Dwayne stopped wiping his hands and shoved the rag in his back pocket. It hung limply over the edge and was a dull rose color.
“I decided I really like him. Billy Faulkner, I mean. William.” I hadn’t yet read enough to be on a nickname basis with him.
“He’d be pleased.”
“When do you get off work?”
“ ’Round seven this evening. I still got a truck to do. Why?”
“We need to go to Brokedown House.”
“ ‘We’ do, do ‘we’? And why’s that?”
“I need to go in that room again to see some things. You’re going home anyway. White’s Bridge is hardly any detour at all.”
“So where’s all your buddies? Night before last, it looked like a Fraternal Order of the Owls meeting.”
“There’s too many of them. They get in the way.”
“What about your good friend Butternut?”
I sighed. “Du-wayne. You know Mr. Butternut wouldn’t have any idea what to do in an emergency.”
“And just what emergency might announce itself?”
“I don’t know. But you do recall the police came that time.”
“From what I gather, a missing girl was that particular emergency.”
I ignored that.
“What’s in this house that’s so all-fired important?”
Abel Slaw shouted from the door of his tiny office, “Dwayne, you better come on and finish up Teets’s truck. I promised he could pick it up before we close.”
I said, “So I’ll come back at seven, okay?”
“Emma!” called Abel Slaw. “Now you shouldn’t be hanging round the cars.”
Dwayne said, “Okay, come ahead.”
I answered Abel Slaw: “I’m leaving, Mr. Slaw.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t I don’t want you around, but it’s dangerous out there where all the machinery and stuff is.”
Some idea of danger he had.
Miss Bertha found another reason to complain, with having to come into dinner at six instead of her preferred time of six-thirty. It was as if she had a schedule of events on her social calendar that would be completely thrown out of kilter by this earlier time. She demanded to know why as she and Mrs. Fulbright sat down at their table.
Pouring the water, I knew if I said it was because I had certain plans for the evening, she would do everything in her power to make me at least a half hour late, so that I would gain nothing from the change. I had to make it worth her while. When I’d set their menus before them, I told her that our candy supplier (for the display case at the desk) had called up and said they just got in the York peppermint patties—which was Miss Bertha’s favorite—that we’d been out of for so long and that he’d be there till seven this evening if I wanted to pick them up. It was a special trip I’d have to make but seeing how much she liked them I would make the effort.
I love going to the candy wholesaler when Mrs. Davidow goes to pick up boxes of Hershey bars, Butterfingers, Snickers, Mounds, and Three Musketeers, my favorite. It’s because the bar is in three sections of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Candy boxes, each containing one or two dozen bars, are stacked in the warehouse ten feet high, row after row. I often wonder how they sold all of that candy. To Miller’s and the five-and-dime and the drug stores, I guessed—all around.
When I’d told her this, she didn’t know how to respond. She was on what is called the “horns of a dilemma” (a state I myself am often faced with), as she wouldn’t want me to miss delivery of her York peppermint patties, but then she’d have to go along with this time change. The York patties won out, for she told me to get their first course (fruit cup) and be quick about it.
I smiled and told her “Coming up!” and made for the kitchen. Miss Bertha would not be happy when she saw the display case tomorrow, but I’d worry about that tomorrow. As Scarlett O’Hara liked to say, tomorrow is another day.
45
Master mechanic II
It really bothers me sometimes, this life of lies, but more times it doesn’t. I thought this while bumping along in Dwayne’s pickup. It was noisier than either Ubub’s or Ulub’s trucks. It sounded like every little pipe and wire was getting jostled loose.
“How come with you being a master mechanic your own truck’s falling apart?”
He shifted gears and they ground as if they were hammering into the highway. “Don’t have time.”
“I don’t want to be rude, Dwayne, but it’s not a very good advertisement for a master mechanic to have a car like this.” We had passed what city limits there were and were rumbling along the highway.
“Yeah, well, of course, I don’t often get the extreme pleasure of a customer driving around with me listening.”
