Nightwoods

  —You leaving? Bud said.

  —Not leaving, I’m gone.

  Lit sprayed gravel, and soon his two red taillights faded to nothing down the road. Leaving Bud standing alone.

  No big deal. By tomorrow everything would be fine. And no long dark walk home, either. A man in Bud’s position had many new friends to count on. He went back to the bar and started talking up a ride to town. Acting cheerful, though pissed inside.

  But it was a slow night, and late. The few drinkers were pros, planning to stay put until closing time. Bud held up a ten, dollar a mile. But no takers. Finally, the offer of a twenty, more than any of these idiots had ever made in a day, got him a ride in a panel van full of cabbages. The driver, drunk and mute, rarely drove faster than fifteen or twenty, but it was white-knuckle anyway. Lake close on the passenger side and the wheels dropping off the pavement over and over. Bud rolled his window down in case they fell over the edge and sank to the bottom. Swim through the window and up the black water. Rise into moonlight.

  He rode holding the armrest and bracing his feet against the firewall, wondering with considerable bitterness why this was the best he could do. Bootlegging had made Bud a man of consequence. An eminence, much to his amazement. But there was no glamour to it. He was just a delivery boy, and it was making him soft. His lost money swirled constantly, bright and desirable, in his head. Brooding, too, about the injustice of being taken for a sidekick, even though Bud liked Lit an awful lot, even when he was high-strung. For Bud, the relationship felt part like brethren on a football team without all the ass patting and showering together, and part like boy crushes where you don’t so much want to be in love with the other boy as to be him.

  But apart from that, just sticking to the practicalities, getting close to the law was not bad strategy in case complications arose in regard to Bud’s new profession. And possibly helpful if he got caught prowling up at the Lodge.

  On Main Street, Bud climbed out of the van, thanking the spirits of commerce that he hadn’t been foolish enough to pay in advance. He stretched a five through the window, and the driver was too far gone to notice the difference. Bud walked the dark streets home trying, all at once, to focus his mind on his money and the lessons of the teenager-prison counselor. Be patient. Defer gratification and wait for rewards to pour down. Not part of the lesson, though, was how long you were supposed to wait. Bud’s patience had a fuse, and you could hold up thumb and forefinger of one hand to depict its length.

  CHAPTER 8

  AFTER A WEEK OF INDIAN SUMMER, skies deep blue and leaves beginning to turn yellow and red, a cold front blew through. Chilly rain fell out of a pewter sky for two days. Stubblefield became animated and nostalgic about the northern Gulf of Mexico in the warm days of October. And at first, Luce enjoyed hearing him describe a place she’d never been. How most of the shore was muddy, and you had to know where to go if you wanted white sand and clear water. But he knew exactly where. Plus, epic bouts of fishing to be accomplished, whether casting from shore or boat. Little cheap rental cabanas on stilts at the edge of the water. And white clapboard bars set in crushed-shell parking lots under live oaks, where the beer was ice-cold and the oysters hadn’t been out of the Gulf more than a few hours, and they handed you a zinc bucket overflowing with them, and one brown leather glove and a thick-bladed knife. You twisted the shells open and gave the live oyster three spurts of Tabasco and watched it quiver and then tipped your head back and slid it from the shell into your mouth, and chased it with cold beer. Maybe a saltine or two, depending on your attitude toward the texture of a raw oyster. And then dancing to a neon Wurlitzer full of beach music unknown in other quarters of the country. One bare light bulb swinging from its ceiling cord, pitching dancers’ shadows crazy against the walls. Later, after midnight, swimming out half drunk into the black water and not caring how damn deep the bottom might be beneath your white wiggling feet nor what big-mouthed fishes might be gliding almost between your legs.

  By the time he finished talking, Luce felt like she was sinking from him, going down slow. Him still treading water in the moonlight up above. She sat quiet a long time. He had been delicate, hardly hinting at an invitation, but what she found herself wanting to say was, Let’s do that, baby. Go be careless and young. Get sunburned and drunk. Eat too much and dance too much and go night swimming. Do something entirely new. It had been so long since she had even wanted to.

