—It’s not been the nineteenth century around here for several years, she said.
The man drew his last drag and flipped the butt away, like it wasn’t trash at all, it having had such intimate relations with his breath for a few moments. The smoking butt glanced off a pine tree and landed in brown needles.
Luce went over and picked it up by its flesh-tone filter and dropped it into the red dirt of the drive and crushed it out with her shoe. She wiped her thumb and forefinger on the thigh of her jeans three times, which was probably once or twice too many.
The man said, You probably wouldn’t believe how little I get paid to do this goddamn job.
—I probably might, Luce said.
THAT NIGHT, JUST UNTIL she figured out how to live alongside children in the Lodge, Luce pulled another daybed from the sleeping porch and put it on the other side of the fireplace from hers. Radio playing low, the children slept pretty well, tired from the long day, but Luce lay hovering at the edge of sleep through three DJs.
The shape of long peaceful days prior to the children kept rolling in, and she guessed it would be naïve to believe that wouldn’t change. Days when she had her own life to herself to go walking down the road, free and easy. Though, truthfully, despite all its many joys, life without wheels had a few drawbacks. Hitchhiking, you placed more hope in other people than they would generally bear. You walked and walked and nothing much changed. You had to be attentive to avoid boredom. But for your efforts, there were reimbursments. Elder people and all their hard-earned peculiarities to visit along the way.
In particular, Maddie, living in her own world like it had remained 1898 on and on forever. Or, to be generous, maybe 1917. Her age was indeterminate, as long as you started with old and worked up from there. Her house sat back from the road, and by late summer, flowers grew thick in the yard. Coneflowers and gladiolus and black-eyed Susans and goosenecks all tangled together. In the fall, hot red peppers and brown leather britches drying on lines of cotton twine drooping from the porch posts. Maddie mostly stayed in her country kitchen, with its wood cook stove and dinner table and fireplace, the stones sooted from fifty thousand hearth fires mostly lit by women long dead. The main touches of the current century were a few light bulbs swinging on braided cords from the ceiling.
Maddie wore flower-print cotton dresses all year round and topped them off with pilled cardigan sweaters in the cool months, and she might have been tall and willowy when she was young, before time compressed her into herself, thickening and shortening and bending year by year until all you could see of the young woman she had been were her quick blue eyes, faded almost to the color of steel. Some days she’d be in a mood. All she wanted to use were the sorts of words she’d grown up hearing. Yonward and thither. Hither. Sward. On a really bad day, half of what she said, you had to figure by context. Early on, Luce viewed Maddie’s homeplace as mostly imaginary, life still circling around hog killings, oil lamps, fetching water, outhouses, and all that other old business. Until Luce realized that these days, her life was a lot like that too.
When Luce stopped for a visit, Maddie would give her a drink of cold spring water from a dented ladle and sing her a song. Maddie knew many ancient ballads about girls getting in trouble and being murdered by the men who had lately so much wanted to get up on them. She warbled and keened at an extreme pitch of emotion unattainable by the young, and the verses of the songs went on and on toward a receding conclusion. They were dark-night songs. Knocked-up girls got stabbed or shot or hit in the head, and then buried in the cold ground or thrown into the black deep river. Pretty Polly. Little Omie Wise. Go down, go down, you Knoxville Girl. Sometimes reproduction did not even factor into the narrative. The man snuffed the girl out because he could not own her, a killing offense if the girl’s opinions ran counter to his urges. In the ballads, love and murder and possession fit tight against one another as an outgrown wedding band on a swollen finger.
Back then, Luce had thought Maddie’s songs were only interesting antiques, but her sister had proved their abiding truth when she came up against Johnny Johnson. Their feelings ran so hot at the start that it must have been sad to watch, though awfully compelling to read about in Lily’s occasional letters, where new love’s bells jangled like a fire engine’s. Lily’s spirit neediness expressed itself raw as a kerosene blaze in the material world. Love, love, love. That’s how she described those few months of desire. Each letter signed in a looping hand: Love, Lily.
