Soon after that, Answan was born. Two years later, Arnold came along. The boys got bigger. Hyacinth took in ironing and mending and squirreled away every cent, going so far as to spend Sunday afternoons, after she made all her wash deliveries, downtown, checking telephone booths, as well as the stubble around the parking meters in the town lot, for change. Summers, she went through the park, up and down the paths, back and forth over the lawns, her eyes alert to the slightest glimmer in the grass. People started saying she was odd. Her back got a hump to it, which her own daddy said was the direct result of her foraging. He said, “Hyacinth ain’t seen the sky in ten years, least not on a Sunday afternoon,” which all the Kluggs split a gut laughing over. But damned if Hyacinth hadn’t had the last laugh on them all.
She had put enough aside to buy the little house they lived in, which was something Hazlitt had never been able to do. She was the first Kluggs to become a landowner, and she was proud of it. Yes sir, it was dignity she was earning, through frugality and cleanliness and serving the Lord every Sunday, singing all three services in her uncle’s church. Yes sir, those boys might have the name of Wallace to contend with, she’d sigh, and in the next breath she’d rattle off, like a grocery list, the misdeeds and failures of every last one of their Wallace cousins and uncles and grandpas, drunkards and welfare hell-raisers, and, most shameful of all, that one whole Wallace brood of six boys, all retarded and crippled. But it was Kluggs blood in her boys’ veins, she’d insist, with a piece of thread quivering between her teeth. “Kluggs blood!” she’d say, and then pound the table with her shear handles.
And then as now, Aubrey would always turn away. For one thing, he was scared those shears were one day going to land in his heart, and for another (the second reason being the cause of the first), those two boys looked like Wallaces—not only talked and walked and smelled like Wallaces, but had report cards and mattress stains to prove it.
The commotion out on the porch confused him now. When the door burst open, he half expected to see one of Hyacinth’s flower-named sisters leaping toward him. But it was Ellie, screaming and holding her hands to the sides of her head. After her raced Dotty, the scissors gleaming in one hand and a slender rope of long black hair in the other.
“Oh Ellie,” she cried. “The scissors slipped. I’m so sorry,” she called through the bathroom door, but Wallace could see how hard she was trying to keep a straight face.
After supper, Dotty tried to even out the rest of Ellie’s hair, but each new trimming only left it more chopped looking. Finally, Dotty gave up. “You’ll just have to have it all cut off the same,” she said before she raced down into the driveway where the dog barked at the explosion of dust and pebbles that met Jiggy’s squealing brakes.
Ellie’s wails could be heard in the cabin even though Jiggy had shut the door and closed the window. It was dusk and the cabin’s stale heat lay like a veil across Wallace’s face. He kept blinking and lifting his chin to see better through the misty vapors. He was surprised that neither Jiggy nor Dotty was smoking. It must be their words, he thought, their voices snagging on his whiskers like dust or soot settling in all his pores.
He sat between them on the chair, his spine as rigid as the chair back. They talked back and forth across him. Dotty was sulky now and hot looking. Damp tendrils of hair curled at her temples like little red feathers. Wet little bird, he thought. Minute the air clears and morning comes, she’ll be gone. “Where to now?” he’d ask, stretching his legs out long and sure over the pedals, feeling the highway’s heat boiling up through the floor mats. “Anywhere,” she’d sigh, her heart so much a part of her voice that the words bled and ran her disappointment all over him and Canny, who would pass secret smiles through the rearview. They’d have her back, same as always. And for days after, she’d need the two of them, him and Canny, the way she needed air to breathe. And his own heart would pound in his ears so loud he was sure she could hear it too. And he could think straight, and Hyacinth and those two boys and the long, pine-dark mountain road would be as distant and as dim in his thoughts as the man in the moon.
