Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (9 page)

“Not anymore,” she reminded him. She went on, babbling. “I know what you mean. It's getting hard to know who to trust anymore. People everywhere saying they're sincere, and they
seem
sincere, but at the same time they're living a bold-faced lie.”

“You mean a bald-faced lie.”

“I thought it was bold-faced? Like a headline.”

Wes was yawning. He rattled his car keys in the pocket of the blue windbreaker he was wearing. “I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,” he said, turning the doorknob. “Anyway, I think you need to work with that dog a lot. It'll be a challenge.”

“I do need to learn more about dogs,” she said, yawning back at him. She wondered if yawning was contagious with dogs and decided to try it with Mick later.

After Wes had gone, Mick paced through the room, sniffing. He lifted his leg against the couch where Wes had been sitting.

“Bad dog!” Annie yelled. When she returned from the kitchen with some paper towels, she saw Mick with the lawyer's fur-lined cap, which had somehow gotten out of the closet. She lunged at the dog, crying, “Drop that, Mick! No, Mick!”

Mick ripped an earflap from the hat. When she tried to take it from him, he growled possessively. She retrieved the cap, but he kept the earflap.

She dropped to the floor and cradled the dog's head. “O.K., Mick,” she said. “It's time for a heart-to-heart.”

She located Andrew on his car phone.

“What do I do now? I think I blew it.”

“Hold tight,” said Andrew. “I may fly you out pretty soon.”

“O.K. This is too confusing. I'm ready for a change.”

“Good girl.”

“What about my dog?”

“Why did you get a dog, anyway?”

“Because I wanted a dog.”

“What kind of dog?”

“A German shepherd mix.”

“Good dogs.”

“Andrew?”

“Yeah.”

“Don't say ‘good girl.' It sounds like ‘good dog.' ”

“Right.” He paused and she could hear a car horn on his line.

“I've got a car,” she said. “Do I have to fly—with the dog?”

“You could drive. Fine. Annie? I'm sorry about this. It's not your fault. I think word got out somewhere else. But this is part of it, you see.” His voice was exuberant, punctuated with traffic sounds. “You did your job. Now we know somebody's on the lookout. They're nervous. Something's going on.”

“Well, I know I didn't let on. Maybe somebody saw me scribbling a poem on a napkin and thought I was taking notes on them.”

“Why would you write a poem?”

“Same reason I wanted a dog.”

“Funny. O.K., Annie. Get a good night's sleep. Contact me tomorrow night after work, and we'll decide what to do next. I'm thinking Birmingham. Either that or Little Rock.”

Annie was thinking the Riviera. Or the Zambezi. She imagined hitting the road with Mick. The dog seemed to like riding in the car, and she saw the two of them adventuring together, a team—like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Lewis and Clark. Harry and Sally? She couldn't remember many adventure duos, but she was sure there were plenty. She wondered if she should stay in this kind of work. Wes had thrown her. She had been trying to perform the job she was hired to do, and her parents, after all, had sent her to college so she could get a good-paying job. But they thought that majoring in hotel management meant she could start running a hotel the day after graduation.

When she let Mick outside later, he began barking immediately. She grabbed his collar and told him to stop, but he barked harder. She couldn't get him to yawn when she did, either. He whimpered, then pawed the ground in an embarrassed way. A car horn sounded, and he slammed against the fence, barks flying out of his throat like a water pipe bursting.

Before work the next day, Annie stopped at the public library to get some books on dog care and training. Wes was right about her dog. She had a nut case for a pet. She had left Mick in the yard, barking his head off. She didn't know how high he could leap, or what neighbor might poison him. By next week, she could be far from Atlanta. She would have to mail the books back.

She checked out half a dozen dog books—obedience, nutrition, canine history, even a guide to the sure-fire way monks train German shepherds. Later in the restroom, Annie noticed a woman standing next to a pallet she had made in the corner. She was listening to a small radio through earphones. Suddenly the woman thrust her hand into Annie's face. Annie saw the broken nails, polished bright orange. The hand was chapped. Annie flinched.