Now Luce lay awake in the dark, knowing Maddie’s murder ballads addressed exactly that situation, and taught that the flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect. Luce pictured the killer of Omie Wise through a porthole of dirty green water. A noose around his neck and a trapdoor about to open into a black hole beneath his feet. Oh, what longing and regret he then felt. But too late. And also forever too late for Lily to learn that raging passion predicts nothing but a mess of bad news for everybody.
Luce kept trying to sleep, but hundreds of thousands of katydids or locusts or other screeching insects broadcast a high-voltage buzz into the summer night. She got up and turned on one dim mica lamp and went to an oak cabinet taller than she was and took out a cigar box. The children slept on, and Luce sat inside the circle of gold light, the box in her lap, riffling through Lily’s letters from the past few years. Lavender or green or hot pink ink in big happy cursive on coordinating pastel stationery.
Luce opened envelopes at random, reading until she reached a sentence where it became impossible not to criticize Lily’s fatal hope and trust in other people. Everybody Lily met was so wonderful, and the shiny future stretched forever. Every page held evidence against her. Luce never made it all the way through any of the letters before she returned them to Lily’s precise folds.
Luce decided not to read them again until she could appreciate them more. Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.
CHAPTER 2
BUD WAS A HANDSOME MAN, at least in the retrograde style of the expired southern fifties he still loved so much. High cheekbones, sideburns, upturned collars, and a forelock shaped into a perfect comma down his forehead with a two-fingered swipe of Royal Crown pomade. Bud was nobody’s real name. Sometime in youth, a deluded soul had considered him a friend and dubbed him Buddy Buster.
He had a criminal record by the time he was barely a teenager, caught shoplifting a coat pocket of yellow Sun 45s from a dime store. From his first day in high school, Bud kept a small-caliber pistol in his locker, mostly to impress girls and to insinuate himself into the company of bullies and roughnecks. He was successful on both fronts. At fourteen, in an era when it was daring to show up at a party with a beer or two, Bud once arrived with three cases of Schlitz in a stolen car. He announced his presence by cutting a doughnut in the front yard and then jumping out and popping the back end to reveal seventy-two can lids studded into a trunkful of crushed ice, reflecting the porch lights like the crown jewels of a minor country. Which made Bud the hero of everyone except the kid whose parents were gone for the weekend.
And so on, through his youth. Bud endured several bouts of probation and then served nearly two years on a breaking-and-entering charge, made worse because he was carrying his pistol when arrested. The low-security teenager prison was fenced barely stronger than a poultry yard, but Bud chose to serve his entire term. It didn’t do him much good, though. He might as well have skipped out. Nearly all the anxious psychological counselor had to recommend was that Bud learn to defer immediate gratification and find a hobby. Such as listening to jabber from overseas on a shortwave radio. Bud said, How about shooting rats at the dump with a shotgun pistol? But that didn’t seem to qualify, and not only because shotgun pistols were illegal for some obscure reason. It was more like a
mind problem, to be marked down on the counselor’s notepad and held against you if you summed up the wrong answer. Like when the counselor delved into your habits of using a public toilet, such as do you flush with your foot and use your elbow to open the door? If yes, woe unto you. You’re crazy. From now on, all the doors of opportunity will be rigged to slam shut in your face.
After his release, Bud scrabbled for some years. Short-time jobs and larceny. Selling various forms of dope, kind of as a sideline to pumping gas. And then he got a job with the railroad in the capital city. For a time, he actually drew a paycheck every Friday. He told people he was a railroad bull, but his friend Billy was the bull. Bud had been demoted after only a week. He couldn’t be relied upon to kick the asses of hoboes, and not because he was unwilling. It was a matter of prudence. First day on the job, he came up against a big fullback-looking bum who was not the least intimidated by Bud’s nightstick and company badge. Bud immediately panicked and ran away, knowing he was overmatched and about to take a beating. And then, soon after, the thing that lost him his position was going too far with a frail old man who’d been riding the rails since the stock market crash in ’29. Knocking the man down with his stick and then kicking him with railroad boots past the point of consciousness. After that, Bud’s job became more custodial. Pushing a broom, hosing concrete aprons, dumping small containers of garbage into larger containers. His greatest responsibility was using a big Tin Man oil can to lube metal parts that rubbed against each other around the boxcar couplings.
