“‘Erroll went back to stocking the well, and I had another look at the guy across from me. His coloration was mostly due, I decided, to the ruddy lighting, and, that in mind, I realized he wasn’t a Seminole, but a white guy with a long face and high cheekbones and a deep tan. There was something familiar about him. I didn’t put it together right away, but I kept on glancing over at him, and eventually I realized that if you gave him a buzzcut, stripped off thirty-five, forty pounds of muscle, and erased the worry lines creasing his forehead, the frown lines around his mouth, he would greatly resemble my old friend Bobby Bonfleur, who was doing a dime for armed robbery in Raiford. Just the sort of place where a man might acquire muscles, worry lines, and a shitload of tattoos.’
“So what do you think? I’m getting better, huh?”
Silence.
“Yeah, well. I figured that’d be your reaction.”
FOURTEEN
Sanie and Jackson haven’t had sex for a month, twenty-seven days to be exact, and when he comes to her one rare sunny morning, she’s too enervated to deny him. But she’s dry as dust down there, dry as the lunar surface, unable to perform this most fundamental of wifely duties, unable to participate in this calendar ritual that, while no longer central to the marriage, nonetheless has occurred once a week for what seems like forever. He’s understanding to a fault, solicitous, and pretends it’s no big deal. Maybe she’s a little under the weather, maybe she should get a check-up. She imagines that when he leaves her to go down to the study, he’s bursting to tell her to pick up some lubricant. She’s fighting back tears and, after she hears the study door close, she does cry, though God knows it’s not about Jackson—he’s even less appealing than usual, now that he’s letting himself go to seed in his native soil, wearing a scruffy week-old beard, suffering from an outbreak of acne, bathing irregularly, hair curling down onto his unwashed collar. She mops her eyes with a Kleenex, inwardly curses hormones and emotional stress, whatever has called forth this reaction. The thought of Frank Dean crosses her mind, and she cancels it out, blam!, she brings down the mental CANCEL stamp right onto that sucker. Even if it weren’t simply a sexual attraction, if he was the great love of her life, she doesn’t need it, can’t use it. She’s got a full plate, and he’s too much a creature of this place. He’s happy in Edenburg and she could never be happy here. But what if he’s not happy? Suppose his return was ill-conceived? What then? Blam! She puts on jeans and a sweater, forcing her thoughts into a conventional groove. Things to do today. A list. She’s a great little listmaker, yes she is. Pick up this, get that fixed, arrange for this, take care of that. By the time she’s halfway down the stairs, she’s worked herself into a foul mood. She hopes that Allie comes hunting for a spoon today. Allie’s avoided her assiduously since their first meeting, but sooner or later she’s due for a Sanie-style ass-kicking. So how’s it going Anal Intruder-wise? she’ll ask. Is that part of Swami Will’s tour of the Ass-tral Plane, or does he throw it in extra? And what about that toy action figure? Did he convince you it was an alien probe? She’s about to enter the kitchen when the doorbell sounds, a primitive institutional buzzer like those that signal the rolling back of electric gates in a jail. It sounds again, a short burst repeated over and over. Jackson’s voice floats out of the study: “Sanie! Will you get that?” Grimly, ready to vent on whoever it turns out to be, she goes to the door and throws it open. “Can I use your phone, ma’am? It’s a medical emergency!” A step van is parked in the road, a poster on its side portraying a happy child carrying a glass of water, a sacred glass of water judging by the light radiating from it, and the driver, who’s standing on the porch, is short and skinny, his features dominated by a mustache so full, it obscures his upper lip. He wears a pinstriped uniform shirt, the name Sonny embroidered on the pocket. He’s agitated, his hands twitching, on the verge of jumping out of his skin. Sanie moves aside, points to the kitchen, and says, “The phone’s straight back through that door.” It’s only after he’s rushed past that she realizes he looks familiar, and it’s not until she follows him into the kitchen that she recalls where she saw him. The downstairs corridor, the day she did peyote, standing opposite an older man wearing the same kind of shirt, the name Ralph written on his pocket.
