But he remembered her response pretty clearly, at least in précis. How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All the urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we’re immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that’s why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.
Something like that. It was a fairly awkward conversation.
But Stubblefield was quite sure Luce had concluded by saying, I’m not the same person as that girl. Sure, too, that he had collected himself enough to state a firmly held belief. We are who we are. Ten or eighty. What we see in the mirror is all that changes. Same fears and hopes running around inside like hamsters on a wheel.
—Well, that’s depressing, Luce had said. But whatever. I didn’t win that day.
—They chose wrong.
—The sunglasses?
—Could have been the Mars bar.
After Stubblefield had turned and started to walk away, Luce said, either to his back or to herself, So, a flame still burns?
Even in that dizzy moment, Stubblefield at least retained enough clarity to know sarcasm when he heard it. Or would that be irony? Fine line, sometimes.
He had kept walking, but raised a hand as far as he could reach above his head, made a leveling motion, and said, Yea high.
As he rounded the corner, he saw the children sitting in rockers at either end of the porch, glaring and intemperate like pickets guarding the flanks. Stubblefield thinking, If they had muskets they’d shoot me down.
Later that night, back at the cottage, Stubblefield remembered that he had seen Luce one other time. The summer after the beauty show. His final summer at the lake. A teenage burger joint in town. Luce leaning over the jukebox, studying the songs. Her long hair falling forward, hiding her face until she hooked it behind her ears and he recognized her profile. She had on boy clothes. A white button-down shirt, the tails untucked over faded jeans. Black penny loafers with dimes in the slits. And the memory, when it came, kept spooling all the way to her dropping the nickel in the slot and the fans of shiny 45s rotating until one fell onto the turntable and Johnny Ace began singing “Never Let Me Go,” scratchy and hollow, since the record had been in the Wurlitzer for some time. Luce slow-danced solo, doing the Stroll, back to her booth to rejoin her friends, some dismal triple-date arrangement of cheerleaders and football players. As for weather, it was raining that long-ago night when Stubblefield walked out to his grandfather’s car. The neon of the cafe set the water drops on his windshield alight with pink and lavender.
CHAPTER 2
MIDMORNING, LIT ROLLED SLOW down a gravel road, letting farmers harvesting crops see their tax dollars at work. It was one of the perks of the job, plenty of time for driving and thinking. That plus the cruiser, a lawman special with the big-block engine set up so hot that citizens couldn’t just walk into a dealer and buy one like it. At idle, the two banks of huge pistons rocked the whole car slightly from side to side, despite the extra-firm suspension.
Lit felt like shit. He’d downed about a pot of coffee already, and it hadn’t really raised his mood. He dialed the volume on the two-way down so as not to interfere with his thoughts about law. How, most places, it could be bought for a price, high or low. Which was a fact Lit knew could be tested all the way from little county deputies right up to Supreme Court justices and rarely fail. But it failed with him. He was not at all corrupt. If some lawbreaker tried to slip him a twenty to get off, Lit was not above pulling a blackjack out of his hip pocket and laying him out twitching in the road.
And deputy was fine with him. No higher ambitions, mainly because you had to get elected sheriff, and then the fools who voted in your favor thought you were beholden to them. The sacred public trust and all that tired bullshit. Deputy was just a job like any other. The sheriff got unhappy with you, he could fire you. You got unhappy with him, you say kiss my ass and walk away.
The current sheriff was a plump old boy who made a lot of money off a gravel pit and a bunch of crooked State road contracts. The unpleasant part of being a lawman didn’t interest him whatsoever. That was Lit’s job. The part where somebody deserved getting beat to the pavement and grabbed up by the scruff of his neck and thrown into the back of a patrol car and taken to jail. It was the part Lit was proud of and expert at, quickness of movement being such a great and unexpected equalizer.
