And this was her life. Having been strong it was now compromised, trembling and mortal as the filament in a lightbulb, and she was dependent on no one, and no one depended on her, and she knew the faces of all the cars that lived in her parking lot as though the face of a car were a human face. And all the cars faced out tonight toward the road and were known to her, but one.
God protect you, wherever you are—
She slowed the car. The night was hot. No overhead lamps lighted the asphalt perimeter of the building where she lived.
—and don’t give up on me yet.
* * *
• • •
UNCOMMON, THE CAR of an overnight visitor here. The living units did not fit sofas. She backed in several spaces away from the unfamiliar car, in which a figure sat aslant, inert, reclining. As she moved to get out, the figure in the other vehicle stirred and did likewise. And she had already incautiously got out of her car and was standing with both thoughtless feet on the pavement before the tremor overtook her of carjack, rapist, killer. Women got killed like this in the parking lots outside their own rented front doors, old women whose deaths accomplished nothing but to slake the killer’s need to kill. She and the figure had closed the doors of their respective vehicles, the darkness everywhere. The killer seemed to mirror in the dark her every smallest motion. If she should reach into her backseat to lug out her rice, he would reach into his and pull out his gun or club.
And because the angel of death calls us each individually, and though we might live together we must each die alone, this killer in the dark said her name—not like a bureaucrat from hell droning from a list of the condemned but like someone to whom saying the name was an expenditure he couldn’t afford, and yet he had chosen to pay it anyway. “Is it you, Louisa?” he asked.
In the dark, she said his name.
It was by her saying his name, not by her knowing it and then saying it, but by her mouth itself, her body making the word aloud and the mind hearing it, that she knew she was standing in the parking lot with Tilly. But the name she had called him was Dwight.
* * *
• • •
THEY STOOD IN THE KITCHEN AREA under the hanging wagon wheel festooned with compact fluorescent tubes within frosted lamps that overhung the table. She offered him a sweet tea. He said okay and stood, not drinking it.
The glass perspired in his fist.
She took out her mother’s comb and refolded her hair on top of her head and put the comb back in. Her heart beat like mad. “Why don’t you sit down?” she asked.
“That’s all right.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Isn’t Leonard asleep?”
She felt herself go insane: from a high ledge she took a step into the open air, and the foot came down firmly and rested on nothing. Then she stepped backward onto the earth. She said, “We—” but the words crowded her throat and stopped it.
“Tell me if he’ll mind. I would have called ahead. The computer didn’t have your phone number.”
“Which computer?”
“The web. It even knows how old you are and where you lived before this. Everybody’s on there.”
“You aren’t,” she said. In this way she intended to expose everything—her heart, all of it. She waited to see if he understood.
A flush emerged in his cheeks. All at once it rose straight to the roots of his hair. He made no effort to disguise it.
The silence between them was a torture.
He wore an iron-colored waterproof jacket that whizzed synthetically when he moved; and black jeans, formless, as if he had borrowed them from a larger person; and a belt that went around him one and a half times with jagged holes in it punched at uneven intervals; and running shoes with green soles and neon orange laces. His eyes were hard and very tired and perplexed, and he smelled of himself, a smell of their former bed. His accent, when he spoke, of Nowhere, America. The hair uncannily silver and shining. The strong hands, red and wrinkled and veined, and spots the color of browned meat that ran up the backs of his fingers.
Sometime in the previous century, somebody had fitted into the window an air conditioner now long empty of its refrigerant but with a fan that still worked, and Louisa went to the living area and switched on the machine and opened the window opposite, and an unnatural breeze moved in the place, and she breathed it.
When she turned around he had taken from his inside jacket pocket a worn business envelope with foreign writing in the corner, and she saw in a flash of delayed recognition that he had come to tell her Elroy was dead.
The ice snapped in his glass. He took a letter from the envelope and flattened it and handed it to her. She unfolded a pair of drugstore reading glasses from the utility drawer and read the letter through rapidly without speaking.
She knew herself to be falling in the dark at slow then zooming speeds, through an infinite void to no hard place but only toward further falling in a universe with no one else in it.
When she had finished reading, her hand went to her forehead and gripped. She said, “Oh my God, I’m going to be sick.”
She read the letter again repeating aloud certain phrases mechanically, drilling them into her mind. Stapled to the final page was the picture of a boy in a black ski jacket, the thick hair disarranged. He wore a horrid look of hunger.
“Are you sure this is him?”
“I didn’t look too close,” Tilly whispered. He slouched. He shrugged and squirmed as if the true person she knew were trying to grapple his way out of the false envelope of this old man’s skin. “Anyway, I never saw him. Elroy was supposed to bring him to stay at my place. He flew to Europe to get him. Then he came back empty-handed.”
“He never showed you a picture?”
“He never did.”
“This letter is from six months ago. You done nothing that whole time?”
