This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  Kori looked at her mother, then down at her plate. More than once she’d seen her mother with bruises on her neck or shoulder after hearing sounds, thuds and intakes of breath, in the night. Emma had never talked about it. Nobody was ever around in the morning. “You could take up crafts,” Kori said after a while. “Sell them on the stand, to the summer people.”

  “I’ve seen what they sell to the summer people. I wouldn’t waste my time on that kind of rubbish.”

  “It was only an idea.”

  “Your food’s getting cold.” Emma sighed, her hand resting on her big breast, her fingers spread across the flowered cotton material. Kori watched her mother’s hand rise up and down as she breathed. “You don’t eat enough. That’s the reason you’re so peaked.”

  Pee-kid, a word Kori had heard since childhood, a label she hated.

  “Ma, don’t start.”

  Emma frowned and got up to stoke the wood stove. Kori looked out the window and saw that it had begun to snow again.

  Saturday night Britt picked Kori up in her Pinto, and they drove the forty miles to the movie house in Millettsville, the county seat. A light snow was falling. The tinny little car skittered on the road, its wipers whacking and its radio playing staticky pop music. Britt puffed on one cigarette after another and talked about her boyfriend, a guy from their class who’d joined the merchant marine. Most of their classmates were gone now, off in the service or moved south to find work. Britt bagged groceries in the Pick ’n’ Pay, a job she loathed. The stingy old goat of a manager was forever breathing down Britt’s neck and giving her a hard time.

  The movie house stank of perfumed bug spray and stale popcorn; your shoes stuck to the floor because of all the spilled drinks. Still, Kori always felt a quiver of excitement when she pushed through the door, anticipating the new world she’d be invited to enter. Kori and Britt chose seats near the back. Before the lights went down Kori noticed that guy who’d talked to her in Henegan’s, ambling down the aisle with a couple of rough-looking characters. She turned toward Britt and started to say something, hoping he wouldn’t see her, but before she’d got two words out he’d swung into the seat next to hers and was staring at her. Crystals of melting snow glistened on the shoulder of his jacket. Could be beer she smelled on his breath.

  Kori dropped her eyes and Britt said, “Did you want something?”

  “Just to say hello.”

  “Well, hello and goodbye,” Britt said.

  For a moment he continued to look at Kori, not saying anything. She picked at a small hole in her mitten. Then he got up from the seat, letting it bang so hard Kori could feel the impact jolt her spine. “Enjoy the show,” he said over his shoulder.

  “You know him?” Britt asked.

  “No,” Kori said.

  “He’s one of those Duggans that have camps down on Coffins Neck.”

  Coffins Neck? That’s why he was driving in that direction the night he stopped to give her a ride. “Oh,” Kori said. “In the bog.”

  “Pete, I think his name is. He seemed to think he knows you.”

  “Well, he doesn’t.”

  The lights dimmed, and the previews of coming attractions came on. Over the soundtrack Kori could just hear Britt say, “Duggans are nothing but trouble.”

  Monday after work he was there waiting for her, in a black pickup with scars from past collisions and scabs of touch-up paint over rust. Since Freda was watching her, and Miriam right behind her, Kori decided not to argue there in the parking lot. He leaned over to open the passenger door, and she climbed into the cab. “Are you following me, or what?” she asked.

  “It’s cold out. Shut the door.”

  She slammed it and said, “I don’t want you following me.” They watched Freda and Miriam get into Freda’s truck and pull out of the lot, and then Gladys roared past in her old heap. Kori yanked on the door handle, but the latch didn’t open. Stiff or frozen, maybe. She never should have closed the door. What was she thinking?

  “I just saw a doe,” he said. “On Bridge Street.”

  Kori half turned to look at him.

  “I was heading onto the bridge and she came loping down the middle of the road right toward me. I thought sure she was going to get her hooves caught in the grate on the bridge. Would have been a shame.” He glanced at the shotgun in the rack behind them. “Sure wouldn’t have wanted to have to shoot that poor old doe. Out of season, too.”

  “I bet.”

