Andi scraped a pale lock of hair behind her ear and said, “I asked her where I could see old copies of the local paper. There should be something in them—if this is where I’m from.”
Mary felt her heart sink. “It’s kind of a long shot, Andi, you being from here.”
Andi shrugged. “If he’s from here, I could be.”
“The newspaper would have covered a disappearance, that’s for sure. Only—”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Mary was thinking that if this were Andi’s home, her return would create a stir, if not an actual sensation. She didn’t want to point out that the woman inside assisting tourists, who was probably well informed, hadn’t recognized her.
Neither did the postmaster.
Neither did the elderly couple who ran a general store.
Neither did the librarian who led Mary and Andi to a periodical nook. By the time Mary had looked at a few months-old newspapers, Mary was certain that the “incident” had not happened in Salmon. She believed Andi must have thought so too, for her inspection of the newspapers, slow and intent at first, grew progressively more quick and careless. But at one point, she stopped and said, “A girl died here.”
Mary did not want to point out, callously, that a number of girls might have died here. She looked over Andi’s shoulder and saw what she meant. The girl had drowned in one of the rapids on the Salmon several years ago. There was a picture of her, taken with a group of other rafters. Or kayakers, maybe. A couple of these figured in the picture. The girl was young. Mary did not want to press the paper for details.
By the time they’d left the library, it was clear that Salmon wasn’t Andi’s home. And although she was disappointed—for who, having had their home wrenched from them by a force far worse than a hurricane, wouldn’t be hungry to get it back?—Andi still wasn’t giving up. Salmon might never have been her home, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t his.
Now they were drinking ice-cream sodas in tall ribbed glasses as they sat at the counter of an old-fashioned drugstore which, Mary guessed, would do a good business in summer. Mary liked the drugstore because it really was old, and not some newfangled place trying to look old. The marble of the counter, instead of being a raw, glaring white, had a buffed and porous look to it, stained like weak tea. The chairs and tables were clearly old, with the same signs of wear and tear.
And the sodas were marvelous. The old man, who went so well with the drugstore and who had made the sodas, was coming along behind his glass display cases now.
“Anything else, girls?”
Mary started to give an automatic no but was interrupted by Andi.
“I guess you’ve had this business for a long time, haven’t you?”
“ ’Deed I have, young lady. Longer’n I sometimes care to think about. And where might you be from?”
“Santa Fe,” said Andi, and hurried on. “You must know just about everybody.”
“Well, I hope I cured more’n I killed.” His laugh was wheezy.
Andi joined him in a polite laugh. “The reason I ask is, we got kin around here—”
Kin? We got “kin”? Mary just looked at the marble counter and shook her head.
“—but I’m not sure where they live.”
The pharmacist had picked a Coca-Cola glass out of sudsy water and started to dry it. “What’s your relatives’ name?”
Here, of course, Andi was stumped. All she could do was offer “C. R. Crick.”
He held the glass to the light, lowered it, and started in polishing. “Can’t say there’s no one lives here by that name, only I never heard it. Where’s he live?”
As if an address were written on it, Andi read from a now-crumpled piece of paper the Forest Service lady had given her. “ ‘Box Ninety-one, Salmon, Idaho. That’s all.”
That was clever of her, thought Mary. Not committing herself to a certain street. But it was still useless; she was giving a name that was pure fiction in the first place. But she had to have something to which she could attach her description. For all the good it did her.
“Easiest thing to do is try the post office.”
“We did. They said the box number must be wrong; there wasn’t such a one.”
Andi repeated Patsy Orr’s description of “Daddy,” which was also a description of the driver who had picked her up, adding a more vibrant picture of the dark hair and blue eyes, eyes that got bluer with each telling. But it was all she had to go on, so Mary made no comment.
Having polished the Coca-Cola glass to a diamond shine, he set it down, pulled out another. “Well, now, that description, that could fit half a dozen fellas in Salmon I know of.”
“Who? Where do they live?” Andi had the stub of a pencil out and was smoothing the piece of paper out to write on.
