“There hasn’t been any quarrel yet, and if there is to be one, it does not concern you! Now, please leave. I’ve asked politely.”
“If this is your idea of polite, I’d sure hate to see rude.”
Alan emitted a little bark of laughter. Reverend Johnson found himself at a loss for words. He glared at the woman, and she glared right back.
Finally it was Judy who dealt with the impasse. “I’m sorry if we don’t seem hospitable, Miss… Turney, isn’t it?”
The woman nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes off Reverend Johnson.
“But this is a family situation here. We need to speak to my son privately.”
“It looks to me,” the woman said, “like you mean to turn him out on the street—and he’s just thrown his arm out of joint, he’s got a possible concussion, and his car is back at Navaho House on the other side of town. And you’re suggesting that I drive off and leave him alone in this situation?”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” Judy said. “Because this is none of your damn business.”
“I know what it is,” Alan blurted out. “Someone from New Ravensburg called you, didn’t they? They told you about the DNA tests, right? Right?”
“Alan,” said Judy, “we’re not discussing this out here in the cold.”
“I don’t know, it looks like we are. All my stuff is out here, and Grandpa says I can’t come in the house.”
“We’ve put your things outside to teach you an object lesson, Alan.”
“What you mean is, I’ve got to stop helping Jim Cottonwood, right?”
“Alan,” Judy said through gritted teeth. “Not—out—here.”
“God, the two of you, it’s like—” Alan shook his head. Then, with a grin of devilish triumph, “Anyhow, guys, it’s too late.”
“How’s that?” said Judy.
“The results are in. And Cottonwood was right all along. There’s no possible way he could be my father. There’s not even like a one in six million chance. Which means that you had to be lying. You had that man sent away to prison all this time knowing he hadn’t done what he was sentenced for.”
“You little shit,” Judy said.
“So where do the rest of my genes come from, Mom? Got any ideas?”
“Get out of here,” Reverend Johnson commanded.
“You know what the final result might be, don’t you? You might go to prison. For perjury. That’s what the lawyer told me I should be aware of.”
“Out of here! Or, by God, I’ll—” Reverend Johnson raised his fist.
Alan turned to the Turney woman and asked her if she would help him get his belongings back to Navaho House. She said she thought that was a good idea and insisted on carrying the suitcases to the car herself.
Alan turned back to face Reverend Johnson. “You got my computer in there, too. I want that.”
“Your computer!”
“I bought it with my own damned money.”
“The parish mailing list is in that computer. It stays right where it is.”
“There’s thirty names on your damned mailing list. I’ll send you a printout any time you like. The computer is mine, I paid for it.”
Reverend Johnson stood in the doorway and glowered. Judy put her hand on his shoulder and whispered into his ear, “Do you want me to go get his computer?”
He shook off her hand. “I’ll get it. You stay here. Don’t let him in the house.”
Anger is an intoxicant. It can make us do things we would never do in a sober and reflective frame of mind. We strike out without regard to the consequences. Reverend Johnson was seething with anger, and when he saw the screen of the boy’s Wang computer, sitting there on its white Formica ledge, it was as though its blank screen were the boy’s face—smug and silent, with all its nasty little secrets packed inside. He ripped the electric cord from the wall, but he found the thing was still tethered to another piece of equipment from which it was not as easily disconnected. That was the last straw. He tightened his right hand into a fist and gave it a whack.
The screen disintegrated like a shattered light bulb, littering the Formica shelf and the rug beneath with splinters of thin gray glass. Reverend Johnson didn’t even notice the blood on the back of his hand, or feel the pain, as he grasped the screen and yanked it free of its moorings.
At the head of the stairs he stopped to catch his breath. He realized that he was beside himself. He went down the stairs with a special caution, placing his feet precisely on the center of each step. But once he reached the front door and saw Alan, the same fierce anger took control of him again, and he lifted the shattered computer to chest level and hurled it into the snow.
Alan went over to the computer and knelt beside it. Was he going to shed tears over it? Reverend Johnson wondered.