  “Just before she got to the bridge, she scrambled down the rocks to the riverbank and vanished into thin air.”

  “You must have dreamed it. I never saw a deer in town.”

  “Swear to God.” His eyes seemed very dark, the color of tar or blackstrap molasses. A touch of stubble on his cheek. “I’m heading up 1A, “ he said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “How’d you know where I live?”

  “Bought a dozen ears of corn off your stand, more than once. Don’t you remember?”

  Maybe she did, kind of. Across the street she could see the lights on inside the Pick ’n’ Pay. Pete started the engine and rammed the truck into gear. “Wait,” she said, but he didn’t. The truck lurched out of the lot.

  Kori wondered if Britt was inside at the checkout counter. She wondered what Britt would think if she knew what was happening.

  On the bridge Pete let the truck idle and told Kori to look down. Maybe she’d spot the doe. All she saw was the black river channel spurting into the bay, and great slabs of seaweed-encrusted ice piled against the banks, and sea smoke rising from the bay in billows. But she thought the doe might be there, invisible, disguised somehow. She couldn’t say she wasn’t.

  He drove up along the river and then swerved right onto 1A. Dusk already, too cloudy for stars. The marsh seemed dark and secretive, hidden under snow.

  “How long you been working at Stinnett’s?” he asked.

  “Half a year, about.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Not so bad. Kind of boring.”

  He switched on the radio, but could find nothing but static—a nest of hornets—and switched it off again.

  Behind them in the open truck bed she could hear various kinds of gear rattling. They passed the Finney place and then the spot by the woods where she’d said no to a lift. Now here she was in the truck and hurtling along at some speed, although a thin layer of new snow was slick on the road. He turned on his wipers but didn’t slow down, even as the road sloped down toward the stream, and she felt the truck lose traction for a second. Only one of his hands on the wheel. “Careful,” she wanted to say, but didn’t.

  At the top of the rise she said, “Slow down. The house is coming up on the right.”

  “You don’t really want to go home yet, do you?”

  She had a momentary image of the overheated and stuffy kitchen, of Emma’s broad-beamed body at the stove. “What else do you suggest?” she asked, a little surprised at the way her own voice sounded in her ears. Wise, like Britt. He didn’t say anything. She listened to the wipers crash back and forth and looked at the falling snow, tiny swirling black flecks in the headlights. On the right the snow-covered garden slid past, and then the old house—lights on in the kitchen—and then the tumbling-down barn. Kori felt the truck accelerate, and once in a while it briefly slipped onto the shoulder of the road. She was scared, yet at the same time she was enjoying it, in a way, the wildness.

  They passed the town boundary sign and in another hundred yards the truck abruptly turned to the right, brakes screeching, onto an unmarked road. The truck bounced along from pothole to pothole, the loose gear in back slamming violently into the sides of the truck. A couple of times her head hit the roof of the cab. She couldn’t imagine how he could see where he was going. He must know every twist and turn in the road, every rut and pothole, by heart.

  Without s
lowing the truck dived into an even narrower road, room enough for one vehicle only. Branches crashed into the cab on either side. Abruptly they reached a clearing, and in the headlights she caught a quick glimpse of a trailer. The truck jounced to a stop. Sudden silence, except for a dog barking inside the trailer.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “He won’t attack unless I give the word.”

  Pete got out of the truck and came around to help her down from the cab. For a moment his grip was tight on her mittened hand, and then he let her go and turned toward the trailer. She followed, fitting her boots into the tracks he’d made, thinking she must be out of her mind. He went up the steps and opened the door. She heard a thrashing sound, and then saw he’d got the dog by the collar, a big black dog that snarled in spite of the choke chain. “Easy, boy,” he said.

  Inside the trailer was a smell of dog, and something salty or fishy, and a whiff of propane. He switched a light on, but the room remained dim. She saw pots piled by a sink, some clothes and other gear hanging from nails on the wall: a wetsuit, a diving mask. The dog had slunk under a couch. He gnawed on his tail, keeping an eye on her.