What childish sarcasm. “What is a master mechanic, anyway?” I looked out my window and thought those were the exact same cows standing and looking at us over the rail fence. I wondered what they thought. I wondered if they thought. For a moment I shut my eyes and put myself in cow-mode, me behind the fence looking as the truck passed. But nothing came to mind and Dwayne was talking.
“It means I’m good.”
“Well, You-boy is good. I guess so is Abel Slaw.” When he didn’t bother answering, I said, “I bet you could easily do something to a car so it couldn’t run.” Naturally I was thinking of you-know-whose. Then I realized the Dewey’s Do-Nuts hut wasn’t far off. I said, “Suppose we were being chased and we all stopped for doughnuts. I’ll bet you could just nip out to the chaser’s car and put it out of commission.” I could see the blue neon Dewey’s sign ahead. “Couldn’t you?”
At the doughnut hut, he pulled his truck over. “I always stop here. Got nothing to do with you dropping big hints.”
We piled out and piled into Dewey’s Do-Nuts. I was starved. I had sacrificed my own dinner for this.
On our way again—I had insisted on paying for the doughnuts and coffee and was glad he didn’t make some remark about me drinking coffee—I ate my vanilla-iced doughnut and decided Dwayne was mysterious. I didn’t actually know anything much about him, I mean about his life so far. He didn’t talk about himself, which was awfully unusual in a person. I inspected my powdered-sugar doughnut; I’ve always loved powdered sugar from watching my mother make designs with it on cakes. I like to watch the powdered sugar drift down from the sieve like sweet snow.
We were just a short distance from the turnoff. I wondered if Dwayne was running from the law and that was the reason for his secrecy. But he hadn’t been at all bothered when he’d met up with the Sheriff that night.
We turned off and I saw the Silver Pear sign casting its moonish glow on the branches, turning them pale and unearthly looking. The restaurant’s parking lot was crowded as usual.
Dwayne said, “You can buy me dinner there some night by way of repaying this favor.”
“Oh, sure. Listen, maybe you shouldn’t park by the pond.”
“Why’s that?”
We were trundling over White’s Bridge now. “Because Mr. Butternut will see the truck and come to Brokedown House and we’d never get anything done.”
“Just what are we trying to get done?”
“It’s a long story.” Mirror Pond came up ahead and Dwayne stopped and braked in the same spot as the first night. So much for my advice.
“I like long stories. Come on.” He opened his door and I opened mine and both of us climbed down.
He went around to the back of the truck and pulled out his shotgun. It looked absolutely lethal. Well, it was, wasn’t it? Just ask a rabbit. He broke it over his arm and jerked his head at me in a “come on” gesture. We crossed the road and went up a small embankment. We were taking the way through the woods instead of the road.
It was dusk, the same part of the day as when I’d been here before. Dwayne was carrying his square flashlight with the handle and switched it on. I love the woods but not if I’m walking through them. With Dwayne there I felt considerably more comfortable, even more than with
the Woods and Mr. Root. Every scraped rock, every snapped twig, brittle leaf, wind rustle sent a chill down my spine. It was dark activity of such a level I really thought God ought to be notified. (When I said to Father Freeman I didn’t hold with the belief that God knows everything, he said back, Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.)
There was this beaten path that we kept to. I wondered how a path had ever gotten trampled out here, with so few people in the place, and no one living in the houses farther along than Mr. Butternut’s.
“How come you brought your gun, Dwayne? I mean, you’re not going rabbit hunting, are you?” Frankly, I wished he’d say yes, he was, for I didn’t like to think he’d want to carry it for protection.
“Always do, going in here.”
I didn’t care for the sound of that, so I kept quiet. Matted leaves, rotted and wet, squished unpleasantly beneath my feet. Narrow ribbons of water ran down the bark of an oak we passed as if the trees were raining after the sky had stopped. Every so often a shower of drops lighted on my head. Dwayne played his flashlight on either side of the path.
