by Bea Bledsoe
“I assure you there is no reason to fear. Hmm...” He frowned and noted something on his clipboard. “Okay. Well, that makes you officially the youngest person in this town. I have some questions.” He clicked the pen. “Are you planning on going away for school?”
Leigh had opened her mouth to respond, but her father had beat her to it, wrapping an arm firmly around his daughter’s shoulder. “No, she’ll be staying here, sir. Plenty of things to learn here in Blackriver.”
The man smiled and clicked his pen again. Anger coiled silently inside of Leigh. “Best place to spread your wings is where you got your roots.” He said to her father, smiling.
Her father nodded, and Leigh thought she might scream. “Damn right.”
The man stared at her for a long moment. “Leigh, are you very active here in your community, would you say? Do you have a lot of friends outside of Blackriver?” Leigh didn’t have any friends really, so she shook her head. “No sir.”
“No online boyfriends?”
Her mother made a low sound of disapproval in her throat. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
The census taker smiled softly underneath his hat. “You’re right ma’am. I apologize. We’re just trying to get a clear idea of how Blackriver is connected to the outside world. Small towns like these struggle to survive, and it’s best to know how influential the outside world is in relation to their existence. It helps us determine the likelihood of their survival.” Leigh raised an eyebrow, and her words had been spoken with equal parts pride and despair, both for herself and to her parents: “If that’s what you are looking at sir, then you should know there is no outside world in Blackriver. What’s inside this valley is all that matters to these folks.”
He looked at her for a minute, muttered “Interesting…” and then
carefully tucked his pen back onto the top of the clipboard. When he stepped away, Leigh saw that he was packing; the heel of a gun poked out of his waistband. She remembered thinking it was odd that a census taker would bring a gun with him, but by then he had moved on. Five minutes later the entire town was dismissed to return home and Leigh quickly forgot about the whole thing. The census had been uneventful and therefore not worth remembering. Until now. Maybe it mattered. Maybe it didn’t.
Leigh closed her eyes, her arms trembling over the sink. Had anyone checked the man’s credentials? The mayor of Blackriver at that time had been Carl Bunter – she shuddered at the memory of his corpse staring up at her - a seventy-five-year-old man who preferred not to be bothered, and Leigh couldn’t see him caring one way or another about some supercilious auditor from the state. She walked out of the bathroom, sitting down hard on the edge of the bed before burying her face in her hands. Had that man been who he said he was? Or had that been the day they had let the fox into the henhouse? Leigh heard a breath and jumped.
“Hey.” Henry’s speech was drowsy with sleep as he rolled over. “Did you actually get some rest?”
Leigh wriggled away from him, letting his hand drop into the air. He was too close for her comfort. “You’ve only been sleeping about ten minutes. But I think I may have remembered something important.” She recounted it for him. After she was done, he sat up on his knees and rubbed at the growing stubble on his chin.
“So, what I hear you saying is that this census could be everything…or it could have been nothing.” He sighed. “I don’t know if you realize this, but we’re pretty amazing detectives.”
Henry stretched his arms over his head, and Leigh saw a glimpse of his torso; it was more solid than she thought it would be, like a thick tree trunk. Leigh swept her hair up from her neck; she was suddenly feeling warm.
“Hey, I think I saw a country bar down the street,” she suggested on a whim, desperate to get out of this claustrophobic room. “Why don’t we get cleaned up and head over? I could use a drink…or four.” She sighed. “I actually think getting out of my head might be the best thing for me right this second.”
Henry smiled. “I like the way you think, and I agree. I think getting out for a little bit would be good for us; clear our heads. Hey, do you think they have craft beers there?” Leigh was still laughing at him when she stepped into the shower.
