Stubblefield could save the troubled girl from all this. He would take her to his cottage, which is what he had started calling the garage apartment. She could bathe away her smudge in his tub while he sat in the living room drinking coffee and listening to Kind of Blue, which would be exotic to her. She would come to him, flushed from the hot water. He would be all cool and cook a simple dinner, which they would eat at the table out back under the walnut tree at dusk.
So, the upshot was, somebody ought to do something for her. But still, Stubblefield didn’t want to meddle too deep in local matters. Back here, that was a good way to become a shotgun victim.
Yet, finally, one afternoon, Stubblefield worked himself up to visit the sheriff’s office. He said at the front desk that he had a concern about someone’s safety, and he was told to go see Lit, in the second office down the hall. The deputy sat behind a metal desk, and when he stood to shake hands, Stubblefield towered over him by a foot and found himself stooping a little to reach Lit’s hand. Lit wore his dark hair combed straight back, shiny with Brylcreem, comb tracks straight as soybean rows. No jewelry, not even a wristwatch. His faded chino uniform was starched and pressed sharp, with a silvery shine along the seams at pockets and fly and cuff and collar where somebody leaned hard on the steam iron. Stubblefield tried to call up the name of some little slim twitchy mammal that could squirm through the cracks of a henhouse and kill every bird in the place. Mink wasn’t it, but close.
Lit gestured Stubblefield down into a chair across the empty desktop and listened blank-faced to the detailed story.
—Exactly where is this cabin? Lit said when Stubblefield finished.
Stubblefield gave all the numbers of the roads and the turnings, including his best estimations of distances from major landmarks and intersections.
—We’ve been knowing about that situation for some time, Lit said, nodding. But there’s not much we can do until there’s an actual crime.
—Somebody needs to do something to help her.
—I believe it would be helpful, Lit said, if you would go check on that girl. As a private citizen, you’re not as restrained as I am. Hands tied behind my back, if you understand me.
—Yes, I do, Stubblefield said.
—Report back, Lit said.
Stubblefield drove directly to the cabin. Pulled two wheels onto the grassy shoulder. The afternoon sun broke rips in the cloud cover and cast a yellow glare on the glass, obscuring the desolate girl. Stubblefield walked onto the porch and knocked at the door. Nothing from inside, not a rustle. He circled through the high grass to her window, set in checked logs. He cupped his hands around his temples to shed the glare. His nose mashed its print against the glass.
What stared back at him was a dummy, the unclothed top half of a mannequin. Its frazzled dark nylon hair blown out on one side, like a hard-used brunette Barbie. One arm was broken off at the shoulder. The other lacked a concluding hand but was cocked back as if in the act of throwing something through the window directly at Stubblefield’s head. Yet what beautiful smooth nippleless breasts. And blue eyes painted impossibly wide with thick lashes like a Venus flytrap.
Stubblefield drove back to the sheriff’s office. Lit was waiting at his desk. He sat pitched on his chair’s hind legs with his hands behind his head against the wall. Expressionless except for a quiver of tension around his pressed lips.
—Appalachian humor? Stubblefield said.
—Welcome back to the Lake, Lit said.
CHAPTER 11
THEY SAT WET-BOTTOMED on a big flat rock at the edge of the creek, swapping a mossy crawfish back and forth. Dolores let it clamp its pincher onto her lobe like an earbob, then pulled it off, her eyes watering from the pain. She passed it to Frank, who let it grip his lower lip with both claws until he yipped like a beagle. Then into the creek again to flee backward, tail-kicking. Frank lay prone, put his whole face in the creek and opened his eyes to a green-tinged world, mica-flecked sand and gravel. He breathed out, and silver bubbles rose toward the surface, tickling up his face and into his hairline.
Sprawled in the grass of the creek bank, faces to the sun, they communicated in their manner with each other, trying to remember Lily. The color of her hair, her eyes. Chilly mornings when they ran in and climbed shivering into bed with her. How warm she was. She smelled like wet grass, fallen leaves. The memory remained vague, just her presence and her absence. A ghost that doesn’t wish you harm but can’t do you any good either. A beautiful white haze. They held memories in their heads like boxes. Some they were happy to open whenever they wanted, and some stayed closed and dark.
