The Elementals (22 page)

“But that’s still three! Two of ’em upstairs and one downstairs, even if two of ’em were still just pretending to be locked in!”

“No,” said Odessa. “You don’t know how many they was, you don’t know! They might all be fifty of ’em in there, or they might be just one moving around a lot. You seeing what they want you to see—you not seeing what’s really there.”

“If they can do all that,” said India sullenly, “then how did we manage to get away?”

Big Barbara returned to her husband’s house, where he was waiting for her with a typewritten list of all the places she was to go in the next few days. They must leave almost immediately for a Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

“Lawton,” she said with a nervous smile, “I got to tell you what I did at Beldame.”

“Barbara, all you got to do is get dressed or we gone be late. I’m speaking, and it don’t do for the speaker to come in late.”

“You got to listen to me though. You got to hear what I’ve done for you, Lawton. I got myself off the bottle, that’s what I did. I don’t need it now. I’m not gone be drinking any more. You don’t have to worry about me. I know I’ve still got faults—we all still got our faults no matter
what
we do—but mine don’t have anything to do with liquor any more. I got so much energy, I’ve been sitting on the beach all day thinking of ways to help you with this campaign. Listen,” she said feverishly, unnerved by her husband’s cold gaze, “I think I’d
love
to live in Washington for a few years—I know it’s gone be more than a few years though, once you get up there, they’re not ever gone let you out of Congress—and Lawton, I’m gone be so much help to you! I can give a good party—you know I can, even Luker says I can and Luker hates parties. I’m gone see if Dauphin and Leigh won’t let me have Odessa for a while and Odessa’s gone fly up and help me give the best parties you ever saw in your life. We’re gone have people coming and going like our foyer was a hotel lobby! That’s what I’ve been thinking about at Beldame, Lawton. I know you’re gone win, I’m gone be right behind you too, in everything you do, I’m gone—”

“Now we gone be late for sure!” interrupted Lawton McCray angrily.

Luker and India again took the guest wing of the Small House; but Lawton McCray did not provide his son and granddaughter with any itinerary to be followed for his political benefit. They had the time free to themselves.

Luker questioned India whether anything were wrong.

“Where’s Odessa?” she said.

“She went home for a while. She’ll be back later in the afternoon. You know,” he said to India, who still had not removed her sunglasses, “it’s strange how much you’ve become attached to Odessa—”

“What’s wrong with it?” India demanded sharply.

“Nothing,” said her father. “It’s just strange, since when we first went down to Beldame you wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

“She has inner qualities.”

“Are you saying that with a straight face?”

India wouldn’t reply.

They listened to the television noontime report while they were eating their lunch and discovered that for the past week Mobile had been enjoying a spate of abnormally temperate weather: cool mornings, rainy afternoons, positively chilly nights.

“Isn’t that strange,” said Luker. “And it was hotter than hell at Beldame, for the whole goddamn week. Fifty miles away, and we were in a-whole-nother climate.”

Leigh and Dauphin were at the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon too, and tried not to appear too interested in Big Barbara’s decisions when the waiter came around to ask if anyone wanted a cocktail before the food was served. Big Barbara flushed—not with the decision, which was an easy one, but with the consciousness that she was being watched.
Like I was the weather
, she told herself. On her way to the ladies’ room, halfway through the meal, she stopped at Leigh and Dauphin’s table, leaned between them and whispered: “Y’all don’t need to worry about me. With everybody complimenting me on my tan, I haven’t had time to raise a glass to my lips!”

While Lawton spoke, Big Barbara, whose place was on the dais next to the podium, stared up at her husband with a dizzying smile of conjugal admiration. Scarcely a man or woman in that audience but commented later how lucky the candidate was to have such a wife—and even those who liked Lawton, or professed to like him, said that they felt better about voting for him knowing that it would also be Big Barbara who would end up in Washington, D.C.

