“Wait—hold up.”
Lloyd looked at him. Hicks nodded toward the water, and Lloyd looked at the wooden marker and the calm, black water. It took a moment before the penny dropped for the lieutenant. The canoe was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Winnie knotted her hair behind her head, stripped off her sodden clothes, and climbed into the bathtub. She slunk down so that only her head and knees were exposed to the air. The water was uncomfortably, wonderfully hot. She watched her toes being pulled upward, stretching for the surface. Tears collected in her eyes, and she extracted a hand from the depths to wipe them away. She grabbed a small plastic container and burped a dollop of thick green goo into her hand. She looked at the goo and felt silly, but she also felt good—she couldn’t help it. She knew no one else in Mammoth View—probably no one else within three hundred miles—had this stuff. It was French, this facial mask. Catherine Deneuve supposedly swore by it. Winnie had to send away for the product, of course. No store in these parts would carry something like this. She rubbed it into her face, taking care under her damaged eye. She burped more of the product into her hand and lacquered it on top of the first layer. She lay back against the tile, resting her head on her hair knot.
Winnie considered Deneuve the most beautiful woman in the world, hands down. Everything about her—the steely gaze, the willowy figure, the cock of her walk—was perfect. Made personally by God himself. (Sophia Loren was number two in her book, though she and Deneuve shouldn’t be compared—they were essentially different species.) What did it say about her that she thought the most beautiful women in the world were European? Was she a snob? She thought about who the most beautiful American was and settled on Cybil Shepherd. The depthless blue eyes, the sharp cheekbones, the lifeless blond hair. There was a stark, rural blandness to her beauty. Very ordinary. Very American. God, she was a snob. That’s what college did to a girl.
Winnie stared at the tile walls. Johnny had made her promise to stay at the police station until he returned, but that was ridiculous. She was perfectly safe at home. Those hillbillies didn’t know where she lived or even her name. They didn’t know anything about her, except that she got away. She thought about what had happened to her today. She touched her swollen eye, her hand jumping away as if it had grazed fire. Snot, responding to the jab of pain, leaked out her nose. She began to weep softly. Winnie tilted her head back to get a good gulp of air and felt the mask resist and crack. She needed to talk to someone, someone who would understand, but there was no one. How had that happened? Winnie had been in Mammoth View for almost two years. She was on a first-name basis with almost everyone in town, but she didn’t consider any of them a friend. Not really. Winnie lifted a foot, pressed it against the faucet and stretched her back. The water sloshed around her. She could call Dannie, she thought. She swiveled her head to find the clock on the shelf above the sink. No, it was too late in Chicago. Dannie got up early and went to bed early. In college, Winnie had poured out her life to Dannie. To Lisa and Tatiana, too. She’d had close friends all her life. She didn’t know what had changed, why she was a loner in Mammoth. Maybe she really was a snob.
She sat up in the tub, cupped her hands and splashed water on her face. She wiped the mask away as if erasing herself. She knew exactly why she hadn’t been in touch with Dannie lately. She had nothing to say for herself anymore. Dannie had a career and lived in an interesting place. Winnie had followed a man to Podunk. She didn’t even want to tell Dannie she was pregnant. She was happy about it—she was thrilled—but she wasn’t proud. Getting pregnant was a beautiful thing, a life-changing experience, but it wasn’t exactly an accomplishment. Breathing hard, Winnie pulled her legs to her chest, rested her chin on her knees and closed her eyes. She had to decide whether she was going to see a doctor about her injuries. She figured Johnny would insist, but that didn’t matter. She could tell him she went, and that would be that. She didn’t really see the point of going. What could be done for her eye beyond putting a steak on it? The various bruises were just bruises—she’d had a million of them and would have a million more. And the other thing? The hick hadn’t accomplished much. Close only counts in horseshoes and nuclear war.