With his free hand Alan reached down and picked, from within the broken screen, a shard of glass. “You seem to have cut yourself, Grandpa. Look”—he held the shard up—“there’s blood.”
Reverend Johnson looked down at his hand and realized that Alan was right. Droplets of blood were trickling down from the cut on the back of his hand and curling round the knuckles to drip onto the fabric of his pants.
“That was a dumb thing to do. Really dumb.” Alan was removing other shards of glass inside the broken screen and placing them in a handkerchief.
The Turney woman had carried all his other things to the car, where she was waiting for him. She honked, and called to Alan: “Come on, Alan. It’s broken, just leave it where it is.”
“Right, right!” Alan called back, getting up from his knees. He placed the handkerchief wrapped about the shards of glass in the pocket of his coat.
“And where do you think you’re going with her?” Reverend Johnson demanded.
Alan laughed. “It pisses you off, doesn’t it, that I’ve got anywhere to go at all? You thought you really had me over a barrel. Instead”—he patted the pocket of his jacket—“it’s just the other way around. Maybe—huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, that’s par for the course.”
The boy turned on his heel and walked toward the car, and Reverend Johnson went back in the house with a frustrated sense that the boy had somehow got the better of him even as he was being evicted.
Judy helped with the cut on his hand, which wasn’t as bad as he’d feared at first. She washed it and sprayed on antiseptic, and then bandaged it with the last two Band-Aids left in the medicine cabinet.
17
When Diana got back to Navaho House and the Johnson boy was still with her, Louise Cottonwood didn’t raise an eyebrow. When the boy had shown up at the back door two years ago, looking like a second grader inflated to grown-up size, she’d had a feeling that, whatever kind of fool he turned out to be, he was going to complicate himself into her life and Jim’s and the Turneys’ till he was lodged there solid. He had that kind of needy look in his eyes that’s worse than love, because with love it’s not so hard to turn the other way. People get over love fast enough, and if they don’t, it’s because they enjoy their broken hearts. But this boy wasn’t after love, not in particular. He just wanted any scrap of attention he could get—a scratch behind the ears, five minutes with a cup of coffee, or just someone remembering his name. How do you say no to that kind of pure mongrel hunger?
So here he was back again, a bad penny, and it hadn’t even taken that much persuading on Diana’s part for Mrs. Turney to agree to let the boy move in—“temporarily,” of course—to one of the empty upstairs rooms on the corridor alongside her own. So while Diana and Mrs. Turney clucked over the boy at the kitchen table and tried to find out what had got his grandpa so fired up, Louise was getting the room ready. The mattress had a musty smell, that couldn’t be helped. But before she made up the bed, she tucked a plastic sheet round the mattress to keep the damp out of the bedclothes. The old ladies always complained that the plastic sheets were crinkly and uncomfortable, bu
t the ones who complained the most were also the ones who were the worst bed-wetters.
When the bed was made, she cleared out two drawers of the dresser that were used for storing the old ladies’ surplus flannel nighties. Then she unlocked the closet door and pondered whether there was time to clear out all the stuff drying there before the boy moved in. There looked to be about two boxfuls, maybe two and a half, and she knew where there were some good-sized boxes in a room down the hall, from when she’d unpacked the presents that Mrs. Boise’s nieces in Fargo had sent all the old ladies at Christmas. Every one wrapped in its own box with a tag for the name to go on. What a commotion that caused. Just when you think the world’s rotten down to the core, somebody comes along and does something as nice as that.
When she came back with the empty boxes to the room she was getting ready, there was Diana standing in the doorway of the unlocked closet. What a nose the woman had for things that didn’t concern her. “Louise,” Diana said, “I thought I’d come up and help.”
“Thanks just the same, but I got the bed made. I’ll just get this closet cleared out and he can move in.”
“I didn’t know you were an herbalist, Louise.”
She used the same wheedling tone of voice she’d used on the drive to the Shop ‘n’ Save. It was probably the way she talked to the kids in her classes. Louise wondered if it got on their nerves the same way.
