by Tabitha King
She flipped his small suitcase shut. “Yes. It’s very quiet here. I think that’s kind of nice, don’t you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s creepy. Can I watch a tape?”
“No,” she said. “Go play with your guys.”
He slid off the bed onto his knees, staggered to his feet, and swaggered to the door.
“I can tell,” he said, addressing the ceiling, “this is going to be more fun than humans should be allowed to have.” It was a flawless imitation of Pat. He grinned over his shoulder at Liv.
“Right,” she said, and made a grab at him.
He squealed and evaded her and danced out the door. She felt a little better.
They ate by firelight, in the premature night of December’s tag end. The dark was another house around them. The firelight, like the flickering of an angelic sword, showed them glimpses of the trees, the shore, the frozen lake, and all the wild out of doors that surrounded the house, separating them from their own kind not just by miles, but by other dimensions, not the least of which were time and human silence. The cat slept on the hearth, coiled upon herself like a braided rug, her nose stuffed into her belly. Her sides rose and fell gently, fur catching the light of the flames now and again so for once she was picturesque and therefore comforting, if not handsome. Travis spread cards on the carpet and they played the simple games he had learned from Pat and Doe, and then she read him stories until he fell asleep against her.
When the pricking of pins and needles in her feet told her his weight was cutting her circulation, she gathered him up, noting as she did it was beginning to be an effort, and carried him to his bed. She did not undress him but tucked him in and kissed him, plugged in his nightlight, and returned to the living room to bank the fire.
A great weight of tiredness settled on her. She went to her own bed, let down her hair, and laid down, still dressed. When she was Travis’ age, it had seemed such a victory, such an act of freedom-taking, to sleep in her clothes. She remembered her father winking even as her mother asked her if she thought she was a little wild animal. It was impossible to recapture that feeling; she only felt defeated, lying on her bed in the clothes she had put on that morning in the house in Portland, miles away, after a sleepless night. They were wrinkled and sweaty and soiled and so was she, but just then, she felt no amount of washing was ever going to make her feel clean again. At last she got up and washed her face and brushed her teeth and her hair. Then she went back to bed, still dressed, still keeping to the outside of the bedclothes. She lay on her back and waited for the telephone to ring, waited for Pat to call, but he didn’t, or if he did, she had already fallen asleep.
Early the next morning, Walter McKenzie huffed up the steps and across the back porch. Mrs. Russell peeked out the kitchen window at him and then disappeared. He knocked shave-and-a-haircut on the door, and she opened it right away.
She was just out of bed, running her fingers through her hair for a comb, her face still damp from a wake-up splash. She hadn’t had time for more, he knew, because when he had come down the hill in his Scout, he had seen her dark hair fanned over her pillow through the top third of the window in the master bedroom, which was uncurtained because it was so high, nobody at a normal height could see in, but in a vehicle, halfway up the hill, he could. Not time enough even to dress, but she was dressed, in jeans and a plaid shirt that looked like maybe she slept in ‘em. So he guessed probably she had. She was still a little underweight, not filling her jeans or her shirt as much as he appreciated, but she didn’t look yellow sick anymore, which was a relief. But it wasn’t a good sign for a woman as fastidious as she was to be sleeping in her clothes. Leastways her eyes weren’t swole up and red, so she didn’t pass out drunk anyways. He misdoubted she was any kind of drinker. There had never been any evidence of it, and he would know that kind of thing if he saw it. Her scrawny, wild-looking excuse for a cat was twining around her ankles, wanting her breakfast.
“ ‘Mornin’, missus,” he said, taking off his ancient porkpie hat and grinning at her. “Somebody musta left a door open. Heck of a draft out here.”
Most of his teeth were gone, which only emphasized the remaining dozen, small and yellow and sharp, as well as the veined and plummy ridges of his gums from which the teeth poked in all directions. He needed a shave and a haircut and very likely a bath, but he would always smell of the cats who bred unchecked in his woodshed, and the menagerie of wild animals which included birds, coons, and foxes that he kept, as well as the milk cows, an ancient nag, goats, rabbits, and his ugly, mis-bred dogs. Though considered a great catch because he was a reformed alcoholic, did not cuss in the presence of women, and held a lien-free title to his farm and woodlot, and despite the machinations of several local women who had worn out one or two husbands already, he refused obstinately to remarry, or to go to church. He wore a red plaid mackinaw and black rubber galoshes that flapped open where the metal catches were broken or missing.
