by Sheri Holman
Wallis slams into Jasper, who has stopped. She hits into him sharply and he grabs her to keep from falling over, holding her tight. Together they stare down the tracks to see if they’ve outrun it, whatever it was, but instead, like her mother, find themselves staring into a stretching darkness that holds only the vibrations of their footfalls. No light. No conductor. Nothing.
Jasper could let go but he doesn’t. “What was it?” she whispers.
“Swamp gas, maybe,” Jasper says, his eyes wide and black. “Lights from the highway. Where is Eddie?”
“You were afraid,” she says. “You are afraid.”
He tries to let her go then, but she doesn’t move, because this night will get them in so much trouble already, why stop now? And so as it must be done, as they both finally know it must be done, he leans forward, and his lips are yeasty, his breath sweet.
He pulls back and she sees the look of dismay on his face. Still she doesn’t move, but this time he pushes her, hard, and disappears into the funnel of trees toward the swamp and the conductor’s lantern. She is alone with that kiss. The night is still and finished, everything is suspended in that kiss. Slowly she follows, making out in the moonlight a field, a pickup swallowed by kudzu, the wreckage of what had once been a farmhouse, its windows target practice for decades of boys who had brought their dates to this place. Beneath her feet, she feels the vibrations before she hears the whistle, high and plaintive. Into her open bedroom window, when the wind is just right, she sometimes hears this far-off whistle and, as a little girl, she used to imagine a brightly colored train carrying cars full of tigers and elephants off to tented circuses across the country. Now, she can think only of the conductor, and even as she imagines him swinging his light, looking for something that doesn’t exist, the train’s head beam blinds her. She steps out of its way, feeling the shock waves of crashing metal, melting into its own force and noise, oblivion, it’s rackety freight and rattling gondola cars. She had thought to tell the ghost story tonight, but she should have known her father would not allow it. She could never compete with the master.
Ahead she sees her father in the laser of moth flutter down the tracks. He is waiting whole and unhurt on the embankment, knowing what he has set in motion by bringing them here. Jasper walks toward him, his face the carving of a lover’s initials into a tree. Jasper was brought here to feel what he had never felt, and learn what must be feared, and now her father opens his arms; Captain Casket, who has spent the last twenty years of his life teasing young boys with ghost stories and whose idea of seduction is a ball of vanishing light.
Wallis
NEW YORK CITY
3:00 a.m.
Wallis talked as Jeff led her back upstairs. She talked as he stripped her naked and stood her in the crummy freestanding Plexiglas shower in the center of the loft, and continued talking when he climbed in beside her and lathered her hair, digging his fingers into the roots, letting large dollops of lather run down his elbows. She talked while he tilted her chin and rinsed her hair clean and wrapped her in a towel and led her back to the bed. She had never talked this long, naked, in her life. Now, she wonders why not. No one had ever let her, she supposes. That’s not what naked had been about.
“What did your mother do when you got home?” he asks.
“We didn’t get home until after midnight. A few people were still there, which made it worse, I think, because she had to listen to him apologize in that charming way of his and make everything okay.”
Wallis rolls over. Her mother had let her father talk to the drunks who were still there while she excused herself, saying she needed to put Wallis to bed, even though she hadn’t done that for years. She laid out her daughter’s pajamas and Wallis pulled them on, wondering what her mother was going to say, wanting to explain that she had tried to make them come home, but what could she do, she was just a kid? What power did she have to make anyone do anything? She had crawled miserably into bed but her mother had still said nothing, only took down the red hard-shell Samsonite from Wallis’s bedroom closet and began filling it with clothes. That’s when she knew how serious it was and that Mom meant to leave Dad. She would have to spend the rest of her life with her mother alone. She wondered what would become of Jasper. If Mom would put him out like the garbage or if Dad would get him. She wanted to ask but her mouth was too full of having been kissed for the first time and wanting to cry because she knew if they left, it would never happen again. Then they sat in the dark in silence, the two of them, Mom looking out the window, Wallis strobing through the light and the chase and his mouth against hers. She wanted to tell her mother they’d been down at the railroad tracks, that she and her mother had shared something, and she wanted to ask if it had been complicated for her, too. But nothing about Mom invited conversation. It was after two in the morning when the last car pulled out of the driveway. Then her father burst in, in that state of drunk she always liked best but trusted least, past cynical but before morose, when he was just happy and expansive, and he flipped on the light, blinding her, and said, “Wallis, darling, wake up! We’re going on a little ginseng hunt!” Her mother had been waiting until morning but, as usual, her father trumped her. I’ve already packed her bag, Eddie, said Mom, rising stiffly as though she had been waiting for him instead of for the sun to come up. Have a nice trip.
