Nightwoods

  When she finished the story, Luce wasn’t even close to getting weepy about her dead daddy. He wasn’t that kind of daddy, and she wasn’t that kind of daughter.

  CHAPTER 1

  A COOL NOVEMBER DAY, blue sky and sunlight thin and angling, even at noon. Leaves entirely off most trees, but still hanging tough and reddish brown on the oaks.

  Luce says, Good day for a pony ride.

  Stubblefield makes an expression, eyebrows up. A question.

  —We can’t live indoors forever, Luce says. And since you’re going to be here awhile, drop us off at Maddie’s and go to town. Get the rest of your things. We’ll all be back before dark. She turns to the kids and says, Pack your lunch. We don’t want to go with our hands out, riding Maddie’s pony and begging dinner at the same time.

  Stubblefield tries to find a place to carry his pistol. Sticking it down the waistband of his pants seems treacherous, so he puts it in his jacket pocket. But its weight pulls that side down uncomfortably, so he loads a book in the other pocket for balance.

  The children plunder through the kitchen, and Luce tries to let them do what they want, or at least what they can. She’s long since stopped getting judgmental about what a meal ought to be. Simply watch them and say the names of the things they choose and get them to repeat after her. If most of what they put in the lunch bag is edible, that’s enough for now. So, leftovers of last night’s mashed potatoes and this morning’s home fries, Luce lets it go. After all, she doesn’t really think of mushy white potatoes and crisp brown potatoes as being the same thing either. Maybe a little harder to be cool when they seem to believe lunch should be bread-and-butter pickles and ketchup. Or a jar of beets to share. But Luce takes the attitude, when you start fretting the day-by-day you lose track of the long view. And the long view is, they need to learn to speak for themselves and do the best they can. For now, if they bag their own lunch and it’s pickles and prunes and they say the words, all you do is put both thumbs up and say, Good job.

  THE SHADOWS BENEATH the big pines near the shore fall darker than under other trees. The deep pine straw smells sharp and clean. Astringent. It’s what those half-moon evergreen urinal cakes are going for but miss by a mile.

  Bud waits and watches. Lights the next Lucky off the butt of the one before. This is what? The third or fourth time he’s been here the past month? He’s beginning to worry that his money is no different from Blackbeard’s buried treasure. Once real, now imaginary.

  In time, Luce and the kids and the boyfriend walk to the car and drive down the road. Ten minutes later, Bud goes to the door. No more summertime latched screens with their simple hooks. The big wood door is locked tight. He had guessed it would be. So, a small hammer and a thin chisel. A few educated taps, and the door opens.

  Bud entertains no plans, no list of places to look. He’s given up trying to guess what either of the two sister bitches would consider clever. Whatever idea strikes at the moment is what he goes with. He checks the back sides of framed artwork. Lifts the corners of wool rugs. Lies on his back and looks at the undersides of coffee tables and end tables and settles. Feels up into the bases of mica-shaded hammered-brass table lamps and down into the cavities of many big shapes of useless pottery.

  Upstairs, walking the halls lined with identical doors to the many guest rooms is no different from gambling. Bud sends out feelers of hope and waits for mysterious powers to cough up rewards. He enters rooms that call to him. Tarnished brass numbers relating to his birth date or to some year less shitty than most of the others. Inside 218, he opens bureau drawers, lifts corners of the mattress, blue stripes over cream, a big mysterious brown stain featuring waterlines like the lakeshore out the window. Bud lies down. His theory is, get calm and let the power of money speak and tell its whereabouts.

  He falls asleep, which is fine at first, because he dreams immediately of the money. A vague sense of it fleeing from him, first down these very hallways, and then down walkways between rows of barred cells stretching into the distance. Down a bright tunnel of headlight beams through black night. Nothing but trees, the trunks rowed and leading onward into the dark. The dream goes on forever, but no message is delivered.