“What are you doing?”
“Just lookin’ to see.”
“See what?”
“You might recall I saw someone the other night.”
I certainly did recall it. I edged closer to him. The path was really too narrow for two people walking abreast, but I wasn’t going to hang around behind him. “You’re not the only person that comes out here hunting, I guess. Maybe it was another poacher you saw. Or heard.”
“This ain’t hunting season, as you were quick to remind me. No, it wasn’t another poacher.”
I heard running water. We must have been near a stream. I asked him.
“That’s the creek, one that runs under White’s Bridge. It runs into the lake. So if you ever get lost, just follow this creek, you’ll get out okay.”
Lost? I had no intention of getting lost.
He left the path and I was right beside him. In another forty or fifty feet we’d come on the creek. Dwayne looked up at the sky. “Full dark in another fifteen minutes.” He leaned his gun against a tree and set his flashlight on a stump.
“Stumppocked, this place is,” I said.
“Where’d you hear that word?”
“Light in August.”
“You’re one for details, aren’t you?”
Beneath the tree was a wide flat stone, its surface as fine as pewter. He fingered a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. He sat down on the slab of rock and motioned for me to sit, too. “I always stop here, take a cigarette break, and think.”
I sat down. The rock was worn perfectly smooth and was big enough to hold us both.
“Cigarette?” He reached into his pocket.
I just gave him a look, ha ha ha.
“You gave it up? Wish I could. Here.” He held out his hand.
It was a piece of candy, a Caramellow, that I love just as much as Miss Bertha does her York peppermint patties. Caramellows are hard to find. I felt less anxious when I bit down into its softness. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now, what the devil is it inside that house you want to see?”
“You know that letter that you read and the picture of the man?”
“I remember the letter. Yeah, so?”
“It’s just possible it was written by the man in the photo. Just possible.” I made it sound as if I didn’t want Dwayne to build his hopes up.
He frowned and sucked in on his cigarette. “So what you’re saying is you think you know him.”
“Know who he is. Maybe.” It amazed me that Dwayne didn’t ask the next question: who? He must have figured he wouldn’ t know him anyway, so why ask the name? He was leaning forward, one arm across his knees, chin in the other hand. I kind of copied how he sat, my legs drawn up, my skirt pulled down over my knees. It occurred to me if anyone (my mother, for instance) knew I was out here in the woods with a strange man, she’d be totally horrified. (But what would she do about it?) I could hardly be afraid of Dwayne since I was the one who talked him into coming. Maybe if his mother knew he was out here with me, she’d be horrified too. I felt I should say something else. “It’s just a hunch.” But it was more than that.
“Most things are.”
I had no idea what he meant. Dwayne said strange things a lot of the time that seemed unrelated to what was happening. I would like to talk to him sometime when we hadn’t so much to do.
“You finished your smoke break?”
“Yep. You finished your marshmallow break?”
“Cara-mallow.”
He smiled and crushed his cigarette on the stone, then brushed the bits away.
I couldn’t say if the wood was darker than before since whatever light had filtered through the trees had stopped before it hit the ground. Upward it was dark. Except for the squelch of our feet, sounds were blanketed so that the too-whit of a barn owl or the scraping of branches or the snap of a twig seemed awfully insubstantial in all of this creaking darkness. He was still checking the undergrowth beside the path.
“How much farther?” I whispered for no reason. I had hold of the hem of Dwayne’s bulky wool shirt. When he stopped and knelt down, I did too. He pulled something from a thick bush of mountain laurel, dwarfed I guessed from a lack of light. It was a piece of cloth I saw when he shone the light on it. In this light it was hard to tell the color, though I could see it was dark—dark red or blue, or a kind of plum color. The material was heavy, probably wool. It had been torn off by the small sharp branches; threads had unraveled from one end.
“So what do you think, looking at that?”
I felt complimented that he was asking my opinion—seriously, too, for his expression bore no sign of the usual Dwayne-mockery.
