The Midnight Cool

by Lydia Peelle

  We come from Kentucky, Billy said. Which was not a lie.

  Passing Gin, Charles kicked a rusted sardine tin against the side of the house. He flung open the loose-hinged door and went inside, where the smell of salt pork and woodsmoke and the stink of laboring men leached from deep in the lath. The walls for years had been insulated with layers of newspaper and magazine print and now the whole place was a crazy patchwork of words and pictures, floor to ceiling. Headlines, Sunday comics, baseball scores. Advertisements for safety razors, health tonics, toothpaste, chewing gum.

  do not tinker with your dort. trust only a licensed serviceman for all repairs.

  german u-boat sinks passenger liner lusitania. 1,154 dead, 114 americans. many women and children.

  straw hat season is here. get yours at castner-knott, nashville.

  Charles didn’t bother to shut the door behind him. Let the flies in, hell. They were leaving.

  He searched for the Tuckertown whiskey in the boxes lined up to be loaded. It was the jar they had gotten in boot for the trade of the horse they sold to the sheriff who ran them out of town.

  Bad luck. Would it never end. The girl in the garden last night had warned him, hadn’t she? She had, in plain words. But he had been too awestruck by her, slack-jawed as a hayseed farmer, to even hear it.

  He lifted a pasteboard box, which fell to pieces in his hands. He threw it down and a tangle of harness spilled out of it, along with the green smell of moldy leather. When the kid in Celina cleaned them out he had stolen their crates too. Ever since they had been making do with these damn pasteboard boxes.

  Against the far wall sat the toilet they had been hauling around all summer, boot in another trade. When they brought all of this junk in, this house had seemed like high living. Two beds and a stove and a water pump in the lean-to kitchen. But it was nothing more than a shabby old rattrap. The floor was covered in a gaudy purple-and-green Congoleum rug, worn clear through at the door by the feet of countless tenants. Where was that whiskey? Charles ran his hands through his hair and looked around wildly. A worthless crazy horse, doped to the gills. He couldn’t believe he had been so blind.

  feed your children cream of wheat.

  battle of verdun rages on. casualties approach one hundred thousand.

  trust firestone tires.

  His eyes moved to the picture just beside the door, the face of a pretty girl selling Pears’ soap. Her cheeks were painted pink and her lips were parted as if she was about to laugh. Her hair sat on her forehead in a soft swoop. For four days Billy had not entered or exited the place without giving the picture a little sweet talk and a kiss. Last night, back from town and tight as a drum, Charles had been so happy he had kissed her too, rolled up the last of his cheap Corn Cake tobacco and smoked it, and declared that after they sold the black mare, only the high-dollar stuff would do.

  He studied the smiling face. He should have listened to the girl in the garden. Hell, he should have listened to his gut, which told him to bolt even before he had seen the house, from the moment he turned Gin off the Nashville Pike and passed through the great stone pillars of the gate. The word Everbright was etched in each one, only you couldn’t see the place at all from the road, just a long winding drive, newly graveled, which crunched neatly under Gin’s hooves. At the moment he passed through, an owl hooted in the neighboring wood, and he felt a chill at his neck. It was bad luck, Billy always said, hearing an owl at dusk. Charles halted Gin and reached into his pocket to touch the rabbit’s foot he carried. Then he reached into the other pocket and pulled out a nickel. Heads, he’d go in. Tails, turn around. He tossed it and slapped it down on the pommel of the saddle and lifted his hand.

  Heads. In he went.

  The house appeared on the hill above him like a great white face, its windows watchful eyes, the roof bristling with chimneys. In front of it spread two big black magnolias, old as time. A man was up on a ladder in one of them. Charles hardly had the nerve to dismount and leave Gin, but he did, and got himself up onto the porch, so big you could have held a dance on it. Through the windows, a colored woman was setting the dining room table. As she put out each glass, she first folded a cloth around the lip and gave it a brisk quarter turn. He watched, entranced, his sweaty hands shoved in his pockets, one clenched around the classified ad he had torn from the paper, the other around the rabbit’s foot, his thumb working the worn place at its tip. The walls behind the maid were hung with old portraits of women in frothy dresses and eagle-faced men with purebred dogs at their feet. The oil paint gleamed and shone. The maid disappeared before it occurred to him to knock. When he did, no one came.