  Until recently, it had been theoretically possible to throw clothes in a bag and get in the car and go. By tomorrow, be sitting on the beach at sunset drinking a beer. In the new reality, though, the children.

  She said, Down at the Gulf, it’s like the ocean?

  —Well, it looks a lot the same. Water as far as you can see.

  —No trees on the other side? No towns?

  —None whatsoever.

  A week later, James Brown and the Famous Flames were playing over in Tennessee, and Stubblefield asked Luce to go with him. A long dark way across many mountains on winding roads, and there wouldn’t be two dozen white faces in the whole place. And damn, James Brown, one of Luce’s favorites. What an adventure.

  —Can’t, Luce said.

  —People will be dancing in the aisles, Stubblefield said. I know you want to see him led off the stage totally beat, sweating and barely conscious, and then throwing the cape off and dancing back to the mike for one last time. And then doing it again five or six more times after that.

  —The children.

  —Please, please, please, Stubblefield said. We’d be back by dawn, and maybe the kids could stay with Maddie.

  —I can’t leave them that long. But go and do. I’m not your warden.

  —I don’t think you’re my warden. Just, it wouldn’t be any fun without you.

  —See, I’m supposed to be flattered, but I’m not. Get over thinking I’m your vehicle like that. All you’ll end up is disappointed and mad at me. You need to quit thinking I’m your perfect girlfriend. I never was, and I never will be.

  Stubblefield acted like he hadn’t heard those last bits and said, Seeing James Brown would be like going to church and speaking in tongues. But I don’t want to quarrel about it.

  —Oh, did I miss something? Luce said. Should I get out my diary? October ninth. Our first quarrel. I am devastated.

  IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, having passed on the spectacular dates, Luce tried to think of reimbursements. Breathe an autumn afternoon’s crisp breath, tilt your face up to yellow sunshine, observe ragged blue mountains lying in five folds to the sky, receive the faint daily joy that’s offered. Such as, for a couple of weeks, a tortoise with bright yellow concentric rectangles on its brown shell had walked west to east across the lawn shortly after dawn. Or that during the same period, wild hen turkeys, usually five, had come at dusk and launched themselves, one by one, into a big oak down by the lake, where they roosted to keep away from night dangers, especially all the predatory mammals that liked to eat them. And though Luce fell into that category, she wished this particular bunch luck, no matter how good one of them might taste roasted in a hickory-fired oven, with six strips of bacon draped over the breast and an apple, an orange, and an onion shoved up inside the cavity.

  Perfect attendance, that was the goal. Try to get enough quiet so your mind lined up right, and you found out new things about yourself. The Gulf and James Brown would, no doubt, be splendid and powerful. Climactic experiences. And staying home with Dolores and Frank would be frustrating and confining and inconclusive. To little effect beyond the awful dailyness of life. The dismal failures and rare moments of minor victory. And it wasn’t even as if love factored much. Luce didn’t expect to love the children, and she sure didn’t expect them to love her ever. That was a lot to ask in either direction. But there was something she was feeling toward them, and it had to do with their survival. Damaged and scathed, they sure were. But they had lived through a ruinous encroachment. And, yet, they hadn’t become withered and tender children. They could be litt
le fierce savages when they wanted to. Much of the time, they didn’t give two shits for your particular world and could endure pain, whether yours or theirs, as stoic as an Apache. And when they saw an opportunity, they avenged themselves against the reality they occupied. Strike a match and score a point toward getting even. Some days they seemed nearly fatal and exhausted as elderly Geronimo photographed in his later years, blank-faced but still watchful out of beady sharp eyes. Whatever feeling Luce was starting to have toward Dolores and Frank, she hadn’t yet figured out the name for. But it resided in the same family as respect.

  Still, those dates would have been grand. And really, for short periods, Maddie made a perfect babysitter. Cocked and loaded every day of her life, the double-barrel always close. A plaited blackjack and chrome pistol in her purse. Armed and fierce and ready to charge the jaws of death to save little ones. Plus, she was isolate enough in her thinking to find Dolores and Frank lovable.