“Whoa, now, little girl! You’re not gonna try chasin’ down each one of these men?” His shaking hand set down the glass. “Ain’t one of ’em named Crick, I promise you that.”
“Well, we might be mistaken in the name,” said Andi.
The old man was not also an old fool; now he was suspicious. No matter they were merely two “little girls,” he was still suspicious. “Don’t have much on this fella, do you? Now he ain’t even got a name.”
For once, Andi was silenced. Mary helped out, saying, “It’s someone our mom’s trying to trace; it’s really important to her; we don’t have much information, that’s true.” Mary marveled how Andi’s glibness had spilled over onto her.
He resumed his glass polishing. “Tell you what. You want to talk to a man named Reuel, lives at the trailer park. He takes care of the town dump. ’Cept these days we call it the landfill. He’d probably be there now, for it’s open weekends, closed on Mondays. You girls got transportation?”
“Yes,” said Mary. “We’re with Mom.”
He nodded. “Here, I’ll draw you how to get there, to the dump.” He made a rough sketch of the part of town they were in and the roads they’d have to take. “Reuel knows just about everything goes on. And surely knows everybody.”
“Thanks very much,” said Andi sweetly. “That’s the best ice-cream soda I ever drank.”
When Mary started to put down three dollar bills, he waved the money away. “Ah, forget it, girls. Call it a welcome to Salmon, and have a nice stay.”
26
Five miles outside of Salmon proper they found the town dump. The road they traveled to get there was stony, rutted, and winding. Andi (who said she wanted more experience driving dirt roads) pulled up in a cloud of dust before a high chain-link fence, its big metal gates open, accelerated, shifted too late, and lurched to an unplanned stop. She tried again and popped them through the gate and went grinding up the incline. There was a lot of land and plenty of room for cars to circle. The road itself was a horseshoe, making an easy entrance and exit.
“Look at that,” said Mary, all in a breath.
All along the top of the landfill, up above the area where you could drive in your car, were figures “sculpted” of parts that could only have been salvaged from the town’s trash, a pile of heavy rusted pieces sitting at the far end, probably the raw junk pile from which the sculptures were constructed. In among the cast-iron stoves, the refrigerator doors, and heavy car parts were aluminum pieces: parts of bumpers, grilles, hubcaps. It was really amazing, especially since the parts hadn’t just been piled together to form some unnameable object but had been carefully welded to form the unnameable object; whatever the object formed in this manner, it resembled things she’d seen resting on public lands—gracing state capitals, libraries, parks. What a great place to display them, Mary thought, on that beak of higher ground overlooking the big Dumpsters and the curving road. She was about to leave the car to get a better look when she saw a tall man in a leather jacket and black hat coming slowly toward them who didn’t look much like he wanted their company.
What he looked like was one of those state cops whose opaque black sunglasses made you think they saw
everything, saw right through you. He was very tall and had to bend down pretty far to lay his arm across the passenger door and look from one to the other, pushing back the black Texas-sized hat as if its brim might be obscuring something more interesting than them. He had a craggy face, a meaningful face, and gray mixed in with the dark brown hair of his sideburns.
“You need a permit to dump here.” His voice was surprisingly soft and the tone only marginally annoyed as he tapped the windshield. “A sticker.”
“We’re not dumping anything. Are you Mr. Reuel?”
For a moment he didn’t say anything, just frowned, as if the question of his own identity were a puzzle he hadn’t yet mastered. “You old enough to drive this car?”
Andi ran her hands around the steering wheel. “I’m eighteen.”
Mary always marveled at Andi’s lack of hesitation in announcing facts that she didn’t know about herself. One corner of Reuel’s mouth might just have quivered, one corner of a smile been suppressed. “I make that out to be—oh, somewheres around seventeen, sixteen, that right?”
Andi ignored this. “The drugstore owner in town told us a Mr. Reuel maybe could help us locate somebody.”
“Would you mind getting outa the car?”
Mary was alarmed. “Why?”
“I’m getting a crick in my neck’s why.”
His face disappeared from the window; they got out.
He said, “You don’t need to call me mister. Plain Reuel, that’ll do.”
