“Go ahead.” She nodded.
“And then I drove away,” he read. “And no one saw me.…”
“Did she have anything with her?” Bird broke in. “Something in her hand? Was she carrying something?”
“Jest a spoon,” Wallace said, remembering. “That’s right. I forgot about that spoon!” He looked eagerly at Dotty. “’Member that spoon?” he asked her. “’Member how she wouldn’t let go of it?” Dotty nodded and held her finger to her lips. There was an odd silence. All he heard in his ear was breathing, a strange breathing, like the pant of a lung or the beat of a heart.
“What kind of a spoon was it?” Bird finally asked, his voice strained and weary and small.
Wallace shrugged and looked at Dotty. “I dunno. Jest a spoon, I guess … a fancy spoon—it had a word on it … no, not a word … a … a … a … a A. It had a fancy A on it. I ’member now ’cause my na …”
Dotty clamped her hand over his mouth and groaned softly.
“What? What did you say?” Bird called loudly. “I can’t hear you. Where’s the spoon? What did you do with the spoon? Don’t hang up, please don’t!”
“I threw it out the window,” Wallace said.
“The spoon? Where?”
“At a red light. We was stopped and I threw it out.”
“Why?” Bird asked.
“I was afraid she’d get hurt,” Wallace said. “The way she was banging it.…”
“Is her …” Bird was saying as Huller took the phone. “Okay?” Huller said gruffly, then nodded as he listened. “All set then?” Again, he nodded, smiling now, his face gleaming with sweat. “Yah … yah …,” he murmured.
Dotty stared at him, her eyes narrow and bright in the dark.
“That’s what he wanted to hear, Pops,” Huller said, slapping his back as they headed for the truck. “That spoon did the trick. That was never in the papers. Never. Nobody knew about that spoon.”
“He told you about that? About the spoon?” asked Dotty when they were in the truck.
“He never said what it was. Just that there was something only one person could know.…”
“And you never said nothing to me,” Dotty mused. “I guess you figured I’d blow it or something, huh?”
“I knew you wouldn’t blow it,” Huller said, turning and looking over his shoulder while he backed the truck out into the lot.
“Or maybe you still thought I was lying about the whole thing. That’s it! You had to prove it to yourself too!”
“C’mon, Dot.…”
They drove in silence for a few miles. Wallace could feel Dotty’s foot tapping next to his. She bit her lip and sighed. “I don’t know if I can do it,” she said.
“Do what?” asked Huller.
“Give her back. Five years is a long time,” she said in a funny voice. Wallace listened carefully. He knew that voice. That was the shivery voice of the crazy girl, the one with blood cuts on her wrists; the voice that ran from tears to bright jangly laughter and back again so that it was all the same, screaming, talking, laughing, crying, all the same, saying the same thing, skimming the sharp blinding edge of a jagged, glassy cliff.…
“I love that kid,” she was saying in choked, stuffy gasps. “Maybe I don’t show it all the time, but I do.”
“What’re you getting at?” Huller asked, veering sharply into the breakdown lane. He stopped the truck and stared at her. “What the hell’re you saying?”
“Just that it’s gonna be hard.” Tears blubbered down her cheeks. “She’s all the family I got,” she sobbed, and blew her nose in a tissue. “Her and Aubie.” She lifted her head and looked at Wallace and then sobbed even more. His own eyes were filmy with tears.
“Look,” Huller was saying. “She’ll be better off. They’re loaded. They’ll give her everything.”
Dotty continued to cry. Wallace’s chest ached with the pain of containing his sadness. Huller’s calloused finger tips tapped on the wheel. Dotty’s weeping grew louder.
“And don’t forget,” Huller said exasperatedly, “she’s their kid. Not yours.”
“I need a drink,” Dotty sobbed. “Or one of them pills or something, Jig. I gotta calm down.” She blew her nose again. “I’m going to pieces. Jesus Christ, I’m falling apart.” She held up her hands and the sharp silver tips of her nails glinted. “Look how much they’re shaking.” She stared at her hands as if they weren’t part of her.
