Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “Why?” It was an easier question than who?

  “You think someone watched? Saw what happened?” Hannah looked back up the dark hillside.

  Liz looked up too. She thought about Hilltop School. The boys there often broke school rules and sneaked down to Bluegang to swim and smoke and catch crawdads. For a while they kept a secret clubhouse in a cave farther up. It was possible one of them had watched Hannah shove Billy Phillips off the oak saddle onto the rocks.

  “Why would they take your panties?” Liz asked.

  Hannah lifted her shoulders and let them drop. She murmured under her breath.

  “What?”

  “Blackmail?”

  Liz started to laugh, looked down at Billy Phillips and stopped herself. “There’s no such thing in real life. Only in cities. Only bad people.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Because Liz would rather read novels than play outdoors, because she lived on Casabella Road in Rinconada, California, because she had looked hard enough at the new world for one day.

  “I bet Jeanne came down here and got them.”

  “How come?”

  “She probably remembered and—”

  “No.”

  Liz stared at the back of her friend’s head. The wild mass of blonde curls and tangles, silver in the moonlight.

  “She would have told me. She would have called.”

  “It’s late.”

  “Not that late. Not even midnight yet.”

  Jeanne loved the telephone.

  “She called me at two in the morning when her dog died.”

  Liz looked down at Billy Phillips. His right arm lay awkwardly with the palm of his hand facing straight up and the fingers curved toward the calloused palm as if about to grab something. She wished they had at least closed his eyes earlier but it was too late. From books she knew his eyeballs were dry and dusty now. Pretty soon they would start to wrinkle up and fall back into their sockets. His mouth was open, and she remembered a song from third grade: The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out/ The worms play pinochle on your snout.

  “We gotta go.” Liz knew if she didn’t get away from Bluegang and fast she would be caught there forever. She imagined Billy Phillips’s hand grabbing her ankle, pulling her down to lie beside him. She clambered back up the hill.

  Hannah did not move.

  “We have to get out of here.” Liz held out her hand.

  “It could have been a tramp, huh?”

  “If you don’t come now, I’m leaving you.” It wasn’t true. She would not abandon her friend, not ever and they both knew it. It was the kind of thing tough-minded Jeanne would say. “Jeanne’s got ’em. I bet she shows ’em to you tomorrow.”

  But she didn’t and early next morning when it was reported that two boys with fishing poles had discovered the body and run into town to tell Sheriff Bacci, Hannah Whittaker’s Saturday panties were not mentioned.

  Florida

  “Water walls,” Liz Shepherd said. “I’m standing on the balcony and I can’t even see the building across the street.” She held the cell phone out over the abyss. Fifteen stories down the swimming pool was a blue baguette. “Can you hear it?”

  Hannah Tarwater sighed from California. “Bring it with you. Please.”

  “California’s got enough natural disasters without importing hurricanes.”

  “Is it windy?”

  “Mostly just wet.” In the bathroom Liz had hung her drenched raincoat over the tub. Her boots were in the tub leaving muddy prints. “We’ve had more than an inch already.”

  “Everything’s so dry here. I’ve practically abandoned the garden.”

  They made trivial conversation; the important questions hanging in the air like wash on a line stretching coast to coast.

  “I’ll pick you up,” Hannah said. “Look for the woman having a hot flash.”

  “Still?”

  “The doctor says a few women have it bad despite hormone replacement. I seem to be one of those.”

  Liz tried to read Hannah’s voice. False cheer? Hard to tell with her, even after decades of friendship.

  “The up side is I’m saving a fortune on blusher.”

  They could go on like this for hours. They could pirouette around and about one hundred subjects, silly and profound, twirl through menopause, family, gardens, clothes and makeup, animals, world affairs, God, and never once come down off their toes long enough to talk about Bluegang. After so many years wasn’t there something deeply, even dangerously, strange about this determined silence? Gerard said there was.

