by Isla Morley
“One more thing.” He gives me a queer look, like he’s almost embarrassed to say.
It doesn’t matter what that thing is; that there is more makes me drop to my knees. I bend my head till it reaches the floor in front of his shoes. Those ugly beige moccasins. It feels so terrible that my braids are not beside me, that my bangs are not there to offer some small relief from the cold concrete floor.
He pulls me up by the armpits. I am set down on the cot. He places the bar of carbolic soap, the rag, and a bucket of water beside me. Then he hands me a razor. “You are going to have to do down there.”
“What?”
“I will be checking, so don’t try to pretend.”
He draws the doctor’s office curtain around me. I look at the razor for a long time. I cannot understand what is happening.
“Are you done yet?”
I stand up and turn my back to the curtain. I pull down the underwear. I make a little lather in my hand. Raising my skirt, I shave myself without looking.
When I am done, I slide the bucket and razor under the curtain.
“Very good.” He flings back the curtain. He hands me a wet napkin and asks me to wipe myself because he has to be sure. I aim to close the curtain again, but he stops me. He has to see me do as I’m told. I turn my back to him. I think I am going to be sick. I wipe myself and hand him back the napkin. He inspects it for stray hairs.
“Excellent!”
I was a girl with hair. Auburn hair. Now color has gone. Everything fades. Mama’s flushed cheeks, the smutty palette of the evening sky, our yellow clapboard farmhouse. As goes color, so the senses. I try to conjure the scent of Theo’s head, all sweaty from play; Gerhard’s voice; the smell of Suzie’s nail polish. Nothing. What does rain feel like? Only yesterday, I’d gotten drenched in an afternoon downpour. If I could just hear the sounds of the carnival, or visualize the colored lights strung along Main Street, if I could feel Arlo’s fingers on the back of my hand. Instead, everything condenses into a small point of memory, like a knot in Grandma’s needlepoint, and then—snip!—gone. In its place is absence, and the color of absence is gray. Gray walls, gray floors, gray ceiling. I can taste the gray, smell it. On my arms, the hairs have risen up to meet the stale, gray air. Gray pushes its way into my ears and up my nose. Down my throat, too thick for lungs. I start to gag. It settles in my stomach, and retching moves it not one inch.
Dobbs bends over me. “You okay? Here, use the bucket.” On my back, his hand is heavy and damp. His forefinger rubs back and forth over my vertebrae.
“Don’t!” I right myself and clutch the rumpled curtain so we have at least this between us.
“Blythe, don’t be like this.”
“Be like what? You don’t be like this! Why are you doing this?”
He does nothing but stare at me.
“Please! Say something!” I scream.
“I’m sorry about your hair. They aren’t going to suspect me, but if they do, they won’t find any trace of you on my clothes. Hair fiber’s the kind of mistake amateurs make.”
I don’t want to cry in front of him, but I can’t stop myself.
“I’m going to have to leave you again. This time, it’s going to be for a bit longer. The fluorescents are on a timer, seven a.m. to nine p.m., but if for any reason they fail to come on, or you need a light in the middle of the night, there are glow sticks under the basin.” He points. “Crack one, and it’ll give you ten hours. Try not to use them, though, because I can only get them on special order.”
He moves toward the door. I do, too.
“I’ll be back to give you the grand tour tomorrow.”
I clutch his shirt.
“You’ve got to stay now.”
I grab him around the waist.
“Be a good girl.”
“Please. Please don’t leave me here.”
“I can’t expect you to take this in all at once, and I don’t expect you to feel the way I do. But you’ll see—it will all make sense in a little while.”
I try to get through the door when he unlocks it, but he pushes me back. Before I can recover lost ground, the lights go out. The door closes with a heavy thud.
“Dobbs?” I beat my hands against it. “Dobbs!”