“Got any spare change?” the woman was saying.

Annie dug into her purse and found a handful of coins. The woman dropped the money into the side pocket of a tote bag bearing an art museum logo. She was perhaps in her forties, with uncombed shaggy hair and several layers of shirts and vests. Her aqua pants, splotched with brown stains, were stuffed down into shiny red rubber boots.

“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” the woman muttered in a thin singsong voice. “It's all you hear. The Rolling fucking Stones will make more money in one night than my mama made in a lifetime.”

“You want a ticket?” Annie said impulsively. “I've got an extra ticket.” She set down her books and plunged her hand into her purse, unzipping the compartment where she had stowed the tickets.

The woman laughed sarcastically. “Well, let's see. I don't have anything on my social calendar, and I'm not going on a Caribbean cruise this year. I must have money to burn.”

“No, I mean, I'll give it to you. I'm not a scalper. I'll just give it to you.”

The woman studied the writing on the ticket, her mouth moving silently, her face expressionless.

“Just pretend you won a prize,” Annie said, backing away and leaving the restroom. Instead of waiting for the elevator, she ran down the stairway two flights to the exit, pausing to show the library books to a guard. She was confused about what she had done. By the time she reached her car, it occurred to her that the woman might just sell the ticket and buy drugs. Annie tried to imagine who might show up in the seat next to hers. It was like anticipating a blind date. It was an interesting thought—one that stopped her for a moment in the act of pointing her key at the ignition. She realized an important fact she hadn't mentioned to Andrew. She couldn't leave Atlanta until she had seen the Stones. And she wouldn't. So what if he fired her.

At work Wes was painstakingly swabbing the ficus tree with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. “Every damn leaf,” he said proudly. “I came in early to do this and I'm almost finished.”

“The tree looks great,” she said, amazed that anybody would go to such lengths. Wes seemed joyful as he stood back and surveyed the gleaming tree—the life he'd saved.

“You seem nervous,” he said.

“Really? Oh, I guess I am. I guess I wasn't prepared for the big city, after all.” She told him about the woman in the library. “I gave her my extra ticket. Scott's not going.”

“Good for you,” Wes said as he shifted the tree back into its accustomed spot. He collected the cotton balls and wadded them into the business section of the morning paper. He wiped his hands on a napkin.

“Do you want to go eat after work?” he asked. “I know this barbecue place. It's just a hole in the wall, but the barbecue is out of this world. They've got practically a whole cow on a big table. You pull the meat off with tongs and put it on a piece of refrigerator cardboard and they weigh it. It's your basic meat-and-slaw place, but it's better than this wimpy French stuff we serve here.”

Annie stared at Wes. Enthusiasm was running out of him like the bubbly fountain outside, with its atmospheric lights that operated even in the daylight.

“It's my apology,” he said. “I wasn't too nice last night.”

“That's O.K.”

“Let's go eat and I won't say a word about your dog—or your boyfriend.”

“I got some dog books,” she said. She gazed out the window at the traffic. “What in the world is refrigerator cardboard?”

Wes was giving some answer, an effusive description that she half heard, intending to store it and savor it later. People were getting off work, and the sidewalks were a blur of similarly dressed business people—shadowy, layered images interweaving like a flock of birds swirling together. Her eyes zeroed in on the only spot of brilliant color in the scene—a woman's yellow basketball shoes, the color rising and falling, boats chopping at the gray waves.

Three-Wheeler

Checking the dirt-streaked window, Mary saw the little boys slipping around through the woods again. They were sneaking from tree to tree, hiding. Today they had their rifles with them.

She let her pottery wheel die and stomped outside. The boys were brothers, and they lived two houses down the road. Their small white house appeared to be barricaded, with its hedge of oil drums and chicken crates.

“What are you boys up to now?” she said, rubbing her clayey hands with an old dish towel. They beamed at her with calculated innocence.

