The final story belonged to Vex. It was full of words he had crossed out but could still be read.
They went into the woods forest together. The trees were tall. The shadows of the trees were deep and long. Stickers Small plants Undergrowth scratched at their ankles. They trudged hiked until they reached a meadow clearing filled with grass. There was a puddle at the center of the clearing. They took off their clothes. When they were naked, they held each other.
Another thing came out of the forest. It was a tall man in dark clothes. He told them not to run. When he reached them, he put a hand on each neck. He choked them until they passed out. He raped them and urinated on their clothing. He went back into the forest.
He The boy came to first. He looked at the girl. She was on the grass. She was naked. She was unconscious. He He He What he did next is unclear.
Then they got dressed in their bad ugly stinking foul smelling clothing. They went back into the forest. They held hands. The plants tore at their smelly scented fragrant clothing. Smelling that way, no predator approached them. The path was not easy to follow in the night dark. They were in the forest forever for a long time. They are in there still. The stench of their clothes keeps them alive.
Billy read the story twice before grabbing his keys from the kitchen hook. He was going to drive to Onyx Springs and find Vex. Billy had his address, a halfway house near the railroad tracks. He could call the van driver for directions. Billy was afraid of what he might find. But that was his job, wasn’t it? To know the people in the workshop? To keep them safe?
Being with his fiancée and his sister at the new restaurant in Liberty Corners, Candler decided, was a lot like being the referee in a boxing match.
No, that wasn’t right. Boxers know they’re fighting each other. A boxing match is an acknowledged hostile engagement, while the conflict between these two women was pointedly unacknowledged. For that matter, with boxers, there was nothing personal in their violence. Each merely agreed to act as if he had reason to pummel the other’s head and body; while the clash in the Blue Willow was, he was certain, deeply personal, not to mention psychologically submerged, emotionally indirect, and perversely cheery. It was nothing at all like a boxing match, and yet he was very much stuck between them, like a referee. Where the holy fuck was Billy when he needed him? It couldn’t take more than an hour to drop off Lise and return. Unless he had lingered at her apartment. Candler didn’t want to consider that possibility. He thought about purchasing boxing gloves. Violet and Lolly could go a few rounds, and he and Billy could go a few more, and then maybe they would all be fine together. Boxing suddenly seemed the epitome of civilized sophistication and diplomacy.
“What is this noise they’re playing?” asked Violet, smiling grumpily. She had to be perfectly aware of the enormous retro jukebox and the fact that Lolly had punched in the preferences.
“Oh, you have to love this,” replied Lolly, showing maybe a thousand teeth. She undoubtedly recalled that Violet disliked rock and roll, especially the screaming variety. “I only picked songs from your generation,” Lolly continued gaily, though she could hardly be ignorant of the fact that “Communication Breakdown” was released at least fifteen years before Violet entered high school.
“Let’s all order, shall we?” Candler said, unnaturally cheery himself. “Billy, that rascal, may be gone all afternoon. We may never see Billy again.”
“I’m so happy that there’s a new place to eat in the Corners,” Lolly said.
“There’s not one piddling thing on the menu that looks appetizing,” Violet replied.
“Hamburgers are a safe bet, I bet,” Candler said. “Yum. Yum. Yum.”
“These fluorescent lights give our skin a green tint,” Violet said. “Luckily for you, your hair looks good green.”
“Thank you!” Lolly said. “Fluorescent lighting is green, you know, peachier for the environment. I was thinking we could make the house greener if we put in a few fluorescent bulbs, and do we have to flush every time? If it’s yellow, be mellow, that kind of thing?”
“Yes, indeed, a burger for me,” Candler said. “Hamburger. America’s—”
“Mellow is one of those words that makes me . . .” Violet’s head seemed to have developed a tremor.
“Unmellow,” Lolly offered and laughed. “Mellow makes you unmellow.”