Dotty kept glancing up at him. Jiggy was telling them how he had driven each of the possible routes over and over until he had finally settled on the safest and the quickest. The money would be left off in the cemetery—in a sand bin that was next to a certain vault. And that way, Jiggy added, Wallace wouldn’t have to worry about waiting in the cemetery. However, it was clear from his tone and the quick way he looked at Dotty that he had fixed it so she wouldn’t have to worry any more about Wallace getting scared in the cemetery. Jiggy said he would be there himself. All Wallace had to do was give Canny a sleeping pill to knock her out, then drive to the town forest, which was on the outskirts of Stonefield, where he would leave her in a shack, sound asleep. Like a sleeping princess, the soft-eyed little man was thinking.
After that, Wallace was to go to a telephone booth and call the Birds and tell them where they could find their long-lost daughter, the baby girl, little Caroline, the pale-haired shadow in the picture, the fairy baby whose image had begun to glow behind his eyes like faint yellow candlelight.
Jiggy smiled proudly and Wallace’s head swayed dreamily. Dotty was looking for a cigarette. She emptied her purse out on the bed and scratched through candy wrappers and lipstick tubes and the bright slivers of a shattered compact mirror. All she could find was a broken-off filter. On the other bed, Huller had the map open. He was drawing a black line from the cemetery to the town forest. He bent close and measured the line with his two fingers marking the inches. “Almost eight miles,” he murmured. “Maybe nine.…” He measured again.
“Got a butt?” Dotty asked, sliding her legs between the beds and reaching into his shirt pocket. She fished out a piece of paper and when she saw the flush of anger on Huller’s face, she giggled nervously and held the paper in front of her, dangling it as if it were in flames.
Huller bellowed and lurched for the paper. Dotty screeched and jumped onto the bed to get away from him. For her it was still a game, a way to get his attention. She shook the paper open and held it close to her face.
“I was saving that,” Huller said uneasily. “I was gonna show you later.” He gestured weakly and looked at Wallace. “Thing’s exaggerated all to hell,” he said.
Dotty’s breathing seemed to stop as she read. Her shoulders curled close and she sank to her knees onto the bed. Her eyes rose and fell from line to line.
She looks like a little girl, Wallace thought. And in the last trail of daylight, with her head bent forward like that and her hair frizzed close to her sweaty temples, he was for some crazy reason reminded of the little Johnson girls who lived back through the woods, just up from Carson’s pig farm. The hairs on the back of his hand stood on end and he felt goose bumps scurry up his spine like hard little feet. His head swirled. Suddenly he was remembering all kinds of crazy things. The yellow and pink squares in the quilt Hyacinth kept folded at the foot of the bed, but would never use; some things were just for show. Into his mind came faces and names he hadn’t even thought about since that day, flying down the mountainside next to such a creature as Dotty was, wild and laughing with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Jesus Christ!” Dotty gasped, still reading. “Her father’s a bank president … holy shit!” She looked up at Jiggy and made a face. “The F.B.I.” She shuddered. “The F.B.I.!”
Wallace was grinning as he remembered something else, them sugary baked beans Hyacinth always made from scratch. Saturday night was beans and franks and brown bread she did up and baked in cans.
“They always call the F.B.I.,” Huller said, looking quickly at Wallace. “No big deal.”
“No big deal!” Dotty said, shuddering again. She thrust the paper out at Wallace. He smiled and glanced at it. Now he was remembering her scalloped potatoes and all them soft fat raisins swimming in the cheesy sauce.…
“Take it, damn it!” Dotty was saying. “Here!”
He went slowly,
sounding out each word. Most of them he had to point to so Dotty could tell him what they were. His stomach felt queasy the way it used to in school when he had to read out loud with the teacher standing over him, sighing, while the whole class snickered.
TOT FEARED KIDNAPPED
Police tonight are investigating the disappearance of Caroline Anne Bird, the eighteen-month-old daughter of Louis and Martha Bird. The child was reported missing at 2:10 this afternoon. Mrs. Bird said that it was shortly after 1:30 that she first discovered her daughter’s empty playpen. Mrs. Bird said she was upstairs in the family’s 8 Trenton Street home for only a few minutes while Caroline was in her playpen in the family room at the back of the house.
