She wished that her voice wasn’t so breathy, as if she’d swallowed too much air, that her eyes, which tended to wander, didn’t make her look slightly confused, maybe even dumb. She could be taking calculus at school, if they offered it; instead she was wearing makeup and shorter skirts, and the future seemed more and more remote each day. It was a relief to finally be alone. Here, beneath the gumbo-limbo tree, Shannon feels at peace. Here, it seems possible that she is more than a silly, confused girl who wears strawberry-flavored lip gloss. With every minute she spends beneath the tree, she grows more sure of herself, until it seems to be the only place she wants to be. She thinks about the sunlight filtering through the leaves while she sits through her classes, and when the lunch bell rings, she runs all the way to the Burger King, edgy and confused until she sees the tree. She’s drawn here even in her dreams; in her dreams she makes a bed out of twigs, she covers herself with leaves, and sometimes, in the morning, there are tears on her pillow. Already she has begun to wonder how she can ever leave Verity, how she will manage to exist among pines and sugar maples.
Each time the Angel watches her, he’s filled with agony. When she goes, he vibrates like a piece of electricity; some of the leaves on the low-growing branches have already been singed. He would do anything to be able to kiss her, but since he can’t, he thinks the word kiss. He concentrates so hard that there are times when Shannon’s mouth forms a surprised O and her cheeks grow flushed. What he wouldn’t give to be real with her for just one hour, to thread his fingers through hers and walk far into the field beyond the Burger King, his arm around her waist. She looks enough like her mother for the Angel to be reminded of his past, but that’s not why he begins to radiate bits of light as soon as he sees her, so that the grass beneath him turns pale gold. He understands her completely, he knows what it’s like to want to escape and want it desperately. When she thinks about the future, the Angel can see it right along with her, and for this he’ll always be grateful.
Through all the years he’s been trapped here, time has moved in instants, pure white flashes of empty space. Now, an hour without her is an eternity. And that is how it happens that, after twenty years of waiting for his cousin to show up, the Angel is reclining beneath his tree, thinking about love, when Julian finally finds it in himself to return to the scene of his crime.
“Pull in there,” Lucy says as they near the Burger King.
Julian immediately feels light-headed; his hands have begun to sweat.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“I need to ask if anyone’s seen Keith. That’s where he hangs out. That’s where he found the alligator.” Lucy has already pushed the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Right in there.”
Julian steps on the brakes, but he drops his hands away from the steering wheel.
“Is there a problem?” Lucy asks.
“No problem,” Julian says. He feels as if he’s just eaten several pounds of sand.
“Well, there’s a space,” Lucy says.
Julian swallows hard and then turns the wheel. He drives into the parking lot slowly and edges into a space at the far end.
“Are you coming with me?” Lucy asks as she opens her door.
“You go,” Julian says.
He leans his head back and closes his eyes and listens to Lucy’s footsteps on the asphalt. What he would like to do is roll up all the windows and lock the doors, but instead Julian forces himself to get out. Loretta watches him through the window, but he leaves her in the backseat. It’s too hot for a dog to be out in the sun, and it’s not much better for a human being. Sometimes Julian wonders if living in all this heat eventually does something to your brain. In weather like this the air turns into waves, and those waves break down into sharp white circles, so you feel that you’re surrounded by stars in the middle of the day.
He begins to head toward the tree, but it’s like walking through molasses. By the time he reaches the edge of the parking lot he’s exhausted. He can’t even hear the traffic on West Main anymore. In Julian’s path is an orange salamander, frozen in fear. If the salamander stays in one place a moment longer, its feet will sink into the asphalt, so Julian kicks a small rock in its direction, forcing it to run before it’s too late. As he approaches the far corner of the Burger King, Julian thinks he can recall sitting in a wooden-slatted playpen beneath the blue sky. He can remember following Bobby through the mangroves to look for those indigo snakes you never see anymore. He was Bobby’s shadow moving through the red-and-black mangroves, and like a shadow he didn’t exist by himself. He had to wait in a corner or on a dusty stretch of road, folded up on himself, like a piece of stocking, until his cousin’s presence brought him to life. And now he’s back on the last path they ever took together. Inside the Burger King, a beautiful woman is ordering him a hamburger; she thinks he’s a real live person instead of a shadow. She thinks he’s waiting impatiently in the car, when he’s standing here terrified in a place that was once filled with gumbo-limbo trees, beneath a sky so bright it brings tears to your eyes. Julian Cash has spent his entire adult life tracking down lost people. It’s second nature for him to see in the dark, to follow his dogs through the bramble bushes, to hear what other men can’t. That is why he notices the dry grass rustling. And that’s why he stands perfectly still.
