Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  “You’re still here,” she said.

  He smiled. “I own the building,” he said. “Ain’t gotta make nothing but the utilities and the taxes.” He narrowed his eyes. “You one of the Harris girls, ain’t ya?”

  She smiled. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I am.”

  “Alma, right?”

  She cast a quick look over at Randy. “Yes, sir.”

  “One that run off and left ol’ Danny Leery at the altar.”

  The smile disappeared. “Yes, sir. I’m the one.”

  “He’s right up on the hill,” the old man said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “State consolidated all its offices a while back. Put ’em all up in the ol’ high school building. Danny works up there. Does the DMV and issues permits, lookin’ out for the county records, you know that kinda stuff. You want anything official done in this part of the county, you got to see ol’ Danny.” He beckoned them forward. “Come on in,” he said. “Got just about anything you could ask for. Got me an espresso machine. Got wi-fi. I’m diversified is what I am. Gotta be flexible when things get bad,” he said as he turned and disappeared into the store.

  “Alma?” Randy mouthed.

  Brittany took a deep breath. “Brittany is…you know sorta like my city name. I mean…think about it, can you see anybody back where we just came from being named Alma?” She shook her head in frustration.

  “Who am I to talk?” Randy asked.

  “No kidding,” she said, rummaging around behind the driver’s seat until she came out with a silver laptop. “Might as well check my e-mail,” she said with a shrug.

  He followed her inside, where it was cool and dark. Hadley’s was an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor, all stripes and squares and shiny stools. The kind of place modern designers were always trying to recreate but never quite managed to capture.

  Alma ordered a double espresso, Randy a chocolate milk shake. As the old man shuffled back around the other side of the counter and Alma logged onto the Web, Randy excused himself and walked toward the restrooms. Actually it was a restroom, one of the unisex variety.

  On his way back to the table, Randy hooked a leg over a stool. “How long you been doing this for?” he asked the old man.

  The old man poured chocolate milk into a stainless-steel cup. “Me personally?”

  “Unless there’s some other kind of ‘me.’”

  The old man smiled. “Fifty-seven years.”

  “Long time to do anything.”

  He dropped three scoops of chocolate ice cream into the cup with the chocolate milk.

  “Used to be a lot more fun,” he said. “Used to be a little movie theater right down the street there. Every kid for miles around’d come in for the Saturday matinee.”

  He slipped the cup into the milk-shake machine and pushed the button. He walked over next to Randy. In the harsh overhead lights, the old man’s skin was nearly as gray as his hair. “Soon as the picture was over, they’d all run over here.” He waved an expansive arm. “I’d have ’em all over the sidewalk out there.”

  He flicked his bloodshot eyes in Alma’s direction. “She back to stay?” he asked.

  “I don’t think she knows,” Randy said.

  He looked Randy up and down, “You and her…” he started.

  “Just traveling together.”

  He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “I’m askin’ ’cause, you know…Danny…” He looked up at Randy. “…you know, the one she left…”

  “I know the story.”

  His eyes took on a conspiratorial cast. “You was to ask me, I’d hafta say he was still carryin’ it for that girl.”

  “After all these years?”

  “Some things don’t change.” The old guy put the period on the sentence with a nod of his head and then turned to the espresso machine.

  Randy levered himself back onto both feet and rejoined Alma at the table. She was intent on the screen, pecking away at the keyboard.

  “So…” he said, “who’s looking for you?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Not a soul,” she said. “I’ve been gone three days and nobody’s even noticed. It’s like I was never there at all.” She stopped typing and looked at Randy. “See, that’s why I wanted to leave. The city’s so impersonal. You’re gone three days and it’s over. Somebody else slides right into your place and nobody knows…hell, nobody so much as cares you’re gone.”

  His failure to respond pulled her eyes from the keyboard. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  He shrugged and looked out the window.

  “You’re gonna find what you’re looking for. I know you are.”

  “Been a long time.”

  “You’re going to find it.” She reached over the table and put her hand on his.

  The tension was relieved by the arrival of their order. Randy handed the old guy a twenty while Alma typed with one hand and sipped coffee with the other. Randy found the milk shake too thick to drink and began spooning it contentedly into his mouth. The old man returned with the change. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  They told him it was. Several minutes passed before she looked up from the keyboard. “There’s a whole lotta Wesley Allen Howards,” she said. “All over the country. Seems like it was a pretty popular name for guys your age.”

  Randy’s spine stiffened; he dropped the long spoon into the tall glass and then reached out and twirled the laptop his way. She’d typed the name into something called Peoplefinders. Three hundred twenty-seven hits.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “That might not have been a good idea.”

  “What?”

  “Typing that name. You know…putting it out there on the Web.”

  “Why not?”

  He told her about Helen Willis.

  “Are you sure that’s all she did?”

  “No.”

  “It was probably more than just looking up a name.”

  “You’re most likely right.”

  She stopped talking and shut her computer down.

  “Might be a good idea if we got out of here,” he said. “Just in case.”