Andi and Mary leaned against the dusty car. Andi said, “We were told you know just about everybody around here.”
“Maybe. Why?”
“We’re looking for someone.”
“And who might that be?”
Andi looked off across the land, empty but for the Dumpsters. “We’re not sure about his name; it could be C. R. Crick.”
“Don’t know anybody by that name.”
Andi ran through the same description she’d given the pharmacist. “Dark brown hair and very, very blue eyes.”
Reuel removed his dark glasses. “Well, that could be me, I guess.” He looked from one to the other. His eyes were an almost electric blue.
“He doesn’t squint,” said Andi.
“I see. Looks like me except for the squint.”
“I didn’t exactly mean that. And he’s shorter than you, maybe five feet ten or eleven.”
Reuel was silent for a moment, considering. “Looks to me like you’re looking for someone you don’t really know what he looks like and don’t really know his name. That makes for a real questionable search.”
“There’s another thing. He was gone from here round about February. He was in Cripple Creek, Colorado. There’s a lot of gambling there.”
“Maybe he was,” Mary put in. “We can’t be absolutely sure about that.”
After another moment of silence—he seemed to be a man who always had to consider what he was about to say—Reuel asked, “Mind telling me what you want to see this fella for?”
“I do mind, as a matter of fact. It’s highly personal.”
Mary thought it would be better not to take this lofty tone with a man she needed help from.
An old coffee-colored truck with a busted muffler was coming up the landfill’s rutted road. With all of its dents and scratches it looked as if it were molting. The truck bed was heaped high with trash and children: a couple of kids sat dangerously atop it. The driver was a woman and the other occupants were children ranging from what looked like just-born upwards to Andi’s age. There wasn’t enough room in the cab to hold everyone, so this accounted for the two little boys in the pickup’s bed.
The woman jumped down and waved at Reuel, who returned the greeting, saying, “Hey, Bonnie,” whereupon she started unloading the bed of the truck, the two boys shoving things her way helpfully. The oldest girl got out and the two younger girls stayed hanging out the windows. One of them held a baby, perhaps a year or two old. Reuel shook his head. “One of them kids’ll get hurt someday, she lets them ride in the back that way.”
Mary frowned. “It must be hard to watch over six kids, though.”
Reuel smiled. “That ain’t all of them. She’s got another three or four at home. Someone told me she’d ten altogether. But I don’t recall ever seeing them all at once. Their name’s Swann. The one driving’s the mother, Bonnie Swann.”
One of the boys who’d climbed down from the truck now stood in the dust, midway between the truck and the three of them. He was grinning.
“Brill, how are ya?” Reuel called out to him. But the child didn’t move and just kept on smiling, as if the grin were plastered in place. He raised his hand to suck his thumb. His most noticeable feature was his bright red hair. When the sun lit it, his head was shiny as a copper bowl.
Mary said, “They all look different, nearly. I mean from each other.”
Reuel had his knife out, scraping down a stick of wood. “That’s probably because they had mostly different daddies.”
Andi flinched at the word. Mary asked, surprised, “Ten different?”
“Well, maybe not that many, but off the top of my head I can think of at least five men Bonnie picked up with. That one there”—Reuel nodded toward the lad with red hair (who was still trying to grin around the thumb he was sucking)—“his father’s the longest she ever lived with a man. Brill must be five, six, maybe. Name’s Brilliance, if you can believe it.”
“What? Why would anyone ever name a poor kid that?”
Reuel grinned back at Brill. “Oh, they all got names like that. Bonnie claims she was trying to name them after what she calls the Seven Virtues.”
“I never heard of it. And even if there is such a thing, Brilliance isn’t one of them.”
“No, I expect not. But I’m thinking Bonnie just couldn’t resist that red hair of his.” Reuel gave Brill a little wave. “There’s the others: Honor, which is pretty straightforward; Tru, that’s for Truth, but of course people think it’s Trudy; Goody’s for Goodness; Happy, for Happiness; Hope, that’s easy. She’s the oldest.”
“Hey, Reuel,” the older boy called out, his face expressionless as a plate. He was walking over to where they were.
