Nightwoods

  Luce’s breathing went shallow and quick. She realized her mouth was partly open. She closed it and drew a breath from deep down and said, How do you know where I live? What I wore back then? How do you know anything about me?

  —Public knowledge. Which is simply a bullshit mix of facts and opinions. Not threats. And they can’t do anything to you in this country for stating facts and opinions. Not yet.

  —You burned the uniform, didn’t you? Luce said. You’ve been where I live.

  —Calm down. All I did was look through some yellow newspapers at the library. You were a tight little piece in those old Friday night pictures.

  A SONG PASSED BY and Stubblefield got up and drifted toward the bar looking for Luce. When he got to the back hall, a man stood in the door to the ladies’, and Stubblefield saw the top of Luce’s hair over his shoulder.

  —What the hell? Stubblefield said.

  Bud turned and grabbed Stubblefield by the front of his shirt and wheeled and shoved him hard inside. The mirror broke. Then all three of them were there with the door closed. Bud clicked the lock behind him.

  In the cramped space, Luce and Stubblefield crowded up against the toilet. One bare bulb over the sink, its light fragmented by the spider-webbed mirror. A machine for sanitary napkins to match the rubber machine screwed to the same stud on the other side of the wall, in the men’s. A loop of cotton toweling hanging from a white dispenser.

  —It’s Johnson, Luce said to Stubblefield.

  Bud squared his shoulders against Stubblefield and studied him and said, So you’re the asswipe asking about me?

  Stubblefield said, I was checking rumors.

  Bud shook his head sorrowfully. Fuck me twice, he said. Makes me feel dirty that my business is anything of yours.

  Stubblefield said, I wanted to know what you’re doing here.

  —Well, as the philosophers say, everybody’s got to be somewhere. And even Sister Luce agrees I’m free to live wherever I want to.

  —What is it you’re after? Luce said.

  —I don’t guess you happen to have any money squirreled away in a clever place? Bud said. You don’t live like you do. But I heard your boyfriend might have some.

  —So is that it?

  —Be way simpler if it was. I’m just after what’s mine.

  —The children, then? Luce said.

  Bud made an incredulous expression. He turned to Stubblefield and said, She’s sure pretty, but if she’s as big a whore and pain in the ass as her sister, and even half as ignorant, you have my tenderest sympathies.

  Stubblefield swung a misconceived roundhouse toward Bud’s mouth. It took a great deal of time to come around, plenty enough for Bud to cock his head to the side so that Stubblefield’s fist barely glanced off the brow and dwindled most of its energy into nothing.

  By the time Stubblefield collected himself, Bud had reached into the cuff of his railroad boot. He came out flashing a black-and-silver switchblade with little imitation quillons like on a sword. He tripped the button, and the blade sprang from the handle into life. It had a blood gutter running partway down its cheap chrome length, and it cast jagged reflections from its angled faces.

  Bud sank into a knife-fighter crouch and his eyes got all concentrated. He said, Legal tip. Looks bad in court when you throw the first fist. Way it stands, you brought on what happens next.

  Stubblefield raised his arms to shoulder level and pushed out flat palms in a gesture like a traffic cop whoaing up approaching cars. Bud flicked the blade and cut the palm of the left hand into the meat.

  Bud danced in place, three little steps like a boxer, and watched Stubblefield’s face blanch and his hand start bleeding down his arm. Luce had never screamed in her life, and she didn’t scream now.

  Dark blood splattered on the dingy white linoleum near the base of the white toilet. Stubblefield tried to swing another blow, but Bud smacked it away with his empty hand. Stubblefield bent double and grabbed his cut hand with his good hand and pressed them both between his knees. His face was turning the color of the linoleum.

  Bud stood straight and dismissed Stubblefield without further comment, like his pain and fear didn’t factor at all. He looked at Luce and slowly wiped the blade’s two faces on the thigh of his jeans and pressed the button with his thumb to release the spring and folded the blade slowly back into place with the forefinger of his left hand. Very fast he said, You better figure this out before somebody gets hurt. I don’t give two shits about your whore sister’s bastards. I’m glad to be shut of them. All they ever did was gag up dinner or crap their britches at bad times and keep me from getting up on her whenever I wanted, which was all she was good for.