Liv clutched the edge of the door and smiled at him. “Brrr,” she mock-shivered. “Come on in out of the cold. Cup a tea, Walter?”
He grinned again. Something about Mrs. Russell made him grin a lot. She had a dewy look when she was well. Didn’t often see that. Russell was a born fool if he was treating her bad. “Don’t mind if I do.”
He took off the two layers of holey, home-knitted gloves he wore and held them in the same hand with his hat, waiting politely for her to tell him what to do with them.
“Take off your jacket, Walter,” she said. “There’s an extra hanger in the hall closet.”
He ducked down the hall, heard the can opener in the kitchen and the cat yowling to encourage it, and was glad she had remembered to bring vittles for the animal, as that was one thing he had forgotten on his shopping list. Didn’t even hear the boy over the jangle of the coat hangers and when he turned around, he jumped a mile.
“Hey, old hoss,” he said to the boy.
The boy looked up at him without blinking, and said, “Hello, Mr. McKenzie,” like they met at the closet every morning. The kid looked just the same as he had at the end of the summer, big for his age, both feet firm on the ground, steady. Not one of those pants-afire little kids that made old folks like himself nervous, skittering around underfoot so a body didn’t know where to put a foot down. Can’t expect ‘em to know old bones is easy broke, but you’d think the parents would know. Someways one of the things he liked best about Mrs. Russell was how calm that boy was. Like Travis always knowed inside and out he was safe, his ma was right there looking out for him. Nothing but good mother-love could make a yowen sure of that.
Travis led him back to the kitchen, moving slow like a horse that knows his own size and wasn’t about to be hurried. He had those little army men clutched in both fists. Once he boosted himself onto a chair, he put ‘em down on the table, and started to arrange them in ranks.
Mrs. Russell gave him a peck on the cheek in passing. Travis ignored her, which Walter remembered clearly, even at eighty-three, doing to his own ma. It made him want to chuckle. Instead, he cleared his throat and settled onto a chair. He patted his three or four strands of crinkled, colorless hair over his mottled scalp. He smoothed the legs of his green wool trousers, held up by red suspenders that had lost most of their elastic and gotten crinkles like an old woman’s stretch marks in them, and were secured on one side by a big rusty safety pin, under cover of a faded plaid wool shirt that showed his yellowed long underwear shirt at the throat and cuffs and in the gaps where his shirt buttons strained over his belly. He reflected he was not exactly dressed for a tea party. He did have a good black suit, purchased at Sears & Roebuck during Harry S. Truman’s first few months in office, but it was rare now he had occasion to wear it except for funerals. Mrs. Russell wouldn’t pay no nevermind anyway, which was another one of the things he liked about her. She brought the tea, with milk and sugar, for all three of them. The cat had climbed into the fourth chair at the table and was licking herself just as vainl
y as if she had something to be vain about.
Walter rubbed a hand over his jaw, where his beard stubbled through skin the color of a crust of dirty snow like blades of old grass, still and lifeless and near enough to colorless so they were mostly dry shadow. He cleared his throat again. “Have a good trip?”
She sipped her tea and said, “It felt awful good to come home to a warm house and find food in it, too. Thanks.”
Walter nodded. “No trouble.”
The boy stirred in his chair. He tugged his cup toward him and stared at its contents, then sipped tentatively.
The cat leapt into Walter’s lap. Starting, Walter nearly upset his own cup. He laughed, and rubbed the cat behind her ears. She sank onto his lap and made herself at home. Walter winked at Liv.
She smiled at him, and he reflected that was another one of the things he liked about her. She had a nice smile. Still a mite crooked, even after all the work on her teeth, but that gave it a charm perfection wouldna had.
“Ought to warm up later,” he said.
She nodded.
“Talked to Mr. Russell last night,” he said to her as genially as if they were discussing the weather.
She sipped her tea. He waited for her sympathetically.
“Oh,” she said. “What did he say?”
“Wanted me to see if you got in all right. Said he tried the number here but it didn’t go through.”
She looked up quickly, catching him looking concerned before he could blink it away.
“Damn telephone company,” she said.
