The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

by Laird Koenig

  The girl was beginning to think her expressionless mask was a mistake. The man seemed compelled to make himself understood.

  "You’d be surprised," he said. "Some pretty creepy people. Even right here in the village.”

  The wind lifted long strands of his brown hair revealing a bald head that gleamed like her polished furniture. Undaunted by the little girl’s impassiveness, Hallet began to explain the significance of this particular cold and windy evening.

  "At Halloween we trick or treat. You still don’t understand? You’re English, right?"

  "Yes."

  "You don’t have Halloween in England?"

  "No."

  "Hey," he said, "we’re letting all the heat out." The man thrust himself inside the door, a second step that forced the little girl back into the hall.

  "Tell your father you’ve got company."

  2

  "TELL YOUR FATHER," the man had said as he pushed himself and his glowing pumpkin into her home. "Tell your father," he had said as if he need not ask her permission to enter, as if this was not the girl’s home, but only her father’s.

  She stood motionless at the front door and with a great deal more hatred than most men and women remember that children can feel, clamped her teeth and held her silence as the man’s wet shoes splotched footprints across the shining oak planks of her polished floor. At the window he shoved back the curtain and shaded his eyes to look out through the glass.

  "Your neighbors are too far for the kids to hear me call," he said, his breath misting the window she had washed that afternoon. "But from here I can watch for them. One’s dressed up like Frankenstein’s monster. The other one’s a green skeleton." Pretending to shiver with fright, he giggled.

  The girl hated his giggle, and she hated the smell of cologne, sweet and heavy, that he left behind him. Choking with rage, all she could think to do was slam the door.

  She remained in the hall, staring at him.

  He was taller than her father. His puffy red face glowed from the cold wind. That bitter wind might account for blue eyes being so watery, but those eyes had a look she had seen in the eyes of a friend of her father’s, another poet her father said drank too much. Finding the girl staring at him, the man put the pumpkin down on the gateleg table and with his left hand, on which an unusually large gold wedding band glinted, smoothed his hair while with the other he drew a chapstick from his raincoat pocket and ran glistening balm over his large, red lips. Like the trail of slime left by a snail, thought the girl.

  He slipped the ointment back into his raincoat pocket, the edges of which were filthy with grease. The same black bordered the sleeves and the bottom of the coat. His gray flannel trousers below, hung unpressed over the wet brown-suede shoes that had tracked the floor. The pink hand continued to smooth strings of brown hair across his scalp that shone under the hair’s inadequate cover. Everything about the man seemed soiled, shiny or red.

  "If you’re going to live in the States," he said in a voice that was still far too loud, "you have to know about Halloween. That’s because tonight’s the night all the kids get dressed up, come by your door with masks and pumpkins."

  The girl, who had yet to move from the hall, clawed her hand on the door knob.

  "When they come to your door," the man said, "they holler 'trick or treat' and you’re supposed to act scared. If you don’t give them a treat they pull some terrible trick on you." He waggled a red finger at her and giggled. "Something dire."

  The man pressed his pink face back to the window to peer out into the night. His breath made another dim little patch of fog on the black glass.

  "As for being so terrible and dire," he said, "I wouldn’t worry too much about that. With my two kids it’s only as dire as four-and six-year-olds can get."

  The girl could not imagine this tall pink man with the heavy wedding ring as the father of two children. Compared to her own father he seemed more like a child himself than a parent. A child who smelled of cologne.

  "Now you understand? About trick or treat?"

  "What’s considered a treat?"

  "Popcorn. Candy. Anything."

  "Would they like a piece of cake?"

  Both the man and the girl looked at the cake glowing with candles in front of the fire. A few of the tiny candles had already burned down and their flames had died. Others flickered.

  "But that’s birthday cake," the man said.

  The girl left the front door to go into the kitchen area. A drawer opened, a cupboard door slammed. With a knife and a box of waxed paper, she knelt before the cake.

  "You shouldn’t," Hallet said.