  “You really think…you know…whoever these people are…you think they could…you know, some podunk place like this…”

  “I’m probably just being paranoid,” he said.

  She agreed and got to her feet. Randy left a tip on the table.

  “No need to run off,” the old man said.

  “Thanks for everything.” Randy waved on his way out the door.

  She rested her arms on top of the car. “Maybe we oughta backtrack to Hollis…you know…maybe get a motel for the night. Start fresh in the morning.”

  Randy remained silent. Fleecy clouds moved slowly across a pale blue sky. The double line of elm trees running along both sides of the street had begun to bud, sending out little patches of lime-green leaves high among the branches.

  “Whadda you say?” she prompted.

  “It’s your trip.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m looking for a little feedback here. Help me out, will ya.”

  “You nervous?” he asked.

  She started to object but had a change of heart. “A little…yeah.”

  “You came a long way for this moment,” he said.

  She set her jaw and grudgingly nodded her agreement. “Might as well get it out of the way, huh?”

  “Might as well,” he said.

  They drove in silence. Up the length of Main Street, the vacant storefronts looking on with accusing eyes, up past the gas station and a couple of ancient clapboard houses, before the town petered out altogether, giving way to patches of thick forest surrounding hardscrabble farms, gaunt livestock, and a palpable sense of despair.

  Couple miles down the road and she pulled the car to the shoulder. At first he thought it might be a silo of some sort, the way it poked into the sky.

  “That’s the Methodist church,” she said. “When I was a kid, w
e walked there every Sunday morning, all of us, rain or shine.” She stopped and looked over at Randy. “That was before…that was when Mark was still alive.” She turned her attention back to the building, bisected horizontally, like heaven and hell, wooden shakes on the top half, planks across the bottom. What must have once been the bell tower had little louvered windows all around, allowing the pealing of the bells to call the faithful to worship.

  To the left of the church, a smaller building leaned precariously under the weight of an all-encompassing green vine.

  “Kudzu,” he said.

  She turned her attention his way. “You know kudzu?”

  He nodded.

  “Where from?”

  He shrugged. “Right now, my memory doesn’t have a ‘where’ or a ‘when’ or anything else. I keep remembering more and more things…movies I’ve seen, song lyrics…stuff like that, but nothing is connected to anything else. They’re all just floating around in there by themselves.”

  “Gotta be someplace around here,” she said. “Someplace in the Southeast, ’cause I’ve been pretty much all over the country, and far as I know, that’s the only place it grows.”

  “Who’s Mark?” he asked.

  “My older brother,” she said. “Got killed in the first Gulf War.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Me, too. We were real close. We used to—” She stopped herself. She squared her jaw and then her shoulders. “Let’s go,” she said after a moment.

  Just about the time the car got rolling again, she downshifted and turned left into a long gravel driveway. Newly plowed fields ran along both sides of the road, rows of brown dirt stretched for nearly as far as the eye could see. The smell of the earth filled the air inside the car. The air was alive with insects.

  In the distance, a mighty stand of trees hovered over a clutch of buildings. Two minutes later, she brought the car to a halt in front of a white frame farmhouse. A pair of massive barns towered. A blue Ford pickup and a white Honda Civic were parked out front.

  Randy watched as she steeled herself and then got out of the car. He followed her out of the car and then stayed put. A skinny blond girl, her eyes squinting in the afternoon sun, opened the door and peered out. She turned her face back over her shoulder and shouted back into the house.

  “Grandma,” she called. “I think you better come out here.”

  Alma walked halfway to the house and stopped in the grass. In the doorway, the girl was replaced by a middle-aged woman in rimless glasses and a patchwork apron. She was drying her hands with a baby-blue dish towel as she came down the pair of concrete steps leading to the front door and stood on the patch of lawn.

  “Mama” was all Alma said.

  The woman stopped in her tracks. The dish towel fell from her hands and lay in the grass like a wounded bird. She blinked several times. Without warning, tears began to roll down her face. “Thank you, Jesus,” she said.

  19

  She wheeled the VW out of the driveway with a bit too much throttle. The car bounced out onto the two-lane blacktop with a bang. The engine rattled twice and then stalled, leaving them sitting crossways on the pavement. Didn’t matter, though. In both directions, as far as the eye could see, County Road 14 was stone empty.

  “What’s the big hurry?” Randy asked as she twisted the key and tried unsuccessfully to coax the car back to life.

  “Papa comes home tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “So…he’s probably gonna take one look at me and send me packing.”

  The engine turned over, caught for long enough to maraca the car, and then died.

  “He’s going to be just as glad to see you as everybody else was,” Randy scoffed.

  “You don’t know my papa.”

  “You’ll always be his little girl. That’s how papas are. Stop worrying about it.”

  The engine came to life with a knock and a shudder.

  “You could have stayed back at the house,” she said, revving the engine.

  “They were starting to ask me questions.”

  She grinned. “That’s how they are. They’re used to knowing everything about everybody. No strangers around here.”