“Ayuh,” Walter agreed.
As long as it wasn’t she’d taken it off the hook, as long as it wasn’t she wasn’t here last night, though where she’d be he couldn’t guess. Just sometimes she was here and she wasn’t, like when she was here, here wasn’t here anymore, it was someplace nobody could reach or know about but her. The way it had been this season past, when she seemed to be fading right away to wherever it was she went when she wasn’t quite here. Russell was afraid he was losing her; there’d been a terrible panic in the man’s voice, underneath the cheerfulness he had been putting on for Walter’s benefit, and to save himself embarrassment.
“Look Walter,” he had said straight out, in a rush, “she’s not herself, and I’m worried about her, but she won’t, she’s pissed at me, Walter, and I can’t talk to her. I guess she’s right, I did something I shouldn’t have. I wanted it so much I conned myself into believing I could talk her into it. I’ll come out there as soon as she cools down. I’ll come in a minute if you think she’s not okay. You’ll check on her, won’t you?”
Walter woulda checked on her without the asking. A woman alone with a little kid out in the woods, it wasn’t what he’d call safe. Oh, ordinarily it was, prob’ly safer than in the city, amongst all those desperate strangers, all crowded together like a garden choked with weeds. But trouble in the woods was twice trouble. Whatever the trouble between Russell and herself was, she could be in a bushel more if the boy hurt himself or sickened in the middle of a bad storm. Or if the power was out or her vehicle broke down.
He wouldn’t have allowed it of Mellie, rest her soul, but then, Mellie wouldn’t have run off even if she had had a place to run to, which she didn’t. Whatever he might have done, not that he ever give Mellie any reason. Mrs. Russell had always seemed a sensible girl, a lot more sensible than her husband, for sure, but it didn’t surprise him, her turning up out of season. It seemed like he’d been waiting since September for her to call and ask him to open the house, and for Pat Russell to call up and ask him to look after her. Whatever was wrong, it had been wrong since last summer.
He squinted at her slyly. “Needed a rest from the city?” One hand resting on the cat’s head, thick fingers of the other hand gripping the back of his chair, he twisted in his chair to follow Mrs. Russell as she rose to plug in the toaster, open the bread. The skin of the back of the hand, drawn taut and transparent, was mottled with liver spots like the skin of an exotic snake.
She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, forgiving him his nosiness. “There’s no place like here, Walter,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it all fall.”
Walter studied the residue in his teacup. As always, it didn’t look like anything but flecks of tea leaves to him. No doubt she really didn’t know her own intentions. Best to let her idle a few days, and perhaps boredom and loneliness would drive her back to her husband.
Gently he lowered the cat to the floor. She stretched and wandered away. He pushed away from the table, gathered up his cup and saucer one-handed, and put them in the sink. “Thanks for the tea,” he said. “I can do anythin’ for you, you holler.”
Liv gripped the edge of the sink and from the kitchen window watched him stump down the back steps.
Travis came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He yawned a jaw-cracking yawn.
“Liv,” he asked, “is Walter going to die?”
“Someday,” she said. She ruffled his hair, then smoothed it. “Everybody has to die someday. Walter’s getting on, but he’s a tough old bird. I’ll bet he’s got a few years left in him yet.”
She didn’t say to Travis: He’s beginning to look eighty-three. Sometime between last spring and today he started to stoop and shuffle. There’s a rheumy yellow cast to his eyes, which in May had still been clear white, the irises translucent gray as the water of the lake in the morning mist of August. And his skin had acquired that sheen of transparency, as if it were beginning to melt.