  —You asshole, she kept you in groceries, Luce said.

  —Stupid bitch thinks I won’t cut her too, Bud said, in the direction of Stubblefield. Y’all need to go on about your own lives and leave me alone. And if you take this to the law, I’m really going to bear down on you heavy. This right here is nothing. I wasn’t trying to go deep. He’ll heal.

  —But why are you here? Luce said to his back as he went out the door.

  Bud turned back around. He said, We were talking about facts and opinions. Here comes another one. Way I see it, up there by the lake, if somebody was to holler, nobody would hear it.

  It took a pretty major effort not to look off, but Luce kept her eyes straight at Bud’s and said all in a rush, You ever come around my place and those kids, I will kill you. And you can go straight to Lit with that, and I’ll own it under oath.

  Bud grinned and said, Correct me if I am wrong, but besides being the word for scream, holler’s also local talk for a sort of narrow valley, ain’t it?

  He slammed the door shut behind him.

  Stubblefield was still bent around his wound. Blood dripping into a pool at his feet. Luce straightened him up and made him hold his cut hand under the faucet. Somebody started to come in the door, but Luce put out her foot and blocked it.

  —Later, she said, and flipped the lock.

  She pulled at the roll of towels, but it was at the end. All the used droop looked grubby. She lifted her skirt and stepped out of her half-slip underneath. It was the color and sheen of mercury with lace at the hem, and she didn’t even try to rip it into strips of bandage. She wound the whole thing tight as she could around Stubblefield’s hand. They went out the back door, the way to the stables in the day of horses.

  LUCE DROVE THE HAWK, headlights dim in fog, probing forty feet out and then fading into the grainy dark. Stubblefield hunched forward pale-faced with his clammy forehead almost on the dash, his bleeding hand clamped between his knees. He rocked in his seat, saying, Shit, shit, shit.

  Stubblefield twisted and thumbed on the dome light with his right hand. He unwound the bloody wad of silver slip from his cut hand and held his wound to the light. Blood began running down the inside of his forearm and dripping off his elbow. Stubblefield tipped his head down and studied his bloody sign. On his black shirt it looked like a grease mark, and puddled on the upholstery it looked exactly like what it was. He switched the light right back off.

  Luce said, You need stitches.

  —I look like a damn autopsy victim.

  —Your hand’s cut. We’ll get it fixed.

  —I saw bones, he said. I thought they would be white. They’re sort of blue.

  —Tendons, Luce said. They’re bluish.

  —Bones, Stubblefield said.

  —Move your fingers. Touch each one to your thumb.

  Stubblefield did so, and everything worked right. The bleeding, though, still bad.

  —Wrap it back tight, Luce said. You need a bunch of stitches.

  —No shit. But not the hospital.

  —That’s where I’m headed.

  —No, Stubblefield said.

  Luce turned and looked a quick question at him.

  —Because if we do, Lit will hear of it. Your father keeps up with everything.

  —And then, so what? Luce sa
id.

  —And then that could be bad. What I heard, he and that man are tight. Buys uppers from him. And you heard what he said back there. I’m not leaving you that exposed.

  —Shit, shit, shit.

  LUCE PARKED WITH the headlights aimed through fog at Maddie’s house, amid its tangle of wildflowers. Half-dead brown stems and stalks and canes arcing toward winter, the tangle cut through by a narrow footpath to the steps. No light showing on the porch or in the windows.

  Not wanting to startle Maddie, with her shotgun hanging over the door on two hooks cut from forks of tree limbs, Luce said, Maybe we’ll sit here a minute with the lights on and then toot the horn.

  Stubblefield reached with his good hand to the horn ring and held it down for a long blast.

  A yellow light came on in the window to the right of the front door. Almost at the same time, Maddie opened the door and stepped out into the headlights. She had on a pale nightgown that fell to her bare feet. Her white hair fanned across her shoulders, and she held the shotgun at an angle slightly below parallel.

