by David Downie
She made a face and nodded and sucked at the air in empathy. “First things first,” she said, the slight southern twang he loved coming into her voice. “We shear you then we soap you up and do the fine trimming,” she added, a mothering note entering her pleasant soprano lilt. “Then we catch up on four decades, right up to the cage and wire. I watched the report on TV last night, and Alex filled me in.” James leaned forward, laying his head on her bosom, then reached up and gently cupped her breasts. “Whoa cowboy,” she said, gently pushing him back, “let’s get to know each other again.”
“Yes, ma’am,” James said. “We are virtual strangers.” But it felt to him as if he had seen her yesterday, as if she had always been with him over the years. He wondered if she felt the same. Could such things happen?
As the tufts rained down, James looked up surreptitiously to make sure he wasn’t imagining the scene, but Maggie scolded him and said he’d be sorry, he’d get hair in his eyes and regret it. “Cut it off, please,” he murmured, “cut it down the way I used to wear it in summer.”
Maggie stood back and frowned. “This is winter and you’re pale and as skinny as a scarecrow,” she said. “With all these scratches and cuts you’ll look like you had a car accident.”
“Cut,” he said, making a snipping motion with his fingers. “My life has been a series of car accidents. Finally, here’s a happy one.”
“You’re as pigheaded as ever.” She laughed.
“And you’re as beautiful as ever,” he said, staring into her eyes.
“You must be dreaming,” she teased, but her voice quaked.
“I must be dreaming,” he agreed, nuzzling. He pulled her close and kissed her neck and ear.
“Stop,” she said but meant the opposite, her defenses falling, “or I’ll never finish.” She flushed and seemed a woman-child again, wielding the scissors for play in a kindergarten classroom, alternately cutting his hair and sliding his hands away whenever they reached out and touched her. After what seemed an eternity, his shorn hair stood up like gray and black boar bristles atop a white scalp. “You must be freezing,” she said.
“I’m numb,” he answered. “You could put me on ice or in a fire and I wouldn’t know it.” His arms encircled Maggie’s hips. This time she did not retreat. Reaching down, she pulled his beard taut and snipped, gray clots of fur raining to the floor again. “Let me loose,” she said, “just for a minute more.” Bending forward and whispering in his ear, she said, “I’m getting the electric clipper and the razor and then we’ll be done.”
“The small-animal clipper,” he remarked, watching her cross the bathroom to a wicker chest and go through the drawers. “Is it the one your dad used on the dog? What was the name of that horny old dog of yours anyway?”
“Frisky,” she said, her face lit with joyful nostalgia. “Don’t you remember? You frisky dog . . .”
James blushed now recalling how she called him the frisky dog, a dog with a bone. “Maybe you can teach this old dog some new tricks,” he said.
“Can I, now,” she asked, trimming with the clipper until his remaining head and facial hair were as neat as a croquet lawn. She ran her hand over it and laughed. “It tickles,” she said.
Speculating that she must have become a professional hairdresser since he last saw her, James let Maggie finish trimming his sideburns and eyebrows then lather his face and neck and shave him. She used one, then a second, then a third curved pink throwaway razor designed for legs and underarms, she said, but equally good on an old turkey’s neck. Still encircled by his arms, she produced a pair of round-tipped scissors and snipped the hair out of his ears and nostrils. Then she wielded tweezers and plucked the ridge and tip of his nose, hair by hair, clearing away the gnomish thicket that had grown there in the last year. James did not flinch, not even when she nicked him or yanked at the long curling tenacious white hairs on the ridge of his nose that refused to be uprooted.
Pointing to the shower, Maggie wriggled free and said she’d wait outside, in the kitchen, if he was feeling shy. She was starving anyway, they must eat. Then she would check for messy patches of hair she might have missed and finish the job.
“Why leave,” James asked, dropping his pants and drawers and stepping unself-consciously under the stream of water.
“Watch that bandage,” Maggie said, her eyes appraising him as she snatched up his dirty clothes and threw them in the washer. “I’ll get you a fresh one.”
