Nightwoods

  ——

  THAT NIGHT IN BED, WLAC playing low and not helping much, Luce couldn’t sleep for thinking about the black hole. She didn’t spend a second wondering what creatures lived down there. One look and she knew nothing lived there. Life would only be in the way. The black hole was before life and beyond life. If you dipped a ladle of that water and drank it, visions would come so dark you wouldn’t want to live in the world that contained them. You’d be ready to flee toward the other darkness summed up in death, which is only distant kin to the black hole and the liquid it cups. A darkness left over from before Creation. A remainder of a time before light. Before these woods and these mountains and the earth and even the sun, there was a black hole filled with black water. The black held no reference to the green world around it. And what did the green world mean if the black was and forever had been?

  It was a question Luce could not immediately answer. But she knew the black hole pulled at you. You stand up to it, or you go down. If the children found their way back there alone, they would drop themselves into it like stones, and fall and fall into the dark. It was altogether their kind of place, and the job that had been put on Luce’s shoulders was to keep them from the lip of rock and the face of black water below. Upon which God does not move, not even a quiver.

  In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce’s mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her head again.

  IN TOWN, PICK UP the phone to make a call, and a woman’s voice would say, Number, please? The owner of the phone company could conjure warts using stump water and a mumbled formula of words. Also, he owned the only tennis court within fifty miles, a rectangle of red clay covered in weeds and fenced with rusting sagging chicken wire, which he had built in the glowing decade of the twenties, when he was also in his twenties. The whole phone company involved fewer than a dozen employees. When you went to pay the monthly phone bill, you walked through the dark upstairs hallways of what had been a hotel back in World War I times but was now nearly abandoned. The oiled strip floors creaked against the nails. At night, three-fourths of the milk-glass light fixtures remained dark, and just one door had light behind it. Inside the room, across one entire wall, a rat’s nest of colorful wires and silver sockets and silver plugs with cylinders of black Bakelite to grip them by. Every telephone subscriber around the lake and down the valley and up the coves had a hole, which meant somewhat fewer than seven hundred holes. If 7 wanted to talk to 30W, it was a matter of making the connection, the correct plug into the proper socket.

  Day shift and evening, there were two operators. Graveyard shift, one. They mostly looked like the tough young women in black-and-white detective movies. In the corner of the room, a sort of illicit sagging cot covered with a patchwork quilt for the night girl’s naps. Graveyard was an easy job, if you didn’t mind the hours. Almost nobody used the phone after ten, but you never knew. Had to sleep light. Shady business during the deeps of night. Emergencies or trysts or threats to be conveyed. Sad lonely girl sleeping with one eye open at three in the morning anticipating some sad call.

  For a time, a few years after high school, that graveyard girl was Luce. She lived in a room over the drugstore, beside the movie theater, so on her way to work the daring late-night moviegoers from the second showing would be coming out onto the sidewalk under the bare glaring marquee bulbs. Main Street’s three stoplights flashing yellow. On Sundays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays, when the features changed, a guy Luce barely remembered from school would be lofting a long pole with a pliers jaw on its far end to take down the red letters saying the name of tonight’s movie and to put up the ones announcing tomorrow’s. Happy when two or three letters in a row from the previous title worked for the next, like women washing dishes getting to an unused knife or teaspoon and calling it a hallelujah. When Luce came out the street-level door to walk two blocks to work, the night owls stood yawning and checking their watches and thinking of bed, and the letter guy got to watch her walk away. Probably the high point of his evening.

  Luce didn’t mind the late shift. It gave her a great deal of freedom. She usually got two or three hours of sleep after midnight, and at eight she went back to her room and slept a few more and then had the afternoon and the evening to fill however she wanted. For example, the grand little Carnegie library with steep steps to the double front door. Inside, high ceilings and tall windows and full bookshelves and a stern tiny librarian who always wore black and peered through her spectacles in judgment at your choice of book to see if it was worth anybody’s time or if you were a foolish and suspect person to be wanting to take it home with you. Those years, nearly all Luce read came from the travel section, and for a while she couldn’t decide whether Kon-Tiki or Around the World on a Bicycle was the best thing ever written.

  Despite the librarian’s disapproval, Luce read a great number of westerns, such as Wanderer of the Wasteland, and planned one of these days to get on a bus and head out there. Amazingly, the one road running right through town went all the way to anywhere you wanted to go. From her study of library atlases, Hinton, Oklahoma, seemed like it ought to be a fine town for her, though that opinion was based on absolutely nothing but how well the empty spaces fell around it when you looked at its dot in relation to other dots and the web of roads spreading across the whole continent.

  Then one day Luce went up the street to pay the power bill for her room and saw a government topographic map of her immediate landscape framed on the wall. It came as something of a revelation. She had to study awhile to place herself in the quadrangle. When she found the town, it was a red speck at the edge of a thin blue slice cut into great overwhelming swaths of mountain green in various shades. Thin black contour lines crowded dense in waveforms to represent how steep and complex the mountains stood all around. Below the dam, the valley lines spread wide apart and the flat farmland was a wedge of palest green. A blue river wiggled down the center of the valley and off the page, spilling over the edge of the world into blank space.

