“I mean before that. Was she always, you know … the grocer and Koswalski both implied she was always kind of weird.”
“She was a very religious woman. She used to chat with God from time to time. A lot of them around here do that, however.”
“Maybe they don’t have anyone else to talk to,” Goodman said.
She laughed. “Very possibly.”
“And she didn’t think much of education.”
“Noooo, but that’s not rare, either.”
“Sounds like Aaron was pretty much a free soul.”
She nodded somewhat wistfully. “Everything excited him,” she said. “He read anatomy books when he worked for Doc Koswalski and law books when he worked for Avery Daggett. When he was a sophomore in high school he played Biff in Death of a Salesman. He was wonderful—he really loved acting. Of course people around here hated the show, but he didn’t care because he became Biff every night. But like everything else, there was no outlet for it. Fact is, he never mentioned it again after that.”
“Where did he go when he left here?”
“Lexington, I think. I heard he worked in the hospital there for a while.”
“He never wrote you?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t expect him to.”
The room fell silent again. A question nibbled at Goodman’s brain but he pushed it back into a dark chamber of his mind.
She leaned across the table, studying him.
“What did you do before you became a cop for the defense?” she asked.
“I was a prizefighter.”
She looked shocked for a moment. “Really?” she asked. “You did it professionally?”
“Yeah. I was working my way through law school,” Goodman said. “Smashed up my hand and Marty talked me into doing this.”
“Is Marty the lawyer?”
Goodman nodded.
“Is he good?”
“Best there is,” said Goodman. “If Aaron has a chance, Marty’s it.”
She stared into her wineglass, suddenly lost in thought, and they ate in silence for a while longer.
“Were you in Vietnam?” she asked suddenly.
He nodded. “ ’Sixty-nine and ’seventy.”
“Those were bad years.”
“Any year was a bad year over there. I didn’t have it that tough. I’d go in-country for a couple of weeks, then they’d pull me back, send me to Saigon or over to the Bay to fight. I’d train a couple of weeks, do a fight, get a couple of weeks R&R, and they’d send me back on the line. It went like that the whole time.”
“Did you always win?”
He nodded. “All but that last one.”
“And what happened?”
He held up his hand. The bones had healed badly and were twisted and deformed. It was a gnarled fist, like a knob on a tree. She moved closer to him, took his hand in hers, felt its imperfections, imagined the pain it must have caused.
“Did you like to fight?” she asked, still staring at his broken hand.
“The amateurs were fine. Young fighters with style. But not professionally. I did it for the money. It was kind of a relief when I ruined my right.”
“It’s not ruined,” she said, watching her thumb trace its irregularities. “It’s different. It has character.”
“Thanks. Where are you from, anyway?”
“Santa Fe.”
“Santa Fe. I couldn’t place the accent.”
“I ran away when I was sixteen. Spent six years in the Haight.” She stopped for a moment, her mind spinning back to a psychedelic dream that had lasted more than half a decade. “God, we tripped day and night. For six years, I thought the sun was tie-dyed and clouds were whipped cream—LSD reality.”
“How did you end up here?”
She emptied the wine bottle, sharing it between both glasses.
“Answered an ad in the Lexington Tribune,” she said with a smile. She got up and walked a bit too precisely to the kitchen, got a pack of cigarettes from a drawer and walked just as cautiously back.
“Sometimes I like a cigarette,” she said. “I smoke a couple every three, four months. It’s a cheap high, although I really don’t need a high right now.”
She lit a cigarette.
“What happened after Haight-Ashbury?” Goodman asked.
“Oh, I bummed around.” She shrugged. “Spent some time in communes, like that. I was just out of a rehab house and I read this ad for a schoolteacher. No references, that’s what got me. For about a year I lived in a commune outside Toledo, teaching the kids—you know—ABCs, start them reading, so I thought, Why not? No references. When you’ve been high for six years that’s important. And I figured there’d be no place better to go dry.”
“You’ve been here ten years now?”
She nodded. “Since I was twenty-four. I was a mass of neuroses. Used to dream my mind was being invaded by spacemen.”
“C’mon,” Goodman said. “Next you’ll be telling me there’s h’ants up on Sackett’s Ridge.”
“They were like silhouettes at the window over there.” She wiggled her fingers toward the picture window. “They were space miners, I could tell because they had psychedelic lights on their caps, like kaleidoscopes? And I could feel them seeping into my brain.” She stopped and giggled to herself and added, “I don’t dream it anymore. Maybe they’re in there for good.”
“Maybe you got over them,” Goodman suggested.
“Oh no—I just switched to other kinds. And by the way, there is a ghost up on the ridge. Some very prominent people have run into her.”
“It’s a she?”
“I assume it’s Mary Lafferty.”
“Ah … well, do you want to jump in the car and drive up there? Maybe we can shake her up.”
“No.” Candlelight flickered in her green eyes. “No ghosts tonight.”
“Well, guess I better find someplace to spend the night,” he said. “I hear there’s a rooming house about eight miles down the road.”