“It’s from clothes,” I said, “somebody’s shirt or dress, maybe.”
“Uh-huh. Last month, last year, when?”
I frowned. “When was it caught here, you mean?” He nodded. “Can you tell?”
“Sure, whether it’s old or recent. Look at the tear. The threads haven’t stiffened up with cold or anything. You can tell that even without a magnifying glass.”
“So it’s just been torn recently?”
“Recent as a couple of nights ago, maybe.”
I handed the bit of cloth back. “Dwayne, that’s really jumping to conclusions.”
“Sometimes conclusions can’t be got at any other way.”
It was then I realized that Dwayne was taking this whole thing seriously, that he wasn’t seeing it as just some crazy twelve-year-old’s notion. He pushed the cloth into his shirt pocket and we walked on, me clutching his shirt again. It wasn’t long before I could make out the roots of the big oak, where I’d hidden that first visit, just coming into the edge of the flashlight’s light. It seemed months ago, years even.
“You’ve got to be realistic, Dwayne.” This coming from me? “It probably doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Sound and fury is all. That’s what Billy Faulkner said about life. Or what Shakespeare said; I believe those were his words, originally.”
I was having enough trouble with Faulkner. I didn’t want Shakespeare adding to it.
Dwayne stopped and stopped me, too. He put on a listening face, the two of us standing a few feet from the rear door. He shone the flashlight carefully, seeming to walk the light from right to left and back again. Nothing moved, nothing sounded. I wished for some sign of life, even a rabbit scurrying (though I guessed what its fate might be). Both the screen door and the back door protested when Dwayne creaked them open and we went in.
What I noticed first was the scent of grass, the toilet water that first Dwayne and then the Sheriff had opened. This faint scent had escaped the bottle and stayed.
“Dwayne, you smell that?”
He nodded. “Probably from the other night.”
I stopped as he had and listened.
“There’s no one,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Used to be a cat burglar. Come on.”
I looked at his back, openmouthed. He was kidding. Wasn’t he?
There were two bedrooms we had not paid any attention to before. Dwayne swung the light across the bed, dresser, and bureau. The surfaces were empty of what small items they might have held before: jewelry, brush, comb, mirror, stuffed animals, a doll. There were no bedclothes except for a blanket folded at the bottom of the bed. The second bedroom was much the same, except here there were curtains at the window and a closet on the side of the dresser. I stayed in the doorway while Dwayne went to the closet and opened it.
Anxiously, I asked, “Are there clothes and stuff in there?”
He shook his head. “Nothin’ except a couple worn-out suitcases.” He pulled them out; they were cheap plastic or the cardboard that suitcases used to be made of a hundred years ago.
“Come on,” I said, “into the other room.”
Still looking at the cases, one of which he’d opened—it was empty—he grunted and rose up.
The third bedroom was as we’d left it. The bottle of grass-scented toilet water stood in the same spot, tightly stoppered. The dolls and animals sat back in the same corner. While Dwayne lighted the two thick candles, I headed for the doll Maud had been holding. It was true: the doll was dressed in the white organdy, a little yellowed and stiffened by time, that had made both Iris’s and Mary-Evelyn’s dresses. The tiny, faded, blue satin flowers were the same ornaments as on the dress that had been Mary-Evelyn’s shroud. The fact of this doll was dizzying. I turned away from the night beyond the window full of woe, woeful. I was making way for the blue devils, misery’s misery. It was never going to go away. It was the return of the feeling I’d had in the kitchen the day before, and again tonight. I felt the end of something.
“This is it, here.” Dwayne was holding the letter he’d read to me, the same letter the Sheriff had read. “You want to read it?”
I shook my head. “You read it.”
He read:My dear, I have faith that we will be together again and soon. It has become too much for me and, I’m sure, too much for you. It’s better I leave for a little while until this fury quiets down. I suppose a century ago, my faithlessness would have been shouted in all the newspapers!
Cold Flat Junction Page 30