The World Made Straight

  Dena sat down on the couch and picked up a Redbook from the pile of out-of-date magazines Travis had brought from the grocery store. Travis turned back to the math workbook on the coffee table. The dogs began barking and Leonard peered out the window, thinking it might be another of Dena’s boyfriends, come to have his turn. A battered silver Mustang pulled up to the trailer, a carload of teenagers inside. Leonard went outside and saw one of them was Shank.

  “What you boys want?” Leonard asked. He wore a sweatshirt but the cold went straight through it. If he’d had a thermometer nailed to the trailer, he knew the mercury would be stalled near zero.

  “What we want is some pills and a couple of six-packs,” Shank said, “but since you won’t sell them to us anymore we just come to wish our buddy a happy new year.” He nodded toward the trailer. “I don’t reckon you’d let Travis come out and play, would you?”

  “He’s studying for his GED.”

  “Damn,” Shank said. “Between you and Lori he never gets out.”

  Shank followed Leonard into the trailer, the other boys staying in the car. Leonard sat back down in the recliner.

  “Why don’t you come with us,” Shank said to Travis. “We’ll get higher than the moon.”

  Travis nodded at the book.

  “Can’t tonight.”

  “Just for a hour,” Shank said.

  “Can’t,” Travis repeated.

  Shank raised open palms in front of his chest as if to ward Travis off, stepped back. “Fine. Sorry to bother you.”

  “We’ll get together soon,” Travis said.

  “Sure,” Shank muttered, let his eyes settle on the textbook in Travis’s hands.

  “Lori’s been telling it around town that you’re going to A-B Tech come fall.”

  “What if he does go,” Dena said, closing her magazine. “What problem you got with that?”

  “Who says I got a problem with it?” Shank said. “I’d just like to know what’s going on with my best buddy since first grade.”

  “Real friends support each other,” Dena said, mouthing some advice-column wisdom Leonard knew she’d read in a magazine.

  “How can I support him unless I know what he’s doing?”

  “I’ll tell you when I decide,” Travis said, frustration in his voice. “But I ain’t decided nothing yet. Nobody else will decide for me neither.”

  “Why don’t you finish the math tomorrow?” Leonard said after Shank and his friends had headed back to Marshall.

  “No,” Travis said. “I want to do it now.”

  Travis sat down and spread the workbook open on the coffee table. He hunched forward and peered at the page as he would a pool he was about to cast into. The boy’s eyes did not shift as he reached for the pencil and wrote an answer in the workbook. Dena came out from the back room, a clear plastic baggie in her hand.

  “This all we got left?” she asked, nodding at the half-dozen pills in the bag.

  “Yes,” Leonard said.

  “And you’re not getting more from Carlton?”

  “I’ve been telling you that for weeks now.”

  “Is this some kind of stupid New Year’s resolution?”

  “No, just a matter of staying out of jail. The SBI is starting to show up around here and Crockett’s having to make some busts.”

  “And you’re really going back to work at that Seven-Eleven?”

  “It’ll do for now,” Leonard said.

  “You could make as much money picking up drink bottles on the side of the road,” Dena said, and laughed derisively.

  “Maybe you could pick up bottles to pay for your pills then,” Leonard replied.

  Dena shook her head.

  “You’re not keeping up your end of our bargain. I didn’t come here for this crap.”

  Travis rose from the couch and stepped between them. He spoke to Dena, his voice soft.

  “Maybe you could just quit using those pills.”

  Dena stared at Travis a moment.

  “I’m the only one who hasn’t told you how to live your life,” Dena said. “I’d think you’d do the same for me.” Dena clutched the bag tighter, enough to where her knuckles whitened. “The hell with both of you.”

  Dena went into the back room and slammed the door, the sound reverberating through the trailer. For a few moments neither Travis nor Leonard moved. Then Travis sat down and began working again. He wrote an answer but immediately erased it.

  “I don’t get this one.”

  “Give me your pencil,” Leonard said, and wrote the solution’s first three steps in the margin. “Here’s where you messed up.”

  “How?”