An hour later, they stepped through the door to Spur. As they were seated at a table near the worn dance floor, Leigh was trying her best to keep her eyes off Henry. The green thread of the plaid he was wearing was doing an incredible job of bringing out the olive shade in his eyes and the warm chestnut of his hair. For the first time in days, Leigh didn’t look so bad herself: She had blown out her hair and decided to let it cascade over her shoulders instead of pulling it back in a braid. From the limited clothing in her suitcase, she had pulled together a semi-decent outfit: straight-leg jeans, a tight black long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of turquoise earrings that she had luckily found at the bottom of her purse, which had been – no surprise here - Imogen’s. It was basic, but it would do.
Spur was just like any other country bar in town. It was kind of seedy, but it offered the three essentials: greasy food, cheap beer, and really good music, the kind of music that Boston couldn’t compete with. Leigh felt curious gazes follow them as they sat down, but everyone was quickly absorbed back into the music. In front of them, two guitar players strummed out covers while an older woman in her forties sang along, her voice exquisitely lived-in.
The waitress, after sweeping her eyes appreciatively over Henry, turned to Leigh as an afterthought. “Can I get you guys anything to drink?”
Leigh nodded. “A whiskey and coke please. And he’ll have the same.”
Henry looked over at her with amusement. “I will?”
“You will.” As the waitress walked away Leigh looked over at Henry. “If you’re going to be in Wyoming, you might as well drink like it.”
He tilted his head. “Alright. I’m game. But only if you promise not to steal from me.”
She winked at him in a moment of levity. “You never know.”
Their drinks came quickly; too quickly, and before Leigh knew it, they were two or three in. The lights in the bar dimmed a little, and the woman on stage started singing melancholy songs about lovers left behind. Leigh felt herself drifting away on the alcohol and the music, lifting out of her body and into the buzzing blue neon light of the bar.
“Why did you hop a plane with me?” She asked out of nowhere.
Henry stopped swaying to the music and met her eyes. “You really want to know?” He rolled the ice in his high-bottom glass and took a last sip.
Leigh tucked her hair behind her ear and leaned forward. “I really do. You know everything about me, which was at one point my worst fear, that an East Coast boy would see the real me. Isn’t that silly? There are such worse things to be afraid of.” Like your family disappearing.
Henry leaned forward and let his finger trace over her palm. Leigh was on fire. “The real you is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Leigh…dance with me.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Here’s the deal. I’ll dance with you if you tell me why you were so eager to leave Harvard.” Henry sat back in his chair in defeat.
“Fine, but it’s not a nice story. It’s weird and embarrassing.” He took one long drink, draining the rest of his glass. “I’m really close to my grandparents. They live just down the street from us in Back Bay, in this enormous house. My grandparents are a huge part of my life, of my family’s life. My grandfather is the man I want to become.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Wanted to become. About three months ago, I went searching in their attic; an enormous place, ridiculous, really. Our rowers club was having an induction ceremony for the new recruits, and I knew that my grandfather had a paddle somewhere, signed by all the rowers back in in the fifties.” His smile faded at the reprimanding look on Leigh’s face. “We don’t hit them hard – the coaches are there. Anyway, I couldn’t find the paddle, so I started opening up some random boxes near the back, and that’s when I
saw a long one tucked away under a knit blanket, the perfect size for a paddle. I thought I had found it, and I opened up the box and instead…instead…” Leigh’s heart beat faster as distress appeared on Henry’s face. “I found a Klan uniform,” he finished.
She leaned forward, her voice hushed. “A Klan uniform? Are you saying what I think you are saying?”