  "Shouldn’t what?" asked the girl who had already drawn a careful line with the tip of the blade across the satiny frosting.

  "Cut it. Just for them I mean."

  "They won’t like it?"

  "Sure, but. . ." In front of his raincoat a red hand rose in half protest, but it fell.

  "Pretty cake."

  The girl drew the knife through the snowfield of pale yellow.

  He turned to glance through the window. Then suddenly he spoke, "Where’s your mother?"

  The girl frowned, concentrating on cutting the cake. 'The man waited. Was she not going to answer his question? She was lifting out the first wedge of cake when she spoke.

  "My mother’s dead."

  "But your father’s here though." The man sniffed the air exaggerating his reaction to what he sensed. "He, smokes French cigarettes, right?"

  The girl ripped a long piece of waxed paper from the box, spread it flat and carefully wrapped the first piece of cake.

  "Am I right? About the French cigarettes?"

  "Yes."

  The finger of his red hand waggled. "And he’s a very wicked man."

  The girl, cutting the second wedge, did not look up.

  "French cigarettes. Ho, ho." The man’s wicked chuckle included the girl into his mythology, the folklore that anything, even cigarettes, if French, was sinful. He giggled again. "French cigarettes. Out here on the Island? Off season? Very wicked." His innuendo seemed incomplete without another conspiratorial chuckle.

  The girl wrapped the second piece of cake. With the knife she scraped the snowy frosting from her fingers, but she did not eat it.

  "My father’s not at all wicked. He’s a poet."

  She was looking into the circle of flames on the candles which yet burned.

  "Upstairs?" asked the man.

  She gazed across the flames at the man at the window.

  "Who?"

  "Your father."

  "No," she said. "In his study. Working."

  "A poet."

  "Yes."

  "My mother says he’s a poet, too" and when my mother says anything—well, automatically it has to be true. It wouldn’t dare not be. My mother’s the real-estate lady who leased your father his house."

  The girl rose from the oak floor and carried the two pieces of wrapped cake to the man at the window.

  At his, strong scent she felt a wave of nausea rise.

  "The kids are going to love that," he said reaching for the offering. His red hands touched the girl’s slender white fingers. Almost dropping the cake, she pulled her hands away.

  For too long a moment the man found the girl staring at his hands. Hands. According to her father, hands told more about a person than a face, and these hands were small and soft as a woman’s and even though they were pink and red with cold, the backs were dotted with large pores like a pigskin wallet her father had once been given as a gift, but had thrown away because the leather had never lost its unpleasant smell. The little girl was certain that if this man’s touched her again her flesh would jump on her bones.

  "Clearing up," the man said. "No more rain tonight. Just mud puddles for the kids to splash through."

  The girl returned to the coffee table, picked up the knife and waxed paper, and carried them into the kitchen.

  "So quiet," he said, and for the first time his voice wa
s hushed. "Listen. Sometimes from this house you can hear the ocean. Tonight all you can hear is the wind."

  From the kitchen the girl watched the man across the room at the window.

  "Most people think it gets lonely out here in the winter," he said, wiping the patch of mist with his raincoat sleeve. "Actually you and your father are lucky to be here this time of year. As soon as fall comes all the summer people pack up, put up the shutters and dash back to New York and turn on the steam heat. Winter comes and all the Jews finally give the place back to the natives. Back to us Wasps. And the Wops."

  The man was now looking at the birthday cake candles burning down, one by one winking out. "You’re thirteen?"

  "No."

  "Then why thirteen candles?"

  "All I had."

  "You’re fourteen?"

  "My father published his first poem when he was only eleven."

  "In England, right?"

  "Yes."

  "It’s easier to be a poet in England." A red hand slid across his hair, rearranging it over the shining bald patch on his skull. "Here in America when you’re eleven it’s Little League."

  Could he not tell she did not want to talk?

  "I wrote poetry," he said. "In prep school. For the school paper. You write poetry?"

  "Yes."

  "What about?"