“How did you know?” she asks Jeff. “Why did you show me his card tonight?”
Jeff studies her with red, tired eyes. “I didn’t know tonight was important to you. You have a reputation at the station. I just wanted to see if I could have you, too.”
She’s not mad. Stretched out beside him, she runs her hands along his body, slipping them between his thighs.
“I learned something in the years I spent among suicide bombers,” she tells him. “The boys and girls who are willing to blow up their lives are not the true believers. They are the ones in agonies of doubt. There is always someone with nothing to prove who buckles the belt around them.”
Jeff tilts his head back as she runs her tongue the length of him. “Living out here like this,” she asks, “being with me. Do you believe in anything, Jeff?”
She knows they all want her because she creates the doubt, and doubt is where they all feel safest. She knows why they chose each other tonight and why he is listening to her and she doesn’t feel guilty anymore for taking what she needs. He climbs onto her and bites her neck hard enough to leave a mark. Then he rolls her on top.
“Hold that thought,” she whispers, reaching for his cell phone next to the bed. “I just need to make one quick call.”
Eddie
NEW YORK CITY
3:00 a.m.
You would think by now I would feel something, wouldn’t you, Wallis? Some numbness or tingling or drowsiness? You must have a word with your sponsor—I feel wide awake and more alert than I have in months. It’s dark in here, and muffled, but through the air holes in my lid the smells still circulate. Diesel fuel on the rain, toasted horse chestnuts in Central Park, the blood metallic scent of the penny my neighbor tapes to his record needle to keep it from skipping over a Carmen Cavallaro 78 played on the 1960s console he rescued from the curb last Large Garbage Day. That is one of my favorite underappreciated New York institutions—the ultimate redistribution of wealth, when we might with impunity place on the curb for pickup all of our sluggish refrigerators and cat-clawed couches and hutches and such. Maybe Charles will come home tomorrow and instead of calling the funeral parlor, he’ll get the doorman to help load my coffin onto the freight elevator and they’ll just leave me out on the street for Large Garbage Day. I will end up scavenged for some dorm room at NYU.
I have a confession to make. Charles phoned about an hour ago. I thought it might be you and I opened the lid and climbed out and checked my caller ID. Since then I haven’t been able to get it back, that feeling of wanting to die. I didn’t pick up. I could have. I could have listened to the update on his mother and how he had to phone the insur
ance agency five times to get her preapproved for her surgery. I could have assured him I watered the plants and mailed the birthday card to Ollie and took my medicine when I was supposed to. Instead, I let him leave a message for a dead man. Better that than talking casually about those daily routines we took such comfort in. Which would be worse for him? Wondering if I was already gone when he phoned or having had our nightly conversation in which I forgot to mention this one small thing?
Have you checked your messages, Wallis? Are you on your own ginseng hunt tonight? I close my eyes and see our stories like two fronts passing somewhere over the Brooklyn Bridge, turbulent and electric, causing this rain to fall, this far-off thunder. I see them colliding, yet finding in each other some lovely marriage of sense and larger truth, so that I might with my final breath sigh, Ah, and know, after all this time, that finally we understand each other. But I suppose this is the real ghost story, Wallis. The lonely horror at never knowing if what we put out there for each other will be understood. Or recognized. Or even heard.