She plucked the bar of soap from the dish and began to scrub herself with it. Like any good Catholic, she found solace in ritual, and cleansing was ritual. Cleansing was godly. O God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins. Winnie crossed herself, accidentally flicking water into her eyes. She wasn’t sure how much God mattered anymore, how much He affected the modern world, but she still felt comforted by the church. The physical place. The stained glass, the Stations of the Cross, the quiet. The experience of being in a church always removed all thoughts from her head, which was usually what she needed. She scrubbed her torso, her arms, and her pits. She held the soap under the water and scrubbed her legs vigorously, the insides of her thighs. Done, she let go of the bar and heard it clunk on the bottom of the tub. It came to rest against her right heel.
If she told her parents about what happened, would they come down to visit? Mom would, in a flash. Dad wouldn’t be willing to close up the shop. He was keeping the place going on a wing and a prayer, and putting bread on the table had to take precedence. Actually, her mother might not come down. She’d ask Winnie to fly home. Her mother hated to travel. She’d never forgiven her only child for moving away. To California, of all places, with the hippies and crazies. If Winnie told her what had happened to her, it would confirm all of her mother’s fears. Her mom would insist that Johnny look for work in Oregon and Washington. She’d start crying on the phone—big, retching sobs.
Winnie hugged herself. The heat had dissipated from the bath water, and she felt goosebumps crawling along her back and arms. She thought about how embarrassed Chief Hicks had been at finding her in such a state of disarray and not knowing what had actually happened. How kind he was, to not ask questions right then and there. She stood up and shook the water off her arms. Reached for her towel.
She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to find the chief a girlfriend. A real one. He’d made mistakes in his life, and he’d paid with his marriage and his health, but he was a good man. He’d saved her, and he deserved to be loved. She’d find him a girl at the ski resort. They got new blood in there every season. People moved to Mammoth to work at the resort in hopes of escaping their lives and building new ones. Sometimes there were middle-aged women among the recruits. Winnie pushed her face into the towel and rubbed. Yes, that’s would she would do, she decided. Then the chief’s girl could be her friend.
______
Winnie put on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts—she didn’t check which ones or look in the mirror. She pulled open her jewelry drawer and lifted out her St. Benedict replica medal. It was large and heavy, copper-colored. She’d attached it to a cheap gold chain she bought at Walgreens. She put the chain around her neck, placed the medal carefully at the base of her breastbone, tapping it into place. There was no one better at warding off evil than Benedict. She walked into the hall, opened the closet, and took the putter out of Johnny’s bag. She hefted it, choked up on the staff. Next she grabbed a pitching wedge. The clubs were too long for her, but she wasn’t going to go out to the garage in search of hers.
She slung the clubs over her right shoulder, walked through the kitchen and, barefoot, out onto the porch. Johnny kept a coffee can filled with old balls on the railing next to the door, and she snatched it up on her way. The lawn was green but overgrown. Johnny hadn’t gotten around to mowing for a while. It was a deep yard. If they had a boy, it would be perfect for Johnny to throw a ball with him. That was a father-son ritual, tossing a baseball back and forth, but Winnie preferred football. She didn’t have a favorite team or anything, but she enjoyed watching it: the complex strategies, the substitutions, and the teamwork necessary for every single yard advanced or repelled. She understood why Southerners with their martial sp
irit loved the sport so much. Stonewall Jackson would have been a helluva quarterback, sitting in the pocket, waiting for his receiver to break free while the whole world was falling down around him, waiting, waiting. She liked the tight uniform pants they wore, too. Joe Namath, now that was a good-looking man, even if he did wear pantyhose.
The tall grass felt good on her ankles, ticklish but pleasant. She thought of the picnics her parents used to take her on. She put the can down and grabbed a ball from it. The ground was hard, but it seemed to give a little under her heel when she tried out a practice swing with the wedge. The ball all but disappeared when she dropped it. She turned her hip, brought the club back, and swung with an abrupt chopping motion. The ball popped into the air like a magic trick, made a neat parabola, and fell with a plop in the narrow utility right-of-way between their property and the Bakers’ behind them.