“I’m going to have cheese on my burger,” Candler said brightly. “Sharp cheddar.” He pointed to the menu in his hand. “They let you choose what cheese.”
“Daddy would disapprove,” Violet said—a sentence like a lifeline, separate from the feminine tussle, and Candler yanked on it.
“That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten that.” To Lolly, he added, “Our father objected to cheeseburgers.”
“Still does, I’m sure,” Violet said. “He hates how people put cheese on everything. It’s a point of honor with him.” She smiled ever so slightly.
“And burgers are cheaper without cheese,” Candler put in, “but he did seem to be philosophically opposed.”
“I can’t wait to meet him,” Lolly said.
“He loved Arthur,” Candler said, recalling the first time that their father met Arthur. James had been there to witness the encounter.
Violet nodded but clearly did not want to talk about her late husband. “I guess I’ll have a burger, too,” she said. “If there’s nothing else. No cheese for me.”
A sweet respite of silence followed while they scrutinized their menus again.
James had not only attended his sister’s wedding, roughly ten years earlier, he had also joined the newlyweds on their honeymoon—for the second part of it, anyway. Their mother and father had divorced a few weeks before Vi’s wedding, and their mother’s decision to fly over the Atlantic for the wedding necessitated their father’s decision not to come. He claimed to have pneumonia, but James and Violet were not fooled.
Their mother was not much fun in London, and would hardly engage with Arthur, who was approximately her age. After a day of this, during an interval when Arthur had left the apartment on a business errand, Violet burst out, “I’m not marrying Dad,” and James had the urge to flee down the stairs and run after Arthur. “He’s nothing like Dad. Besides, I never dated any other older men, and I hardly dated Arthur. I worked with him for years before—”
“No details, please,” her mother said. “I like Arthur fine, but it will be easier from a distance. My own affairs . . . The wound is too recent.” Her lip quivered but she did not fully lose her composure. After another moment, she added, “She’s not even pretty, you know? It’s, I don’t know, insulting. To be left for a girl who isn’t even attractive, and she’s no goddamned painter. He just wanted a young body. That’s all. What am I supposed to . . . just a young body. Young flesh. She modeled for him, and, well, it’s so tawdry, and he’s nearly forty years older, and I am aware that you and Arthur aren’t the same thing, but forgive me, I cannot help my feelings right now, and you’ll just have to put up with me.”
“All right, I’ll put up with you,” Violet said, and she did. She kept their honeymoon plans—which included a week in the U.S.—secret from her. They chose Chicago because Frederick Candler had moved to nearby Kentucky. Following a few days in the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago, they flew to Paducah, Kentucky, from which they would drive to the tiny river town of Wickliffe and on out to the farmhouse that Frederick Candler had purchased. Violet had asked Jimmy to meet her in Paducah, and in a drunken moment at the reception, he agreed to be there.
Candler hadn’t wanted to dip into his savings again, after flying to London, and he drove to Paducah from Flagstaff. Dlu was supposed to have come with him, but she was annoyed not to have been invited to the wedding. “I’m not welcome in London but I’m supposed to come to a farmhouse in Kentucky to see your father and his concubine?” Billy volunteered to take her place and share the driving, but Violet nixed that. “I
want Arthur to have a good impression of us,” she had explained.
Jimmy drove his Corolla from northern Arizona to western Kentucky alone, in a single ill-advised twenty-four-hour non stop trek. He was sprawled across a row of seats in the Barkley Regional Airport, profoundly asleep and dreaming of the white lines on the highway, when their flight arrived.
“You need a bath,” Violet said, waking him. “Couldn’t you have bathed, at least?”
The Corolla wouldn’t start, and they had to rent a car. Jimmy nodded off in the backseat, his head against the suitcases that would not fit in the trunk, on the drive to Wickliffe, but he roused himself when they took the county road to the farmhouse. Their father had purchased a farm of more than one hundred acres. Land in Kentucky was cheap, he had explained to Jimmy over the phone. “A hundred of the richest acres this side of the Valley Nile.”