Am I just talking to myself? This life, this massive love. Has it all been in my head?
I’ve been thinking of the night of my surprise party—why is that? Remember, we drove all night long and reached the mountain at daybreak. Did you know your mother kicked me out of the house? I don’t think I ever told you. She left me a note in the master bath where I’d find it when I brushed my teeth before bed. It said, I think it might be wise for you to take the children on a holiday. I have some matters to attend to here and I need some time alone. If you ever intend to humiliate me like that again, don’t bother coming back. She signed it, Yours, Ann.
We stopped at the Waffle House at the foothills just as the sun was coming up. There was a woman in a flannel shirt pulling the arm of a slot machine and her baby in its car seat on the table by her ashtray. I remember you complained your neck was stiff from sleeping against the cold window. Jasper ordered orange juice and put two packets of sugar in it. Then we were back in the hearse taking the switchback turns that led along the ravine and beside the river up to Panther Gap, which transported me to the backseat of Tucker Hayes’s car and the pain in my collarbone that aches right now, because of the dampness I suppose. Or maybe because my bones are brussels sprout stalks of tumors these days. I always wondered if that crack allowed a certain malignancy to slip in.
When we finally arrived, the path to my mother’s dogtrot was choked with sumac and briar, but I recognized the rock formation that looked like a calf bending to drink. You complained about having to carry your suitcase up the steep hill—why did we have to park so far away, you grumbled, and I’m tired, I didn’t get any sleep. Jasper said nothing but walked close beside me. My mother’s yard was barely distinguishable from the path, all blown soldier weed and sorrel with alopecia of anthill, but the house was still standing, listing and reproachful like it had been waiting for me all these years, resigned to the fact I’d never come.
The spare key was still hidden on top of the windowsill and I threw open the door to the front parlor to reveal a study in animal entropy: muddy footprints of vermin across downed drapes, spilled candle ends, cushions dragged into the beginning of some inhuman pattern. One by one we walked through the rooms, finding in each traces of interrupted industry, whether it was the half-spun spiderwebs at the ceiling corners or the red-checkered cookbook you found under the kitchen table, abandoned, on its way to who-knows-what nest when its weight overwhelmed its worth. You reached for the light switch but there was no electricity. The bent lead pipe still channeled water into the sink and with no faucet to turn it off, stars of green moss had filled the basin. In the pantry, we found a black raisin carpet of droppings, the flour bin knocked over, and the cursive mandala of trails of tails, years’ worth of petty crime.
We can’t stay here, kids, I said, or I should have said. It’s too far gone.
With a little work, Jasper answered, we can bring it back.
You, Wallis, were your mother’s child. You knew this place was unreclaimable, but you fell to work anyway. I handed you a bucket and a dry-rotted mop and you stepped across the breezeway to the bedroom. Inside I could see it was as it had always been. My mother’s waist-high chestnut dresser stood against the interior wall, pegs along the exterior, and the iron bedstead, where I’d recuperated all those years ago, below the transom window. I thought of your girlhood and how, when you had a little flu, you would convalesce in your pink shag-carpeted, poster-hung bedroom. You’d been brought up with so much clutter and diffusion. Safer, if one dreams of movie stars, to hang their faces on a wall than to carry all your yearning on the inside, as we did. And yet there was something so spare and elemental about this room in which my mother and I had slept, as if it had been scoured with stone. I could breathe here. Why had I waited so long, I wondered, to return?
Jasper was shaking a rusted metal can of Bon Ami into the sink. He had taken off his shirt and his back ran with sweat as he scrubbed the green stains. You were more than halfway done, the floor in the bedroom where you mopped dark, like a phase of the moon. Standing in the breezeway, I was an eight-year-old boy again. Tucker Hayes and I were about to walk into the woods, leaving them all behind. He turned and asked, as if I might provide an answer, why God created a species that considered itself grown only when it left the place it most longed to be?
We had driven all night and I was home.