  He stood there at the door. There was no way in hell he was going to be able to afford this horse, no matter if the ad in the paper said, Must go. No serious offer turned down. When he left the shack he had emptied out their cigar box of cash and folded it all into his breast pocket. He patted it now, to be sure of it. Finally he looked up at the porch’s pale blue ceiling. A dove perched on a blade of the ceiling fan peered down at him, eyes two black beads pressed in clay.

  Alright, he thought. If the bird flies, I go. If she stays, I stay. He counted to ten. The bird did not ruffle a feather.

  He went over to the magnolia with the ladder in its branches to speak to the man hidden in the patent leather leaves. He asked for the name on the ad. Leland Hatcher.

  The man climbed down slowly, wiping his brow, and told him to try up at the stable. But when Charles asked if he would take him there, he refused.

  Soon as I get done with this, the man said shortly, snapping a rag against his leg, I got to do the front windows. And I don’t go near the stable if I can help it, he added mysteriously. He looked Charles up and down. He expecting you?

  Charles toed an old dry magnolia cone that lay on the ground beneath the tree.

  Nossir.

  Well you come at just about the worst time there is. Now let me get back to washing these leaves.

  Washing the . . . leaves?

  The man nodded, one foot on the ladder. Mister Hatcher’s got company coming. Likes to have everything just so.

  The wind gusted and the big trees shook themselves like dogs. The man went up the ladder and disappeared back into the branches. Charles picked up the cone and squeezed it, feeling the prick of its scales in his palm, then headed in the direction the man had pointed for the stable.

  In the side yard a Model T up on blocks had a belt run under the hood to power a band saw, a half-built gazebo beside it. It looked as affronted as a man with his mouth cranked open in a dentist chair. Charles was beginning to feel like he was trespassing, that he might look up to see a shotgun in a window. He stopped at a walled garden, where a white cat crouched on a sundial and rosebushes bloomed in riots of red, and palmed the magnolia cone, his eye on a concrete birdbath at the far side.

  It goes in, I go on to the stable. If it misses, I get the hell out of here.

  It went in with a splash. The cat streaked away.

  Someone applauded.

  He started. He would have sworn that the garden, save the cat, was uninhabited. But when he looked there she was, not eight feet from him, standing on a wrought iron bench and half hidden in a tree, just as the man in the front yard had been, only this tree was small and delicate, bearing flowers like silk tassels. He could see only a blue skirt and a white blouse with a wide sailor collar, the brim of a straw hat. Above her swung the paper lantern she had just hung, a pale moon.

  She climbed down and came over to him. Watching her come his mouth was already going dry, his head emptying of words, and when she was before him he found he could not look directly at her face, this high-class girl, the kind of girl who crossed to the other side of the street when she saw him coming, and he caught only a glimpse of her hair dark and clean-looking beneath her hat and her collarbone at the place where the tie of her blouse was undone, and then he dropped his eyes.

  Are you the iceman? she said. Where on earth have you been? Don�
�t you know we can’t have a party without ice? I was thinking I might have to send my brother to the North Pole and he doesn’t like to travel.

  He dared look up at her. She was smiling at him. She had a gap between her front teeth, just like his mother. It hit him like a hammer in his chest and his eyes went straight back to the ground.

  Here to see about a horse, he managed to say.

  Don’t buy that horse.

  Miss?

  I’d get out of here, if I were you.

  A car was coming around the house, a Pierce-Arrow, big and slick and high. An incredible car—Charles had only ever seen them in pictures. He watched it coming, still rocked by the strange shock of seeing his mother’s smile on this high-class girl, in this high-class garden. And now, this car, the headlights staring him down. If it could talk it would have said, To hell with you.