Winnie smiled. That was pretty good. She’d taken golf for her physical education elective in college. It simply made sense. She’d always liked Arnold Palmer. Unlike Namath, who was just plain sexy, Arnie was appealing in an unthreatening, comfortable kind of way. A soothing presence in newspaper pictures and on TV. Like he could be your uncle. It was something she and her father could share, rooting for Arnie in the twilight of his career as he tried to score one last big win against Nicklaus, Casper, and Trevino. Her Dad never took her out to the public course, though. Never asked if she’d like to play.
When she finally did play, she found that she kind of had a feel for the game. From all those times watching, she supposed. And the swinging motion relaxed her; it reminded her of the lulling bliss of riding a seesaw when she was a child. For her last two years in college, she would go out to the school’s driving range during stressful periods: before a difficult final exam or after a bad date, that kind of thing. Seeing that little white ball soar into the sky—up and up and up, as if it might join Sputnik in orbit. It was nice. She would feel her shoulders relax and her neck unkink. All the benefits of beer with none of the calories. After five or six drives, her mind would start to white out, leaving her dazed and happy.
She gave up the game after she graduated and quickly forgot how much she’d enjoyed it. Arnie was essentially retired, so she didn’t seek out the leaders list in the newspaper anymore. Then they moved to Mammoth View. There was a public course an hour and a half away, in Sanger. Back in Eugene, Johnny had only played now and again, with buddies or for cop charity fundraisers, and never seriously. But he didn’t hunt or fish, which was what every man in Mammoth did during the summer, so now golf was his only available leisure activity. If Winnie hadn’t started playing again, she’d never see him on the weekends. Besides, the closest Catholic Church, St. Bonaventure’s, was in Sanger. She was able to get Johnny to go to church with her every Sunday before they hit the links; she was able to sell it as a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of thing.
The problem was, she wasn’t a natural athlete like her husband. She quickly found out she wasn’t nearly as good at golf as she’d thought she was. Johnny improved week after week on the Sanger public course. Winnie struggled. In fact, she had forgotten almost everything she learned in college—she was almost starting from scratch. At first, she was having trouble even getting the ball into the air on her drives.
Her second chip stayed in the grass. Instead of jumping skyward and landing in the utility right-of-way, her objective, it merely shuddered and rolled forward a foot or so. Criminy, she thought. She found the ball with her foot, rolled it back to her, heel to toes. She turned her hip, chopped: this time the ball jumped, wavered in the air, and thumped against the three-foot-tall fence at the end of the yard. So close. She dropped another ball in front of her, turned her hip, and chopped. The ball barely moved again, spinning crazily this way and that before expiring. “Shit,” she muttered, angry at the ball, at her club, at herself. What a stupid game this was. She stepped up to the ball, reared back, and swung. The ball shot into the air, clearing the fence by about five feet, zooming between the two ash trees in the right-of-way, toppling out of sight. The tinkling startled her into a crouch. Her throat closed, and she huffed to force air into her chest. She knew exactly what the sound was. She’d broken a window.
She didn’t know what to do. She stood and rose up on tiptoes in hopes of making out what had happened, but it was too dark to see anything. She stood there for three or four minutes with the club in her hands, its head up in the sky like a periscope. When a blob appeared in the Bakers’ back yard, she dropped the club to the ground.
The little blob grew and quickly took on the form of a human. It was Mrs. Baker. The long streaks of white in her hair made her look like a stockier Cruella De Vil from One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The Bakers kept to themselves—they were known for it. Practically shut-ins, at least according to the gossip. The couples waved at each other when they were both in their yards, but that was it. Johnny and Mr. Baker had chatted over the fence a few times, but she’d never said much more than “Hello” to either of them. Mrs. Baker was wearing a brown cloth coat over an airy nightgown. Her sausage-like legs were encased in rain boots. She held the golf ball in her hand. She stopped at the end of her yard and squinted across the right-of-way, grimacing violently. “I was expecting a boy with a baseball bat, not a woman with a golf club,” she said.
Winnie’s face burned. She hid the golf club behind her back. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m so embarrassed.”
