Obedience

by Will Lavender

  Mary remained silent. She couldn’t debate the point that it seemed as if Williams was, in fact, leading them to the trailer for some reason. She thought about that old comic strip of the carrot on a string leading the mule. This is what she felt like: led, played, not in control of anything she did.

  Just as Dennis was bending into the driver’s seat, Brian said, “Wait. I have something to tell you.” They both looked at him. Mary braced herself for some acknowledgment that Brian had been in on it all along, or that Brian knew where Williams was but had not told them for some reason. But he only said, his voice soft and hesitant, “I met Polly.”

  “You what?” Dennis asked.

  “It was two weeks ago. I’d had too much to drink. This girl started following me around, and we ended up”—diverting his eyes from Mary now, refusing to look at her—“down in Chop Hall, by the kilns. She told me her name was Polly, and of course I didn’t believe her. I think I got mad. Irate. I screamed at her. I thought she was part of this, you know. I thought Williams had sent her there to show me up. The next day, this guy told me the story of Deanna Ward.”

  “How old would Polly be?” asked Mary.

  “Thirty-five?” Dennis guessed. “Forty?”

  “It was hard to tell,” Brian said. “She looked—she looked young. But she was hiding her face. Her hair was over one eye and she kept turning to the side, like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself. Look, guys, I didn’t know what it meant. I would have told you if”—he looked at Mary, shame in his face—“if I thought it meant something.”

  Mary couldn’t stifle the laughter that was in her throat then. She let it out and it crashed out into the air like an animal uncaged, her soul finally, after weeks of pressure, finding release in what Brian had said.

  “What?” he asked, reddening.

  She couldn’t answer. She only laughed, and when they were in the car and heading toward Upper Stretch Road, she was still laughing, giggling every now and then into her fist. “Shit,” she heard Brian mutter. But then he was laughing, too, and then Dennis, until they couldn’t contain themselves anymore.

  How silly! thought Mary. Everything means something.

  31

  Upper Stretch Road was a sinking stretch of highway in northern Martin County. If they had felt as if they were in the backwoods at the Collinses’ house on During Street, then now they were beyond the pale of civilization. Rusted car hulks burned orange under the sun out in front lawns. A group of children, many of them in diapers, played inside the carcass of an old Cale school bus. The road was just a whisper now, nonexistent, pitted and damaged and crumbling down the hillside.

  They drove for two or three miles. They were beginning to wonder if they had missed it when the forest to their right opened up and they saw the trailer. It was in a sad shape, dilapidated and caving, its facade red with rust. The color gave the impression of blood, and Mary could not help but feel that she was entering into the final chapter of Williams’s game. What would it be like, to find a lost girl? But what if the girl was dead and Williams had killed her? There were still so many questions—but there was something about this abandoned trailer out in this expanse of nothingness. An answer was in there. She knew it.

  They got out of the Lexus and stomped through the high grass. The trailer had been set up on cinder blocks, and every time the wind blew the whole thing creaked, as if it were going to tip over and break apart into a thousand pieces. The sky was graying up now, and a little mist was beginning to fall. The grass swayed at their knees, and wisps of oak seed blew here and there, white as snow.

  “Look,” Brian said, dragging up the remains of a tricycle out of the muck. The significance was clear: these are the things that had belonged to Polly. Finally, she was more than a misty apparition they were trying to find for credit in some stupid class. She was real, and they were standing outside the place where she had grown up.

  They walked around to the back. An old children’s pool was there, turned upside down. A swing set without the swings. The ground here and there had been burned, and Mary thought about what Edna Collins had said about kids building fires on their property. It seemed that the same activities went on at this trailer, and suddenly Mary felt sad for Polly, that the girl had unwillingly caused all of this. And for what? Just because she bore a striking resemblance to a missing girl from Cale? There had to be more than that.

  “Over here,” Dennis called.

  He was standing on a small embankment that overlooked a stream. At the bottom of the embankment was a motorcycle. Its wheels were missing but the bike was otherwise intact. “What is that?” Brian said, pointing. They strained to see. “There,” he directed them, “painted on the side of the bike.”