They circled to the smokehouse, where Luce had stored the unopened box of Lily’s things. They ripped the cellophane tape with the point of a rusty nail pulled from the wall and sat on the greasy dirt floor in the dim pork-smelling air. They sorted through treasures. A white rabbit-fur muff, a blue leather jewelry box that opened in tiers of little empty blue velvet compartments, a green hat with a black wide-mesh veil inside a hatbox, a blue velvet handbag with seven identical thin silver bracelets inside. A lumpy fox stole with beady-eyed heads and dangling tails. Two hard-shelled cases, like small pieces of luggage. Everything smelling of Lily’s perfume, Lily’s powder.
Dolores held her thin arm up and dropped the bracelets one by one past the elbow and then tipped her arm down to spill them jangling over her hand to the greasy dirt floor. And then again, over and over and over. Frank upended the muff and wore it like a hat, and then he wore the hat like a muff. Then he set the green hat, punctuated with a gold hatpin, on top of the muff, and pulled the black veil down over the white fur. Lily, though, was nowhere to be found.
Not curators by nature, they reached for contact with her by deconstructing her things. Breaking the golden hinges of the blue leather jewelry box and pulling out the blue velvet compartments. The hatbox, with its octagonal walls and thick lid and double floor, became a flat stack of pasteboard, hunter green striped with cream. They separated the hat into its components, green felt and black satin and veiling. The locked white train case, nearly as big as the hatbox, took some work, but it finally yielded many fragrant tubes and boxes and squat cylinders and, finally, two pink circles of pleated satin lining. The locked pink case held hair, two blond wigs and a ponytail extension, plus circles of white lining. The lumpy fox stole with beady-eyed heads and dangling tails was tricky, but eventually, after much picking at stitching with the rusty nail, it became three separate flat animals with no insides.
They continued their work until bits of Lily’s life covered the smokehouse floor. Lily, though, stayed far away. Frank took a big powder puff from the train case and held it as high as he could and shook it. A pale shape formed in the air and then disappeared. They began heaping the stuff back into the big box, leaving until last the fake ponytail and useful stacks of paper tinder wrapped in red bands. Frank held the tail up and tipped his head back and brushed his face lightly with the ends of the long hairs. Dolores held one stack of tinder near her face and thumbed bottom to top and let the dry flammable leaves flutter her cheek.
Back at the creek, they lay on the bank, turned their faces to the sun, and remembered Lily hugging them tight, both at the same time, until their stomachs tingled and they laughed uncontrollably. Lily saying over and over, Love you, love you, love you, till the day I die.
CHAPTER 1
A LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON. Tall stalks of ironweed and goldenrod bordering the dirt road nearly ready to bloom. Stubblefield drove one-handed, sipping a beer, trying to keep the Hawk from dragging its sensitive underparts against the rocks. Raking its shiny flanks against the various jungle shrubs encroaching on the passway. He had worked most of the way through a green eight-pack of Rolling Rock pony bottles, a gift from the Conway Twitty–looking dude leasing the Roadhouse and very much wanting to keep his jolly position, it being so central to a certain half-legal local social whirl.
Jollier still to be the owner of the Roadhouse. During Stubblefiel
d’s tour, the potential for entertainment seemed clear, even hours before opening time, no music from either jukebox or live band, neon off, back-room pinball tables dark and silent. Daylight blared gritty through the opened door and cast a vampire-killing trapezoid onto the nineteenth-century wood floor, the splintery puncheons hip-wide and wrist-thick, cut from trees nearly two hundred years ago and made to last. Still bearing adze marks from bearded pioneer ancestors. The festive stale odors of spilled drinks and tobacco smoke soaked so deep into the thick boards that some archaeologist with sharp instruments could scrape down the layers of wood and identify McCallum’s Scotch spilled by some horseback trader in the days of the Cherokee Nation. Might as well put up a sign: SERVING HIGH TIMES FOR TWO CENTURIES. Stubblefield imagined cashing a check every month, and yet no other responsibilities on his part than to be el patrón.