  More desultory conversation and then Hannah had to go off to a place called Resurrection House where she was a volunteer. Something about crack babies. She was always taking care of someone or something. Mother to the world, that was Hannah. Liz walked back into the hotel room, closed the sliding door, and picked up her room key and purse and went out into the hall and down to the elevator.

  The hotel had more amenities than most villages in Belize where Liz and Gerard lived. On a wet and windy night she could buy a wardrobe for a family, liquor and salsa and gourmet sausage, books and souvenirs and laxatives, without ever leaving the hotel’s protection. She stepped out of the elevator and fitted her dark glasses over her ears. The fluorescent midday dimmed to a murky twilight. In the drugstore she bought a plastic spray bottle, the kind used to spritz hair or sprinkle clothes back when housewives still stood at ironing boards.

  A garish sign in Spanish and English in the window of a hair salon caught her eye: NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY. Reflected next to it she saw herself. A tallish middle-aged woman, thin and long-muscled after a tubby childhood. Her features—even her nose—seemed miniaturized in contrast to her thick dark hair like a chrysanthemum gone wild.

  The salon’s Cuban manager—her elided accent was easy to identify—warned Liz the electricity might go off at any time. Did she really want to get her hair done in the middle of a hurricane?

  “I’m no’ workin’ by flashligh’, ya know.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  Now that she had noticed it, her hair seemed like a blind, a bosky hideout, and she couldn’t wait to escape it. She was soul-sick of hiding. Besides, a haircut always lifted her spirits, gave her confidence, which she needed for what lay ahead. But later when she stared at her image in the mirror over the bathroom sink the swingy dark hair shaped to the curve of her jaw didn’t do it. She felt no more up to what lay ahead than she had an hour earlier though certainly the cut improved her appearance. And at least she wasn’t hiding anymore.

  She walked out onto the balcony, unscrewed the spritz top of the bottle she had bought and held it out beyond the balcony’s shallow overhang. The hard rain almost drove it out of her hand. For several moments she stood with her arm outstretched, getting wet to the shoulder, filling the plastic bottle with rainwater. Afterwards she screwed the top back on and put it in her purse, standing it upright so it wouldn’t leak.

  She lay on the expanse of bed that faced the window, folded her hands across her stomach and thought about the week ahead.

  Liz had been back to Rinconada fewer than a dozen times since college graduation almost thirty years ago. Her parents had retired from the state university system and moved to La Jolla in Southern California where Liz had visited them only twice before they died, within months of each other. But despite distance and time her friendship with Hannah and Jeanne had endured. They met two or three times a year on more neutral territory, spoke often on the phone; and now they had long, searching conversations electronically. Rinconada had become a kind of destination of last resort, a place she went to only because she knew it was expected of her occasionally. The town of her childhood was gone—the blossoming trees and one-lane roads, vacant lots alight with wild mustard—smothered in silicon, buried under new houses and chic stores up and down the main street where once she and Hannah and Jeanne had been known by every proprietor.

  The Three Musketeers. Battle, Murder
and Sudden Death. The Unholy Trinity.

  Gone utterly yet she knew that behind and beneath the new architecture, the widened roads, she would encounter the geography of her childhood. A thousand matinees and Friday nights at the movie theater on Santa Cruz Avenue, the high school’s wide lawns, Overlook Road where they went to neck and drink beer. And Bluegang. Bluegang right in Hannah’s backyard.

  Her eyelids grew heavy staring at the steel-colored wall of water, but she did not want to sleep. She sat up and turned on the bedside light. Where was her novel? Was it too early to order room service? Why did they always hide the menu?

  She walked back to the window.

  Somewhere, between the two buildings across the street, there was a view of the ocean; but she had only glimpsed it for an hour before the rain began. She shouldn’t have left Belize at all with a tropical storm in the forecast. This one, Claudette by name, had been promoted to a hurricane while she was at the doctor’s office that afternoon. By the time her plane took off tomorrow, the worst would be over.