  “It looks like…stars,” Mary said.

  “It’s his,” Brian said unequivocally. “Deanna’s father’s motorcycle.”

  They went back to the trailer and looked in the dirty windows, swiping away the grime that had accumulated on the panes with their sleeves. There was no furniture inside. The walls and floor were stripped bare, and in one corner there was a lump of rags and trash. There was something about the lump, though, something angular and strange—

  The lump moved.

  Mary jumped back from the window. “What the hell is that?” asked Brian, who was standing next to her on a milk crate, looking in the kitchen window.

  Mary looked back inside. The man was sitting up now, rubbing his eyes as if he were just waking up from a long sleep.

  The mist had turned into a light rain, which now slanted down and ticked off the window, striking Mary sharply on the cheeks. She was too afraid to run or move or do much of anything but stare at the man. This, she thought. This is where it ends.

  “What?” she said aloud. She didn’t know why she had said it, but it was the word that had come out, choked and broken like a gasp.

  From across the room where he lay the man looked at her. He looked right at her. The window was so streaked that it looked as if the inside of the trailer was the inside of a lung, or a storm cloud—everything was blurred and stretched. The man got up and took a few steps toward the window.

  “What the hell does he want?” Brian asked. He was suddenly at her arm, squeezing it, priming her maybe for a mad dash to the car.

  The man slid open the window. It broke and cracked away from the nails that held it down to the rotted sill. The man leaned out as if he were serving them from a drive thru window. “Afternoon,” he said.

  Mary felt his hot breath on her face. She tasted him—his breath was dirty, as if he had been eating soil. His teeth were ruined, and little wisps of oily hair splayed out on both sides of his head. But there was something attractive about the man, something Mary couldn’t identify. He had been someone’s lover once, a long time ago.

  “You the folks here about Polly?” he asked.

  Mary nodded. She was still locked in place, immobile.

  “Sharon called me from the diner. That’s my girl. Said there were some kids down from DeLane looking into the Deanna Ward thing. Anyway. Said I might know something about that. I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I certainly do. Or I know someone who does.’”

  “Who would that be?” Dennis asked.

  “He’s at the Wobble Inn. That’s down on Rattlesnake Ridge, out there by I-64. You just take Upper Stretch all the way to its end and take a right on Hopper Road. You’ll be on the ridge then. Follow the signs toward the interstate. The inn is up on the right-hand side, just a mile off the freeway. You can hear the rumble of the semitrucks from there.”

  “Who are we supposed to see at the inn?” Brian this time.

  “You’ll know him. Tends bar there nights. You tell him Marco sent you, and he’ll tell you everything he knows. Which is a lot, let me tell you. The boy is like a goddamned encyclopedia on Deanna Ward. Some folks said he might have been involved in it, but that ain’t the truth. He’s just curious, you know, like you all.”

  The man smiled his ruined sm
ile again. “I don’t want you all thinking I’m some crazy,” he said.

  “No.” Dennis again, assuring the man. “Not at all.”

  “It ain’t like I live here or nothin’. This is just…temporary. Just until I get on my feet and Sharon gets her own place. Look, I got it nice in here. Hot plate. Cell phone. I’m twenty-first century, baby.” Mary saw that he was trying to convince himself more than them. The man did an odd little bow then and leaned back into the shadows of the trailer. Slowly, as if favoring a hurt leg, he returned to that corner, where he curled up among his rags and old quilts.

  Then the sky opened up and the rain came flat across the wind into their eyes and faces. “Run!” Dennis said, and they all dashed for the Lexus. Inside, the rain crashed against the windshield and their breath steamed every surface, making it impossible to see. For a few minutes they sat in the car without speaking. The inn is just a mile off the freeway, Mary thought. There was something to that statement but she didn’t know what. She decided to let it be until she could articulate it; she had found in the last six weeks that there were “private” thoughts, such as her curiosity about Summer McCoy in the Mike photograph and the call from the campus police, and there were more shared thoughts, possible facts that she needed someone to check. Confusing the two, she knew, would only get her into trouble.

  “Are we ready?” Dennis asked when the rain had slacked a bit.