  She shrugged. It was the least possible answer she could give to his question. Why did he go on talking? Nothing seemed to deter him.

  "Published?" he did not seem at all discouraged by her silence. "Your poetry?"

  She nodded.

  "School paper?"

  In the kitchen the girl shut a drawer but did not answer.

  "Newspapers? Magazines?"

  In the fireplace a log burned through and fell, rolling burning coals onto the hearth. The girl ran from the kitchen to pick up the iron poker.

  "I’d like to read your poems some time."

  The girl poked the embers back into the fireplace.

  "Your father’s name is Leslie Jacobs, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Yours?"

  "Rynn."

  "R-Y-N-N? That’s very unusual."

  The girl pushed a glowing coal under the grate.

  "You must be very bright." He looked around the room. "Just you and your father live here?"

  She did not reply but lifted the lid of the woodbox and dropped the poker back inside it.

  "Just you two?" The man asked again.

  "Yes."

  Hallet moved to the rocker and with a red hand set it rocking.

  "His chair?"

  "Yes."

  "And you don’t like for anyone else to sit in it, right?"

  The girl shrugged in the direction of the man who pressed strands of brown hair against his skull.

  "Vibes," he said. "Vibrations, I get about things. Am I right?’ With the back of his pigskin hand he stopped the chair’s rocking. "Some people have a superstition about rocking a chair when no one’s in it."

  The girl did not turn from the fire.

  "They have that one in England? Now don’t try to tell me you’re not superstitious."

  Silence.

  "You should be superstitious," he said. "After all, it is Halloween. You should also have a black cat. Black cat’s practically obligatory for tonight." He glanced around as if to show the girl he expected to find a cat here in spite of her denial. "No cat at all?"

  "No cat."

  "All little girls love cats."

  The girl crossed to a corner by the wood box and knelt down to open a tiny wire-mesh cage.

  "What have you got there?" The creature the girl held in her hands was the man’s excuse to edge nearer.

  "White rat?"

  As Hallet maneuvered for a closer look at the rat, she turned her face from his scent.

  "What’s your name?" he asked of the rat.

  The little girl kissed the rat’s pink nose.

  "Got to have a name. Come on, Rynn. Tell me what it is."

  "Gordon," but the girl was talking to the tiny creature whose whiskers twitched, not to the man.

  "English?"

  Rynn nodded. She had not even told her father when she smuggled Gordon into the States in her Marks and Spencer duffle coat. After another kiss for Gordon, she carried the rat to the table and set him down before the cake. The rat raised his head and his pink eyes surveyed the mountain of pale yellow frosting, the candles wavering with flames. Rynn picked up a crumb and held it to the rat to nibble. Her eyes sparkled with candlelight. Gordon stood up, his front claws sinking into the frosting.

  "Before the candles all go out, shouldn’t you call your father?"

  "Not when he’s working."

  The man watched the girl and Gordon for a long, silent moment. "Anybody ever tell you you’re a very pretty girl? Pretty hair. Especially in the candlelight." His hand reached out but stopped short of touching Rynn’s hair.

  "Pretty girl like you—on your birthday and all—no boyfriends?"

  The girl and her pet, in a world together, closed out the man. She leaned over the table to put her face close to Gordon.

  Hallet studied her shining hair, the caftan that stretched tight across her back and over her hips.

  "Come on. I’ll bet you’ve got a boyfriend. Lots of boyfriends. Pretty girl like you."

  Suddenly the man reached down and slapped the girl on the curve of her buttocks. Rynn wheeled around to face him, her eyes glaring hate.

  Hallet giggled nervously. "It’s okay. I get to spank you. On your birthday you have to get spanked. Once for each year. And then one to grow on."

  Rynn’s green eyes held the man’s until he slid his glance away.

  "It’s a game," he protested. "A birthday game!" His voice was loud and shrill. Backing up toward the gateleg table, he almost stumbled.

  "You think. . . . Wow. Look, I’ve got two kids of my own. Out there." He retreated to the window and peered out.