  Even without the dates, Stubblefield had begun making it clearer every day that he was in for the long run, if that’s what Luce wanted. The kids didn’t spook him, and he didn’t spook them. He hadn’t fled from her life, which probably he should have done. At which point, Luce spun off briefly, wondering what defects he must have to be so interested in her. And none of it really mattered. She was too overwhelmed with the newness and strangeness of the kids, her life suddenly feeling out of control every day, and the responsibility likely to be hers from now on. So, bad timing when it came to romance.

  Something about Stubblefield, though, kept working at her. Just flashes at night, lying half awake. The planes of his face, the angles of his eyes. Maybe simple geometry could explain the unwelcome attraction. Too, so much of her late-night music was about love or desire. Hard not to be swayed by it.

  But she couldn’t dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old boyfriends. And maybe who you fell for and who you eventually loved wasn’t rational, no matter how hard you tried to list pros and cons and sum the results. You couldn’t think your way through it, not all the way. Maybe just the scent of somebody carried more weight than everything else put together. She remembered watching him swim. Surprised by how much more at ease he was in the water than on land. Suddenly graceful. The movements of his arms and back and legs, the long muscles under the skin, looked effortless, almost languid. But measure his speed by landmarks along the shoreline, and he was flying.

  THE KIDS. They were such a hard fact, at least in their physical presence. No matter how much Stubblefield tried to send out sensitive feelers, hoping to connect with them somehow, and thus become essential to Luce, he failed. All his waves of hope kept being met with mighty currents of dark undertow, and his first concrete attempt at making a connection was a total bust.

  Stubblefield tried to engage them in basic conversation. Just chattering, really. Something about how you’re not from here and neither am I. We’re all three here because of ancestors. So this place is strange and familiar at the same time, but in a way, maybe this is where we belong, at least for now. The children eased away toward safe space. Not running or backing off, just sidling slow and retreating steady. No direct eye contact, but always keeping him in their peripheral view.

  The next time Stubblefield came to the Lodge, he had devoted some time to thinking. How it was mostly by nouns that the kids reached into the world and touched it provisionally, like a tap with the tip of one finger. So, touch back with equal delicacy. When he got out of the car, the children were squatting on the porch, knees to chins, playing the kindling game. Didn’t even look up. Stubblefield climbed the steps and set an unopened cellophane sleeve of cookies down near their competing shapes of imaginary fire. He said, Fig Newton. Didn’t say another word or wait for a reaction. He walked through the screen door and let the spring slam it behind him. Cool as cool could be.

  When he saw them again, it was raining. The trunks of hemlocks streaked vertical black, and the lake flat and dark. The children rocked so hard in the porch chairs that on the backswing they banged the knobs at the tops of the spindles against the siding behind them. And going forward, they held the ends of the arm rails white-knuckled until the chairs almost stood on the tips of the runners and nearly flung them off the porch and into the boxwoods. Their heeling and pitching was both asynchronous and rhythmic in the banging against the siding and the rattling of the curved runners against the cupped floorboards. A percussion song. At the bottom of the steps, Stubblefield said, Good rocking, and made a little one-finger eyebrow salute. Dolores and Frank let up, and by the time he climbed to the porch, they had slowed down enough to salute back, though if you were in a critical frame of mind, the way they did it might have seemed ironic, if not sarcastic. Which suited Stubblefield fine. All he wanted right now was for his existence in their lives to be acknowledged. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere. With luck, they’d have to deal with each other’s peculiarities for a long time.