THERE IT IS again, that terrible silence that comes when the lights go out. And the kind of chill that doesn’t come from weather. I crawl on my hands and knees back to the cot for the sweater Grandma knit that Mama insisted I take to the picnic in case it turned cool, but I can’t find my way. I tell myself crying won’t help. I give myself the small task of finding the sweater, believing if I can do this, I will be able to do greater things when the time comes.
My knees are scraped raw by the time I find it. I clutch it instead of putting it on. I find Grandpa’s watch, too. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell what time it is.
I rub the inscription on Grandpa’s watch.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
I didn’t think twice about pocketing it. I took it from Mama’s jewelry box before heading out for the Horse Thieves Picnic because I didn’t want to be late for meeting Arlo. I thought Grandpa’s watch was going to help me. Now, the words make my blood run cold. Not a stone tell where I lie.
* * *
Any minute a great commotion is going to come for me. Any minute, my father’s going to bust through that door and take me home, and Dobbs Hordin will be marched off to the county jail.
Any minute becomes just like every other minute.
I can’t decide which I hate more: the quiet or the dark.
Wait. What had Dobbs said about glow sticks? Where did he say those were kept?
The blackout has done a number on my balance, so I get on my knees. I navigate my way over to the right, where I am hoping the kitchen still is. With hands patting dead air, I shuffle forward until I hit something. Feeling around its rounded edges doesn’t help. I can’t fathom what it is. Several steps to the left is the counter. I stand up. Everything on it is unfamiliar. Why hadn’t I paid closer attention when the lights were on? Something clatters at my feet, and something else bangs down on the floor. A can, maybe. After a sweep of the counter, I find the burner. The space below is covered by a curtain. Behind it are pots and pans and a stack of plastic containers. I am in the ballpark. In one of them, I find the glow sticks. I have to use my teeth to tear through the plastic wrapper. I snap one. A sporing of neon green light. There are my hands; there are my elbows, my legs, my feet. Still in one piece. I snap another one. In the green glow just three feet away, and not the half mile I imagined, is the table. By the time I’m done, there are half a dozen sticks glowing throughout the room. It’s like one of those toxic algae blooms down at the reservoir in the spring.
I look at Grandpa’s watch. It’s a little past midnight, which means six hours have passed since we first arrived at the picnic. Only six hours separate me from my life. Six hours ago, I was watching my town do what it does best. With the carnival set up between the old school and the fire station and crowds jamming the sidewalks, downtown was barely recognizable. Main Street was lined from K-10 to city hall with parade floats, tractors, hay wagons, and vintage cars gussied up with banners and apple-cheeked officials. If an outsider were to have driven by, he’d have likely mistaken Eudora for the land of milk and honey. It wasn’t only the festival; nature helped put on a show, too. Summer’s always when our town looks its best, like it is yay-close to living up to its potential. The creek runs full, the trees are so leafy it’s a wonder we don’t get light-headed walking beneath them, and the sun brightens colors like a washing detergent commercial. Fall’s more honest. It shows our town as it truly is: worn-out. A ghost town except with the people still in it. Come October, it’ll look like someone needs to take a great big broom to the place. Yards will be stacked with dead leaves; trash will have blown against
the chain-link fences; flower beds in tractor tires will have dried up. The only signs of life will be old vans parked in cracked driveways and the occasional dog tethered to a stake in a yard. Nobody will be outside. Instead, waxy children with stringy hair will be playing silently indoors, trying not to get on their parents’ last frayed nerve. But the weekend of the Horse Thieves Picnic in the middle of summer: well, it gets everyone’s hopes up. Especially someone on her way to meet Arlo Meier.
I knew what Mama was going to ask, so before she had a chance to open her mouth, I told her I had to run. Having none of it, she thrust Theo at me and repositioned her bun.
“But I’m supposed to meet someone in a few minutes.”
“Who?” Mama was ill-tempered on account of Theo’s tantrum. He was insisting on riding his trike down the parade route, even with a sudden fever.
“Mercy,” I fibbed.