  Pete turned up the gas heater, and it began to take the edge off the damp and chill inside the trailer. “Sit down,” he told her. Since the dog was under the couch, she took a chair at the little folding table, which had some old mildewy-smelling magazines on it. She pulled off her mittens and her cap, and unzipped her parka. He hadn’t taken off his boots so she didn’t, either. They were beginning to drip onto the dirty floor. Almost idly she wondered what was going to happen. She felt the situation was out of her hands entirely.

  He got a couple of cans of beer out of the refrigerator and put them on the table. Then he brought a cookie tin from the makeshift counter by the sink and pried it open. Inside was a round cake of some kind. “Want some?” he asked.

  She hesitated, and he said, “It’s good. I made it.”

  He cut off a wedge and laid it sideways on a plate. Tentatively she broke off a small piece of cake and put it in her mouth. It was moist—almost soggy—and buttery, and sweet, and it had some kind of seed in it, poppy seed maybe. She ate her whole slice and then let him put more on her plate, and she finished that, as well. He popped open his beer and she opened hers, too, although ordinarily she didn’t much like beer. The delicious sweet cake had made her thirsty.

  After she took a drink from the can she looked at the wetsuit. “You dive for urchins?”

  Yeah, he told her, that’s what he did.

  “Isn’t it dangerous? People drown diving for urchins.”

  “Only stupid people.”

  In a sort of built-in scabbard on the leg of the wetsuit, she saw the handle and part of the blade of a steel knife. “What’s the knife for?”

  “Fighting off giant man-killing lobsters.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t like it, so far down under the water.”

  “Why not?

  “Not being able to breathe.”

  “You can breathe fine, as long as there’s air in the tank.”

  She shook her head. “The darkness down there. The pressure of the water, I’d hate that.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t if you tried it.” He put down his beer can and gazed at her so long she felt her face go hot. The dog under the couch moved restlessly, his collar rattling on the floor. She licked butter from her lips. Finally he reached across the table and touched her copper-colored hair. “Pretty,” he said. Then, “Time to take you home. Your old lady must be wondering what happened to you.”

  At the end of break when Kori was heading out of the john, she found old Miriam waiting for her by the door. “You will be careful, dear,” she said, her thin hand fluttering on the sleeve of Kori’s sweater, “won’t you?” Her breath smelled of Polident or something like that.

  “Careful? What do you mean?”

  But Miriam didn’t explain, just picked her work gloves out of her cubby and went to her place on the line. Not that Kori was dying to hear any more.

  It was crazy. First Emma with her inquisition—Why are you so late getting home? Whose truck was that you got out of?—and then her bruised silence, and now old Miriam’s cryptic warning, when Kori hadn’t even done anything yet.

  Sunday morning the temperature was 22 degrees when Kori set out. She left Emma sleeping in her bed and didn’t stop to eat breakfast.

  Very little traffic on 1A. A spotted cat whipped across the road and disappeared in the ditch. It had snowed lightly in the night. On the fields blueberry bristles sprouted out of the fresh snow.

  After she passed the town limits sign she began to look for the road. A hundred paces—past a fieldstone wall, and a cellar hole, and around a slow curve. Now she saw that the road wasn’t unmarked, after all. At one time somebody had painted a piece of scrap wood and nailed it to a tree: Coffins Neck. But scrub had grown up around the tree, little popples and pin cherries, so the sign was nearly obscured and the paint faded and leached into the grain of the wood.

  No tire tracks on the road: no one had come from or gone to Coffins Neck since the snow. Sunday, everybody hunkered down, sleeping off Saturday night. The road seemed much longer than she remembered, hard going since the snow cover concealed patches of ice, potholes, rocks. Spruce and fir grew close to the road on both sides. They badly needed thinning. Many were spindly, many were dead or dying, their trunks splotched with lichen, their brittle branches trailing old-man’s-beard. Ravens in the woods screeched, sounding like crazed humans. After a while Kori began to worry that she’d missed the turn, would eventually wind up at the tip of the peninsula and have to retrace all her steps.