The water stung the wounds on his arms and legs, but it also reinvigorated him and removed the fallen hair that had started to prickle his neck and back.
When he stepped out, Maggie said, “Why, you frisky old dog! You look fifteen years younger.”
Drying off and wrapping the towel around his waist, James said he felt forty years younger. Before she could move or speak or stick the new bandage on his wound, he stooped to scoop her up but halted halfway, wincing. Hearing his back click, Maggie put her arms around his neck and took the weight off by slowly climbing halfway up the stepladder. “That easier?” she asked, lowering and cradling herself in his arms as he swung her up and walked toward the door. With the towel slipping off and dragging on the floor, he could feel Maggie unpinning her hair and shaking it loose, feel her mane falling free and brushing his belly and loins.
“Across the threshold,” he murmured, making for the master bedroom.
“In there,” Maggie waved shyly. “I don’t know, JP, maybe we should wait, it’s been so long . . .”
Setting her lightly on the bed, then watching her hesitate before tugging down the coverlet, he saw how the sunshine poured through the windows and filled her hair with golden light. It was silvery grayish hair now, only a hint of strawberry and yellow remaining, and it was as thin and fine as silk. He felt it with his fingertips and on his freshly shaved, pale, sensitive cheeks. Unbuttoning, unzipping, and unhooking her clothes, he nibbled and brushed her skin with his lips as he moved up and down. “You know,” she said, putting her finger to his lips and blushing. “It won’t be the way it used to, it can’t be, JP.”
“I know,” he said, “the heroic age is over. I’m not twenty, either.”
Pensively, with a shyness he had never seen in her before, Maggie pulled the blinds and drew the curtains closed, until the room swam in dust-speckled semidarkness. “I’ll be back,” she whispered. “We old ladies have our tricks.”
They made love with slow and gentle kindness, caressing, exploring the creases and wrinkles, tracing patterns on scars and stretch marks, grateful to be alive, overwhelmed with joy to have found each other, to hold each other again, to lose themselves again in carnal embrace.
Waking up an hour later, James could hear the clock ticking and the waves crashing on the beach. Then Maggie sat upright. “Alex,” she said, fumbling and finding the alarm clock. “He’s back early. Someone’s at the door.” She started to dress, throwing on a gown and twisting her hair up and out of the way. “I’ll check his helmet camera,” she added, flipping open her tablet.
James slipped off the bed and lifted a corner of the blinds. Looking diagonally across the porch past the front door to the parking lot, expecting to see the sheriff’s SUV idling there, he chuckled and pulled Maggie back to bed. “It’s the raccoons,” he said, nuzzling, “a whole family of raccoons.”
PART TWO
Family Reunion
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall . . .
SEVENTEEN
We talked and pecked at our food, unable to keep our hands off each other, like heartsick adolescents, waiting until the last minute, with Taz only a half mile away from the house, when we finally relented. Maggie had tracked his progress on screen. At ten miles per hour he would cover the remaining distance in three minutes, she said. Our goodbye kiss took half that. Afterward, I dashed down the staircase to the rock pool and hopscotched across Five Mile Creek, feeling like a teenager, then headed south at a trot. The cage and bones and helicopter
had evaporated from my mind like the morning mist burned off by Maggie’s sunshine.
She had said there was no need for me to go, and certainly no need for me to walk to Beverley’s. She could run with me down there, or run me down there, meaning give me a ride, I wasn’t sure which she meant, but I thought it best to let her talk to Taz alone, and tell him more about me and us, before breaking the news that I would soon be a permanent fixture.
How will he take it—his adoring servant-grandmother sharing her until-now undivided love and attention, and her house, with another male? Who would be the prince and who the king? Maggie said she thought he’d be fine, that he was an unusual boy and seemed unfazed by things that bothered other teens. Also, he liked me and had said so. I was “cool” and “crazy” and he loved my hair and beard and thought I should dye them pink and green and learn to ride a unicycle, it would be “awesome.” “He’ll be disappointed to see you clean shaven,” she’d said. Then she added the real October surprise.