“Well, surely she can wait while you walk your brother down the parade. It won’t take but ten minutes.” Mama, unlike a lot of people in this town, would never come right out and say it’s better for people to hang around their own kind, but she lets her disapproval of my friendship with an albino girl be known in other ways—that she sees nothing wrong with keeping Mercy waiting, for example.
There’s no arguing with Mama, so I did as I was told. The Girl Scout leader was trying to organize her troop into neat rows behind us; she might as well have been organizing geese. Faring even worse, the person tasked with lining up the kids’ parade couldn’t keep wayward cyclists from pedaling madly into the crowd. As Theo and I made our way to the back of the line, we passed the new statue of Chief Paschal Fish and his daughter. It commemorates the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of the town’s beginning. Legend has it that back in 1857 when the chief traded 774 acres of his land to three German settlers for ten thousand dollars, he had one other deal in mind. If they named the town for his daughter, he’d promise no harm would come to the place. You’d think the statue would depict him assured of this vow. Instead, he and Eudora appear to be struggling at the front of a storm. Held in his left hand is an oar, as though a current is threatening to wash them away. Eudora is not skipping ahead of her father, as is the custom of carefree children. Rather, she has her father gripped around the waist, his shirt clenched in her fists. With furrows on her forehead, she seems to be looking something terrible in the face. If statues could talk, this one would have Eudora hollering, “Save me, Daddy!”
Daddy’s going to come. He’ll come. I know he’ll come. He always does.
THE CLICKING WAKES me up. I expect to be in my bedroom, but something’s not right. The light isn’t filtering through the leaves of the elm tree, softening the morning. Instead, it comes abruptly, blindingly, from above. I open my eyes to a fluorescent bulb overhead.
I can’t remember what I’m doing on a cement floor, or why there are no windows. The clicking stops and the handle of the door turns and Dobbs walks in with two impossible words: “Good morning.”
I sit up. Every muscle in my body is stiff, as though I’ve been left too long in the spin cycle of a washing machine. I try standing. Rush him! Knock him down! Run!
The dizziness brings black spots to my eyes, and I sit down hard.
Something else is wrong. I remember: my hair. It’s not there. I feel so ashamed, as if this is somehow all my doing.
He steps over my trap—fishing tackle tied between two kitchen chairs—and pulls a doughnut out of thin air. “You look like you need to eat something. Here.”
I can’t even look at it.
“You sleep okay?”
Dobbs isn’t dressed for a road trip. Pressed short-sleeve shirt, clip-on tie, trousers an inch too short, lace-up shoes . . . these are church shoes. Sunday, then. Because Mama didn’t get around to it yesterday on account of the picnic, she would be stripping the beds today. The house would be one big hum—washing machine, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner sucking up all but Suzie’s sulk. Through the windows would come the sound of Daddy’s bench saw, Gerhard’s motorbike on a stand, revving and sputtering with his tinkering.
“They’ve found your letter,” Dobbs says, and just like that Mama’s house is deathly still. Dobbs drags the chairs back to the table and gestures for me to sit down. He unties the tackle and winds it back onto its spool. “It’s all over town.”
In a town of two thousand people, news travels the way it always has ever since those German settlers rushed home to tell how the great Shawnee chief who sold them the land was actually—gasp!—a white man. Word of mouth—it’s trusted more than the Eudora Bugle, which has the annoying habit of printing only facts. For the real scoop, you either call Dolores Weathers or Mel Barker, and if their lines are busy, you show up at church on Sunday morning.
He starts unpacking groceries from an army duffel bag.
“Folks are saying how you and Arlo Meier looked awful cozy on the bleachers last night. Some are speculating you’ve run off with him.”
Dobbs’s mouth is bent crooked. It’s not what I would call a smile. His eyes have chase in them. I cannot be the half-dead thing with no run in me.
“Take me home!”
“What if I told you that you have Arlo Meier to thank for all of this?”
Why does he keep bringing up Arlo? I remember the first time I met Arlo. Lined up outside the first-grade classroom, I was too shy to play with the other kids at the swings. Arlo walked up to me and pointed to the birthmark on my neck. “What’s that?”