Directly in front of him, past the gas fumes and the heat waves, his cousin stretches out, eyes closed, a smile on his face. There are leaves in his hair and his feet are bare. Julian shakes his head, but his cousin remains beneath the tree. Slowly, the Angel opens his blue eyes, and if Julian Cash hadn’t fainted where he stood, he would have received his freedom, right then and there.
By the time they get to Julian’s house, out beyond the palmetto and the sweet bay, about two miles past Chuck and Karl’s diner, the temperature is up to a hundred and one. There’s swamp cabbage growing right up to the side of the road, and the air is so thick the patrol car seems to bump against it. Julian is slumped over in the passenger seat. It took all four of the teenage boys who work behind the counter at the Burger King to lift him into the car, and he seemed so lifeless that Lucy insisted on stopping at the general store to buy him some aspirin and a cold can of Coke.
The scar across Julian’s forehead has turned as purple as the skin of a plum. He’s taken off his jacket, unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt, and tossed his gun into the glove compartment. He feels sick as hell, like he’s going to explode. It does not help that Lucy has turned out to be a terrible driver. He swears she’s aiming for the ruts in the road. Each time they hit one, Lucy apologizes. She keeps looking over at him, worried, as if she had a dying man on her hands. Julian told her all he suffered from was a little heatstroke but he knows she doesn’t believe him. She’s had a great deal of experience with liars, and actually Julian isn’t too sure of the truth himself. Maybe it was heatstroke; that would make a lot more sense than a vision formed out of guilt and grief.
“Take some of those aspirins,” Lucy tells him, nodding to the tin on the dashboard that rattles each time they hit a rut. No one at the Burger King had seen Keith for days, and now all Lucy wants is for Julian to get his other dog and start tracking again.
Julian takes a long drink from his Coke. At Bobby’s funeral he was absolutely certain that if he waited long enough his cousin would open his eyes. The lids would flutter, then rise. His eyes would be as blue as always, so blue it could make you forget you weren’t looking at the sky.
“Take two,” Lucy insists. She reaches for the tin of aspirin and tosses it into Julian’s lap. He won’t be of any use if he’s sick.
Julian slips two aspirins into his Coke, shakes the can, then downs it. He made a mistake when he followed Lucy; he knows it now and he knew it then, but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself. And now look what’s happened to him; he doesn’t even trust himself to drive.
“Make a right,” he tells Lucy when his driveway comes into view.
Lucy turns the wheel
, hard, so that Julian is jostled against the door. His ribs are bruised from his fall on the asphalt; he never would have believed it possible for him to collapse like a rabbit, scared out of its wits. As they drive toward the house, the merlins in the cypress trees beat their wings and cry out as if their hearts had been broken in two.
“They always do that,” Julian feels he has to explain.
Lucy watches the birds as she slowly edges down the driveway. Clouds of red dust rise up around the car. Arrow has heard the car long before it appears; when it pulls up he’s already running back and forth along the kennel’s chainlink fence.
“Stay here,” Julian tells Lucy as he opens his door and gets out. He lets Loretta out of the back, and she trots toward the woods.
Lucy ignores him, but as soon as she opens her door Arrow leaps at the fence, baring his teeth. The flickers in the bramble bushes take flight all at once. “Jesus,” Lucy says. She slams the car door shut and quickly rolls up her window halfway, in spite of the heat. “I think I’ll stay here,” she tells Julian.
“Good idea,” Julian says.