Her own vision of him, treasured and immutable, as she had seen him when once she had stopped in on him, came to mind: Walter, shirtless in his long johns and wool pants, for it was summertime, and he adapted, as did all his race, who had invented the layered look donkeys’ years before the outastaters had discovered L.L. Bean, Walter, swabbing bean juice from a plate with a slice of bread, jaws working steadily under their beard stubble that was always just the same length, never longer, never shorter, always three days old, as if he lived in a fairy tale. Or was a low-rent bachelor Santa Claus. No, a nursery rhyme, he was Old King Cole, a fat, smelly, entirely jolly old soul. There was just the one corner cleared, about a foot square, where Walter could fit his plate and fork and mug. The painted table was invisible under a mountain range of books and papers and magazines: his bills and receipts; canceled checks; tax forms and records; letters from the granddaughter who lived in Alaska; yellowing snapshots, like dry leaves scattered among the papers, of great-grandchildren he had never seen in the flesh; a year or more’s accumulation of Field and Stream and Yankee; and paperback westerns, often coverless, bought for a dime from bins in Dewey Linscott’s junkstore in Greenspark. His favorites were by J.C. Devereaux, who was really a woman named Bobbie Anderson who lived only a hundred miles northeast in Haven, a wide place in the road on the way to Derry and Bangor, a fact that amused the hell out of Walter when Liv told him. In summertime, the litter spilled over onto the cold cast-iron Atlantic range, under which Walter’s smelly old beagle bitch, Fritzie, slept. That time of year, Walter did his bit of cooking on a grubby two-burner gas stove acquired in a swap with Dewey for one of Fritzie’s pups when Fritzie was still capable of whelping, a long time ago now.
His one son, who went for a soldier in 1941, had been dead even longer than Mellie, his wife. Walt, Jr., had not died without issue; his marriage, made in 1943 and broken in 1950, seven years before Walt, Jr., finally died of pneumonia in the VA hospital in Togus, had produced two daughters. One of Walter’s granddaughters, Lucinda, was too far away and had a disabled husband and two daughters, both divorced and with growing children and inadequate incomes, to look after. The other, Jean, had married a foolish lad with more looks, of the weak kind that are swiftly coarsened by hard living, than sense, a no-account, and everyone told her so too, who had gotten one child on her and then, while stuporously drunk, driven his old Ford pickup into another pickup truck, killing himself and the unlucky Indian family of five crammed into i
ts cab. After struggling several years on her own, Jean had remarried, to the first man that asked her.
Her second husband was older than she and had two sons from a previous marriage. Arden Nighswander had a local reputation as a brutal, dangerous, vainglorious man, as well as a deadbeat. He quickly reduced Jean to a quivering drab. Her son, moonfaced and spineless, considered by the locals to be little more than simple, fared better than expected; while the Nighswander boys tortured him a little more than they did their dogs, with less success in creating a vicious temperament, they also adopted him as a kind of mascot. Nighswander had quarreled with Walter, as he quarreled with everyone, and Jean no longer dared to have anything to do with her own grandfather. So Walter, in his dotage, was as good as childless. Liv wondered if anyone hereabouts kept an eye on him, if there would be anyone to take care of him if he needed it.
Chapter 9
FIREFIGHT
Rough Cut #4
On a scenic turnout overlooking an arc of beach, two young policemen in crisp, short-sleeved summer khakis sit on a large, flat-topped boulder, eating sandwiches and drinking pop. Their compact and very clean black patrol car is parked at this end of the turnout. At the end is a large trash barrel and a public phone booth of the head-and-shoulders variety. From this vantage the policemen can see not only the length of the beach but also the entrance, a kiosk in the middle of a lower curve of the same road. The sky overhead is robin's egg blue in which a few tenuous tatters of cloud are so overwhelmed they seem wistful. The sun is white-hot, the color of the beach sand that by this time of day had absorbed enough of its heat to tingle naked feet. Several hundred bodies, some of them quite as white as the sun and the beach sand, many of them as bronzed as an Air Mexico billboard girl, heroically interpose themselves between sun and sand, recklessly courting skin cancer and alligator wrinkles. They are mostly teenagers, in as little as the law allows, a great leveler, making them all nearly naked, rather than idle rich or unemployed. Their bikinis and French pouches also create another mechanism of classification, between the naturally endowed and fit and the unlucky and weak. But there is a minimum of the latter and a maximum of the former class. Whether because the fat and ill-favored are shy of the beach or because they are also poor and so have to work while the sun shines one can only speculate. The kids have ceded one end of the beach, where the water is shallow and there is a tidal pool as well, to young mothers, some of whom are last summer's bikinied beach sprites, and their babies and toddlers. There are only a few old people braving the sun, those really dedicated to turning their skin into handbag leather. Those few are petulant and nervous; they are intimidated by the youth, and the youth, on turf or at least sand they regard as their own, delightedly flex their bully muscles as well as their well-basted and browned biceps and quadriceps.