Henry nodded. “A Klu Klux Klan uniform. White hood and all.” Leigh sat back. This was definitely not where she thought this story was going. “Underneath it, there were all these old pamphlets, literature…saying the most horrible things.” Henry grimaced. “It was disgusting. Shameful. I can’t explain to you what I felt in the attic that day, but it was as if everything I was made of turned to rubble. I left the house without saying anything and found my father. The grossest thing is that my father knew about it – and he didn’t even care. He said we just didn’t talk about it, that it was a shameful thing in my grandfather’s past. But here’s the thing: that robe hadn’t been treated shamefully. It had been cleaned and pressed and preserved. My dad begged me not to talk to my grandfather about it, because they might cut us off, but…I had to know.” He pressed his fingers against his temple. “That was my mistake. When I asked him about it, he defended it. He tried to justify it to me. Here he was, my grandfather, a man who ran on the Democratic platform twice for city council, sitting in his revamped kitchen, trying to calmly explain to me why he still keeps a Klu Klux Klan uniform in his attic.” Henry slammed down his glass. “As if there was justifying it. We fought; it was a big one. Cruel things were said, things that should have been said in our family for years but hadn’t been. The Champney’s don’t talk about their feelings. Everything has to be nice and clean and polite. I told him he had to get rid of it, and in return he said that I had two choices: I could either drop the whole thing and we could go on with our lives, or…if I still thought it was a big deal that he would cut me off financially.”
Leigh gasped. “He would do that to his own grandson?”
Henry nodded. “He’s a hard man. I always knew it, but since I was his favorite, it was like the sun was always shining on me. And so I didn’t care.”
“And now?”
He groaned. “Now the eclipse had come. Within weeks, my bank account slowly emptied. My parents live on the back of my grandparents; they’re pretty poor without their support. I saw the writing on the wall and pulled out cash to make it through the rest of the semester before it bottomed out.” Leigh felt a wave of shame wash over her. She never thought about the people that she stole from; she just assumed that they were all spoiled rich boys, ripe for the taking. She couldn’t allow herself to think any other way, otherwise she would be walking an even darker moral road.
“The cash that I stole from you. Henry, I will get it back to you. I promise.” She cautiously reached out her hand and touched his cheek.
“Leigh. I’m hardly worried about that now. I’m not destitute. My tuition is paid, and I have a credit card that I’m pretty sure my grandparents actually forgot I have. I’m still luckier than most.” He scratched his face angrily. “Only now, I know that the proud lineage that has its very roots at Harvard - in the buildings, in the library wing – is covered in shame. My grandfather, someone I once worshipped and who I loved, has probably done some horrible things in his life. He was the man I wanted to be. And now…” He waved his hands, choking back his emotion “And now I feel like I don’t even know who my family is. Who I am. I also know that any minute now, my parents are going to choose my grandfather’s wealth over me.” His olive eyes were red-rimmed. “I know that talking about this to you is selfish. Your family is missing; how dare I complain about mine?”
Leigh shook her head. “I want to hear about your life, Henry. My pain doesn’t diminish yours, no matter how ugly your secrets. And that’s a pretty ugly one. But it’s not a competition for who has it worse.”
“Uh, you. Your whole town is missing.” He finished her glass of whiskey. “You win for sure.”
“Henry…” Leigh decided to take the risk because life was chaos and she was halfway to drunk. “You’re the only thing tethering me to this earth right now.”
Henry looked at her for a long moment. “Leigh, dance with me.”
It felt wrong, but Leigh let him lead her out to the dance floor because if she didn’t find a tiny moment of happiness, the abyss would swallow her whole. And so instead of falling into it, Leigh danced. She sweated and smiled as the music washed over them both. Henry’s skin smelled like ivory soap and nylon fabric and she let him pull her in between his arms, a place where she fit perfectly. The music picked up and he twirled her out again, and as she spun away from his warmth, Leigh knew that something unstoppable was happening here.
For just a while, they let everything fall away from them, focused only on the music: only on each other. Songs played around them as they lost themselves in the moment. It was about an hour later, as she swayed softly in Henry’s arms, when something stopped Leigh cold in the middle of the dance floor. She stepped away from him, her heart dropping to her knees as she took an unsteady step, swaying as she stared toward the back of the bar. Her heart began pounding as she wondered if she was hallucinating. She hadn’t had that much to drink, had she?
“Leigh, what is it?” Henry’s voice was far away as she blinked in blue neon light, but she didn’t respond. Instead her eyes were frozen on the face of Dog Hawdenfir, the resident hermit of Blackriver, who was sitting at the back of the bar gazing intensely at Leigh.
