by Rebecca Ore
“I don’t look forward to it.”
“Perhaps you took our local myths too seriously.” Maude felt the world she’d believed in turn insignificant. Betty’s steel gray eyes held hers. Maude said, “Are you telling me there isn’t real magic here after all? It’s all metaphor?”
Betty smiled.
Her grandmother said, “But…” The word was tentative, but it opened room for doubt. Maude looked at her. Grannie Partridge was almost in tears.
Betty said, “Why would anyone imagine an impersonal universe? Even the computer wizards want to find personality in microchips, or put it there.”
Partridge found her voice, and spoke strongly, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust. The race is not to the swift.”
Betty said, “That’s the cruelest God anyone could imagine.” Maude realized the biblical promise dismayed her, too.
4
* * *
THE BALLAD CHAIN
That night, Maude stood in the guest bedroom listening to Lula talking to her grandmother, sounds not distinct enough to resolve into words. If Maude closed her bedroom door, they’d be inaudible.
I need a beer. Maude wondered what legal place sold beer in Taylorsville, and how late. She put on her coat and found the skeleton key that locked the front door. I’ve got to see who’s still here.
The only place open for on-premises drinking was the Mayo River Boogie Parlor, with the live caged dancer over the small dance floor. Maude remembered hearing about knife fights there when she was a girl, but now, after having been a welfare crazy, she doubted much would faze her.
As she stood in the Boogey Parlor drinking her one beer for the night, a man with a fake hand—hooks with blunt ends, really—came up and worked the hand in her face, the springs going ying, ying, ying as he not quite clicked the hooks together. He stopped playing with them and asked, “Don’t you remember me?”
Maude recognized him by voice—a trouble-bitten version of Jake Hughes, who she hadn’t seen since she left for college. “Jake?”
“You back?”
“For a while, at least.”
He twitched his hooks and said, “Bracken County eats its young. Move back, Maude, and you’re doomed.”
“So what happened?”
The bartender answered, “Tripped out on LSD and ran his hand into a feed auger.”
Jake’s face muscles seemed to wobble. Maude knew what the bartender said was true. Jake always claimed a man needed drugs or an awesomely tough automobile to deal with mean Bracken County.
“It was like magic,” Jake said, “not that anyone seemed to have gained an extra hand.”
Maude knew, or thought she’d known, that magic too often slants off in its own direction after a witch sets it to a task. “If it were magic, the witch might have been careless. She or he might not have been aiming to take your hand.” She drained the rest of her can.
Jake began babbling about silicone and soluble crystals. Maude left and went back to her car.
The car started, but died in the bar drive. It wouldn’t start again. Maude suspected the car was vapor locked and wouldn’t start until the engine totally cooled down. She’d only been in the bar fifteen minutes, enough to half cool. From an earlier bout of vapor lock, Maude knew she’d have to wait until the engine cooled completely. Meanwhile, all the bar guys tried to get her to let them fuss with her engine. Teach me to stop for beer at that place, she thought. I can’t let the boys work on it. Someone might spell it so the car’d roll me only into his driveway.
An older man said, “Looks witch-drained. You got plenty of witches in Kobold to take care of it.”
Maude learned as a child that mention of witches called them near. She said, “It’s vapor locked. I’ll have to wait until it cools.”
When Maude finally got home, Lula came out walking on bare feet with yellow calluses and fiberous toenails. “It ain’t your house,” Lula said, curling her toes, one foot wiping the other, the calluses like polished horn, the nails like splintered wood.
“Not yours, either. It’s my grandmother’s.” Maude slipped by the woman, holding her away with one hand.
“Smell the liquor on you. Gonna tell Betty and your grannie.”
Maude started to explain that she’d just had one beer, at the Boogey Parlor. But then she had been at the Boogey Parlor, and everyone knew what that was. “I’ll get some at the store to keep around so I don’t have to go out for it when I want it.”