“It’s just some stuff that’s drying out,” Louise said. “The chimney’s right behind there, so things dry out nice in the closet. You wouldn’t think so, as damp as this bedroom gets. That’s one reason, the damp, that I thought having the closet open might be a good idea. Dry the place out. The stuff that’s been in the closet is good and dry now, so I can load it all in these boxes, and we’ll be squared away.”
“I’ll help,” Diana insisted. “I’ll take them down from the hook, and you can pack them in the boxes. Or did you want to wrap them in tissue first?”
Louise shook her head. “No, they don’t need tissues.”
“It has such a unique scent, Louise. It’s some kind of root, isn’t it?”
Louise nodded. “Yeah, it’s a root.”
“Oh, you are a tease, Louise. What is it called?”
“Honestly, Miss Turney, I don’t remember. Some foreign name. I don’t grow it for myself.”
“Well, what is it used for?”
“You’d have to ask the doctor at the rez about that, Miss Turney.”
“Aha! It’s some kind of tribal secret, is it? Have I poked my nose where it doesn’t belong?”
Louise let Diana figure out the answer to that from her silence. After the lesson had time to sink in, she said, “Well, let’s get it into these boxes, shall we?”
When the first box was packed, Louise carted it off to her own room, so that Diana would have a chance to snitch as much of the stuff as she had a mind to. It was obvious she was going to anyhow, one way or another, so why not make it easy for her? It probably wouldn’t do her any real harm, unless she brewed up a whole quart of tea and drank it down all at once.
She didn’t know what exact purpose Jim used it for in his sweat lodge, and he probably didn’t either. It was just a recipe he’d got hold of, and she’d had to do the shopping for him. And in this case the growing as well, though it pretty much took care of itself till it was big enough to dig up. The soil suited it, and no bug would touch it.
One thing Jim had said was that a little of the stuff boiled up and drunk hot would work for constipation problems. When Louise had tried to test that out on the old ladies, only one of them would take more than the tiniest sip. It brewed up into a real lip-puckerer. But the cup Mrs. Corby drank down had worked like Drāno. So if Diana took what wasn’t hers and decided to test it out, she might get an unexpected lesson in tribal medicine.
And it would serve her right.
18
February is nature’s prison. People slow down, and stay put, and brood. Seeds and roots are sheathed in ice. Life has no choice but to hoard its resources and serve its time, counting the days to parole. Not that there’s any hope that March will be better. It will probably be worse, with sleet and the year’s worst blizzards. But the numbness begins to depart sometime in March. The blood quickens and hungers stir. The ravenous deer forage through the woods. Sudden thaws flood basements and slick the roads with ice. Tempers unravel. Business picks up at the bars, and the fights in the parking lots are more serious. March is waking up with a hangover and wishing you were back in the blackout and oblivion of February.
All through February Diana had marked time, doing the absolute bare minimum required to keep things on an even keel. She got meals cooked on time. Everyone had clean socks and underwear. Beyond that it was as though she were on strike. She let Kelly watch the trashiest cartoon shows on TV, or anything else that would keep her quiet. She started to rely on the microwave. She would notice cobwebs in odd corners and do nothing about them. She didn’t bother making her own bed in the morning. Instead, she just closed the bedroom door. She put off changing the water filter until you could taste rust in the tap water and the bathtub started to turn orange.
Love got put on hold. If that’s what it was between her and the Johnson boy and not simply the worst embarrassment of her adult life. A teenager. It was hard to believe. In fact, for a while she’d almost convinced herself that it hadn’t happened, or that she’d mislabeled her feelings and confused a natural concern for his well-being with love. A maternal solicitude. Except that each time she’d driven the icy roads to see him again—he was still squatting at Navaho House—she’d felt like there was a cyclone of hormones whirling through her bloodstream. A hollow feeling in her chest, sweats and palpitations. Sudden tears over any dumb song on the radio. And her tongue, her whole mouth, so hungry for the taste of him that it was worse than dieting. Then, when she’d got there, and neither her mother nor Louise had any idea where he might have gone off to (“Alan? I don’t know. Isn’t he in his room?”), the devastating disappointment. The long wait, the simmering anger, and finally, on the long drive back home, with Kelly whining every mile of the way, the sheer humiliation of it.