  “You tell me.”

  Travis peered at the problem intently.

  “I still don’t see what I did wrong. The formula says the area of the triangle is equal to half the base multiplied by the height.”

  “Except that’s not what you’ve done,” Leonard said.

  Travis leaned his head closer, squinted his eyes as if farsighted.

  “Don’t look at the problem,” Leonard said. “Just go through the formula.”

  Then Leonard saw it happen, as he had numerous times, something not just mental but physical, the boy’s shoulders loosening, eyes coming on in understanding like a pilot light.

  “I multiplied by the hypotenuse, not by the height,” Travis said, writing down the correct answer.

  Dena had turned off the light in the back room by the time they’d finished. Travis marked his place in the workbook as Leonard lifted himself from the recliner and went over to turn down the thermostat. The furnace rattled a last time, became silent as Travis unraveled lights from the Christmas tree.

  “I went to the library during my lunch break yesterday,” Travis said. “I looked up the rolls for the Sixty-fourth.”

  “Why’d you do that?” Leonard asked.

  “I was hoping to find a Toomey on the list. Their folks seemed the type that would have done such meanness. It would give me another reason to hate them.”

  “But Toomey wasn’t on there, was it?”

  “No, but lots of names you’d recognize as being from around here. Names like Revis and Candler and Evans. And Allen and Keith. Those sons-of-bitches’ names were on there of course.”

  “People long dead,” Leonard said. “Whatever they did, they did it themselves, not their descendants.”

  Travis lifted the tree but paused.

  “So you’re saying it shouldn’t matter to anyone anymore whether your family did the killing or was killed?”

  “No more philosophical arguments tonight,” Leonard said, and went to the bedroom and undressed. The heat had been lowered only five minutes earlier but it was already noticeably colder. Leonard lay down and listened, as quiet a night as any he could remember. No barred owl or phoebe voicing the trees, no dog or fox claiming the dark. Even the wind appeared to succumb to the cold, stalled in the air like garments stiffened on a clothesline.

  That August afternoon when he’d called, Kera had told him not to come. She’d remarried by then, her husband in the Economics department at UNC-Charlotte, a visiting professor from Australia. That was the key word, visiting. Leonard coming would make leaving harder for Emily, Kera had told him. If he’d believed that was true, Leonard wouldn’t have done what he did, decide at 3 A.M. to drive the hundred and thirty miles to where his daughter slept. Sleeping for the last time on the same continent as her father—that was what he told himself as he drove.

  He’d parked down the street, keeping close to forsythia and hedges because first light already seeped into the eastern sky. The morning bustle of the suburbs gearing up for jobs and car-pools had yet to begin, and the neighborhood was momentarily so tranquil Leonard believed he heard his own heart as he approached his daughter like a thief. He’d found her room and tapped the glass. Emily woke slow and must have thought herself still dreaming when she saw her father’s face peering through the window’s mullions. He motioned for her to open the
window and she had, but only enough that they could speak.

  I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, Emily had said, her face inches from his but separated by glass. He thought Emily might not let him come inside and they’d communicate as if in a prison visitation room. But after a few moments she’d opened the window. They’d sat on her bed, side by side in the attitude of travelers, but all that moved was time, its seconds ticking away on Emily’s bureau as she told about the goodbye party at her elementary school, the beach they’d live near in Australia. Soon, he said when Emily asked when he’d come to see her.

  It was only when he heard an alarm clock ringing that Leonard said anything approaching what he’d come to say, telling Emily that he knew she might be a little scared moving to a new place but that was how everybody felt. He told her she’d make new friends in Australia, maybe see a real live koala bear. Leonard told her he loved her and always would and then tucked her back in bed. He had not seen her since.

  LEONARD DROVE TO THE TOOMEYS’ FARMHOUSE THE NEXT morning. He could have called Carlton, but Leonard knew it was better this way. A matter of respect. When he got out of the car, he paused to look at the empty pasture, beyond it the rich bottomland that had once been planted in tobacco. Nothing grew there now but weeds and wire grass, some kudzu in the upper portion casting out its first tendrils from the field edge. More and more farmland was like this, either abandoned or razed to build vacation and retirement homes.