“Here,” Huller grumbled, stretching his legs and stiffening himself to get at his hip pocket. “Just one,” he said, dropping a brightly speckled capsule into her palm. “Just to get you over the hump,” he said, and then he put one in his own mouth and swallowed with a gulp. From her purse, Dotty withdrew a half pint of gin. She washed down the pill with a long, thirsty drink, then passed it to Huller.
Wallace’s eyes were glassy with tears. He stared blindly down at passing traffic. Everything came at him too loudly and vividly. The red of a passing truck caused him to cringe and his insides to tighten. The sweet scent of gin engulfed him. Dotty’s voice was smothering, like a drunken kiss, careless and wet and sickening.
“… think I’ll have some more,” she was saying, unscrewing the cap.
“Next twenty-four hours are gonna be crucial,” Huller warned.
“I just keep thinking how close we been,” she sighed.
“Yah, well,” Huller said.
“Just so she knows why. I mean, what if she tells stuff like about Carl?”
“Don’t worry.”
“Or times I had to hit her. Oh Jesus! She’ll tell so much about me, they’ll know right where to find …”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Huller had been saying, as her hysteria grew. “I told you I’ll take care of that part.”
She was drinking from the bottle. “But how? You don’t tell me how.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, laying his hand over her knee. “I’m gonna take care of all that.”
“Oh shit,” she cried softly. “How much more time?”
He looked at his watch. “Less than thirty-six,” he said.
“Thirty-six what?” she asked, laughing nervously. “Days, weeks?”
Huller glanced at Wallace, who was still turned to the side window. “Hours,” he mouthed.
“Shit,” she said. “Oh shit, I’ll never make it.”
“You’ll make it.” Huller said, and he laughed lightly.
17
All night long he tossed and turned, waking, and with one eye charted the pale moon’s descent. Thirty-six hours, he thought. Thirty-six more; that was all.
By morning the thirty-six had been whittled to twenty-four. In twenty-four more hours Canny would be gone. The back seat would be empty. There would be no more stories; no one to watch television with. He would eat alone. But what then? What would it all mean? Would the pain in his chest ever go away?
He sat on the edge of the bed, lacing his black sneakers, staring at the bright spring of light that welled up from the hole in the floorboard. He searched through that small quiet place inside himself where Hyacinth and the two boys were, where his father swilled Carson’s pigs, where a little boy leaned against a fence post, snapping a stick against the metal bone that grew outside his leg; searched, and came upon the lacerated thumb of Camelia Crebbs, and also Hyacinth’s church dress, dark blue with square glass buttons and a wide lace collar that ruffled over her shoulders; searched, but could find neither Canny nor a place where she might eventually be.
All his life, that’s what his trouble had been—knowing A, knowing B, knowing C; but never being able to put them into meaningful form. Parts were always missing. As a child and even later as a man, a father himself, drawing for his boys and more recently for Canny, his pictures always showed a man without an arm or a face without a nose or a dog without a tail.
In the past few days he had hardly spoken to Canny. The lump in his shoe, the article, now so softly frayed that it shed papery flakes each time he unfolded it, had become m
ore real than Canny herself.
On the bed opposite, Dotty groaned. Her eyes fluttered and then her hand shot up to cover them. The morning light seemed to have seeped, not from the windows, but up from the knothole in the floor, rising higher, so that no corner of the cabin was free of its glare. Dust floated in the currents of sunlight and nowhere did a breeze stir or a shadow fall.
With one hand Dotty fumbled blindly through her purse on the floor until she found her white-rimmed dark glasses and her cigarettes. She put on the glasses and lit a cigarette, inhaling as she sagged back, coughing softly against the stained pillow. She asked Wallace for a glass of water, which she used to wash down another of the brightly colored pills he had seen her take last night. She barely bent her head to take a sip. She handed back the glass and her hand shook so that water spilled on the side of the bed.
“My head’s ready to blow,” she said after a few minutes, lighting a second cigarette off the first, which she stubbed out in the saucer on the chair.