“I’ve been preparing him,” she told me without further explanation. Questioned on this, she smiled and said, “I knew you’d come home, sooner or later. I hoped it’d be sooner, but later is better than never. Here you are. It’s a real family reunion.”
So the mansion had been a trap? I joked. She started to answer, but with Taz rolling down the highway closing in, we had no time to explore the subject, let alone finish catching up on basics. Repeating what she’d already said, that she knew I would come home one of these years, and she knew I’d come to the old house because she knew me better than I knew myself, she assured me she had no sentimental attachments now and had not dated anyone in a long time. Taz was the pretext, she explained, the perfect excuse to keep suitors at bay. The real reasons ran deeper, and she would tell me about them in due course.
The basics were fairly straightforward, it seemed to me. Maggie still worked half-time at city hall in the Office of the County Clerk, mostly for the benefits and to get health insurance for Taz, down the road, I learned. Her parents, who had been well off, had died about fifteen years ago, leaving her enough to buy the derelict mansion outright, remodel it, and invest a nest egg. Like me and a hundred million others, she had lost most of her savings in the economic Downburst. But the deflation and devaluation of the U.S. dollar mitigated the effects, and as long as she didn’t buy a foreign car or travel abroad, she was all right, she said, as was I.
Canada had always been an expensive destination, she had added, I’m not sure why. But to think Mexico would become prohibitive was beyond her wildest imaginings. Had I been to Mexico? she asked. Alex might have been born there, she thought, there or somewhere even farther south, she didn’t know, no one knew where Alex’s mother had been from, other than her son, meaning Alex’s father. We ran out of time before she could tell me Alex’s father’s name or anything about him.
How could she have known I would come home one day when I didn’t know it myself? The question keeps playing in my head, even now, as I write this. Had she really bought the old house and waited for me these last ten years? Ten years in Carverville? If so, she was a Penelope of the twenty-first century, a martyr for love. Why she didn’t search for me on the Web and write me an email or a letter I can’t yet explain—ten years ago I was a minor public figure, so would have been easy to trace. I couldn’t believe it any more than I could believe Beverley’s cockeyed story about the cages and bones and helicopters. Yet there was Maggie in the house, expecting me, having moved back here from the East Coast, she said, and there were Beverley and the cage and the bones and the helicopters. I do not have the powers of imagination to conjure them. Knock on wood they don’t spell the end of me and Maggie just when we’ve found each other again.
To believe or not to believe, that was and is the question. I learned soon enough there was good reason to be apprehensive about what seemed at first a ludicrous series of banal coincidences leading to our reunion.
Covering the three miles south on foot to the Eden Resort in record time, my mind buzzing as never before with questions, anxieties, hopes, and plans, I thought about climbing up to the public parking lot to see what, if anything, was happening, but I reconsidered and decided to use the staircase to Beverley’s property instead. I needed time to put my things in order, and I was determined—rashly—to finish rebuilding that chainsaw, god knows why. Maggie had said she would call Beverley and let her know I was coming, so I anticipated she would be on the lookout, and swoop down like a drone before I could get off the stairs from the beach. I was surprised and relieved when I made it to the RV without encountering her, and had time to clean up the interior, pack my toothbrush and some clean things in a duffel bag, and get ready for takeoff.
Maggie and I had not discussed the logistics yet. It was so sudden, so new. I needed to figure things out and regain my balance. Should I drive the RV to the mansion right away, and park it there, or leave it at the resort for the time being, or move it somewhere else entirely and then terminate the lease and get rid of it? We had both said spontaneously that, for many reasons, I should continue spending time in the garden with Beverley and Taz. That was the safest, smoothest way to start the relationship. “Besides,” Maggie had added, “you’ve got to keep the foilage under control at Beverley’s or it will become a jungle and catch fire.”
“Foliage,” I corrected.
“Foilage,” she said again, unable to hear the error. The proverbial penny dropped—that’s where Taz had gotten it.
Also playing in my mind was a scratched LP repeating “The cage and the bones are a hoax.” The words picked up an old Sly & the Family Stone melody, and I started mumbling out of tune, “The bigger the hoax, the more it fools the folks,” or something idiotic like that. But I knew that in reality, the likelihood was near nil the episode was a farce or a prank and would blow over. Beverley had to be right. Something sinister was going on.