Lit’s failings as a lawman mostly involved his being prone to form his own judgments. He’d look away if a mainly all right guy went astray and yet nobody got much damaged by it. Such as the shiny new bootlegger taking over the local liquor business. Lit judged it no big deal. Bootleggers were a fact of life. Can’t sell what people don’t want, and nearly everybody needs to find a way to shift their mood up or down a few degrees now and then. Or even daily.
As for the really wonderful uppers and downers, they had recently become illegal if you didn’t get them through a doctor. But back in the war, the government passed out Benzedrine like jelly beans when they needed you flaming bright seventy-two hours in a row, killing people that badly needed killing. So it was plain wrong that now you had to pay a doctor for a script and then pay a pharmacist to do nothing but count pills and put them in a bottle. In the long fights of France and Italy, nobody kept count. You just dug them out of buckets by the fistful. One bucket for go, another bucket for no-go.
Lit was a man of peace. At least he wanted to be someday. World War II had given him the gift of all the conflict most men would ever need. He’d witnessed all kinds of horrible shit, and he’d committed quite a bit of it himself. Such was life at the time. But back then he was so young. His blood called for other blood. Even now, he couldn’t believe how much fun some of it had been. A perfect dream, unmatched ever after, driven by the fervent hormones of youth and amphetamines.
That was some while back. Yet in these latter-day peacetimes, Lit still never quit wanting him a handful from the go bucket. It was a great chapter of his nostalgia for the past. Back in his youth, when he was always jacked up and happy.
Until recently, in lieu of pills, you could go to the drugstore and buy a Benzedrine sinus inhaler over the counter. Crack it open and be in business. Now the government had outlawed them, made you a criminal to get even a taste of what they once glutted you with. Where was the sense in that law? Probably some drug company or doctors’ union figured it out. And who gets fucked? Everybody but drug companies and doctors. And the old bootlegger was useless. He dealt in nothing but fifths and pints and fluid ounces.
When the gravel met pavement, the valley road, Lit didn’t even think about where to go next. He turned back toward town. This shiny new man needed checking out.
AN EMPTY BLUE SPAM CAN sat atop a locust fence post behind Bud’s rental, yet some firearm malfunction stood in the way of amusement.
—You don’t think about a revolver being broken beyond repair, Bud said. They’re damn simple machines. Not much more than a hammer connected to a tube. But this pistol is done for.
Morose and not aiming in the least, Bud randomly snapped the trigger six or eight times to no effect.
—Point that up in case it does go off, Lit said.
—Shit, it’s dead broke.
Bud snapped three slow dejected snaps. And then a hopeless fourth, which fired with a fierce crack.
Lead whooshed weird and supersonic past Lit’s left ear.
Bud looked at Lit and then held the pistol two-handed up to his face, studying its profile, his expression a caricature of fear and amazement.
—They damn. It’s been healed.
Lit, unamused, put up his forefinger and wagged it at Bud.
—Set it down for a minute, he said. I’ve got questions. Such as, where are you from?
—Down along the coast. Several little towns in t
hree different states.
—Why come here?
—Nice place, with business opportunities.
—Any relations in these parts?
—Nope.
—Mind if I take a look at your driver’s license?
—Not at all, except it went through the wash.
Bud dug his wallet from a back pocket of his jeans, and it came out cupped to the shape of his ass. He opened the wallet and extracted his license. Reached out a limp pale rectangle, which Lit declined to touch.
Not much use anyway. Little piece of pasteboard where somebody typed your name and height and weight and hair color and eye color. So, Lit’s watchman duties half-ass fulfilled, he went directly into his spiel about how you can’t sell what people don’t want to buy and how dim the local laws are. Nothing but the whim of ignorant voters keeping all these steep counties dry when you could drive a couple or three hours in any direction and legally buy alcohol. Or whatever else you need to lift your mood if you don’t get too fussy about every little ordinance. Then he shared several opinions about World War II and its sensible drug policies. The recent idiocy of banning inhalers.