Jimmy caught the reference. “Okay, Big Daddy. See you soon.” But his father had not let it drop. “Is Skipper coming?”
“Sister-woman does not want Billy there.”
“Ah, Billy. Skipper and Gooper rolled into one.”
It wasn’t just the farm that had their father playing Big Daddy, Jimmy reasoned, but also Violet’s strange decision to visit him on her honeymoon. She was afraid their father would die without ever meeting her husband. The pretend bout of pneumonia had worried her, even though she had known it was just an excuse not to come to the wedding. The irony—the ugly, bitter, awful irony—was that their father was still alive, and Violet’s husband was dead and gone.
Frederick Lansing Candler was sixty-eight the spring day that Jimmy, Violet, and Arthur arrived at the farmhouse, but he might have been mistaken for fifty-five if he would have condescended to dyeing his hair. He had grown portly—not fat, neither Jimmy nor Violet could ever have attributed that adjective to him had he weighed a ton. On the day they arrived, as they trundled up the driveway, he was watering a flower bed with a hose, wearing overalls, which Violet could not help but comment on—“What an affectation,” she said. It was not a working farm but an old house with a screened-in porch that wrapped around three sides where her father and his girlfriend set up their easels. Their father bent slightly to peer into the car as it motored up the gravel drive. When he recognized Violet in the front seat, he threw his arms open. His hair and beard were long and unkempt, and the overalls seemed silly, but the gesture—spreading his long arms as if he might lift off—pleased her so much that she tossed herself forward against the constraint of the shoulder belt and cried, “Daddy!”
Candler counted that moment as one of his sweetest memories. “What an awful car,” her father said when Violet climbed from the rental and ran to him. “I could paint that car, it’s so hideous.” Jimmy had followed right behind her, but Arthur took his time getting out, giving them a moment together. This small gesture defined one of the things that made Arthur who he was—a type of consideration about which men of Jimmy’s generation had no clue. Jimmy loved his father’s embrace, the residual smell of paint, even the tang on his breath left over from his morning chewing tobacco. Jimmy had been upset with his father about the divorce, but he had a different take on it than their mother. The family had been falling apart for a long while. Wrapped in his father’s arms, he could muster no anger.
“You’re not so old,” their father greeted Arthur. “May made you out to be ancient. I damn near rented a wheelchair for you.”
Jimmy hoped his sister didn’t remember that line. Some ironies in one’s life could simply never be appreciated.
They expected the girlfriend to be homely but she was nothing of the kind. Sally MacLean possessed a narrow waist and large breasts, and while her face was not conventionally attractive—her wide mouth nearly equaled the span of her eyes—she had a friendly, laconic manner and a soft, imperturbable voice. What Violet did not like about her (she would confess this to Jimmy while they were strolling the grounds that evening) was the scrutiny the woman inspired. Violet caught herself looking for flaws, stories of an unhappy childhood, wondering why this young woman had chosen their aging father. She hated herself for doing it, as it was precisely what their mother had done in London.
Jimmy liked Sally immediately. She was his age and friendly, shy but also pleased that they had come. She seemed to make their father happy. What else did you need to like someone?
The second night in Kentucky, without Violet having asked—Jimmy hadn’t even thought about asking—Sally said, “I was in a fog, you know? What to do and why to bother? Fred is answer enough. I feel grounded. The questions are still there, but they don’t much matter.” She shrugged and looked out to the porch where Frederick and Arthur—the grown-ups—were sitting in kitchen chairs, drinking and chatting. “Maybe we’ll get ten good years. Possibly more.” She revealed what they already had guessed: Violet’s father had not been ill. That was a story to satisfy May. He had not come to his daughter’s wedding because he and Sally had married on the same day. “It’s not a coincidence,” she told Violet. “Your wedding pushed things to a head.”