  "Hey, here comes the green skeleton now! And Frankenstein’s monster!" His cry was almost jubilant as he moved past the table and scooped up the glowing pumpkin. He shoved the wrapped cake into his raincoat pocket mashing the two slices. "Thanks for the treat. I guarantee my monsters' best behavior. No tricks."

  With long steps, Hallet backed toward the door.

  "Tell your father I’m sorry I missed him."

  He flung open the door. Outside two costumed children waited in the blowing leaves.

  "I almost forgot. Happy Birthday!"

  But Rynn did not thank the man. With another glare surprisingly full of hate, she faced him.

  Hallet giggled and hurried out the door.

  "Happy Birthday!" he boomed, but the wind hurled his voice into the night.

  The girl shut the door and turned the lock.

  3

  FRIDAY MIGHT have been a day in spring; the air was that soft under a cloudless blue sky. By afternoon, however, it felt more like fall. The air was sharp with wood smoke; the clapboard farmhouse behind its screen of tree branches was bathed in a light more amber than golden, and shadows that grow as long only when the year is dying stretched across the dead leaves.

  A 1966 drophead Bentley, huge and shining and of such a rich dark red the villagers called it "liver-colored," moved down the lane through the drifting smoke and slowed to a stop in front of the house.

  In a silence broken only by crows cawing, a car door opened, and a woman who was older than she looked from a distance left the car with a basket. Her hair, touched by the sunlight, shone gold, but a gold with a hard, unnatural glint. She slammed the heavy door, locked it, and pulled a brown tweed coat around her. Her hands, even in the full light, were as unlined and pink as those of the man who had come to the house on Halloween. This rosy plumpness, the same as Frank Hallet’s, kept her face smooth except for two deep frown lines converging at the bridge of her nose, like painted Hindu markings. Hard blue eyes glittered, polished stones peering from the pink, smooth face.

&n
bsp; Fitting the wicker basket over her arm, the woman strode toward the house, brown suede shoes crunching acorns and scattering dry leaves.

  Overhead, in the branches of a leafless tree, a blue jay flashed. In a far-off field crows cawed. Even further away, ocean waves churned on the shore.

  Halfway up the walk the woman slowed to listen, for the windows and doors of the house ahead stood open as if breathing in the autumn air. Strange sounds brought her to a complete stop.

  She could hear voices intoning words and phrases, but even straining to listen she could make no sense of them nor guess what language they might be.

  Instead of going to the front door, the woman made her way through the leaves to the back of the house and a small untended garden. Here the' grass was high. Chrysanthemums, yellow and orange, survived, but zinnias and dahlias, black and rotting, drooped on brittle stalks.

  In a grape arbor the woman found shriveled clusters of raisins furred with mold. An espaliered apple tree, crucified against the wall of the house, bore a few yellow apples, but these were either pockmarked with wormholes or brown with rot.

  "They really might have sprayed," she said to herself.

  Only the quinces in the sprawl of a fallen bush were plump, green and gold. Reaching out, she snapped off the choicest of the fruit. In no time she filled her basket.

  She stepped through the dry grass to the house to examine the clapboard siding. Some of the wood, silver-gray with the years, was split and crumbling. At a window a shutter hung unevenly on a rusted hinge. The woman made a mental note to call the handyman in the village, but in the next instant the landlady in her nature decided the little house could wait till spring.

  At the open window the voices were louder, more distinct and even more unfathomable.

  "Ha-oo-KHAL luh-tal-PAYN mee POH?"

  Another voice, much quieter, repeated:

  "Ha-oo-KHAL luh-tal-PAYN mee POH."

  The woman peered in the window. To her surprise she had never seen the little parlor and kitchen so clean. The polished furniture and the oak floor shone; the pewter candlesticks on the gateleg table gleamed in the sunlight.

  "Ha-too-KHAL luh tal-PAYN a-voo-REE?"

  The woman realized one of the voices was too loud to be anything but an amplified voice from a phonograph record. But the other?