As he talked, Lit began feeling like Bud was reading his mind. Like maybe signals passed between them along the order of Freemasons with their deep verbal codes and intricate handshakes. At that point of possible understanding, Lit looked at his watch and said, Time to go and do.
THREE DAYS LATER, the black-and-white sat at the street again. Lit, bleak and furious in Bud’s garage, attacked a stubborn inhaler with a chrome nutcracker. It was Lit’s cracker, conqueror of a thousand inhalers, but now something about the diameters mismatched. Either Bud’s new tubes were slightly slimmer or Lit’s cracker was reamed out from hard use. Lit worked with great focus, damning capitalism and government nonstop.
—How you doing? said Bud.
—Hanging in there, like a hair in a biscuit.
—Don’t you ever get tired of that stuff?
Lit looked up from his work and made a great exaggerated expression of incredulity and went back to cracking.
Swallowing the woolly strip inside was the goal, the thing that set Lit’s day up and gave it a forward motion, an aim.
Lucky for Lit, clever entrepreneurs had recognized in advance the profit to be made when inhalers were driven to illegality by the government. For a year prior, a fellow Bud knew down in the low end of the state had bought case upon case of the little tubes from every drugstore around. Now there was a mighty steep markup to be taken. Getting higher all the time in ratio to the dwindle of supply.
—On the dim day when these all go away, then what? Lit said. Twenty cups of coffee before lunch, is what.
Bud bent from the waist, his head in the bright circle from a caged shop light hooked to the upraised hood of the truck. He studied down the open barrel of the carb like he actually knew how all the springs and needles and jets and butterflies and floats deep in there actually worked in concert to make the truck go.
He said, Some of these bits you’re meant to twist one way to mix the air and gas lean, and the other way goes rich. And then some bits, you’d better let alone if you ever care to drive again.
—Damn government, Lit said, working the cracker with elbow and shoulder action. Feeling all wretched because you fight for your country and then you come home wrung out to alleged peace, and they leave you to your own poor devices to find the daily fire. Sad times when heroes pay high money to bootleggers.
—Hell, I’ll do it for you, Bud said. I thought maybe you enjoyed the challenge.
He took the inhaler from Lit and dropped it on the concrete floor and stomped it flat. He stooped and picked the ribbon out of the bits of broken shell and flicked dirt off with a middle finger and then blew on it and handed it back to Lit.
Lit meticulously twiddled the paper into a perfect tight spiral, reflecting how he intended his thoughts to go for the rest of the day. Delicately, he placed the spiral on his tongue and swallowed, tasting the delicious eye-watering tang all the way down.
When his eyes quit watering, Lit said, Coffee’s not the same thing at all.
Bud said, When they make coffee illegal, you come to me. I’ll have it.
—For a price.
—Damn straight. Name something worth having that’s not got a price. The first rule of life is, you got to pay. In my opinion, the more that’s made illegal, the more capitalism works as it was intended.
—That doesn’t really move me one way or the other, Lit said.
—You know, you don’t need these inhalers. It’s not really my line of work, but I can get you pills if you want. White crosses and that kind of thing. Trucker stuff.
Lit glanced skyward, said his thanks to the divine light suddenly bathing him.
RIGHT AFTER HOOKING UP with Bud’s wonderful constant resupply of uppers, Lit stayed awake for three days and nights. Work hours, people driving through town five over got all kinds of angry barking shit right in their faces to go along with their speeding ticket. Later, about three in the morning, the TV test pattern accompanied by radio music seemed pretty fascinating after some beers cooled Lit down without having the power to put him all the way to sleep, which would have taken a fist of army downers to accomplish.
—Need me some no-go. Mucho, mucho no-go, Lit repeated to himself, until he found the rhythm in the words, and it seemed like a good start for the chorus to a country song, except you probably needed to figure a few more lines. And a bridge. Songs needed bridges, but Lit wasn’t certain what they were. He decided maybe Bud would be a good place to start looking for a cowriter. Bud looked pretty musical, especially his hair. And even if they couldn’t make up a hit song together, Bud could for sure get some downers.