  “I guess,” Mary said, too soft for anyone to hear.

  They set off down Upper Stretch Road, toward the Wobble Inn.

  32

  The bartender was a member of MENSA. He was telling them about his many failed attempts to get a degree, how the “establishment” had robbed him every time. When Dennis asked what his interests were, he said, “How much time do you have?” He began to list them: seventeenth-century poetry, fluid mechanics, string theory, game theory, chaos theory. He looked at them squarely, gauging their level of intimidation. Brian sipped his Diet Coke. “Anyway,” the man said, wiping down a glass with the long towel he had draped over his shoulder, “none of it is applicable to the real world. I guess that’s why I’m here.” He spread his arms so they could behold it, this dark little dive off to the side of a rarely traveled stretch of two-lane highway. There were four or five people there, all men, and they were huddled in a back corner playing Texas Hold ’Em. Mary wondered if the man on Upper Stretch Road had somehow led them astray.

  They were trying to bide their time with the bartender, disarm him somehow so they could ask about Polly. He was going on now about one of his theories—the one where there were multiple galaxies “pancaked,” as he explained it, on top of one another. “It’s a certainty that there is extraterrestrial life in this model,” he said, his tone deftly serious. And then he leaned closer to them, his finger pointed toward Dennis’s chest. “An absolute certainty.”

  Brian was getting anxious. His foot was tapping below the bar, and he was down to the water in his Coke. The men in the back fell into sudden laughter, the sound like a shot in the close acoustics of the tavern. “Did you know Polly?” he finally asked.

  The man stared at them. He wiped out another glass and placed it on a high shelf, his eyes never leaving Brian’s. “Sure,” he said, his voice calm now and searing. “Everybody did.”

  “Did she come in here?” Dennis went on.

  “She was just a kid when she left Bell City. Nineteen or twenty. This wasn’t her kind of place.”

  “Where did you know her from?” asked Dennis.

  “I knew her aunt and uncle. They lived out on Upper Stretch Road.”

  The bartender was being difficult. He was stubbing up, closing them out of some information that Mary could see he had. He was leery of them, she knew, suspicious of these questions. Just the name, the word itself—Polly—must have sent a charge through the residents of Bell City.

  “What kind of girl was she?” Dennis tried.

  “Nice,” the man said. “Sweet girl. Got involved in some stuff, you know. We all did. Made mistakes. Regretted them. Lived to see another day. It happens. Otherwise, she was just an average teenager.”

  “Stuff?” asked Brian.

  He was still looking at them, his gaze almost hot. He shook his head, then; laughed a little. The lights behind the bar were severe, probably on a mandate from the county because bad light led to fake identification scandals that a place like the Wobble Inn surely couldn’t afford. The man’s face was lit harshly in the glow.

  He knows something, Mary thought. It’s right there. If I could just get him to open up. If I could just—

  “Marco sent us,” she said, smiling at the man.

  “Marco?”

  “We saw him earlier today,” Brian put in, moving his stool in closer so that the bartender could refill his soda.

  “Damn, Marco knows more about it than I do,” the owner said, spritzering the drink into Brian’s glass.

  “But Marco’s not here,” Mary said coolly.

  The bartender blinked. His eyes finally disengaged from them, and he took a step away from the bar. “Look,” he said, “everything I know is just secondhand. I got it all from Marco, anyway, so I’m not sure why he sent you to me. But if you’re really interested, there’s some stuff that will make your toes curl.”

  “Such as?” Dennis asked.

  “Such as: the girl was abandoned by her real mother and father. She was staying with the aunt and uncle because she had nowhere else to go. And these were good people, like I said, but they didn’t know nothin’ about raising a girl. They wanted to do what was best for Polly, but she got wild. She fell in with the Creeps. Dom Frederick started seeing Polly—and now, keep in mind, Dom was thirty-four and Polly was all of seventeen—and he was a member of that gang. Of course, that’s how she met Star, Deanna’s daddy.”

  “What kind of a relationship did she have with Star?” asked Brian, urging the man forward, his foot now going crazy beneath the bar.