He whistles for Loretta, and she runs to follow him up the porch steps. The house is little more than a cottage, painted gray, with a deep, shady front veranda. The yard is a jumble of overgrown bushes, but all along the porch railing is an old frangipani vine, with flowers the size of teacups. A long time ago, when Julian was a boy, he used to walk in these woods with Miss Giles. The house was deserted back then, but the vine was there. Angels drink out of those cups, that’s what Miss Giles told him. They’re drinking from them right now, but their thirst escapes us.
“Hurry up,” Lucy calls from the safety of the car.
Julian knows that people from New York think that fast and good are one and the same. They like to call the shots and tell you how to do your job and think they’re in control. Lucy wants him to start tracking immediately, but of course she has no idea what he may find. He wouldn’t want her to. Julian gives Loretta some fresh water and kibble and gets himself another can of Coke from the refrigerator, then phones Roy Schenck over at Red Cab. He’s got to get rid of her now; already he’s gone back to the one place on earth he fears most and had some sort of temporary nervous breakdown or hallucination. He told Lucy that Arrow is special; he’s an air dog, that’s true. What he left out is that another name for this is “corpse dog.” Arrow isn’t concerned with spirit or sound; the only differentiation he makes is between dead and living matter.
Unlike Loretta, who sleeps on Julian’s bed and whines when he leaves her alone in the house, Arrow has never licked Julian’s hand or allowed himself to be petted. When Julian brings him his dinner in a large metal bowl, Arrow keeps his head averted, and he won’t touch his food, no matter how ravenous he is, until Julian has left him alone. Sometimes when Julian sits in his kitchen, eating a TV dinner or some reheated pizza, his own aloneness comes down on him so hard he can’t stay in one place. On those evenings, he throws his uneaten supper in the trash and goes out to the kennel. Arrow never acknowledges his presence. All the dog wants is to be left alone in the moonlight. Given half a chance, Arrow would leap the kennel walls and run as far as he could. Julian understands that desire, he’s had it himself: to disappear into the woods and never once look back, to get as far away from whatever’s been caging you in as fast as you possibly can.
Julian has that desire to run as soon as he goes back out to the porch. It’s worse than he anticipated; Lucy is crying in the car. Her tears are so hot they leave little red spots, like match burns, all down her cheeks. Julian goes to stand by Lucy’s half-open window.
“Don’t do this,” he says.
The Red Cab pulls into the driveway and honks. In the kennel, Arrow gets up on his hind legs and claws at the fence.
Now that Lucy has begun to cry, she can’t seem to stop. She thinks about lost children, guided by the position of the stars in the sky. She thinks about boys who vanish forever, tangled up in weeds, trapped in drainage ditches, small bodies washed out to sea, where the fish pick their bones clean.
Julian opens the car door, but Lucy doesn’t move. In desperation, Julian looks over at the kennel, where Arrow is pacing, still growling and showing his teeth.
“Look at that dog,” Julian tells Lucy, and he waits until she does. “He’s a maniac, but let me tell you something about maniacs. They see and hear things no one else can. That’s why this dog’s going to find your boy.”
As soon as he’s said this, Julian knows it’s too late for him to turn and run. He never makes promises, and although he never said whether it would be dead or alive, he should have kept his mouth shut. This is what happens when you’re born on the third day of the worst month of the year. Everything you ever did or loved or wanted comes back to haunt you. And if a woman happens to cry in your driveway, beneath the cypress trees, you may actually believe, however briefly, that it is still possible to fall in love.
“Just don’t cry,” Julian says. “Don’t even think.”
Lucy looks up and nods, then wipes her face with her hands. Together, they walk toward the idling taxi while the merlins above them swoop through the still air. The wing span of each bird’s shadow is so wide a full-grown man could lie down on the road and not see a bit of sunlight. Lucy tries her best to take Julian’s advice as the taxi starts down the driveway. The dust comes up in small cyclones and there is the sharp scent of bay trees. In the backseat of the cab, Lucy lists inconsequential things, apricots, peaches, and plums, fruit so sweet you can taste it before you take a bite. And then, before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it.