“Do you need us to kill you some snakes?” the older one, Jeb, said, fixing her with a sly Humphrey Bogart gaze. He was about ten.

“No. What do you want to kill my snakes for?”

“They might get in your clubhouse,” the smaller one said. His name was Abe. He was freckled like an old blue-enameled dishpan.

“You've got a neat clubhouse,” Jeb said, tossing his head half an inch.

He was talking about her pottery studio, the little shed tacked on to a storage barn. She spent all her time there, throwing pots. She didn't have time for little boys or anything considered normal around here—cooking, TV, church. She was sure these boys had picked all her daffodils last week.

“Do you need us to kill you any groundhogs?” Jeb said.

“I haven't seen any groundhogs.”

“It's a dollar-fifty for a groundhog, ten dollars for a snake,” said the younger one.

Jeb shifted his rifle. He said, “Abe specializes in snakes. I'm after foxes, but ain't many of them. And the coyotes are whomping all the groundhogs.”

“I don't need you little boys around here,” Mary said, hiking her coveralls up.

“Don't you have
any
thing that needs killing?” Abe said.

“We can help you do stuff,” said Jeb.

“I don't need your help,” Mary said. She motioned toward the “clubhouse.” “Don't let me catch you messing around
there.
”

Pointing their rifles ahead, they disappeared around the corner of the barn, where there was a padlocked door. “What's in there?” Jeb asked when she reached the boys.

“That's where my ovens are,” Mary said with a dangerous grin. “My ovens are so hot they would melt those guns of yours. Now don't let me catch you fooling around here or I'll shut you in my ovens.”

“We ain't scared,” said Jeb.

“Don't you know what happened to Hansel and Gretel?” she asked.

Their blank faces said no.

“That's pathetic,” she said. “Don't your parents teach you anything?”

She was certain these boys had killed the birds she kept finding scattered throughout the woods. Earlier in the month, she had found a pile of songbirds beside a tree. The shattered birds looked as though they had gathered for a songfest and sung themselves to death.

The next day, from the kitchen window, she saw the boys sneaking out from behind the barn. Yanking along a small wagon, they ran through the woods. They skidded into the new mound of dirt she had had delivered and began digging. She had gotten the dirt to fill in a place where an old outhouse site was sinking, but it had been dumped ten yards away from the hole. A latticework of roots covered the depression in the ground.

Again, she rushed out to face the boys. “What are you doing?” she barked. “Quit messing in my dirt.” She paused to collect herself but then blurted out anyway, “I know what you boys did to my March flowers. You're thieves and vandals.”

She pointed to the picked patch, a few yards away. She imagined the daffodils still nodding their heads, like a reflex action.

“We want to work,” Jeb said. Their sincere faces were shining up at her like cut flowers. The younger one was pudgy, with sandy hair cut in a line across the middle of the back of his head, as though he'd had a run-in with a Bush Hog. He said, “We need to help out at home 'cause Mama's lost her job and has to get oddities.”

“That ain't it, Abe. It's
com
-oddities,” Jeb said slowly.

“Cheese and sacks of no-'count stuff,” said Abe, making a face.

“What are you doing with my dirt?” Mary asked. Their wagon had some of the new dirt in it.

“We was going to help you move it—fill in that hole.” Jeb was suddenly a funny sight, the way he was acting like an experienced building contractor.

Mary studied the little boys closely. It had been hard to get help since she inherited this unmanageable property from her uncle. She was busy with pots. She had orders to fill for the spring catalogs, and she was behind with her outdoor work. Leaves were falling when she moved in last October. She hadn't raked or mowed. She knew the frontage must be kept clear or she'd get fined, but the point held no urgency for her. The barn was full of machinery that she had not troubled herself to use. Recently Mrs. Hayes, a neighbor down the road, dropped by to chat and snoop. She said, “Your uncle always cleaned out the woods and picked up the limbs and kept it mowed like a park. But you've got all them flowerpots and sandbags. That's not how your uncle kept this place.”