  The Pierce-Arrow stopped at the opposite wall. A pale boy leaned over to the passenger window and pulled a cigarette from his mouth. He wore a brand-new Panama hat with a pencil-curl brim.

  Catherine, he said over the engine growl. We’ve got to go pick up the cake.

  You go on without me, she said.

  Someone’s got to hold it or it’ll get smashed up.

  The boy in the Pierce-Arrow looked over, noticing Charles for the first time. He hooked his elbow over the door frame and looked back and forth between the two of them. His eyebrows lifted under the brim of his hat.

  If you keep looking for trouble, dear Cat, one of these days you’re gonna find it.

  Charles’s hand closed into a fist. Blood will tell, his mother always said. Blood will tell. He had repeated it to many men, but never one in a Pierce-Arrow.

  I’ll be waiting for you by the front door, Cat. All you need to do is hold the damn thing in your lap. Or hell. You drive. I’ll hold the damn cake.

  The boy had driven away fast, gravel scattering under the Pierce-Arrow’s wheels.

  The girl took a step closer. Charles held his breath. He could still only half look at her.

  Don’t mind my brother, she said. He’s in a hurry to get up there and get his whiskey before the bootlegger takes off. Otherwise it’s going to be one dull party. Thanks to Edmund, our father’s now a teetotaler. The hardest thing he’s serving tonight is lemonade.

  He didn’t like you talking to me.

  She sighed roughly. Ed’s had a difficult spring. In fact it’s been an awful year. And I can’t say this in front of him. But look—trust me. You don’t want that horse.

  Well, Miss. I seen all kinds of horses in my time. I been all around the world.

  Well then you must feel as I do. That the world’s been absolutely turned upside down. Knocked off kilter. The war in Europe. The terrible bloodshed, never ending. And now that business last week on Black Tom Island. A poor little baby was killed, did you hear?

  Terrible, was all he could think to say.

  Yes, she said. Terrible.

  He stole another look at her and realized she was waiting for him to say something more. He groped around, came up with nothing.

  Well it was a terrible accident, he finally said.

  See! That’s the trouble.

  Miss?

  She waved at the house. In 1862, she said, the Yankees took Nashville. Two months later Union soldiers marched up this hill and through that front door and moved in. They were here for two years. Just walked right in, while the family stood there clutching their silver, still saying, ‘It will never happen here.’ Well just because you say something’s impossible doesn’t mean it is.

  Miss?

  Why is everyone saying it was an accident? They blew up those ships on purpose. It’s plain to see.

  Charles thought of old wattle-necked Dillehay.

  Who did? he said. The Irish?

  The Irish! Her hand went up, as if to wave away a fly. The Irish! Of course not. The Germans. All that ammunition was bound for the Allies. It was clearly an act of sabotage.

  He looked around the garden for a clue as to how to proceed. The branches of the rosebushes looked as if they might break under the weight of all the blooms, red and pink and white, impossibly fat. The tassels of the tree above the girl were like no flowers he had ever seen, so elaborate they made the lanterns she had hung seem unnecessary. He didn’t think too often about the war in Europe. In towns sometimes he heard people argue about whether or not the United States should get into it, but out in the country it had nothing to do with anything and men just left it alone. He rubbed the back of his neck, stalling. Then he opened his mouth, with the hope that something smart might escape it.

  I heard the Statue of Liberty caught on fire. Now that’s a shame.

  Oh! she said. She was agreeing, he thought, and he looked at her, relieved. Now, if only he could make her smile again. But she was shaking her head so violently her hat had slipped, and now her nostrils flared. A lock of hair had come loose. She pushed it out of her eyes and reached up and repinned her hat.

  A shame! That’s the one good thing that came of it, if you ask me. I wish they had blown that thing into the ocean. It’s a howling farce, is what that statue is. She lowered her voice then. But you can’t say that to anyone around here.

  Well you can say it to me because I’m just passing through. I reckon we’ll be gone tomorrow or the next.

  At this, she brightened. Where to?