“Berkeley,” Lula said. “California. Californicators.”
Mornings, the old women gossiped in the Kobold Post Office while the postmistress put up the mail. Two days after Maude’s car stalled at the bar, Maude came in and saw Aunt Betty. Betty leaned forward as though about to pounce, her face looking pre-Colonial.
“Hi, Aunt Betty, how things going?” Maude asked, switching to her country accent. She wondered what plans Betty had for her, but this day seemed to have space enough for mutual courtesy and several erratic world views.
“How are your adjusting to Bracken?”
“I heard that the secret was to get to a city once a week.”
“I haven’t left in years. Last trip was to visit a spot in upstate New York. So far away, yet so much like home, only colder. You’ll get to that stage eventually. Come over and visit. Lula can take care of Partridge.”
“I need help with my car.”
“What kind of help?”
Maude said, “The compression’s down. In Berkeley, one guy told me it needed a new carburetor, but that seemed okay driving cross-country. I think it’s vapor locking when the motor’s half hot.”
“Of course, you want me to put a protect hex on the physical work.”
Damn Betty. “No.”
Betty smiled. “But you came back. You could have stayed in Berkeley, got more drugs to smother the call in your head.”
The overhead lights flickered in their gas tubes and chrome boxes. One man—all Kobold men seem like leather-covered sticks—came in, looked around, and saw Betty looking at Maude. All the other women were quiet. He didn’t go right to his mailbox, but leaned against the wall and flipped through the wanted posters, listening.
Betty said, “You worry that if you give in to magic, your mind will mush up? Magic hasn’t hurt my mind and I’m of an age where outside…” Betty broke off and shuddered slightly.
Magic toys with us now.
“Afraid?” Betty asked. “Don’t want to learn the magic?”
“I know some of it.” Halfway across the county, Maude found out later, a man was gored by a jersey bull. The man knew the bull. The goring came from the legend in which the familiar turns vicious. And as the human dies, he finds out he’s been worshipping a black god all his life.
A trooper shot the bull. The bull collapsed, knees in human blood. This happened when the post office clock hands shivered, then clicked to 11:18. Maude asked, “How do I know you’re the good guys?”
Betty shook Maude’s chin. “Maudie, we’re the good guys because we’ve got great taste. And because we have power.”
Maude wandered around Bracken County most of the afternoon, trying to get out. But Bracken was trapped in a magic Mobius and all the roads led back to Kobold.
The MiniCooper rapidly lost compression, backfiring, tread rubber left black and smoking behind. Ghost blight.
At the Kobold Grocery, Aunt Betty stood by the gas pumps with a bottle of STP Gas Treatment in one hand. She held a ratchet wrench out in the other, and moved it as though blessing Maude’s car.
The car engine stopped knocking.
“Why?” Maude asked.
“If you go out, you might find ways to hate us. Your attitude matters,” Betty answered, putting the STP on top of the leaded-gas pump.
“I want to have my body here, helping my grandmother, and my mind elsewhere. I need to get away some.”
“If you’re here, you can choose whether to be on top of magic or under it, not magic or no magic.” Betty wave
d the wrench around at Kobold Grocery, the abandoned brick bank building, the modern chrome-trimmed grade school.
Maude heard children shrieking, the tamp, tamp of basketballs in the schoolyard. “I don’t think magic is necessary.”
Betty stood with the wrench up between her breasts. Suddenly, Maude visualized Betty as a young woman, but Betty had never been young even when Maude was a baby. Betty said, “Magic matters. And we’re family. We love you.”
“A funny love,” Maude said. Betty looked infinitely patient, attached behind the eyes to something limitless. Maude added, “Family love is for the relation, not the person.”
“All of us have a place in a larger pattern here. Not a logical pattern, perhaps, but a personal one.” Betty’s wrench hand sank and she pulled off the socket and put it in her dress pocket. “Do you really prefer to be a unit in a mob?”