“I’ve been trying to understand first what it means.”
“What did Elroy say when he got back from Europe?”
“He said, ‘Just, it didn’t work out.’” This fateful datum dangled in the air. Tilly had pronounced it precisely, with no intonation that might betray what he believed to be its secret import, leaving her to read it for herself, to imagine the Elroy she knew saying it, to follow the chain of implications.
“What in the hell happened to the mother?”
“She was supposed to let the boy go, for a visit,” he said with equal deliberate impartiality. She had forgotten this talent of his never to impose on you his own reading of things, instead to leave you free amid your own conclusions, however they frightened you.
“But where has she been all this time? Don’t you have to assume she’s been looking for the boy? And with whatever authorities looking for her, is it really possible they couldn’t find each other? Someone’s lying.”
“All right. Who?”
“It must be someone trying to make Elroy look bad.”
“But who?” If he had his own guesses, he disliked or distrusted them and didn’t show them. They had trapped him, the way his money once had done.
“I don’t think it’s the priest,” she said.
“Is it the mother who’s lying?”
“The mother isn’t even here,” she said to the letter. “Somebody cut the mother out.”
“Let’s go outside,” Tilly said. “I don’t want to wake him up.”
“Somebody’s lying who doesn’t want the mother there. What was it exactly Elroy said when he came back from the trip?”
Dwight told her again.
“He was trying to hide the truth and he wanted you to ask him about it,” she said. “So you could tell him what to do. I think the mother reneged after he got there. But if that was all there was to it he would have said so. That would have taken him off the hook. For some reason he was evading you. Somebody doesn
’t want the mother there. Somebody did something with the mother. But what?”
He stood at the front door with his hands stuck in his jacket pockets. “The mother was always trying to shake him down,” Tilly said. “Silly things he couldn’t afford. She wanted to travel and she wanted him to pay for it. I’ll tell you more outside. I don’t like to be in another man’s house at night when he’s asleep.”
The fan in the air-conditioning unit shivered, and its false breeze made the pages ripple in her hand.
She said, “I can’t bear this picture.”
Dwight watched her with strain.
“It’s the eyes. They’re Elroy’s eyes. They’re the same.”
He came back to the kitchen area and dumped the tea she’d given him and filled the glass from the tap.
“The water’s no good here,” she said. “There’s hexavalent chromium and fracking and fertilizers and I don’t know what else.”
He drank anyhow, looking away.
“Someone transplanted his eyes, or he could be a clone,” she said. “It’s so clear, it’s disgusting. Look.”
“I believe you.”
“But look.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Look.”
“No,” he coughed.
“Look at him.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Look at the picture.”
“This water tastes like the puddle under the drain trap, in the cabinet where you keep the cleaning chemicals.”
“Look at it.”
“I won’t.”
“Yes, you will. You look at it this minute.”
“No.”
“Yes. You go on do it now.”
“No.”
“Here.”
She shoved the page at his hand. He submitted to look at the picture.
He gave it back. In his discriminate eyes she saw reflected the conclusion that had just come to her. A distraught communication was happening. A resifting of the data. Both of them contending with the information, struggling to come to some conclusion other than the one he didn’t want to say.
She said, “You already figured this out.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you believe you know the answer. And you came here to lay all this in front of me. And see if I came to the same answer you did.”
“I want to know how you figure it,” Tilly said. “You always had a better mind.”
“You think the mother hasn’t turned up because Elroy killed her. You think he went there to get the boy, and the mother changed her mind and wouldn’t let the boy go, and Elroy’s beast came out, and he killed her.”
Incredibly, Tilly stood there waiting for her to say something more.
“Please don’t make me be the only one of us who said this out loud when you’re the one who believes it,” she said. “I don’t believe it one bit. I can’t. One of us has to be the one who doesn’t believe it, or we’re being too cruel to him.”
Tilly said, “All right. That’s half of what I thought.”
“It’s your guess. You’re the one who knows him now. All I know is how he always was. He wouldn’t hurt somebody he cared about, would he? What do you mean, ‘half’?”
Tilly asked why she thought he had left the boy in the airport—a question spoken as a statement.
She was unsure. She had heard the airports nowadays were crawling with police armored to the teeth, their fingers on the triggers of machine guns to make the people feel safe.
Tilly’s neck minutely twisted in the chemical light. The thing within him struggling to get out was not knowledge as he seemed to believe, but slander, and it was festering in him, and she could read it, and he could not, and he was asking her to extract it for him. He believed he knew why Elroy had left the boy in the airport.
She said, “You think he was afraid he’d kill the boy too.”
* * *
• • •
EVERYTHING HAD GONE BADLY WRONG. And yet its going wrong was not the end.
Dwight cast his eyes about the place taking in its smallness for the first time and asked if she and Leonard were not living together any longer.