Mary, instantly spiteful, thought of the woman as the Nasty-Nice Neighbor, but she took out an ad in the paper for a yard man. One fellow said he would come and mow the woods, but he never came. Another took the job, raked leaves for two hours, and then went home with a headache. He called later to say he was allergic to leaf mold and had to quit. Then a woman called and accused her of running a sexist ad. Mary dropped the ad. Sometimes she just didn't think, she told herself. Most of the time she just didn't think. She had to focus on one thing at a time. She was here, not in Santa Fe. She had to make the pots, fill the orders. She had abandoned everything else, on the advice of Henry Thoreau, who said, “Simplify, simplify,” and Henry Ford, who said, “Simplicate, then add lightness.” Ford was speaking about his formula for airplanes, but it would apply to anything, she thought.

When she visited here as a little girl, the shed was her playhouse. She played in these woods, where these little boys now explored. The woods were thick then, shielding the outhouse from the road. One year when she came back to Kentucky to visit, Uncle Bob and Aunt Reba had a new bathroom with lime-green imitation tiles. That tileboard had now buckled from the mildew behind it.

“Well, maybe I could use your help,” Mary said to the boys.

They wore loose, baggy jeans and had their baseball caps on backwards. Their little wagon was rusty, and in one end it had yellow scum and wads of clotted comic books.

“We can weed-eat,” Jeb said to Mary.

“We weed-eated our fencerow yesterday,” Abe said. “Mama said we done it good.”

“Let's just fill in the hole,” Mary told them. “It's where an old outhouse used to be. I want to fill it in where the tree roots are showing.”

“We need us a dump truck,” Abe said solemnly.

Maybe his hair had been trimmed with a weed-eater, Mary thought. “Do you know what an outhouse is?” she asked.

They shook their heads.

“I'll bet you've never seen one.”

Their faces lacked all curiosity. She might have said, “Environmental Protection Agency” and aroused more excitement.

“All right,” she said to the boys. “If you can move that dirt and fill in the hole this afternoon I'll pay you five dollars.”

“Ten,” said Jeb. “There's two of us. Five dollars apiece.”

She grunted an O.K.

The boys got to work. She watched them from the clubhouse, where she was shaping a medium-sized pot. Her pottery was simple and functional, not like the useless multi-textured art pieces she used to make out in Santa Fe. She had O.D.'d on artiness—all moonshine and selfishness, she decided. Her pieces were no better than the glitter-dusted ceramic frogs and elves Aunt Reba had collected. Now she supplied plain clay pots to a mail-order company that sold them as bread-loaf bakers, with recipes. She tried baking bread in one of them, but it seemed a silly and clumsy thing to do.

Every few minutes she glanced up, to check on the boys. What an odd pair they were, with old-men names. They even spoke like old men.

It was hard to concentrate on the spinning mud while the boys were there. She gave up and went outside. She began burning leaves in the trash barrel. Then the boys came up behind her, startling her.

“You can't burn till four-thirty,” Jeb said. “When the wind dies down.”

“Is this any of your business?” Mary asked, heaving leaves into the flames.

“They'll get you. They fly over in helicopters a-looking for people burning.”

“And they look for Mary-Juanita,” said the little one.

“How do you know that?”

“Daddy said.”

“How much dirt have you boys moved? I'm not paying you for Sunday-school lessons.”

“We need your riding mower to pull our wagon, so it'll be faster.”

“That's silly.”

“We can make twice as many loads.”

The idea tempted her. She could get the mower out. She had filled it with gas before the yard man's two-hour visit. A two-hour yard man ought to be twice as good as a sixty-minute man, she thought, remembering the raunchy old song. She always thought it should be the theme song for
60 Minutes.
Her mind was flying around loose. She was suddenly eager to look at the equipment in the barn.