I was in the shack, halfway through the rebuild of the chainsaw engine, when I heard the kind of panting and shuffling in the garden I’d heard earlier at the mill. So, naturally, the first thing I thought of was the feral hogs. I wondered if they’d come in under the barbed wire, climbing up the escarpment from Graveyard Beach where the ramp to the dock used to be. Snatching the reading glasses off my nose and looking for a weapon of some kind, I turned and found Beverley leaning breathless on the doorjamb, half hidden by the shadows of the trees. Her face was a ghastly gray, but she managed to raise her eyebrows and speak with them like Groucho Marx. Catching her drift, I brushed the sawdust and dirt off the top of a wooden crate and pulled it out of a dark corner so she could sit.
“We don’t have much time,” Beverley whispered, hoarse. “I see you outed Glinda the Good, alias Maddie the Baddie, the bewitching Dame of Carverville. Cherchez la femme, they say. I thought it must’ve been the sainted Madeleine you pined for, but there was nothing in that high school yearbook or on the Internet about her, there still isn’t, as you probably realize, and no, she never said a thing to me about you. If she had, I would not have revealed it.” Beverley paused and shushed me by gasping for breath. “Let’s not go into the gush stuff just now. By the way, I knew you were a handsome devil under all that hair,” she added, looking me over, “in a kind of craggy Stonehenge way. It won’t do you any good, not with Harvey Parvey, no sir, it might make him even madder and more jealous once he gets over the shock of seeing you. And when he finds out you’ve found Maggie. . . . You know what he calls her sometimes, when it’s not Maddie the Baddie?” She paused for emphasis, studying my face for a before-and-after reaction. “He calls her Kitten Caboodle.” Grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, Beverley pulled a smartphone from the pocket of her stretch pants and glanced at it. “Taz texted a few minutes ago, saying Harv and the Tom Cat were on their way out in the patrol car, he’s tracking them on the cameras.”
“You knew he was hacking the cameras?”
“Of course I knew,” she wheezed. “Listen, there’s no time for explanations. This i
s what you need to remember. They don’t know that I know about the murders. That means they have no reason to think you know or Taz knows or anyone else for that matter. What they want is a scapegoat for what they’re going to call a hoax, and by god do they have a pair of scapegoats in you and that tattooed Tasmanian devil. But it won’t add up, and that cage won’t hold water, not even in Carverville, where justice is a colander, and Harv knows it, believe me. He may be as ignorant as a fish, and a vindictive cuss, too, but he’s not stupid, and he’s damn hard to fool, so he’s equally good at spotting a flaw in his own plans.”
“How do you know?” I started to ask.
Beverley cut me off, waving her pudgy, boneless hand again. This time I noticed it looked even more bloated and pink than usual, the hand of a future heart-attack victim, the clock ticking. “Never you mind how I know, the important thing is, they don’t know we are in the know, got it? You don’t even know he’s the sheriff, do you? Whatever happens, don’t ever let on that you think it’s anything other than a hoax or some freakish murder, maybe perpetrated by a lunatic with a handsaw or a chainsaw, whatever.” She paused and listened. “They’re coming. Get back to that engine and we’ll pretend everything is hunky-dory. And for god’s sake, don’t correct him when he says ‘perpetuated’ instead of ‘perpetrated.’”
Taking a deep breath again and diving into her act, Beverley began talking in a stentorian, bantering way, almost shouting at me, her voice higher than usual, the way it had been that first time I met her in the parking lot. “Now, for dinner, I’m making an Italian specialty Number Three loved,” she brayed as the sheriff and deputy approached the shack, “spaghetti carbonara. The White Rhino just went wild for carbonara. I make it with bacon and butter and egg yolks, no whites. I used to add a dollop of cream for him but—” She stopped the stream and feigned surprise. “Hello, Harvey,” she sang out brightly in her little-girl voice. “Hello, Tom,” she added, seeing the Tom Cat stride into view. “What’s new in Dodge?”