  Bud wakes to the sound of the kitchen door banging closed, people moving around downstairs. The door bangs again, and then an armload of stovewood from the pile on the back porch thumps onto the floor. In time, the sounds settle. Bud walks down the hall and waits at the top of the stairs, listening. All the rattling comes from the kitchen. He creeps down the stairs and across the room toward the front door. Almost there, he sees the children sitting together on one of the faded rugs, playing with kindling, forming shapes like they’re getting ready to burn the place down. Their heads lowered in quiet concentration. Frank placing his sticks to build a strict combustible cone. Dolores free-forming an imaginary geometry, many pieces and angles and spaces, perfect airflow. Bud takes two more steps toward the door, his hand reaching for the knob, and a floorboard creaks against a nail. The kids look straight at him.

  —Hey, Bud whispers. I’ll let myself out.

  Dolores stands, pulling Frank with her. They begin backing slowly into dimmer light. Looking at Bud dead-eyed. No screaming or crying. They get to the door frame to the dining room, and Dolores, real flat, repeats her mother’s words. I’ll fucking kill you if it’s the last fucking thing I do. Frank echoing a second behind her.

  They run up the steps, and they keep running, thumping feet growing distant.

  Bud runs, too. Out the front door, down the lawn to the lakeshore, and around to where his truck is parked. Panic rises in him like a bad dinner. He can’t draw breath. He twists the key in the ignition and pats his foot so fast on the accelerator that he floods the carb and has to wait for it to clear. And then he has to vomit and doesn’t even have time to get the door all the way open before his insides spray out bitter onto dead poplar leaves.

  He wipes his mouth and gasps for air, seized up all through his center. Heart attack is Bud’s first thought. So bring it on, then. Check out right now. Fuck everybody and fuck tomorrow too.

  Bud waits and waits, and fails to die.

  Turns the key, and the engine fires. He floors it, and before long, he’s flying crazy down the gravel road. Three curves along, partway into a tight left, the empty back end of the pickup gets loose and begins coming around, skittering across the gravel in slow motion. He stomps on the brake, and that makes things worse. The truck swaps ends and comes to a stop in a cloud of dirt.

  He sits in the road and tries to breathe. Grabs his necklace and cuts his thumb deep on the serrations and then tastes the blood. Memory is so damn harsh when it grabs you tight. The little bastards remember, and they are talking.

  BY THE TIME LUCE comes from the kitchen, Bud is gone down the lawn and into the trees, just another flicker of dark shape silhouetted against the bright metallic light of the water. Luce goes looking for the kids, calling their names, knowing they won’t answer unless they really want to. She makes a quick pass through the ground floor and becomes convinced they’ve gone outside, though they’ve lately had an understanding about that. She finds the front door unlocked and begins running.

  In front and out back, no children and no smoke signals rising in the near distance. She runs the lakeshore a couple of hundred yards in either direction and then back to the Lodge. Looks harder this time, calling their names as she checks the sleeping rooms of the second floor and down into the cellar and then up into the eaves, opening doors and saying their names in a tone that means business. She gives up and heads straight for Maddie’s place, running as long as she can and then walking.

  But Maddie hasn’t seen them. They’re both thinking Bud but not exactly saying it. Maddie starts down the road to the phone at the country store to call the law, for whatever that’s worth. Luce goes back home, shouting for the children constantly. Alternately walking and jogging in the thin angular light of late fall, the lake blue with tiny waves breaking against th
e shore rocks.

  EVERYTHING QUIET and empty up in the windowless, claustrophobic warren of servants’ quarters, the halls shoulder-wide, the rooms like closets, the tiered bunks narrow as coffins. They press together in the dark, as far under a bottom bunk as they can get. When everything stays quiet and empty for a long time, they come out wary and slip down the two flights of stairs and start packing for a long journey. They wrap a fist of matches in wax paper. The splits of fatwood kindling they’ve used for their game and a leather thong for making a fire bow, if it should come to that. They put great faith in their feel for the various materials necessary for fire, how to light them up. The difference between dry kindling on a clear day and damp kindling in a drizzle. How moisture fights you and wants material things to rot slow over long years, whereas you want them to blaze away right now.