  “Different people said different things, you know? Marco and Star went to school together down in Cale, and so Marco knew those folks pretty well. Star was fresh on the girl, I do know that. He came in here one night about that time talking sweet about her. We’d just opened. This was right before Deanna”—Mary began to see that people in these parts labeled periods of time according to that divide, Before Deanna and After Deanna—“and nobody knew a thing about what was going to happen. We were all just ignorant of it, you know, like the man standing on the bridge watching the storm coming on, and then in a few minutes lightning strikes and zap! The guy’s hit. He’s charred because he didn’t have enough sense to get off the bridge, poor bastard.” The bartender paused in his story, looked back toward the men playing cards. They had stopped to listen to him. He was commanding attention now. He had the floor and he didn’t intend to give it up. “Marco says that Star was seeing Polly’s aunt, but who knows. Who knows why he came around here. I never did really believe that he and Polly…you know. This guy could have had any woman in Martin County. What business would he have with this little girl?”

  “Some people say Polly looked like his daughter,” Brian said.

  “If by ‘looked like’ you mean that they were both teenage girls, then ‘some people’ are right. That’s about the extent of it. I saw Polly all the time around Bell, and I saw pictures of Deanna of course on the news when it happened, and there wasn’t much of a resemblance. The police fucked that one up. They said he confessed to it and everything. I never believed that. If he confessed to it, then why didn’t they arrest him?”

  “Maybe the confession wasn’t about Deanna,” Dennis offered.

  “You mean that New Mexico bullshit?” the bartender said. “No, there’s something more to this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist”—though, clearly, he was—“but come on. Any idiot can see that Polly was not Deanna Ward.”

  He stopped talking and poured himself a beer. His hands were shaking a little, and it was obvious that the story had rattled him. The m
en in the back resumed their game. No, thought Mary. There’s more. There’s something that he left out.

  “That’s about all I know,” he said, his voice scratchy now and nearly gone.

  “Thank you,” Dennis said.

  They turned to leave. As they were walking out of the bar, Mary whispered to Brian, “There’s more to find here. He didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. The guy—Marco—said that we would get our answers from this guy.”

  “That’s all he’s got, Mary,” Brian said. They reached the door and opened it. The world outside had the thick and heavy smell of rain. As Marco had said, she could hear the nearby echo of eighteen-wheelers surging down I-64. The trees dripped, and somewhere nearby a creek rushed noisily down through the hollow on its way toward the Thatch River.

  A sudden thought came to Mary. She stopped at the door, one foot outside.

  “Do you have the book?” she asked Brian. He removed it from his pocket, just as he had done for Dennis that day on the Tau roof.

  She returned to the bar and got the bartender’s attention. “Yeah?” he asked, clearly disturbed to see her again.

  “Have you ever seen this man?” Mary asked, holding the book into the bar light so the bartender could see Leonard Williams on the back flap.

  The man’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen him. That’s Polly’s uncle.”

  33

  It was late when they made it back onto Highway 72. It began to rain again, harder even than before, and when Dennis could not see the road any longer he pulled into a Days Inn, the students deciding to stay overnight in Cale. They pooled together all the money in their pockets, sixty-five dollars exactly, and got the cheapest room at the hotel.

  There was an uncomfortable moment when Brian and Mary were in the room together and Dennis, who had sprinted to be the first in the bathroom, was changing. They were all wet from their run from the car, and Brian and Mary looked at each other warily, their clothes dripping on the carpet. Finally, when it was clear that Dennis was showering, they turned their backs on each other and got undressed, putting on some golf clothes that Dennis had in the trunk of the Lexus. Mary wore a long PING oxford and her underwear, and before Brian could turn around she dove into the bed so that he could not see her. Brian had put on a pair of bright-colored, checkered shorts, and he stood by the mirror shirtless, looking at himself. Mary had to laugh at the sight of it, and she lost it when Dennis appeared from the bathroom wearing pants in an identical pattern. He and Brian climbed into bed together as if they were twins, regarding each other suspiciously and creating a boundary down the middle of the bed with pillows so their skin couldn’t touch during the night.