“Yeah,” he’s saying to, she assumes, the 911 operator. “I’ll wait just down the road from Snade’s. Hurry, okay? No, nobody’s with him. My cell phone wouldn’t work. I had to drive back and use someone else’s.” He pauses, then says, “Because, damn it, you ain’t never gonna find your way back in there. There’s three or four turns you gotta make onto little dirt roads. Now get somebody out here, will ya?” Another pause. “I am calm! I’ll wait down the road from Snade’s. Please get someone out here!” He bangs down the receiver. “Fucking idiots!” He spots Sanie and says, “I appreciate it,” and ducks his eyes, brushing past her on his way to the door. She hurries after him and catches up on the porch. He’s lighting a cigarette; his hands tremble.
“Something I can do?” she asks.
“You know where the Turners live? These hippies got this ol’ farmhouse way back in the weeds off Payne Road?”
“I’m just visiting. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’s thinking if you did, you could direct the emergency people where to go, and I could get on back there.”
“Sorry. What happened?”
He butts the cigarette on the porch rail, flips the butt into the weeds. “We was making a delivery to the Turners. When they’re not home, we’re supposed to put the water up in the loft of this rundown old barn they got out back. So Ralph, that’s…he’s my friend, he’s teaching me the route.” His chin quivers and he has to take a moment. “He’s going up the ladder balancing these two bottles. Says if I do it a bottle at a time, it’ll take all day. Then the ladder give way. He didn’t fall far, but I think he’s busted up pretty bad. His back’s broke, maybe.”
“Is there a problem?” Jackson pokes his nose out.
Sanie fills him in and asks if he knows where the Turners live.
“Buncha fucking hippies,” Sonny clarifies. “Down there off Payne Road.”
Jackson shakes his head. “No. But there’s a place…It belonged to a family named Kyle when I was a kid. Will told me a few years ago some college drop-outs had taken it over. If Will were here, he could tell you.”
“That might be it,” Sonny says. “You take a left onto Payne Road and about mile and half down, you take a right on a trail’s hardly more than an old wagon track?”
“Sounds like it could be the Kyle place,” says Jackson. “Tell you what, I’ll drive down there and if that’s it, I may be able to help your friend. I had some medical training in college.”
“You wanta take the truck? It gets muddy back in there. I can ride with the ambulance.”
“The SUV can handle it.” Jackson flicks his eyes toward Sanie and holds out a hand. “Keys?”
Once he’s gone, the driver stations himself beside the van, smoking another cigarette, and Sanie closes the door, walks back into the kitchen, where she drops into her customary pose, sitting at the table, her notebook open, looking between the window—a view of the dying cornfield, the woods starting to show drab autumn colors—and the Cumberland Farm Supplies calendar, which she has turned to the September page. Despite the fact that it’s thirty years out-of-date, she chooses to pay homage to the passage of time. The picture for September portrays a teenage couple, perhaps a younger, happier version of August’s farmer-and-wife (suggesting that time may run backwards in Cumberland Farm Supplies World), strolling hand-in-hand along an oak-shaded country lane, the foliage there in full Super Kodachrome fall regalia. She’s confused by Jackson’s display of competence, by his willingness to exert himself on a stranger’s behalf, though perhaps it’s easier for him with a stranger than with someone he knows and purportedly loves. That aside, she marks the fact that the driver, Sonny, was no ghost, and thus it follows that he and his friend Ralph were not ghosts on the day she
saw them in the corridor…unless her understanding of ghosts is incomplete, which it well may be. Knowing that the house is haunted has never bothered her, it’s never felt threatening. Yet now that something truly strange has happened, something beyond her capacity to name, she feels a cold spot of fear under her collar bone. She opens her notebook, makes a squiggle with the pen, tries to organize her thoughts, intending to write something that will put Sonny and Ralph, Jackson, the world and her place in it into a comprehensible light. A few words that will unsnarl the knot her life has tied in creation. It almost seems possible. After five or ten minutes, she starts the coffee, washes some dishes left in the sink, mindless puttering that serves to chase her uneasiness.