“It’s fortunate that I wasn’t in the bathroom when this came through. I could have been seriously injured.”
“I’ll come over and clean up the mess. Just let me put on some shoes.” She started to turn toward the house.
“No, no,” the older woman said. “No need for that.”
“Are you sure?”
Mrs. Baker nodded. “I don’t like people in my home.”
Winnie grabbed at her neck and rubbed, trying to cool herself down, trying to breathe properly. “We’ll pay to replace your window.”
“Yes, you will.”
The two women blinked at one another through the darkness. “I don’t know what else to say,” Winnie said. “I’m terribly embarrassed. I was letting off some steam, and I just—I don’t know—lost control.”
Mrs. Baker crooked an arm, rested her hand on her waist. She took a step back, as if she were having trouble getting Winnie into focus. “Must’ve been a busy day for your husband,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The emergency. Whatever it was.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” Winnie felt herself starting to calm down. Her pulse disappeared inside her skin. “He’s still at work. I don’t know if he’ll be home tonight.”
“They’re making fun of us in Bakersfield. The hard-faced blond girl who does the news on Channel Two. Smirked through the entire report.”
“Uh huh.” Winnie thought she’d misunderstood what Mrs. Baker said. Or that Mrs. Baker had misunderstood the news report. She didn’t dare ask for clarification. “You and Mr. Baker stayed home all day? You didn’t leave?”
“Mr. Baker’s in ’Frisco. And me, where would I go? Whatever happens, I want to die in my own home, not in a ditch somewhere.”
“A ditch?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, of course.”
Mrs. Baker had a pack of Marlboro’s and a lighter in her right hand. She lit a cigarette, sucked in a block of smoke, and blew it out the side of her mouth. She looked at Winnie sidelong, holding the cigarette like a teacup. “When are you due?”
Winnie’s face flushed. “I—I didn’t know you knew.”
Mrs. Baker pulled on the cigarette. “Honey, look at yourself.”
Winnie did. She discovered that her shirt had hitched up with her backswing, exposing the bottom of her stomach, her navel winking. Embarrassed, she pulled the shirt down. That could be a little beer belly, she t
hought. It was nothing. Nothing at all. No, somebody had told Mrs. Baker. It wasn’t a secret. No way this woman could tell she was pregnant.
“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Baker said. “It seems overwhelming, but you’ll be just fine.”
Winnie gaped for a moment before comprehension grabbed hold of her. The pregnancy, she reminded herself. Mrs. Baker had no idea what Winnie had been through today. None at all. Winnie sighed and forced herself to smile. “You’re right. It does seem overwhelming sometimes. I don’t know why. I want children. Three or four, I think.”
“Well, you’ll get them,” Mrs. Baker said, blowing smoke into the night air. “That husband of yours. He looks quite virile.”
Winnie smiled, nodded. “He might even be the father of this one.”
Shock paralyzed Mrs. Baker’s face. Her mouth eventually opened, but no words came out.
Winnie realized with horror that her attempt at lightening the mood hadn’t gone over. “Sorry,” she said. “Bad joke.”
Mrs. Baker forced out a smile. “That’s very funny,” she said.
Winnie watched Mrs. Baker walking away, her nightgown swishing, the outline of her stocky frame visible in the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she called out to the retreating figure. “About the window, I mean,” she added, not as loud.
Winnie kicked at the grass, decapitating a swath of turf. Friggin’ neighbors, she thought. Adjusting to small-town life hadn’t been easy for her. She still hadn’t adjusted, in fact. When she’d lived in bigger burgs, being out in public always put her in a good mood. She’d loved drifting anonymously through department stores. People streaming around her, the pleasing smells wafting in from the cosmetics counters. She’d never lived in a really big city, like New York, so there’d always been the titillating possibility of running into someone you knew. But they were big enough towns that she knew it probably wasn’t going to happen, which is what made the possibility exciting. In Mammoth View, it always happened. She now hated running into someone she knew, because there was no avoiding it. She knew everyone—or, at least, everyone knew her.
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