Wallis
PANTHER GAP
1980
The sun has set on a long day of work. Eddie will sleep on the sofa in the front parlor, Jasper will take the back porch in the open air. Wallis is given her grandmother’s room and the bed. They dragged the mattress out back and beat it with branches until the dust flew out. Her father ripped a handful of spiky, purple pennyroyal from the overgrown garden and rubbed it front and back. This should kill any bedbugs, he said, but for God’s sake if you get bit in the night, sleep on the floor. I don’t want to hear it from your mother.
Wallis doesn’t want to think about Mom. She tries not to picture Ann waking alone to a house full of dirty glasses and crumbs in the carpet. She is moving slowly, emptying ashtrays and half-full beer bottles into a bucket. By lunch she has discovered the scuffs in her grass and the snapped necks of peonies. Stooping in the late afternoon sun, she picks the cigarette butts from her mulch.
For dinner they ate what her father had shoveled into a cooler from the refrigerator before they left. They rolled slices of bologna, fished bread-and-butter pickles out of the jar, and dug their fingers into marshmallow spread. Eddie had brought two six-packs of beer from the party. Sitting on the back porch, he passed a can to Jasper without offering her one. Instead, he taught her how to dial up the wick of a lantern and light it. Now Wallis sits between them, sifting through an old dovetailed wooden box, Cora’s first-aid kit, her father told her. Instead of Band-Aids and aspirin, it is full of dried burrs, spiny pods, and cork-stoppered glass bottles that conjure words like tincture and unguent and salve. By lantern light, Wallis carefully turns the brittle pages of Cora’s herbal, trying to match the plants she finds inside. She had immediately searched out ginseng, but the entry showed only a simple line drawing of leaves and berries—nothing, from what she could see, worth riding all night for. Barely a day since Jasper taunted her with her grandmother and now they are in her house, lighting her lamps, reading her books, and watching her moon rise.
It wouldn’t take much, Jasper is speaking excitedly with her dad about wiring the cabin for electricity. He sketches a diagram on the endpaper of the red-checkered cookbook, connecting the singular rooms to a fuse box outside the kitchen. Her father is skeptical but doesn’t say no. Tomorrow we’ll drive into town for supplies, Eddie says. How long will we be staying here? Wallis wonders. Why have we come?
Mom has cleaned the house and is sitting on the sofa in the dark, waiting for someone to call and tell her they’re safe. Wallis wonders if she can consider herself kidnapped.
“I’m going to bed,
” she says, to test how far she’s allowed to go. Her father looks up.
“Sleep tight.”
She takes up her lamp, her box, and book, and walks the breezeway to her grandmother’s bedroom. It is the only room in the house with relics of Cora’s old age. A stained 1960’s purple-and-green polyester quilt on the bed. Ben-Gay and Rose Milk next to the Bible on the dresser. A pair of translucent gray reading glasses, crusted with dust at the hinges. Her father had kept them moving all day; no sooner was Wallis finished mopping than he had them beneath the roof beam of the springhouse, lifting it back into the support grooves. They pulled down fallen curtains and washed them in the spring, spreading them on rocks to dry. They restacked firewood. Through it all, Wallis looked for signs of her grandmother’s alleged crime, but she has found none. Now, with the privacy to explore the bedroom, she hopes for something more.
She sets the lamp on the dresser and tugs open the solid, heavy top drawer.
The first layer of her grandmother’s wardrobe is polyester to match the bedspread. Zip-up-the-front paisley housedresses and elastic-waist slacks. Clothes she would see on any old lady comparing the prices of canned peas at the grocery store at home. This is not the grandmother Wallis wants to know, so she roots swiftly down to the garments below, older cotton and linen pieces that smell of cedar when she shakes them out. Even after they are washed, she suspects the discolored folds will show. She holds up a faded green dress that looks to be about her size, and a long white rag of nightgown. It is low at the collar with three bone buttons. The hem is stained gray from years of being dragged along the ground.