“It’s a map of the world,” I said, because that’s what Mama always called it. He said he wished he had one, and I guess that was all it took to get me to be his friend. Arlo lived three blocks away, and I can’t count the number of times we ended up roaming the creek bank together in the late afternoon, or practicing our birdcalls, or spying on the teenagers necking under the bridge. Arlo moved away two years ago without so much as a good-bye. When he came back a month ago, I pretended not to notice. Maybe it had something to do with the scandal that led to his family’s moving; maybe it had something to do with the fact that he seemed different. I hadn’t yet figured out what turned me shy around him when he snuck up behind me at the checkout line in the library and held his hands over my eyes. I knew it was him from the way he smelled—that same smell: a pile of leaves turned boggy and something new, aftershave.
“Hey, Rand McNally.” He made to touch my birthmark, asking if he’d fallen off my map, but I swatted his hand away and turned my books over to Dobbs. That same afternoon, walking to the bus, I heard Arlo call to me as he pushed his way through a throng of kids. “So you guys have moved out to the country. Is this your bus?”
No, it’s my very own personal limo that I just happen to share with twenty other kids, I’d wanted to say, to show him I was like other girls now, mouthy and sure of themselves. At the very least, I wanted him to know that if you up and leave a friend without so much as a good-bye, you couldn’t expect to be welcomed back with open arms. I said nothing and hurried into my seat. Arlo slid down next to me, took my backpack on his lap as though it were a toddler we were going to raise together, and started talking. I spotted Mercy in the crowd outside. She was about to wave and then saw who was leaning in next to me. She stuck out her hip and wagged her finger instead.
I got out my notebook and turned to the poem I’d been working on all week.
“You still scribbling in those books of yours?”
On the page the words kept rearranging themselves. They got smaller and then bigger. When Arlo pressed his forearm snug against mine, they ran clear off the page.
I slammed the book shut. “What is it you want exactly?”
He grinned. I hoped it had nothing to do with my cheeks, which felt like seared and tender slabs of flesh. “I want to marry you and be the father of your children and live with you till they bury us side by side in Oaksview Cemetery.”
“What?”
“Okay, I’ll settle for a conversation. Like the old days.”
Exce
pt it wasn’t the old days.
“It’s a stroke of fortune, Arlo’s not turning up this morning,” Dobbs says now.
There’s not enough air left to manage the question out loud: What’s he done to Arlo?
“Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t have anything to do with it. My guess is he’s sleeping off a hangover at one of his girlfriends’ houses.”
No, he’s lying! I am supposed to be Arlo’s girl, or at least, on my way to being his girl.
Arlo got off the bus at my stop and walked me the quarter mile down the dusty road, past the rows of parched corn, until I told him my house was coming up and he best be on his way. I looked at him properly, then, to show him I meant business. Running from his sideburns to the bend in his square chin was a line of acne that hadn’t been there before, but the same big wheat-colored curls fell across his blue eyes. He looked back at me, and it seemed he’d found something different about me, something worthy of his curiosity. “I didn’t forget about you,” he said. And just like that, there was no arguing with him. When he asked me to meet him at the Horse Thieves Picnic, I couldn’t seem to insert any delay between his asking and my agreeing.
Dobbs clucks. “Arlo Meier. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Dobbs starts whistling. He doesn’t act like a crazy person, and our town certainly has its share. All of them are what Grandma calls “harmless crazies,” like the man at the old-age home where Great-aunt Maeve lives. He likes to get out his whatsit and play with himself just as the lady chaplain comes by, but nobody pays him no mind. Mr. Lambert who shaves his head and calls his classroom the Temple of All Knowledge—he’s crazy. As is Mrs. Littleton’s son, who looks like he’d just as soon lop off your head as eat a cheese sandwich. But Dobbs Hordin is not like any of them. He has a kind of craziness you can’t tell from the outside. Only the whistle gives him away. There’s harm in that whistle, in that terrible tune.