FOUR
IN THE HEAT OF THE day, when the dragonflies rest on the surface of the water so their wings won’t catch on fire, the meanest boy in Verity follows the drainage ditch along the service road between the Interstate and the golf course. The ditch hasn’t held a drop of water since winter; it’s filled with dust and small black toads. Whenever the boy walks beneath an overpass, into a dark concrete tunnel, his heart echoes louder than the traffic above him. Inside his throat, there is now a lump the size of a golf ball; he can’t grunt or hiccup or sigh. A line of hot red skin runs across the bridge of his nose, and his bare shoulders and back are already blistering. The baby has fallen asleep in his arms; he’s covered her head with his T-shirt to protect against sunstroke, and as he walks the little girl’s feet swing back and forth and hit him in the stomach. Each time a car passes, the boy freezes, but no one seems to notice him. All those cars have their windows rolled up and their air conditioners turned on high. They pass by like the wind, flushing birds from the saw grass, traveling so fast they leave no trace on the melting asphalt.
The boy has already realized that the problem with a baby is that you have to take care of it. It holds on to your fingers and makes whimpering sounds and expects you to find food and water. It puts its arms around your neck and presses its hot cheek against you as it falls asleep, convinced all will be well when it wakes. The meanest boy in Verity would sit down in the dust and cry if he weren’t so dehydrated. He’s made of straw and bones and teeth, furious and ignitable. If someone came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, he would turn and bite, then run. Everything that has ever happened to him before has dissolved. There is no before and no after. All he can see and remember is this blinding sunlight, the slow, steady breathing of the baby, the lurch of his own pulse.
Like a wolf, he is headed back to the place where he knows there is food. When the baby sees what he’s found for her, she’ll smile and coo; she’ll unwind her fingers from his neck, letting go of him only long enough to eat. They’ll sit in the long green shadows and drink orange juice and cold coffee from discarded cups, and they’ll fill themselves until their bellies are fat and their fingers are sticky with sugar. The idea of the dumpster, and all that it contains,
is so compelling that the boy starts to jog, though it strains his back to run while carrying the baby. She’s a big baby, and her arms and legs are red where she’s scratched at her mosquito bites. She smells clean, though, in spite of how dirty she is. When she’s asleep her breath comes out in warm little puffs; her eyelids flutter, as if she is able to see with her eyes shut tight.
At the end of the drainage ditch, when the Hole-in-One Donut Shop is finally in sight, the boy sits down in the tall grass, exhausted. The baby wakes up, and the boy unwinds her arms from his neck and plops her on the ground. But as soon as he goes to stand, she grabs on to his leg and won’t let go. The boy waits, and when the baby turns her head, he quickly tries to edge backward, but she scrambles right next to him just as quickly. She’s not about to let him out of her sight. He has no choice but to pick her up and carry her across the road, in full view of a line of passing cars. He runs to the Dumpster, sits the baby down on the curb, then raises himself up so he can root through the garbage. The boy brushes the fire ants off the first piece of jelly doughnut he finds, then crouches down and hands it to the baby. She holds the lump of dough in two hands and devours it, making a humming sound as she eats. While she’s occupied, the boy searches the Dumpster again, pulling off the tops of plastic foam cups, his hands shaking. He finds half a cup of coffee and gulps it down; it is the most delicious thing he’s ever drunk in his entire life, in spite of the lipstick marks around the rim of the cup.
It is so hot now that the air crackles. Aside from that, and the occasional car passing by, the parking lot is silent. There are no birds foolish enough to fly in this heat, and all the insects have crawled into the burrows they’ve dug in the sand. Behind the screen door of the Hole-in-One’s kitchen, Shannon is watching. She wears shorts and a T-shirt and a pink apron; her long hair is gathered into a ponytail. She works at the Hole-in-One on weekends and afternoons after school, and ever since she came to work the register today, Shannon has been chewing ice and thinking about the future. She’s beginning to wonder if it’s some kind of obsession, the kind that makes it impossible to live your life day to day. How can it be that she wants to get out of town so badly, and yet each time she leaves the gumbo-limbo tree she’s torn apart? Today she missed lunch because her math teacher had her stay in to make up her missing homework, and now she feels all empty inside, as if she’s lost the most important part of her day. It’s not as if the tree is waiting for her, and yet she feels she’s betrayed it. She could almost believe that sorrow will wind its way along the tree’s branches, chasing away the birds that nest there.