After the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon, as they were driving back home, Dauphin passed the drugstore where the week before he had left off India’s film to be developed. He stopped and picked it up. Both he and Leigh were surprised that, when they handed it over to India, she thanked them but briefly and made no move to examine the photographs.

“Aren’t you even gone look at ’em?” said Leigh.

“I’ll look at ’em later,” replied the girl, and took the envelope off to her room.

The action was of sufficient oddity to excite comment, and was reported to Luker a little later. Toward the end of the afternoon he came and sat in India’s room; he had a tall glass in his hand. “My God, it’s good to have a drink again. I think I suffered almost as much as Big Barbara.”

“You had pills,” said India.

“Shhh!” said her father. “I don’t want you telling anybody that! But the fact is I don’t think I took more than a couple of downs the whole time I was there.”

“No ups?”

“What the hell for? What is there to do on speed at Beldame?”

India shrugged, dropped her chin on to her fist, and gazed out the window at the Great House. The Alabama foliage was grotesquely lush; trees seemed absolutely weighted down with leaves. The flowers in the gardens—hydrangeas, lilies, and showy annuals—drooped with blooms. Despite the absence of the family, the gardeners had been pridefully at work.

“What’s wrong with you?” demanded Luker. “Are you mad because we had to leave Beldame?”

She shook her head but did not look at him.

“What then?”

“I’m”—she struggled for a word—“disoriented,” she said at last.

“Oh, yeah?” said her father softly. Then after a moment: “Dauphin brought back the pictures of the third house that you took. How’d they come out?”

India glanced at him sharply and then turned away.

He waited for an answer; when none came, he went on: “Did you look at them?”

She nodded and scratched the windowsill with an unpainted fingernail.

“Let me see them,” said Luker.

India shook her head slowly.

“They didn’t turn out?”

India sniffed. “I’m no dummy,” she said. “I can work a light meter. I’ve got control over my apertures. Of course they came out.”

“India,” said Luker, “you’re being coy and I hate it. You’re being like your mother, in fact. Are you going to show me the fucking pictures or not?”

“You know,” she said, looking directly at him for the first time, “when I was taking those pictures, it was Odessa who told me where to stand and what to frame. She was with me the whole time—except for the last part. I didn’t tell you, but for the last half-dozen frames I went to the top of the dune again and took some pictures of that bedroom, that bedroom where I broke the window.”

Luker nodded slowly and crunched ice. “And they all came out?”

“A couple at the very end didn’t,” India replied. “There was some reflection on the windowpanes. The image isn’t all there.” She stood, walked to the dresser and took the envelope of photographs from one of the drawers there. “Oh, Luker,” she said as she handed it to him, “I’m scared, I’m still so scared.”

He took the photographs in one hand, and with the other he drew her by the wrist. He would not open the envelope until she had left off weeping.

The first nineteen of the black-and-white photographs were of India in her bedroom; forty-one more of the third house, taken from the back and the two sides. And the final ten were of the bedroom on the second floor that corresponded to India’s own in the McCray house. Luker nodded as he went slowly through them, and but for India’s having wept, would have pointed out where some composition might have been improved or the lighting and shutter speed adjusted to better effect. On the whole, however, he found them excellent work, and complimented India on them afterward, though with some puzzlement.

“India,” he said, “these pictures are good. They’re better than good, in fact, they’re the best work that you’ve ever done. I don’t understand why you were afraid to show them to me. I mean, don’t you
see
that they’re good?”

She nodded slowly, but still held her arm tightly wound round his.

“I look at these and I want to go back down there with a four-by-five, even an eight-by-ten. Then we could get something
really
spectacular. Maybe we could rent one when we go back on Wednesday, if there’s a decent camera store in this town, we—”

“These weren’t the only pictures I took,” said India, interrupting him softly.

“Where are the others?”

“I pulled them.”

“Why?”

After a few moments she answered: “I think Odessa should see them.”