  Luce opened her door and got out and shouted, Maddie, it’s Luce. We need your help.

  Maddie dropped the twin muzzles to rest on the porch boards and visored her free hand against the light. She said, Shut out those goddamn lights and come on in the house. You’ll wake up the kids.

  The fire had burned to a bed of hot coals, and Maddie threw on a dry split of red oak and it blazed up in seconds. Stubblefield sat at the dinner table at the end of the kitchen, and Maddie switched on the light and cleaned his hand with peroxide and looked at the cut.

  She said, You’ll live. It’s not all that damn deep. I guess there’s a reason this couldn’t have been done at the hospital?

  —Yeah, Stubblefield said. One day when it gets to be a good story, I’ll tell it to you.

  Maddie struck a match and burned a needle. Licked the end of black thread to sharpen it and aimed through the needle’s eye dead steady and drew about a foot from the spool and scissored it and paired the wet end with the dry and knotted them. She pressed the back of Stubblefield’s hand firm against the table and told him to keep it still. The cut gapped and didn’t want to go back together, and Maddie’s pressing and yanking on his hand caused Stubblefield to make a noise like a high-pitched cough.

  Maddie said, Need a stick to gnaw on, like in cowboy movies?

  Stubblefield said, Go on.

  Maddie made the best sense she could of the bleeding slash and sewed a baker’s dozen of tight quick stitches, angling from the pad of meat at the base of the thumb toward the little finger. Then she slowly tilted the brown bottle and poured the remainder of the peroxide over his hand. Pink foam rose along the puckered line of stitches, and the blood on the tabletop washed into the woodgrain.

  —From now on, palm readers won’t be able to make shit sense out of your future, Maddie said. Look at that ragged new love line. This is going to throw everything off.

  —Ha ha, Stubblefield said, looking down at his mangled hand.

  —The children? Luce said.

  —Let ’em sleep, Maddie said. Get him home before he passes out on me.

  MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, Stubblefield sat at his breakfast table, holding his cut hand higher than his heart in a failed attempt to keep it from throbbing. Grouped on the white Formica like a modern still life, a half-empty fifth of Smirnoff stood beside a full Davy Crockett jelly glass sitting in a pink plasmatic puddle. Stubblefield angled his hurt hand into the light. Still oozing. The black thread looking damn bad against the waxen skin, even paler than the tabletop.

  Luce slumped in the armchair. She had set the radio to her late-night music. Lightning somebody. Smokestack something. So many of the musicians seemed to be either little or blind. Then an ad for a record store and Royal Crown hair dressing.

  —He’s white, you know, Luce said.

  —Who’s white?

  —The DJ. I’ve seen a picture of him. He sounds black, but he’s white as they come. His voice is an expression of his state of mind because he loves the music so much.

  She paused and said, You didn’t tell me.

  —What?

  —That he was here.

  —Rumors. I had to drive an hour to a library that takes downstate papers to find out he’d been let go. I didn’t want to worry you until I knew for sure.

  —Future reference, don’t ever leave me out again.

  Couple of songs went by, and the phone rang. It squatted dense and black on the table at the end of the sofa. Luce answered immediately. Old habit.

  Bud’s voice, pitched thin over the wire as cricket song, said, They’re not your damn children, Lucinda. Go live your life, and forget about me. Do it and don’t look back. And remember what I said about keeping your mouth shut, because I meant it.

  Luce said, How did you know to call here? But the line went dead after her first word.

  She put the phone back on the hook and looked at Stubblefield.

  He said, Him?

  AN HOUR LATER, Luce sprawled on the sofa, asleep, her head pillowed on her right arm, her shoes kicked off. The girlfriend dress twisted around her, bloodstained.

  The line of her hip and thigh and calf hit Stubblefield as painfully pretty, and somehow consonant with the heartbeat throb in his hand. He sat at the table way into the early morning with his vodka and Luce’s powerful radio music, watching her sleep. Holding up his cut hand like swearing an oath, and imagining the remote borders he might be willing to cross on her behalf.