  “Yeah…except I don’t know the answers to the questions.”

  She laughed. “That would have been interesting, now, wouldn’t it?” She reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Besides…it’s Wednesday,” she said.

  “So?”

  “So…I have to find him.”

  “Your father?”

  “Nooooo, dorkus…Danny.”

  “You sure you’re up to this?”

  She sat up straighter. “I gotta be.”

  “Couple hours ago, you were scared your own family was going to throw you out. Now all of a sudden you’re ready to face a guy you left standing at the altar.”

  “If there’s anybody I owe an apology, it’s Danny. He was my sweetheart since the eighth grade and I…” She slowed the car and looked over at him. “I’ve gotta make this right.” She put her eyes back on the road and seemed to consider her own words for a moment. “At least as right as I can.” She banged a hand on the steering wheel. “I’ve gotta walk out of there today feeling like I did everything I could to apologize for what I did…for the pain I caused him.”

  “I was him…I’d still be pissed.”

  “I wouldn’t blame him if he punched me one.”

  He thought about telling her what the old man in the soda fountain had told him, that this Danny Leery guy still carried a torch for her, but decided against it. She’d already made up her mind, might as well let her go through with whatever she was planning to do. He didn’t feel like it was his business to be changing the whole nature of the reunion. If the old man had wanted her to know, he’d have told her.

  By the time they’d blown the dust from the car, they were back in Thurston. She drove past the sweetshop and turned left at the next intersection…School Street, of all things…riding second gear up a long tree-lined incline until a long brick building came into view. She turned left into the parking lot. The afternoon sun had warmed the pavement, sending gentle heat waves rising like apparitions into the air. Spring weeds sprouted from cracks in the pavement. Three cars huddled together at the front of the lot. Here and there along the face of the building, decorations still festooned some of the classroom windows.

  Directly to the right of the front doors, a black-and-white sign read COUNTY RECORDS and beneath it DMV.

  She stopped the car but made no move to get out. “I graduated from everything from here,” she said, as much to herself as to Randy. “Grammar school, junior high, high school. You just moved from one part of the building to another. Mama said they bus kids from all over the county over to Hadleyville these days.” She smiled. “Said the school was ‘bigger than a Wal-Mart,’ which is my mama’s idea of real big.”

  A skinny man in faded coveralls and a weathered straw hat came out of the building. He hurried down the dozen stairs, got into a silver Chevy pickup truck, and drove away. She heaved a sigh. “Maybe you ought to…”

  He helped her out. “No way you get me in there,” he said.

  She got out of the car and then bent and leaned her forearms on the window frame.

  “Don’t imagine I’ll be too long,” she said.

  “Do what you’ve got to do,” he advised. “I’ll be right here.”

  As she turned to leave, a middle-aged woman exited the building. Like the gentleman before her, she moved quickly, as if this were but one of many errands on her to-do list. As she passed, she offered Alma a brief, uncertain smile before getting into a faded red Honda Civic and motoring off.

  Alma rocked twice in the direction of the building but failed to move her feet. Again she leaned down and peered across the seat at Randy. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Sounds about right to me,” Randy said. “I’d have to say this scenario here ranks right up there on the stressometer.”

  She stood
with her hands on her hips, swayed once, and then, without another word, turned and walked away, mounting the stairs without the usual swing of her hips, and then pausing to pat her hair into place at the door before disappearing inside.

  Randy got out of the car. He stretched and then stepped up onto the sidewalk, where he lounged against a built-in bicycle rack, thinking, if he heard furniture breaking or the sounds of screams, how he’d hustle up the stairs and lend a hand.

  He looked out over the roof of the car, out to the flat farm country, brown and fertile and flat as a griddle, a jigsaw puzzle of greens and browns, as rows of trees crisscrossed the plowed land without regard for reason.

  Although the school couldn’t have been elevated above the valley floor by more than a hundred feet, the air was warmer and sweeter up here. Randy cocked an ear toward the building, but the place remained silent as cement.

  Half an hour later, an old Jeep Wagoneer pulled into the lot. From the car’s open windows rolled the plaintive strains of country-western heartbreak. The driver was young, sixteen at the most, and singing along. She got out, threw a metal smile Randy’s way as she mounted the stairs. She was inside maybe ten minutes. She came out red-faced, holding a wad of paperwork in her right hand. Her braces glinted in the sunlight as she skipped down the stairs. She raised the paperwork and giggled from behind her hand.

  “You Randy?” she asked.

  He said he was.

  “The lovebirds want you should come inside,” she said with an embarrassed grin.

  She giggled a couple more times as she got back in the Jeep, turned the radio up even louder than it had been before, and drove off. Randy waited until the girl was all the way gone and then slowly made his way up the concrete stairway. He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  The interior was dark and cool. The couple locked in a passionate embrace down at the far end of the room was not. Randy smiled. No wonder the little rodeo princess had gotten her knickers warmed up. Randy started their way. Made it to within ten feet before their mutual ardor managed to sense his presence.