The Hawk rounded a turn, raked its oil pan alarmingly on the high center of the two-track, and drew to a stop. Projected on its windshield, a brown log fortress set against a green mountainside. Down a weedy slant of lawn, the lake lay glassy, about halfway between the color of sky and the color of mountains.
Some memory of country etiquette learned in childhood from his grandfather kicked in, and Stubblefield tapped the chrome horn ring, the briefest of friendly toots, before getting out of the car. Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to walk right up the footpath and climb the steps and knock on the front door. He waited below the porch and called out, Hello?
Across the lake, mounds of pale grey and silver clouds rose in convincing mountain shapes so high into the sky that Stubblefield became confused about what was heaven and what was landscape. Have to be in Tibet to validate some of those upper peaks.
—Hey? he said.
Off to the far side, past the row of rockers, two small heads popped up over the rim of porch boards. Hair like dried shucks, and dark eyes glaring at him. Then they ducked back down. Stubblefield walked around to the end of the porch, but the children were gone. Whose children, by the way? Grandchildren of the hermit spinster’s?
In the backyard, no children. Just a clutch of chickens pecking at the ground and a slim girl. Or, rather, since she appeared to be about Stubblefield’s age, a woman. Wearing black pedal pushers and a white blouse and scuffed black penny loafers. Standing at a chopping block splitting kindling with a double-bitted axe, the shape of its flared blades echoing deep into Iron Age history, some Viking or Celt thing. Whack, and two yellow-faced pieces of pine fell away from each other and landed in a pile of their fellows.
—Hey, Stubblefield said.
The woman swept back dark hair with her wrist and glared, about as welcoming as the children. She said nothing for an uncomfortable stretch of time.
—So, again, greetings, Stubblefield said.
Just then, he realized that an empty pony bottle still dangled from his right fist. He shook it, pretending to throw it away but it wouldn’t go. A Red Skelton bit surfacing into his life all of a sudden.
The woman raised the axe to whacking level and propped its helve on her shoulder.
—Help you? she said.
—No, Stubblefield said. Or, possibly, yes.
—Which?
—My name’s Stubblefield.
—He died.
—Grandson.
—Ah.
—So, I guess Grandpa, what? Mentioned me?
—A time or two.
—And he hired you to, what?
Nothing from the woman but a neutral straight-on look. Put a level to her eyebrows and the bubble would stay inside the lines.
Stubblefield glanced off toward a set of fading ridges or clouds or whatever. Some big bird passed overhead. A shadow of wings brushed him but he didn’t even look up to see hawk or raven or buzzard. Instead, he watched the shadow waver away across the grass and become broken up by the ragged garden.
As if making an apology, he said, I guess I own this place now. And I need to … He paused and started to say, Make some decisions. But before he could get all confessional about what hard choices they were likely be and what a mess his grandfather had dumped in his lap by dying with everything in such disarray, he factored the lack of upwelling sympathy in the woman’s demeanor. The axe, but not just the axe. Something about her eyes. So Stubblefield revised his sentence on the fly, like lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of an old one, and said, Have a look at my inheritance.
—Look all you want, she said. It’s yours. And by the way, there’s a fair chance the children burned down the house.
She set another section of pine onto the chopping block and whacked it, scenting the air with piney odors, sharp and clean. And then before Stubblefield could go, What? in relation to the house, some instant memory flashback washed over him. Something about the sway of her hair, or a glint of light off angles of cheekbones and jawbone. Seventeen memories came rolling in from some useless brain attic that usually opened up only to inform Stubblefield exactly where he was and what he was doing and what the weather was when he heard a particular song for the first time, even back to early childhood. Hearing his mother singing, When the red red robbin goes bob bob bobbing along along while she ran meat through a hand-crank sausage grinder, October sunlight beaming aslant onto the green tiled kitchen floor, segmented by the crossed black shadows of the muntins.