The distraught mother, who is nine months pregnant, told this reporter that she panicked and ran up and down the streets, calling the baby’s name. “It was like being in shock,” Mrs. Bird said. “I couldn’t believe that she could be there one minute and gone the next. I still don’t. I kept hoping one of the neighbor’s children had taken her out to play. I just kept looking and looking and hoping. It never occurred to me until I called Lou at the bank that she might have been kidnapped.”
Relatives and neighbors, along with local police and a National Guard unit, as well as fifty Boy Scouts, were still combing the area at press time. At 3:30 this afternoon, “Bunti,” a four-year-old bloodhound, was brought up from the Georgetown State Police barracks to help in the search for the missing toddler.
The child is described as fair, blue-eyed, and blond. She was wearing a yellow and white pinafore, soft-soled white shoes, diapers, rubber pants, and a narrow white ribbon in her hair.
Stonefield Police Chief Daniel T. Mismanno said the F.B.I. has been called into the case.
Louis Bird has issued the following statement: “Caroline’s family anxiously awaits any communication as to what is expected of us. Until further word, we are offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for the safe return of our beloved Caroline.”
Louis Bird is president of the Stonefield Savings Bank and Martha Bird is a Paxton Academy faculty member and former town selectwoman. Caroline is the family’s only child.
“What’s that mean?” Wallace asked.
Dotty looked at the word. “Faculty member—means she’s a schoolteacher.”
He thought about this and when he spoke there was a note of wonder in his tinny voice. “I always knowed Canny was real smart.”
Huller rolled his eyes. “Is he for real?”
Dotty giggled nervously. Huller folded up his map and went to the door, then paused and said softly to Dotty, who was right on his heels, “He’s not … you know, retarded or anything, is he?”
Dotty laughed and tried again to make light of the little man hunched intently over the copy of the newspaper article he could barely read. Huller’s face was tight with worry as he looked back at the strange mixture of pleasure and fear that played over Wallace’s features.
“I mean, I can’t be betting it all on a loonie—you know what I mean, Dot?” There was fear in Huller’s tone.
Wallace’s lips moved silently as his finger traced an arduous path from word to word.
“It’s like the way he drives,” Dotty said. “He gets there. It just takes him a while.”
Huller muttered something. Dotty closed the door softly and followed him outside into the warm, damp twilight. Down in the driveway her voice slipped into the silence like a stone through water, quick and smoothly appeasing. “He’s the least of our problems,” she was saying. Huller went into the house without answering.
Now, the moon was round and white as a pearl in the black night. Wallace was still reading; the same words over and over. The little words triggered his recall of the bigger, harder words. It was just like a real story. Only he was in this one. Someplace. His hands trembled and the paper fluttered as if a vein pulsed through it. The words were magic. The letters had powers. They moved and scrambled all over the paper, then reset themselves so that all at once he could see everyone. They were all here; Hyacinth and himself and the two boys and the hot-top crew and Canny. He looked up, swallowing dryly. He could not imagine a day without Canny. What would he do? Who would he talk to?
He slid from the chair now onto the bed, where he lay on his side with his knees jackknifed to his chest. The moon rose higher and higher, its stark light flowing through the doorway and window. When it was exactly over the cabin’s tar-paper roof, Wallace closed one eye and then the other and soon he was asleep; but the sleep swirled through a black vaporous tunnel that pushed out from his soul into the farthest part of the night, ending in that bend in the dark hallway with his cheek pressed to the damp wall and his eyes sewn tight like dead men’s eyes, while in his ears Hyacinth’s harsh voice told of the great horned beasts that crouched in the tangles of bed sheets and window shadows, ready to sink their razor-sharp fangs into the soft warm throats of naughty little boys who peed in their beds in the middle of the night.
All through the night, he stood by their door. Never once, in the dark of sleep or the deep pain of his dreams, did he leave them unguarded. When morning came, he sat up suddenly and felt the mattress wet against his thigh. Just then, a gust of early morning wind caught the door and blew it shut and he screamed to have the thing so near.
