frank’s head, and then they rolled in the dirt. Luce, pretty hot, grabbed them by their collars and separated them and stood them on their feet. Then she took a slow breath and decided that for the rest of the afternoon, they each had to wear the hat exactly fifteen minutes. She mashed the hat on Dolores’s head and clicked her fingernail five times against her watch crystal. Said, Dolores, you have to wear the hat until three thirty-two, then Frank has to wear it. Don’t cross me on this.

Dolores took the hat off and tried to give it to Frank, who wouldn’t take it. Luce made her put it back on, and Dolores walked tragic and sad-hearted, dragging the toes of her sneakers in the dirt, her face down and shadowed by the brim. At five to go, Luce started counting off the minutes. Dolores’s mood suddenly brightened, and dread overwhelmed Frank. At the moment of transferring the hat, Dolores danced three happy steps.

Back at the Lodge, they sat in the porch rockers, sulled up and sad, rocking slow. Partway through the walk home, it had quit mattering anymore who wore the hat. All the joy had drained out of it.

Luce sat with her feet dangling over the porch edge, looking at the blue lake and the green mountains, keeping time and enforcing the exchanges. Trying to hide how delighted she was to find that the children understood and actually complied with her totally arbitrary rules, an important skill for living in the world with other people. Unless you retreated to your own private wilderness. Except there was no wilderness.

Arbitrarily, Luce decided that one more exchange would finish making the point, and afterward, she gave the children the choice of what to do with the hat. They carried it to the cook stove and used a piece of kindling to stuff it down an eye onto the bed of coals. The straw flamed up yellow through the open hole for a few seconds and then was gone for good.

CHAPTER
  4

B
UD’S LAWYER WAS A SMART
and ruthless old white-haired bastard. Drove a new black Coupe de Ville, and had gotten drunk with every governor back into the late twenties, regardless of political party. He’d taken Bud’s case only because he figured one way or the other, he’d end up with Lily’s house to sell. Said to Bud, right at the outset, Not a great deal of money in a little two-bedroom bungalow, but sadly the modern world has become largely a matter of volume.

The State’s man was so fresh out of law school that he still went back to campus for parties thrown by friends who had not yet graduated. He seemed stunned to find himself in court. During the course of a morning, Bud’s lawyer convinced the jury of men that Lily had been little better than a whore. All in all, they inferred, she probably deserved killing, at least within the shadow of a doubt the old lawyer had laid out as a confusing yet binding covenant between God and man regarding the administration of justice on earth. Case in point, Lily had conceived not one but two children by another man. Also, hypothetical boyfriends were alluded to vividly and with only a hesitant objection from the boy lawyer, who seemed crushed when the judge ruled against him. When it came to the murder weapon, the old lawyer asked a simple, compelling question: If you live in a house, aren’t your fingerprints on everything, including the knives? Crazy dope-addict killers wearing gloves could never be ruled out. And, further, the only possible eyewitnesses, when questioned by police detectives, had not testified to his client’s guilt in any way.

The old lawyer failed to mention that the witnesses were children who either could not or would not utter a single word or even acknowledge they had been asked a question. When the State’s man went into those inconvenient facts, the old lawyer pulled out a doctor’s report labeling the children as feebleminded. After that, the State’s man sat quiet, like he knew he was taking a beating and just wanted it to be over.

Three days later, Bud walked out the courthouse doors. Hardly two o’clock, humid and hot and the sky dull white, still wearing his grey trial suit the lawyer had bought for him, and carrying a paper poke with his clothes and effects from when he was arrested. Outside, an elder woman sat on a bench feeding peanuts to pigeons, and when a group of them took to the air their wing beats were like muffled applause.

Many high feelings rushed through Bud. Mainly he felt giddy disbelief over his impossible good fortune at the hands of the justice system. What a grand idea democracy is, where every fool who can’t get out of jury duty gets to have his opinion counted. Especially the two fools who held out and voted not guilty. And the judge didn’t even ask for a bond while the prosecution decided when and if to retry. He just said, Don’t leave the state, son. Also the splendid matter of the little retard bastards keeping their jaws shut. Though, of course, the lawyer had to piss on Bud’s parade by reminding him that even if they don’t retry soon, there’s no limitation on murder charges. Ninety years old, they can drag you out of your sickbed and have another go at you.

And then, a more forward-looking early thought. Where was his goddamn money? Where else but with the mute witness kids?

Bud walked down the street to the bank and checked Lily’s account balance. It was exactly what he’d guessed it would be. He zeroed it out, which only bought him a beat-up Remington revolver and one box of shells at a pawnshop. Only enough left over for a club sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter.

Homeless and penniless, but armed and pondering deeply, he wandered the streets of the capital city. The lawyer already had papers for the house, so about all Bud could claim were the furnishings. Flea-market shit. Selling scratched chifforobes and stained mattresses was not how he cared to spend time. He knew Lily had family up in a hillbilly mountain town. Minus a mother who’d had the sense to fly away many years earlier to places unknown. So, nothing left here worth fooling with. But he had a damn hoard somewhere. Dusky dark, Bud hot-wired a new Chevy coupe and took off west.

THAT FIRST NIGHT
, in a thunderstorm, Bud hit two filling stations, one right after the other, for the day’s receipts. Pretty simple transactions, when it’s just you and one guy at the register, and you’re the one waving the gun. Afterward, Bud kept driving west on slick black roads for a couple of hours, and checked into a linoleum-floor motel in time to flop on the plaid bedspread and watch
The Twilight Zone
. Next morning, he did two more filling stations and a country store. Fifty miles onward, he drove the Chevy down a red dirt road and pushed it over a steep clay bank into a brown river. He knew enough about sinking cars from teenage joyriding to roll the windows down and open the trunk and hood. The car bobbed briefly, and then went all the way under, nothing but fat bubbles breaking the surface of the water. A rainbow sheen of gas trailing with the current. Reluctantly, Bud pitched the Remington and the unused ammo to midstream. Then, figuring you can’t be too careful, he pulled out the red bandanna he had worn over his face for the stickups, cowboy-movie-bandit style. He knotted it around a rock and threw it into the river and walked on to the nearest town.