15
It couldn’t be him, right? Leigh stared at him with a naked intensity as he lifted a beer, drained it, and tilted his head toward the back door. Then he slammed the bottle down, threw some money on the wooden bar, and headed outside. Leigh walked off the dance floor, following silently behind Dog. Henry caught up quickly. Dog wove through a dank hallway and out past a noisy kitchen before stepping out into the night. Leigh watched as he staggered toward a beat-up truck parked at the back of the lot, his crooked frame silhouetted under the streetlamp.
“Who is he?” Whispered Henry behind her.
“His name is Dog Hawdenfir. He lived in the hills above Blackriver and owned an auto body shop just outside of town.” She dropped her voice as she walked. “He’s very eccentric, but he was Blackriver through and through.”
“And he’s here? That can’t be a coincidence.”
Leigh felt adrenaline rush through her system, a rush of hope, but she couldn’t help but wonder why of all people in her town did it have to be Dog that she saw, a man who had a standing reputation for explosive outbursts and conspiracy theories?
“Stay close to me, okay?” Leigh’s fingers twitched; she had left the gun back in the hotel room and wished she had it now. God, she was so stupid to leave it. When Dog turned back to face them, Leigh was right behind him. She didn’t want to wait, didn’t bother with niceties. She stepped up in front of his face, not bothering to hide her desperation.
“My parents!” She snapped. “Where are they?”
Dog looked surprised at her boldness. He raised his head into the light and she saw the lines in his tan face like mountain crags, skin weathered like leather. He looked so much older than she remembered. His eyes blinked rapidly at her before he noticed Henry. He seemed discombobulated.
Was he on something? Leigh could feel fury stirring inside of her when he finally leaned forward.
“I can’t tell you here.” He said carefully, cautiously.
Without warning, Henry burst past Leigh in a rush of anger, his intensity making Dog sway backwards defensively. “Like hell you can’t!” He snapped in Dog’s face. “Do you know what she’s been through? Don’t play coy with us, man! Where are her parents?”
Dog stared at Henry for a long second, and then, quick as the feral cats that had prowled around his home, Dog pulled a gun out of the back of his pants. Henry had triggered something in him and he was losing control, she could see it in his face, in the ri
gid way he held his shoulder. Dog stepped forward, pointing the barrel at Henry’s head.
“Get away from me! You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’ve seen!”
Henry stepped back with hands raised and she followed suit, staring down the cold metal tip of the gun, right down the barrel. Then she stepped forward gently, one hand reached toward him.
“Are you going to shoot me, Dog? You watched me grow up in Blackriver. You were friends with my dad; my family fished in your pond, you ate at our table. And whatever happened there, you need to tell me. That was our home.”
Dog’s lip trembled once, and he had just lowered the gun when a high-pitched scream ripped out of his mouth, scaring them both. They leapt backwards as he clutched his head with his other hand.
“GET OUT OF HERE!” He screamed, pounding the side of his head with the hand holding the gun. “Get out!” His eyes were bloodshot, his lips stained a dark red. After a second, his breathing slowed, and his hands slowly curled down from his head. Leigh could see long, jagged scars on either side of his head, as if he had tried to scratch something free.
“I can’t get to it, girl.” He whimpered, meeting her eyes. “Can’t get to Blackriver, can’t get to that day. Can’t go back. There’s a wall there, high as a keep.” His lip curled. “And it’s full of demons with young, pretty faces.” Leigh stepped forward and let her hand gently brush his shoulder.
“We’re here to help you. You know me, right? Skip’s daughter.”
His exhausted eyes rested on her as the moon passed behind a cloud, plunging the group into semi-darkness. His voice was low when it spoke.
“Doesn’t mean nothing now, knowing someone.” He hissed.” You could think you’ve known them forever, but you don’t, not really. Those men, that woman - they said they would give us everything and then they took everything instead. Every. Last. Breath.” He began shaking his head back and forth.