During that strange time of normal employment, he met a pretty young widow with bad judgment and two little children. Nobody who knew Bud considered violence to be his main calling as a criminal. Various forms of theft and violations of substance codes were his specialties. So it was a surprise when Bud married Lily and then soon killed her.
AS A CHILD, Bud was made to attend a church where the preacher spent most of his time at the pulpit talking about Christ’s wounds and Christ’s blood. The message was clear. Blood mattered above all else, the sacred shedding of it. The rest of Christ’s life—his actions, his pithy sayings, his love—became incidental compared to the dark artery offering that covered the globe. Some Sundays the preaching was pitched so fervent and descriptive that little Bud couldn’t shake slaughterhouse images out of his mind until the next morning. Which meant dark hours of nightmares interrupted by long sweaty periods of terrified hovering wakefulness until dawn broke on Monday.
At grown-up Bud’s new happy church that Lily made him go to, they talked about Jesus all the time, but never about Jesus’s blood. That would be embarrassing for this tame bunch of worshippers. Their church featured an arched stained-glass window picturing Jesus standing on green grass in a glowing yellow light beam against a blue sky. Jesus was sad-eyed and pretty, with his arms spread and his palms upraised, long yellow hair flowing to his shoulders and long white robes flowing to his white feet. Little children and lambs and other youngster livestock flocked around him.
For Bud, that vision was unsatisfactory. Disgusting, really, in its cartoonishness. For Lily’s benefit, Bud condensed whatever leftover inner religion he had into a bleeding heart tattoo covering the outer face of his left biceps. Fairly painful to receive and impossible to remove. Also a big artistic disappointment, since he had imagined it highly anatomical, but it came out more like a valentine.
Even at that, the tattoo accorded in some pleasing way with his necklace, a big black fossilized shark tooth. On their honeymoon, Lily had found it at low tide down at Surfside and had it wound in silver wire to hang on a leather thong against his sternum. The tooth was millions of years old, but you could still cut your finger on the serrated edges, which Bud did while the tattoo still wept, sealing his thinking about their harmony. Jesus’s blood and some big black-eyed shark reddening strange waters. Both expressing the exact same reality. The meaning of the necklace could be summed into one useful idea—adapted from the possibly true fact that sharks die if they stop swimming forward—useful for every single misstep in life. Move on. And the meaning of the tattoo was equally brief, and no argument about it. Everybody dies.
Now, Bud too had drawn considerable blood. He wasn’t always proud of it, and though he hadn’t actually confessed, things seemed pretty cut and dried in regard to his guilt. In jail awaiting trial, he noticed that everybody treated him like he was a terminal case. So before the court date, he wasted time trying and failing to get his mind right for sitting down in the big chair with a smirk on his face and sucking down a deep breath of gas.
BUD AND LILY HAD become a bad match immediately after the hot courtship ended. In short order, Bud realized marriage was not always going to be a fun time. Lily was not his dream lover anymore, not by a long stretch. Her children could pass for normal back then, but they were still a constant irritant. How could romance prevail with them always needing something contradictory to romance, such as ass wiping and nose blowing?
It could not, was the short answer.
Also, Lily owned her house outright due to the horny grocery-store-manager first husband who knocked her up with twins, then up and died before they were even born. It chapped Bud’s ass to live in another man’s house, even a dead one’s. Troublesome too that Lily had her own money. Some from the dead husband and some from work. She was a beautician. The State had issued her a license to cut and color hair, and she had an arrangement with an older woman down the street to watch the kids during Lily’s work hours at the beauty shop.