“It’s them pills,” he said. “They make you crazy, you know they do.”
“I’m already crazy,” she said. “I was born friggin’ crazy.”
“It’s them pills,” he said again. “’Member that other time?”
Her mouth trembled and then she bit her lip. She stared at him. He couldn’t see her eyes behind the black glass lenses, but he knew she was staring at him. He shrugged self-consciously. “Them pills made you crazy,” he said softly. “You took a knife and you locked yourself in the room with Canny. And you said you was gonna kill her and you. And then you fell asleep and Canny took the knife and got open the door.…”
She was laughing. She blew out more smoke and laughed.
“Oh Aubie,” she said, and then he saw her wipe at the tears that leaked out from the dark glasses. “You think she’ll remember stuff like that and tell?”
“She was awful little,” he said.
“Maybe you could talk to her,” Dotty said. “Or maybe I could write a letter or something. Just so they’ll know we didn’t mean to hurt her. I could just stick it in her pocket. After you give her the pill to keep her asleep. Jig wouldn’t have to know.”
“What if the pill’s bad for her?” he asked suddenly. “What if it makes her sick?” This bothered him. He had never forgotten the time she started running around in circles after he had given her a spoonful of cough syrup. She had banged her head into the wall and thrown things and acted so crazy he finally had to tie her arms and her legs. He had held her like that, struggling and kicking so much that the ropes rubbed her legs and arms raw.
“It won’t,” Dotty said. “Jig musta made sure it’s not too strong.”
“What if he don’t know?” Wallace asked.
“He knows!”
“What if he thinks he knows, but it ain’t right and she g …”
“Damn it, Aubie! Will you cut that out? You drive me nuts when you start that stuff.”
“Yah, but what if the …”
“What if the world stops spinning, Aubie? What if the sun explodes? Jesus Christ!” She took off the sunglasses and squinted at him. “Do you understand what’s happening here, Aubie? I mean, really?”
He just looked at her. He couldn’t tell if she really meant the question or if she was building up to a fight.
“Do you understand that tomorrow morning you get Canny dressed and ready and then you feed her and make her take the pill and then we drive to Stonefield in our car and Jig follows us in the truck. We take her to some woods, to this cabin he’s got ready. We leave her and then he goes and picks up the money. And if it’s all there, Jig calls the Birds and tells them where she is. Then he …” She paused, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly. He could feel the gears turning, the wheels spinning. From across the way came Canny’s voice, raised and angry. “I did not! She did! No, I didn’t! You shut up!” And then she screamed suddenly. Wallace started for the door, then turned back with a helpless look at Dotty.
“Listen to me, Aubie!” she said, calling him back. He kept looking at the door.
“This might be our last chance to talk,” she said. “I gotta say this. I … I feel like this real old lady sometimes inside. Like I’m dying. Like I will, if I don’t take off. I gotta get off on my own. But the thing that stops me is you, Aubie. I always get this feeling it wasn’t just Canny I took that time, but you too. That’s what’s giving me the shakes—not just Canny going, but you too, Aubie. The thought of it’s … I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you.…”
The front door of the house slammed and then came the familiar roar and skid of Huller’s departing pickup.
“She’ll probably take you back,” Dotty said. “You could tell her you got hit on the head and you been all this time trying to figure out who you are.” She sat forward eagerly on her crossed legs. “I saw that once in a show and the guy was gone for ten years and his family spent all that time looking for him. I’ll bet she’s been looking for you all this time, Aubie. I’ll bet she hasn’t slept a night since you been gone.” She smiled. “Why don’t you call her, Aubie? Call and say, ‘Hey, Hyacinth, I just come to and I know my name now and I wanna come home.’”
He had been shaking his head. “I wanna go with you,” he said. “Like we said.”
“Yah,” she sighed. “Well, remem … think about what I said anyways. Keep it in mind.” She got up from the bed. “Shit,” she muttered, wrapping the sheet around herself. She lifted the plastic curtain and went into the bathroom. When she came out, she was dressed in a red skirt and a baggy black tee shirt that said MIAMI BEACH in glittery pink letters.