At the first used-car lot, he bought a happy-faced green Ford pickup from deep in the previous decade for two hundred and sixty dollars cash. He put the title in the glove box for future reference by any interested party, such as the highway patrol. They were welcome to have a look. Title and tag were clean, and he had been turned loose and was unarmed. The law was his friend, and he was off to start a new life in his farmer pickup with the wood sideboards grey as old fence palings. Such was the attitude he would strike if he got pulled. But he didn’t plan to get pulled. He drove carefully and no more than five over at all times.

NIGHT AND RAINING AGAIN
. Bud had driven across two mountain passes and through a dark twisting gorge. All the way, the narrow road hung either at the brink of a long drop or else ran right alongside a rush of white water. Few signs of life out in these black mountains. If there were houses, the folks shut out the lights and went to bed early. Probably no TV this deep in the vertical country. The radio in the piece-of-shit truck barely worked due to a possible short in its wiring, so mostly it picked up a lot of static and one strong blast of race music, and then, in between patches of silence, strange gibber that sounded like Cuba or Mexico or Texas, one.

The gas gauge alternated between half a tank and empty. Pecking at it with a forefinger clarified nothing. There hadn’t been an open station for two hours, and not even any closed ones lately. The only business for miles, a dark roadside shack with a hand-lettered plywood sign offering boiled peanuts.

His map said the town had to be not far ahead, but for all the evidence the road offered, it might well go nowhere from here. Drive and drive through winding steep cliffs, and then without warning the pavement would end. And immediately beyond it, in the yellow converging headlight cones, would be a patch of tall weeds ending in a solid wall of trees. Damn nature all around. Not even a sign saying
DEAD END
. Probably because you would surely know already that’s where you were.

So it was a welcome moment when Bud crossed a low gap and dropped toward a lakeside town, streetlights and neon glowing ahead. At the edge of town, a giant towering sign cast a distorted image of itself onto the wet pavement. Twisted tubes in pink and lavender and yellow outlined an Indian wearing a feather headdress, and underneath, flowing blue letters spelled out the title of the place.
CHIEF MOTEL
.

Bud checked in, and the room had a surprise television, though when he turned it on, he found only one snowy station featuring a man in a gas station uniform guessing the weather. Then an old melancholy Wolfman movie, to which Bud fell asleep and dreamed one of his favorite innocent clarifying dreams involving Jesus’s blood bathing the world and making it fresh and clean. It was like the picture on the paint can, except it was blood pouring over the North Pole and dripping off the equator.

Bud woke late morning with a feeling of certainty about his future. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up and said aloud, I don’t know when, but I do know how. Then he started reflecting. In a minute, with less conviction, he said, Maybe I don’t know how, but I do know where.

CHAPTER
  5

L
UCE DIDN’T CLAIM ANY UNDERSTANDING
of young children, or even one useful bit of knowledge about them, and though Maddie had plenty of opinions to share, they were largely theoretical. Luce couldn’t even look back to her own childhood and remember anything practical in regard to child care. She wondered if Lily’s children had even pushed out their baby teeth. When did they stop doing that? She was like her father in degree of ignorance. He used to say that when Luce was born, the first time he saw her, she was asleep. He asked the nurse how old they had to be for their eyes to open.

Luce did know that if Dolores and Frank were able to go to school, they would immediately take the common childhood diseases one right after the other. Measles, mumps, chicken pox. What a mess that would be. They were pretty, and that’s about all they had going for them. Speckled and lumpy and scabby wasn’t much to look forward to.

As an experiment, Luce tried to teach the kids to count, get them to number their fingers, say their age. No dice. Bedtime, she tried to play Little Piggies with them, adding numerals to the old rhyme for educational purposes. This biggest one went to market. This number two little piggy stayed home.

But the children attended poorly and found no delight in having their toes handled. In fact, just the opposite. They drew their feet from her fingers and pushed them under the covers and scooted close together, shoulder to shoulder, ready to flee inside themselves if Luce insisted on continuing with the game.

The first time Luce tried to take their clothes off to help them bathe was a bad day. They cried bleak, silent tears. They could bawl like calves or wail like beagles when they were frustrated or mad, but this was something else. She stopped undressing them immediately, but they went off into their own heads, dazed, and stayed there for hours.

She found, though, that if allowed to undress themselves, they didn’t mind being buck naked outdoors. Pour a pail of chill spring water over them in the backyard while they soaped themselves, and all was okay. But it was still muggy August. Come a November morn, frost white on the ground, then what? A pair of children could get to smelling pretty high over the course of the cold months, was Luce’s guess. But mainly she began thinking about how bad their bad patch must have been for them to go down so deep where fear and pain couldn’t reach.

AFTER THE BATH INCIDENT
, Luce never saw the children cry again. It was not a channel they used to communicate. They expressed their feelings in ways besides whimpering and chin quivering and their eyes watering up. They might fly at you with balled fists and try to fight. They might go running away toward the woods. They had a sound like a growl, and also various hollers and hoots and screeches. Or they might give you a slow look that suggested if they weighed a hundred pounds more, they would kill you where you stood. Most of the reasons regular children cry—pain, fear, embarrassment, frustration, anguish, regret, sorrow, guilt—didn’t seem to apply with these two. They showed little fear and no embarrassment. And especially no sorrow or regret or guilt under any circumstance.