“Why Odessa? Wait a minute, India, now listen. Something upset you about these pictures, and I want to know what it is. I don’t want any more of this mystery. I tell you something—mystery is real boring. Now here, I want you to take a long swallow of this drink—it’s decent scotch and I know you like decent scotch—and then I want you to tell me what’s bothering you. I don’t intend to sit here the whole fucking afternoon, and play Twenty Fucking Questions.”

India took a longer swallow than Luker expected. She rose and from the very back of another drawer of the dresser took a smaller stack of photographic prints. She handed them to her father.

“Are these from the same rolls?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re not in sequence. But they’re all from the second roll.”

The first few photographs were of architectural details of the house: casements mostly, but one also of the turret of the verandah that protruded from the dune at the front of the house. “These are just as good as the others,” said Luker wonderingly, “I don’t see—”

And then he saw.

Something was leaning against the turret, on its shadowed shingles. The outline of an emaciated figure—something not much more than a skeleton wrapped in a tissue of flesh—was evidently trying to escape the camera’s lens by leaning very close along the line of the turret. But the protruding ribs showed a little against the sky, as did the chin and jaw of the thrown-back head. The knees and spindly thighs could be seen, but the lower legs and feet were buried in the sand that covered the verandah roof. Whatever it was had been the same color as the slate-gray shingles. The long fingers of one withered hand protruded onto the sunlit portion of the turret. It appeared that whoever—
whatever
—this was had been caught as it scurried around the turret out of the sight of India and Odessa in the yard.

Luker looked down at India; she was crying again.

“India,” he said, “when you took this picture—”

“I didn’t see anything,” she whispered. “There wasn’t anything up there.”

Luker quickly flipped through the pictures he had just gone through.

“That was the worst one of those,” said India, “but look . . .” On each of the other prints she pointed out something Luker had missed: a dark bony arm laid across a windowsill, a dark withered hand fingering the rotten curtains inside the rooms of the third house. Luker shook his head in frustrated disbelief. “I hate this,” he whispered. “I told you not to—”

India still held two prints in her hand, face down.

“Those are the worst?”

India nodded. “Do you want to see them?”

“No,” he said, “of course I don’t want to see them, but show me.”

She flipped the first one over into his hand. It was a photograph of the verandah showing the handsome curve of the dune that was overtaking the lagoon side of the third house. But Luker saw at once the fat gray creature that was huddled behind the low porch railing. From its crouched position, and the fact that most of it was hidden by the railing posts, it was not possible to reconstruct its shape—Luker thought that it might be the animated fetus of an elephant. Only that part of its head from the round flat ear to the round flat eye was visible. Its white pupil stared out into the camera lens.

“It makes me want to vomit,” said India matter-of-factly.

The second photograph that India handed her father was of the bedroom on the second floor of the house. All the other pictures of that room had been marred by the reflections on the glass of the windows; but this one was not. The crosspieces of the window frame were visible, but it was as if the glass had not been there at all.

The photograph showed the chifforobe on the far side of the room; its door was open and the mirror on the inside of the door reflected a part of the room that was not directly visible from where India had stood. And against the outside wall of that bedroom a woman crouched in the edge of the dune of sand that had come through the broken window. She grinned into the camera; her eyes were black with white pupils. A parrot had embedded its claws into her shoulder, arched, and spread its wings.

“It’s Nails,” said India.

“And it’s Marian Savage,” said India’s father.

Chapter
23

“Tricks,” said Odessa, when she was shown the photographs that India had taken of the third house. “It’s all tricks.” She had looked at them cursorily and handed them directly back to India.

“But there are
pictures
here, Odessa. You can’t look at these and tell me it’s a trick of the light, because I know it isn’t. There’s something on the roof, you can see his chest and his chin and his legs; and there’s something on the porch because it’s looking right in the camera, and here’s this dead woman upstairs—and I know who it is because I saw her in her coffin at the funeral!”

Odessa was adamant. “It’s tricks. All of it’s tricks.”