  Oh. He waved his hand. Everywhere. We’re always going.

  Life on the road. How exciting.

  You could call it that, sure.

  She stepped closer. He could feel her trying to meet his eye.

  Is it—is it dangerous?

  No, he said. Then, sensing her disappointment, he pulled in a long breath, rubbed the back of his neck, studied the ground, and said, Well. I reckon maybe. There’s bear and there’s wildcat and some of these farmers, they don’t want you around none. We used to carry a gun but Billy done traded it.

  That was the end of it. The man from the magnolia came around, calling to him, having had a change of heart about taking him to the stable. Charles had turned to follow without even the wits to say goodbye to the girl, stumbling along through the manicured grass.

  And when Leland Hatcher came out to the stable to meet him, wearing a pristine pair of coveralls and a big smile on a pleasant, handsome face, he had treated him so kindly. Pumped his hand, explaining that it was a good, sound, well-bred horse, that he was only selling because he was getting out of horses, should have done it years ago, it was the way everything was headed. Charles nodded along. He was used to standing a head above men, but this fellow was almost small, and he would have thought the man of a place like this would have towered. Hatcher kept rubbing his fingers with a square of washleather, so generous with that big white smile that did not quite go up to his eyes, apologizing for the trouble it was to find him.

  Party tonight, he said. Terribly busy.

  Then a stablehand brought the mare out, and she was so damn perfect Charles forgot about everything else. Hatcher took his offer without a kick, folding the cash into the pocket of his coveralls. Disappeared quick.

  She’s a touch hot, buddy, the stablehand said, handing over the lead.

  I can handle hot, Charles said, too happy to notice how sluggish she seemed as he tugged her along to the front yard. When he passed the garden and saw the girl was gone, he was more glad than disappointed. He could hardly believe that he had even had the nerve to attempt to talk to her.

  Finally he found the whiskey, in a box of broken pocket watches. He unscrewed the top and took it down in one pull.

  Last night he and Billy had gone up to Richfield’s blind tiger, a dank basement room near the depot where a sign hung behind the bar:

  the sale of intoxicating beverages is illegal

  Billy had gotten right to work, trying to drum up a trade. Take a look at this penknife. Nice one, ain’t it? What would you give me for it?

  Charles had stood there, spinning his glass on the bar and studying
himself in the mirror, his head high above the rest of the crowd. Sometimes girls said he was too tall for his own good, but the girl in the garden had seemed nearly as tall as he was. Catherine Hatcher. Her brother had called her Cat: You keep looking for trouble, Cat, you’re going to find it. What had she called the Statue of Liberty? A howling farce. What on earth could she have meant?

  The man next to him had a red nose ruined by drink and cheap charms on his watch chain. When they came in he had been complaining to the barkeep about the money his wife had just spent on a dress in Nashville.

  I never go to Nashville, the barkeep said. You’ll lose more than your money down there.

  Now Charles turned to the man and asked him what he thought about Black Tom Island. If it had crossed his mind that someone had done it on purpose.

  Such as who? the man said, rubbing his swollen nose.

  Such as—Charles coughed—the Germans.

  He felt foolish even saying it. The man just laughed.

  Son, America is neutral. Neutral as the color white. Neutral we are and neutral we will remain, in spite of what the preparedness folks try to stir up. We haven’t a single enemy in the entire world.

  Charles nodded. The man was right. It was crazy, the notion that Germans had blown up an island in New York Harbor, crazy as thinking he had any right even lifting his hat to a high-class girl like Catherine Hatcher, no matter who his father might have been. And his thoughts turned to the black mare, now asleep in the pasture, and there came over him a flicker of doubt about her. A prickle at the back of his neck. When Billy saw the horse he had folded his arms and sucked his tooth. Just folded his arms and sucked his tooth and said, Huh.

  Charles took another slug of whiskey.

  What do you know about Leland Hatcher?

  What do I know about him? I work for him, son. Up at the shoe factory. Half the town does, and the half that don’t, they got a brother or an uncle who does.