But no music kicked off his Luce memories. They rose to him like watching an eight-millimeter movie thrown onto a white wall by a Bell & Howell, the only sounds a soft clatter of sprockets engaging holes in the film and the hiss of the film feeding off one spool and snaking its way onto another.
IT IS SUMMER’S END. But not reckoned by some vague astronomical moment when the autumn equinox passes and nobody even looks up or feels an onset of chill. Reckoned, rather, by Labor Day, after which the pool closes for the year and school resumes. Which feels much more like something irreplaceable just died.
As for locale, it’s the town swimming pool beside the mile-long grass airstrip. Two dozen pretty teenage girls walking around the concrete apron, the water dark green. A Labor Day beauty contest back when girls wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner. All the bathing suits identical except for color, body sheaths cut low across the chest, modesty panels stretched quivering tight. Deep reds and blues and greens, and then the less interesting pastels. The most popular girls are curvy armloads levered up onto stiletto heels. Scarlet pouty lips. Breasts scooped like double cones of vanilla almost to their chins and glowing with Sea & Ski. Hair domed and flipped and sprayed into crunchy helmets. Pinched waists and asses like upside-down valentines.
Aluminum megaphones on creosote poles at each corner of the pool’s chicken-wire fence blare some fake Latin samba cha-cha saxophone shit played by heroin-addict New Yorker jazzmen daydreaming they’re living in Rio or Batista Cuba. Anyway, whatever the music, even if it were a Sousa march, only pretty girls drive Stubblefield’s picture show. They walk around the rim of the pool, each one a Helen of Troy, launching a carload of high school boys to spray-paint her name on the water tower.
A red-and-white antique biplane lifts off the green grass airstrip into the pale blue sky above the dark blue mountains. Four shirtless teenage boys ready for football season set off running down the length of the landing strip, constantly angling their Timexes, worn on the undersides of their wrists, to see how close a pace to Bannister’s four minutes they are achieving. Townfolk gather around the pool fence and hang over the rails atop the sunbathing platform, applauding all the loveliness their lives encompass.
Luce is one of only two beauties wearing sunglasses. Green lenses set in black cat eye frames. And, by a long stretch, she is the only one eating a frozen Mars bar from the concession stand while she parades. Her lips candy-apple red, and all twenty nails painted to match. Black swimsuit. A swoop to her do so that one eyepiece of her glasses is nearly obscured by a dark wave of hair.
So, what high and mixed emotions for young Stubblefield that day after the beauty show. Drivi
ng his grandfather’s Packard back around the lake to the farmhouse, the hopeless and glowing vision of Luce burrowing deeper into his head by the minute. And then the gloom of his mother’s arrival the next day to take him back to Jacksonville for the start of his final year of high school.
KEEPING COOL AND LETTING the memories unreel, Stubblefield wandered off to check out the Lodge. Floor to floor, opening a door now and then, barely attending. All the way up to the sad, airless servants’ quarters under the eaves. Back downstairs, he studied the lobby, the daybeds near the fireplace and the elderly radio. Kerosene lamps mixed in with a few mica-shaded electrics. Woodstove in the outsized kitchen, iron frying pans big as car wheels, and a flashlight by the back door. By the time he finished scouting around, he was dizzy from trying to hold the current image of Luce and the one from the past in his head at the same time.
When he returned to her, Stubblefield started trying to say some vague things about the Lodge’s potential and its liability, talking like he was all business, using the bald lawyer’s vocabulary. Assets and profit and shit. Imaginary money. He broke off and said, I guess when the power goes out, you don’t hardly notice.
—I miss the radio.
Then Stubblefield decided to tell Luce about his memories. Except it wasn’t exactly a decision. He blurted something stupid before he could catch himself. Like, Great God, do you remember that beauty contest back when we were in high school?
ON THE WAY HOME he kept striking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and trying to remember exactly what he’d said. His face felt flushed red as a lipstick kiss. Was it possible that he’d concluded his memories with, You were so beautiful back then? Had he really committed that unforgivable past tense?