  A tiny island in the vast sea is what Luce thought the town looked like. The map that described her entire range rested on the wall more like art than information. And Luce took it as a clue to why she had never left, that being one of the big questions in her mind during her time as an operator.

  LUCE’S RAPIST WAS A YOUNGISH MAN, and married. Mr. Stewart. Luce knew him well. He had been one of her high school teachers. Fresh out of college back then. Luce, like most of the girls, thought he was cute and sort of funny. Mr. Stewart taught chemistry, not at all Luce’s best subject, so she settled for an easy B in his class.

  There wasn’t any question in Luce’s mind what had happened. He came in awfully late for paying his bill. And it was clear he had confusing expectations. He smoked, nervous and abrupt. Flirted a little, talking about how much prettier he thought she was now in comparison to high school, and yet how pretty she was when she was seventeen. If Mr. Stewart had not been married, Luce might have gone out with him. He was no more than six years older. No big deal. Go to a movie. A football game on Friday night. But Mr. Stewart was not single, and that was that.

  He took a final long drag on his cigarette and dropped it to the floor. Suddenly he was reaching and grabbing and pulling at her. Then pushing her across the room to the narrow cot, where it was all yanking at her clothes and groping. Then grabbing her wrists, and his weight on her. She distinctly remembered shouting, Quit. Shouting, No. Over and over. Maybe she even screamed it, but who would have heard? And she tried to shove him off her, but he was so urgent. She turned her face aside to keep him from kissing her. She refused to cry for the moment it took him to be done.

  It started so quickly and ended so quickly. He had not removed any of his clothing, so all he did was stand up and zip and apologize and leave. His check for the month’s telephone service lay faceup on the table. Three dollars and sixteen cents. Also a gold Sa
int Christopher’s medallion on a gold chain.

  Funny thing. Soon after Mr. Stewart left, the clapper on the bell started striking, announcing a call coming in. Luce stood up from the cot and pulled her skirt down. She couldn’t think. Her mind felt distant from her body, and her body felt distant from everything in the world. The cigarette butt still smoked on the wood floor, and she crushed it out with the toe of her shoe on the way to the switchboard. She put the headset on and jacked in the plug and said, Number, please?

  It wasn’t until after midnight that it came to her. She was sitting there in the chair on a damp place doing her job just because a bell rang. Luce stood up and took off her headset and walked out, leaving the door standing open. Didn’t call her backup girl. Luce wasn’t really premeditating much at the moment. Mainly, she figured, phones dead for one night, so what?

  And normally, she would have been right. Except this night the high school burned down, and there was suddenly all kinds of need for people to make phone calls. Switchboard all lit up. And true, most of it was still useless chatter at three in the morning because sirens screamed and the sky was yellow with flames. But one call in particular was an actual urgent emergency message to the closest larger town, requesting a ladder truck and a crew of firemen to help out. The school became a heap of scorched brick fallen in on itself, and the oiled oak floorboards and wall laths and beams and joists converted to ash and charcoal. The pile smoked for weeks.

  Naturally, Luce’s name became mud, regardless of whether the truck and crew would have arrived in time to make a difference or not. Small towns will go a long mile to take care of their own, but there’s a bright line you dare not cross, and Luce found herself on the far side of it. She might as well have left all the black plugs and silver sockets as they were and gone straight to the school with a gas can and a book of matches instead of walking down the empty street to her room and showering in the dingy bathroom used also by a waitress at the diner and a counter girl at the drugstore fountain. Then trying to sleep, and wondering what to do about Mr. Stewart. Finally falling hard asleep with the radio on, not even hearing the sirens.

  Luce never went back to work. For two days, she kept trying to tell herself that if Mr. Stewart had been a stranger instead of her teacher, she might have reacted differently. Maybe in that moment of shock, she hadn’t fought hard enough. But no matter how she tried to revise the moment so as to heap the blame on herself so she wouldn’t have to try to make Mr. Stewart pay, she kept circling back around to the truth.

  Also, she couldn’t help replaying things she’d never forget. Him licking up her neck and biting her ear. And after he was done and gone, touching her lobe and looking at the drop of blood on her finger, black in the dim light. Also how, back in school, when he waved his hands to make a point, the skin of Mr. Stewart’s fingers, and the nails too, were scurfed chalky white from the chemicals he handled all day for experiments. Thinking how, from now on, it would be a fact that those fingers had been in her.

  She walked up to the Sheriff’s Department. Sat in the chair opposite Lit’s metal desk and told her story, looking him in the eye the whole time.

  Lit started trying to act a little fatherly, but Luce would have none of it. She said, We pass each other on Main Street and barely speak. I saw you last week outside the post office, and we sort of nodded to each other, like to an acquaintance. We never were close, not before or after Lola took off. Let’s do business and let it go at that.

  Lit said, Well, if that’s the way you want it, then I’ll tell you that this sort of charge is hard to make stick. You say one thing, he’ll say something else.

  —Of course he will.

  —You might not know it, but the last graveyard-shift girl, the one that only stayed here a few months, was sort of an amateur whore. Mainly, when her rent was coming due.

  —So what?