“I like being just a person.” Maude got back in her car and tried to start it. The MiniCooper sounded like a Model T Ford. Maude asked, “What’s wrong now?”
“It absorbs the time it saves you,” Betty said. She climbed back into her Essex, whose paint seemed finely wrinkled, like crepe.
All Maude wanted was a universe that worked the same for everyone. No deals. But now her car wouldn’t feed gas into the engine. She saw the STP bottle sitting on top of the gas pump, but left the car at the store and walked home.
When Maude came back for the car, someone had put the STP in her tank and left her a note saying he’d done it as a favor.
Maude found a blender in Taylorsville and brought it and some vitamins home to feed her grandmother. Rain began falling on the drive back. I’m not going to stay here forever. I wish Douglas would call.
The house seemed small against the clouds and trees whose fall leaf color faded. Maude carried in the blender. Lula said, “I’m not going to use it.”
“It’s all right. I’m going to use it.”
“I’m not gonna clean it.”
“I’ll do that, too.”
“You ain’t gonna get rid of me.”
“I’m here to take care of my grandmother.”
“Maude?” she heard her grandmother call.
“Go in and see her,” Lula said, as if speaking before Maude could act would make Lula someone who gave orders in the house.
“I answer to her,” Maude said. She put the blender on the counter and went back to see her grandmother.
Partridge looked frailer than ever, sweat soaked. “I fell. I hurt my arm.”
Lula came in. “Ain’t nothing but a strain. She got herself back to bed.”
“It hurts real bad, Maude.”
Lula sat down on the bed beside Partridge and smoothed away some of the sweat. “The undertaker has a woman who dresses out the female corpses,” Lula said. “She washes them and puts on makeup, and their prettiest clothes.”
“Stop that, Lula. I need to take her to the doctor.” Partridge looked at Lula, then at Maude. Maude knew she didn’t want Lula to stay anymore, not with her morbid fantasies of women corpses dressed and powdered by other women. Partridge said, “I’m hurting.”
Maude pulled the covers away. Her grandmother’s arm was visibly broken. As she called for an ambulance, she wondered if Lula had broken it.
The hospital seemed like a battleground between paradigms—magic versus science, healing versus the medicine of explanations that tied bacteria to a greater design. Oh, please, Maude thought and wondered to what god she could pray.
An intern came out from a city for rotation and he brought in reason, X rays, and surgical plaster. A local nurse took Maude out while the intern set Partridge’s wrist. Then the doctor came out and said, “Do you take care of her?”
“I just found out she hadn’t been eating. I got a blender today.”
“She needs food, care for her bedsores. Whoever’s been taking care of her…”
“An old kinswoman has been taking care of her. I knew something was going on and came to help. I just got here.”
“I’d like to have a social worker talk to you. Maybe make some visits.”
Maude said, “I’ve been living in Berkeley for a couple years.” She wanted him to stop accusing her of failing to take care of her grandmother.
“Her arm’s been broken for hours.”
“I was out.”
“You can’t leave her alone.”
“Lula was with her. I’ve got to get rid of Lula. Do you know an agency, someone who could help?”
“That’s why we need to have a social worker talk to you.”
Maude said, “Call social services. I need to get rid of Lula.” When Maude started to walk, she shook. The doctor’s face softened.
Back at the house, Maude found that Lula had opened the blender box. The box was empty. Maude first looked through the trash while Lula watched. “I took it apart,” Lula said.
“Did you break anything?”
“I’m not bad,” Lula said. She turned as though she’d been insulted and went to the bedroom. Maude followed and saw her stretch out over the whole double bed.
By midnight, Maude had found the cutter blades with the knives, the rubber gasket with the canning jar lids, the motor with the power tools, and the blender jar with the vases. So Lula believed herself to be good? She could leave an arm unset for hours, but wouldn’t, perhaps, actually kill.
Maude thought about trying out the blender but dreaded Lula’s anger at the noise. Maybe someone else could take Lula in? She took the blender to her room and put it in her closet.