“I’m gonna get something to eat,” she said at the door. Across the way, the children’s screaming had begun again. Alma screamed back at them. Dotty turned from the door and took a pill from her purse and slipped it into her pocket. “My head’s gonna goddamn blow,” she said, lighting a cigarette for the walk over. “I can feel it.”
He began to straighten up the cabin. Every corner was heaped with her clothes. He picked them all up and dumped them on one bed. Each thing he folded, he laid on the opposite bed. When all her clothes were folded and stacked, the colored shoes lined up in pairs, he reached under the bed for the empty bags and boxes they never threw out, but kept. All them moves, he thought, all them times, town to town.… Suddenly his arms fell to his sides and he sank onto the wooden chair. This time she means it, he thought. She’ll be gone and Canny’ll be gone.
“Quick, Poppy!”
He looked up to see Canny pushing a square red gas can through the torn flap at the bottom of the door screen.
“For the bugs,” she hissed, stepping quickly inside. Even as she spoke, she scratched her head. “The kerosene!” she groaned, lifting the can with both hands and bringing it into the bathroom. She came out and shook his arm. “I got it, Poppy! I got the can!”
She wore an old green shirt he had never seen before. Threads hung from the armholes where the sleeves had been cut. The blue pants she had on were torn at both knees. Her feet were black with dirt.
Can’t go back like this, he thought.
“Poppy!” She shook his arm again. “Do my hair! They’re all watching a show!”
She took his hand and tried to pull him up from the chair. “Please, Poppy! They’re all itching and Alma just told Momma they either got chicken pox or bugs. Please, Poppy. Alma’s mad as hell!”
He pulled the chair into the middle of the cabin and sat Canny on it and covered her shoulders with a cut-out plastic trash bag. Using an old sock dipped in the kerosene, he patted each matted clump of hair until her whole head was soaked. Her eyes were bloodshot from the fumes and her nose ran. He pulled the oily strands of her hair between his thumbnail and index finger, trying to scrape off the pearly white lice eggs. When it pulled, she winced and wiggled her shoulders. “Ow,” she said softly. He parted the back of her hair and was sickened by the rash of sores there. Her scalp looked like raw hamburg.
“Yo
u got ’fections,” he said, peering close. “They’s all pussy. After, I’ll put some of that ’fection stuff on,” he said, working more carefully now. “Make it feel better,” he murmured. “Get ridda the hair bugs and the sores … make it all better.…”
“I love you, Poppy,” she whispered. She tilted her head and looked up at him. “You love me?”
He nodded and she grinned.
A crow cawed and high leafy breezes swept over the cabin roof, flapping the tar paper up and down like wings. Just then Huller’s truck hurtled into the driveway and screeched to a stop.
“Ellie’s pregnant,” Canny said in a rush. “Alma told Momma if she gets his gun she’s gonna shoot ’em both.”
“Who?”
“Ellie and him. Jiggy.”
“What’d Momma say?” Wallace cleared his throat. The fumes reddened his eyes.
“Nothin’.” Canny shrugged. “I think she’s drunk or getting there. She’s having breakfast. Beer and pretzels.” Canny grabbed his wrist as he started to work on her hair again. “Poppy, I’ll bet if you say we’re going now, she’ll go. She looks so sad.”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “And you know what else? All of Ellie’s stuff’s in the toolbox back of Jiggy’s truck! I think they’re taking off!” she whispered happily. “I saw them putting the stuff in last night. Late, after Alma was sleeping and the cabin lights went out. She said, ‘Thirty-six hours. I don’t think I can wait that long.’ And he said something about ‘the rainbow.’”
At the sound of Huller’s truck, they both looked toward the open door. With the old red dog barking after it, the truck raced around the circle and onto the road. Wallace bent close and skinned another strand of nits from her hair.
The rain began at noon. It fell in soft, warm waves, each time subsiding for a few glaring minutes of wet sunshine, only to sweat down from the hard blue sky again. The children had been inside most of the day watching television with Alma and Dotty.
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