12
He thought it was July; sometime in July. The days were a bright web of women’s voices shimmering in the porch heat and a blur of tires spinning dust in and out of the driveway and the late-night slamming of doors on children’s nightmares, from which could burst the sudden clear scream of tears, children’s tears, his, the little girl … Answan … Arnold.…
The cabin door banged open. “Give it over,” Huller said, eclipsing the square of morning light. He gestured with his fingers. “I need it!”
Wallace pretended to sleep. His big toe twitched.
“Jesus Christ,” Dotty groaned from the other bed. Hugging the sheet to her bosom, she rose up on one elbow, her face puffy and dully white.
“Wake him up!” Huller barked. “The article, I need it!”
“He lost it! He already told you,” Dotty said.
Huller was at the foot of the bed now. Wallace lay so still that he felt dizzy, suspended in air.
“Wake up!” Huller demanded. “I don’t have all day.” He shook the bed, then kicked it. The impact vibrated in a ringing metallic shudder through the bed frame. Again, he kicked it, and this time the bed jumped.
“Jesus Christ,” Dotty groaned, holding her head.
Huller bent over Wallace. He reeked of stale booze and old sweat, the smell like a bad taste, like spoiled meat, sour and wormy. Wallace’s eyes seeped open. Huller’s skin was dry, scaly. Flakes of it lifted at the cracked corners of his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot and pouched with circles.
“You awake?” he asked.
Wallace nodded.
“You find that clipping yet?” he asked. He kept wetting his lips. His chest rose and fell in wheezy gasps.
“Nope,” Wallace said.
“You better find it,” Huller said. “You got until this afternoon!” He swiped his fist at Wallace’s face, just missing him.
“Leave him alone!” Dotty said in a disgusted voice. “You’re just taking it out on him!”
“I want that clipping!” Huller growled.
“Get another one then,” said Dotty. “You said it was a copy, and besides, you said yourself it wasn’t important.”
“That ain’t the point,” said Huller, his voice flattening, the anger and panic reined in and tight as a fist. The dog was clawing through the weedy underbowels of the cabin, its snout snuffling up against the floorboards. “The point is carelessness and worrying every minute the dummy’s gonna blow it on me, that’s the goddamn point!” said Huller.
Dotty drew the stained sheet around her as she got out of bed. She yawned and her bare feet made sticking, flappy sounds on her way to the bathroom. “The point is, you’re just taking it out on everybody ’cause yo
u can’t find out their telephone number.” She went into the bathroom and sat down with a little grunt. Beneath the stiff plastic curtain her feet straddled the base of the toilet bowl. “Like it’s our fault or something,” she called over the gush of her urine.
Wallace was embarrassed.
She flushed the toilet. “Like it’s our fault they got an unlisted number!” She came out, knotting the sheet under her arms. From the heap of clothes on the floor she picked up her pants and fished a half-smoked cigarette from the pocket. “Call him at the bank,” she continued. “Say you got something private to discuss and ask for his home number. Say it’s personal.” She lit the cigarette, her eyes sagging heavily on the first deep drag.
“It’s the fucking Fourth,” Huller said. “Everything’s fucking closed.” He looked down at Wallace and gave the bed another kick. “I want that fucking article,” he warned before he left.
“Call one of his neighbors then,” Dotty said, following Huller down into the driveway.
Wallace could hear the scuffle of their voices. The truck door slammed shut and the motor sputtered, then came on with a roar.
“Don’t forget about the cookout,” Dotty hollered.
“Fuck the cookout,” Huller hollered back.
As soon as the truck was gone, Wallace got out of bed. Completely dressed, he had even slept with his sneakers on. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face, then peered into the cloudy pitted mirror. His eyes were strangely bright. He moved closer and his breath fogged the glass. In the center of each eye he saw a small square of light, opaque and gleaming like a sun-flooded window. He looked away and quickly left the bathroom. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Cocking his head, he listened a moment before he unlaced his sneaker and slipped it off his foot. He lifted the rancid innersole and pulled out the flattened clipping, its soft corners tattered and sweat-stained. He smoothed it out on his knee.
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