In the morning, as the two women ate oatmeal, Lula said, “You had someone call while you took Partridge to the hospital.”
“Who?”
“A man. I told him you weren’t home.”
“Was his name Doug?”
“Don’t remember.” Lula squinted at Maude over a spoonful of oatmeal. “Maybe.”
“I’ll call him,” Maude said.
“You meet him in the bar the other night?”
“No, he’s someone I knew in California, an engineer.”
“It’s your grannie’s phone. She won’t like you running up calls to California. You say you met this guy in a bar?”
“No, I didn’t say.” Maude felt her face getting red. I hate feeling like a teenager.
Lula ate her spoonful of oatmeal. Her narrow face looked relaxed, even dreamy. “So you’re not going to call him on your grannie’s phone.”
While visiting her grandmother at the hospital, Maude heard about a garage off in the country that she hadn’t considered—Burton’s Speed Shop. The physical therapist who came in to talk to Partridge about rehabilitating her arm was from outside Bracken. She told Maude about Burton and said, “He’s really good with the bills, too.”
So Maude called him from a pay phone and took the car in. The shop felt rational, a clutter of radiators, crankshafts, wrenches, and other mind-shaped metal. The man was taciturn in the way of good mechanical people, asking questions and listening to both Maude and the car.
“I can drive you home if you can leave the car.”
Maude wondered how long it would take. She’d be trapped in Kobold until the car was fixed. He nodded at her when she said, “I need to get up to Blacksburg.”
When he dropped her off, he said, “Sometime soon, you’ve got to get the engine rebuilt or buy a new car. If you buy a new car, don’t buy it here. You’ll pay $1000 more for it.” And it could be hexed, he seemed to be thinking.
“And it could be hexed,” she said.
“I keep to my tools,” he said. “I don’t let anyone else touch them, either.”
When she got the car back the next day, it ran as well as it ever had and she drove it very fast toward Blacksburg, over the faultline and up the Blue Ridge and over, to her money on Main Street in Blacksburg, and took out another $250. She then walked around Blacksburg, by the university, by the tattered posters for poetry readings and political rallies. History was between times, after the sixties, idling slack
, something coming, but all the good radicals who’d mocked the Mr. Joneses had no idea.
Early fall, historically as well as seasonally, Maude thought. She noticed that outside Bracken the scope of her concern expanded.
And what winter comes? Would that be historically, or just personally?
Maude went in a bookstore that felt like home, and stood reading in various sections until a thin boy clerk came to within four feet of her and watched. So she bought a copy of the Village Voice and a Roadside Geology of Virginia and a hiking guide for the area.
The clerk at the counter checked her out on a computer, impersonally, without comment. Maude wondered why she felt relieved, then realized she’d have to hide the Voice from Lula.
Maude found a restaurant with ferns in the window and a music system which played preconversion Bob Dylan. She bought a falafel sandwich and ate it while remembering all the similar restaurants and bars she’d been in, in New York, Berkeley, and San Francisco. She could sit here all night, until closing, and know the people who came in would know something about the general theory of relativity, about the subconscious, about DNA. At least one person any time of the day or night would know about Noam Chomsky’s claim that all languages were the same in their deep structure and that language was innate.
The universe didn’t change its responses here to comply with particular human will. Maude finished her sandwich and left a tip. She found a ticket on her car, which she’d parked in the visitor’s parking lot. For a second, she felt punished and paranoid, but read the back of the ticket and realized that all she had to do was tell them she was neither a student nor a faculty member. So, slightly uneasy, she wrote down her address and social security number and put the ticket in one of the campus mailboxes.
Back home, Lula said, “Betty wants to introduce you to her niece. She said maybe you’re lonely for people your age. And they had to keep your grannie another day at the hospital, so I think you should pay for it. And Betty brought a little package from the post office. It’s on the dining room table. It rattles.”