Jackson’s back in about an hour. His flip-flops smack the linoleum, striking sharp reverberations from the high yellow ceilings. He tosses the car keys on the counter next to the sink, says, “The guy died,” and goes to pour a cup of coffee.
“Was he fiftyish? The man who died?” asks Sanie. “Leathery and tanned? Frizzy hair?”
“His tan had gotten a little chalky by the time I arrived,” Jackson says, sitting beside Sanie. “But that basically describes him. Did you know him?”
“I think I saw them in town once. Was he dead when you got there?”
“Yeah.” He stirs sugar into his coffee. “You shouldn’t let people, strangers, in the house.”
Sanie gives him a what-the-fuck look.
“The driver,” he says. “You shouldn’t have let him inside. He could have been a murderer…or a rapist.”
“If he’d been a murderer, not inviting him in wouldn’t have stopped him.”
“Do you think we should get a chain for the door.”
“You want me to pick one up in town?”
She says this sharply, able to restrain her anger, but not to hide it, and, without raising his voice, in a controlled, rational, slightly weary tone, he says, “What would be the point? We’re only going to be here another month or so. Don’t you think you can be a bit more circumspect? Not invite anyone and everyone in?”
She knows if he had officially suggested that she race into town and buy a chain, he’d be controlled, rational, and slightly weary in support of the idea. His contrariness is designed to make her feel incompetent, though by any practical standard she’s infinitely more competent than he. She can do minor repairs on the car, the washing machine; she can deal with the bank, the credit cards, the telephone, all the minor functionaries that plague their lives. He has no need to be competent—he has an entourage of one to handle his affairs. “Anyone and everyone?” she’d like to say. “Have you counted the number of people who’ve stopped by since we’ve been here? I have. There’ve been four. Someone asking for directions, two kids from Furman selling Jesus door-to-door, and Sonny. We’re lucky to be alive, we’re so besieged by predators.”
But she keeps her mouth shut. When it comes right down to it, she does not want to fight, even though she has recognized that she’s already in one. She can’t abide the idea of a confrontation, and all she wants at the moment is for him to lock himself in his study and leave her alone to collect her thoughts and try to make something of her day. As if he senses this, he says, “Let’s drive into town and get breakfast.”
“Shouldn’t you study?”
“My morning’s shot.” He stretches luxuriantly. “It’d do me more good to take a few hours off. Re-energize. It’ll be nice to spend some time with you for a change.”
Breakfast is at Nellie’s West Side Diner, which seems an incongruous name, because Edenburg isn’t big enough to have sides, a knot of streets and houses that a strong thrower could heave a baseball across in three or four tosses. The diner is across from a silo and a freight yard, and is patronized that morning by a couple of short haul truckers, farmers lollygagging over coffee, and, in the booth adjoining Sanie-and-Jackson’s, four prosperous-looking old men who speak unintelligibly, talking over one another, like a crowd of extras in a movie who have been instructed to mutter ominously, repeating a phrase like “peas and carrots, peas and carrots…” so as to simulate the rumorous muttering of a mob preparing to break into a jail and hang a rustler. Jackson’s in an effusive mood, talking about his high school days, interrupted now and then by their unduly sunny waitress, Marie (“Y’all got everything you need? Well, just holler!”), telling how he won the ninth grade history medal, an event that, in Sanie’s estimation, likely solidified his reputation as a geek and caused the rest of his high school career to be miserable, and about his various friends, how they became successful, unlike his various enemies, all of whom remain stuck in Edenburg and environs. Sanie gives stock responses, devotes herself to eating her eggs, knowing if she doesn’t, her lack of appetite will inspire a further examination of her health, her behavior. As she’s polishing off her orange juice, she notices once again the drastic slide of Jackson’s appearance and has a moment of illumination. This trip back to Edenburg, it’s Jackson’s Rayfield move. He’s pulling back from life, giving in to the tension of his elastic band, and he’s never going to leave again. Why, she asks herself, hasn’t she understood this before? She’s been too self-absorbed, she thinks. Too wrapped up in her side of the marital issues to look closely at him. His deteriorating physical appearance is not the only evidence that supports the theory. A regional accent has begun creeping back into his speech, putting cracks into its paved-over neutrality. He’s dropping his Gs, using elisions and contractions. His moods are less even. He’s acquired disgusting habits like spitting and fondling his balls in public. An easy explanation for all this would be that he’s studying for the bar. He’s tired, stressed-out, he’s let himself go. But that cold spot under Sanie’s collarbone has redefined itself, and she knows, she knows!, that Jackson, like Rayfield, is on a slipping-down path from which there will be no turning. The image of Jackson, naked and many-hatted, walking into Snade’s, amuses her, but what that signals, distraction and madness (despite Will’s testimony, she believes Rayfield was mad), is not amusing in the least, and when Jackson breaks his monologue to have a swallow of coffee, instead of giving the matter due consideration, instead of permitting time and caution to overrule her instincts, she blurts out, “I think we should go back to Chapel Hill.”