  The green pickup was nowhere in sight, and Leonard wondered if just one or both of the Toomeys were gone. He climbed up the steps and was about to knock when Carlton opened the door, a pencil in his massive right hand. The black reading glasses the older man wore made him look almost scholarly despite the overalls and gray bristle on his chin.

  “About to figure you to have got another partner, professor,” Carlton said as they sat down at the kitchen table. A newspaper lay on the table, folded to the crossword puzzle’s page. Only two lines remained blank. Carlton took off his glasses and placed them beside the paper.

  “Don’t tell nobody you caught me with a newspaper,” Carlton said. “It’s an amazing thing. You get a fellow convinced he’s smarter than you and he’ll pretty much open up his billfold and give you whatever you ask for. Especially them from Charlotte and Atlanta.”

  He pushed back his chair to get up.

  “You wanting the usual?”

  “No,” Leonard said, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact. “I’m not going to deal anymore.”

  A flicker of irritation, maybe anger, creased Carlton’s face, gone so quickly Leonard wondered if he’d imagined it. The big man eased back into his chair, saying nothing for a few moments.

  “Well, if that’s what you want to do,” Toomey said. His tone revealed neither pleasure nor displeasure, but his eyelids sagged, as if he were suddenly sleepy.

  “Yes,” Leonard said. “That’s what I want.”

  “OK, then,” Carlton said. “Mind if I ask you why? I’m kind of curious.”

  “Just getting out while I’m ahead. Crockett’s starting to make some busts.”

  “You might notice none of them folks worked with me, professor. That ain’t no coincidence.” Carlton shifted his body, leaned back in the chair. “So be it. You done good work for me, for yourself too. I figure you to have quite a good nest egg, probably over ten thousand. That’ll tide you over for a while.”

  “More like half that,” Leonard said, pushing back the chair. “I guess I better be going.”

  Ribs that had felt pulled taut as a child’s shoelaces loosened as he stood. More air filled Leonard’s lungs and the oppressive sense of confinement lifted. Toomey put his glasses back on and peered at the crossword puzzle. He didn’t look up as he spoke.

  “You know a seven-letter word for error?”

  The answer should have been obvious, but almost a minute passed before it came to Leonard.

  “Mistake,” he said.

  Toomey pointed at the word penciled into the squares.

  “I figured it out too,” Toomey said, “and a whole lot quicker than you did.”

  ELEVEN

  It was Travis’s idea to visit Shelton Laurel on the massacre’s anniversary. Snow had fallen all night, half a foot by noon, but that made the boy only more determined. It will be just like the day it happened, he told Leonard. Travis didn’t have chains so they strapped Leonard’s on the Buick’s tires and drove north, first to Antioch to pick up Lori.

  “That’s it,” Travis said, and Leonard stopped where a rusty mailbox squatted on a cedar post. There was no driveway, just a bare spot by the house where a decade-old Mercury Comet was parked, no hubcaps and no radio antenna, a wadded rag in place of a gas cap. Leonard had known Lori’s family was poor, but he was still surprised. If smoke had not been rising from the chimney, someone driving by could easily believe the place had long been ceded to whatever crawled or slithered through the cracks. The rust-rotted gutter had separated from the roof soffit, and blue plastic tarp replaced glass in a window. Out in the yard, a doll without arms, a tricycle with a missing back wheel. Nothing seemed whole.

  The door opened and Lori came out, cautiously traversing the snowy steps. She wore a worsted wool coat short in the sleeves, the top button missing. A hand-me-down from her mother or an aunt, Leonard knew, the scuffed barn boots and mustard-colored scarf as well. All purchased by someone too worn down by life to take much stock in her appearance. The jeans alone looked to be something Lori picked out herself.

  She closed the door and squeezed in beside Travis, took off her mittens, and pressed both palms against the heater’s vent.

  “Momma says we haven’t any more sense than shirttail young’uns to be out in weather like this,” Lori said. “She about didn’t let me come.”