CHAPTER 3
IT TOOK LUCE A WHILE to believe that the children were not mean, they were scared. Or, maybe, to hew closer to the harsh truth of a bad day, they were not just mean, they were also scared. The scared part was what they guarded against showing Luce or anybody else outside the pair of themselves. Luce thought of her new understanding as a hypothesis. They want to travel on, put an end to days where every moment begins in fear. Shift the load somewhere else. So they strike a wood match and hold its power between thumb and forefinger. Which leaves about five seconds to decide how best to be its agent. No wonder flammable things like nostalgic cheerleader outfits and wonderful old farmhouses got lit up and burned to ashes.
Give anger a furious voice, why not? The argument for finding joy in those strong blazing minutes of destruction was not lost on Luce. Afterward, though, nothing but a black circle in the green woods to show for it. And the after is what she couldn’t quit worrying about.
Left to the thoughts that arise from fire, maybe in fifteen years the children would be making everybody who brushed up against them scared or hurt or dead. End up in Central Prison, sitting on the wrong side of the green porthole, buckets of acid between their feet, eyes as blank as burnt holes in carpet. So, like prep for a high school debate, Luce started thinking about ideas to argue against fire.
——
A BLUE-SKY SEPTEMBER DAY, color in some of the trees, especially poplar and dogwood. Luce and the children walked past the edge of what was once a cornfield, but now the lovely hopeful processes of plant succession had transformed it into a Brer Rabbit briar patch. The arcing canes etched a tangled geometry where bright migrant finches, yellow and black, darted for the last drupelets of withered blackberries. In a cleared space about the size of a stage, a pony mare harnessed to a long pole paced a circle centered on a simple machine made mostly of wood, a mill designed for crushing cane to make molasses. A nearly forgotten folkways practice from the past, but not an irretrievable past. Short of poisoning all life or blowing it up, people could keep doing it on and on, if they wanted to. Like when you’re on the wrong road, you turn around and go back.
Luce believed that the children could learn something here. A calmness. Some seasonal lesson about time flowing forward
pretty steady, and this day connected to all the others, and the years connected too. Not every day needing to stand all by itself and be its own apocalypse.
Maddie wore a broad-brimmed man’s hat and tended a slow fire of wood coals under a big three-legged iron cauldron of simmering cane squeezings. She sat on an upturned stub of log with her shanks crossed and her boots unlaced, and when Luce and the children arrived, she tipped her face out of the shadow of her hat brim and winked a pale eye at them. She scraped at a raw split cane with a pocketknife and then licked the white marrow off the blade. When the pony came around at less than the necessary pace, Maddie tapped her with a long stick, a gentle reminder of the job they were doing together. The air sweet with the smell of the crushed stalks heaped in bright yellow piles and the boiling molasses syrup and wood smoke. No sound in the immediate world rose louder than the grinding of the cane press, and it so muffled as not to obscure the shuffle of the mare’s feet in the dirt and the occasional pop of the hickory fire.
Normally, the children would have offered a lot of emotion back at the fire, but the mare drew their attention so strong that they ignored everything else. And, Luce hoped, not because it was occasionally being struck with a stick.
The pony was a stocky elderly Welsh cob, dusty black and already growing her winter shag, even before the first frost. She was descended from pit ponies, bred to pull mine carts, but was several New World generations beyond that ancestral brutality—being lowered by a belly strap down into a horrible dark shaft to live a brief life beyond the light of day. Her nose was pink as a rose petal over yellow teeth nubbed from cribbing. Pale patches at hip bones and shoulders where her hair was worn down almost to the hide by time and work. She sported a wide barrel and a deep neck, and her back swagged low between her shoulders and her hips. Her expression struck Luce like she held no illusions, having seen it all. Yet her ears aimed forward, alert and hopeful for the next significant thing to appear, even though right then, walking in a circle, she just kept seeing the same old scenery come back around every thirty seconds.