  She liked hurricanes in the same way she half-enjoyed earthquakes when she was a girl and the house shook and grumbled and books fell off shelves in her father’s study. There was nothing she could do about natural disasters except live through them. She wasn’t expected to take responsibility for anything so she needn’t feel like a failure for doing nothing.

  If there had been a way to avoid this trip to Rinconada she would have taken almost any detour before confronting the path down the hill through the wildwood’s bay trees, gums and oaks to Bluegang. But Gerard had said, “You cannot run the rest of your life.” He knew what she was going through. Mornings when he walked into the kitchen and found her seated at the big worktable drinking her third cup of coffee, sitting where she’d planted herself in the middle of the night because dreams had awakened her as they did several times a month, staring at the whorls in the worn surface of the worktable as if by following the lines they would lead her to a place where Bluegang wasn’t, on those mornings he saw the struggle knotted in her. He would kiss the top of her head and leave her alone. He cared but what could he do? She might have endured the dreams if they were the only disturbance; but Billy Phillips, his grieving mother, and she and Hannah and Jeanne hugging at the top of the hill had become her daylight companions too. Walking down to the quay to buy fish, Bluegang was with her; browsing at the booksellers the memory came in and all at once she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think of anything but that dead boy.

  “Something’s eatin’ at you,” Divina the fortune-teller said. “Best get it out, like a worm, ’fore you waste.”

  There were details she recalled clearly now, which she did not remember noticing at the time. A line of dirt around Billy Phillips’s neck. His mouth open a little, as if death had caught him in midcry. That was what she heard in her dreams. That cry. That plea for help. What she saw was a coyote.

  Gerard said it was impossible that she was the only one having a reaction to the Bluegang experience. “You cannot put such things from your mind forever,” he told her, sounding very much like his psychiatrist father. Under different circumstances she would have noted this aloud and he would have sputtered defensively. But why tease when she knew he was right? He said Hannah and Jeanne would probably be grateful for the chance to talk about what happened to them. Liz didn’t think so, but she’d let him talk her into flying out to California. She had to come to the United States anyway for the other business—which she also didn’t want to think about. It was hard work, not thinking.

  Had she hit on a new definition of middle age? Was it the time when the secrets of the past and the mistakes of the present came together and made life miserable and sleep impossible? Maybe this was why some people died early. Middle age took so much energy to survive they had none left for old age.

  Thursday

  Hannah Tarwater woke at dawn when a mockingbird trilled its lyric from the top of the eucalyptus tree outside her bedroom window. Through the half-open shutters she glimpsed another cloudless October sky and sighed. Last year the Santa Clara Valley had less than fifteen inches of rain, the year before just barely twenty. There hadn’t been a drop since early March, not even a sprinkle. She thought of Africa, of Oklahoma, of California lifted by the wind and deposited around the world, grit from her own garden drifting down over Mexico.

  She reached behind her to the combination radio/ tape recorder and pressed the rewind button. When the whirring stopped, she pressed play and after a moment the sound of distant thunder and rain falling on leaves filled the shadowed bedroom. She closed her eyes and dozed a little.

  Dan stirred and reached for her. Pulling her back against his chest, he nuzzled the nape of her neck and growled.

  From down the hall an alarm’s nervy scream was followed by a feeble ding-a-ling as the clock hit the floor.

  “Eddie’s awake,” Hannah said.

  They listened for the ritual noise of their teenage son’s rising: the bedroom door flung wide, the bathroom door assaulted, the clang of the toilet seat hitting the tank, the torrent of pee. Flush. Clatter.

  Dan tightened his embrace, cupping Hannah’s breast in his large warm palm. He kissed the nape of her neck.

  She asked, “How’s your schedule look?”

  “Routine. Big bellies and bawling babies.”

  “Heaven, right?”

  “Wrong.” He hugged her so tight she gasped. “This is heaven.” His hand slipped down the curve of her hip and between her thighs.

  She elbowed him gently. “What’s going on down there?”