They went to the parking lot and got in her car, and she drove to the reservoir, and they got out and tramped along the dirt trail watching for the night-black cottonmouths that lived in the mud below the embankment. The moon came on them. Among the woods, fog. The blue-white LED floodlights of distant farms irradiated it. The twisted trees the loggers had left behind made jagged black stripes in the glowing air.
She told him what had happened between her and Leonard. What she had done. The choices she had made. His last days, at the hospital in Tulsa with a corrections officer outside the door. After Leonard’s lungs had begun to fill with fluid, his kidneys and liver had begun to fail. She sat in the hospital room reading him the underlined passages in his prison Bible. No one else came. They had cuffed his ankle to the rail of the bed. Occasionally his eyes would come halfway open. They seemed to see. Then they closed again. In the hallway, nurses hooted. She went out to talk with them, two black women named LaQuanda and Ruth. They were watching a video on a smartphone. They asked her where she was from, and she said East Texas. They were from Little Rock and from Barbados. They asked where Leonard was from, and she told them a little coal town in western Pennsylvania where nobody lived anymore, she had forgotten the name. The one called LaQuanda asked what Leonard had done to get life.
The other looked away at a chart.
Louisa told them, but they were not appalled at the injustice. Ruth said that last month they had had a killer in from Big Mac for brain surgery. The attending had advised them before they started their shifts that the killer belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood and instructed them as to when he was required to be in restraints. As they were prepping him for surgery the killer asked them to save him the dark ponytail that would have to be cut off. They obliged. When they shaved the back of his head, two tattoos were exposed in matching gothic capital letters. One read WAR. The other, ARTIS. When LaQuanda asked what Artis was, he said she was his mother.
“Gosh,” Dwight said.
That had been his father’s word, Louisa remembered—the father he always claimed never to have met. One time, just once, in Ramah in bed after they had fucked, Dwight had said, “Gosh.” And she had laughed. And as he’d fallen asleep he’d slurred, “That was near as my father ever got to cussing. He’d say it over a piece of pie.” Dwight had made a slip, but she never pressed it. He had lived in another world, played another self there. Did he really think she couldn’t tell, or that she hadn’t done the same herself? Who among us has lived only once?
“Who gave you this shirt?” she asked amid the shadow trees. “It fits you like a tent.”
It was his own, he said. In the months since he had received the priest’s letter, he had lost interest in eating. He had lost a quarter of his weight. He had taken to walking long hours in the Jemez Mountains, trying to figure out what choices lay before him.
In the Jemez, at Bandelier, he had climbed among the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. The ash of a volcanic eruption had compacted over the millennia into cliffs of welded tuff from which the ancient pueblo dwellers had hollowed out their homes, and he scaled the wood ladders into the dark smooth high caves from the mouths of which families had watched the bright night sky for centuries, snug in their cliffs and safe from raiders, and the smoke of their fires had drawn away through holes carved above in the domes of rock. The Anasazi had disappeared from that place four hundred years ago leaving only caves and petroglyphs carved in the cliff faces, hardly visible for the sun shower, of birds and crude human beings, open-mouthed and shouting, elegant spirals turning ever inward on themselves, the same spirals replicated in the rock all over the settlement, their meaning unknowable. Even the name t
hese people had called themselves was lost. Anasazi was a Navaho word meaning “ancestors of our enemies.”
All night the two of them walked through woods and in the thickets of tall marsh weeds taking counsel together and asking each other what they would do.
18
Tilly didn’t know how to put a knot in a necktie. Louisa did it for him. She had become adept back at the prison, where she had maintained a collection of ties in various lengths so visiting boys could look their best when they went inside to see their fathers.
At her little bathroom mirror, she and Tilly stood in their finery. His stippled neck was red and warm, and her fingers turned the silk with confidence, and their bare feet pointed crookedly allowing them to be together in the tiny space, and when she drew the broad end through the front of the knot she stood up on the balls of her feet to watch that the edge should not curl in on itself, and as she did so he looked from her sternum down to her legs where her contracted soleus and gastrocnemius muscles were separately visible, and the two of them inhaled through their noses the mixed air of their separate breath and the smells of their bodies.
This time a minister married them. After the ceremony they drank coffee and ate donuts in the church basement with some of her friends from the casino who came to congratulate her and say goodbye.
Later that week they packed her things into cardboard boxes and rented a truck, and at the Texas panhandle town of Higgins she put the state of Oklahoma behind her once and for all, and they continued into New Mexico and unloaded her things into a former warehouse for logging equipment on the outskirts of Bandelier where Tilly had been storing his own things since his small condo had sold. The walls were steel sheeting kept together with screws and did little to hold the heat inside or impede drafts, but the stacked boxes of the possessions from their separate homes formed a windbreak inside the dark structure. Here they lived like squatters, cooking on a camping stove that burned gasoline and taking their showers at the Y in Los Alamos while their new house was being built.
The Volunteer Page 36