“Yes, in Morgan’s Creek.”
“Right,” he said with a smile, “they got the name first.”
“You been talking to Clyde Boise.”
“He own the grocery?”
“Um-hmm. That’s his best joke.”
“I see what you mean—about the sense of humor in this town. He’s the one told me Sam and Mary were killed in a car wreck. Some wreck.”
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin in cupped hands and studied Goodman in the flicker of the candles. He had a wonderful face. Scarred by the abuse of fighting and etched by turmoil, it fell short of being handsome, for which she was grateful. In the wine’s giddy cosmos, she felt as if she could see through his soft eyes, deep inside him, and what she saw was an architect for the havens of lost souls, creatures laden with hapless causes; a man who could withstand a slash of the sword but not a cut to the heart. She moved closer to him and reached out and ran her fingertips over his face. The harsh cicatrix hidden in one eyebrow and the bony ridge of his crooked nose became part of the aphrodisiac and her breath came short and finally she stood up and took his hand and led him up the stairs to the sleeping loft.
The bed seemed the size of a continent and was covered with a handmade feather mattress and soft yellow flannel sheets. She lit a single candle on the night table beside the bed and then she slowly unbuttoned his shirt, spreading it open and exploring his chest lightly with the palms of both hands, like a blind person studying an alien texture. He responded by stroking her hair, letting it run between his fingers and then caressing the back of her neck. Their breathing was spasmodic, out of rhythm. She pulled her sweatshirt off and her breasts tumbled from under the cotton sweater and she pressed them against his chest and rose up on her toes until their nipples met. He kissed her and her tongue flicked out, traced his mouth, found his tongue, then her mouth opened and she sucked gently on his lips, drawing them between hers and tracing them with her tongue. His hands slid under her slacks,
embraced the mounds of her buttocks, pressed her against him, and she began to move ever so lightly against him, her breath setting an erratic cadence for a slow-motion ballet of discovery. She undid his pants, the zipper tracing priapic geography, and let his trousers fall away, and he did the same, slipping her slacks down, and then she stepped back and they studied each other before she drew him down on the bed.
She kissed his chin, his throat, traced his earlobes with her tongue while her hands swept over his stomach, touched him and stroked him and his hands searched her soft down, felt her grow hard and wet under his fingertips, trembling as she rose to his touch. They stroked each other, their moans and whimpers became a rhapsody, time and place dissolved in seizures of ecstasy, until she rolled over on top of him, straddled him, staring into his eyes and crying out as she guided him into her. He stared up at her and she leaned forward on stiffened arms, arched her back, pressed herself against him, her hair whisking his face, and they moved faster and faster, racing, holding back, racing, holding back, until finally they surrendered in frenzied rapture.
She collapsed on top of him, lay there for several minutes until her breathing was almost normal and finally lifted herself off him and lay beside him on her stomach, her head nestled against his shoulder, her breath still unsettled.
“Oh God,” she murmured in his ear. “How glorious to want something that badly. I mean, to be attracted to you that way. It hasn’t happened in a very long time. It was so good … just to … to want something again.”
“Are you that lonely?”
“Crazed.” She giggled. “I knew I wanted you the minute you came in the school today and said that—you know, about learning something? I thought, my God, a man with a sense of humor—a real sense of humor, one that doesn’t involve some kind of body function.”
He stroked her back with one hand, soothing her, feeling her pulse—in sync with his—return to normal. She lifted herself on her elbows and kissed him softly and rolled over on her back.
“Wouldn’t a cigarette be just grand now?” she said softly. He lit one and handed it to her.
She smoked for a while, then reached over and laid her free hand on his arm, stroked it, then leaned very close to him. “Spend the night with me,” she said softly in his ear. “I want to feel you beside me when I wake up in the morning. I want to smell you before I open my eyes. You can make breakfast and I’ll be late for school. In twelve years, I’ve never been late for school.”
“They’re liable to descend on us, tattoo an A on your forehead.”
“Then I’ll change my name to Abigail,” she said.
He raised up on one elbow and stared down at her.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I told you. I was attracted to—”
“No, not with me.” He laughed. “I mean, here? What are you doing in Crikside-damn-Kentucky?”
She did not answer for a minute or two.
“I guess I’m hiding,” she said plaintively.
“From what?”
“From what the world’s become,” she answered. “Maybe… I’m afraid to go back out there.”
“Don’t you ever miss it?”
“I miss a laughing man. I miss caring… strong arms around me. It’s funny but I always did like the smell of after-shave lotion. Oh, at first I missed the museums, hearing good music, things like that. But you get over it. I even learned to play the fiddle. I can play a very wicked reel. And I like my independence. I don’t work for KC&M, I work for the county. KC&M doesn’t own the land, I bought it from the county ’cause nobody wanted it. This house came in a kit. You know, like an airplane model? It was in an ad in the Sunday paper. I tutored for two years, trading out with carpenters and plumbers and electricians to help me put it up.”
“Aren’t you ever going to leave?”
She stared at the ceiling for a while and then said, “No, I guess not.”