  They heard another door open, footsteps, several sharp raps on the bathroom door, and listened to their seventeen-year-old daughter, Ingrid, announce to her younger brother that he would vacate the bathroom instantly if he knew what was fucking good for him.

  Dan groaned and rolled onto his back. “That girl’s a Marine.”

  “Hard to believe she was once a sweet-tempered baby. She was so quiet in the mornings, I sometimes forgot we had her. Remember how happy she was to lie in bed and play with her toes?” Hannah felt Dan’s body tense but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like picking at a wound, taking perverse pleasure in the pain. “And the way she used to talk to herself, making all those little nonsense noises with little question marks at the end? Remember, Dan?”

  “Don’t start this, Hannah.”

  “I’m just remembering.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You loved her.”

  “I still love her.” In the shadowed room his eyes were cobalt blue. “I love Eddie too.”

  “You loved being a Daddy.”

  “And I still do.”

  “I don’t mean teenagers. I mean babies and little ones.”

  Dan groaned again and closed his eyes, cutting the line between them, disconnecting the fuse. Depression dived into bed beside Hannah, ignored Dan and tucked around her in the bedclothes, nuzzled up. Tears sprang to her eyes and she was suddenly furious.

  There had been a time when she could wangle anything she wanted out of Dan. When he was a homely, shy and bony boy in medical school Hannah knew he couldn’t believe his luck that she loved him. Back then all he wanted to do was make her happy and keep her that way. Now, she asked herself, did he care? Did he give a good goddamn how she felt since time and good bone structure had turned him into a middle-aged hunk? His shyness had become a soft-spoken charm both men and women found attractive; and no one called him bony anymore. God forbid saying he was homely. The cowlicky brown hair, his hawkish nose and square jaw, these made a strong Yankee face, friends told her. You’re so lucky, Hannah. You got one of the good ones. They didn’t know how mulish he could be. Pigheaded and half-blind.

  “It’s not like we’re too old, Dan. I know that’s what you think but it isn’t true. Fifty isn’t the same as it was for our parents. Besides, when I talked to the child advocate she said the court would waive the age requirement under the circumstances.�
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  “Jesus Christ, Hannah, you’ve been talking to the advocate?” Dan pushed back the bedcovers, swung his legs onto the floor and sat up. “How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want another baby.”

  “But if you’d only come over to Resurrection House and take a look.” She knelt on the bed behind him, wrapping her arms around his chest, resting her cheek on his shoulder. Angry still but trying not to be, trying not to let it show. “If you’d just hold her . . .”

  “I don’t want to hold her. Or see her. I don’t even want to hear her name.”

  Angel.

  Dan shrugged free of her, rested his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands. “You’re driving me crazy with this, Hannah. I can’t take much more.”

  Hannah put a plate of cinnamon toast before Eddie, neat little triangles overlapping like shingles. “You can’t go to school without breakfast. How do you expect to play football if you don’t eat?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to play football.”

  Ingrid stood by the back door and applied mascara while she waited for her ride. She was a strong athletic girl with her mother’s wild blonde hair and her father’s deep blue eyes spaced far apart. Healthy skin and perfect teeth, the smile that gleamed: she could have been an ad for the American Dream, Hannah thought. Ingrid would have been identified as American on any street in any foreign port.

  Ingrid said, “Maybe he wants to be a computer nerd ’til the day he dies.”

  “Shut up, Gridlock.”

  “Of course he wants to play football.”

  “Ma—”

  “Eddie, trust me on this one, okay? Finish your oatmeal and eat your toast. Your body needs fuel. Even to move a joystick. Can I drive my car without gas?”

  He stared at the toast as if it were contagious.

  Tires crunched on the driveway. Ingrid grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m outa here.”

  Hannah watched her long-legged daughter swing up into the open Jeep’s passenger seat and kiss the driver. Mix Hannah Whittaker with Dan Tarwater and you got this lithe and confident, smart-mouthed, sexual creature. Children were the strongest argument she knew of for the existence of God.