  CHAPTER 11

  OUT OF FEAR AND ALSO making assumptions like he would do if he were dealing with normal people, Stubblefield placed a couple of phone calls. Within a day, a guy he knew in Jacksonville had an address for Luce’s mother.

  You need a safe place far away to hide, what’s more normal than over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s Florida beach house? That was as close as he had to a plan. Get Luce and the kids gone from Bud’s orbit. Get Lola to keep them for a couple of weeks. Let him go back and try to get Lit or the sheriff or somebody to pay attention. Get Bud out of their lives.

  Luce probably should have known it was a mistake from the start, but she was scared, and wanted to believe that something as simple as distance might protect the children. Also, Stubblefield’s argument for normal was pretty compelling. When you’re up against it, family is who most people turn to.

  STUBBLEFIELD CARRIED a musty kapok daybed mattress from the sleeping porch to the Hawk and pressed it to fill the entire backseat area. Luce cooked popcorn on the woodstove, enough to fill a brown paper grocery bag and leave dark butter stains on the bottom third. They set out driving south in the late afternoon, the children alert and eating corn by the fistfuls, studying the passing landscape with their eyes pinpointed by the low sun. And then, soon after dark, the children burrowed under a quilt and slept as deep and innocent as the dead.

  Luce spent a great deal of time twisting the knob on the radio, which drew strange new stations, such as one from a town with a bus station big enough to advertise both its own newsstand and its restaurant, said to be known far and wide for T-bones and chili dogs and banana splits.

  —Living in this car wouldn’t be all that bad, Luce said. Hard to hit a moving target.

  They were way far from home, driving down into the flatlands of Georgia, a waxing half-moon in the sky. Supper had been a while back. Cheeseburgers and fries and vanilla shakes ordered over a speaker at a drive-in and arriving on an aluminum tray that stood levered from Stubblefield’s half-open window. Luce had never had food served in such a novel manner. The children didn’t even wake up, but there was a box of Cheerios and a few cans of corned beef hash if they got hungry. They were happy to eat cereal without milk, and their favorite way to eat the hash was cold. Open both ends of the can and push one lid against the grey cylinder until it plopped out, with its impress of ridges intact, and then chop it into two exact portions with the other of the sharp-edged lids. To make up for the bad nu
trition, Luce figured she’d cook a big stew of kale and white beans and tomatoes and smoked sausage the next chance she got.

  They drove through the middle of Milledgeville as the second showing of the evening movie was letting out. The Defiant Ones.

  —I saw that, Stubblefield said.

  —How was it? Luce said.

  —About what you’d think. He nodded toward the one-sheets in their lighted glass frames on either side of the box office. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier chained together and getting ready to fistfight each other.

  —Sort of a county-fair three-legged-race kind of story? Luce said.

  —Yeah. Pretty much.

  Then, for lack of anything else to say, Stubblefield announced, State crazy house is in this town. Also, the man that wrote Brer Rabbit lived near here. Some time ago.

  Luce failed to say anything at all in admiration of his knowledge, and in a minute Stubblefield said, There was a historical marker back there.

  —Saw it.

  They went out the bottom end of town, into dark country. Luce twiddled the radio to mostly hissing static with intermittent fading snatches of music. Far into the dark flatwoods, out of nowhere Luce said, You fetch up to our age, still single, people start wondering what’s wrong with you. Like you owe them an accounting of your love life. Most people are married by now. Why aren’t you?

  —I almost got married one time.

  —Almost, like engaged?

  —Briefly, Stubblefield said. It’s a boring story.

  —Yeah, but tell it anyway.

  Stubblefield pitched it as a comedy, youthful idiocy way back a couple of years ago. Though it hurt a good bit at the time. His almost wife was the daughter of the owner of the Cadillac dealership, which in a small town made you nearly royalty. Her name was Alice, and she got intense about Stubblefield shortly after he moved to the island, when he was still the mysterious stranger come to town. Alice was fairly pretty, with swoopy reddish hair and good legs. Freckles across her nose and shoulders in a tempting spray. She featured herself special, to the point that she was at the end of youth and still uncommitted and prone to get attracted to somebody new flashing into her life.