  They pack a red box of raisins, a cylinder of red-skinned bologna, and a yellow wedge of cheese. Canned peaches and green beans and okra and tomatoes. A jar of peanut butter. Flesh-colored sleeves of Ritz crackers and a jar of dark honey with a chunk of comb in it.

  Also, out on the back porch, a red gallon of kerosene used for lighting the woodstove. Less than half full, a heavy slosh in the bottom of the can. Oh so dangerous, according to Luce. Keep away. But they take it anyhow.

  Then to the smokehouse, the box of Lily’s things. Frank buries his face in one of the flat foxes from the stole and takes a long inbreath of Lily’s scent, and then puts it back in the box. It’s the bundles of dry tinder they’re needing. Finally, a pat of pockets to make sure the lightning buckeyes are on board.

  They know to stay away from roads exposed to the world. Woods are the place for escapees. Each carrying a tow sack of goods, they walk over the ridge to Maddie’s place and sit still in the dead weeds outside the paddock and watch the windows of the house for movement. They sneak to the shed and get the bridle and scoop grain into their sacks, and open the gate and go in. Sally walks over to meet them, and when Dolores holds out the bridle, Sally puts her head down and takes the bit of her own accord and Dolores slips the headstall over her ears and buckles the throatlatch. Using the fence rails like a ladder, they mount up and fit themselves into the curve of Sally’s back and ride out the gate.

  Their only idea about where to go is farther away from people, deeper into the mountains, up to the highest peaks. So they look where they want to go and grip Sally with their legs. She steps out eager, ears forward. They enter the edge of pines and fade into shadows.

  IT’S NOT UNTIL after a few beers in the dim calm of the pool hall that Bud begins lining his thoughts into proper order. He let himself lose the picture in his mind of who he wants to be. And way back then, in the children’s memory, is somebody he’d like to forget, even if they haven’t. One sure thing: getting puking scared is not at all what needs doing right now, not with witnesses running loose.

  Shit piles fast and deep when you act on one bad idea right after another. No going back, though. You can’t fix the past. It’s broken beyond repair, not worth thinking about. And there’s no predicting the future, at least beyond the knowledge that you can’t expect any mercy whatsoever from it. Anything you try to do to shape it in your favor is likely to rain down a deluge on all your hopes. So what to do right here, right now? Maybe be patient, play a few games of eight ball, and see if an idea arises.

  And it does. Late afternoon, one of the regulars comes in talking about the volunteer rescue squad loading gear into their trucks in the parking lot behind the sheriff’s office. Off to look for a couple of kids missing around the other side of the lake. Possibly with a pony. The fellow worked himself up in the telling, pretty excited and fraught as he went on about the wild country over there, the lost little ones. The cold death they’ll die for sure up on the high mountain.

  People can get so sentimental about a couple of stray youngsters. But the little bastards lighting out offers new possibilities. What a blessing it would be if they passed. How long, though, since blessings got bestowed? Long time.

  So, what are the chances that a couple of frigid morns up on the ridges will lay the kids down for good. Slim to none. Bud figures they might need helping along to the next world. And if they’re never found, nobody will think anything but that they died in a rock crevasse or deep in a laurel hell.

  Sundown, Bud drives around to his best clients, letting them know he’ll be taking a few weeks’ vacation, maybe as high as a month. So they better order big for his next run. Full payment in front like always. Except prices are up. No explanations or excuses, gas going up or whatever. Life can get fucked up fast when you try to be a pleaser. Because people won’t ever be pleased, not even if you drop them ass-first into paradise. They like bitching too much.

  By the time he’s done with his rounds, Bud has a couple of rolls that should let him drive until there’s no more road to ride. Wipe the board clean and start over. New places, new people. Nobody to witness against you. Let the past be what it is. Gone, gone, gone. Drive until you hit water too wide to cross. California, maybe. Or South Florida, the drain at the end of America’s bathtub. Mexico, that’s where cowboy outlaws used to go. Live another life under palm trees at land’s end like a new-minted soul.