Sally was twenty-three, a Capricorn. She painted miniature canvases, no larger than her hand. She dropped out of the fine arts program when Frederick was forced to retire. “It was screwing me that got him axed.” She smiled, an embarrassed acknowledgment of pleasure. It was the first time she stretched that wide mouth to reveal its barricade of teeth, which transformed her face, and made her quite attractive.
“I understand your wanting to know,” Sally said, speaking to his sister, but then expanding to include him, “and I appreciate that you don’t judge.” After a moment, she said, “There’s something I’d like to know. It’s about your brother.”
Of course, Jimmy thought, the endless mystery of Pook.
“He killed himself,” Violet said. “I suppose you know that much.” She nodded. “I have the facts but not what really happened, you know?”
Did anyone ever know what really happened? Jimmy knew more than the facts, but he could not say what really happened. His sister, though, had an answer.
“What happened is, it destroyed our family,” she said. “It turned out that Pook was the glue that held us together.” She offered a sad smile. “Who would ever have guessed?”
Jimmy said nothing, but he had known as much from the beginning, long before Pook died. Pook had been the secret part of them that made them whole.
Ten years later, and May Candler still did not know that Violet and Arthur had come to the U.S. on their honeymoon. Candler suspected that if he made the effort to look up Dlu, she still would not have forgiven him for not taking her to London. And the Corolla never ran again. He’d had it towed to a car lot and traded it in, along with the remainder of his savings, for a Toyota pickup, which he drove back across the country, taking three days, sleeping in the cab at rest stops. He drove the truck through graduate school and up until he heard about the Boxster. He missed that truck. Sometimes, more often than he liked to admit, he missed Dlu. And he missed his family and how they’d once been a single group, not always happy, but always always always bound together.
“You have to like this one,” Lolly was saying. A new song began on the jukebox. “It makes me think of us.” She reached past James and took Violet’s hand: Aretha Franklin, “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Except to mouth the word us, Violet said nothing.
The halfway house was nothing more than an old Victorian on the wrong side of the freeway, painted mustard yellow, inside and out. What had Billy expected, a lobby and rec room? A list on the wall provided room numbers for the occupants. It was full of cross-outs and scribbles to indicate the current dwellers. Henry Veeks lived on the third floor, room 301.
The place reminded him of an apartment he and Jimmy had shared in Flagstaff. It, too, was an old house, with beaverboard partitions to create extra rooms, full of guys who wore kerchiefs and women with hair to their waists, people who played their music constantly and burne
d incense that smelled exactly like an angel food cake tossed into a campfire, which Billy had done accidentally one time. It became obvious they had to move after Dlu spent the night a few times. “This is officially a hell hole,” she said after something raucous upstairs—likely sex but possibly dancing or a fight—had shaken the walls and a fluff of black insulation fell into her bowl of chowder.
On the positive side, Billy twice saw Dlu naked in that terrible apartment. To get to the bathroom, you had to go through Billy’s narrow bedroom, and the door didn’t want to stay shut. The first time was just a glimpse, but the second time he lay on the bed and watched as she dried herself after a shower. She wrapped her hair in a towel and stared into the mirror over the sink to put on makeup, bending in ways that made her butt flat and unattractive (a lesson in why not to look at sex scenes in Hollywood movies because they only show perfect angles, which ruin you for a real person). At one point, mascara from the tiny brush fell on her, and she made a sweeping motion to wipe it away. That just killed him. God, he loved that woman.
He wondered if any of the others at the workshop lived in such dumps. He had been to Alonso’s and met his parents. “Onyx Rehab has been a godsend for our boy,” Mrs. Duran told Billy and insisted that he take home a slice of ginger cake. Such nice people. He had gone there to deliver some comic books from his own stash that had been riding in the trunk of the Dart since he left Flagstaff. His plan was to read one to Alonso each day that he went until noon before shanking his baloney pony in the john. So far Billy had read two issues of The Incredible Hulk and one Aquaman—three successful days in one week.
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