“Can I ask you something very personal?”
“It’s about Aaron, isn’t it?”
“Yes. That’s why I came to Crikside, remember?”
“All right, ask it,” she said with resignation.
“It occurred to me because of what you said—about his father lacing him. The marks on his backside?”
“Yes?”
“Did you see them?”
She didn’t answer.
“Did you sleep with Aaron?”
He watched her expression taper from irritated to cold to inquisitive to curious. And then back to resignation—or acceptance.
“Why would I do that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Goodman said. “It was a question, okay? Just say no.”
“I can’t,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, just waited.
“Yes,” she said truculently, lying on her back with her eyes closed. “From the time he was fourteen until he left.”
“Fourteen?” he said.
She nodded. “It was like a ritual. We made love two, three times a week. Except for about four months when he went with Mary. Then again after she died.”
“Mary?”
“Mary Lafferty.”
“The girl who was with his brother …”
She nodded. “She was Aaron’s first crush, right after he started in high school over at Lordsville. She was from Morgan’s Creek and they dated for about four months and—you know, it’s really strange—even though they weren’t making it, Aaron had this funny sense of—not loyalty, exactly—more like monogamy. He stopped sleeping with me during that time. Sam was a year ahead of Aaron. He was on the football team and I guess Mary found him more desirable. Aaron’s first heartbreak. We all go through it.”
“Did it shake him up, the way it happened?”
“Not really. When he first found out about it, he just … erased them from his mind. He could do that. If somebody hurt him, he could just, you know, X them out.”
“A fourteen-year-old kid?”
“If you’ve never lived in a place like this, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Give me a try.”
She drew deeply on her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a slow, steady stream, never looking at him.
“I was attracted by his passion,” she said. “He was a very passionate young man, even before his teens. Passion is a rare quality here.”
“Just passion?”
She stared at him scornfully. “Is this part of your investigation?”
“Yes,” he said, although somewhat uncertainly.
“Hmph.” She stared at the ceiling as she spoke, stopping between sentences, dragging on her cigarette.
“I told you, he was very bright. And smart … We could talk about things, things nobody else here would understand. I remember once, we laid in bed for two, three hours talking about the composition in Ansel Adams’s photographs and how we… the feelings we got from each picture. Things like that…
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and he was facing her, reading to her from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which was one of his favorite books. He was at the end of the story called “Mother,” a bittersweet story about rites of passage and the inability of mother and son to reveal joy or sorrow or elation to each other. When he read, it was without accent. The quaint contractions of the valley vanished, replaced by orderly vowels and concise consonants and by the beauty of words spun into masterful narration.
“‘He fumbled with the doorknob,’” he read. “‘In the room, the silence became unbearable to the woman. She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had come from me lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become impossible to her…’”
He stopped reading half a paragraph from the end and looked up at Rebecca and there was a time, it seemed interminable, when he sat there with his breath coming in short gasps and looked at her with a question in his eyes she had seen there many times before. She knew it was inevitable, for she had seen, through the years, the fab
rication of his desire, look upon look, thought upon thought.
“Kin I touch you?” he said fearfully.
“Don’t say ‘kin,’ say ‘can.’”
“Can. Can, can, can…” he repeated, closing his eyes for a second, his breath coming harder, as if he had been running.
She gazed back at him and saw the fever in his eyes. It was a moment she had dreaded, anticipated, fantasized about and ultimately longed for, but had never encouraged. It was past time for denial. Past time to consider conscience or custom. Her skin was electrified, humming with desire. She unbuttoned her blouse slowly but did not spread it open and she sat adrenalized, her heart throbbing in her temples and her mouth dry. He stared at her, short of breath, licked his dry lips, and reached out with trembling hands. His fingertips barely touched her skin in the small gap of the open shirt. He drew the hand down—lingering, uncertainly, not probing but sensing her, as if he could perceive every molecule. Then just as slowly he spread the shirt open and gazed in awe at her breasts. He moved his hands back up but stopped and pulled them away and held them out in front of him, an inch away from her nipples.
“It’s all right,” she said in a whisper. She felt her bust swell, and reaching out, she took his hands in hers and placed them on her and felt her nipples harden under his palms. And he continued his delicate exploration with fingers as soft as feathers.
“I’m not ashamed of it, y’know,” she said. “I didn’t seduce him. It happened over a long period of time. I guess starting when he was … I don’t know … about twelve. It was a very gradual thing. When it happened it was because we both wanted it to.”
“Like you said, people get married here when they’re fourteen. A little chancy though, wasn’t it? I mean, seems to me that could be a lynching offense in Crikside.”
“Maybe that was part of it.”
“Did you love him?”
She thought about that for a long time, trying to blow smoke rings at the ceiling, but they fell apart very quickly.
“I felt sorry for him,” she said finally. Then she closed her eyes and after a minute added, “No, I felt sorry for both of us.”
She suddenly turned away from Goodman, lay on her side for a moment, then sat on the side of the bed, her fair skin hidden behind the cascade of fiery hair.