For once, Jackson is stunned.
“I’ll answer the phone,” she says. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re not disturbed.”
Poise restored, Jackson takes a bite of egg. “Going home now would be a massive disruption. You’ll be back with your friends soon enough.”
“It’s not about that. It’s just I have a feeling…” She falters, wondering how to paint a picture that won’t engage his stubbornness any more than is necessary.
“A feeling. I see. A meteor’s going to hit the house? This is a Psychic Friends thing, is it? You had a bad dream, like Caesar’s wife?”
“Caesar’s wife was right,” she says. “But no, I didn’t have a dream.” She takes a breath, hesitates before releasing it. “I’ve been thinking about leaving you, and I don’t know how much of what I feel is due to this place. I want us to go home and take stock.”
He stares at her, chewing, and then forks up another bite. He gives a sardonic laugh.
“Saving our marriage is a subject for derision?” Sanie asks.
“No.” He draws out the word, as if talking to a child. “I was thinking that you pulling this now is precisely what I needed to help me concentrate.”
“The marriage isn’t important as the bar—that’s what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying, you want to ruin your life? Go ahead. I’m not going to ruin mine on the slim chance that you’re going to do something crazy.”
The arrogance of his response, the notion that she’d be ruining her life by leaving him, by abandoning the SUV and the Lexus, the house, all the material perks of the marriage (she knows that’s how he views it), and what’s more, his arrogance in assuming that she won’t leave
…It’s unbelievable. She’s trying to save him from himself, and this is how he reacts? Okay, her first thought is to save herself, but she doesn’t want to leave him here to become an unstable old man surrounded by ghosts. At least she’s looking out for him. At least that much of her loyalty hasn’t been neutralized by years of servitude.
“Are you having an affair?” he asks. “Is that why you want to go home.”
Sanie’s “no” sounds to her own ears a lot like his. It’s how she might deny something when she’s lying, and she supposes that she is, in truth, lying—she’s been betraying Jackson in her mind for years, and her most recent betrayal has acquired a powerful value.
“This is such a sudden change in attitude,” he says. “It’s like you’ve received bad news and need to get back to repair the damage.”
“Don’t be silly!”
“In light of what happened this morning, I don’t think it’s silly of me to wonder about another man.” He dabs his mouth with a napkin. “I suppose it’s not out of the question that you could be trying to end an affair by scurrying back to Chapel Hill.”
“Right,” she says. “You nailed it. I’m sleeping with our waitress. Cute little, sunny Marie. It’s a different thing for me, but so far I’m not hating it.”
Apparently hypersensitive to the sound of her name, Marie, who’s standing three booths down, starts toward them, snagging the coffee as she comes. Sanie attempts to wave her off, but there’s no stopping Marie once her wait-staff reflexes are triggered, and they endure another round of smiles and mug-freshenings.
As he always does, Jackson has turned things around on her, changed the subject and put her on the defensive, and he’s preparing to turn it around on her some more, chewing over a new accusation or a follow-up insult, when one of the men from the adjoining booth, a beaming old fart in corduroy trousers and a plaid wool shirt and a gold belt buckle the size of the badge on a county fair ribbon, heaves up beside them and says, “Jackson Bullard? It’s not you, is it?”
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