  So who’s standing in the way of clearing the tracks for good and heading out? Two, is all. Or four, if things turn real messy. And one thing Bud knows for sure, it’s blood washes things clean.

  WHEN STUBBLEFIELD gets back to the Lodge from bringing more clothes and records and books from his garage apartment and buying sacks of groceries, the sun is falling to the ridges. It’s not dim enough for headlights, though the sky to the west is forming sunset bands of violet and iron. Around the last bend in the road, he sees the door standing open. Through the windows, every electric bulb in the Lodge blazes. He drives across the lawn to the steps and runs inside, calling for Luce. No answer, and when he stops in the lobby and listens, he knows right away the place is empty. Back out on the porch, he gets still and hears Luce, way up the lakeshore, calling for Dolores and Frank. Her voice thin and frantic.

  Stubblefield grabs the flashlight from its place by the back door. Runs to the car and reaches the .32–20 from under the seat, and an extra handful of cartridges from one of the boxes, destroying the precise grid. He stuffs the pistol into his pocket and runs along the shore, stopping over and over to listen for Luce’s voice. When he catches up with her, she stands dazed and numb at the edge of the water.

  He holds her, and she falls into him briefly, like he’s her last shelter. And then she squirms to get out of his arms to do what needs to be done. Searching. Blaming herself.

  —What? You ought to have tied them down? Stubblefield says, as they walk up the lakeshore.

  A WATCHER WOULD think Sally knew hidden paths through the dark woods. But she is just aware of her riders, and steps slow and steady to balance the load. Not fooled by the thick layer of new-fallen leaves, feeling for the hidden slick rocks underneath. And not going straight at all. Going the way the land requires, so that curves are the shortest distance between two points.

  They climb a steep damp trail along the bold creek of a cove. A canopy of hemlocks and maples all the way, black as midnight underneath. Then they contour around a dry shoulder of mountain with oaks and hickories, their limbs bare enough to show stars and the slice of moon scooting along in the breaks between clouds. Look up and glimpse Orion and his dangling sword, the Seven Sisters fleeing before him.

  They keep contouring, bending back into another identical cove with its own canopy of maples and hemlocks and its creek, and then around to another shoulder. Over and over, that slow sinuous movement into wet dark and out to dry bright. But all the time, climbing.

  Dolores and Frank rock along for hours, warm from pressing against each other and also from Sally, who steams in the moonlight. They doze a little but stay awake a lot, because of the importance of looking where they want to go. Up and far away.

  LUCE AND STUBBLEFIELD find a blue-and-wh
ite De Soto coupe pulled off the dirt road at the edge of the lake. The water flat, and the same shade as the night sky. The car windows are fogged opaque, but it is a known vehicle to Luce. Inside will be the artistic man who teaches music at several mountain schools many miles apart on twisting roads. Like a Methodist circuit rider from two centuries previous, roaming the revolutionary hills on a weary gelding. Presumably, the musician has an actual place to live at a less remote radius of his circuit. Low pay from the State, though, sometimes requires that he overnight in his car near the lake, sharing the backseat with his wardrobe of two suits, navy and charcoal, three whitish shirts, and one red necktie. Also his professional clutter. Envelopes of sax reeds, little vials of oil to lubricate the pistons and slides of brass, white plastic flutophones for teaching younger kids the basics of fingering, crushed packets of Viceroys, and several bottles of cheap Scotch at various degrees of empty.

  Luce raps a knuckle at the driver’s window and then steps back. The teacher rolls down a rear window and sticks his head into the night. All that shows clear is his dark hair and his blinking eyes.

  —Yes? he says, with the precise pitch of annoyance due someone whose telephone has jangled at midnight.

  —Little kids, Luce says. A girl and a boy. Yea high.

  She makes a leveling motion with her hand at her hip.

  —Sort of blond-headed, she says. Maybe with a pony mare. Seen them?

  —With a what?

  —A blackish pony mare. White socks in front.