  —It doesn’t help, is what.

  Lit described how it worked. Some man hears something in the pool hall or barbershop or gas station, puts off paying his phone bill until late. Knocks on the door and steps inside. Says something smooth, like, I been a-thinking about you. Gives the girl the monthly payment, plus a gift. An item of jewelry or something else easy to hock. She didn’t take cash, just gifts. Fifteen minutes later he walks out the door to the sidewalk with an attitude like Adam cast out of paradise.

  —So what? Luce said.

  —I’m talking about expectations. Maybe there was a misunderstanding of some kind, Lit said.

  —I guess he misunderstood that I was the same kind of whore as the last night girl. But I don’t see how that changes anything.

  —Hard to convict. One says one thing and the other something else. Might help some if this was the first time.

  —First time I got raped? Luce said.

  —That wasn’t my point.

  —I got your point.

  —I was thinking about a jury. It can matter an awful lot to them, especially if a defense lawyer lays things out real vivid.

  —Good God.

  —I’m just saying, it’s a hard case.

  —I guess it is, unless criminals generally confess right off. But is there anybody in Central Prison serving time for rape?

  —White ones?

  —Yes.

  —A damn few, Lit said.

  —Maybe one or two, though?

  —You said you want business, but I can’t leave it at that. I’m saying, it won’t be easy on you if it goes to court. A little shit of a lawyer can do to you in a couple of hours what you won’t let go of for the rest of your life. People get all kinds of crazy ideas, and facts don’t matter much. Stewart’s got a place in this town. He wears a coat and tie to work, and you’re a nightbird living in a single room with a bath down the hall.

  On her way out the door, Luce said, You go straight to hell.

  A week later, her first evening as caretaker of the Lodge, Luce sat on the porch after a supper of light bread and yellow cheese. Paint flaked off the stair rails and pickets in dry petals, the bare wood weathered and bleached, and the grain raised. Rocking chairs equally weathered and skeletal, with sunken bottoms of twisted kraft paper woven in an intricate angular pattern by somebody now likely dead. What she had wanted was grilled cheese, but the whole tedious matter of lighting a fire in the cook stove for just a sandwich set harsh priorities.

  The day was slowly going dark and chilly. Luce wrapped a quilt around her shoulders and poured amber liquor from an important-looking bottle into a little stemmed crystal glass. Old Stubblefield had told her to use whatever she wanted, and she had found the bottle that afternoon as she’d searched through every room, every closet and corner, under every bedstead. Hours of searching. She hadn’t wanted to go to bed imagining hidden places and getting herself all worked up. Down in the basement, back in a corner tangled with busted-out cane-bottomed dining chairs, she had found stacks of wooden crates, each holding dusty bottles of Scotch or red wine from France.

  Luce rocked and looked across the water toward town, judging the separation to be about right. A mile by one measure, an hour by another. She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.

  That first evening, as she continued to do for so many of the next thousand, Luce sat through all the degrees of sunset. Venus and the crescent moon and some other planet all stacked and falling through an indigo sky, the three spaced equally down a bowed path toward a jagged line of black ridges. Distant sreetlights in town came on, tiny and yellow, reflecting in streaks across the still water. Long past dark, Luce believed she had watched the seasons collapse, one into the ashes of another. To the east, winter star patterns rose, coming back
around again. Orion chasing the Seven Sisters, old reminders of an abandoned order like a deep indelible pattern in the ground. An Indian trail, a long path. She went inside, reluctant, feeling eluded by so much.

  CHAPTER 9

  IN DIM BROWN LIGHT, an old man scrabbled in a wooden bin, searching for the shiny two-cent nut that would thread onto his rusty bolt. Two boys in Keds and Wranglers studied red-and-white boxes of bicycle tubes for the correct size to fix their flats and give them their freedom back. Along with nails and brads and staples, the space behind the narrow storefront was crammed with lawn mowers, shotguns and rifles, a glass-fronted case of pocketknives, latigo dog collars, ripsaws and keyhole saws and bow saws, two-man crosscut saws so long they hung from pegs near the ceiling almost to the floor. Wooden spirit levels six feet long with silver bubbles floating in mystery green liquid. Many sizes of awls and planes and adzes and chisels. Wonderful adjustable wrenches in several sizes with knurled spirals to twiddle back and forth endlessly, imagining all the variety of nuts they were capable of turning. Brute murderous monkey wrenches two feet long with jagged teeth in their jaws. Sledgehammers and double-bit axes. A general odor of metal and oil, and also some funky underlying man smell that sparked an unwelcome prison memory for Bud.

  His shopping trip was not for a little poke of finishing nails or a ball-peen hammer. He’d come to lay down an alibi. So he picked up a cheap rod and reel and the biggest, gaudiest bass lure, for purely artistic reasons. As an afterthought, a filet knife because of the thin, elegant blade.

  At the register, Bud shouted, Three fucking dollars for this fucking piece-of-shit Zebco?

  Heads turned.

  He tried to pay with a hundred, which the cashier couldn’t possibly break. He grumbled some more and finally pulled out a fist of ones and walked out to the car with no doubt that everybody in the store would remember him outfitting for a fishing trip.