She went indoors for the key to the barn. Uncle Bob and Aunt Reba's decrepit old house resembled an antiques mall, with random collections of grimy old stuff. Mary had cleared out a couple of rooms for her needs and crammed the bric-a-brac into the other rooms. She shoved away the needlepoint pillows, the artificial flowers, the Coca-Cola memorabilia—Bob and Reba's lifetime.

The boys followed her to the barn. Abe was dragging a tobacco stick. With another stick, Jeb was whipping at bushes. “Leave those bushes alone,” she said. “They'll bloom soon, and you're not going to pull their heads off when they do.”

She opened the barn. Inside was a treasure trove of equipment—a leaf blower, several mowers, a riding lawn tractor, and a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle.

“Wow,” said Jeb. “A three-wheeler!”

“Gah,” said Abe. His mouth hung open.

She sent them to work with the riding mower, but before long they were back again, bursting right through her clubhouse door. She was about to spin off a pot. She kept working with fierce concentration.

“You need to get that three-wheeler out and ride it some,” said Jeb.

“No, I believe not.” The pottery wheel slowed to a whisper.

“It'll rust out if you don't ride it.”

Abe said, “I want to ride it.”

“Have you got that dirt moved?” The pot gleamed, shiny and fresh.

“We need that three-wheeler,” Jeb said. “It'll pull the wagon better.”

“The tire's flat,” she said.

“We've got a pump at home. We'll go get it!”

They took her vague nod for “yes” and went flying home.

She loaded some pots into a crate to carry to the kiln. She liked the way you could bake something into place. She liked the illusion of permanence in something so fragile as pottery.

In a few minutes she saw the boys coming through the woods with a pump. They had entered the barn and pumped up the tire of the three-wheeler by the time she reached them. Jeb had the gas cap off and was feeling inside the tank with his fingers.

“She's good to go!” he cried.

She thought how satisfying it would be to take a willow switch to these boys.

Jeb said excitedly, “Our papaw said he ain't seen none of these three-wheelers since heck was a pup.”

“Papaw's at our house,” Abe said. “He sleeps all day, but he woke up and got us the pump.”

“I don't have a key to this thing,” she said.

“It don't use a key. It has a button,” said Jeb. He was already starting it up. “If we hook it up to the wagon, we can pull the dirt a lot faster.”

“We're good workers,” said Abe. “We're worky-holics.”

They were already driving away, like a bus she wanted to catch, pulling away without seeing her signal. They were racing across the woods. Abe held on behind Jeb. The three-wheeler was buck-jumping. She ran along behind them to the pile of dirt.

“You've got too much dirt,” Jeb said. “We need to take some down to the creek down there.”

He pointed beyond the bushes to a small creek on her boundary. Even in April, it was only a trickle.

“If we had a bale of hay, we could load it on the wagon and we could ride it down there and make us a dam,” Jeb said.

Mary shook her head. “If you dam that up, you'll flood the whole bottom.”

Jeb said, “If we had some beavers to come, they could make a good dam.”

“They could make it with sticks,” said Abe. “And trees.”

“We could catch some fish if we had a pond,” Jeb said. “We could catch some beavers, too, if there was a dam.”

“Now don't you go damming that up,” Mary said calmly, as if they were having a reasonable discussion. “There are no beavers here, and if you dam up the creek, Mr. Smith's pond over yonder will dry up and we'll have a pond here. That's like stealing somebody's pond.”

She saw the gleam in the older boy's eyes jump like an electrical spark over a synapse to his brother's eyes. She said, “Now go on and finish spreading that dirt like I hired you to.”

She went back to her work. She had to spin another set of pots. She cut the clay and slapped it angrily on the table. She didn't believe the boys would fall into the pit where the outhouse had been, because of the tree roots, but if they did it was their own fault. They were pestering her. She slapped the clay down. She pumped the wheel and helped the mud spin into shape. The little boys were moving dirt. They wanted to make a dam. Making a dam would be like making a clay pot. Had they really said the three-wheeler would rust out if it wasn't ridden? She shivered. She thought about the last time she had had sex. Her doctor said regular sex kept the tissues healthy.