She was certain he must be trying to avoid her. Except she’d never given advance notice of her visits. Certain that her very hunger had driven him from her. He was just a teenager, after all. A virgin, most likely. He had that kind of shyness. A full month went by without her once seeing him, but she had only to close her eyes and she could summon his face, the gray eyes, the tentative smile, the pallor of the skin—and the blood speckling the snow, like a Kirlian photograph, his aura made visible.
Early in March, during a window of opportunity when the plows and the salt and a brief thaw made most of the main roads reasonably drivable, Carl announced that he’d arranged to spend the weekend with Janet in the facility her prison provided for spousal visits. He would take Kelly with him, and Diana could have the weekend to herself. She had forgotten what a blessing a weekend could be, its promise of freedom from the daily grind, with every Friday or Saturday night a New Year’s Eve in miniature. Just the prospect of a trip into the Twin Cities was such a tonic that she made her first entry in the appointment book that had come in the mail as a Christmas present from Brenda Zweig. TO DO she wrote in large block letters on the page facing the frowning marble face of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
Then, momentarily, she was stymied. Not that she didn’t have plans already laid out for what she meant to do, but those plans did not need to be set down in so many words: get drunk, get laid, pig out, in no particular order of preference. Then she remembered the plastic bag of dried roots she’d taken from Navaho House. She’d hoped that Brenda might be able to say what they were, and what they did, at a glance, but Brenda was still basking in San Miguel. Maybe a visit to the university library might solve the problem, or she could see if there was some botanical whiz at the Natural History Museum who might know—though probably not on a weekend.
“Roots?�
�� she wrote at the top of the list, and then, as though loosened by a spritz of WD-40, the worthy purposes stacked up into a column of respectable length:
Roots?
ACoA (8pm meeting)
Bookstore:
Freddie the Detective
Bingo Palace (for Alan)
Secret Survivors (for Janet)
Jojoba
Toenail clippers
Bloodstains on coat?
Check oil in car!
Extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar
At D & R Auto Service in New Ravensburg, she had the pleasant surprise of finding out, from Ruben, that Carl had checked the oil the last time he’d borrowed her car, put in two quarts, and never even mentioned it to her. Typical of a man to be more attuned to the needs of machinery than of other people. But she must, in any case, remember to thank him.
She turned the trip odometer back to zero and checked her watch. The button that controlled the display had got stuck on the 0-to-24 system just after she’d moved back home, and she still had to do the arithmetic: 15:45 seemed meaningless as a time of day; 15 minus 12—it was 3:45, so for all her rushing around, she wouldn’t get into the Cities before dark. There’d be an hour of night driving on the throughway at rush hour. On the other hand, she’d have time to check into a motel before the ACoA meeting.
It had been a bright morning and early afternoon, but by the time she was on her way the sky was a solid gray, the air misty, the snowy fields on each side of the road the same dreary gray as the sky, flat and shadowless. All the northbound traffic had their headlights on, and Diana took the hint. Her car, being an off-white, achieved near-invisibility in such weather if the lights weren’t on. She deliberately eased back on the gas pedal. In weather like this you can’t be too careful.
Even so she almost had an accident as she turned up the sharply curving entry ramp to Route 371. Because of the snow banked on either side of the road she didn’t see the carcass of the deer until she’d nearly driven into it. The crows that had gathered, as surprised as Diana, took to the air with caws of indignation. She backed the Camry away from the body without thinking to look in the rearview mirror. Fortunately there was no one close behind her. What to do? The deer was sprawled across the road in such a way that she would have to drive over its front or hind legs to reach 371, or else get out of the car and pull the thing out of her way. The first option was too cruel, the second too dangerous, not to mention messy. The deer’s legs were crushed and bloodied, either from the collision or by other drivers less squeamish than Diana, and the crows had already set to work on its guts.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 10