  But then she came to a narrow drive off to her left, and through the trees could just make out the black pickup. As she approached the trailer the dog inside began to bark. She guessed sooner or later the barking would roust him, so she didn’t go any closer, just stood there in the clearing and waited.

  The trailer was an old one, streaked with rust. It had two metal doors, blank as closed eyes. A cinderblock stoop led to one door, nothing led to the other. You’d need to jump a foot and a half or more off the ground to get through it. Empty bottles and cans, tires, a rotting overstuffed chair, other assorted junk partly under snow littered the clearing.

  Now that she wasn’t walking, she felt chilled. Her socks were wet inside her boots, and her nose began to drip. She found a tissue in her pocket and wiped it.

  Relentlessly the barking went on. He must be some heavy sleeper, she thought. Either that, or out cold. She didn’t consider leaving. She thought she might put down roots right there, like a willow twig idly stuck into marshy ground.

  Then Pete opened the door above the stoop, holding the black dog by the choke collar. “It’s you,” he said. He was wearing a rumpled shirt, mostly unbuttoned, and the bottoms of long johns. His feet were bare.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “Sure you want to do that?”

  “I didn’t walk all this way to stand out here.”

  “Things might be different this time.”

  “I know that.”

  He yanked the dog back from the doorway by its chain and she passed by. It was the way you feel going into the fun house at the Millettsville Fair, she thought. Right away the ground under your feet isn’t level, so you think you’re going to careen into a wall. The mirrors give you back a picture of yourself you don’t recognize. Squat like a pig with a smeared-out nose, or skinny and rubbery like a noodle. Then you notice that’s your jacket! Your hat! You don’t really want to go on in. But you don’t want not to, either. And anyway you’ve already paid for your ticket.

  Suicide

  My jacket gapes open because the zipper’s jammed, and my hair whips around my face, flying into my eyes and mouth. It’s February, a raw wind blasting
up from the harbor, gravel-encrusted snow heaped along the sidewalk. Most of the shops on Market Street are still boarded up for the winter. I’m on my way to my usual afternoon haunt, Leonie’s.

  Leonie’s is a café with straggly plants in the window, meant to lure tourists, I guess, and week-old newspapers abandoned on the tables. I don’t know why the place stays open all year round, except that otherwise the fat old hippie, Leonie, would have nowhere to go. Local people don’t come here much. But it’s warm inside, and I can stay as long as I want without anybody giving me a hard time. At home my mother would think up chores for me to do or hassle me about my homework.

  I pour myself a cup of coffee from the carafe. It’s honor system at Leonie’s. I’ve been sitting at one of the gimpy-legged tables for a minute or two when the door opens, jingling the strap of sleigh bells hanging from it, and a man comes in. He’s in his fifties, maybe, with a face cratered as a battlefield, thinning grayish hair, bony ridges over his eyes. He walks directly to my table, carrying a folded piece of paper. “I saw you drop this the other day,” he says. “I’ve been watching for you, to give it back.”

  He must have seen me on the street and followed me here. “It’s not mine,” I say automatically—never admit to anything you don’t have to—though the paper could have escaped from my backpack. I haven’t missed it.

  “I’m sure it was you.”

  “Nice of you to take the trouble, but it really doesn’t belong to me.”

  “All right,” he says, shoving the paper into the pocket of his overcoat. It’s wool, dark and heavy, and smells like it’s been hanging somewhere damp. “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asks.

  Why not? This is a free country. He scrapes back one of the mismatched chairs, which were white when the café opened but are now chipped, revealing a variety of other colors underneath, and pulls himself up to the table.

  “I’m in town for the winter,” he tells me. “Working. I’m staying in the studio on the Haskell property.”

  “Studio” is a ridiculous name for the place. It’s an ancient rusty trailer a couple of miles north of town, clumsily situated on the edge of the marsh, as if a tornado picked it up from somewhere else and dropped it there. Denny Haskell, who’s a scalloper and famous for his meanness, had his father-in-law living in the trailer until the old geezer departed for the hereafter, his only way out. Nobody in their right mind would choose to live there. “Are you an artist?” I ask.