  Next visit, the children were playing in the yard. They both had pie pans, identically black from many excursions into the oven. A rich history of peach and rhubarb and blackberry and apple and pecan and sweet potato and pumpkin pies dating to the previous century. Separately, the children explored the joys to be had from banging the pans against various hard objects. Spinning them away with the sweep of hand and wrist and arm. Watching them float briefly on air and sink to the grass, becoming a circle of shadow set into a field of green. When Stubblefield got out of the Hawk and walked near, Dolores said, Stubblefield. She didn’t look directly at him, just said his name. No different than saying tree or rock. Then she and Frank began running away. Like they expected him to come after them. But Stubblefield let them run, remembering the old Irish sheepherding wisdom his grandmother had applied to her late-life failures of memory. Don’t chase it, and it will come back to you. Barely loud enough for them to hear, Stubblefield said, Dolores and Frank. Not like he was calling them, just stating their names. They ran to the edge of the woods and stopped and looked back. Stubblefield did the one-finger salute, and the kids saluted back. As he walked to the Lodge, he saw Luce standing grey and ghostly behind the screen door, watching him. When he went to the door, she opened it and leaned to him and gave him a rough, awkward, slightly clashing kiss. He stood and touched his tongue to his front teeth, checking for chips, and then he said, What was that for?

  —Thank you.

  —For what?

  —You know.

  —No, I don’t. I kind of need you to say a word or two here.

  He expected her to balk, but she said, Well, for not being afraid.

  STUBBLEFIELD TAPPED ON the snowflake translucent glass of the door and walked in. The lawyer glanced up from a pile of papers, raising his big fountain pen higher than necessary to indicate he’d been interrupted in mid-thought. The still blades of the ceiling fan reflected an X off his brown pate. He said, Sit.

  Stubblefield sat. Said, I’ve been thinking about those ag leases you mentioned.

  The lawyer studied his calendar, one of those page-a-day deals fanned on a chrome stand, a chunky red number on each perforated sheet. He flipped through the recent past, making a show of how long it had been since they last talked. As he got back to the final day of each month, he enunciated the name as if he were calling out words for a third-grade spelling bee. October, September, August. Then he slowed down for a few pages before finally stopping.

  —Ah, he said. Here we are.

  He dug in a file drawer for a yellow pad and turned to a page of big blue figures.

  He said, So, you’ve had plenty of time for deep thoughts.

  —I’ll think of some clever comeback tonight and drop you a postcard tomorrow, Stubblefield said. Right now, thing is, I’m going to be here for a good while, and it’s not just me now.

  The lawyer said, Hum. He raised his eyebrows, casting waves of wrinkles up his forehead and over the dome of his head.

 
He said, The back taxes haven’t gone away.

  —Sell the Roadhouse, if we can find a buyer, Stubblefield said.

  —Oh, I’ve had a name or two in mind.

  —And those leases sound good. Same deal we talked about, if you’re set to go.

  —Je suis prest.

  —I took Spanish.

  —I’ll draw up the papers. You can come by tomorrow and sign.

  Stubblefield sat within himself a few beats. He said, I thought you old boys worked off a smile and a handshake.

  —We do, when we go into business with each other.

  Stubblefield stood and said, I’m trying not to get insulted, but if you want a deal, this is it. I’m not signing any papers.

  He reached his hand across the desktop.

  The lawyer looked at Stubblefield and then down at his yellow pad of numbers all the way to the bottom line. He grinned and stood and took the offered hand. Hell, he said, I guess you only live the one time.

  CHAPTER 9

  POOL HALL.

  Said so twice on the blacked-out glass of the windows on either side of the door. Same angular gold script as the Citizens’ Bank a block up Main Street. Some probably dead dude from the twenties with good handwriting must have passed through town and made a couple of quick tens. Still a lot of casual business to be conducted here, such as taking orders for jugs of cheap vodka and grain alcohol tinted brown to become Scotch. On non-traveling days, the pool hall was like Bud’s office from afternoon until night, when he shifted to the Roadhouse.

  Inside, festive odors of stale spilled bootleg beer and tobacco in its many forms. Dark as midnight, except that each of the five tables occupied its own circle of yellow light descending in a smoky cone from a shaded hanging fixture. Men moved about the room, entering and exiting the bright circles like Jimmy Durante saying good night at the end of every week’s show.

  At a back table, a game of eight ball. Bud hunched in concentration, the nap of green felt around the head spot rubbed to a bare greasy brown like a tanned hide. His stick twitched a fraction back and forth behind the dingy cue ball while he waited for his opponent, who took pride in a tight rack, to finish jiggling the triangle of balls. Bud set the butt of his cue down on the floor and said, Shit or get off the pot.