  “Well, I’d agree with her,” Leonard said, “but your boyfriend insisted.”

  They recrossed the French Broad and followed its tributary westward. Leonard drove slow, keeping to the side of his lane farthest from the drop-offs. There were few guardrails, for the most part nothing but loose gravel between road edge and gorge. White covered the rocks sprouting up in the stream, skimmed the pools and slow runs. The road narrowed where a granite outcrop loomed above, its jutting chin lengthened with pale beards of ice. Snowflakes settled on the windshield like miller moths, the gray sky so low it seemed to be resting its belly on the ridgetops.

  “How long has your family been in Antioch?” Leonard asked.

  “Daddy’s people came over from Tennessee after the Civil War. Momma’s family didn’t get up here till the nineteen thirties.”

  “Where’s your momma’s family from?”

  “Down near Shelby. Momma says her daddy got tired of hot weather, said if he and his family were going to starve they might as well not be miserable hot while doing it.”

  Leonard laughed. “I guess he had a point.”

  “What about your people, Leonard?” Travis asked. “They been up here long?”

  It was a question Leonard had anticipated for months, but he still stammered slightly as he replied.

  “The Shulers came from Swain County in the 1890s,” he said.

  “Probably a good thing for both your families,” Travis said. “If they’d been on the Union side there’s no telling what kind of terrible things would have been done to them.”

  “It happened to Confederate sympathizers as well,” Leonard reminded Travis. “Nance Franklin had three of her sons killed right in front of her by Union troops. They made her watch them die.”

  Lori shook her head.

  “It must have been awful up here.”

  “I can’t believe there was a worse place to be for either side,” Leonard said. “If you lived near Bull Run or Shiloh at least the armies moved on after the battles. Here it settled in for four years.”

  “They were still fighting even after Lee surrendered,” Travis told Lori. “A fellow bragging about some meanness he’d done in Shelton Laurel got shot d
ead over a year after the war ended. That happened down at Mars Hill, right Leonard?”

  “Right,” Leonard said, and glanced over at Lori. “Bet you didn’t know your boyfriend was one of the world’s leading experts on the Civil War in Madison County.”

  “I’m beginning to believe it,” Lori said. “We just have to make sure he knows enough math so he won’t have to do remedial courses at Tech.”

  Lori looked out the window and didn’t see Travis’s face redden or hear the muttered obscenity. The boy didn’t understand. Travis thought Lori was just being bossy, but Leonard knew it was more than that because he’d gone to high school with girls who came from similar homes and wore similar hand-me-downs. Like Lori they’d learned early on that any hope for a good life lay in a series of carefully planned steps, with no margin for error. They always did their homework and kept themselves out of backseats on dates, knowing if they didn’t they’d end up with lives as tough and hopeless as their mothers, old women by age forty. A-B Tech hadn’t existed then, so they’d worked especially hard in typing and shorthand classes to get clerical jobs in Marshall and Asheville. Over the years Leonard had run into several of these former classmates. They were always friendly enough but there was a certain hardness in their eyes, as if believing what they’d worked so hard to have could be snatched away in an instant.

  They met only one vehicle after they entered Shelton Laurel, a pickup whose bed was loaded with pewter milk canisters. A few final flurries lit on the windshield as they made the last turn, passing the white clapboard church and the mailboxes with Shelton printed on them. Some of the mailboxes had red flags up, expectant. Leonard turned off the road and parked. He glanced over at Travis and saw the anger had dissipated. The boy’s moods changed so quickly they seemed to never quite stabilize. Mercurial, that was the word for Travis’s temperament.

  “I guess you want to go to the meadow first,” Leonard said.

  “Yes,” Travis said. “You want me to carry the machine?”

  “No, I’ll get it. I don’t know how it’ll work in the snow, but we can try.”

  Travis and Lori went on ahead, holding hands as they made their way down to the meadow. The boy’s leg appeared to be almost healed, only the slightest limp discernible now. Travis slipped and pulled Lori down with him and they got up laughing. Leonard followed, the metal detector in his right hand.