“Earl,” said Reuel.
“You find any bicycle wheels yet?” asked Earl, his voice as flat as his face. He had that pale blond hair that’s almost white and eyes that looked lashless.
“No, son, never did. But I’m keeping a lookout.”
Earl blinked his white-lashed lids, did not look at either Andi or Mary, which Mary found disconcerting, coming even from a backward boy. She felt invisible. Then he turned around and walked away like a little robot.
Mary asked softly, “Is there something wrong with him? And that little one, that Brilliance, is still just standing there staring.”
“I’d guess a little something’s wrong with most of them. Though Hope seems sane enough.”
Hope was still unloading trash; it looked as if an entire dining room set was being tossed overboard. She was as dark as her mother and probably pretty underneath the surly mad-at-the-world expression. But then Mary thought she herself might get pretty surly if she had eight or nine young ones to help out with.
“Earl. That’s a pretty ordinary name,” said Andi.
“Yeah. Well, it would be if that’s all it was. Early-to-Rise is his whole name.”
“That’s certainly not one of the Seven Virtues, even if there were seven.” Mary felt irritated by this profligacy on the part of the Swann mother, Bonnie. She shook her head, murmured, “Brilliance, of all the names! You shouldn’t saddle little kids with names like that.” Brill was still sucking his thumb, watching the three of them as if they were interesting as acrobats or jugglers.
“I guess you’re right.” Reuel laughed. “Kids around here call him Brillo Pad.”
“See,” said Mary, justified in her irritation.
The bed of the truck was empty now and Hope climbed up to the passenger seat, but no
t before she shoved the heads of the two girls back from the window. Bonnie walked over to where Brill stood, sucking his thumb and grinning, and yanked him back to the truck to join his brother. Waving again at Reuel, she mounted the driver’s seat and started the engine up.
In silence, the three of them watched the old truck, nearly hidden in clouds of dust, bump off down the road.
Reuel said, “Tell you what: I was about to leave here, go home. Maybe you’d like to talk to me there?”
Andi and Mary exchanged glances.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself; I’m safe. I live in a trailer park outside town. There’s always plenty of people around. And you girls look like you could use a cup of coffee.” He chewed his gum meditatively and added, “Or a beer.”
Mary wasn’t sure whether he was kidding or not, which really exasperated her.
27
There weren’t many things funkier than a trailer park.
Most of the people here were probably retirees, couples sitting out under their awnings, taking advantage of this freakishly hot end-of-May day. They read newspapers, did crossword puzzles, all of the middle-aged or older ladies with glasses dangling from garish gold or colored-bead chains that rode on their bosoms or swung down both sides of their faces. The men seemed for the most part to be wearing boxer shorts, but Mary supposed they were walking shorts. Their short-sleeved shirts were island-inspired, huge bright hibiscus and palm fronds.
Mary didn’t think the land on which Sweet Meadows Trailer Park sat had anything to do with its name. Things seldom did. She remembered vaguely passing it when they’d been driving the other way. Like a lot of trailer parks, it sat back from the road and, except for its sign on the main route, was invisible in the way trailer parks tend to be. They were like little cities, had their small grocery business and laundromat and, since Sweet Meadows was fairly large, even its own made-up little street signs (suggestions of money like Gold Rush Road or Fort Knox Way). They weren’t much more than narrow dirt roads.
Reuel’s silver Airstream trailer was in one of the middle lanes, on Silver Street, but at the end, so it didn’t seem so closed-in as the others. Most of them had the equivalent of a neckerchief-sized lawn on which some of the owners had set out garden ornaments. The little lawn in front of the trailer across from Reuel’s sported a family of ducks and ducklings positioned by the door, and in front of it ran an even narrower lane called Penny Alley. The trailer just below the Airstream was a white one with a fanciful garden of plastic tulips and daisies and petunias. There was a birdbath, on the rim of which was stuck a plastic cardinal. But it was a better setting, as it shared a number of trees with Reuel’s lot, so that between Reuel and the owner of the garden there was a little wood, which made for privacy.
Biting the Moon Page 15