Bud’s strongest argument rested on the fact that he was the man, and therefore Lily should put the house in his name and quit her job. But it got nowhere, especially since Bud’s weekly check from the railroad wouldn’t at all cover the bills. Pulling a third of his weight was the best Bud could do, which seemed about right to him, give or take. Still, it irked him when Lily headed out mornings into the wide world looking pretty in her tight white beautician outfit and white crepe-sole shoes like she was in the medical profession. Most days, she would put her lipstick on and blot it with a rectangle of Kleenex and throw it in the toilet and walk out. There it would float, unflushed, a perfect red print of her mouth for Bud to take a piss into.
And even more irksome, her hints in conversation with others that what she brought home was so much more than he did. But the two sums drew a little closer if you subtracted tips, which, Bud reasoned, was like taking charity. He told Lily to quit letting rich blue-haired grannies palm her a bill on their way out the door. It was demeaning for her, and even worse for him. Like he was married to a whore.
Lily said, No, I won’t quit taking tips. I earn them. It’s how the job works. You don’t have to eat the groceries I buy with them.
That kind of heartless remark, and the general misery of their marriage, was what lit a fire under Bud’s ass, so that before long he got ambitious and came into some money. One afternoon, Bud and his railroad friend, Billy, were smoking reefer and listening to the radio and bitching about their jobs when they should have been working. And out of nowhere Billy proposed a simple break-and-enter deal. Some rich guy he had done a little work for a while back. Surely his house would have enough pawnable stuff—watches and jewelry and silverware—to pay a couple months’ expenses and leave ample pocket money while they pondered their futures.
Bud had sort of halfway sworn off felonies. Teenager prison was bad enough, and he sure didn’t want to do time with big boys. But it would only be this once, and they’d be careful.
Except Billy’s guy was into some shady commercial real estate dealings or other lofty half-legal commerce demanding cash transactions. Stashed in his dresser drawer, alongside his wife’s jewelry and a fancy wristwatch, was a size 12 shoe box filled with stacks of money. And a few days after their job, Billy’s guy turned up floating in a big lake ten miles north of town, which was a puzzler and sort of sad, though not a major cause of concern.
The shoe box held bundles of bills, all tapped into strict rectangles and banded. Altogethe
r, they stacked nearly to the box lid. The top layers were mostly worn ones and fives and tens. So at the moment they found it, they thought it was nothing more than a little lagniappe to the job. But later, when they dug to the bottom, they found that the final layers were perfect stacks of new hundreds wrapped in red bands.
Billy drove, so Bud counted a stack. That one little half-inch fucker was ten thousand dollars. Who would have guessed?
The first thing they did was go raise hell for a couple of days, and when Bud finally got home, he was still thoroughly drunk and exhausted. Lily, of course, took advantage of the situation and set right in on him. Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless.
On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundreds and threw them on the bedspread. If you were honest and stupid, you worked a couple of lifetimes for that kind of money, doled out by the hour in pocket-change amounts by asswipe bosses.
Lily riffled through a few stacks and then began questioning where they all came from, because she knew for sure he’d never earn that kind of money, no matter if he lived as long as Methuselah.
Bud stretched out grandly on the bed among his winnings, his hands behind his head and a satisfied look on his face, saying nothing. Very shortly, unfortunately, he dozed off or passed out, one. When he woke late the next day, the money was gone and the room started spinning whenever he moved his head. Try to stand and the whole world tipped at a severe angle to gravity. He found himself banging against walls and knee-walking on the way to the toilet.
After a couple more rough days while his head cleared and his appetite came back, he started asking questions regarding the whereabouts of his money. Being cool, since he couldn’t exactly snatch it back and hang on to it now. He was the very bird that threw it out there on the chenille, trying to be the big man. And then gave Lily the gift of his unconsciousness, plus two additional vomit-dominated days, for her to plot and hide.